The Grey Peace

I was born and grew up in the Great Northwest. And it is great. Grey, calm days filled with light rain and glowing green trees filled my soul with their peace from birth. This influenced me greatly as a child. I could never get enough of the outdoors. From the time light began to grow in my room until frogs filled the twilight air at night, I wanted to be outside. I remember following ants, or wandering from tree to tree, stopping to examine pinecones, buds on trees, caterpillars, leafs, flowers, berries and rocks. One of my friends had a gentle stream that ran through her woods behind her house and we spent countless hours walking peacefully through the stream picking horsetails and rubbing the moisture from the break on our stinging nettle bumps to sooth the stinging, spreading my feet out in the soft mud, picking Salmonberries, and enjoying the speckled sunshine that broke through the canopy of Big Leaf Maples, Vine Maple, Alder, and Evergreen trees above us.

But things changed as I went to school and was disconnected from nature’s tranquility for the majority of the day. I was often too fatigued when I finished school and activities to feel the peace of a grey wet day or follow ants around but some days, usually when I was particularly tired or lonely, I would find my way to my old climbing tree and climb up to a favorite crook in the branches and sit, soaking in the peace that radiated from my tree and my woods. By High School, I rarely found my quiet places in the woods, except on special occasions when we would take a walk on a Sunday with my family through the falling autumn leaves, or ride our three wheelers back through the mud puddles in the forest trail. I had become a very busy person, with so many things to do. I did everything, quite literally. I was an intense nearly straight A student, A-‘s made me whine. I was involved in Student Government, Select Choirs, sports, church leadership and any fun activity I could get involved in. By my junior year of High School I often bragged about getting 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night…though I could only do that for so long before I got sick or spent a Saturday sleeping until 1 or 2 in the afternoon to recover.

College was better, only in that my sister had been in a coma my entire senior year and that had forced me to slow down…a little…and it carried over into college where I had learned to play harder than ever and was learning to enjoy life again, simply for life’s sake but I still didn’t know how to slow down. By the time I was married and had a couple babies, my pace only got worse, the amount of things I felt I had to do was completely unrealistic. Everything I did, I did in a run, run, run, crash pattern. Though I thought I enjoyed nature and tried to teach my children to, I still wasn’t allowing myself to slow down enough to feel the peace and calm of nature. We were living in the Mountain West and had sunshine most the time. And though I missed the moisture and green of the Great Northwest, I was happy to have sunshine and the energy of go, go, go all the time. It fit me better…then.

As a young mother, my husband and I moved back to the Northwest to be near our families. We had two young children and El Nina weather that year gave us a record 90 days in a row of rain! My children spent many days inside. That was a rough year. I had already been dealing with depression that seemed to hold on long after post partum blues should have departed. I began feeling more and more physically exhausted and in pain. I complained about the grey wetness outside that made me feel even more depressed and tired and rarely ventured out in it. I travelled from one doctor to another and became irritated when they figuratively patted me on my head and told me that all young mothers feel tired. I began to research and found that I probably had fibromyalgia. I learned all I could and was diagnosed by two doctors who confirmed that fibromyalgia is what I had. I then went to work at my normal frantic pace to cure it.

After eleven years of trying everything I know of to heal myself, I have finally admitted to myself that I really have fibromyalgia and it isn’t going away. I did not want to accept that the only option I have left is to slow down! But I have finally given myself permission to do just that. I realized that if this is not going away, I have to learn to live within the bounds of fibromyalgia and this has changed my life. It has helped me to sit down and write articles like this where I am learning I have been yearning to slow down for years but didn’t know how. I have been able to clear out clutter that was adding ‘busy’ness to my life with no great payoff. I have finally given myself permission to go to bed early, to not push so hard during the day, to slow down and feel more peace. It is ironic but accepting that I have this painful, exhausting, incurable disease has helped me more than ever enjoy the grey, dark days of our Northwest Winters instead of blaming them for my pain.

I realize that since I entered school, I have been fighting against the slow, peaceful rhythm that has called to me since I was a child running through the green woods. And though I am aching for spring sunshine and the radiant beauty that makes the darkness of the winter worth living here, I love and accept the peaceful calming ambiance that settles into my very soul on these peaceful winter days in the Great Northwest.