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So Tired, So Much to Do

January 23, 2016 //
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I am enjoying another quiet morning, and the joy of spending more precious time with my traveling partner. We both sleep much more easily, more deeply, and generally better when we sleep alone, each for our own reasons. I have, over days, been getting less sleep than I need, and averaging only about 5 hours a night, and rarely more than 2 or three uninterrupted hours. My typing and spelling are affected; I can see that as I write. My emotional balance is taking the hit this morning, although it has not yet expressed itself in any noteworthy way. I feel it.

I'd rather be sleeping...

I’d rather be sleeping…

I’m so tired. I’ve got days of fairly intensive manual labor ahead of me for the move, and more critically still; i have days ahead requiring my planning, cognitive, and judgement making skills be at their best. I can’t really afford, logistically, to spend the weekend recreationally in its entirety, there is simply too much to be done. The more of it I can do myself, the less expensive the move is. The less expensive the move is, the more available funds I have to ensure the bedroom in the new place set aside for my traveling partner when he stays with me can be furnished nicely straight away.

I’m tired. Very tired. I have ‘that headache’ – it’s the TBI headache most common when I am deeply fatigued. I have to think through the headache. I have to work through the fatigue. I have to communicate through the cognitive challenges cropping up as I get more sleep deprived. Maintaining my emotional balance and self-sufficiency, and also managing to remain quite flexible to the constant changes of plans around me is becoming seriously difficult. In part, these challenges are inflicted by the lack of consideration or willingness to plan of a person not only not here in this lovely quiet place, but also not even actually part of my life. My traveling partner’s plans get messed with by his Other, and the ripple effect hits me. At this point I am sufficiently fatigued to be less civilized about that fairly irritating reality, and in an effort to address everything I could, I dragged my unable-to-sleep self out of bed far earlier than a Saturday demands and spent an hour meditating, before the anticipated time my traveling partner’s alarm would be due to go off. I personally find that while it is wholly understandable to be feeling uncivilized, I am not comfortable with behaving thusly; meditation helps tremendously, and I get my perspective back.

Sometime later, I check the clock. The sky is beginning to lighten up quite a bit. It’s not so early now – and definitely after the time I expected my partner up and about, preparing to be on his way. No alarm. FUCK – this hits one my oldest childhood triggers hard. Memories of my hungover alcoholic father passed out as his alarm rings, Mom unresponsive beside him, and my childish dread that something terrible will go wrong if Daddy doesn’t go to work, and reminders to “Be a good girl, Baby, if Daddy doesn’t wake up, you make sure I do.” Panic. Anxiety. But… My traveling partner is not my father. He’s a free will adult with an alarm clock of his own. I dither. I’m too tired to think clearly. What to do? Anything? Will he be annoyed if he oversleeps? Did I not understand his plans? Shit. I gently wake him and just let him know his alarm did not go off. He confirms he changed his mind about his plans. I mumble something I hope is reassuring and exit the bedroom, hoping he can at least get easily back to sleep and catch up on his own deficit; he wasn’t having an easy time of sleeping next to me last night, just as the night prior I struggled to sleep next to him.

I closed the door quietly behind me. Now what? I haven’t had as much uninterrupted leisure of late for writing, and sit down with my thoughts in my mind, and let the morning unfold. I have no idea what the day holds. Don’t know what my traveling partner will do. Don’t know whether I will also have to change my plans, and don’t even know whether I am frustrated, annoyed or disturbed by any of it… I’m just so tired… and there is so much to do. I may just wrap myself up in a cuddly bathrobe and crash out on the rug, and let fatigue-stress tears slide quietly down my cheeks until I manage to sleep…

A helpful reminder; I apply it equally to how I speak to myself these days.

A helpful reminder; I apply it equally to how I speak to myself these days.

Or… I could make coffee. It’s Saturday. There’s no rush; that’s harder to remember when I am so tired. Most of the timeline planning, and basic strategy around how my move is organized so far was planned before I went short of sleep. I can trust my skillful rested self to take care of my less skillful fatigued self – we’re good at this now! I check my earlier notes; Saturday is identified for reservation making, changing over services, doing basic housekeeping – and getting the rest I need for the week to come; I don’t start moving until Tuesday.

Some solutions are practical.

Some solutions are practical.

I could do without the headache. I decide to put self-care first today, and take the day as it comes. I start water for coffee, and push the morning forward a bit at a time. It will require kindness with myself, and regular reminders that I have reached certain limits that can’t be ignored without putting me at risk of having some unpleasant emotional experience. It’s been a while since I have been at such risk on this level. Life’s curriculum includes pop quizzes. Sometimes things we want, or enjoy, come with ‘strings attached’ – other things that must be managed, mastered, or endured. Before anything else, I remind myself that the beloved human being in the other room is also tired, and being twisted into unexpected disorder by yet another being with her own challenges and agenda. I remind myself that my traveling partner is – beyond any of that – someone I love greatly, and who means me no ill will whatever. It’s a lovely morning, so far. I think I’ve got this. 🙂

 

 

 

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Mindfulness, more than a little bit of bitching, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, The Big 5, Words

Investing the Best

January 20, 2016 //
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There was a time in my life when I was pretty certain that I was so entirely broken, in some fashion or another, that any contribution I could possibly make in my relationships would be a material one – or sex. That was the limit of what I thought I had to offer the world, or a partner; if I couldn’t buy it, or provide the manual labor, or do the sex thing, what else was there, really? Well, art. There was art. I am hopeful that I don’t have to point out what an incredibly limiting – and self-fulfilling – perspective that was.

Be love.

Be love.

I say “be love” as though what I mean is obvious. Perhaps it isn’t, and maybe a gentle morning over a good coffee is a nice time to clarify? It isn’t as if “be love” is something I came up with – because, if  it were…first, what a tragic state for the world to discover love so late, and second… well, damn, what about all those love songs? So, yeah, not my original thoughts, and surely there are other people who have written more better words with greater clarity on the subject of love, generally. So…if you’re after more better words with great clarity about love, I suggest Thich Nhat Hanh, Leo Buscaglia, or, if you’re ‘not there yet’ any of a number of books on loving the person in the mirror, which does have to come first, as it turns out, to love another with any real skill…have you checked out my reading list? 😉

The love thing is a big deal. It drives a lot of marketing, and therefore a great deal of profit-making goes on associated with love (I’m looking your way Valentine’s Day!). It’s clearly something human primates favor. Are you ‘getting your share’? Are you still thinking of it in those terms? I spent a lot of years stuck on the idea that if love were ‘real’ – and I wasn’t convinced it might be until well past 30, and couldn’t seem to figure out ‘how to have it’ until I was well past 40 – if love were real at all, why wasn’t I ‘getting my share’?? Ouch. Well, in fairness, there’s so much media pressure on us all regarding love we easily succumb to the visions of love we see in advertising, on television and in movies – how can what we see at home compete or compare? We are each so human – and no one is providing us handy re-writes of our script; our best moments are at risk of going unnoticed because we are so busy looking for something very different. How suck is that? You see where this is headed, right?

Mindful love. Yep. I couldn’t fathom it for a while. Mindfulness… check. Meditation… check. Awareness… check. Present in the moment… check. Treating myself well… check. Each concept falling into place, building on each other, and more than once I returned to my therapists office with this question “how does mindful love work?” It sounds like a simple enough question, and I couldn’t quite answer it in words – however many books I read. I didn’t understand that it wasn’t the part about mindfulness that I wasn’t fully grasping… it was love. 🙂

Now we’re getting somewhere! Is this the hot sexy part? With the tips for pleasing a lover? W00t!! Go sex!!

Oh… wait… nope. Sex is sex. Love is…

Love.

Love.

By moving into my own place, while also maintaining a romantic loving relationship with my traveling partner, I did something wonderful for me; I opened my eyes to some experiences about love that I hadn’t been able to understand so simply before. Some of the lessons have been complicated. Some of them have been so simple that they tripped me up while I sought to understand them as something more complicated than they were. Love matters so much that I figured I’d share some of the things I am learning – I expect that as with really first-rate self-care, learning to love well is likely a lifetime of practice, and similarly many of the practices themselves are so simple they mislead one into thinking they are also effortless – nope, in loving too there are verbs involved. Here come some verbs now…

Invest the best in your relationships that you have to offer. This is so simple and fundamental on the surface, but it is a rich deep practice that has kept me on my toes for months now, and until this past weekend, I didn’t have simple words to describe what I might mean by it. So here it is – invest the best in love. Kindness, a welcoming approach, listening deeply, and ensuring that the assumptions in my day-to-day thinking regarding my loving relationships are positive ones have nothing at all to do with money, with sex, or with material goods – without these things, though, no amount of money will buy me love.

An easy example, and common, if I am short-tempered with a loved one in a brief moment, surely it can be understood as part of being human, and an appropriate apology and making it right allows everyone to move on. If, however, my short-temperedness is a character trait that is recognizably ‘who I am’ it will likely undermine love over time. Other things work that way too; sarcasm, mockery, meanness, and cruelty have no role to play in love – defending their use by saying “it’s just who I am”, or by calling it a joke, may not be enough to stop love’s erosion over time, particularly if the user of such behaviors is unaware of the hurtful effect. (If the user is entirely aware of the hurtful effect of such things, and uses them for amusement or in anger without regard to the hurt they cause – that’s not love.)

This weekend, I mused with regret at some point that I don’t have money laying about in capital amounts with which to support my traveling partners endeavors – how wonderful it would be to be able to invest heavily in a solid business proposal, see it get off the ground, and watch his success and independence grow! I felt, ever so briefly, that I ‘don’t have enough to offer’. In material terms, that may be true (it also may not be true; ‘enough’ is a slippery concept). I realized as we talked through that particular conversation that what love asks of me has nothing whatever to do with money, and it’s never been money that was the strength of this relationship; emotions don’t work that way. Love is an emotion. Suddenly, I felt unsteady in my understanding of the world – I awoke to the vast riches I have to offer my relationships (and they are vast indeed).

If love isn’t looking for a cash investment, what is it looking for that I do have plentifully? How about – are you ready for this, because we’re all a lot wealthier than we realize, if we choose to be so – kindness. Yep. Day-to-day kindness and gentle words. Patience. Deep listening – really put myself on pause to hear what my partner is saying without ‘waiting for my turn to talk’. Hearing – really hearing my partner, the words, the intent, the meaning, the emotion – really ‘getting it’, because they matter, and it doesn’t cost a thing besides my good intentions, and a verb or two. Isn’t the basic willingness to do these things sort of implied when I say “I love you”? Making room in my experience to share the journey with another – graciously, generously, merrily – and making the good moments of greater value by savoring them, sharing them, exploring them, and giving them more of my precious mortal time, than I spend ruminating over some momentary misunderstanding, or hurt feelings over thoughtless words. How about vulnerability, too? Sharing life from the perspective that we are each very human, and being open to sharing our selves and experience in a raw and honest way – still being kind, still speaking gently, still listening deeply… it sounds easy. It’s worth practicing. It takes practice – invested, willful, engaged practice. And more of that, again and again.

Yelling, irritability, contentious disagreeable conversation, argument, fussing, insults, anger – not a bit of this is love. The love is in the quiet spaces in between, and in the laughter – and if we don’t invest the best we have to offer in the love we wish to enjoy, the love will slowly be squeezed out by thoughtlessness, negativity, anger, attachment to expectations, and disappointment when our assumption that love ‘should’ overlook our nastiness and bullshit doesn’t turn out to be true. Love isn’t a tantrum; it’s the long-term investment in what is best within ourselves.

Before we go too far, I want to be clear about one small detail – I don’t know of any way to actually ‘fake love’. This isn’t a ‘fake it until you make it’ sort of area of life, and a saccharine smile and a terse insincere “I’m fine” when that is clearly not the case isn’t love, either; it’s a lie. It is possible to speak honestly and sincerely – and also gently. (Listening helps with that.) Seriously. It is. Try it out sometime. It’s quite a lovely experience, I find. Yep. It does take practice. 🙂

Love is in the small things - strange for such a big deal.

Love is in the small things – strange for such a big deal.

Today is a good day to be love. Today is a good day to invest the best of what I have to offer in the relationships that matter most to me. Today is a good day to practice loving well. I’ll start with the woman in the mirror. Love can change the world.

 

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Categories art and the artist, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, women, Words

Someone Won!

January 14, 2016 //
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So hey, someone one that colossal PowerBall jackpot… Well, of course. Probably wasn’t you. Definitely wasn’t me – I didn’t buy a ticket. I could have, I suppose, in the spirit of ‘Can’t win if you don’t play!’ On the other hand, I am also not out the money spent on the ticket, which I’ll contentedly spend at some future time on something I need.

The PowerBall jackpot just kept growing, and people were getting so excited about it that for some short time their day-to-day fears and insecurity were drowned out by the eagerness to escape their lives in a moment of good fortune. I’ve been there…daydreaming about how I might spend the money, what the moment of realization would feel like, how life would change…earnestly wishing for more, different, or ‘better’, and forgetting entirely that I can have ‘more’, ‘different’, and ‘better’ – yes even that – by using some verbs, and letting time take its course. There are choices – and a lot of useful verbs.

I’m not criticizing you if you bought a PowerBall ticket, let’s be clear with each other; I have bought my share in years past. I even used to have rules for how and when I would do so, and which included, very specifically, just buying just one. I was fortunate when very young to see the impact on a family when a family member compulsively buys up lottery tickets with the grocery money – as with any other damaging compulsion, the outcome isn’t pretty, and I have avoided that behavior, aware that the odds of winning are such that those behaviors do not realistically improve the odds of winning a jackpot. My focus in recent years on sufficiency and emotional self-sufficiency just tend to turn my attention away from ‘instant win’ schemes, generally. I wish the winners well, and hope that each of them were the sort of folk who will both benefit from, and truly appreciate, the opportunity they now have to change their lives. That’s really the bigger deal isn’t it? 🙂

It is a quiet morning, and I feel a little as if I am a ‘blank page’, a clean whiteboard, or an empty day in a generally crowded day planner. It is not a bad feeling. It’s also not a particularly good one. I feel… ready? Available. I am not ‘waiting’ – nor am I acting on plans. I sip my coffee aware of the world, aware of the quiet space wrapped around me, and aware of this strangely timeless moment. I am aware of the clock ticking, and the distant sound of traffic outside these walls. I consider the state of my pantry; declining as I use things up and don’t quickly replace them. I consider my tidy habits, and calmly anticipate the tasks I plan to handle after work tonight (it is too noisy to vacuum at 5:30 am). I breathe. I live. I have enough.

Clearly sufficiency is still on my mind. I find myself wanting so badly to reach back in time, and have an earnest conversation with the woman in the mirror as long ago as 1995 or so, and talk about ‘sufficiency’, particularly emotional self-sufficiency, and talk about why it so quickly feels like there isn’t ‘enough’, when I squander what I have foolishly, or thoughtlessly. I want to point out her 10 or more $5 coffees every week in the 00’s, eagerly consumed morning and night – while struggling to make ends meet and putting a partner through college on wages that most definitely didn’t feel like ‘enough’ to begin with. I want to show her how her fears are preventing her from managing her challenges with greater skill. I want to talk to her about love, loving, and taking care of herself. I want to tell her not to wait to make the changes that will turn things around for her…but she can’t hear me from ‘now’. I smile, realizing that it’s enough that I eventually did make some good changes, woke up to some important [for me] ideas, and did eventually embrace the values that find me here, now… There’s more ahead of me, more challenges tackle, more problems to solve, more eagerness, more loss, more verbs… because the journey is the destination, and there are more opportunities to choose, to practice, and to learn.

Practice the practices that take you closer to being the human being you most want to be.

Practice the practices that take you closer to being the human being you most want to be.

Today I will practice the practices that take me ever-closer to being the woman I most want to be. It’s enough.

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, solo hiking, The Art of Being, The Big 5, Words

A Good Night’s Sleep and a Cup of

January 13, 2016 //
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…Well…hardly ‘coffee’ … and you may be sipping something quite different. (I’ve read somewhere that more people drink tea than coffee, and considered it myself this morning.) Maybe you didn’t even sleep well? I woke in the night to the sound of a cough next door, which caused me a moment of concern before drifting back to sleep; my neighbors are elders of many years – and my bedroom is separated from their by the differing floor plans which put their living room between the bedrooms of the two units, I find myself hoping no one is seriously ill. When the alarm goes off, I am alert – reaching to switch it off, and listening for sounds of wakefulness next door. Still, generally speaking, I woke feeling well-rested in spite of that.

Wait…why ‘hardly coffee’? Because I’m out of coffee beans, and don’t keep instant in the house. lol I noticed last night before bed, and took no action on the basis of ‘I can get caffeine at work soon enough’. We’ll see, eh? This cup of dark warmth here next to me is half decaf – in order to get enough beans through the grinder for a whole cup of coffee, I added decaf to it so… yep. It’s not the usual brew, and it won’t have the usual wake-me-up factor. I begin sipping it almost reluctantly, as if my brain is guiding my will via ‘who cares’ signals, but once I overcome my vague feeling of dismissiveness about the coffee this morning, I am finding it quite tasty and suitable to the morning. Assumptions, expectations – humans. (Note to self: just go ahead and give yourself a chance to enjoy things without forecasting the outcome, would you please?)

My back cracks and pops through my morning yoga, but the pain I am in is somewhat diminished having gone ahead and practiced my way through my practice – each change of posture accompanied by an assurance to myself that “I can always stop after this one…” I just keep going until I am finished. (Is it going to be that day?) I shower, dress, take medication… each step in my morning routine feeling subtly forced, like a child being pushed along on a school morning. I am the grown up in this house! Yeah… but I am also the laughing naked child dashing through the house, resisting ‘what must be’ for all those other opportunities… to play. I earnestly want to ‘skip school’ today – just not go to work, just not do ‘the thing’. I don’t really want to be the grown up today. I’d like to stay home and paint, or read, or listen to music, or garden. All the truly worthwhile things life offers for our enjoyment – and for which I do not get paid. LOL “Welcome to Adulthood” I hear the woman in the mirror mutter back to me – out loud. Considering I am alone with my thoughts in this wee haven, that just seems mean – it wasn’t at all necessary to speak the words! Besides… I haven’t really had my coffee yet, and I don’t want to hear conversation just now.

If I only see what is unpleasant, if I only hear unpleasant words, will it be a surprise if my experience is also unpleasant? I can choose my perspective.

If I only see what is unpleasant, if I only hear unpleasant words, will it be a surprise if my experience is also unpleasant? I can choose my perspective.

It isn’t a bad morning. It is a fairly ordinary, very human, sort of morning. I’m okay with that – as I said, it isn’t bad. Is it good? My traveling partner would most certainly point out that I am phrasing it in the negative to say the morning ‘isn’t bad’ (“How is it?” he might ask…) I might answer “It’s okay, better than bad… not noteworthy…I’m enjoying it well enough.” All rather vague, but all… okay. 🙂 It is in the nature of contentment that the fancy adjectives and superlatives get a little dusty from disuse. lol

The work week is at a half-way point. I am eager to hear word on the apartment I’d like to move into, but I am not impatient about it, since it is happening rather faster than I expected as it is. The weekend is ahead of me… a date with my traveling partner Friday night… friends over to plan shared hikes this year on Saturday…Sunday…well…I’ve no idea. The housekeeping doesn’t do itself around here, so perhaps Sunday will be spent on practical matters, and invested in myself entirely? I find myself wondering… once the chaos and damage has all been sorted out, and put away, and once the gates of The Nightmare City are closed permanently and locked, and once life has proven it’s point about lasting contentment… then what? Does such a thing ever occur in life? Would I stop writing? I haven’t really had to look at any of that realistically in earlier years; it wasn’t a realistic likelihood in the past – it may be the future. Life isn’t about perfection and standing still, though, and I am confident that life’s curriculum is more vast than any single lifetime, so… yeah. Probably still writing for a while. LOL 🙂

I tend to think about work and life very separately, and sometimes wistfully imagine that I make my living doing something profoundly important to mankind, something remarkable, or something meaningful… I wonder what that would be like? Ah, but I remember in this same moment things that do matter. The gratitude of the young employee whose needs were met using unconventional solutions. I remember a day when some particularly elegant piece of analysis improved efficiency by illuminating a challenge in a way that allowed it to also be easily addressed. I remember great moments of partnering with colleagues on exciting projects. I start feeling renewed excitement and commitment as my thoughts shift toward the professional side of my life. It’s complicated. I’d like more time to paint, more time to live my own agenda – I don’t actually hate what I do, as much as find that it competes with what I love. Perhaps I am almost grown up enough to tackle this one, too? 🙂

Today is a good day to live each moment right here in the moment I am in, enjoying the thing I am doing now with my entire awareness. Doing so tends to change my view of the world. 🙂

 

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, more than a little bit of bitching, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being, Words

Making Fire

January 12, 2016 //
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Sipping my coffee on a quiet comfortable morning, and I am musing at lessons learned on other days, in other moments. I am thinking about the crackling fire in the fireplace that kept me smiling much of the weekend. I am thinking about a camping trip last March in which I experienced a real moment of dread and anxiety – because I wasn’t easily able to make a fire. I am thinking about the distance I have traveled between those events, and what it has taken to grow from one to the other.

I wasn't as prepared as I felt.

I wasn’t as prepared as I felt.

In March, I had planned a camping trip of 4 days to gear-test new gear, and find out whether I was up to colder weather camping (newsflash: it’s not my preference to camp if low temperatures are below 45 – it’s an important planning detail). I headed for the trees thinking I had everything I needed. Truthfully, the lack of coffee was what kicked my ass emotionally (I’d also overlooked tea), and looking back it was a huge opportunity to overcome that limitation, but the headache spoke louder than reason. I had also not packed my bee sting kit, thinking that the weather was not yet ‘bee weather’. Being wrong about that was a safety issue, and that was the deciding factor to ‘call it’ only two days in and return home. My traveling partner retrieved me from the forest, and although he genially teased me just a bit about my lack of readiness, we both knew that was why I went out there for that particular trip; I’m planning much longer ones, solo, more remote – and on those occasions, it’s pretty urgent that obvious mistakes not be the mistakes I am making when I am too far from home to call for a ride. But this is simply some context on the experience; the lack of coffee may not have kicked my ass if I had been easily able to make fire from on-hand resources, no cheats.

Light without heat won't cook dinner.

Light without heat won’t boil water.

I camp fairly light, and I make sure I have flint and emergency fire-starting gear, but generally rely on Esbits for quick fuel to boil water. Doing so let’s me travel fairly light, and doesn’t place a requirement on me to actually build a fire and burn wood traveling through forests, or in places where a fire is a bad idea. It had been so long since I actually made a wood fire I had entirely lost those skills – and was wandering around in the world unaware of that (far more important than the loss of skill was the fact that I was unaware of the short-coming). It was an embarrassing discovery. I had brought along an alcohol stove, another common hiker/camper favorite, but one I wasn’t so familiar with using and didn’t have a lifetime (any time) of personal experience; my use of fuel was inefficient, even wasteful, and I didn’t bring enough fuel to account for that. I used up my fuel figuring things out (and setting my cook pot handle on fire – don’t ask). To prevent myself from ‘falling back on favorites’ on this particular trip I hadn’t packed as many Esbits –  and I “knew” I had enough alcohol. (I was wrong.) These sorts of things add up to potentially life-threatening fails under extreme circumstances, and it was wrecking my nerves even after I returned home. (I thought I could count on myself for fire for crying out loud!) I had some work to do. There would be verbs involved.

No skill required - yet.

No skill required – yet.

Over the winter holidays, I enjoyed a number of fires in the fireplace, and have continued to do so. Each new fire in the fireplace became an adventure, a learning experience, and part of a progression – the first one was just a Duraflame log, lit and enjoyed for a couple of hours (and an opportunity figure out the flue with confidence). Each successive fire has been more reliant on skill, until this past weekend I started a lovely warm fire without cheating it at all – lit with a lighter meant for lighting fires, but aside from that nothing made it effortless, and success was not assured. I learn from each stumble, each mistake, each new transition toward being more fully reliant on the basics (wood, oxygen, and spark or flame to begin it). This weekend I explored a variety of tweaks on placement of wood on the grate, size of kindling, timing of putting heavier wood on the fire, and had quite a lot of fun with the experience, and ending each day with a bed of coals banked and ready to begin again.

The cozy warmth of a fire built with purpose and skill.

The cozy warmth of a fire built with purpose and skill.

In between my March camping, and my lovely warm fire this past weekend there has been quite a lot of study, and some practice (with more practice yet to come – because a fire in the fireplace is not 100% analogous to making a fire in the cold, or the rain, or the wind, and there is much more to learn about fire, about readiness, and about self-sufficiency and interdependence). I’ll probably continue to hike and camp relying on what works best (and most reliably) for me, and what feels most comfortable, but I’ll be heading to the trees far more prepared to take care of me when circumstances don’t allow for what feels most comfortable, and more aware of what I may really need to enjoy the experience.

Taking care of me has a lot of verbs... and some nice perks. :-)

Taking care of me has a lot of verbs… and some nice perks. 🙂

Today is a good day to be a student of life and love, open to new understanding. Today is a good day to put aside assumptions, and ask clarifying questions. Today is a good day to look suffering in the face with a mind open to understanding what my needs really are. It’s a journey worth taking. 🙂

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Oregon Trails, Parables, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, solo hiking, Spring, The Art of Being, The Big 5, winter, women, Words
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