(warning: pictures have nothing much to do with text)
I still think of my life as "wild and precious" even though it is pretty mundane. I think it is all in how you perceive your life, and how much you dream. Your dream life can be pretty wild, and make your daily life all the more precious.
As I have been recovering from the brain and spine surgery, I have taken note of all the things in my life that make me happy, things I have often previously taken for granted.
Sometimes, it's the simplest of things.
My quiet house for a little while, except for Roy's snoring next to me on the couch, my mother gone to church with one of my angel daughters. No noise, no TV, a clock ticking softly. Soup on the stove, simmering.
A basket full of yarn calling me to knit, finally in my life able to meditatively savor the rhythm of my needles, without any guilt that I might be wasting time.
Money, not riches, but enough to shop for food, buy heat, put gas in my car, occasionally buy something fun, like a magazine, or more yarn, even go out to lunch or dinner. They don't call it social "security" for nothing. And a pension, that I worked hard for, and not worrying that I can't pay my way. Priceless stuff.
I am so fortunate, and I remind myself when I hear myself grumbling about someTHING or somgeONE that I find annoying.
I have my studio to go to every day, that place that sustains my creativity, and my joy. I love to weave, it's true, but if I didn't throw the shuttle even once, I would still want to be there in that old house, with its golden light, and warm, wood floors.
But all my life I have been stricken with the worry that I couldn't do it all. Crazy?
Probably.
But more than that, there was the realization that I didn't have the time to live all the lives that I imagined.
I often, in my fantasy world, have imagined living in the country in England, or maybe France, baking bread in a wood fired oven, planting flowers.
Then again, I have always dreamed of living in Maine, carving out a life for myself there.
I believed, when I was in my younger years, that when I was very old, I would somehow be sitting on my front porch, looking out over the water.
Maybe we all have lives like that, in our dreams, magical, imaginary other worlds. Maybe they make us sad, or maybe they inspire us. Maybe we will never actually live out any of them, but maybe we will.
"I continue to think about how paths not taken -because of choices we made in our present lives - may still be part of our story. Of how a second self, who made a different choice at that crossroads, is traveling in parallel to the present self, and how sometimes we sense it moving very close."
Maybe that's what it is, my parallel lives. The ones I might have lived. That other me.
Today I had lunch with other Chiari patients, two women who have had the same surgery as I have had.
We talked over lunch for two hours.
I am still processing it.
I am so glad that I went, and so grateful to have met them.
One thing that keeps reverberating in my head, is the observation that once your brain is opened up, you get "rebooted".......and when you wake up, you're not exactly the same person that you were before.
Finally.
