Altitude Adjustment

“If you are faced with a mountain, you have several options.

You can climb it and cross to the other side.

You can go around it.

You can dig under it.

You can fly over it.

You can blow it up.

You can ignore it and pretend it’s not there.

You can turn around and go back the way you came.

Or you can stay on the mountain and make it your home.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

Day 260 of Sobriety

I am glad to be home. Home.  I can call it that without a doubt now.  I withstood the test of a sober six months in Mexico to discern whether it was my love/hate relationship with alcohol with all of its accompanying resentments and uncertainties that kept me from fully embracing that uniquely vibrant and sun bright place as home and now, while I love it with a deep and rich passion, I know it is not my home.

 I'm not technically home yet, I can't even see the mountains from here and any of the people that have told me that they thought my life is exotic would get a good laugh if they could see my digs in the only hotel in this little northeast Colorado town where the cap'n is covering call for the weekend, but I'm getting close.  My body knows this and it is going through all those funny little adjustments it makes to shift itself from sea level to the nose bleed section.  I'm only at 4229 feet right now but I can feel the difference.  My heart is doing those funny little extra beats trying to find that extra bit of oxygen it's use to and I wake up feeling tired even though I've slept well.  I'm not complaining, I kind of like feeling all these things I'm supposed to feel, even the slight headache, it tells me my body is doing what it's supposed to without any interference from me.  I used to be convinced that I was one of those people that didn't suffer from altitude sickness, I just suffered from hellish hangovers brought on by low oxygen level homecoming binges.  Not this time.

My soul is having no such problems adjusting.  It is drunk from the perfume of fresh mown grass and a hint of freesia that is wafting in from some unseen blossom bursting bush (say that three times real fast) and it wants to throw itself down in the spring grass and roll around in it until it is all scratchy the way Stanley the blind killer bichon is doing.(Stanley is jubilant to be home)  It has made it's claim, mine is a soul that lives in spring and autumn, with the requisite bits of winter and summer thrown in.  It is a soul for all seasons.  It will never be happy in endless summer.

I can live with that.