A Look Inside

Last night, my cowboy boots, one again, took me to an unrestful night of sleeping in fits. This resulted in me awaking at 4 a.m. and thinking until now. I have many issues. Some that I am happy with and others that I completely dislike.

I show my emotions, so much so that I often make a fool of my self, but I like not feeling like I must mask my emotions. It's real.

I have very low self confidence. This I dislike. People in my life often tell me good things about myself. Last evening, someone that made a big difference in my life told me that I was a delightful person. This was a wonderful thing to hear, but I just can't see it. I long to, but I cannot. I try, but am unable to see myself in a good light. I want to see in myself what so many others say that they see in me.

I love strongly. I like this one, but it gets me into trouble. I care so much, and when I feel that others don't care as much for me, I become sad. I don't think that they care less, I think that I just care overmuch.

I know that the things that I think of are focused on me. Well, I believe that many people, due to other obligations, do not think of themselves enough. Not to a selfish point, but it is important to look inside at who you really are and how you really feel. Individuals need to spend time thinking about themselves, not about their superficial wants, but their true feelings. This is what I have been doing for a while now. It has taken me many weeks on my journey to self realization and I am not there yet, but I am trying. I think that I will be a better person if I know who I am. I will continue this journey until I feel comfortable that I know myself well enough to know my mind, my heart, and my feelings.

Dreams

My cowboy boots take me many places, but inevitably they always take me to my bed to rest. They have good intentions, they really do, but I don't rest. I am plagued with dreams. Good dreams, bad dreams, scary dreams and sometimes sad dreams. The constant is that they are so vivid and I am so involved that I do not rest at night. This is not a new occurrence, my sleep has always been like this. The only instance that I do not dream, and dream vividly, is when I physically work and go all day long until I am completely worn out. I think this is the reason for my love of cutting and splitting wood. Nothing puts me to actual sleep like an entire day of splitting wood.

My dreams have varying levels of intensity, but what bothers me the most about them, the part that really unsettles me, are my emotions. In my dreams I feel emotions so strongly, they can leave me with an ache in my chest when I wake. It is disturbing to feel certain emotions so keenly. The worst is when I have feelings in my dreams for people in my life that I don't have those feelings for. It can unsettle and unnerve me in a way that leaves me dissecting situations that I should have never thought about, that I would never have, if not for my semiconscious mind.

I say semiconscious because I wake at the drop of a pin. I can be deep into a dream in a matter of seconds and out of it instantly. I don't think that this is normal. I thought that it took time to get to REM sleep, which is where a person would have dreams, I think. I'm not sure on those facts, but that is my understanding. So, the fact that I can got to sleep have an entire scenario in my mind and wake in under five minutes fascinates me. It is the content of these scenarios that frightens me.

As a mater of fact, I just realized that the content of my dreams is never happy. Often they are sad and terrifying, but even the better dreams are nuteral at best. Almost a bitter sweet, maybe my mind realizes the unreality of the situation. I would really love to be an experimant for someone who studies dreams. I think that they could have fun with me.

Television Today

Recently my cowboy boots took me to The Maryland Renaissance Festival. On this trip I stayed in a hotel. The festival is very tiring so there were two night in which we laid on the bed and watched TV. I do not normally watch TV and when I do the modern technology of Netflix instant queue allows me to watch exactly what I want when I want.

This hotel had 24 channels. In our modern times this is few but this did not bother me I figured that we could find something to kill some time before we drifted to sleep ... I was wrong. As we began to try different channels I realized that TV is horrible. There was not one pleasant thing on. I went through each of our 24 channels pausing to see the available show and each on was featuring something horrible. One show was about shipwreck survivors who floated in a small boat on the ocean till they were rescued. The show was not positive. It began with five survivors and ended with two. I won't go into the details because it was horrible. This was the case channel after channel.

It made me think of TV years ago when it was about the good things in life and lessons to live by. Now it i about society getting away with horrible things that our children should not be allowed to see. Even the shows that try to show society in a good light feature the worse side of life. Shows such as Bones and CSI are featuring people trying to catch the bad guy and do right in the world, but they focus on how awful the world is.

There are those who say it is necessary for society to see the world as it is at a young age. I disagree. Censorship with reason is a good thing. I have seen children who talk about killing and death at ages that it is difficult to comprehend. I think that television has a lot to do with this. But I have swayed from my topic. I as an adult want to relax and not watch a show that makes me wonder on the horrible things in the world and focuses on the good. I hope that society will go back to that in their idea of an interesting pursuit. I am doubting this, but I still have hope.

A Different Time

This past weekend my cowboy boots took me to the Maryland Renaissance Festival. This is my third year attending the festival and it was probably the most necessary. My meaning is that this is my favorite thing. I have been stressed out and truly needed it. It allows me to see things differently. For many years I have believed that I do not belong in this time. I was born hundreds of years too late. When I attend the festival I get to dress up and be thrown into another time. There is so much laughter and merriment it is easy to forget the troubles of today.

Don't get me wrong, I am not naive about the times. I realize that dressing up is not what they considered it. It was everyday clothing just as jeans and a tee are today. I also realize that in these times all was not merry and life for them was much more difficult than today. Thus the interest to me. Because life was so difficult for people of times past they cherished it more. This, to me, is symbolized in the times of their festivals.

When I attend the festival I see people of our time living and laughing and it makes me forget when I am. In our time life is so easy and because of that people have so much time on their hands to be malicious. People of our time crave drama and create it in hateful ways through television, movies and even social networking. People of times past loved drama as well but it was created on the stage to generate happy emotions and tell stories, now people create drama to be cruel.

At the festival I feel like I can see the citizens of this time trying to go back to when life was a struggle to live and the good times were valued, not taken for granted. It lets me see that society of our time is not so bad as it seems on a daily basis. It gives me hope and I look forward to festival season all year round as I am sure those of a different time did.

An Adventure in the Mountain State

Today my cowboy boots took me to many places and to just one. I traveled to the highest point in West Virginia and to a few of the great landmarks of the area. I began the day at Stonewall Jackson Lake near Weston, West Virginia. We are spending the week at the lake to fish but it was a rainy day and we decided a road trip was a fitting alternative. I traveled first through Elkins and to Black Water Falls. Only once before had I been to the Falls, but I was so young that I could only remember flashes of memories and for years I wanted to go back. The Falls were very pretty. I remembered them being larger, but I was considerably smaller the last time that I was there. Another difference from the last time that I was there is the ability to touch them. When last I was there we could go down to the river at the bottom of the Falls, but anymore visitors are restricted to a wooden stairway. While the surrounding forest reached out to me over railings I felt constricted not being able to touch the beauty of the Falls.

Our next stop was to Spruce Knob, but we came upon some pedestrians on the road away from the Falls. A momma bear and her two babes decided to cross the road right in front of us. It was a wonderful thing for me because I have always wanted to see a bear in the wild. I guess that the road is not really the wild, but way better than the zoo. I was very excited. They left all too soon into the woods on the other side of the road and we continued our journey with a new wind.

We finally reached the top of Spruce Knob after what felt like an eternity up the mountain. It was cloudy as I got out of the vehicle and looked around. It almost required effort to take in my surroundings. At that elevation everything looks so much different. I felt like I was in my own private West Virginian Highlands, but then I guess I was. We were the only visitors the the mountain that afternoon and walking down the medieval path was almost worrisome. The ominous weather and the path that appeared to be cut right out of the forest, with small paths cut out every so often leading to seemingly nowhere made me anxious as if I should expect danger around every turn. It just made for a wonderfully chilling atmosphere. I went up the tower against my better judgement but couldn't really see much due to an unsettling fog that set in so I gladly placed my feet back on the moss-covered ground. Soon we left that place as well which was oddly sad because the mountaintop surrounding that day were so imaginative they were more like a setting than real life. I felt like I could get lost there, probably because I could have.

We traveled through Canaan Valley and then on to Seneca Rocks. I was unable to hike to the top of the rocks because it was becoming dark quickly, but I enjoyed the atmosphere here as well. The romantic tales of love and loss were of interest to me as well as the factual history of the Rocks. Most of all, what I noticed as I explored the area at the foot of the rocks was that they are a constant presence there always keeping watch over the area. It was a comforting feeling, but all to soon we had to leave there as well.

It was a late night but an exciting day. As it is always a wonderful adventure going to places that I have never been I had a wonderful time and now I have many places that I want to return to and explore to the fullest. I went to many places and just one - home. All of them right here at home.

Talented Doubts

Thus far today my cowboy boots have taken me nowhere. I am still home and trying to come up with an idea to write about. As it turns out, I didn't have to think long and it hit me. I am very aware of my self esteem issues, but I don't think that they have a part in this. I feel confident in what I do in the area of graphic design for the most part, but then I see a design by another, read an article by a writer, a book by a talented author, and my confidence fails me. I feel that I will never be good enough in any endevor to feel completely confident.

I feel confident in the things that I create and then I see a graphic design student's work and I feel that I will never create something that awesome. I want to be an author, it is my deeply hidden want in life. Something that I know that I will always want, but that will probably never happen. I am an avid reader and when I read a Kresley Cole novel, I know that I will never have that talent, to create a world and pull a reader in, emersing them in the story.

It is the same in all that I do. When I rode horses, I was confident that I could get that animal to do anything, but then one of the other riders at the stable would make me doubt. I often think that maybe even Kresley Cole has doubts about her writing and the designers for Cosmo get stumped and feel inadequate, but their success is so great. It should bring me hope to feel that people with great talent can have doubts and still make success out of their talent, but I think that it may only make me doubt my talent, or maybe I'm just in a melancholy mood.

This weekend my cowboy boots took me to Kentucky. I had a wonderful time reconnecting with family that I have not seen in years. It was fun and everyone was so nice, but it was too short. To get to know those who you have lost in time takes longer than a few short hours and that was all the time we had. I looked forward to this weekend since I heard about it months ago and the wait seemed like an eternity. Then in two days it had happened and was over and now it is a speck in time.

Life has a funny way of becoming a series of events just like the one that I experienced. An announcement, an excited wait, the too short event, and the time after. In hindsight the event is minuscule, but so important and I hold on to my such events. Without the wait nothing would be as important, but the small moments in life that matter are snatched away so quickly compared to that wait. All we have left are our memories of what was important and what mattered to each of us. We hold those memories close to our hearts and bring them out for a good laugh and a smile when we are lonely.

I make my life of these scenarios and often wonder if it is right. Then I realize that it is not right or wrong, it just is. I feel that Life is made of big events and small moments and without the wait for the big events, the small moments would not be possible or as special.

I still feel that the time was too short, but I must hold on to my small moments and wait for the next big event that will bring us together to build more small moments. And so on, and so on the cycle will go.

Today my cowboy boots took me to my mom's house. We are getting ready for a road trip to Kentucky for my great aunt and uncle's 50th wedding anniversary. I think that it is amazing for two people to have that kind of special relationship that allows them to spend 50 years together. I am sure that in the scheme of forever though, 50 years may seem like a blink of an eye, and I am sure that forever is where they are headed. Just by looking at photos you can see the love in their eyes! I'm such a pathetic romantic!

I am very excited to see them and all of my family that I have not seen in a long, long, (going to throw an extra long in there) time. This especially saddens me because they only live around four hours away! So, I'm excited about the trip and while I was visiting my mom my aunt called and they talked for a while. Listening to them chat about everyone and everything intrigued me, sucked me in, in fact, and then I got a thought. What if they don't like me? I'm eccentric, spontaneous, opinionated, just plain odd, emotional and expecting lots and lots of hugs. What if they think I'm crazy? I mean I do half of the time, but I don't speak half of the things that I think.

So, now I am concerned that they won't like me, still excited, but concerned. I don't want to be someone else but I want, and need them to like me. I have been waiting and wanting to reconnect with that part of my family for so long, I never stopped to think that they may not like me. I guess I should add self centered to my list of faults. I do think that I am a sweet person under all of the eccentricity, but any more with many people it seems like being a sweet person is not enough.

I think that I am just going to go with the sweetness though, dish out enough hugs to make up for the last nine years and hope for the best, because that is all a person really can do.

My cowboy boots take me many places near and not so near. They take me to exciting, fun, and not so fun places and they take me through happiness, sadness, anger, excitement, and all sorts of emotions. This is a place to discuss where my cowboy boots take me, the things that occur, and the emotions that I go through along the way. It may be slow at times, it may be boring and there may be the rare occasion where it is interesting, but definitely hang on for the ride and do enjoy.