I took this photo this morning. I walked around my property - took photos. Want to paint. Set up my easel. I happened to look up. Beautiful.


*****


I carry a notebook around with me most the time so I can jot down notes and observations and feelings. Oftentimes those jots flesh out into essays, but many remain hidden. Below are random jots from my current notebook. Please don't dismay with the seriousness of some of my words. Though they accurately reflect a random moment during a random day, they don't complete the composite of who I am. I'm actually quite funny and amuse myself easily. I have a veryveryvery good life... but today I want to reveal to you some of the jots that never quite got fleshed out. These jots vanished with a turn of a page... and that's what I often do with my sorrows. I turn the page.


*****



For six of the eight years on the Mountain I've been *rotting in paradise*. (Good gravy, I can't recall where I discovered that phrase.) The obscene amounts of loneliness I've experienced have sucked so much joy out of my life and been damaging to my psyche. Sucked a lot of the good stuff right out of my soul, my tender heart. I've been trapped.

The good news is that the past two years have been nice. I hope people aren't more attentive simply because of my diagnosis. I hope I'm not more content just because of my diagnosis.

Um. Wait a minute. Those two reasons are legitimate. It's our human inclination to reevaluate. Give all spectrums of experience a fresh opportunity.


*****


Since my son left last January, I've done well. As odd as it sounds, being alone has become a preferred companion I now call solitude, or on especially good days, serenity. It's not my nature at all, but I can go days without seeing another person, talking to another person, and certainly not touching another person. It's said that hugs are a necessity for life. Pish-Posh. That can't be true or I would've been dead a long time ago. Now that I'm so very ill, it's a moot point that I try to connect.



*****


I can't keep promises anymore.



*****


When my tiara slips, and boy howdy does it - believe me you - I reel myself in with a quote from artist Leonard Clark Knight, "Let's all just love each other - keep it simple."

When I encounter difficult people I take myself to Knight's words: "Let's all just love each other - keep it simple."


*****


I think judging and expecting people to embrace the same of *everything* is impossible. I'll continue to disappoint people if they expect me to conform.

It's because I don't conform to a template that I'm uniquely me and you are you uniquely you. And I hope neither of us ever changes.


*****


Every single day I extend an act of kindness. It can be big or small (to me) but kindness is always *big* for the recipient. It's prayer in action, grace with legs. Kindness is every possible cliche, yet each act of kindness is fresh and new with the birth of hope.


*****


Quote I read one day that delivered me to yearnings for my mother who died in 2010:

"That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you, and it just hits you all over again, that shocking."

- Sarah Dessen, The Truth About Forever


*****


Click Click Click

I'm a slow learner, I guess, but I've just discovered the most marvelous option on Facebook - the option to unfollow sources of others' posts. I click away at sources but remain friends with people I truly like.

OMG - it's fabulous! Click Click Click - away go all the unpleasant sources which are always unfairly biased no matter which side of the fence a person stands. It's shocking how Facebook is becoming a venue for snake oil promotion of bias.

Maybe it's just me, but more than ever I have a low tolerance of angry people.

For me, I don't enter Facebook as a classroom. It's a social event for me.

So I click, click, click.

This does not mean I'm brain dead. Intelligent, thoughtful editorials are marvelous, but rare on Facebook where pettiness reigns.


Click Click Click

*****


Upon my diagnosis, I realized it was providential that I moved to a place so close to one of the country's finest pulmonary clinics. I embrace the destiny.