Kyril's Journal -- January 3, 2005

Moments of My Life

Monday January 3, 2005

(also posted to livejournal) Life is made up of moments. Moments from today: watching the red-bellied woodpecker hang from the bottom ledge of the feeder that is too small for it, having just refilled the seeds while talking with Faol on the phone after having a brief difficult discussion about a topic that may never come to pass and making him angry with my lack of faith; going outside to take pictures with my new digital camera and experiencing frustration when the memory card that came with it was full after just two pictures, coming back to download, going back out and it was still full because I forgot to have the program delete after downloading, finally getting to take some pics of the ice coated rocks and playing with the white balance, which I never even new existed until Tom mentioned it, finding a patch of soft green moss with long red fruiting bodies from summer, each red strand tipped in a ball of ice, which tritely I can only compare to a bead of crystal – where is my creativity?.

Once I began to think of moments I found there were other snapshots that make up my life: Faol bursting out in laughter when his funny bone has really been tickled and the beauty of his broad smile, laugh lines creasing his face, energy radiating off him, and my heart aching with his joy, the bright sparkle in Raven’s dark eyes as she teases, the childish glee that shapes Tom’s mouth when he scores a hit, and years ago the curve of Vivre Draco’s mouth when he was a babe at my breast, sucking in my nipple and holding it firmly against the top of his mouth with his tongue so he could smile his pleasure as he looked into my eyes.

These are what I think are truly important in my life yet the moments created by and experienced through my fears have been too prevalent in the last few years. I used to be the kind of person who let things just roll off. Not for me the angry response to standing in line, or being cut off on the road, or being ignored, or even dissed. There was a time when I accepted what was without rising ire, or fear, or insecurity, or unhappiness. Certainly there were times when I got upset and I have always tended to cycle somewhat between the depths and the heights, though not I think to the level of being bipolar, yet there was a kind of acceptance that ran through the teeter-tottering that kept me more stable, or so I remember, but who knows whether memory is true or not.

I am not sure when it all began to change, when I lost the self I had come to know. The nearly 4 years that I went back to College were fraught with stress. One would think that doing well in my classes and tests would have helped my self-esteem but the constant worry about whether I would do well or not is what lasted and not the awareness of doing well. Did that do it? The political atmosphere in CAW, the feelings of frustration about not being able to do what I thought would help because of the circumstances, the sense of putting out the energy and work only to get flamed in the end didn’t help, and the feelings of betrayal that arose out of the situation that led to my retirement has left me with a bad taste in my mouth for all those involved.

All these moments that shape my life, most of them totally uninteresting to anyone else yet they are a large part of who I am. It is a good thing that people are an emergent process, I suppose.