A peaceful, easy feeling: Cipro, photos and The Eagles

[sabrinamari]

My UTI is still hanging on, but I'm on 5 additional days of Cipro and it's not nearly as uncomfortable as it was earlier in the illness. I still don't stray very far from the bathroom if I can help it, but I'm hoping this will be the last week of that particular behavioral adjustment.

Really, really good news: I've been getting very low bp readings for months, and when I asked if I could come off of my bp meds today, I got the OK to do it. I need to track it for a couple of months and stay aware of it, but I no longer have to take that pill! I'm happy, and I attribute this change to the happiness and peace I am experiencing with the core of my life.

I get up every day and think about how happy I am in my relationship, and how much I love the people in my life. Even though this spring and summer have been scary and stressful in important ways, mostly because I've been worried about Geo and Cat, I am not dissatisfied with the foundation upon which my life rests: I love my honey and his little bunny, I am treated well every day, I love my friend and roomie Shannon and enjoy her companionship and I really love my friends and my community. My work can be demanding and stressful, but I feel good about it, and it *is* flexible. The crunches happen, but they are separated by periods of relative freedom. The work, overall, is meaningful and has the potential to make the lives of actual humans better. Slowly, it is changing a tiny part of the health care system.

The driving isn't much fun, but there's a bit less of it now, and a significant lessening in sight when I move.

I've carved out a few hours to go through a big box of photographs that Ken packed up for me before he left the East Coast. I've looked through it twice over the last week of enforced rest. It's been a pleasure to look through and organize this chronicle of the last 18 years. Last night I separated the photos that survived the first cull into ziplock bags labeled according to year (or general period), and I found inexpensive photo albums at Target that will allow me to assemble a history of the last 2 decades through photographs. It's operating like a sort of therapy: I am looking at each year and integrating it into my consciousness and my readily accessible memory banks. As I look, I think, this year was the year that ____(Cat and Geo got married)___ and ____(my brother first came to visit)___. And so on. And as I look and remember, I share them with Michael, who has been very curious and very pleased to see these pictures, looking over my shoulders and examining them here and there for images of me and the people he now knows. Michael has also helped me to reinterpret these parts of my life in more affirming ways: he thinks I look cute in all of my incarnations---even those in which I felt most yucky. Even those in which I think I look terrible. By simply loving me as I am, and as I was, he is helping me to see myself differently, because he really, genuinely loves what he sees. it's amazing. It's awesome. It's joyful.

And strangely, one would think I would feel anger or bad feelings as I re-view each stage of my relationship with Ken. But I don't. I just see the photos as evidence of where I've been and what forces have shaped me. And most of the photos are me enjoying my friends, enjoying travel, or playing with my coven and celebrating with my community---being joyful with people I still love. I don't feel bitter or angry, I just feel...inspired and aware. Awake. These are the forces that created me, pleasurable and painful, healthy and unhealthy. It's all history now---a history of utility that provides me with resources and lessons to which I can return again and again.

By the way, I will soon have photos to share---extra photos of Karen, Tom, Cat, Geo, Sarah, Lisa, Dorothy, Phyllis, Kim, Devyn, Christopher, Stephanie...photos of so many people I love. I plan to give them to the people they depict in a big festive way sometime before the end of the year.

I have photos of our old coven of many names celebrating after ritual *with face paint* at the cottage where Cat and Geo lived in 1990. Yes, I have Geo in face paint...
I have photos of Karen and Tom playing and canoing on the canal.
I have photos of Sarah and Dan kissing at Turtle Hill's Beltaine in 1999.
I have a million photos of Geo and Cat and Geo, snuggling, laughing, getting married...
I have many photos of AIDSWALK and Braided Stream Sabbats
I have photos of Lorien, of Cat's store, of Shannon making a silly face at Braided Stream's Yule in 1999...
I have many photos of Cat and I hugging and snuggling and feeling good...

So many great photos!

It's happiness. Even the many photos of my early years with Ken and our life together evoke nothing but good memories and rueful smiles. Perhaps it's also that, as Cat once told me, "It's easy to be generous when you are happy". And I am as happy as I've ever been in the whole of my life.

One of my old marriage therapists, Dave Schnarch, once talked to our retreat group about a song that represented mature, differentiated love (as opposed to enmeshed, immature love): The Eagles's "Peaceful, Easy Feeling". I never really "got" what that felt like---or, at least, after so many years of enmeshment with Ken, I couldn't really feel what it would be like to love and be loved in that way.

Today I realized that I feel that way every day:



"I've got a peaceful easy feeling, and I know you won't let me down
"Cause I'm already standing on the ground."

Comments

[hypanebliss.livejournal.com]

((Sabri)) I offer thanks and gratitude on behalf of yourself and to yourself for all the work that you do. :)

Really, you give me such an inspiration that all the hard work pays off. It's an awesome place to be in watching you glow. Keep shining.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Thanks, baby! I totally appreciate your warmth and loving support.

You know, the hard work does pay off. If you keep pushing yourself, you learn. You grow, you *grow up* and your day-to-day living gets better and better. I think it's because you just get used to making better choices, and then you find yourself coasting along and enjoying the sweet payoffs that come from those choices.

Course it's never perfect, but who cares? It's good, and that's what you're aiming for.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I'm looking forward to seeing them. They've been good years in so many ways.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

That's very true!

[skyefyr.livejournal.com]

There's a few in there I'd like to see before you distribute. :-)