As luck would have it, I had finally figured out how to use the external hard drive I had bought about 9 months ago, and I did back up at least most of my important files about a month ago. These are files that mean a whole lot to me, i.e., my writing, my music, my photos. My address book did back up, so I only lost the most recent email addresses. My new essays I have been publishing on the web, so they were still accessible. About the only thing I failed to back up was my Journal. And I'm not so sure it was a bad thing.
The last three years have not been pleasant. I lost my father in 2000, and we went through a difficult adjustment, myself and my family. There was the family farm to consider, and the running of it. My mother, at 80, rallied and did a tremendous job of stepping in to fill my father's shoes, but by 2005 she was sick with some physical problems, and heartsick, I think, missing my father. She died in March of that year despite everything I could do.
A month later, within 2 days of each other, I lost one of my oldest friends to a car wreck, and the mobile home I'd been living in for 25 years caught fire and we almost died. I wrote about that in my piece about Jack.
Once my mother died, it was a free for all in the family. It was a very horrible time. I opted out. I am just too tired anymore to deal with power struggles and ulterior motives and drama and all of that other crap. I actually, surprisingly, found it somewhat easy to take the money, turn around and walk away, and build myself a new farm, and a new home. I bought my Mac about three months after my mother died, installed the Journal program and wrote pretty faithfully about everything. So there was this record, and even though I hadn't ever gone back and read anything I had written, still there was that knowledge that I had written everything down. It was there, like a dark grey cloud in an otherwise blue sky.
It's not there anymore, and the strangest thing -- I feel absolutely light as air. I darn near feel like a new born babe. Just knowing all the bad stuff I had written about was gone, was the most liberating thing. I realized I never had to go back and read about it all again. There was now no way that could ever be done. It's like the sentiments were documented, expressed, and then tossed to the wind.
I woke up to a crystal blue sky today with a ton of sunlight all around, and with my morning coffee checked in with the computer. There was my horoscope for today, saying something to the effect that it was time to move on, that new things couldn't be done as long as I was still involved with things that had happened in the past. How bizarre!! It occurred to me that perhaps some other hand had somehow been involved in the computer freeze up. Odd that the only thing I really lost was the one thing that I really did not need to hold on to. And then I remembered the story of Lot's wife, that God had told her not to look back lest she become a pillar of salt. That's not the first time I'd thought about that, but it is now the first time that, with a smile on my face, I know I won't be looking back, and even can't cause there's nothing there. This is great! I don't even have the choice. I tell you, between the depression, the gray skies and the rain, I was beginning to wonder, but perhaps it's not my time for crystallizing just yet.
