Clammed Up

I've been kinda quiet, blog wise. For the past year and a half or so I've been working on carving out my own life, I have come to accept that I am a continual work in progress. While I have been trying to figure out how to live, life has gone on.
There is no such state as being "fixed" and moving forward; no guarantee that demons from the past won't resurface to challenge me again. Somehow; acknowledging that seems to take a bit of the wind from their sails.

My last blog post was a tribute to my father, on the anniversary of his birthday. I find myself thinking about him again now, on the anniversary of his death. He was a scientist in the working world; a man who died two years before Armstrong took the first steps on the moon's surface.
He would have loved it.

I have often marked the expanse of time since my father's death in terms of events he has missed....the moon landing, my senior graduation, the birth of the grandson who's middle name is his, the birth of what would have been his first great grandchild.

When my father died; my mother died as well. Not physically; but mentally. Her body still clings to this world; but she has been utterly miserable and disengaged from life for 42 years. My father would not have wanted this kind of life for her; yet that seems to make little difference in her choices. Although she has been alive for all of these events; she has rarely been able to experience the joy in them.

A friend dear to me reminds me that there is joy and magic in each day, if we but make the effort to be present to the moment and notice it. I thought I would pass that simple wisdom along.

You can live a perfectly reasonable life; clammed up; but not a particularly joyous one.

I choose, emergence.