Holy hot one Travellers,

I should have kept my mouth shut last Friday because no sooner did I declare the glory of our morning walk and the accompanying weather did Mother Nature decide to humidify our lives. 90% humidity. It’s abit much. In truth we’ve really only had two rough weeks of heat and humidity here this year, which is really a gift, and today appears to be the last of this little bout of saturated air.

I actually think of high school chemistry class when it’s humid like this AND super saturated solutions…do you remember that sort of thing? How much particulate can you dissolve into a liquid before it no longer dissolves? In this case though, it’s the air that is supersaturated and that’s actually true because when it can’t hold anymore water, it tends to rain. Am I right? Sorta? Obviously, I’m not a chemist…but my teacher would be so pleased that I even remembered any of that.

Last night was unbearable, the heat and ugh, thick ass air, but when I went outside, this is the sky that greeted me…

It was rolling in waves of gaseous fire… the humidity and the water in the air did a magic trick with the light of the setting sun, for a just a few moments…I stood there, sweating my tooshie off, watching the all the colors recede into the horizon, moving faster than you think…

This life is temporary. Do you think about that? Not in a depressing way, just in the way that it is true. It’s true.

I know that was an abrupt shift, and I’m not the first person to say it, but let me be the first to say it with some Cyndi Lauper…

The setting suns, the rising moon, the passing storms, the flowers that bloom, and us. Our lives, the moments of our lives, and really just the nature of this whole ball of life called Earth. There is a sort of built in level of difficulty in our mere existence isn’t there? Because when things are good, you want them to last forever. And when things are bad, you want them to end immediately. We want the people and furry people we love to stay with us all our lives and when we begin to see their mortality fading, we realize our own is just as fleeting.

It’s not the lines on your face that are scary, it’s the fact that a day will arrive when you are gone. There will be no more sunsets here in this place. No more time. And that’s not scary for me, but that is a privilege of working with the elderly. I have become well acquainted with death or the short path there. When we work with families, my colleagues and I always have to remind ourselves that our reactions are different now because of our jobs. We have a familiarity with a road most people only glimpse when their parents or siblings die. And that is a sort of strange gift that my job has bestowed upon me. I can see what a human life is, all the way to the end.

I’m not saying time is flying by, I think time is moving at the rate of awareness we give it. If you live more presently, or work to that end, and it is an endeavor of some difficulty, it seems there are always many good moments in a day. In a life. But those minutes are counter balanced by the unpleasant ones. The painfully emotive ones. In those spaces, time feels like a trap of sorts. Like one of those awful metal mouthed ones hunters use for animals in the forest. A trap inside yourself that you accidentally step into on your way to happier times. And once you pry yourself out of it, and that takes some work and pain of it’s own, you have to remember not to pry it open again.

That’s where I’m at these past few days. Prying my leg out of traps. Struggling with myself. Obviously, the pain of any divorce or break up or misadventure of the heart gone awry, we want to get over it as fast as possible. But it takes the time it needs to take, and the time you will allow. I have had many people tell me that in a year or two I’m going to look back on all of this and it will be just a memory. I will be in a better place and I’m sure you know these people. It will all work in the end they say. They are trying to throw you a life preserver of hope. And they are most likely correct, but I’m here now and there’s a lot of time between here and that destination.

I’m also really struggling with myself, trying to find my path in this life. And I get wrapped up in time. Worrying about if there is enough time to change my life course. Change takes time, do I still have that kind of time? Not because death is at my heels, but because I battle the feeling that I wasted so much of it that I feel hurried now. Hurried to make this life matter to myself. Hurried to become this better person of which those people speak. And I worry about where I spend my time, I don’t want to invest in anything that may not pay off. Which is foolish as fuck.  And the thing is a butterfly can’t be forced out any faster from it’s cocoon, because real metamorphosis takes the time it needs to take. And life changes are all tiny little cocoons we spin for ourselves, aren’t they?

I recently bought this little doodle, just the print and framed it to give myself a sort of tangible reminder in life:

I realize now though it’s not just a reminder of the whole, “This too shall pass” situation, it’s also life. Life is temporary. My fur kids, my garden, the setting sun, my body, this home, my family, my friends, this planet. We are all just very small sentences in the story of life. And you would think that might be upsetting, but it’s starting to make me change the way I see each day as I pass by this little image on the way out my front door. I think about all my little cocoons of change and how they are indeed temporary. I will only be here temporarily. The pain is temporary and the gift of our moments are temporary.

It’s something worth remembering.