I took this photograph with my phone yesterday before I heard the news.
The ambulance has been out for a week or so, along with the doll tent. Two doll babies, the doll doctor, various pieces of equipment. I took the photograph because the cats keep “helping” and it keeps looking a bit like a disaster. Sigh. I wish they were just doll disasters with giant cats wandering through, not real earthquakes.
I wrote Flooded after the tsunami in Japan, about PTSD and about feeling helpless watching. I think we all have a little post-Pandemic PTSD and are more hair trigger and more ready for fight or flight.
Send prayers and money and huge blessings on on the first responders that are heading there or are already there.
Oooo, I put orientation up as the Ragtag Daily Prompt today. Then I wondered if disorientation is a word and it is! A mouthful!
This is a series of poems or meditations or arguments I had with myself last week. I was thinking about love and how to handle people that I love that have stopped behaving in a loving way or have actually been cruel or cut me off. Do I stop loving them and hate them? Do I love them anyhow? What would that love open me to? Abuse? It is disorienting to think about. Here is the series.
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The Fall
I am small. The adults love me and give me away. I grieve each time. It doesn’t matter if I behave well or not: they leave me. I decide that the adults are confused. They do not know how to love. Why don’t they know? I want to understand! Babies should be loved! We are innocent!
All babies should be loved and protected. I do, with my sister. The adults continue their mysterious crazy doings. I recognize that alcohol does not help, nor other choices.
All babies should be loved and protected. All adults were babies once. Sometimes they were not loved and protected and they are damaged. I train and then I doctor them. Healing is slow.
All babies should be loved and protected. All adults were babies once. All adults hold a baby that should be loved and protected: themselves. I try for a long time.
All babies should be loved and protected. All adults were babies once. Each adult makes their own choices, to heal or not. To grow or not. To love themselves and the Beloved or not.
All babies should be loved and protected. All adults make choices. The Beloved loves them all.
I am not the Beloved. Nor an angel. I dream of falling.
I am not the Beloved. I let go. I fall.
I do not love them all.
Rise
Yesterday I fell. I let myself dislike four people that I loved.
But no, I choose not. Angels fall and rise again. I choose love. If that means distance, then I choose distance. For now I will love the cruel ones from a distance. No contact.
The Buddhas laugh at the needy ones, the angry ones, the ones who press. Some will be enlightened, some wait for the next life. The Buddhas laugh because they do not control it. It may be the quiet one who says nothing who rises, while one who wants and wants and wants may have to want for longer. Why, Beloved? Isn’t wanting you enough? Isn’t longing enough? How much must one want? How deeply must one long?
I choose love.
Prayer to Kwan Yin
Kwan Yin, I am sorry. I cannot be a Bodhisattva. I am tired. I grieve. I want to love everyone. They hate it. If I love the small child within they are reminded of the hidden hurts and they lash out. I am tired. I don’t want to be the target of that. Kwan Yin, how to do you return and return again, loving these? I am not strong enough. I give up. I throw myself on your mercy, I bow to your infinite love and strength, I abase myself. Forgive me, I am not strong enough. I give up. I do not have enough love in my heart and I am so tired.
Beloved, I am sorry. I tried.
Every Being (Sonnet 9)
Keep the cruel ones at a distance far. Hold your enemies close in love’s embrace. None to hate, yet cruelty glints like stars. I hide quiet with cats in this home space. My heart opens like the universe. Projections batter me from head to toe. Why tear at me with their deep hurts? They project their pain: inside they know. They know, don’t know, choose not to learn. Dark rooms and texts and staring at the screen. My skin scalded, heart black with new burns. I think they’d like me too to turn out mean. I will hide here with Beloved’s dove. Each tear I cry sends every being love.
In spite of want
Sol set in my heart and rises again. I can love whoever I want. There are no boundaries to love. But I will not be abused or used, I will love quietly and silently and without letting my love know. And I will love who I want. No, I will love in spite of want, though I do not want to, though it is not deserved. But I honor my stubborn heart that does not let go of love.
I think of you as dead. Love is not dead, not mine for you. This is not respectful to those truly dead. Yet you are dead to me in that you lie and say forever. Torched and ashes, now it’s never and the real you is dead to me. I love the you that made a different choice, that loved me back. He holds my hand and walks with me and laughs with me daily. And there is nothing you can do to stop him and me. If anyone asks, you are dead to me, dead forever, and I will love whoever my heart chooses, for all time.
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I found the chalcedony nodule on Indian Island yesterday.
Thoughts coalesce, precipitate wet earth soaks rain and turn to mud snow melts and soaks the bosom of the earth sun warms, worms break down tattered leaves what stirs beneath wet brown muddy ground we listen for spring’s soft slow moving sound
I spend a long day wrestling with love arguing with myself back and forth I am no angel descended from above Those undeserving of my love make me wroth yet my core argues that it still loves them and agrees their cruelty’s beyond the pale I snarl and cough and choke on bitter phlegm Defend my self staying far away and hale My core agrees I shall not tolerate abuse Forgive yet we despair we’ll ever reconcile They show no guilt nor shame for their misuse My core says let them be: she is so mild Negotiation done: Agreed. I may love those who I love But I leave contact with them to the angels and Beloved.
Day three of offerings. My Mother did not even take a picture of day two. I do not understand why she scorns my offerings. This is a precious mouse that I extracted from the Tower.
This was a difficult operation. I stood on the sheep that warms and carefully tried to remove the tangled mouse. Mother interfered a little, but at last I could jump down with it. And I have offered it in exchange for more food! This precious toy!
Many thanks to all who made suggestions the other day. I still do not understand how a sub would help, but I will watch for one. Perhaps if I continue to make offerings and observe, I will be able to communicate with Mother. She seems loving, even though she is also obtuse. I am still hungry and lose weight. I fear starvation. My sister laughs when I approach her, but she is smaller and does not have the same needs. Mother feeds us in separate rooms. It is frustrating.
I am in a bus. The driver is a man and quiet. It is night and I can’t see much besides road. I am standing by him.
“You have strong emotions.” he says.
“I am so glad that I can be myself with you and not hide them.” I lean my cheek against the back of his right shoulder. He doesn’t answer but what I feel is acceptance.
I wake up. It was a bus but I don’t know what or who else was on it. I don’t know where it is going. I am worried that I did not have a seatbelt on and I am just standing in the front of the bus. Unrestrained. Unrestrained emotion?
Once a woman says to me, “Your emotions are too strong.”
I think, “My emotions are too strong for YOU. They are normal for ME.” I avoided any discussion of emotion with that person for two years.
The people in dreams are aspects of ourselves. The quiet man is an aspect of myself and he is driving the bus. Emotion riots around but is not driving. Life is rather like that bus. We don’t always know where we are going or what is next.
I have had a very medical January, working to help three other people. I talk to another friend yesterday. She says, “You are being called back to medicine.”
I frown at the ceiling since I am on the cell phone. “I guess so. I am thinking about how I want to do it. I don’t know yet.”
She is off on a trip for three weeks. “You’ll figure it out.”
And where will the bus take me next?
I wish I had an ambulance that unfolds into a clinic.
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I had rather a grand time pulling out action figures and dolls from the basement to set up scenarios with the Barbie Ambulance. Here the baby has a facial rash. Probably 5th disease, parvovirus. This baby’s rash resolves when you wash her face with cold water. I am pleased that Barbie Doctor has a mask.
I have a friend with Long Covid. Eight months now.
My friend describes blood sugar crashes. She does not have diabetes and was tested before Covid. She has not been tested again.
“Sometimes I eat dinner, feel better, and then an hour later I feel terrible again. I have to eat again. And I ate extra in November and all that happened is I gained ten pounds. So eating extra doesn’t work.”
I suspect that as the clue: the feeling terrible an hour after she eats.
I call her the next day: “Spread the carbohydrates out. It could be that your body is producing too much insulin, storing the glucose and carbohydrates, and then your blood sugar gets too low. That can happen early in type 2 diabetes, but this could also be a healing mode.”
I write about carbohydrates to her. Anything that is not a fat or a protein is a carbohydrate. So all the grains and all the vegetables and fruits have carbohydrates, sugars. Glucose, fructose, maltose, lactose. Milk products contain lactose, but also fat and protein. Avocados are weird fruit and mostly fat. Sugar beets and peas are high sugar vegetables. A small apple is 15 grams of carbohydrate and a large one is 30. A tablespoon of sugar is also 15 grams of carbohydrate. A coke had 32 grams and a Starbuck’s mocha has over 60 grams. I quit drinking them when I looked that up. Empty calories.
A cup of kale has only 7 grams of carbohydrate for our bodies. The rest is fiber that we can’t break down into sugars. Fiber doesn’t raise our blood sugar. I wonder about cows with their four stomachs: they can break grass down into food and we can’t.
At any rate, my friend is going to try 3-4 meals a day with only 30-45 grams of carbohydrate and three snacks, at 15-30. This is an athlete and young. Most of my patients were closer to 70, so would need to do the lower end of those numbers.
I had crashes after my second and third pneumonias in 2012 and 2014. Strep A pneumonia and strep throat of the muscles. It hurt, like all over Strep A. After the 2014 one, it was six months before I could go back to work. When I did, it was exhausting. I was only seeing 3-5 patients a day at first and could barely do that. I ate one meal a day because food crashed me. As soon as I ate I went to sleep. My MD did not believe me. I saw a naturopath too. She claimed it was a food allergy and I said, “I don’t think so. I think it is a healing crash. I think my body is doing a ton of repair work and wants me asleep and not moving much.” Over the next six months it slowly improved. I went to 2 meals a day. Since then I really do not eat until I have been up for 4-6 hours. Expect tea with milk. And yes, I am getting a little nutrition through the milk, fat and protein and lactose.
I had one patient who said eating made her faint. I didn’t know what to do, but she was in the ICU, ate lunch and then fainted into her tray. The nurse was standing right there and immediately did a blood sugar and called me. Her blood sugar was in the low normal range. We transferred her to Virginia Mason in Seattle. She came back with a diagnosis that seemed pretty much like hand waving. Idiopathic (meaning the doctors dunno why) central (ok, brain) something syndrome, which meant yeah, she faints after she eats and doesn’t have diabetes and that is weird.
I am reading about similar neurological symptoms with Long Covid and also POTS: postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. This translates to heart rate goes faster than it should when the person stands up. Again, the cause is not clear and it’s not clear how to fix it.
Once an older patient went to the neurologist to discuss getting dizzy when she stood up. She returned grumpy. “He said that I just have to stand up slowly because I am 80. I don’t feel like I’m 80. I want to hop out of bed like I always have. But if I do, I nearly faint.” Her body was taking longer to equilibrate blood pressure after she stood up. The neurologist said no medicine: stand up slower. She grumpily complied.
I told my friend that maybe the pancrease is stressed and producing too much insulin. To store food. But another possibility is that her body wants her to lie down and rest so that it can do healing work after eating. This would make any young person impatient, but sometimes we have to listen to our bodies. I have learned THAT the hard way.
Blessings.
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The photograph is of a Barbie ambulance/clinic. It does have a gurney, but the back opens up to be a fairly well appointed clinic, with lots of details, including a television in the waiting room. Today the doctor has wings. Fairy? Angel? We are not really sure.
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - Flüchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflüchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
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