A Sort of Familiar Road

 

How I love these red dirt roads and tall pines. But this familiar road is not the road I am writing about today. And I am not exactly writing in a straight line here. I'm going round in circles.

After about a four month hiatus, I went back to yoga and exercise class today. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I did not expect it to be such an emotional experience. There was something about being back in touch with my body through movement. We sort of hadn't been in touch for a while.

When I was exercising regularly, and eating better, I was grateful for my body, grateful I could move, grateful for how good it felt to move.

Maybe I let my body down when I “fell off the wagon” of exercise and healthier eating habits.

Yoga is all about body awareness. 

In yoga class, when I was doing extended child pose, I noticed a twinge on my right side. I remembered I’d occasionally felt that same twinge when I was doing yoga four months ago. I wonder now if my body was trying to tell me something and I was too dull to get the message.

My body has let me down. I had to go early for my regularly scheduled colonoscopy (October), and I had to have an upper scope, too, because I was anemic, or low on iron, or both. They found a tumor, on my colon, or in my colon. Somewhere. The doctor seemed shook up. He said he couldn’t find my appendix, he took lots of pictures, and he’d never seen anything like that before. We are not sure what all that meant. Maybe it’s just that the scientist part of him was excited to see something he’d never seen before. I’m hoping so.

In body sculpting class, which was brutal, because I’d not been doing any kind of exercise (well, it was always brutal, even when I was exercising regularly), I wondered why I was putting forth the effort if I am going to have to have yet another invasive surgery. I may back off from that class and pick back up with my walking instead. The walking seems to benefit me more mentally, anyway, and that’s what I think I need right now, more than anything, among other things, of course. :)

Anyway, yeah, I’m waiting for biopsy results. The doctor did say it had to come out, that part is a given.What "it" actually is, is the unknown. 

In the meantime, I am trying to surround myself with positive thoughts, and peace and calm. I’m also working very, very hard on not “researching” anything on Google. I am a firm believer in staying calm until I have a reason to panic.

I would so appreciate your prayers and positive thoughts.

Marking Time: One Thousand Days

We had him in a place he did not want to be. He was marking his time.

It was the place, the first of several, where the man who I thought surely was a real live angel looked me in the eye and said "You're not alone" and he told the boy who marked this time, "You are in a safe place."

And now there is a grieving man, the father, who continues the marking of time with a new number every single day in his journal. One Thousand Days. That's what today is, the one thousandth day. I told him it sounds like the title of a book. He reminded me of the book about John Kennedy (A Thousand Days).

I was curious. I asked him what he did. Did he write it out in a complete and painful sentence, "This is day number eight hundred and whatever" until finally, the thousandth day arrived? He said he just numbers the top corner of the page, each and every day. I've forgotten whether it was the left or the right corner, details sometimes get very important when you're grieving, I don't know exactly why.

I'm rather fascinated that my husband has kept track of this. I knew he was numbering the days early on (I only marked the months, and then the years, as they went by, clearly I am not one for such minute detail) but I did not know he was still keeping track.

I don't want anyone to misunderstand. Neither my husband or I are wallowing in the throes of grief all day, every day. But I do want it to be understood that losses like this stay with you forever. They change the very landscape of your life, they change the way you mark your time. When I write things like this, I am feeling my feelings, and I am choosing to share them with what I consider a trusted audience. Doing so helps me to remember the value and the love in my son's life. 

One Thousand Days, and still we grieve. In a thousand seemingly inconsequential ways, we grieve.

Wordless Wednesday: Oddities

Seeing Joy

Anne Lamott, in talking about writing being a bit like watching a Polaroid develop (where we don’t quite know how the picture is going to turn out), said this about a draft she had written:

My life has not been tragic by any means. I’ve experienced my share of tragedy, though, and have persevered through many trying circumstances by means of sheer effort. Joy is no small reward for the effort.

I often question myself as to why I spend so much of my time documenting my life in my journal, my calendar, my blog, and even in my “thangs” I create.

I have no formal degree, no earned title of importance. I don’t even have the capability to fully support myself I needed to. I have no credible way of proving my worth.

Too many times, I use that “lack” to beat myself up and I struggle with feelings of worthlessness.

This weekend I’ve spent some time going through my journal entries and writing a one or two word summary of each one. Looking through those words, I see there really is far more light than there is darkness.

This kind of documentation, which gives me a quick glance at the overall status of my life by capturing one or two word snippets of what I am writing about is extremely valuable to me. When I am lost in the darkness, which happens far more than I’d like to admit, when my mind tells me there is no hope and that I am a worthless piece of humanity, I can look back at my own documentation of my life and I can see the balance (and the tension) of both darkness and light in my life. I am forgetful and I need the reminders. 

The reminders help me pick up, once again, the strand of joy that runs though my life. They are signposts that help keep me from getting totally lost in the darkness.

These journal entries, these blog posts, the thangs, they are all also notes to/for my future self. I so often imagine such a bleak future for myself. If my future turns out better than expected, these notes will offer a bit of joy over how far I have come. If it were to all downhill, as I often expect, these notes might offer confirmation of how far I have come and encouragement to continue on the journey.

Wordless Wednesday Abstract

Caprock Canyon Photos

I still don't have much of anything to write about my weekend. I have lots of feelings and thoughts and emotions. Mostly they feel like things I want to keep to myself. But here are a few of the pictures I took. The area was beautiful. We saw the Milky Way at night. 

This was a rock we saw in the dry river bed of the canyon. I liked that it was shaped like an angel wing. Had I been able to pick it up and carry it home, I might have done so.

I don't know how many buffalo they had, but there were lots of them. I saw a bunch of them together but it was dark and I didn't get good photos. This guy was all alone getting a drink of water.

Scenes from the park. It was beautiful, I tell you.

I believe this one is called Cathedral Rock. 

This is one of my favorite photos from the trip. We were down in the river bed, looking up.

Sunflowers in the riverbed.

I know my presence has been sporadic around here. As always, I hope to be around more consistently.

Thin Places and Mountain Tops

(A sneaky beginning to a glorious story of a tribe of women, buffalo women, who finally met each other face to face after years of interacting online. Actually, this is just a teaser. . .)

These are pictures from one of my favorite "thin places," a small open-air chapel. I've posted pictures of the building before. It had been a very long time since I'd been here, and I needed the visit.

I googled and found this article that did a decent job of writing about thin places. I've included some of my favorite parts below:

"I’m drawn to places that beguile and inspire, sedate and stir, places where, for a few blissful moments I loosen my death grip on life, and can breathe again. It turns out these destinations have a name: thin places. . .

Thin places relax us, yes, but they also transform us — or, more accurately, unmask us. In thin places, we become our more essential selves. . .

Yet, ultimately, an inherent contradiction trips up any spiritual walkabout: The divine supposedly transcends time and space, yet we seek it in very specific places and at very specific times. If God (however defined) is everywhere and “everywhen,” as the Australian aboriginals put it so wonderfully, then why are some places thin and others not? Why isn’t the whole world thin?

Maybe it is but we’re too thick to recognize it. Maybe thin places offer glimpses not of heaven but of earth as it really is, unencumbered. Unmasked." Eric Weiner

I can think of several places right now that qualify for me as thin places. Most of them are simple places: the Baptist camp where I spent weeks in the summer and later worked as a teen and an adult, the retreat center where I did my first silent retreat, often our place in the country qualifies, and sometimes, oddly enough, I feel it in a cemetery, mostly when I also have my camera. There are other places, come to think of it, where I experience the feel of being in a thin place, mostly when I have my camera. Like the author says, the thin places are where we become our more "essential selves."

Speaking of becoming my more essential self, let my say here that being with my tribe of women on that weekend in Caprock Canyon was both a "mountaintop" experience and a "thin place" experience. It feels, in some ways, disrespectful to write too much about the experience. I will say here, now, that I had high expectations for the visit, and it was way more than I ever could have expected. Using the word "glorious" would not be an exaggeration in describing it. I have pictures, and I have more to say, but I am still savoring the whole glorious experience.