Very sleepy tonight, so I won’t write much. I’m back to the habit of getting about 5 hours of sleep a night and it’s taking its toll. This is just one of the signs of my returning to ‘normal’. I know that ‘normal’ is probably not ever going to happen or at least it’s a long way off at this point. At the moment I find that I am having to think of myself as two different people. One of me (A) is amazed at my own strength and resilience. My family and I have gone through one of the worst things that can happen to a person.. and we’re surviving. Not only are we surviving but we’re taking care of each other, functioning in society pretty well and finding cool ways to honor Sam’s memory. I feel powerful, creative and full of energy. I’m proud of the way I’m deliberately moving forward. The other of me (B) is fragile and drained. I need to be careful to to sink into a quiet sadness that’s hard to shake. My energy levels are low and I need to take things slow. The trickiest thing is that I never know which of me I’m going to find. Sometimes I have A’s energy in the morning and B’s sadness in the afternoon… Other times it’s the reverse (e.g. as it was today ). Sometimes I flip states many times in the course of a day. This is so new for me.. I’ve always felt like I could tap into nearly infinite energy… even to the point of burning myself out.. Now I have to plan extra time to account for periods of low energy.. It feels like the gearshift is busted.. Sometimes I can get into gear.. other times, I can’t. It turns out, there’s a funny upside to this. I am finding that having to plan for these lows is keeping the pace of my life a considerably slower than before.. so far, that’s keeping the stress levels way down and allowing me to keep myself on gentle cycle a bit longer. Diane likened our current reality to a Dali painting.. our normal reality and sense of time is twisted and stretched into a weird version of what it was before. Life imitates art.
Speaking of art… Max and Gabe have been also been bubbling with some great creative energy in the past couple of weeks. Over the past few nights the tow of them have worked with friends Scott and Mason on some time lapse photography.. They’ve come up with some amazing images.. I’ll try to post some of them later this week. Right now I’ll leave you with the following two images they made with colored lights and a digital camera…
-jc
Ps. We’re going to have a short celebration tomorrow night around 6:30ish at