Getting better all the time

These days I am always aware that I'm healing from something, but I don't always know from what.

Gluten intolerance pretty seriously kicked my ass before I knew what was going on; perhaps the process of becoming aware of all the ways my body needed to heal led me to an awareness of the other ways in which I was wounded.

Some are fairly intense - my mom's multiple medical and psychological diagnoses run me (and my sis) through the gamut on a fairly frequent basis. A sense of abandonment is the biggie, there.

Some are pretty trivial, on the outside: the traffic in Portland regularly turned me into a candidate for Tourette's syndrome - somewhat comical to any passenger who knew me more as an empathetic massage therapist than a Type A driver.

And some are old, and so much a part of the fabric of my life that I have no idea who I'd be without them.

Perhaps other gluten intolerant and celiac folks can identify with the feeling that once you'd been off gluten long enough, the mental light bulb clicked back on, and the path back to the life you remembered was illuminated. My body started healing 10 months ago in August. By December, my spirit/psyche/animus reared up and announced that it was leaving Portland, getting the heck out of the city, and going back to a beautiful, slower paced place where it belonged.

And so here we are. I left my massage practice, and now I'm working a very part time job. We live on a small piece of property where the wind and the occasional coyote are all we hear at night. We're 2 miles from the nearest coffee shop, 7 miles from downtown. Sometimes there's nothing to do, so we sit on the porch in the sun, read books, maybe play badminton.

I'm protective of the peace that has descended. In the quiet, I'm aware of the shifting tides of experience, memory, emotion. Floating along I can gently examine parts my life, set them aright. Little bits of healing occur, all the time.




Today I went for a row on Suttle Lake. There were thunderclouds building up in the east, but the lake was calm, glacial green-blue, and quiet. Once I'd packed up and dried off, Siri and I stretched out on a short dock. The lake is so beautiful it's almost shocking. I'm so pleased to now have a life in which I notice these things, and can be filled by them. I'm no longer just a tourist, a dilettante in a life I wish I had. Some part of me that had crinkled and contracted thanks to living in a big city where every view is compromised by buildings, noise, dirt, cracks open and begins to refill with wonder.

Wonder feels so expansive, like it makes more space in me for all of what is and feels good in life. So unlike cynicism...

What would a critical mass of wonder look like?