Getting Found From the Woods, or Back On Meds

Okay! As promised, here's the story about my adventure in the woods--was it really just yesterday? It really was. Time is doing strange things here. I seem to say that a lot. 

Something else I hear myself say a lot is how much I love being in the woods: being surrounded by trees, the way the light dapples and refracts (that word again). Well. I learned some lessons in the woods yesterday, both about being in the woods and, because I can't help it, metaphorically.

I went to Sandy Creek Park, which is a pretty, nicely kept park that appears self-contained. There is a lake with a bridge over it, a beach, children's play areas; over the bridge, some camping areas and some trails around the lake. Had I turned left on the lakeshore trail, I would have made a gentle sweep around the park area. I turned right. I hadn't paid attention to know that in that direction, the lake went off way past the boundaries of the park, almost out of sight, not self-contained at all.

I learned yesterday that being in thick woods for several hours with no clearing becomes claustrophobic. I really was a tunneling worm, although for extra dimension, a little bridge was where I rejected that paragraph of a book review I was writing in my head, and that upward draw was where I composed those nice sentences for the next essay, so that the sentences will always be colored by that part of the trail and, if I hike the trail again, various sections of it will be redolent of whatever sentences I was working on there.

Even so, after a while I was suffocating and really wanted a clearing. After longer, I was tired and ready to be done. Remember, I started the day so tired I could barely get myself out of bed. I kept going and kept going, thinking "it's a lake; surely I'll get back to where I started eventually!" Or at least to another exit from it and a trail back through the park.

When I was sooo ready to be done, I found this big, beautiful bridge. Perfect timing! This was obviously going to take me to a grand exit. 

Wrong. It led to a disused trail and a locked cattle gate. I climbed over the gate into a cul-de-sac with a mixture of grand houses and trailer homes. I asked some folks who'd just pulled in to their property where I was and how to get back to the park. They said I'd have to go back the way I came, several miles--safer than going along the highway. It was 6 pm at this point and I'm not in AK now with 20-hour days! I mentioned that, and they said I had at least a couple hours of daylight. It's much darker in the woods, I almost wailed. Yes, fair point, it is., they said. They absolutely did not want to help me out, even by talking to me. 

So, the best I could do was plan to go back the way I'd come as near to running as possible on my tired, blistered feet. Yes, I cried. I put a sad text on Facebook but more importantly, texted my friend with whom I'm staying to let her know I'd no idea when I'd be home. She called back immediately to say get back out to the road, find out where you are, and I'll come pick you up and take you back to the car. Wow, really? Wow. Okay, then. 

This time, though, I got a different answer from the cul-de-sac. A couple just heading out on their own walk saw me, asked if I'd come from the trail, and said of course they'd take me to my car! Apparently it wasn't the first time they'd rescued a lost crepuscular hiker who faced dashing back through the woods for miles. And it was a long way. Several minutes down the highway. I am so grateful to that couple. They were unconditional warmth and kindness.

So, obviously, the first lesson learned is "Look where you're headed for." Don't assume the lake is commensurate with the park. I had hiked almost halfway around it, seven or eight miles, but that left probably another ten. 

But the second lesson has to do with the two different cul-de-sac encounters. After that last excursion off my meds, I was describing to my psychiatrist how blessedly soon after getting back on them I resanified. "You're so lucky," she said. For many people, the meds don't work so quickly after those sins of omission and sometimes don't work as well forever after. Then she looked me in the eye and held the contact. "Don't take it for granted," she said. Similarly, I have blundered off road or off trail or on unknown trail so often all my life. Somehow or another, I've been rescued, picked up, brought to safety. Last night, though, for some time it looked like my only option was hike back the way I came, in darkness, with no guarantee I'd be able to follow the trail let alone notice the side-trail up to the parking lot. Don't take it for granted that I'll be rescued. But do be grateful that I'm so lucky.

Does it resonate?

Moving Out of a Dry Spell--Month of Posts Coming up!

Today's is the last of the scraggly, infrequent posts. Like many other scraggly, infrequent posts this month, it is also rich in visuals.
Scraggly infrequency is about to be replaced by abundance, and the move to self-hosting and a new platform I've been talking about for over a year may be imminent. I beg compassion for my limited programming skills and pray I lose not one fellow traveler along the way.

April is a huge month for blogging and for writing in general. It's National Poetry Month, including the NaPoWriMo option--write a poem every single day. It's also Wego Health's Health Activist Writer's Month Challenge, a series of prompts for a blog post every single day of April. Not too late to join in on that one, actually. April is also the month of the Healthy Weight Summit (I like that it's not called the "Healthy Weight Loss Summit," btw; I'm starting to get so tired of the obsession with that in self-improvement circles). A different speaker every day of the month, promising some interesting discussions and take-aways.

So. Am I crazy? As I did last year, I signed up for the HAWMC. I'll be sharing a blog every day for the month of April with not just a health but a health activism focus. This will include (if I am able) writing frankly about what my diagnoses are and what they mean. About common misconceptions. About what caregivers should know and do.
I've never thought of myself as an activist.
On the other hand, simply being open is activism. I haven't even been all the way open about events in my life on here lately, whereas my preference is normally toward almost blatant transparency. 
So, instead of hiding in the snow cave...

I'll overcome my claustrophobia and birth myself out into the light: head first would have been better.

And if this flurry of blogging regularity and health- and poetry-centered writing involves a migration, I will leave good signposts.
My trip to Anchorage last week was only an overnight, and when I returned to Homer a disproportionate amount of snow had run away. And so begins the migration (as I've said before, seasonal changes in AK are experienced like travel). Fair-weather person though I am, I've come to love the snow and in many ways prefer winters to summers here, so I feel glad to be staying so far up the hill. Snow will be on the ground awhile yet here. 
Loving the woods and snow, often when we're hiking around up here I have lain on my back, snowshoes and all, just looking, feeling the snow down the length of my body. Yes, and my little friend is right there between my snowshod feet.

Oh, how I love those trees.
Even up here, though, the snow is softening. This fissure runs along the trunk of a fallen spruce where a moose had punched through and broken the snow layer. I'd have walked right over it a week ago; this time required caution.

This is steeply downhill, and the little snowballs my snowshoes knocked loose as I crossed the draw patterned the snow as they ran.

Still, the huge low tides where the beach extends practically across the bay say "Spring" loud and clear.

Roxy's paw with clam worm. That's more congruent with the color scheme to come.

I confess, I'm nervous on the eve of a month public as health activist (the poetry part I am happy with). I'm nervous to talk about my diagnoses when I know some of the readers closest to me don't believe in that kind of thing and perhaps feel threatened by it. I'm cautious of elaborating on some of the crazy behavior and where it's ended me up. But I remember how encouraging my workshop was at residency last year about a section of an essay displaying a psychotic episode.
I offer these revelations as a humble gift, and am always ready to take correction on the appropriateness of the gift.

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.