An Invincible Summer - A Woman's Journey

Test is done! It wasn’t fun but it wasn’t earth shattering either. It was larger in my head than anywhere else. I got dizzy but dizzy is not vertigo. Dizzy is off kilter and odd footed. Vertigo is stop life until the vertigo stops. Vertigo is no up and no down. I am grateful it is done. I’ve yet to hear from the doc but, from what the tech says, there was nothing in this test that would stop a surgery. Thank you for your kind words. Moving forward again.

Today I will be having what the doctor, rather innocuously, referred to as a balance test. Come to find out it’s a bit more than that. It is almost as if they are going to try to produce an episode of vertigo to see how prone I am. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever had a case of vertigo but it’s for the birds. The last full episode I had was 5 years ago this July. I woke with the world spinning. For a week I couldn’t walk or figure out what was up or what was down. For a month I couldn’t drive safely. Luckily I had some fabulous care givers. The after affect lasted a few years. It felt like my brain was bobbing in water and had trouble keeping up with any turn of the head. While those after affects were merely unpleasant, in full episode I was full of despair. It was unlivable. Like being on an endless looping rollercoaster with no idea when, or if, the ride would be over. Feeling fearful but I am trying to remain here, right now, and not borrow trouble that may never come. (Is that a d

There are days when my lack of education laughs at me. It pokes and needles.  It loves to put forward ideas that are foreign and large, and then says, “Nope, not you. Too much for you.”  Or it presents to me a speaker, whose ideas are so compelling, but whose rich and luscious mastery of the English language is such, that I sit with almost a sense of vertigo, certainly a feeling of not being included, with it almost at the tips of my fingers but not quite. Elusive. There is an club that I long to be a part of. There are no directions, no handbook, no assembly possible.  Then I wonder, is this what poetry is meant to do? Put one ill at ease? Am I suppose to be comfortable with the feeling of being uncomfortable? Is that the lesson I missed when I did not finish, or even start, AP English? Once in awhile I am gifted an understanding of something so beautiful. Perhaps a poem by Mary Oliver, who is a little more accessible to the swirling matter that is my brain. But in the next moment, I

Yesterday I worked in the yard. It was a lovely, centering time. In my thoughts, enjoying the beauty, moving my body. It was warm, the dogs were content in my company and I was loving life. Boy Scout went to a memorial for the wife of our neighbor Gary. When he returned home he said he’d take me to dinner 🥳. We opted for a new food cart collective in a neighborhood called Woodstock. Grabbing a nice little isolated table, complete with umbrella, we settled into dinner and a couple of games of cards. The light breeze was warm, the place packed with loads of young families and four legged creatures, a great atmosphere.  I felt a couple of drops of water on my arm, then on my back. Then that warm musky scent of petrichor reached into my senses, reminding me of every other time that smell wrapped me up and made me feel, somehow, like home. God, how I love it.  The sky above us opened, which was interesting, because all I could see was gorgeous blue sky. The table umbrella was hiding the gr

The Boy Scout has a generally happy disposition. His “happy quota” is pretty high. When he took a short term job washing dishes, he would come home and say, “I am blessed with work”. Things like “I love my job”, “We get to live here”, “I get to be with you”  and “My life is so good” come out of his mouth regularly. There are studies that suggest that we are born with a baseline of happiness and that it remains, for most, about that level. Peaks and pits are circumstantial with the dial moving back to baseline when circumstances either level back out or become the new normal. If the studies are correct, I would have considered my baseline well below average, generally looking for the next bad thing to happen. I wasn’t quite Eeyore but I sure as heck wasn’t Betty White. When I read about the studies, I was disappointed, thinking that there was no real way to make it better. The small dark cloud would remain.  This has not been the case for me. I’m still not Betty White but I am usually a

  Peace Is This Moment Without Judgment ​ Do you think peace requires an end to war? Or tigers eating only vegetables? Does peace require an absence from your boss, your spouse, yourself?... Do you think peace will come some other place than here? Some other time than Now? In some other heart than yours?  ​ Peace is this moment without judgment. That is all. This moment in the Heart-space where everything that is is welcome. Peace is this moment without thinking that it should be some other way, that you should feel some other thing, that your life should unfold according to your plans.  ​ Peace is this moment without judgment, this moment in the Heart-space where everything that is is welcome. © Dorothy Hunt Where everything that is is welcome. It seems impossible but as I gradually move that direction, life gets quieter, breath gets slower and deeper. Loving myself into healing.

I set this blog up, almost 9 years ago, to vent, share, work out the life I was living. A recently broken marriage of 30 years, a mom whose kids were now adults, a woman starting over, a person reckoning with her inner family, getting ready to heal. Lately I've found that I don't have a ton to say and have thought about abandoning this blog I have come to love.  Maybe I just need to reinvent it.  I am no longer my problems, I am my answers. I am not my hurts, I am more resilient. Not so much a victim, which is how my inner teenager got her needs met, but more a gal learning to stand on her own two feet, learning to ask for help without manipulation and finding that inner peace is far preferable over inner fear and dread of what might come next. Fun and fascinating....growing up at 59. So, I would like to introduce what got me started.......... Sunday, September 21, 2014 To Start I've decided that weekends are too long. How does one adjust from being a wife of 29 years to be

It happened so slowly that I didn’t really know it had. This little big town has become home. The largest city in Oregon, with less than 650,000 people, has half the population density per sq mile of my home town of Los Angeles. Traffic can get bad but nothing by comparison.  The people are unique, hence the city motto of “Keep Portland Weird”, and they’ve grown on me. In general, they are a little more small town than I’m used to so….a bit kinder. It’s a forest. I love the trees. The food is amazing! Gourmet food carts, hole in the wall restaurants, frequent nominees and winners of the James Beard awards (best new restaurant 2023  Kann ). No need to step foot in a chain restaurant here, there is food on every corner and it’s good. I’m finally feeling connected. It’s taken awhile. I had to get beyond my grief and I have. It doesn’t hurt anymore which is lovely. It helps to be out in the garden after a long winter. The rhodys and azaleas were stunning, as were there dogwood and double c

Standing in line at a restaurant, the checker says to me that the soda dispenser is not working. A gent in a mechanics uniform walks by and replies that it will be working in just moments. I finish checking out and go get my napkins and wait to get my ice. The worker is finishing up. I ask him how is day is going. He looks surprised and says that they are finally starting to catch up and that the company has been way behind in servicing their clients. He's been working a ton of overtime and is not happy about it. "Well, it's good you're catching up then", I say. He finishes up and starts to walk away. He turns around and says with a big smile, "Thank you. Usually I am just invisible to everyone. You have a great smile and you've made my day". I thank him and tell him I hope the rest of the day goes well. Just a small interaction and we both walked away feeling pretty good. It's not hard to be nice. I really do hope the rest of his day was good.

 A gal in the grocery store asked me about my necklace . She said she loved it so I decided, since there was no one behind me, to tell her the story about how I got it. I had recently allowed my then boyfriend to move in. It didn't feel quite right but I was a different version of myself 7 years ago and I let it happen. He was very convincing. With him he brought way too much stuff for a tiny house with no closets AND two large white dogs. He loved those two chug heads but I would be lying if I told you I had any fondness for them. They had way too many counts against them: They shed. A LOT   They were a direct assault to my olfactory senses. It was a persistent and never ending battle that my nose lost every singe time. Their eyes had boogers. There is no nice way to say this. They were just gooey and yuck.  They drooled. You know...that long stringing kind that when they swung their heads would attack you. Their ears were those long droopy ones, which also frequently smelled bad