(07-04-2024, 04:43 AM)FlickerOfLight Wrote: ...
Fast forward to today, and I still care, but I throw my hands up finally. I do, finally, agree that it's time to hang that up. Find me a quiet spot. And go coo coo in p3ace.
Nature and solitude are the remedy im needing.
...
When my war was over, I was just... tired. I wasn't sad, I wasn't happy. I pretty much felt nothing at all but just... tired.
Back then, it appeared as if we had "won". We didn't understand yet what a colossal loss it had been. I should have been happy I suppose, but I wasn't. I was just... tired.
I found that spending long periods of time in the woods was healing. I could feel something like the "spirit" of the land, the trees, the plants and critters... the totality of nature. That "spirit", for lack of a better word, would seep into me out there, rejuvenate, revitalize, recalibrate, recharge me. It was "healing" I guess is as close as I can get to explaining it. I reckon it would have calmed me, too, had I needed calming. As far as I can tell, however, I was already way too damned calm. Calmer than I reckon I ought to have been. That kinda spooked me a bit.
I didn't quite know how to handle "peace", such as it was. So I kept putting myself into situations that would result in "not-peace", just to feel alive again, if only for a moment. I eventually took a job for an agency where I could tote a gun for a living, more or less legally, and worked several government contracts (among other security contracts) for them. I did that for around 14 or 15 years before I decided it was time to hang it up and go legit, mainstream... but I never quite made it to mainstream. For me, "mainstream" was just boring and empty. I went through the motions, but I wasn't happy about it.
Even now, I can be in really, really deep shit, and still that unnatural calm is with me. I might just fall all to pieces afterwards, but while the shit is still deep, I'm just calm.
I ended up, as you mention, in solitude surrounded by nature. I've moved into the house my grandparents built, a place that has a lot of happy childhood memories. I can step out onto the deck, and in my minds eye see my grandpa tending the bee gums he used to keep under the shadow of the big white pine tree out there. The bee gums are gone now, and the tree is somewhat bigger, but I can still see the scene.
I have no real contact with anyone other than Grace and our son who stays with us, and one cousin who lives next door, and who can be a mess at times. My yard is a fenced in half acre, and that is completely surrounded by woods, growing right up to the fence, and occasionally trying to breach it.. All I have to do is step out onto the deck and breathe, and I can still feel that "spirit" of nature surrounding me, like being wrapped in a security blanket.
The woods around me are like a cathedral that God Itself built, just for me.
It's peaceful, and that's all I ever really wanted, even when I didn't know that's all I wanted. I have arrived. You will, too.
.