Category Archives: agate

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small child

You work at healing
For years

You dive in the swamp
Of your psyche
Turn over the mud
Tunnel through it
Breath it
See lilies arise
From the muck

The Beloved is a deer
Dainty hooves
In the swamp

At last you come
To bedrock

So you rest
Bedrock
You think

Until you notice
A chink in the rock
You look away
You avoid it

At last you look
It isn’t going away

The Beloved is a bittern
In the reeds

Fluid leaks
From the chink

Foul black bilious
Acidic
Burning holes in the slanted rock
Again you look away
But not for long

You step forward
Touch the rock

I am present you say
Who is there?

The stream of foul black
Increases
Pours from a widening crack

Beloved is a tiger
Paw against the rock

You see the acid burning
Her paw
But she does not run
She stands guard

Who are you?
You whisper

The rock crumbles

There is a child

“Go away” says the child
Ancient

No you say
Beloved and I
Stay present

The black is swirling around you
It’s hard to keep your footing
Beloved, an orca
Steadies you, swimming

No one stays says the child

We stay present you say

I was born I loved I was abandoned When I was afraid

We are present now you say
Swimming by the Beloved
Hand on black fin

I was abandoned When I grieved

We are here now you say

I was abandoned In my despair

We are here you say

You say
You fought
Out of love
You argued
Out of love
You gave
Out of love
Please child
Let us cradle you

The child is silent

The tide is slowing
The rock has crumbled away
A trickle of clear water bubbles

You will stay? says the child

We stay you say

Beloved is a whale
Singing in space
Singing to the stars

Am I lovable? says the child

You and Beloved
Earth and sky
Wind and trees
Moon and stars
Answer yes

Am I loved?

Yes
Yes

8/27/2007

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Ode to defiance

Is oppositional defiance running YOUR life?

I am oppositional defiant. I have been for as long as I can remember. I ALWAYS want to argue when someone tells me to do something or gives me advice. BUT, I have learned to work with it.

I work with it by arguing with myself.

Give me a topic. Or advice. I will promptly argue the opposite, internally or externally. Then I will argue the original side. Then my demon fights my angel until they are both tired and decide to go have a beer. Somewhere along the way I will make a decision and also I will laugh, because it’s funny.

B has figured this out. “You argue with EVERYTHING.” he says.

“Yes, and if there is no one around, I argue with myself. All the time.”

However, he is also oppositional defiant. He is smart too, and doing some self examination.

“I am thinking about my life. I think ALL of my important decisions were oppositional defiant ones.”

“Someone told you you couldn’t do that?

“Yes.”

He’s chewing on that. Heh. He accuses ME of overthinking. I replied that I am making up for his underthinking, heh. He suggests that I STOP overthinking and I say, “You want to DESTROY the SOURCE of my poetry?” Double heh.

The point is, some of us are oppositional defiant, but really, we don’t want that to run our lives EITHER. We don’t want ANYTHING or ANYONE to tell us what to do.

B says, “I think that everyone refusing the vaccine is oppositional defiant.” He has a lot of friends, both liberal and conservative.

“That is interesting.” I say. And I wonder if it is worth dying for, to be oppositional defiant. Not if it’s running your life, right? I don’t want ANYTHING to run my life except ME.

So then I spend a bunch of time arguing with myself about the causes of refusing the vaccine. And I have not reached a conclusion. Yet.

I took the photograph at the Bellevue Mall on Monday. A three story waterfall. Really? Isn’t there enough rain in Seattle? We should have a three story sun instead.

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After the rains

This is East Beach on Marrowstone Island. After the rains, sections of the sand cliff have come down, with trees in the process of dying and the grass still intact in some piles. There are some seriously large chunks of clay that you would not like to be under when it came down.

New section of fallen cliff

We can see where the tide is starting to break the pieces of clay up and wash out the rocks.

Rocks embedded in fallen section.

So is the land encroaching on the sea or the sea encroaching on the land?

For today’s Ragtag Daily Prompt.

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mask up

Care for your family and friends and community. Mask up and do the best you can not to get nor give Covid-19 this season. The winter is dark but the sun will start returning to us soon. Like the seeds in the ground and the trees with no leaves, we can get through this dark season caring for each other.

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Antibodies to tubulin

All right.

I am thinking about tubulin blocker antibodies. How would they work?

About 2 weeks ago, I had trouble walking down the stairs because my quadriceps just did not want to bend. In fact, all of my muscles felt awake and grumpy. As if I were Sleeping Beauty, now awake. Of course, if I was Sleeping Beauty and some jerk kissed me awake, I’d punch his lights out. Hands off!

Anyhow, I concluded that my tubulin antibodies had released. Was I better?

Well, no. It’s been weird. In me it’s the voluntary fast twitch muscles that don’t work when I have a PANS/PANDAS reaction, so they are back on line. The grumpy muscles are the slow twitch ones who essentially are screaming “WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN, I’VE BEEN DOING ALL YOUR WORK SINCE MARCH!” Nine months. The fast twitch muscles are weak, the slow twitch muscles don’t trust them and I am having trouble getting it all to work together.

My balance is fine. It just all hurts and is a bit unreliable.

I was in Michigan for Thanksgiving, staying with old friends. My oldest friend there is 80 and does not have wi-fi or any internet. That made doing any blogging quite a challenge and many thanks to everyone who pointed creative spelling. I would go to her son’s house daily and try to put up the work I’d done at her house. Not the way I usually do it and three kids distracting me, which I enjoyed.

It is bowling that makes me realize how weird my muscles are right now. I went bowling with the middle (15) and younger (11) child. Mom watching all of us. My role is Weird Aunt, more or less. I have bowled maybe 12 times in my life. I guttered the first three balls, a 9 pound orange beauty. My muscles all started screaming at me at once in my upper and middle back. Oh, I thought. So I slowed way down and tried to slow bowl. Next was a strike. I ended up bowling 100, which I guess is not so bad for someone who really has no idea what they are doing. My muscles were grumpy but slow was ok and I didn’t pull anything badly. Next morning I am quite stiff.

I am trying to figure out how to rehabilitate the muscles. Do I exercise? Slowly? It’s as if half a team has been missing for 9 months and is now back. The remaining team members are tired, pissed off, and have figured out how to work without them. They aren’t very pleased about relinquishing control and they don’t trust the part of the team that’s been missing. I would go to my doctor and ask to see a neurologist or ask for physical therapy, except that since PANS/PANDAS is barely believed in in children, there are only a few doctors that work with adults and other doctors seem to think they are quacks. One writes articles for Psychology Today. I’ve thought about contacting him, but he’s a psychiatrist. How much do psychiatrists know about muscles?

Let’s extrapolate this too, to the people with really bad chronic fatigue. Presumably they have antibodies to tubulin that affects more muscles, fast and slow twitch. No wonder they lie in bed. I would presume that they are hypoxic too, if they could walk, but they barely can. The Functional Medicine doctors are treating folks with hyperbaric oxygen and I think it might help with these muscles that don’t work and can’t move. It is sneaky. It’s not that the muscle can’t move at all, it isn’t paralyzed, it’s just that the exhaustion and fatigue that comes after moving it is terrible. The body says very very clearly : “DON’T DO THAT.” And we are still in the infancy of looking at antibodies, so we aren’t measuring them. I was going to say we can’t type them, but that’s not true. We are using monoclonal antibodies to treat cancer, so there are ways to isolate and type them. Medical science may explode with this and can’t you see the potential for misuse? Imagine an army affected by a tubulin blocker antibody, against an army with a tubulin augmenting antibody. Holy moly. It has the potential to be really really horrific, which is why I am putting all this up on everything2. Keep it in mind, ok? Nothing like making information public to prevent secrets from screwing us over.

And that’s the news from me. “Har det godt!” which is Danish for “Have it good!” or have a really good day.