Fill. Dump. Repeat.

Great Wolf Lodge has this giant bucket that fills up rapidly with water, then just dumps it all at once. Fill. Dump. Repeat. It's crazy fun if you're at a water park.

Perhaps it's the curse of the introvert. I process everything internally.
Sometimes my brain gets full.

But just plain crazy if that bucket is your brain.

Like receiving a call from the school nurse during which she makes social pleasantries when what you really want to know is, Why are you calling me? Is my kid okay?!?!, rest assured that nothing bad has happened: no lightning strikes, no major illnesses, no tragedies. Just "life" stuff, but plenty of them at once so that I barely had time to process one before moving on to the next.

The physical labor of planting the landscape beds was therapeutic in allowing my mind to process whatever it needed to, while my body did something productive and tangible. However, it's hard to write and shovel at the same time, so I scribbled mere phrases here and there. No complete thoughts, or even complete sentences. Yet even if my hands had NOT been busy with tools and plants, sometimes emotions are too strong, too raw, that it's impossible to put a coherent thought together anyway.

So over a period of about four weeks, my mind-bucket kept filling. Inside, I churned through a variety of emotions, plans, and thoughts until I was done. Or full, to continue the bucket metaphor. 

Then it dumped. Once all the thoughts were evicted from my brain, they dissipated and now they're gone. I didn't write enough down, so I look at my cryptic words, dissociated from context, and they have less strength.

So here's the shorthand: I'm at peace with thoughts that were not peaceful, say, a month ago. And now I move on. The thoughts in my mind have resumed their normal ebb and flow, rather than rapid accumulation and dispersal. It's all good.