Travel definitely clears your head and can provide a break nothing else can.
I can sit and meditate and pray and exercise and do all I can at home, and those are excellent things to do. Nothing like just hitting the road and changing the scenery.
Gave KT and Bee a ride to the airport SUPER early for their trip to Mexico. They're both super excited and hoping it's a lot of fun. First time they've done something like that together. They're definitely becoming more of a couple, and I'm thinking wedding bells aren't far off. I like him.
I slept in a parking lot in Cle Elum to make it all the way home. That was trippy but worked. Glad we keep a blanket in the car in the trunk with other emergency supplies. Had a work call w/ a consultant and also checked in w/ our new employee. My mother-in-law had knee surgery today and is recovering well so far.
Started a writing class called Boot Camp through Creative Nonfiction. I'm excited to get started on that and keep pushing out to see what's next in that arena of life.
This was a quote from Rhonda Miller who's moderating the class: "Even the story about meeting your husband in the piece is interesting...39 years later. As one of my wise friends once said, 'Relationships are the issue of our time' and everyone wants the secret of how to have a good one."
This was a comment she made in response to one of the writing group’s profile paragraphs, where we all introduce ourselves. I thought that was really wise as I continue to refine what I’d like to try and focus on in the future for research, learning, praxis, and writing.
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Tonight, I just went through all 2016 photos on my Camera Roll. I purged out photos and also hid a ton of photos I took last year related to work events. There were work trips, events at the office, birthday lunches, etc. I deleted a lot and then discovered you can Hide other photos in a hidden album. So photos from the game we went to, the Symphony, etc. All hidden or deleted. It was painful to see how eager I was to do good for the staff and then how this all played out. Really painful. I guess that’s why I don’t want to delete it all, I just want it hidden, to have a record of some kind of all we’ve tried to do.
It also is really good to sort of see visually what was happening last year in retrospect. What was primarily was happening is I was driving to Moscow, watching movies and being outside. There are a ton of outside photos. I rediscovered my love for photography and also for just being outside, and just being.
I scaled down time with a lot of random people and got down to some basic people, friends, and family. I just really huddled up. I didn’t do a lot. I withdrew and tried to get healthy. We went on these two epic trips and I pulled all that off somehow in the midst of it all. They were both really good to do, good for me and good to have as memories. I’m glad I didn’t pass on them due to my lack of energy.
It was cathartic and I’m glad I did it. Reducing down to the basics seems like a good general life practice.
On the road I realized something profound. You need a balance everyday with activities. I had listened to the RobCast, two of them I think and was like, I need now to just have my own thoughts for a while, process all of this. So I did that a while. Then I was tired of my own mind completely and realized I needed to do some meditating and empty my mind completely. So I tried to do some centering prayer and just look at nature once again, save my mind some. So I realized you probably need all of these in a day; some Learning, some Processing, and some Emptying (observing… letting God more room to speak). This seemed important.
We had our first day today of the two staff members being gone. There are definitely issues that will continue to unfold. No ability to monitor or check on anything. They had quite a little kingdom going on.
Jay says they had a kingdom and the leader who left earlier this year had a camp.