Today is the third anniversary of my first blog post, and this is blog post 498 –so very close to number 500! Honestly, I had hoped to have post number 500 today, but it just wasn’t happening. The words and pictures and ideas were not coming together.
I never expected that I would have continued doing this for so long. I don’t really know how many readers I have, or if what I do here makes a difference in anyone else’s life other than my own –I often hope that what I do means something, to someone, somewhere and that it somehow makes life better because of it. I have done a lot of different things with this blog over time. Some things I have intended to do, some things where surprises waiting inside of me for their time to come out. And there are things inside of me that I still want to create here, but they are gestating, developing, growing and waiting for their turn.
Today, I have been writing all day long, trying to make this one post, and my words have been failing me –distracting me from the chores I have at hand, the chores I desperately need to get done before the morning. But instead I am here writing because I can’t let this day go into the next without making this post. I had nothing to say and too much to say, all at the same time.
And then the realization came that this was not only the third anniversary of my blog, but shortly it will be the third anniversary of my first adult hunting trip I took with my father. It was on that trip that I woke up to an unquenchable need to create. That was when I began taking pictures of the sun and the moon and the flowers and trees. And when the poetry and silly rhythms inside of me began flooding my mind. In fact, when I look back from September to December of that first year, all of those sunrise and sunset pictures in my blog came from the times I was spending with my father, when we were hiking high in the mountains and deep in the woods. As we would walk through the woods or sit quiet on a ridge, with my new little phone and its nifty camera I would take these interesting little shots that appealed to me –it was fun, and not to bad to look at, so I brought them home and used them for blog material. Nearly all that inspired my early work sprang from the pictures taken on those hikes with my dad.
At the same time I was on those trips with my dad I was going through some struggles in my life –I was at divergent paths. I was struggling with what I wanted to do for the next phase I was facing in my life. I was struggling with myself as a woman, mother, and wife. I had just found CrossFIt and weightlifting where I was discovering a power and freedom in my body, and a renewed strength. I was finishing up one stage of parenting and moving into the next. Life seemed to be opening up for me in a way that I had not expected, but in someway hoped for, and at the very same time it seemed dark and unsure. Much has happened in these three years, I have learned many hard lessons and grew into a better person for it.
Tomorrow, I am leaving to go high in the mountains and deep into the woods, to begin the process of preparing my fathers final resting place. Soon, I will have to take my last hike with him, and yet again, as I am preparing myself for this last hike, I find myself at divergent paths, with new struggles, new questions, and new answers to discover.
But that is always the way of life, one path leads to another, and then another, and then one more…
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
But that is ok. Because though I am sad at this new loss, and with all these new paths I will have to travel without him, I still have what I found on those hikes with him all those years ago. I still have my words and my pictures, and I am still making something that is mine. And I’ll always have the trees and the flowers, and the moon and the sun, and a river full of fun.
So get that frown off your face…
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