Walk Journals ~ August 24 Ramblings

From the Franklin Road Bridge, looking east at the Franklin
Road Beach (baby beach) and the shore of Lenape Island.

The sub heading of my little space here in cyber world says I like to ramble.  If you've visited here before or if you're a friend of mine, you'll know I mean that figuratively and literally.  I tend to use a  lot of words when I write--ramblings.  And I walk--ramblings.  I walk a lot.

The walking, as some of you will recall, started with my endocrinologist explaining that one way to get diabetes under control is to exercise and she recommended walking.  The first mile I walked was a nerve-wracking tortuous slow hour of self-loathing.  But she had scared me sufficiently that I found 30 minutes or an hour every day.  In very little time I found myself looking forward to my outdoor excursions.  I began taking pictures of one spot every day--a location or scene that spoke to me for some reason each day.  The pictures began to find their way to facebook along with bits of song lyrics--whatever the music was that was moving me during that particular walk.  The River and Me is an outgrowth of those facebook postings.

A glorious sunrise.

The rambling part comes in, in part, with the stream of consciousness that goes on in my head while I'm walking.  Sometimes it's all about the music.  Sometimes it's all about the "to do" list for the day.  Sometimes I'm re-landscaping the yards of all the properties I pass (well, maybe not all of them, but I do love to help out the folks with crappy yards--if only they knew).  Early on, I needed to sit--often.  I'd bring prayer beads and take a break somewhere pretty and meditate or read the daily office off the prayer book app on my phone.

Crossing back from Lenape Island looking at the log
house and my little creamy storybook house.

View of the eastern shore of Indian Lake from the
Lenape Island bridge.

It seems I'm always walking near a body of water--either one of the lakes in town (having grown up near the Great Lakes, I use the term "lake" in New Jersey quite loosely--these are the smallest "lakes" on the planet), or one of the ponds nearby or my lovely river which I know on a pretty intimate basis having battled her inside and outside of my home on several occasions.  The walks began just after I'd finished rehabing my house following Hurricane Irene.  I love each of these little bits of water that are now thoroughly threaded through my life.  I need to visit one or several of them on a daily basis.  The water, the light on the water, the creatures that make their homes there ... it's all become like a familiar friend on whom I depend a great deal.  The walks are my equilibrium.

Today I'm walking around Indian Lake.  When I was newly married, I had a part-time job teaching aerobics at the local Y.  We had become friendly with the fitness director and her husband who lived in Denville and introduced us to this neighborhood.  This was how we came to buy our first house, a tiny, tiny cottage near the western shore of Indian Lake.  It was a short walk from the "baby beach," the shallow water beach where families with babies and toddlers like to congregate because it's so calm.  The "baby beach" is where I sat in my hideous maternity swimsuit, feeling rather like a beached whale and where I played in the sand a couple of years later with my own toddler.  It wasn't the house I wanted.  I wanted this creamy little house with the stone arch right on the water of the eastern shore.  However, by the time we were qualified for a mortgage, it was already sold.  Today it is for rent.  I still love this house. Our friends lived in the brown house next door, to the left--a little log cabin (before the current owners put on the clapboard second story).  I  loved our tiny yellow cottage too.  I'd thought there were a lot of good memories while we lived there.  Like mine, my friend's marriage also ended many years ago.


It's about three miles from my house in the center of town just behind the shopping district to the creamy little house on Indian Lake.  When I walk this way I usually walk through some of the parallel neighborhood before heading back into town.  Today I follow this route again, walking all the way past downtown, along the Rockaway River to the entrance to Lake Arrowhead before I turn for home.  In all, I do 5.5 miles on this walk.  It's not a great walk for a Saturday--I like to do 7 or 8 miles on a Saturday--but I needed to be home by 9:00.  It was a picture perfect morning ... and it was a good ramble.



Playlist for a Saturday:

Michael Franti and Spearhead, All People
Gavin DeGraw, Chariot

Baggage

This blog started out as a journal about my dual journey to reconcile with the river after Hurricane Irene and my path back to health and my own life.  And that's not really a dual journey, I suppose, because I think the hurricane (downgraded to a tropical storm, most of us still call it "the hurricane"), although real and traumatic, was just the catalyst for a bunch of succeeding thoughts and circumstances that led me to finally take control of my health and, consequently, my life.  I suppose the hurricane represents the least amount of control.  It took weeks to get the disastrous mess left by Irene under control and months of renovation to get the house back under control.  I started getting my life back a few months after the paint dried and the furniture came in.  And I never looked back.

Until recently.

Since I've been back from Boston, I've been out-of-control eating, barely exercising and haven't been journaling food since before the trip.  It's all a vicious circle too.  Eating too much makes you feel lazy and leads to lack of exercise and journaling.  Lack of exercise affects your mood and sleep patterns.  Feeling weak and tired does not equip you for good choices.  So if eating is your Achilles' heal, you'll probably eat without preparation, intention and reason.  Although the trip was beautiful and I had so much fun, my wonderful mood was completely stripped upon my return to the office.  A dramatic mess awaited there that shook me up and turned my world upside down.  Even though the situation is more or less resolved, I've not been sleeping, eating too much and wasting time in the same sort of lethargy of the spirit that marked my years before April 2012.  I've been blaming my feelings on work, however, knowing deep down that there must be more to it because work doesn't own me any more.  What is holding me down for real?

I've been well aware of all the poor choices I'm making.  I can hear myself making excuses and being my own chief enabler.  I eat and tell myself I don't care.  

Yesterday I was reminded that it was my brother and sister-in-law's anniversary.  That's when it hit me:  Tuesday I would have been married 29 years.  Last year I was so buoyed by my weight-loss success and the concert travel that I barely noticed the date.  I don't remember anything about August 2011 before the storm hit but I think I didn't pay much attention that year.  Most years, I'm okay.  But some years are paralyzing.  And the really weird thing is, until something triggers an association with the date, I'm at a loss to explain the overwhelming pervasive sadness that invades my body.  It's not like divorced people have their wedding anniversaries on the calendar, after all. I remember one year a few years after I'd started at the school, I couldn't move.  I couldn't get out of bed.  I called out sick and again the next day.  The second day I called the only administrator who was working that week.  I remember it was the BA and she mentioned the date:  August 6.  I remember saying, Is today August 6?  Energy and relief came flooding into my body and I could function again.  I recognized the source of the paralysis and I could move on immediately.   The trigger this year was the mention of someone else's anniversary.  I became flooded with relief again at having figured it out again and realizing that it's only temporary; that I'm not going to undo all the good I've done myself.  

I just have to get past Tuesday. 

Baggage.  I obviously still have baggage.  Just when I thought I'd put it down forever, it's clear I still have some--at least a carry-on. 

~

Music is a big part of the cure these days.  This weekend, here's what's helping a lot:

Michael Franti & Spearhead, I'm Alive (Life Sounds Life) 

~

This appeared in my Twitter feed about 15 minutes after publishing this post.  Thanks @Lindsay_Gal for sharing it. Guess I'll be listening to some Matt Cusson soon...