I went to Portland to meet my daughter, when she was up visiting friends. I stayed with one friend for two nights and then picked up my daughter and took her to another friends’ house. They currently have an empty garage apartment.
My daughter was supposed to fly out Thursday, but the 10.8 inch snow dump happened on Wednesday night. My friends are on this road that is mostly gravel and steeper than it looks in this picture.
The tracks that you see are driveway. The line in the trees is the road.
My friend has a pickup and chains and left for work at 6:30. My daughter and I put my chains on my Scion, and tried the hill. We blew the left chain off twice and the right one was mostly off as well.
That was probably a good thing because her plane was cancelled and there were accidents all over town.
We spent 2 hours and 30 minutes on hold with the airline and got her rescheduled for Saturday at 11:30.
She left the next morning with my friend in his truck. He dropped her at the metro and she stayed with friends who live close to the airport and are on the metro line.
My friends and I tried my chains again on Saturday morning. B blew one chain off too and we figured that a link had to be locked in a certain way. He drove up the driveway and we followed in the truck. He drove along the road until we were down to where chains were not needed. I thanked them all and headed out. Down the road a little there were three more abandoned vehicles: a truck with chains on and two cars. There were still patches of ridged ice on the 405 bridge. It took from 10 am to 12:22 to get back to Washington State! So hooray for chains and friends!
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.
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.
This is the yellow flowering bush that I’ve put up the last twodays. It is blooming in Portland, Oregon. There are daffodils getting ready to bloom but most plants are not flowering yet.
On Sunday I was in Portland with a friend and went to a memorial at the Laurelthirst. It was for a musician named Turtle. Local musicians showed up like crazy. There were at least six very fine guitar players, three on stage at a time and sometimes more. They switched in and out and switched styles. It was a beautiful tribute.
My two favorites were “They threw me out of the band” and one that bemoaned everyone playing music and drinking and that he had to sing another song about another dead band member. Funny and sad.
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
My mother has changed. For the first year she fed us many times a day, but now she is nefarious. She left for three weeks and a man came in daily. He fed us but less generously. She now feeds us twice a day and less than in the past.
I make offering to the gods in hopes of more food, that the gods will influence my mother and turn her good again.
I place the mouse effigy in my bowl. A mouse would be delicious and if alive it would be delightful fun as well! We watch the birds out the windows and long to catch them.
There is no response from Mother or the gods.
I try again.
Another mouse, a symbol of technology, that sponge that she removes fur from furniture. Mother seems to love technology and will not let me lie on the warm keyboard. She lets me have this technological marvel. I have chewed it but it is not nutritious and gives me nothing. There are wires inside. It is fun for play but not edible.
I will wait and hope that the gods influence my mother and that more food is forthcoming.
What a fabulous line up of musicians! Ben Sollee makes joyous music with a cello, his voice and a drummer! They made more noise and more complex rhythms than many much bigger groups! I got one of his albums and three other fabulous groups!
This is lovely:
All things shall perish from under the sky, music alone shall live never to die.
I put out my recycling yesterday. All that paper that I fill paper bags with each month. Is paper disposable? It does come from trees.
Chainsaw and climbing gear. He doesn’t look like he’s that high up. But I am taking the picture from a rise, through a grove of smaller trees. Here is the tree that is coming down.
A storm had twisted the upper trunks until the lower trunk split vertically. Now it was dangerous and could fall on the house in another storm. And dangerous to take down because each of the four upper trunks had to be done separately.
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
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 - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete 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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