Some Small Realizations

New Year 2013. Chinese New Year, the Year of the Snake. My birthday. Check, check and check. We're already into March, for crying out loud, with the nicely palindromic 3/1/13.
And I still don't know who I am or what all my choices, intentions, achievements of this year will be! You'd think it would be important to find that out, in a time so tessellated with transition. The question of where I should live runs alongside the question of how to structure my mixed genre creative thesis and which of the many themes I'm so excited to write on will really fit, and meanwhile my mental flywheel spins questions of what "diet" I should consider myself as being on; what foods I'm currently eating I should quit, as always..
But some things I have come to know, and I've come to know them through listening to myself.
Some people say they prefer the beach, some the mountains; some don't like the outdoors at all. I've generally felt my usual frozen inability to locate a preference or decision among all the outdoor places I love to be.
But trailing the dogs one time recently, I came with them into some woods atop a bluff above one of the beaches we hike (I had to lift them down from bluff to beach swinging from the sea wall later, but that's another story). I felt myself in that light and presence. And yes, there is truth to the "Ela-treela" and "tree fairy" appellations I've had over the years. 
I love direct sunlight, but I also love the dappled light of woods; of jungle, even, and I love just being amid trees, feeling all that expanding-upward energy, vertical earth, almost.
This photo from those woods looks exactly like a poem I had been working on shortly before. Its title? Simply "Ars Poetica."

For another thing: I spent most of yesterday, my birthday, driving home from Anchorage, grateful for good roads and a good, comfortable, reliable car. I spent yesterday--and most of today too--feeling very sick...because of some things I chose to ingest that I shouldn't have (and knew it), and consequently, that I failed to ingest and should have (was already feeling too sick).
OK, my bad, etc etc... But here's what I learned!
As I was acknowledging to myself at one point that I felt truly awful, a voice inside said I wished I didn't feel like that, wished I could feel more like I normally do.
If I wish not to feel awful, and to feel more like my norm, a fortiori that means I wish to be alive, to be here feeling at all!
Syllogism aside, that was a huge recognition. For most of my life off and on, I've felt apathetic resignation toward being alive, with an apathetic preference not to be. And that's not talking about when I'm in a depression. So, maybe this is moving into one of those spells where I feel an element of active electiveness toward being alive.
Good.