My Return

It has been some time since I have endeavored to journal anything, either on this site or on my primary blog. My only recent attempt at creativity was to slap up a photo from my garden as a test piece for some tinkering being done for the benefit of a friend. I will include an updated picture here.

Time comes in bits and spurts, flowing quickly when we try desperately to cling to it, and stalling when moments of suffering head our way. For me, time is timeless. The pain in my ankles and back has become so severe that I cannot continue working full time. I am, at the age of 35, living as if I were retired, sans any pension. I will not digress into what causes the pain, except to say that it is skeletal and related to joint attachment in the ankles. The back, of course, is due to that bad fall over decade ago.

How best to deal with the incapability to move as I once did? Should I wallow in the depths of deepest despair, sunk in a quagmire of self-pity and detestation of my fellow man? Shall I simple become a recluse, the "Batty woman down the way", who chases children off her lawn with a gnarled cane?

Hell, no.

Life is too breathtaking for all that bullshit.

Pain is something that is, in part, mental. The pain will always be there. The pain is our body's way of saying, "stop, and allow things to heal." Healing for me will require radical surgery (an osteotomy, with reattachment of the major tendons and ligaments of the ankle, leg and foot structures x both legs), but without insurance, I am cursed to limit the amount of distance that I budge in one session. Becoming depressed because of pain only make the pain that much more unbearable. It is better to continue with an upbeat mind-set than to allow one self to decline into a ghostly shell of a personality.

I have always been one that pauses and observes things in nature. I am someone who would spend hours on end in a dense forest if only to enjoy the tranquility. I have an abundance of time to study things now that I am limited in mobility, and will begin to chronicle annotations here.

I heard a thousand blended notes

While in a grove I sate reclined,

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts

Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link

The human soul that through me ran;

And much it grieved my heart to think

What Man has made of Man. - William Wordsworth