I'm beginning to feel again

I'm beginning to feel again, originally uploaded by wendy_l_wareham.

YES!! We had sunlight today. Praises on high. I went out to a field that was pristine. Not a mark in the snow. I trudged up the hill through snow a foot deep lugging my camera case, tripod, purse, and props bag. I had just set up when a spaniel name Walter came tearing down across the snow, running in circles, bounding into the underbrush and back out again, ran to touch me with his nose, ran back...in short, he ruined about 60 full yards of snowfield in about 45 seconds flat.

After driving 11 miles to find this field, goofy, gleeful, oblivious Walter destroyed it before I could get one single shot. So I did the only thing that I could do: I laughed, snapped some blurred pictures of a tongue-lolling, ears-flapping, I'm-so-happy-to-be-alive dog. Walter didn't bother me at all. His owner, however, annoyed me. But I tend to like animals better than people anyway. I never have to doubt an animal's motives.

Anyway, I snapped happily away for a couple of hours, thinking about how I felt like I was coming back to life at long last. I felt a bit like Persephone--abducted into the dark underworld for months and now just starting to emerge again into the land of the living.

I will spare all the details. Suffice to say that someone I gave up a lot of time for, worried about, prayed for, and cared about for years left (the good part) and tried to eviscerate my self-confidence on the way out the door (that would be the bad part).

Despair not gentle reader, because this is not a tale of woe by a jilted lover. Nope. It's all about me, actually. It's about choosing to live in the moment or to live in a fantasy.

I lived a lot of my life for "someday." It was a strange sort of dreamlike thing, now that I look back on it. I thought I was living. But I was really waiting. Waiting for things to finally be the way I wanted them.

Dad used to always say, "Be careful what you wish for. You might get it." Never more prophetic words were ever spoken.

Much more painful than the lesson of appearances vs reality was the lesson of wasted time. And that was all on me. Hey, I'm human. I get angry once in a while and start to want to blame the other. But the truth is, I can't. It just wouldn't be true.

My teacher always said to me, "Real mastery is dwelling in the present moment. Real power is living there. Anything else is a fantasy or a memory. It's a bit of fluff on the wind, a cloud. What's real is what is right now. It's the only place you can be authentic. It's the only place you can be happy."

I thought I understood what she was saying then. I'm fairly certain that I have a better idea now. It's so not about what I have or don't have. It's all about who I am. And I'm realizing that I gave someone the power to almost take that away from me. That was my mistake.

But that was then. Right now, right here, I know who I am and what I'm about. And I'm pretty happy with it. If someone else doesn't think I'm good enough, well, I would be keeping my eye out for something that looks like Karma coming around the bend.

I'm not worried. Are you?