coming full circle

A year ago, my husband gave me this camera and my life is forever changed. Instead of believing that cameras present a distraction from experiencing life, I have found that I slow down and see better with a camera in my hands – at least when it comes to the natural world.

This was one of the first pictures I took – coneflower (Echinacea purpurea).
My general life philosophy, particularly over the last couple of years, is to get away from having a general life philosophy. I’m much better than I ever used to be at just letting things unfold. This is not how I used to be: I used to have a mission statement. A grand plan – my own particular spin on saving the planet, basically.  Now? Not so much. Have I given up?
<shrug>
I’m not so interested in attaching an interpretation to the issue.
A Reiki master and teacher named Pamela Miles, whose blog I occasionally delve into for battery recharging, puts it this way:

Which is harder: trying to make up for not feeling special enough, or disciplining yourself to be still long enough to let the experience of special emerge from within you?

Today was a day to get re-grounded. I really needed it: my self-nurturing tank got depleted this week. Part of it was the adjustment to returning to work (I just started a part-time job, after a two year sabbatical). Part of it was that my beautiful sweetpea husband got food poisoning (or so we speculate) Tuesday night, and was out of commission until basically this morning. And part of it was the tragedy that rocked our community this week – the store manager of the Brattleboro Food Co-op was shot and killed, at the Co-op, apparently by a co-worker.
I went into the Co-op today to restock on supplies, and while a videotape wouldn’t show anything out of the ordinary, by the time I was through and getting back into the car, I felt as though I’d been crying for hours. I am either blessed, or cursed, with something I call “tuning fork empathy resonance syndrome”. You could call it poor boundaries, you could call it overactive mirror neurons. Basically, I pick up on other people’s moods and absorb them unconsciously, and it takes me a while sometimes to sort out whose feelings I’m feeling: my own, or other people’s.
The best way to handle it today involved a large container of coffee ice cream and a half batch of chocolate heroin sauce. And now, in poetic irony, I see I have come full circle, because the the blog post in which I share the recipe for this brain damage inducing concoction is dated almost exactly a year ago…and it’s kicked off with that same photo of Echinacea.