Whenever I feel like writing, it takes a few minutes to decide whether to write to my blog or my personal journal. Things I don’t want anyone else to know go in my personal journal. Things I don’t mind if others know go on my blog. So here I am.
I spent about 5 hours yesterday working on the lawn. We let the lawn go this season until last week, and by then the dandelions were well-rooted and the white top had crept in from the fallow field behind our house and infiltrated about 10 feet into the yard. So I had my work cut out for me.
I wrestled the string trimmer and was able to beat down most of the mature weeds (didn’t flip any rocks into my eye this time fortunately) and edged the grass all the way around. Then I mowed. We have one of the “Reel Mowers” that is essentially two wheels attached to a set of whirling blades. It’s nice and quiet, environmentally friendly, and a pain in the back to use. Especially when the grass is a little bit longer. I’ll bet I went over each piece of lawn three times to get the grass evenly chopped. But I slept well last night
Jo and I just finished watching all three extended versions of the LOTR movies. One of the joys of life is that feeling you sometimes get when a person, a group of people, a book, a movie, or something else takes control of your mind and heart, your perspective suddenly changes and you temporarily lose the ability to think about anything else. That happened to me when we finished Return of the King at about 11:00 p.m. on Friday.
I think some people refer to this feeling as “falling in love,” but to me it’s something different than that because it can happen with almost anything and isn’t accompanied by any urge to commit or make sacrifices. It’s the difficult feeling to describe, but I know if I could describe it everyone would acknowledge having had it at one point or another in life.
It’s been a while since I’ve had that feeling. I used to have it all the time when I was younger, but it’s more rare now and more fleeting when it does come. It’s different now too. It used to be a feeling of joy, but in the past several years I’ve noticed that it’s become more of a feeling of sadness.
Maybe I feel it differently now because I have experienced depths of pain and loss that I hadn’t felt when I was younger. Since my teenaged years, I have stood at the cracks of Mount Doom, considering whether to throw the most precious thing in the world to me away forever. I have waited at the Grey Havens and watched my best friend sail away to Valinor, never to return. And I have returned home again to my life, wondering how I was ever going to go on.
Maybe that’s why I simultaneously love and hate the ending of Lord of the Rings. Maybe that’s why I simultaneously loved and hated the ending of LOST. They hit too close to home.
It’s Sunday now, and the feeling has subsided. I’m tempted to watch all three movies again right away, and try to bring the feeling back. But that feeling always comes upon you unexpected. If there’s one rule of life that’s very clear to me, it is that things never happen the same way twice. So I’ll have to wait until next time~
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