Super rough night last night trying to sleep. My nerve issues are just killing me right now. I changed positions I don’t know how many gazillions of times hoping to find some relief, somehow, some way, some position.
Gosh I wish I knew what I did while stretching that blew everything up. I wish I knew what I could do to fix it just get it back to the baseline level of discomfort and pain, not this… Level that I’m dealing with now. It’s… hard.
But I’m not trying to continue to be grateful and to look at the positive.
It is a blessing to actually be able to empathize with other people. That’s one thing that I long for is to be able to understand what other people are going through and how they really are feeling, and though none of us can ever truly know exactly what it’s like to go through a circumstance as another person, I think we can come close sometimes.
Probably because I was tossing and turning all night, but I actually remembered some dreams.
My first dream, or at least the first Dream I remember having, was of me at some sort of a reunion with the students that I taught at the private high school I used to teach at years ago. It was like a 15-year reunion, or something, with the students all 30 years old. I don’t remember a lot about the dream. I think I remember feeling out of place? I think I am also remember loving them a lot.
I might just be making that up, though. It’s all faded at this point.
The other dream I had was of being attacked by a bear. I want to say maybe I’ve had multiple bear attack dreams over the last few days?
Hopefully that doesn’t portend something awful. 😅
Anyway, I got up and chatted with the Big Guy for a bit. I also downloaded a bunch of gospel music and a bunch of recordings that I made of some of my spiritual experiences from the past, so I could listen to stuff without needing the internet connection.
It’s only been just a few days since I downloaded that filter app to help keep me from wasting Time online in whichever particular avenue of Escape I might want to choose, and though it was pretty difficult the last couple of days, it’s much easier today.
My own experience tells me that first come the days of hardship, when there’s a void that has usually been filled by the life wasters. And then if I hold on long enough, then comes the gratitude, as what I previously used as escapes are recognized as weights around my neck, and I eventually feel lighter and freer.
I might be jumping the gun a little bit, but I think I’m starting to feel the transition toward the latter.
🤞
Being wednesday, I had planned to catch up with my aunt and uncle and go out to eat with them, so I was trying to schedule my day such that I would make it up to their place by dinner time.
Since the hot springs were now off my visit list, which was actually the entire reason I headed inland 🙃, I next thought about revisiting crater lake, which I visited with my mom about a year and a half prior, but I learned that the northern entrance was closed because most of the rim road is still covered in snow, so only a very small part of the overlook down into the crater is actually accessible, and the entire rest of the rim is closed until probably June or July to give time for all the snow to melt off.
Didn’t see that one coming. 🙃
So going all the way to Crater Lake for The limited view was going to mean a six and a half hour drive for the day, which I wasn’t quite up to, given all the nerve issues that are going nuts right now.
But I didn’t want to just drive back the way that I came, because I’d already done that road twice in the last 2 years, so I picked a route through the mountains on Forest roads that was a relatively straight shot toward where I wanted to go, and I headed on up.
Oh what a gorgeous area it was, too. 😍
I drove up I think it was called steamboat Creek Road or something like that or the road along steamboat Creek…?
I followed it up a ways, and then I saw a random turn off through the woods toward the creek in a spot where the road wasn’t right along the creek, so I decided to take the turn off, and it led to this absolutely perfect camping spot. Perfect perfect. If it weren’t for the fact that my power station doesn’t have a way to stay powered, and if it weren’t for the fact that I was heading to my aunt and uncle’s place tonight, I would totally stay there for multiple days on end.
Wanting to see if I could give my body some relief, I went ahead and parked my van there next to a fire pit that someone had built, changed into something that would dry off easier after getting wet, and headed down to the river, Maybe 10 or 12 ft below where the fire pit was.
I have my water shoes on and waited out into the water, checking to see how long it was going to take for my body to settle into how cold the water was.
So I waited. 10 seconds. 20 seconds. Maybe a minute?
But my body didn’t get used to the cold. It was so cold, in fact, that my legs just hurt.
😕
Darn. That kind of cold is just too cold for sitting in reasonably. It’s one thing to sit in cold water that’s uncomfortably cold. It’s quite another thing to sit in cold water that’s so cold that your whole body just hurts.
So I backed out. I wasn’t in it for the quick circulation benefits of going from warm to cold and back to warm. I was trying to give my spine issues some relief, and I was no longer convinced hanging out in water cold enough to hurt without ever getting used to the temperature was going to do anything beneficial for me.
So I disappointedly gave up, headed back to the van, continued answering JustAnswer questions, and started listening to the recordings that I made of previous spiritual experiences. I listened to several of them in a row.
Those experiences have been so meaningful and have taught me so much.
Anyway, though I’ve been in pain and discomfort as a general rule today, much more so than usual, I was still happy and smiling and totally enjoying myself today. I love this area. It’s a little colder than I would like it to be to be able to enjoy it the way that I want to. I like the heat to be balanced out by the ability to jump in the river, but up here, there’s not much heat during the year, so generally, it’s just on the colder damper end of things, so it’s beautiful, but not so enticing in the ways that I generally like. I don’t like a lot of heat, but if I live by a river, then heck yes, I want heat, because I love to play in the river and a Cool River on a hot day feels wonderful, and if you get cold, you can just get out of the water and warm right back up. I think that’s my favorite.
So the Pacific northwest, is beautiful as it is to me, I don’t know if it actually gets hot enough for long enough for me to enjoy the water like I would like.
Then there Are places like Florida, where the water so warm that it feels like bath water, and the only time that it’s enjoyable is during the winter because during the summer time the water is of zero refreshment at all to the hot humid air. You just go from hot humid air, directly to bath water, and it’s… yucky. 😅
🐿️
Anyway so I was listening to lots of important stuff, stuff that’s important to me, at least. I’m grateful to be back centered in gospel things. I’m grateful to be building that relationship back with my heavenly father. I’ve missed him. I’ve missed our conversations. I’ve missed the spirit. And it feels so wonderful, so so wonderful to be finding my way back to it, back to the light that I love so much.
It’s hard to believe how long I was willing to push it away out of my anger and in my pain.
I didn’t spend too long in the perfect little camping spot that I found because I did need to head north up toward where my aunt and uncle live, and I was hoping to maybe stop off at a church building in a nearby town to charge up my power station before heading on to my aunt and uncle’s place.
So I started winding up the mountains on the Forest Road around and around and up and down and up and up and up and up some more. I even passed a little bit of snow that was left underneath a fallen tree, and then I realized why the water had been so cold. Despite the fact that these mountains were really just big hills, there was indeed still a fair amount of snow at the top of the taller ones.
In fact, after maybe an hour of going up and up and up, as I came to the summit and started going down the other side, I was met with a field of snow, probably 12 to 18 in, possibly even more, deep in the middle of the road for far longer than was reasonable to think that I could make it through.
Drat.
I turned my internet on, having turned it off to try and conserve juice because I was running really low on power, and I looked around the other Forest roads for a route around this one that was blocked off by the snow.
So I headed west, or whatever direction it was, on a different road that eventually wound back to the road that I was trying to get to, presumably lower in elevation, and thus, presumably, less likely to have snow blockages.
Funny that I made it all the way to the top of the mountains and down the other side before I ran into snow of any real quantity, but I guess that’s basically what it’s all about, the south side of the mountains are going to melt, and the north side are going to get a lot less sun. Or whatever the directions are. Maybe it’s the East side melts a lot more in the west side melts a lot less. I don’t know. Whatever it is, I didn’t have any snow issues all the way up, but I kept running into fields of snow covering the road in every alternate Forest Road I tried.
Eventually, realizing it was most likely going to be the fool’s errand to keep trying, I reluctantly headed back down the way I came, realizing that going back down the way I came, though the fastest route at this point, was still going to get me where I was trying to get to about an hour later then I had originally planned to get there.
Gratefully, since I’ve been focusing on gospel things, I wasn’t bothered really at all. I just kept listening to uplifting stuff on my phone as I drove, at some point switching over from my recordings of my spiritual experiences over to gospel songs from the LDS library app, singing them loudly while I had my headphones on, driving West back toward Interstate 5.
Periodically, I would pull over to start another phone call? And then head back on the road while I talk to them on the phone. It’s nice to be able to work while I’m driving when they are phone calls. Obviously, I can’t do the chat conversations while driving if I’m going to be true to what I believe is right.
Made it to my aunt and uncle’s place about 6:00, and we chatted for a little while, and then we headed out to Mexican restaurant to eat dinner, and they graciously treated me to the dinner, for which I was grateful.
We have lots of great conversations about life and what’s going on for everybody. We talked about family here and family there and family everywhere. We talked about gospel things and a lot of what’s been going on in my own life over the last years.
Love my aunt and uncle. Great people. 😊
After dinner, we went back to their place and kept talking for another couple hours, or so. So nice to be able to be with family. So nice to be able to visit and enjoy one another’s company.
They offered me their spare guest bedroom to sleep in for the night, but y’all know me: I’m going to kick it in my van. 🙃
Besides, I have only just a little bit less than a month before I’ve lived in my van for a year straight without sleeping in anything but the van.
Oh… wait!!!
Alaska. 🙃
So much for the streak I thought I had. 😆
Oh well.
It’s just after 11:30, Pacific time, and I’m caught up now on my journal, so I’m going to brush my teeth and call it a night.
Gratitude:
- I’m grateful to be able to have had a relatively decent perspective today, despite my physical struggles. It’s definitely been hard these last few days. Hard to stay positive. Hard to stay grateful. Hard to have hope that my future life is going to be worth living if it involves so much pain and discomfort. But today I was able to maintain a pretty decent perspective and to stay relatively positive, so we’ll just go one day at a time, and hopefully this flare up that is so much more challenging than even the regular daily spine issues that I deal with Will subside and give me at least some relief from the more acute symptoms.
- I’m grateful to have found that little spot on the side of the river. I’ve got it marked on my maps, and I may go back there one day. There’s some good spots that I found over the years.
- I’m grateful to have been able to spend time with my aunt and uncle catching up and enjoying each other. And I’m grateful for their telling me about the back surgeon that my uncle went to that completely resolved all of his significant back issues. I think mine are quite a bit more advanced than his, but that still does give me hope that maybe there’s relief at some point in the future for me. I really do hope so. I might end up swinging back through Utah before I go back to arkansas, if I can make an appointment with his back surgeon. I’ll give him my MRI reports and images and try and get a consultation.
- I’m grateful that I had the good sense today to not try and brave the snow fields. In years past, I have tried to force my vehicles through big snow fields like that, and sometimes I’ve succeeded, and sometimes I failed. Today, I was thinking to myself that even if I succeeded in getting through the first snow field, there was no guarantee that there wouldn’t just be more snow fields further down, and it’s a lot easier to go downhill through a snow field than it is to go uphill. Had I run into any more snow, I almost certainly would have been stuck until the snow melted, which was likely to be weeks away still. 😅
- I’m grateful that Rover still is going without any issues, even in my off-roading places and Forest roads in the middle of the mountains of nowhere, etc. Very grateful that he’s just going and going and going.
Success:
- I did fairly decently well today with not multitasking while driving. I definitely wasn’t perfect. There’s a lot of room for improvement.
Improvement:
- Yes, lots of room for improvement. 🙃
Loves and hugs.
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 