Wasted Time - November 29

I forgot to write again yesterday but I was making videos so maybe that counts.  The only trouble is that the videos I make aren't about my journey and healing.  They are about snakes and other wildlife.  I wonder if they have the same effect though as I don't feel the need to write if I am recording and making videos.  Well - more recording videos.  The making part is fun too but that is also a bit of work (only because I am stuck inside on a computer).  The being in nature and secretly recording wildlife (if I am doing it right, it is a secret to them) doing what they do in nature naturally is the therapy part.  It makes me so happy.

But...  Isn't there always a but?  The but is that I have been conditioned and told over the years that spending time in the woods it a waste of time.  From as long as I can remember, people would tell me that looking for snakes was a waste of my time.  Lots of people too.  Friends, parents, teachers, professors, lovers - they all have made comments that looking for snakes so much makes me irresponsible.  That I should be doing something productive instead.  It wasn't that going out was discouraged.  No - I think I was told to go outside (maybe to get me away them).  It was the amount of time that I did it that was frowned upon.  I could spend hours and hours sitting in one spot waiting for a snake to reemerge from a hole.  Literally HOURS and I think this is what wasn't understood by anyone and can be viewed as a waste of time; that I should be doing something better with my time.

But...  And this but is in my favor.  This but is about what I learned and gained from sitting for hours waiting for a snake to emerge from a hole so that I can take its picture.  I learned about the snake.  I learned its habits.  I learned how it behaves without human interference.  I learned how it interacts with other snakes.  I got to witness things that no one else has witnessed (well - no one else except for the people like me).  And it isn't just snakes.  I once got video of a porcupine walking down a road at 2am in the middle of nowhere.  I got video of an opossum that was on the verge of playing dead (I didn't push it over the edge just for my video but I sure wanted to).  Just recently, I spent hours luring a squirrel into my house just to feed it a peanut.  The one thing that I haven't been very good at making videos of is birds.  Birds require a longer lens and a lot more patience.  Well, a different kind of patience.  They are constantly moving and flitting about making set up for videos difficult.  I prefer to set up my camera and leave it running.  Birds you have to follow around and get what you can when you can.  But I am going to try.  It will be a fun challenge.

Sitting and watching wildlife is my therapy.  It is better for me than anything else.  I need to end the feelings of guilt and shame that come with it though.  Those were projected and given to me from other people.  Those aren't my beliefs.  Those aren't my feelings.  Those aren't mine to own.  Being in nature with my camera makes me feel good.  That is what I need to focus on - the good feelings.  I need to focus on what makes me happy and NOT what other people think about me.  They can go fuck themselves and their opinions.  I am going to go outside and sit for HOURS in nature.

High Speed Dreaming - November 27

Wow - where did the week go?  I didn't write all week and I am trying to write every day.  I would say it is weird but I was able to get outside and make videos every day this week - maybe that is my writing this week.  I was able to get some fun duck videos and more muskrats underwater.

But this post is about my dreams and I think I finally figured out why I wake up so exhausted every morning.  I dream at high speed.  It is like I am previewing video and skimming through it using my computer mouse to control the speed.  This is faster than playing it in high speed and allows me to skip through 10 minutes of no action video to find the 2 seconds of a muskrat swimming by or a snake coming out of a hole.  My dreaming may be an unanticipated and unwanted artifact of the way I record hard to video wildlife.  

If I want to record a snake in a hole, or a mouse running next to the wall, or a muskrat carrying food into its burrow, I typically set up my camera, hit record, walk away, and come back in an hour.  This gives the animal time to get use to the camera and then behave naturally.  Without "eyes" staring at it, the animal will often just go about its business.  This makes for extremely long videos with nothing moving in it until that 2 second burst of activity.  So when I am reviewing the video to see what I got, I swing the mouse cursor over the video and play it back at really high speed that really doesn't have a speed - sometimes it is slower and sometimes it is faster.  And when I spot something moving in the video, I go back and forth to figure out what it is.  This is how I dream.  And it is exhausting.

This type of video is highly successful - I am able to capture things that we talk about but rarely, if ever see.  That is my mind.  So I am going to embrace dreaming in high speed from now on and not let it frustrate me.  It might still be exhausting but at least I know I am capturing something special.

Slow Motion Swimming - November 23

Well - I missed two days of writing.  I have been in a complete anxiety fog.  New covid restrictions just came out and I have no idea how that will affect the Lab.  All I can do is try to stay positive and keep moving forward.  We have to survive this virus.  That anxiety has completely buried me. 

But I have found a pond that has a lot of muskrats in it and that presented a new challenge to me.  I want to video muskrats underwater. This not an easy task because muskrats are extremely fast swimmers.  They have to be.  There are so many predators that would catch them if they were slow but they can easily out swim a mink, snapping turtle, or even a large bass.  But this makes for a very difficult video to capture.

Muskrat Leaving Its Burrow on Day 2

So I spent 3 afternoons last week trying to capture a muskrat underwater and each day I got a little better at it.  The first day, all I got were fish.  The second day, my camera was too close to the underwater entrance of the muskrat burrow but I did capture one going in and out.  The third day was better.  I set my GoPro up outside the burrow with a 16mm wide angle lens on it (it is a digital lens) and I captured the muskrat going in and out several times.  The trouble is that they swim way to fast for it to be an interesting video (less than one second in the frame) so I had to slow it down.  I got the video I wanted but all it makes me want to do is go back again and again to get different angles and perspectives.  Muskrats are fascinating!

So what does this all mean?  All my writing that I have been doing lately (I am not publishing it right now - it is painful but necessary as I heal) is exactly what I learned about muskrats.  It is all happening extremely fast - too fast for me.  Yes, it is a part of my healing but it is all way too fast.  Things at the Lab are happening too fast as well.  I CANNOT KEEP UP!  Everything is passing me like a muskrat underwater - way too fast to be of any use.  But I am capturing it all - now I just need to slow it down to make it useful.  I have slowed down the muskrat to just 10 percent of its normal speed.  I need to make lists of the anxiety in my world and slow it down.  This can be done and it will allow me to see the world at a pace that I can react to and catch that damn muskrat.