BODY/MIND/BRAIN: Treehugging, Pushing the Limits and Being a Geek

Well, tis the season, once again. It's been a bit of a strange one, overall - the first time in years that I'm actually living with my folks, getting to them and my sisters again after years of being the cool absentee sister who swooped in for the holidays and then was gone again. There's been a fair amount of familial strife in there, but for the most part it's been fairly painless. It's also the first time I've observed the winter solstice as a holiday, not just an interesting astronomical event. I've been poking around for some small thing I can do by my currently solitary self, haven't found anything yet but I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out in time.

Usually the tradition is that on the evening of my mother's birthday (Nov 30), we all go out as a family and pick out a Christmas tree to take home. This year, however, my dad had helped with a Christmas service as a nursing home on that day and was just "too Christmassed out" to do anything else dealing with the season. So we left it for the time being and went on about normal daily matters until just the other day, when my mom went out by herself and came back with literally the biggest tree we've ever had. To get it into the stand alone took quite a bit of finagling, with my sister and I both lifting it into the thing, then me holding it up while she tightened the base. Yep, that "treehugging" in the post title is quite literal. And this is going to sound either impossibly dorky or hippyish or both, but it's really something of a zen experience - your senses are completely taken up by the tree: the feel of the needles on your arms and face, the heady scent of pine all arond you. It sounds silly, but that was probably the first time I'd felt really in the spirit of the season. It probably speaks to my pagany soul in a way - that of all the many and varied traditions in my family about this time of year, the one that sticks the most is the tree itself.

I also made what I consider a pretty damn huge breakthrough this past week. I've been following a running program lately that has me running for a few minutes, walking a bit and then repeating the process for 30 minutes 5 times a week, and on Wednesday evening I decided that I'd had enough with the stopwatch for then and that I'd just run and walk as the mood struck me. After running for a little while it occurred to me to just see how long I could go on running -to test the limits of my endurance, if you will. Now, keep in mind that I had NEVER run over about 5 minutes straight before that I remember, but I'd been keeping up with the program and thought I could maybe manage between 5 and 10 if I paced myself right. Well, that night I ran for 20 minutes straight, without stopping once. This may seem small to some, but to me it was like finishing a marathon. I felt like a goddess.

Lastl and briefly: I got a laptop! It's a brand that no one knows about yet, which is why I could get a machine with such great specs for such a great price. Hopefully the novelty of it will be slow to wear off, helping me get back into the habit of posting more often. But for now I'll bid goodnight - or rather, good morning, on this very new Solstice Day!

-N