March 22, 2022

Filled with purpose...

Beginning last week, I've been perusing some stuff I've written but not posted on toss & ripple.
I have the intention to post some of these pieces on toss & ripple.
It remains to be seen how many will land here.

Today, I came across the following one. 
It was good to reread; a reminder.
I did post (most of it) on my poetry blog back in November. 
And now I post it here.

~*~*~

Prompt: Trapped in this journey

11/22/21
I've not written for the workshop this past week.
But I have written for me....
I'm currently taking a course: Potential of the Earth: Course One, a discussion between Charles Eisenstein and Orland Bishop. 

11/19/21
This course is bringing meaning to my life of the past 10 years...
Years that often felt without purpose...
For seven of those years, I lived with a deep sense of purposelessness...
I wrote about it often...
A nothingness...

Yet, I did feel a sense of purpose through my connections with non-human animals...
Many through my pet-sitting business...
Many through my wildlife encounters...

In 2017 I wrote a blog piece which I entitled Beyond Words...
Fabio's offspring at Grayson Highlands...2021

Multiple encounters with foxes and deer and raccoon and possums and crows and songbirds and squirrels and insects in the back yard....
Multiple deer encounters at Muddy Creek...
Beloved ground hogs and deer along the Ararat River...
The ancient giant cliffs and rocks along the New River Trail...
The ancient New River itself...

The trees...
Nature's beloved trees...
My beloved trees...
And their lessons...
Whom I last visited on October 19th...
Every time an answered prayer...

What has been that answer this time?
The encounter with the dissociation after Unit Two of this course?
And the insight thereafter?
Will that play into my physical healing, this round?
I do not know...

Yet I have seen parallels in my two different chronic illness lives...

The asthma coincided with the stifling of my voice in The Way...
A specific decision pre-happened Asthma's onset...
I can pinpoint it...

The widespread nerve damage developed on the heels of the therapist abuse...
I felt paralyzed, numb, dumfounded after Therapist's initial gaslighting...
A specific decision pre-happened the onset...
The decision to speak up publicly...
A month later, my limbs turned to rubber...

Both chronic illness lives are also connected with heavy metal toxicities...
In part, or whole, brought on by medical interventions...
I feel that somehow that is connected to the emotional and psychological...
At the very least, they are another straw on the camel's back...

I am a skeptic regarding a 'special time' in which we live...
Every pinpoint in time is special...
Eras...
Moment by moment...
Smaller than moments...

So, I listen and I consider...
I breathe and recall...

Incidents and experiences from my own life...
Encounters...
Spontaneous serendipities... 
Which seem to be the norm these days...
They may have always been...
But I didn't have the awareness to hear them...
Too much static...

So thus far, this course has opened up my realization...
That these past 10 years...
Have been filled with purpose...

I had understood how my pet-sitting provided a meaningful service...
But I could not understand how my Nature encounters provided service...
Until now, through this course...

The purpose of re-connecting with Earth...
Of communicating with Her...
With Her creatures in the wild...
With Her rocks and rivers... 
With the dirt beneath my feet...
With the plants...
With the beloved trees...
And even with inanimates...
All of which are initially made from earth materials...

Nature has hosted me and continues...
And I have hosted her and continue...
Humans are a part of Nature...
And I think I might be re-learning...
How to host humans...
And to allow them to hosts me...

Deep breath...
That is all for now...

~*~*~
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March 7, 2022

I'm never ready....

Prompt: I'm never ready...or whatever bubbles up
~*~

I received my routine cervical spine injections last Tuesday, March 1st.
It was around my 48th round, maybe 50th, maybe 47th.
I started receiving them in December 2013 or January 2014.
Nine pokes in a circular pattern at the top of spine. 
I've received 37ish lumbar epidurals since December 2013. 
I get the epidurals approximately every 12 weeks.
The cervical trigger points used to be every 6 weeks.
At some point I was able to reduce them from every 6 to every 12 weeks rotating with my lumbar epidural.

Wednesday, the day after my cervical trigger points, I lie on our king size bed and later in the recliner...
Feeling the weirdness in my body as the pharmaceutical agent engages my nerve roots and their peripheral receivers around my body...
Especially in my legs and arms...
My body exhausted, feeling like it has been beat up for weeks on end...

I say to my self, I feel like a fucking rag doll. I'm so tired of it all.

Like other times, I  begin to cry, partly from sheer exhaustion...
An exhaustion one feels after an intense battle and can finally let down...
As I wait for the relief, hoping it comes...
Surely it will come, won't it?

"Let down."
In the past, that's how I've described these sensations...
The let-down reflex of the breast when a lactating woman hears her infant cry and her body "lets down" to allow her life-giving milk to flow from where it is stored in her mammary glands...
The "let-down" releases the full-breast feeling...
I know this feeling because I breastfed my own children...
One for 2-1/2 years and the other for 2 years...

But the let-down I feel after my injections isn't in my breasts...
It's in all my limbs...

Wednesday I cried, depressed.

What can I do to help my self?
I don't want to call Hubby.
I could call Abby, but she is dealing with so much right now.
I'll call Daughter.

Daughter never tries to fix me, never. 
Or even tries to cheer me up.
And that can be most helpful.

After our phone chat I'm able to pull my self up from the recliner...
I talk my self through stripping the bed and redressing it...
Washing linens and towels, drying them, folding them and putting them away...
All major tasks for me...

And I succeed.
I begin to feel my body reach beyond the ragdoll stage. 

By Friday, March 4th, I'd lost over three pounds
By today. Monday, March 7th, I'd lost almost six pounds.
Most all of that from de-inflammation.

I know the inflammation will come again...
And we, my body and I, will do it all over...
Again...


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Beyond my grasp...

Prompt: Beyond my grasp...or whatever bubbles up
~*~

5:30 PM, 3/07/22

I don't feel like writing. I'm tired. 
Maybe I should just skip the writing workshop tonight. 
I have written in my journal this week.
Journaling writ. 
But I don't feel like looking through my journal for anything to share. 

Maybe I should skip the workshop tonight. 

Carol, you don't have to write anything grand or profound or even understandable. 
You can just let thoughts spill.

I walk downstairs and make my supper, which is actually heating it up.
Frozen vegetarian, mini-spring rolls. 
I heat 6 of them for one minute in the microwave. 
I turn them over and add fresh organic spinach and heat another minute.
I pull them out and chop 1/2-avocado over them.
I cut each roll in half and add a wee bit of sauce.

"Eat real food. Not too much. Mainly vegetables."
This is almost real food, if not for the microwave. 

I carry my plate onto the screened-in back porch and sit down. 
The sky is gray and cloudy.
A light rain is falling.
Temperature is around 70, unseasonably warm. 
Wind is blowing at 12 to 15 miles per hour.
Wind chimes play their tunes.

I look at the dead flies I have caught in my homemade fly trap.
A tall thick drinking glass in which I've poured about one inch of apple cider vinegar, a touch of honey, and a few drops of dish soap. 
Plastic wrap, held on by a rubber band, covers the top of the glass.
In the plastic wrap I made four holes, large enough for the flies to enter, attracted by the vinegar and honey, and unable to exit because of soapy wings. 
I apologized to the flies. 
It feels kind of cruel to trap and kill them this way. 
I had tried to get them out of the porch other ways, but without success. 
I justified the trap telling myself when I made it, "Well, at least they might enjoy the honey and vinegar during their last moments." 
I've caught 4 flies in the last few days.
Some live ones are still buzzing around on the porch. 
This is the first year we've ever had a fly issue. 
Though it's not really an issue.
And I don't want it to become one.  

I sit with my spring rolls, slowly and mindfully eating. 
I close my eyes.
I take in the wind through my body.

The wind feeds the fires, the fires that are such a permanent landscape of my inner life. 
The multiple fires that burn upon the laurel leaves that float upon the pond of grief.
The eternal flame that burns atop my grief vessel. 
The grief vessel is a vase of ceramic or maybe ceramic-and-precious metal mix.
It can be whatever I want, morphing if I so desire.
Designs are carved in the vase so I can see inside where clay balls of different sizes and colors rest.
The vessel sits in front of what I call my Sol Disc which pulsates like the sun. 
Sol Disc is located in my solar plexus area. 

Other campfires burn upon the hill.
Many campfires attended by different parts of me that have come out of hiding since June.
These parts of me are stick people.
They are abundant.
Back in June they were crammed in a dark tunnel.
Now the tunnel is gone.
They used the rocks of the tunnel to build campfire areas, where they work to aid my inner life.

The tunnel had led to an underground oasis which opened up farther up the hill to another world where I can shape shift. 
Even though the tunnel is gone, I can still visit the oasis and ride my unicorn until I shift into a crow and then become an eagle. 
Waters from the oasis flow like a small river underground down and inside the right side of my torso and meet up below my belly with the pond of grief. 
These sacred, life-giving waters feed the pond of grief.

Again, I notice the wind in my physical life.
I watch the tall pines sway in the back woods. 
And I thank them, these pines and other trees.
They have been a great comfort and inspiration through the years of living with widespread nerve damage. 
They still comfort and inspire me. 
Swaying, strong, surviving the elements.
And still producing an abundance of seeds.
New life. 
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