Spring: New Life

One year ago today: Click here...
Spring Thaw


One year! One year since I resumed blogging and, more importantly, resumed my fitness journey! I sit here today in my beautiful little cottage with sunshine, blue skies, 70-something degrees, and with fresh spring breezes playing with the drapes (Okay, keeping it real... the garbage cans just outside the windows are crying for some bleach action...the gentle breezes are doing more than making the curtains dance, they occasionally assault my nose! ha. ahh, spring cleaning, I LOVE it!)

One year ago... I still get misty-eyed remembering the pain. I felt like I had been through some kind of spiritual and emotional assault that had left me shell-shocked. Compounding the pain, my physical state was critically unhealthy, family crisis abounded, and financial crisis loomed. It was a most low point in my life.

I did what everybody does when they get in such a low place: I exercised and started eating better. (Kidding... not about doing that, but about people choosing that path when they are in the pits.) Amazingly, and only now really beginning to pay attention to my body's signals, an hour or more of exercise a day was like a physical/spiritual/emotional pep pill... I don't know enough about body chemistry to comment here scientifically, but I can say authoritatively that exercise pulled me out of the pit and set my feet firmly on the path towards welless. I began to FEEL better. I began to lose weight. I began to have hope. I began again to be creative, to laugh, to enjoy, to hope.

It has been a long road this past year. In many ways, it has felt simultaneously like I was hopelessly adrift in a sea without water (an abysss)... desperately lost in a bleak wilderness AND on a salvific pathway towards life and wellness. It makes my head hurt trying to understand the tension therein; so, I choose to stop dissecting the experience for understanding, and just make observations about it. Someday, I may have more enlightenment to understand it better; but, for now, I just accept it for what it is: a mixed bag of death and life... hmmm... maybe death and resurrection.

Today, as I listen to birdsong outside my windows (oh my, the grass needs mowed and the back porch swept!), I am just happy to be on the journey. Happy to be 70-75 pounds lighter and light-years healthier than I was a year ago. Happy that I am alive and learning how to be well.

Life is a gift. (Even when it feels like an empty sea!~)