The sun is rising, shining beautiful hues of gold and brilliant white light into the office through these big windows. I breathe, exhale, and relax. I feel encouraged by recent developments in my life, and plans I’m making for camping in May. I feel “more well” than I have for awhile, and moment-to-moment, day-to-day, even my pain feels just a bit more managed – and manageable. It is “real”? I don’t know, but I enjoy the feeling in this moment as if it is. Why not? Savoring our small joys and moments of delight, pleasure, contentment, joy, and wonder fuel us for future moments that are perhaps less than ideal.
Taking a moment in the morning.
Minutes pass. I sip my coffee, contentedly. Pleasant morning. Looks like a pleasant day ahead. My tinnitus chimes, rings, hisses, and buzzes in my ear loud enough to obscure the sound of the ventilation. I sigh quietly; I can hear that, and it helps anchor me to the “hear and now”. 🙂
I think about the upcoming camping, eagerly planning details in my head, then replanning them, then considering new questions, other options, different details. This will continue until the weekend before I go, most likely. That’ll be when I pull my gear out of winter storage, and look it over for anything needing repair, or replacement. I’ll restock consumables, if necessary, and check things for “use by” dates that may have passed. I’m camping a Monday through Friday plan, and although I may not stay the full week, I’ll be ready to. I’ll pack up the car on Sunday, and leave early Monday morning after I wake, and maybe after coffee with my Traveling Partner (if he’s up, that’s a lovely way to start a day).
I glance at the clock. It’s already time to begin again…
What a day this has been. Spent mostly in solitary contemplation, reading, walking the beach here at Siletz Bay, I’ve enjoyed the quiet geniality of my own good company. It’s been lovely.
I sat for a long while on the beach listening to the waves breaking against the shore. It seemed as if I had no tinnitus at all, for a time. Oh, it’s still there, and if I pay it any attention, I hear it, but here on the shore I can let it recede into the background for awhile, more so than I ever can elsewhere. It’s a different kind of quiet, and these moments are precious. Restful.
Some of the people who have been most dear to me in this mortal lifetime have had strong connections to the sea, and this keeps me coming back to the seashore again and again. My Granny loved the sea and the shore so much that she and my Grandfather bought a sail boat and retired to the waterfront. When they moved to the West Coast, later, she regularly yearned aloud for the days of sailing the Chesapeake, and the feeling of freedom she felt being on the water. As a child, she took me to places like Cape May in New Jersey, Rehoboth Beach in Delaware, and Myrtle Beach in South Carolina. Later on, she also took me to Ocean City and to Assateague Island in Maryland, and Gold Beach in Oregon. When she lived on the Eastern Shore, her home was a refuge for me at a time when I needed it most, after I’d returned home from wartime deployment.
My recently departed dear friend loved the sea. She saw the ocean as our cosmic Mother, the wellspring of all life. Our one and only beach trip together was to the ocean beach nearest to Arcata, California, shortly after she had moved there, when she was still easily able to get around. We took a picnic lunch, and ended up eating it in the car, to avoid the strong wind blowing that day, and the aggressive gulls seeking snacks. lol
Even my Traveling Partner has a connection to the sea. He’s a Navy veteran, a submariner. His experiences of the sea are his own, and I know very little about them – but I know they exist in his experience and his memories. He took us on an anniversary trip a couple years ago, and we enjoyed the Oregon coast. Our hotel was a lovely spot along Nye Beach. It was a delightful time together, restful and playful.
I’ve spent many happy hours at beaches. As a child I found fossilized sharks teeth at Calvert Cliffs, in Maryland, and as a young soldier I partied at Padre Island in Texas. I walked the beach in Carmel California and the dunes near Fort Ord, as a deeply unhappy woman with a lot on her mind. I’ve restlessly walked along the beach and explored the tide pools at Cannon Beach Oregon, and sat with a quiet coffee on the beach near Brush Creek, Oregon, thinking my solitary thoughts. The beaches of Lincoln City have been fond favorites of mine for 4 years now; they’re very near by, and an easy getaway for a day or a weekend and I return to them often.
…Funny thing about me, and the seashore… I don’t even swim. lol Maybe that’s not the point at all, I just think it’s a bit comical. I rarely swim even when I have the opportunity, and when I do find myself tempted into the water, it’s generally a swimming pool, and I mostly just enjoy being in the water without actually doing any swimming. I’m honestly not much of a swimmer, although the Army makes a point of ensuring soldiers are “drown proofed” (handy skills, not the same as being able to swim). I dog paddle a bit, if I must, but mostly… if I’m honest… I don’t actually swim. lol I’m certainly not ever going to venture into deep enough ocean water to need to swim. Ever.
At some point, this morning, on my way to the beach, I decided to grab a coffee. I had something rather specific in mind and ordered it with some anticipation. I was eager for the taste – a rare treat – and I ordered it anticipating the experience. By the time the line moved around and I was able to receive my coffee, it had mixed and settled in the cup, and wasn’t at all what I was going for (which was a rather fancy layered drink that looks beautiful in the cup). I was… disappointed. Then I felt like a shithead – because it was thoroughly delicious, it just wasn’t what I wanted. lol It reminded me that there is no guarantee on the experiences we seek; reality will be what it is, and there’s no arguing with that. I sipped that coffee and reflected on the foolishness of being disappointed by what was actually quite a pleasant experience – if only I’d enjoyed it in that moment, precisely as it was, instead of weighing it down with baggage and bullshit to do with my expectations. A moment with a lesson.
Eventually, I became chilled as I sat on the beach with my coffee and my thoughts. The raindrops that spattered me hinted at the potential for a real rain shower, and the storms on the horizon suggested it might be time to return to the hotel for a time. I sat awhile longer, watching the waves break on the shore, flinging sea spray into the air as they did. I breathed the ocean air and enjoyed the breezes and the sounds of the shore birds, gulls, and crows. I finished my coffee, and returned to the car, and eventually to the hotel.
Later on in the day, as I stood on the balcony watching the tide change, I watched the gulls sailing on the breezes. I noticed them as individuals – one for each departed dear one no longer traveling life’s journey: family members, friends, lovers… the fallen ones that are now beyond any words of affection reaching them. No more time for “thank you”, “I love you” or “I’m sorry”. They exist now as memories. I stood with my thoughts, my memories, and my love for a long while, just watching the gulls soaring past, again and again.
I don’t know that the seashore is “my happy place”… it’s certainly a happy place, and a place that I turn to for solitude, when I need to step aside and allow some measure of time to pass me by, in a sense, while I gather my thoughts. I feel connected to the seashore because the sea meant so much to so many that I have held dear to me. Fond memories. Shared moments. So here I am, enjoying my own good company, in the company of my thoughts and memories, finding my path.
Maybe this isn’t “inner peace”, but it’s a handy facsimile and it serves my humble purpose. This is what I need for now – soon enough, I’ll begin again.
As I came around the last bend in the road before I reached the city, the sunrise greeted me with a messy smudge of coral and orange, like badly applied lipstick. I so earnestly wished to make a right turn and chase that sunrise to wherever the day might take me…
The yearning hit me hard. I don’t find myself wanting to chase things like a bigger house, a more exotic car, Birkin bags, or Louboutin shoes. Sufficiency is generally quite enough for me, and I’m content with the occasional excesses of more modest scale, like garden seeds, or art supplies, or a new keyboard…but… I sometimes find myself faced with a very peculiar moment of yearning and discontent that is very much part of “who I am” (and has been for as much of my life as I can recall)… I sometimes earnestly and deeply want to be free of everything that defines my life – however it is presently defined. As though the constraints of habit and routine, and requirements and expectations, just get to be too much, and something within me spills out and I just want to… go. Somewhere. Somewhere else than wherever I am. I want to “chase that sunrise”. I want to sleep in and when I wake wander to some previously unvisited delightful breakfast spot and linger into the day over my coffee. I want to wander a beach or a forest trail, listening to the birds and the breezes. I want to be… untethered. I doubt this experience is unique to me, and it seems generally very human.
This morning, once my commute carried me to the city, and the car was parked in the usual place, and I frowned at the thermostat in the office on my way past it, as I often do, and made a cup of coffee (that has already gone cold), I sat down and did the payday stuff and the budgeting, like a proper grownup. No tears or terror, no stress, just regular adult shit that has to get done regardless of how lovely the sunrise may be. I’m okay with it. I don’t really need to drop everything and escape my existence, I’ve got a pretty comfortable life that I enjoy very much, and I’m fortunate to share it with a partner I love deeply, and who loves me back so wonderfully. Life is pretty good right now. I’m not objecting to that, or craving change – just acknowledging my restless nature, and maybe wishing it were already “camping season” (too chilly yet for me, personally). lol Funny creatures, human primates – give them everything they want and need in life, and still they find their way to discontentedness, wanting either more, or less. LOL
I sip my tepid coffee, unbothered by any detail of the morning, thus far. I’m okay. I breathe. Exhale. Relax. (Mutter something cranky about the broken heat in this office.) I stretch, and check my calendar. Set up my work day. Email the budget details to my Traveling Partner. There’s no particular stress to the day, so far. Hell, I’m not even in much pain; it seems very manageable so far. The sun continues to rise, and the buildings beyond the office reflect the golden glow and hints of orange and pink. Beautiful. I take a minute to enjoy it, before I sit down to write a few words.
It’s a Friday. I find myself missing my Traveling Partner greatly this morning, and wishing perhaps that I’d worked from home, but we’d discussed that yesterday evening, and he expressed a desire to make the day a quiet one, healing and resting, and to support that endeavor, I committed to the commute and the day in the office. Maybe a short one? I’d love to get the weekend started and get out in the garden again, or try a trail I’ve never walked before, or just… drive somewhere far. lol That restless nature nagging at me in the background almost makes me giggle – I’d be satisfied to spend the day in my studio, on an artistic journey, and as that thought crosses my mind, I realize that this is what I’m yearning for – some creative time in my own head, whether writing, or painting, or in the garden. Well, the weekend is here, and that’s easily done. I just have to begin again. 😀
I “slept in” this morning, still waking well before sunrise. My Traveling Partner was already up, and we enjoyed a cup of coffee together before I left for my morning walk. It was a pleasant moment together.
One perspective on the morning.
I arrived at the trailhead before the gate opened. There was a drizzly rain falling, but by the time the gate into the park opened the rain had stopped. Convenient.
I hit the trail happily, and watched mumurations of birds rising from the marshy lowlands, and flocks of geese moving on to their next stopping point on their journey. I listened to peeping frogs, unseen in the weeds at the water’s edge. I felt the morning breezes on my face along with an occasional raindrop. It’s a lovely gray cloudy morning with mists clinging here and there, looking rather mysterious. I walked along in solitude, content to be alone with my thoughts, still reflecting upon the dreams that had filled my sleep, and seem somehow relevant and worthy of further consideration.
When I got back to the car, it was still very much the start of a new day. I’ve got a short list of things to pick up at the store and a plan to go to the local nursery for some gardening items and inspiration. (It’s already time to think about Spring!) I feel an extra bit of relaxed delight with the day; it’s a three day weekend and I am in no hurry.
I sat for a moment after changing back to sneakers from hiking boots, just thinking my thoughts. The misty rain began to fall again, as if that pause in the rain had been just for me, to get my walk without being soaked. lol I enjoy the happy coincidence with a helping of whimsy before I begin again.
The day got off to a challenging start. Lab work needing to be done had already thrown my routine off more than a little bit, and that seemed fine and accounted for, but real life is not exclusively dependent on my own lived experience of it. Ever. An absolutely reasonable request by my Traveling Partner (more of a wish or hope than a request, actually) that we find somewhere closer to do this sort of thing added a layer of complexity and an opportunity for miscommunication. That didn’t have to be “a thing”, but eventually became one, simply by being one of many details weighing on me.
I rolled with the changes best I could, and even found myself feeling a moment of real satisfaction and delight with a work call that went exceptionally smoothly with great positive outcomes (happy boss, happy customer, happy me)… then… the “rug pull”.
Look, this is a thing probably everyone experiences now and then, I was riding high on a great feeling, and then, suddenly, that was gone in a moment of… something else much less pleasant or satisfying; my partner’s discontent. It happens. There I was feeling good, and then there he was, not feeling so good himself at all. He shared that experience with me, because as it happened, I was the driver of his poor experience (loud conference calls are annoying to have to overhear, successful or not). My mood was immediately wrecked, not because he did anything “wrong” and not because the moment required it, but just because – no bullshit – I’ve got mental health issues, and one of those is that I struggle to maintain perspective, to refrain from fusing with my partner’s emotional experience, and I take shit personally far far too often. Bouncing back is hard for me (the biochemistry of my emotional experience doesn’t resolve quickly) – thus my rather constant harping on resilience and practices associated with it. I need that practice, badly, and even with all the practicing? My results vary.
After the lab work, and getting my Traveling Partner back home, and doing what I could to set him up for comfort for the day, and getting on the road to head to the office to finish work (because rather stupidly I’d also managed to schedule an afternoon doctor’s appointment on this very same f*ing day, with limited room to maneuver or adapt and basically had to go into the city just to get to that appointment later on) – I finally had a chance to get a cup of coffee. It was almost 11:00 by that point, and I was developing a splitting (caffeine) headache, on top of my usual headache. Fuuuuuuuck. Still, 4 shots of espresso shaken with ice goes a long way toward dealing with a caffeine headache. My blood sugar was dipping by the time I reached the office, and I was a seething mess of vague fury and aggravation that extended well beyond any association with the day’s events thus far. I mostly managed to avoid snarling at any hapless humans to cross my path, and got logged in and head-down in the spreadsheets with a quickness. Maybe that’ll be enough?
…It wasn’t, really…
Breathe. Exhale. Relax. Try to remember this shit isn’t personal, it’s just random human bullshit and temper. Let it go. Let it go. Let. It. Go. It’s hard sometimes. I wanted to enjoy that feeling of pride in my work and that sense of accomplishment, and savor a job well done. I didn’t get to do that, even a little bit, and it was less because my Traveling Partner was irked over my loud talking so much as how much it stung to hear about it right then. Like it or not, generally the things my partner has to say just “hit my consciousness harder” – regardless how meaningful, significant, trivial, urgent, heartfelt, or true (or the opposites of any of those things) they may happen to be. The smallest moment of irritation from him is enough to sadden me for at least a moment, and even more so (and for longer) when it’s legit something I’ve done or not done, or something I’ve fucked up for him. That’s a fucking mess right there, I get it. Not super healthy – but refusing to acknowledge my baggage on this doesn’t let me unpack that baggage. The way out is through. So I put myself through the exercise of reflecting on it, asking some hard questions of myself, and weeding out my bullshit from what matters most.
Once I had a minute to think about things more clearly (after some coffee, after some calories), I realized I could not realistically work efficiently and complete the tasks I had in front of me, and also go to that afternoon appointment that was scheduled for a in-office visit (could have maybe made it work for a virtual appointment). So I canceled and requested a reschedule. I tried like hell to pick a date that wasn’t already scheduled for some other appointment (mine or my Traveling Partner’s), and tried to pick a week that wasn’t so overloaded with obvious meetings and calendared workload that it would be a poor fit in general. Once I’d done so, a lot of the stress was gone (although I also miss doing this appointment, which is already overdue).
…You know what wasn’t gone? My shitty mood. I keep finding myself on the edge of tears, and it’s 100% fragility and bullshit and I’m as annoyed with myself over that as over any other detail of the day so far. I think what gets me most about the “emotional rug-pull” as an experience, is how poorly I’m able to bounce back from one of these, and how fucking common they are for me personally. Like… my implicit sense of things is that “the better I am feeling in a given moment, the more likely an emotional rug-pull from some source will be”. The common factor isn’t at all where that might come from, and 100% is simply “me”. I feel relatively confident that both the high likelihood of an emotional rug-pull developing, and how hard it is to bounce back, are “me things”. This stings. Like, a lot. I mean, on the one hand, if it’s me – surely I can work on that, yeah? …My results vary. I keep practicing practices. I keep working on building emotional resilience – and counting on it. I keep failing in this very specific peculiar way (that is not at all unique to me). Frustrating. I stay angry because I’m angry at myself as much as anything else. Angry that it matters enough to fuck with me like this. Angry that “my results vary” as I work to sort this out, over time. Angry, even, that “people” don’t bother to just reality check the likely outcome of sharing negative feedback with others to maybe, just maybe, avoid wrecking a lovely moment. (Note: that’s definitely too much to ask of human beings generally; we are centered in our own experience much of the time, and how the hell would a person even determine reliably how someone else is feeling without asking first, which would become a completely different conversation?)
A lot of people with trauma histories struggle with the “emotional rug-pull” and with a sense of “waiting for the other shoe to drop” any time things seem to be going well. That’s a thing to work on… it’s not easy, and it takes a ton of practice (and many practices). It gets better. It’s not as bad as it once was (for me), I just still deal with it, and when I do it still reliably sucks, and I definitely don’t like the experience at all, nor do I find any value in it. It’s just a shard of chaos and damage – a metaphorical splinter in my paw that I’d like to figure out how to remove.
I take another breath and refrain from having still more coffee (there’d be comfort in that, but also caffeine, and I’ve had mine for the day). I open a bottle of water. I make an effort to begin again.
Evening Light 