Vertigo

Yes, really.
I woke up yesterday morn and the room kept spinning.  Walking to the bathroom made me seasick.  It took many naps, and phone calls, and time, before I figured out what was up and found my feet again.  It was a day pulled out of space and time.
But good.
I've come to appreciate how my body takes metaphors literally.   My pseudo heart attack, showing me again my broken heart;  my vertigo, how dizzy and mind bending all these changes in identity are to me.
I am being stripped down to some primal version of myself as the activities I've used my breath and body for are no longer possible or what I want.
"I am not who I was, though some principle  of being survives from which I struggle not to stray"
I remember reading the "Little House" books and wanting to be a self sufficient pioneer; that's what has driven me to become good at "putting by" my garden and meat raising.  It's become fashionable now, but contrarian that I am, that makes me want to move on, or do it in a way which uses up less of me.
I remember listening to Joan Biaz records when I was 12, and deciding that that's what I wanted to look like, be.  And so the beatnik version of me was born, though I lacked the olive skin and my hair, even ironed would never hang straight.   I still have trouble spending money on clothes or other appearance driven womanly maintenance activities, though I am getting remedial fashion assistance and education.
I remember all the turn of the century kids books I used to read which fostered my sense of responsibility for family, family, family.  I have an idea of family as my root stock which has driven a lot of my choices, and perhaps that's been the deepest part of my identity up to now.

Identity vertigo, that's what is going on with me.  I sometimes feel friends or family respond to me as though I am someone else at essence than who I feel myself to be. They may have been distracted by some of my identity driven behaviors and think because I do these things, that must be who I am.  And isn't it?  How can I be other than what I've done and continue to do; habits die hard?  
But I feel like I am more than that.
What is the star I'm following now, freed of work, husband, young children??    Ir seems like I'm thirteen instead of sixty three, and that I'm looking for new Identity clothes to try on.  I need a lot of solitude, silence  and stillness to hear what that small voice in me is suggesting I try.   Of course I'm dizzy, I've lost the orientation of my old horizons, as I "voluntary free fall" into the future.
"I am not done with my changes"

January 8th

Gil died 9 months ago; it feels like 9 years.  I have traveled so much new territory, so many miles, I can barely remember so long ago.
But also,
It was a year ago that we started down the slippery slope, and it feels like yesterday. Gil spent the weekend with the Kavanaughs while Adam and I journeyed to Ohio to visit David.  When we got back I sensed that something was wrong, he was weak, confused, my alarms went off. When we went to the hospital, his platelets were out of wack, and his myeloma was soaring.
In hindsight, his myeloma had mutated sometime in late December and was becoming an out of control, burn the house down kind of fire.  I remember that all so familiarly; it was the world I lived in, and it changed so abruptly 9 months ago.
I am reassured when I still tear up easily with this and that memory.  I have not become cold and callused but I am shifting Universes.  I was living in a world of Doctors and numbers, intuitions and crises.  I did my garden and turkeys as though it were still my life, but increasingly over the years, I was not present, to myself or anyone else.  Oh I had insights, and awareness of this and that but to the deeper current of my life, I was not tuned in.
I feel like I'm waking up now, like a person after a train wreak, who lost an arm or leg, who realizes that they are still alive, and that the rest of their life will be radically different.  The Universe has been swatting me upside the head, with crisis after crisis.  All at first looked like potential disaster, all were, with some $ and effort, manageable.  What have I to fear of flooded basements or dead vehicles? The current of my life is pulling me.  Where, I have no idea, but I'm learning how to move a little within it.   And trust.      I feel the reality, Death IS.  And equally, while I'm still alive,   BE ALIVE.