Postcards from My Soul

My love of nature started young.  I was often outside climbing in, talking to the trees, and talking to the plants and animals. Going camping with my parents, we would drive into the most remote places our vehicle allowed, rarely seeing other people. More often than not, I would find myself hiking off trail with my dad. He always said he was taking a short cut. The short cut inevitably turned it to the steepest, hardest terrain and always took longer than the trail but was almost always much more fun.  As well as much more challenging for a 6 year old to keep up with her 6’ 3” tall dad! * I didn’t see many camping trips during my younger adult life.  Some summer weekend car camping in pay to use camp grounds and a few stints of camping in the desert for Burning man.  Not the kind of camping in a location that felt like I belonged there.  The mossy, pine scented forest held my heart all those years while I was a city dweller or living in other states that didn’t even have real forests.

I’ve had a few long dark nights in my life.  The last two months have been right up there with my 2005, laying in the hall curled up in a ball crying for hours.  That was a rough time, with a lot of loss and change.  This has been a different long night. I’m not crying that much. Nothing specific that I’m mourning, nothing specific tragic happened.  But winter, and 3 years of very strange uncertainty on all levels, while not taking care of my spiritual and emotional self caught up with me it seems.  A little peri menopause and health issues probably haven’t helped much either.  There were warning signs it was coming, I tried to ignore them. I hoped it would just be a short bout of winter blues. But then it hit hard and I was beyond empty. I was in an energetic deficit that I could no longer ignore.   I needed and still need a recharge of my soul.  Something to fill my inner battery.  So much in life can drain an empathetic, sympathetic, extreme introvert if one isn’t careful. Sometimes