Some days...

The hours are quickly passing before I have to make my business trip.  As much as I worry about leaving, I also recognize how badly I need to get away and gain some perception.  Over the last few weeks I have felt my footing slipping, my will to do anything, draining away. It all feels like too much effort to force myself into an existence when I feel so overwhelmingly invisible.

I feel the need to slip into someplace where I don't expect to be seen or paid attention too.  I crave a world where I have no expectations of my loved ones, my career or my ability to be heard and noticed. It is the expectations that crush me. If I did not set expectations, then I would not have to register the disappointments. I need a crash course in how to live life without expectations, for myself or for anyone else.

I'm grateful for what I have in this life. I wish that felt like enough all the time. I wish my many blessings were enough to make me feel full and complete and successful at this stage in my life. Some days though,  they are not. Some days all I see are the failings, all I feel is the loneliness and the tide of darkness slowly creeping up on me.  Some days my accomplishments feel far too few and insubstantial and whatever ambitions I may have, seem to be overreaching.  Some days I wish I had someone I knew would pick up on the other end of a late night phone call or be the voice that asks me, "am I okay?".  Some days I wish I it wasn't so hard to feel seen.

It is crazy that someone who feels so alone is somehow looking forward to spending time actually being alone.  It is crazy that I actually find comfort in knowing I'm going some place where I will be actively ignored. Maybe its because for once, my expectations about people and situations will prove true and I won't be disappointed. For once, for the next few days, things will be exactly as I expect them to be.

I think I might be in the middle of a mid-life depression or something. Maybe I have felt some of the losses this past year more acutely then I thought.  I don't know.  I just know I feel vacant, like a placeholder, not a real person some days. I feel robotic and pedestrian. I oscillate between rage and an acquiescing numbness. I feel like I want to shine but can only manage the weakest flicker, like some dying candle losing its battle with the dark. At least I am not manic, wildly swinging from joy to despair, but rather I'm stuck in the middle of the grays...all the shadowed hues. My days of vivid color are too few and far between. I tell myself this will pass, this stage of my life is just some mediocre plateau and eventually I will wake up. I will wake up to me, to the woman in the mirror. I see her at least. She isn't invisible to me. I think she's just lost.

The Lesson of the Lorax and The Legacy of Madness

"Blogging Circle of Friends "
DAY 1586: March 20, 2017
Prompt: Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not. Dr. Seuss Use this quote to inspire today's entry. Write a story, a poem, or your opinion.

In the days before I embraced corporate life, I was a student of science. The love I had for exploration and investigation seemed imprinted on my DNA. My childhood heroes were Jacques Cousteau, Jane Goodall and the shark lady herself, Dr. Eugenie Clark. I was going to follow in their footsteps of research, discovery and conservation. Somewhere along the line, my other passion won out and I was compelled to follow in my father's footsteps. I traded in my wetsuits and regulators for a corporate office and airplanes. Though my career has me pursuing altitude rather than exploring fathoms, my love of science and nature still draws me to the importance of conservation and preservation.

Scientists predict that over the next 100 years, our planet will lose over 50% of our species. The oceans are being over-fished at alarming rates, entire ecosystems are experiencing degradation and ruin and some species are suffering unprecedented rates of die-off... all this while some politicians insist climate change is over-hyped or worse, merely a hoax perpetrated by liberals. The scientific community has offered irrefutable evidence that we are in the midst of a sixth period of mass extinction, fueled in part, by a host of human activities from ranging from deforestry to consumption of fossil fuels and carbon emissions. Certainly some climate effects and large scale changes to the global ecosystems are cyclical and part of the Earth's natural order and evolution, but that should not excuse or pardon the human factors that affect and in many cases, expedite radical and harmful environmental and climatic change. We all consume, therefore we mustn't we also all act to educate and conserve?

It sometimes seems overwhelming. It sometimes seems like a fight that can never be won but still, every minute of every day, there are scientists and engineering researching and designing ways to conserve and protect our national resources. There are activists and educators fighting on the front lines as well as lawmakers lobbying for legislation. There are filmmakers and artists bringing the messaging to the global community with films like Racing Extinction. There are so many movements designed to educate people on how to make conservation a part of our everyday existence.

Regardless of those striving to politicize protecting our oceans and ecosystems, the fact remains that it is our human responsibility to do what we can for our planet. Why wouldn't we want to save our coral reefs, protect our endangered species and national parks? If we could, wouldn't we all try to stop the slaughter of our ocean's apex predators? Slow the rate of melting or our polar ice caps? Save the black rhino, Hawksbill turtle, Asian elephant or any number of those species currently categorized as critically endangered? Where will our politics be in 100 years when 50% of life on our planet has disappeared? Unless...someone like me and you...#startwith1thing

http://worldwildlife.org
http://www.opsociety.org/
http://racingextinction.com/


"Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"
DAY 1103 March 20, 2017
Prompt: Totally different from the scientific and cosmic black holes, imagine your very own, fictional black hole. What would it be like? Describe it or use it in a flash fiction story or poem if you wish.

The dark space in the earth was an open maw of inky blackness. It called to her, she felt an almost magnetic pull in her gut. The toes of her sneakers, protruding just over the edge, where like bright white triangles against the sea of black below her. If she took one small step, she would fall into it, she would fall forever. No single thought in her life had even been more wholly appealing and compelling.

Alexia fought the urge, the temptation to feed herself to the pit. The physical will it took to draw herself back and away for the edge, left her winded and her skin covered with a slick film of perspiration. Even now as she sat four feet away, leaning against big maple tree and feeling its rough back biting into her bare flesh, she wanted more than anything to hurl her body down that deep shaft. There was no world but the one that was a mystery to her. There was no future but the one that beckoned, dark and endless, from the broken earth. The black hole called her, as it had called her mother. How long could she live without answering?

Human Slugs and Looking Up

I feel very much like I have been slogging through today. My desk has been a jumble of the kind of work you need to catch up on periodically like piles of junk mail, industry publications to sort, followup letters to go out. They are necessary tasks that give you no level of satisfaction when completed other than a space of clear real estate which will be inevitably filled by other things in piles before the day is out. I'm struggling to keep a bad mood from growing worse and failing miserably. I want to go home and crawl in bed. I want to wake up some other random week.

I'm trying to focus on the bright spots lately. My daughter lost her first tooth this weekend...a tiny one in the front of her mouth. We never found the tooth but her wide, proud smile was a beautiful thing to see. She had been waiting patiently as friend after friend regaled her with stories of losing their teeth and visits from the tooth fairy. It was one of those sweet first moments that mark the passage of time in family's journey together. Thinking of it now makes me feel marginally better but I know it won't stave off the black mood hovering just under the surface for very long. Maybe it has sometime to do with turning 42 this week...maybe its just an accumulation of the stress and frustration that's been building for week...maybe its just the general discontent that seems to resonate from everything these days. I'm so sick of the same talking heads, the same obnoxious bullies spewing their political garbage and turning the world into a place where I feel divided and isolated instead of welcomed and included. Maybe...I don't know. I just know I feel like a human slug, a moderately unhappy one at that!

After several prompts have slipped by unaddressed over the last few weeks, I have to get back on track with at least that part of my life so here goes...

"Blogging Circle of Friends "
DAY 1356: August 1, 2016
Prompt: "My first poem was a bolt from the blue... it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence... it filled me with soul satisfying joy." - William Carlos Williams.
Have you ever written something or encountered a piece of writing that filled your soul with joy. If you haven't had that type of experience when writing did you have it at any other time. Tell us about it.

I wish I could say that something I had written had filled my soul with joy. I think I am too much of a self-critic to let that happen. I've written things that have brought me peace and closure which I am thankful enough for. I think joy is an emotion reserved for very powerful experiences. It just seems much less accessible than happiness, less stable. Joy seems to be a more compelling, encompassing feeling that overwhelms you temporarily. Joy seems to me like it may be too intense to be experienced in any sustained state. You experience joy at those tremendous moments of life. For me, my most joyful moment was seeing my daughter for the first time. I had been an emergency c-section and the sudden onset of fear and trauma had been almost too much to bear. Then, that moment when they brought her to me, showed me her perfect little face, and I knew my daughter was healthy and well...that's when joy hit me. It drove everything else out and I was floating - blissfully.


"Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise"
Day 876 August 1, 2016
Prompt: Right now I am looking up at the ceiling; when outside, I look up at the sky, the clouds, and the tops of trees. Do you ever look up, and what does looking up mean to you?

I try to remember to look up now and again. I had a good friend once who tried very hard to impress upon me the wonder of clouds. He spent a lot of time looking up there, into the blue. He could always find the most amazing things. He told me it wasn't about what you could find, it was able taking the time to look. In my busy life, I do try to take that time. Not just at the clouds, but into the vast network of limbs of the oak in my yard or out into the wide expense of long island sound. I look. I remember. Sometimes I am even rewarded by a glimpse of a massive owl, a fleeting hummingbird, the rolling back of something big breaking the water. It is good to look up, to look out. It gives us a few minutes to breath and connect with ourselves and the world around us.