FALL

As the leaves fall, so do I. I know this to be true every year, every fall, but it crawled up and slapped me. Use the lights. Yes, I walk in the sunshine, but I need to remember to focus on my daily needs. One half hour watching news at 7am with the lightbox, meditate, which has fallen off the last few days, and walking.

I walk the meadow and wonder at my body’s failings. My legs feel funny, a tingling in the feet, like two wooden tree stumps I tell to move one step then another. It is scary when the body fails. When my mind, emotions and spirit are young but the body isn’t. It surprises me.

While moving slowly along the path of crunchy leaves, open hear shaped hickory nuts, a leaf wafting down overhead, I talk realities in my mind, a conversation with myself. At 62 people contract ravaging disease, are in pain, die. You don’t know how long you have or what the quality of your life will be.

It is hard, this loss of strength. Walk more? Exercise more? Yet I know when my legs act up they need rest. Have I caused my own demise? When my friend died, now almost three years ago, I stopped moving, or caring about much of anything. Did a few years of lack of movement, and listlessness bring this on? I remember farther back when I went to the gym trying to incorporate the same exercise that once sustained me, a good work-out on the stair-stepper or my five-mile jog, and the aftereffects of a few days of bent over soreness because my joints couldn’t take it. So no. I don’t believe two years of mourning my friend with the hopelessness and lethargy associated with it caused my problems now.

But I also know the tingling is not good either. Walk to make the circulation better. But after lap 4 I give in to the fatigue. Though I love my grand-daughter dearly, after 4 hours I’m ready for Mother to come. But she’s two hours late because she has a conference with a parent. To be attentive and present for that amount of time exhausts me. Later I snap at Samuel and say terrible things, ricocheting back to my old ways, my foul mouth, my foul mood. Irritable and tired we scrap over silly things, or the big things have piled up so it’s a little thing that makes us blow.

“You are hard to live with,” he mutters.

“Move out! If I’m so hard to live with, leave,” I snipe back with immediacy, hardly any emotion, just a statement of fact.

Why I am not abhorred at my mouth, my words. I’m freaking tired is why. I’m just irritable, tired, and having a hard time moving. And I’m blaming my own self for this overweight, achy body, which could be just as achy if 60 pounds thinner, but maybe not.

Although whatever is going on will proceed anyway with a lighter body, change is in the air. I cannot drag around this excess in body and be happy. I need change. I will find it, provide it, do it. I’ve done it before, I’ll do it again. This time not with a feeling of scarcity, but with a feeling of fullness, wholeness, and generosity; of giving to myself, not taking away. I won’t yearn and dream of food, because I’ve learned to give to myself what that yearning really represented, self-love, self-caring, self-nurturing, a place inside to call home.

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