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 n...

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 hidi...

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 ...

  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...