delight and joy

I did not realize how very tired I was until I left town and headed to the swamp.

This past month, I spent almost every spare moment sleeping, and yet always seemed tired.  I did not realize it wasn't my body that was tired nearly so much as my head and my heart until I had a few days with a dear friend, and we talked about nothing particularly deep, and I got to hold an alligator.

Sometimes, the only way to refresh a tired soul is to give it something new to encounter.

I've spent the past year and a half dealing with some really heavy stuff, and recent events in my family caused another muddy swirl of digging up old issues.  This is emotionally exhausting work when you actually take it on and don't just pretend Everything Is Fine.  This path leads to joy, but sometimes it feels like a slippery climb.

My normal way to take a few days off is to either stay home and sleep the entire time, or go somewhere and pack in a ton of stuff to see and do and experience.  This time, I went to Louisiana to visit a friend, and we actually, you know, relaxed and ate well and fit in a few fun and easy touristy things like going on a swamp tour which involved holding baby alligators.  That was pretty cool.

We talked about life stuff, but nothing particularly deep, and I found I was quite content to just let everything be -without constant analysis or rethinking or finding hidden meaning or creating a higher level of existence.  My mind finally found a place to rest somewhere between ghost stories at a haunted mansion and listening to a tour guide sing "Desperado" while playing a 100+ yr old Steinway at a plantation dating from the 1700s.

Delight may not be quite the same as joy, but it is a lovely place to take a nap on the way there.