Category Archives: photography

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Satirical

I am looking through photographs looking for a Satyr. Or Satyrs. I know that I have Fauns on a frieze in a very peculiar old repurposed Elks Club in Portland, but Fauns are not quite Satyrs. And satirical is from a different origin than Satyr.

Really, though, I am surprised that no one was dressed as a Satyr at the Great Port Townsend Kinetic Sculpture Race.

The costumes are always amazing.

Here is a sculpture with the rider. A Satyr or not?

This is the day before the race, with the parade and the brake test and the water test. The water is in the 40s or low 50s.

What do we call a female Satyr?

No, surely she is not one. Will the Judges permit Satyrs?

It does not appear that they will.

The cover picture is most satirical to me: the joyful silliness of the human powered race, on land, on sea and through mud, with a sailboat race in the background and Indian Island, with a crane and a military presence. Let’s have more more more joyful silliness.

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The Great Port Townsend Bay Kinetic Sculpture Race: https://www.ptkineticrace.org/

This is the 2018 Race.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: Satyr.

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Qia and the monsters

Qia is three. She is scared.

“Don’t be scared or go to your room.”

Qia wants help. She is scared of the monster, FEAR, the giant monster, but her father won’t listen. She sniffles and tries, but she can’t stop crying. She goes to her room, because her father has turned his back. Her mother is drawing. They are busy. They don’t like it when she is scared.

FEAR is enormous and pushes into the room with her. She cries harder in her room with the door closed. No one can hear her now except FEAR. FEAR is large and has horrible drippy teeth and too many arms and keeps swatting at her. Qia gives up and lets FEAR swat her. She sits on the bed with her knees up and puts her head on her arms.

FEAR rages around her room.

After a while Qia is tired of crying. She lifts her head off her arms.

FEAR is smaller. Still bigger than her father, bigger than her mother, but just standing and looking at her. FEAR looks tired too.

Qia pats the bed beside her. FEAR hesitates and looks scared. Qia waits. FEAR shuffles over and sits beside her on the bed.

The room is very quiet. Qia finds a scrap of tissue and blows her nose. She looks sideways at FEAR.

FEAR’s head is down and FEAR seems to be crying. Qia reaches out and takes FEAR’s paw. One of the paws. There are a lot.

FEAR holds her hand tightly and then leans against her. Qia wiggles over a bit more to give FEAR room. FEAR sighs and then snuggles down onto the bed, massive drippy toothy head in Qia’s lap.

Qia strokes FEAR’s fur. It is very soft and dark purple.

FEAR is the first monster that Qia makes friends with. There are many more.

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I was thinking about this story even before the Ragtag Daily Prompt: bugbear.

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Soup of tears

It’s time to write an ending to a story.
Let go of those calling me word twister.
The ending is dark, sad, devoid of glory.
The one who named me twister was my sister.
She has been dead a decade. I still miss her
except for the calls of money gone awry.
The cousins whitewash her and call me twister;
past time for me to gently say goodbye.
The small bird of hope has sung for ten long years.
She lives even on crumbs of cruel spite.
She sings in spite of no respite from tears.
Quietly in day or night, in dark or light.
The hope bird flutters: she’s waited years.
I release her now and I drink a soup of tears.

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Make space for the difficult feelings

I am watching a four part video from the UK about illness and trauma.

The first part is about how trauma memories are stored differently from regular memories. Regular memories are stored in files, like stories in a book or a library.

Trauma memories are stored in the amygdala and often are disjointed and broken up and have all of the sensory input from the worst parts, including the emotions.

The therapist is talking about healing: that our tendency is to turn away from the trauma, smooth it over and try to ignore it.

However, the amygdala will not allow this. It will keep bringing the trauma up. And that is actually its’ job, to try to warn and protect us from danger!

The therapist counsels finding a safe time and place and safe person (if you have one) and then making space for the trauma to come back up. One approach is to write out the story, going through that most traumatic part, but not stopping there. What happened next? Writing the story and then putting it aside. Writing it again the next day and doing this for four days. As the story is rewritten and has an ending, even if it is not a happy ending, the story is eventually moved from the amygdala to the regular files. People can and do heal. They may need a lot of time and help, but they can heal.

I am not saying that four days of writing stories is enough. That is one approach, but nothing works for everyone and people need different sorts of help. There are all sorts of paths to healing.

In my Family Practice clinic I would see people in distress. With some gentle prompting and offering space, they would tell me about trauma and things happening in their personal life or work life. Things that were feeling so overwhelming that they could not tell their families or friends and they just could not seem to process the feelings about it. I would keep asking what was happening and give them the space to tell the story. Many times when they reached the present they would stop. There would be a silence. Then I would say, “It seems perfectly reasonable that you feel terrible, frightened, horrified, grieved, whatever they were feeling, with that going on.” And there was often a moment where the person looked inwards, at the arc of the story, and they too felt that their feelings were reasonable.

I would offer a referral to a counselor. “Or you can come back. Do you want to come back and talk about it if you need to?”

Sometimes they would take the referral. Sometimes they would schedule to come back. But nearly half the time they would say, “Let me wait and see. I think I am ok. I will call if I need to. Let me see what happens.”

When a person goes through trauma, many people cut them off. They don’t want to hear about it. They say let it go. They may avoid you. You will find out who your true friends are, who can stand by you when you are suffering. I have trouble when someone tries to show up in my life and wants to just pretend that nothing happened. “Let’s just start from now and go forward.” A family member said that to me recently. Um, no. You do not get to pretend nothing happened or say, “I wanted to stay out of it.” and now show back up. No. No. You are not my friend and will not be. And I am completely unwilling to trade silence about my trauma for your false friendship.

Yet rather than anger, I feel grief and pity. Because this family member can’t process his own trauma and therefore can’t be present for mine. Stunted growth.

People can heal but they need help and they need to choose to do the work of healing.

The four videos are here: https://www.panspandasuk.org/trauma.

This song is a darkly funny illustration: she may be trying to process past trauma, but the narrator doesn’t want anything to do with it. And he may not have the capacity to handle it. He may have his own issues that he has not dealt with. And maybe they both need professionals.