Tag Archives: RDP

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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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Mortal

I am feeling mortal.

I am in my post-pneumonia phase where people say, “Well, you LOOK great.” This is round four, so it’s not a surprise. It just took two years this time, instead of two months. In 2003 it took two months.

There are various things feeding in to this. A friend my age has had a stroke. “NO!” I think, “TOO YOUNG!” The death of the actor from friends bothers me mostly because he’s nearly a decade younger. Drugs and alcohol shorten the lifespan by quite a bit. A study checking for five things: inactivity, drugs, tobacco, alcohol and very heavy weight showed that the people with all five tended to die 20 years sooner than the people with none. That study was at least a decade ago if not two. So cross off about 4 years for any of those, sigh. A cardiologist recently said tobacco is worse than alcohol and now I am wondering how much worse? And how do they measure that? Tobacco kills more but serious alcohol use is a lot faster at killing people. Both of them affect all body systems: GI, heart, lungs, brain, bone marrow, liver, kidneys, and so forth. Even skin.

Also, the last lung test was still abnormal even though I am off oxygen and feeling mostly good. I am having muscle trouble though. Every morning I wake with really bad pain in both thighs and whatever muscles I’ve been trying to build. This has been going on since at least August. Since I think that this is an antibody disorder, it implies that the antibody baseline has risen to the point where my muscles are grumpy and hurt. Alternatively it could be a Long Covid issue: microclots could be clogging the capillaries in the muscles when I exercise and causing hypoxia in muscles, which means they can’t build. Muscle cells are fascinating. When you exercise the cells need more food and build new insulin receptors in the cell wall. So exercise changes the individual muscle cells! How very amazing. My muscles are resisting the build and it is very annoying. There is research going on re the microclots, but there is bleeding risk from the anticoagulants including strokes. So, um, well, I seem to be stuck. It is not stopping me from hiking and dancing and being active but boy does it hurt in the mornings.

This is not very bucolic, is it? I am still attending the Long Covid talks and it is really fascinating and quite scary. It’s just a very very nasty virus. I wish it would calm down. The 1918-1921 influenza really calmed down after three years, but there are no guarantees. Anyhow, at least I can dance!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: bucolic.

The photograph is taken in Michigan in 2014.

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Messy

Everyone I get to know and really become friends with, has a messy life with difficulties. I think we are terribly afraid to admit it, with the curated lives on the place that is not a book but has lots of Faces. I write that all of my patients are smart and they are. I had my own rural family practice for eleven years. My goals were more time with patients and to do good medicine. I succeeded at both. With more time, I could learn a little more about my peoples’ lives. People that I would never suspect of having very messy lives still have them. Does everyone in our culture have estrangements, family that they don’t talk to, parents that they find difficult, friends that they have gotten upset at and abandoned?

In high school my daughter says, “Most of the fights are stupid. Usually someone says something without thinking, even in passing. Person B takes it personally, gets upset, talks about it to others and then person C or D says something back to person A or shuns them. Person A has no idea what is going on and is hurt and upset. It is stupid.”

Adults do this too. I had a friend where I would think about something for a week and then go back to him. “You said this. What did you mean?” Usually he didn’t mean anything or meant something very far from what I was thinking. At least I went to him and did not add person C or D or E to the mix. He said, “You think about it for a WEEK.” Well, that was his own fault, actually, because he can’t tolerate anger. Even if I was upset or hurt, it was still interpreted as anger. Raised in an alcohol household and trained by medicine, I can hide feelings. After a while he could tell when I was chewing on something.

We grow up physically by our mid twenties, but often we don’t grow up emotionally. Especially if relationships are interrupted and colored by drugs and/or alcohol. People miss developmental stages. Everyone is trying to cope as best they can, but I do wish our culture celebrated mature calmness and quiet adulthood, rather than just the wild youth. Wouldn’t that be a change?

If you were to curate your life for something like the site that is not a book and has Faces, what would your ideal be? What do you aspire to? Kindness? Emotional maturity? Peace? My feed has friends, insects, birds, rocks, fossils, funny animal videos and music. I get almost no politics in it. I have not blocked anyone or anything. I try not to friend people I do not know. It is peaceful and a celebration of nature and yes, that is what I would like to curate.

Blessings.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: curate.

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Wild light

Christmas 2018, my son, daughter-in-law, daughter and I drove to Roanoke, Virginia to see my two aunts and one uncle. We went to the science museum. Among other things, there were mushrooms that light up under black light.

I am not sure any of these are neon lighting. But they are wild light!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: neon.

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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.