Tag: Update

Weird, Wacky, Wonderful Life?

DSC_0128Weird, wacky and wonderful at the same time, was returning from this vacation. I’m all upside-down.

I’m tired, and head-achy, and did I mention tired and that just makes no sense for someone who spent two weeks doing next to nothing.  I finished reading one book and did little else, though worked overtime as usual thinking.

Something odd is going on inside by body that’s scaring me.  Abnormal aches, pains, funny symptoms (and unmentionable ones too.)  I’ve been with older people enough lately (and I don’t just mean my in-laws, who are young old!) but neighbors moving on to a retirement home and my mother facing those hard decisions of where to live, asking can she take care of herself. That I’m considering my mortality I suppose.  And facing aches a little fearfully. And pondering aging as it happens to me. Just before vacation I spent nearly a month unable to use my right knee, from a stupid thing.  These are things that happen as you age.

Coming home to my messy old house, I feel suddenly ashamed of all our stuff.  The end of year school means now home the many pencils, and calculators and spirals that went unused again?  Ugh, I’m not organized enough to take advantage of the excess.  Simply want to brush it all into a dumpster.  Along with my whole kitchen that is dying.

I’ve written and then scrapped.  I mean who do I write for and what sense can I make of the world for others if I’m such a poor example. My words feel like more clutter, in an already chaotic head, life. There are so many important topics, things I care about deeply, and I cannot work up the gumption to write.  So, I’ll not force it.  Plenty of opinionated others out there in cyberspace.

This summer we’re doing projects so every room of the house it seems is upside-down or maybe we live like this all the time and I’m just seeing it with new fresh vacationed eyes. Either way I don’t like it, at all.

I’ve read along, virtually watching friends travel across the planet wanting to “make a difference” somehow, knowing they are the ones who will be changed.  And I’m envious.  My life is too much of boring, stupid shit sometimes. Our question of the day being: Should we replace the garage door (it’s old and sodden and barely works) that still works? 

We are such materialists in general with our things all around us, and on us.  Do our clothes and our homes really say who we are?  I’m aging, and I’m no longer cool (trust me I have a teenager that knows and isn’t shy to tell me) and I’m beginning to wonder if it’s important, even as I worry about being relevant.  I sat people watching at the airport, noting Capri’s definitely said “Middle aged and dumpy.”  Why do I even think about that stuff?

I have just ended, yes ENDED in the sense of a school year anyway, the most difficult,challenging year of my life and honestly most of it I cannot write about because it is family and it’s private and it’s hard, so f-ing hard.

What am I learning?

That love of family is perhaps central to joy and contentment (and pain!) That I have too much stuff and it’s making me feel smothered.  That my health cannot be taken for granted and must be a priority. That I don’t have enough friendship, in real life, the kind where you spit up laughing or end up crying, because you feel so understood.

Also, I’m learning I haven’t seen the end the suffering or pain, but we’ve ended one part of the cycle and that’s to be celebrated. Life goes on—weird, wacky and wonderful.  And on the spiritual dimension I am reading and studying about the Christian notion of prayer and for that you will have to stay tuned.

Here are some images from Florida.

Here’s a link to some Florida pictures.

Life. It is a humbling (er, humiliating) journey

an update

I appreciate the care and concern.  And thought it would be good to write an update since I fear some may avoid me for my returned melancholia and others will fret and worry for me.

By the time I posted that poem, I was doing somewhat better.  Improvement made it possible to write and think and therefore compose those words, stringing them together one after the other into some semblance of poetry.  At the very least they were a cry for help, as they say.  Ha!?

For days I have looked at my camera and not had the will to pick it up.  The last couple of days I have been able to and that is a sign.  Though yesterday in my ineptitude I spilled water all over my camera and it may be dead.   I am afraid to put in a charged battery and know for certain whether it is gone.  All is not lost.  I have a better camera bought for the business venture.  I don’t know how to use it exactly but I may be forced to learn.

finito

That reminds me.  The business of Imagine Photography LLC is finished.  Although I love working with entrepreneurs (my father was one) I am not one.  And I didn’t enjoy the business of family and wedding photography.   I am hanging up my “professional photographer” hat and picking up my Artist’s.  Closing the “doors” after three years and it’s somewhat of a relief, though I regret not having the personal umphf to “make it.”   Some of my depression may have been triggered by the finality of this admission.

back to the issue

I have certain people for whom I have held on to lack of forgiveness.  I feel hurt by them and so I resent.  Resentment hurts me and is a self-defeating prophesy in a way.  Anxiety, insecurity and fear come in and all of a sudden it is  unbearable.  Figuring out how to forgive, myself and the other person, is the only way to get past this.  This requires time to pray and find the place of openness inside.  Right now, my heart is still full of anxiety, it’s pressing down and creating tension and pain.  I must do this business of forgiveness to move on.

It is no coincidence that this all started right after I wrote the poem about forgiving my parents.  I wanted something powerful from that ‘gift’ of writing it for my church.  My ego wanted it.  And ironically, what has come of it is a humbling (er, humiliating) experience of being battered down by my weakness, frailty and continued inability to be a forgiving person.

“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” [Lewis
B. Smedes, The Art of Forgiving.]

This is the journey.  This is only one piece of it but it is imperative that I figure it out.  What a joke to be a follower of Christ and hold on to resentments and pain.  To live held captive.  To live without joy.  To live bound and controlled by our fear and bitterness.

I know this is not right.  I am humbled by my mistakes and want to climb out of this hell hole I’ve sunk into.  That’s only accomplished one fragile experience at a time, as I listen and respond to the nudging of the holy spirit.   I am so relieved to know there is a way out of this.

Feeble though I may be, I respond.  There’s strength to be found in that.