From gobbledigook to just plain off kilter

Today my mother and I attended a Celebration of Life service which was hosted by the VNA East Hospice. I had jokingly referred to it as "Grief Fest 'O8" and "Griefapalooza" -- sarcasm's one of my greatest defense mechanisms. Services are hard and church in general is just hard. The music and the songs knock down my walls almost immediately. I cry there. It comes quickly and overwhelms. I usually try and fight them back, but they always come. What was different about today's tears was that I could really feel them brimming and myself trying to fight them back. I don't normally notice the fight nor notice the brimming. I felt alive.

I needed the cry. I've felt off kilter for the past fews days. In wanting to do so many things, I've put a tremendous pressure upon myself under which I was bound to crack just a bit.

I've been annoyed by my hard drive being full to capacity (uploading videos eat up a lot of space). My capacity issues sort of stopped me in my tracks at a lot of different levels. I know it seems peculiar that a hard drive would do that, but it did.

The truth is I know that it's not about the hard drive or the pictures or the blog or the comment challenge. It's rarely about what it's about. What it's about is deeper. I'm searching for meaning and purpose and wondering why I'm doing this.

The answer didn't take long to come. Last night my mother digitized an audio tape that my grandfather had made of a conversation he had with me as a 3 year old. I listened to that tape this afternoon and it all shifted. In the recording you can hear my grandfather and I discussing what we were going to take with us on our trip to the North Pole. Purses, my friend Colyn and sandwiches were high priority.

After listening to the tape my doubts and confusion were replaced with a conviction that I was on the right path. In continuing to write; to take pictures and video; and to post all of these to the blog, I too can leave a "tangible memory" for my family and friends. Where my grandfather had Super 8, an audio cassette recorder, a type writer, and photo albums I have a digital camera, an imac, blogger and flickr. It all just brings you right to that time in the most multi-sensory experience.

Now, I'm going to follow through on an inspiration I had a number of days back but that my momentary emotional paralysis had stymied. A few weeks ago I discovered a manilla envelope in my father's office marked "Personal stuff". Leafing through its contents flooded my mind with experiences I could write about. Now that I'm a bit more centered, I'll have at it again.

And by the way, I bought a 1 TB Time Capsule. Maybe all I needed to do was solve the hardrive capacity issue after all.