A Good Summer
My life has been following an unasked for path. Unwanted and unanticipated.
Yet, many of us live with the unwanted.
The child I pass on my morning walks, who sits in her wheelchair, smiling crooked and bright, and lifts a fragile arm to wave at me. The older woman walking by herself that passes Hans and I and stops to say, “How nice to have a hand to hold.” The boy who smiles sweetly and stammers, looking at the ground, as he tries to tell us about his electric lawn mower. The people who carry burdens invisible to sight.
I miss my old life. It’s been twenty months. I don’t want this particular journey.
But still, I’m grateful for these good, warm summer days. And they have been good!
This summer, doing yoga has become progressively easier.
I’m even a friend of the Down Dog again. My head below my hips and I’m able to tolerate it. My Dog and I are quite happy to be reunited!
I am running errands again. Able to go get groceries on my own. My husband is ever so happy to come home and find the fridge stocked, the cupboards filled. Huzzah!
I’ve mowed the lawn! Three times! All that noise and motion? No sweat! Who ever thought mowing would be a WIN?! Well, it is!
We’ve been on a few local-ish trips. One of them Glamping at an Airbnb site an hour and a half outside of Fargo. Tenting with a real bed! Highly recommend.
We made our longest trip since my injury: five hours in the car to Duluth. Challenging, but we made it work. A lunch break halfway there. A nap when we arrived. Duluth! It felt like going to some foreign country. The farthest I’ve been away home in over a year and a half!
Gardening has been a win this summer, too. Last year I couldn’t bend over long enough to plant or harvest. This year is going like green beans! It’s such a pleasure and a joy to be outside, in the sun, weeding lettuce, plucking eggplant, picking tomatoes.
What remains the most difficult, is the continual perception
that my brain thinks it’s on a dance floor!
It’s never really calm and quiet inside my brain. It’s always at a dance studio. Somedays doing the twist, somedays preforming ballet, once in awhile doing the jitterbug. It’s exhausting keeping up with long conversations or listening to a podcast when all the while my brain continues to skip, and jounce, and rattle. Somedays are better than others. I don’t know why.
Somedays are just too much and I retreat into solitary mode. Go on my own silent retreat. For the most part, I suppose, I’m just learning how to live my new life. When to stop. When to answer the phone. When to take a nap. Learning to listen to my body. It’s not a bad thing. But it does offer up a fair amount of boredom. I guess, that’s part of the journey, too.
I have learned many things this past year and a half.
Life can be a slog, but I am not alone.
I’m learning to understand the sorrows we bear as our bodies fail us. Learning a deeper kindness towards people - who like me - live in the unwanted-ness of their own life situations. Situations they did not ask for. Situations that are difficult and unfair.
This is what I know.
Hope soothes. Kindness encourages. Love heals.
May your days be warmed by both the giving and the receiving of love, hope, and kindness.
Love always,
Jill