Emotive Rambling

Choices… and Perspective

/ Twist the Leaf / 1 Comment

I may have stumbled upon one of the new perspectives that my Self Care Saturday spread from earlier this week was referring to while I was in the shower last evening.

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Sometimes in my mind I gripe about the shit I don’t like… as I’m sure most people do.  You know… not the people per se, but like the soft water in this house that has a weird taste and makes it fucking impossible to rinse all the conditioner out of my hair.

And then my mind kind of wandered on to thinking about my shower at home, which has much harder water and you come out of it feeling much cleaner.  And in the middle of this thought, I had a memory of when my aunt and cousin came to visit MY home for a while and how she had complained about my water being too hard.

And that got me to thinking…

Would I rather have her (or them) visiting my home?

Or would I rather be a guest in her home?

Her home.  Hands down, 100% completely her home.  That’s the answer.  I don’t like them in my home.  I don’t like any of them in my home. I don’t like them touching my stuff, putting ass prints on my furniture in odd places, or mingling their scents into the familiar scent of my home. I don’t like their energy mucking up my space, their dirty dishes, or their constant disturbances, or the need to feed them or entertain them.  I hate it.  All of it. I really do.

If coming here now and again keeps them from coming to my house?  It’s worth the discomfort.   Absolute, completely worth every little shred of the discomfort of being here.

And that is an entirely new perspective on visiting family that I hadn’t thought of before. So there you go… there really is gold at the end of the rainbow, you just have to dig in the mud to find it.

Nature Does Not Hurry

/ Twist the Leaf / 3 Comments

So every day, I have tea in the morning.  This isn’t because I’m a big tea drinker.  All the teas I drink are herbal, because I can’t handle caffeine.  And honestly?  It’s taken me a long time to even find some that I’m fond of.

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That said, I have managed, over trial and error, to find a few.  One of them is a Rosehips tea by Traditional Medicinals that I like to mix with either  chamomile tea or peach tea.   In the Traditional Medicinals tea, each tea bag comes with a little quote on the tab.

Today’s quote was from Lao Tzu.  “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.”

Although I get what this is saying?  I disagree with the quote in a very literal way.  The fact is that it is true, nature does not hurry.  But, everything is -not- accomplished.   This is why plants die before all the buds can open at the end of the season, and there are often still new leaves just coming into being when fall and winter come to kill off the plants and make the leaves fall.

Everything does not get done.

Everything does not survive and thrive.

This quote, or perhaps how it is used in this instance, makes it seem like you can just take your time with things and everything will fall into place.  And it’s true, everything -will- fall into place.   But if you want things to fall in the place how YOU want them to?  It’s going to take more than that.  Otherwise, like late blooms and off-season buds, those things that are important to you will die off instead of flourishing.

This is not to say you don’t need to take time to slow down and breathe, time to step away and relax.   But sometimes?  The only way anything gets done is with a PUSH to get it there.

Just my two cents.

And, because I know you’ll be wondering, I drink tea every morning because I need a hot drink to mix my collagen peptides into. It’s healthier than hot chocolate.

Interesting Places

/ Twist the Leaf / 2 Comments

I really liked one of the prompts in a group I’m a member of on Discord, and I wanted to do an extended reply to it here.

Question:  Where is the most interesting place you’ve been? What did you find interesting about it?

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This wasn’t a difficult question for me to answer, as I live near what I believe to be the most beautiful, captivating place on the planet.  (Not that I’ve seen the entire planet, but I have a feeling I’d be hard pressed to find anything that could out-shine it or my connection to it.)

That place? The Olympic and Cascade Rainforests of western Washington state.

I could spend an entire day exploring the moss draping from branches of trees, or the lichen on a fallen tree trunk. I could pick a spot, a single spot, and spend an entire day exploring just within that spot… and then pick another on the next day.  Another on the next.

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I love that the terrain that is not flat or soft nor hard.  Instead it is rugged, with places of soft, spongy earth, and spots where the jagged rocks of the mountain beneath the soil jut out to trip you.

Speaking of tripping… I love the roots.  They are everywhere, exposed and reaching.  The earth is moist and fertile, roots lift out of it.  They fan out beneath the earth, other than these surfacing of knobs and knots that are like the joints of a swimmer poking out of the water’s surface.

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Lie down on the forest floor in places like this, and even in the driest of summers, over time your clothing becomes damp and then heavy with moisture as the forest lends some of its bounty to you.

Here in this place I know the mosses and the trees, the ferns and the mushrooms; I know the slimy and wet, I know the crisp and crunchy. I know the fronds and the spores, the molds and the crumbling decay of fallen trees that give life to all that claim them home. The flora and fauna here are my family.

These rainforests are filled with life and death.  It is in the air and touches your skin, you breathe it in with every breath.  I love the rich myriad of  greens and browns, the dank and earthy smells, the muffled and whispering sounds in the kind of quiet stillness that feels sacred.  I love the damp darkness and decay that blends seamlessly with lushness of growth and green.

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This is my home.

I live in the city, but it is among the trees and the moss, the decay and the growth, the earth and the water…. it is there that is home.  These places are a balm upon my soul, and no matter where I travel or whatever else I see, I do not think I could ever find any place more engaging and more interesting to me than here.

 

Obsession

/ Twist the Leaf / 1 Comment

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I just wanted to muse for a bit on how much I love you… and how surprising it is that you don’t creep me the fuck out.

What I mean by that is to say that you take me by surprise in many ways.  One of these is in the  many ways in which you fit the “profile” of a stalker.

After all… you’re obsessive. Invasive. Highly focused. Extremely protective.  And in someone else?  These things being directed at me would absolutely set off a crap load of triggers and freak me out.

And yet with you?  Not at all.  You’re all mine, including that intensity with which you set your focus upon me.

It took me a long time to be comfortable with the sheer volume of attention you wanted to direct my way, though. Then again, it probably helped that I was a bit oblivious as well.

I remember being shocked at some of the things you remembered that I would have never thought to even notice. Quirks, shoe size, preferences on various innocuous things, and so much more. If I had not been so oblivious, you might have scared the ever living shit out of me.

As it was though, I became aware of the obsession gradually, only discovering more and more as you snuck your way deeper and deeper under my armor and before I knew it, you’d taken root there in my heart.

I love you.  Always.  All ways.

 

Revisiting Fear and Indecision

/ Twist the Leaf / 2 Comments

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I wanted to revisit the topic of fear after my post from yesterday and the topic of the meditation that I did yesterday.

Yesterday’s meditation was about indecision, which I definitely do not have a problem with in any way, shape, or form.   But I feel like my post made it sound as if I don’t have fear, which is definitely not the case.

I do, absolutely, have fear.

I fear losing my home to the point where I obsess over work and push myself beyond my limits at times in how much work I should take on. (Thank goodness that I’m also someone that likes their creature comforts, or that fear might rule my entire life.)

I often have issues around fear when it comes to some of my scars (particularly the one on my face) and how people react (or may react) to them, which has gotten better over time as I am no longer trying to seclude myself into my home… but I know I still have a long way to go on this.

I fear my ex and the day he will be released from prison.   I fear my ex, as well, in his conniving “other” ways of trying to reach me even while he IS in prison.

I’m goddamned well -terrified- of spiders, even though my logical mind tells me I shouldn’t be.  You can add piranhas to that list, too, ever since as a kid I saw that first original Piranha movie.

The point is, I do have fears, and I didn’t want my post from yesterday coming off as some kind of bravado or something.  It’s just that fears do not inspire indecision for me.

For me, indecision doesn’t come from fear.  It appears when I am feeling extremely vulnerable, which can put me in a place of “I dunno, you choose”, and it appears when I have not managed to gather enough information or had the chance yet to think something through.

Something To Say – An Emotive Rant At No One In Particular

/ Twist the Leaf / 2 Comments

So I watched an episode of the show “What Would You Do?” tonight, which I shared with you a bit in IMs earlier. But… I really wanted to write a post about it because, as you know, this is a really big issue that hits close to home.

On the show, it made me cry. Literally cry while I watched the kindness of some strangers… and the very realistic representation of the hurdles involved with this issue.

Although not deaf, in being mute I have a serious hurdle to overcome when out in public. It is a part of the reason that I often choose to have someone with me when I go out.

Still, I do plenty of errands and tasks out and about on my own, and you cannot imagine how often I run into problems. Whether I go out with paper and pen, my tablet to type messages on, or my phone that has multiple text-to-speech apps to use… there’s just some people that are completely intolerant to the hurdles involved with being non-vocal.

These people? Lift my chin and show them the scar so that they can understand I have no voice? And all you get is an “EW, WTF MAN?? That’s gross.”

There’s no empathy. There’s no understanding. No compassion. There’s no -effort- at all on their part.

I’ve had people I’ve tried to communicate with just snort at me and walk away. I’ve had them literally call me a “retard” and tell me that I shouldn’t be allowed outside my home alone.  These are people that work in a customer service industry.  Waiters, cashiers, retail employees…. people that should have SOME sort of temperance and make some sort of effort to understand and communicate.

I’m not a goddamned cripple.  I’m not mentally handicapped.  I don’t need a babysitter. I’m a grown fucking man that was attacked, died on my kitchen floor, and was brought back by paramedics to find myself forever  irreversibly injured in that attack.  I can communicate just fine as long as the other person is willing to put in a little effort beyond using their ears.   And yet?   That kind of behavior shown by the waiter in that show?  Is so very common.

It was really nice to see the people that stepped up, but as someone that deals with this issue on an everyday basis?  I can tell you from first hand experience, those kind souls are few and far between.   In my experience?  Most people would rather turn their head and pretend it’s not happening.

I don’t know why I’m posting this.  I think I just had to get it out.