Tag Archives: Beloved

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Freeze and melt

Last winter, I walked Rock Creek Park with my son, daughter-in-law and daughter. There was a quite beautiful stream with wonderful ice patterns. We lost a button and then found it the next day, caught on the ice.

The ice formed beautiful patterns on the creek with the cycle of freezing and melting and air caught under the ice.

And the birds were out.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: melting.

The button story is here: https://drkottaway.com/2022/12/30/small-miracle-2/

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We make up all the words

My daughter says, “We make up all the words.” Authentic is the word of the year, but what does it mean to you and what does it mean to me? I am reading a book about the brain, The Neuroscience of You, by Chantel Prat PhD, brand new last year and from the library. She talks about nemotodes. A certain species has 302 neurons in the brain. Humans have 86 billion neurons in each brain. The nemotodes have been studied so that each neuron is mapped, but we still cannot predict exactly what an individual nemotode will do when presented with a new situation. Humans, obviously, are worse. She is writing about the wiring we are born with and then how experiences shape and change the wiring. I am very much enjoying this book. I am a science nerd and love fiction and poetry as well. Word nerd. When my daughter and I disagree about what something means, or what words mean, she reminds me: “We make up all the words.” Many diagnoses in medicine are really lists of symptoms and the more things on the list, the more likely it is that diagnosis. However, there is still a “number needed to treat” which tells me how many people have to be on a medicine to help one. That number always makes me a bit gloomy because I don’t think it is ever one. Some illness are pretty clear: a broken bone, a sick appendix. Others are mysterious, we don’t know what causes them and they can take years to diagnose, like multiple sclerosis. And then the behavioral lists, the latest version being the DSM-V. The diagnoses of behavioral health illnesses CHANGED. Well, some did, some didn’t. Words change their meanings, AI listens in, my phone wants me to tell everyone I am at a restaurant (why would you care?) and we pay lip service to authenticity, people being themselves, except then sometimes, no, we don’t like it after all.

And that is my authentic feeling as much as I can put it in to words this minute.

I like this photograph. What will the photographer do? Go out? Jump in? Fall in? Go home for tea? I can be most authentic out in nature when I often am not thinking in words so much as sensory impressions. Wind, cold, water sounds, light, the sunrise, clouds, birds, deer, and what do I see in the water?

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: authentic.

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Cauldron

2 Ways to Manage the Emotional Cauldron of Anger
Freud’s Theory of the Unconscious Mind

So, the iceberg graphic is wrong, wrong, wrong. Am I right? Icebergs are about 90% below the surface, which is NOT what the picture shows. Regarding the first article, preset timeouts? I think when two people are losing it, that may go by the wayside. My strategy is, “I have to use the bathroom.” It might take a while if I am really upset and want to rip the sink off the wall. But, it lets me cool down, cool off and not say terrible things. Let them stay inside my head until I am calmer and realize how stupid and nasty I wanted to be.

But let’s think about cauldrons, yes? A stew of emotions? Our culture still has little respect for emotions. Just think if we were all nice on the surface all the time and never showed any other emotion. Bunch of AI robots, I think.

Cauldron

It’s not so surprising to look up the emotional cauldron
and have it be about anger. Anger in couples, but the cauldron itself
brings up witches and therefore women. Women in black
women with cauldrons, women boiling angry.

I vacillate between thinking that black men are treated the worst and then, no,
women are treated the worst. Assumptions, useless, toys, pretty, be nice,
true that women don’t get shot as much, but our country found a black man acceptable
in the white house, but not a woman, black or white.

Anger is not nice, I am told. But anger is appropriate at injustice, when people
are discriminated against, treated badly, pushed from homes, jailed, hung and shot.
Much of our country reveres guns to protect homes, a man’s home is his castle,
and what is left for women? Not the workplace, the public, the home.

How dare they take the cauldron as a symbol of anger stewing?
The truth is that men fear women’s anger and rightly. They fear the people
who are enslaved, discriminated against, shot and dismissed, rising up.
Rising angry, anger not in a cauldron, but hot as lava and righteous.

A sermon about fear and abuse and the minister says, this is where anger can be understood
and is right. Anger at the abuse and at the fear, letting people break free.
Energizing a person to leave abuse, to leave an intolerable situation
and no reconciliation without the abuser taking responsibility.

What the cauldron really holds is greed, the people who think they deserve
more than others, more money, more women, more adulation, more more more.
Greed, gossip, lust, and all the other sins. Anger at mistreatment is not wrong
though it may not be safe to show it. Let it be conscious even if not expressed

and fight on.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: emotional cauldron.

The photograph is my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway, in 1945. She was seven. I have photographs of my daughter and me with the same expression. Not anger, thought. I cannot credit the photograph because I don’t know who took it.

And to lighten the mood, both sexes are profiled.

Not all anger is right, though, and it’s often because of different interpretations, different frames of reference or misunderstanding.

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Wild

Mount Baker, seen from Marrowstone Island this week.

The tide was not out very far and was coming in, but an agate showed up anyhow.

A closer look.

Conferences in the wild.

Sections of cliff melting into the beach stones.

Gifts from the sea.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: wilderness.

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Side by side

I went downtown yesterday morning to pay a bill and a ship was coming right in on its way to Indian Island. It felt like it was right there, by the crane, which was already working. I grabbed my camera and hurried out.

A second side by side, the boats accompanying it.

And lastly two grebes, side by side in a mass float. They look pretty unconcerned about people and ships.

May we peace each other today and every day.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: side by side.

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Birth

I am born today anew. Why does birth feel like a rejection, like a spitting out from the shelter of a womb, a body, a mother, a community, a job? I gasp in the new unfamiliar air, unsure how to use my lungs in this place. This labor was not terrible, not as hard as ones in the past. The air and light are shocking, I open my eyes, what is this place? Too bright, I close them. Hands have me and then I am back with my mother. Not inside but against her skin. The lights are down and I open my eyes. It was dark, dark, dark in that womb, so I open my eyes wide, to take in all the new information. I am shocked and afraid, but my mother’s heartbeat reassures me. I hope I won’t be eaten. What is this place? And now I am hungry and I start to search, not sure how to do it, search for food.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: birthday.