"There's still time to change the road you're on""

Sometimes we are just on the wrong road for what we perceive are the right reasons and we just need to see the sign at the crossroads before we take pause to correct the course. This is the case for me lately, but in a good way. I had been shaken up by some recent health issues and I recognized that much of what was happening to me was based on my various life choices along the way for better or for worse.

First strike to the side of blight 

One area that has strayed the course is my diet. I have been a foodie for a long time, longer than I can perhaps remember to be honest. I think it started when I was a child and there were times when we felt this urgency surrounding food. Sometimes things were concocted from pasty flour mixed with butter and dropped into broth just to have something in our stomachs. Such scarcity created a sense of fear in me that never left.

Then, in later years that seemed to ratchet up when I was living in the homes of various relatives and kept on a strict diet for much of my upbringing. This was for my health and betterment, I recognize now, but at the time it felt too strict and constricting. Sometimes it felt on the border of shaming to me. So, when I was with visiting my maternal Grandma for extended stays, I felt such freedom in her bounty. She created a life wherein food was one of her central focus areas I sensed the love she poured into food. My malnourished spirit ate up all of her generosity.

I loved how Grandma nourished garden plants and seeds to life. From those seeds she grew robust gardens and brought the food in to create lively, generous, and life giving meals. I followed her path like an eager sponge trying to take in all of the earthy simplicity. Though I was a lazy child at times and low key, I loved to be around her barefoot amongst those wonderful plants that yielded such delicious bounty, chipping in to help when she asked of me. I celebrated with her in the kitchen too. There I was not only allowed but encouraged to prep food alongside of her. My cousins and I would help her snap the ends off big bowls of peas and beans, we'd peel carrots and potatoes, we'd help whisk cakes and later on lick the batter. I wanted to go further and would watch eagerly as she showed me the timing of cooking certain foods so that the ingredients sang. Oh the joys we found in such things together.

Yet, there was a downside. While her cycle was one of healthy eating, a cyclical journey of walking through the days and seasons, mine became an unholy obsession. I wanted to get that feeling around every corner. I grabbed up a candy bar when at the store checkout, I planned activities around the meals I could get while attending an event or going to a special destination. Hers was a means to an end, tried and true from the days of old when gardening meant food for one's family and the mother was the center of the kitchen and central to the hearts of the home. I on the other hand was mourning what I didn't have when young and making up for it in all kinds of exaggerated ways not even realizing the harm in the pattern for many years.

Second strike

The second area that caused me to stray was my interest in the arts and writing. These interests weren't bad in and of themselves, but when I was defining myself n these ways I was doing it so much s that I wasn't listening to or understanding that there were other facets of myself that I was not 'taking care of'.  To put it indelicately, I was becoming sedentary in my approach to life and therefore physically lazy and atrophying. I was sitting far too often and fixating far too much. I was sitting to paint, draw, sculpt, sew and many other pursuits. I was barely ever on my feet. I was even taking my wheeling chair from computer to art table to kitchen areas. I felt that I was doing right by all of this busy-ness of the pursuit of excellence....but it was doing nothing for the physical components that made up my wholistic being.

Sadly, the pursuits didn't yield me with what I had hoped it would along the way. I wasn't wealthy from the art and writing, I wasn't famous, I wasn't even the 'head of the class' per se when it came to how I compared to my peers. I think I craved those accolades and the perks of being financially secure and foolishly I thought that decided and driven effort would yield me the way. Somehow it didn't pan out and what a tragedy it came to be when I realized the things I wanted from art and writing were not the things that would come to be It's sad because art and writing initially served as my 'voice' and my way of speaking when I didn't have another ways verbally.

Perhaps I will return to that road again when I have balanced myself out more steadily....or when I have aged enough to not care to heal and progress along the way physically speaking.

Third strike you're out?...

I tried for very long naively to make my creative passions my avenue for earning a living versus taking traditional work. I thought it noble and groundbreaking, creative and bold. I thought that by relying on innovation and aspiration I was becoming an even more robust version of me than I thought I could ever be. I felt that there had to be a gold gilded lining surrounding the pursuit. I thought that with the work would come accolades and the world would come to appreciate me simply for being a creative spirit, but there was so much more to it that I hadn't realized. Self-promotion, self aggrandizing, pushing and pulling for clients, trying to make something 'good enough' or 'compelling enough' to get somewhere in the public eye. It was counter intuitive to the process of being creative which was just an authentic outpouring or a challenged task and not as much about the end result for me. I took on a part time job recently that made me realize the simplicity I overlooked but was just across the other side of that job application waiting for me!

Turning the corner?

How does one fix one's foibles? Does it only occur when we are at the precipice of losing everything? Reinvention always seemed possible for me, and it was hard to understand what was at stake until I reached that turning point wholly. Now with a vision of myself reforming,  I recognize that holding on to the newly formed vision seems key. 

To find this sense of self, I was pushed to the edges of the end recently. My dearest companion had been practically begging me to wake up the side of me that cared about being physically active and healthy. He couldn't bear to see me degrading further and it seemed it was killing the something that my wanderlust spirit sparked in him when he met me... Even though he tried in countless incidences to share his urgency with me, I didn't see the depth of his need or his sense of anxiety toward me. For a long time I couldn't reconcile that his wish was betterment for me so that we could together be happy.

Yet, despite all of his care, the turning point was not just propelled by his urging but also by a recent health issue that has beholden me to the path of what felt like dying lately. It wasn't even food related this time, but it was enough of a scare nonetheless as I veered near to careening off the path and down the rocky and treacherous ravine. I had a bad allergic reaction that left me severely sick for a month nearly. Skin weeping, swelling inflammation, terrible rashes covering me top to tail. Somehow, I couldn't heal. One week of dealing with all of this prompted me to go in for another ten days of antibiotics, and now 14 days of steroids...and amidst this cycle of meds, I feel I am finally on the mend...barely. 

What did all of this say to me? Wake the 'eff up! See that the road is not limiting you.. you are not abiding by the call of the healing path and not using your eagle eye to scope the way. I heard the song lyrics recently from a song by the Eagles called 'Already gone' and in it they sing. "So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains, and we never even know we have the key". Boy did this ever strike me as true lately! I was not forced to be sedentary, I didn't have to pine for food like a starving child or a a strictly treated teen. I didn't have to define myself as a self employed person to be special, to make a difference...to be happy...

Wait, but who am I really?

Isn't it such an interesting journey we are on? Just when we think we know who we are, we are given another opportunity to make good on the things that we knew ourselves to be deep down, even if these things have only represented latent energy awakening up until we turned the key?... 

I realized that the thing that drew me to my boyfriend were the very same things that always lived in me. I always loved hiking until I could run, running until I could go further, testing myself. I loved pushing up one hill on a bike one day and getting past it and onto the next the following day. I loved trying for the next bend or vista on a trail--the thrill of the breathy wonders along the way and how it spoke to my being metaphorically every step of the way. 

I realized that if I could leave some of the old 'baggage' behind, and shake free some of the fear and misgivings about being those things that I can be more happy and more free. Shake it off and find the trial. That is what has recently been driving me! When I was young I couldn't 'keep up'  athletically and this made me no longer wanted to be athletic with other people in a group or team.  As a child I also saw that I lacked the tried and true finesse required to excel at certain sports and sadly when I decided I had wanted to be more 'like others' it stole away my natural gait and my own sense of authentic adventurousness.

Yet, I took a hike today, a rare solo hike, and I saw things for what they were for me. I loved every step, I relished at every encounter, I communed and communicated, I drank the essence of the place in and it fed me--and I wept as I sat to reflect midway along the journey.. And in the midst of the journey I realized this is who I am capable of being, so this is the bliss that drives me!! Alleluia, and glory be. I no longer need to prove it to anyone else. I know the truth as I found it there on that path and my heart is there in nature...and nature is there to call and guide me. Now I can go down it more confidently whether partnered or alone out into the wilds, I feel the trails the sanctity of nature calling me.

As an end note, I recently heard the song 'Stairway to Heaven' by Led Zeppelin and in the song they say "Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run, there's still time to change the road you're on". Perhaps this is the truth that I need to hold as I shape the new and improved sense of me! :) <3