her able hands

Gosh, it’s gotten so green. This sudden burst of energy on the planet gives me a sense of awakening, but also of nostalgia that makes me feel inward and pensive. I don’t know why, but at this time of year I want to escape to a small, enclosed garden by myself with a notebook and pen, a few good books and the knowledge that I won’t be interrupted. Mama needs a vacation.

Chris’ dad had a stroke yesterday, was in a coma at home for half of the day, but came out of it when the EMTs tried to transfer him to a board to get him downstairs to the ambulance. He’s in the hospice ward at city hospital now, paralyzed on the left side. It’s so strange to be thinking of death standing by while the whole world around me is bursting with new life.

I’m making the effort to stay present to what’s in front of me. To face it openly, instead of checking out the back door into my imagination like I want to. It’s going to get bumpy here, and I hope I can rise to the occasion and be of help. The situation with my father in-law is not good. He’s absolutely in the end stages of cirrhosis (genetic, his mother died of the same disease), and I hope for my mother in-law’s sake that this is it, that he won’t be coming home again. She’s struggling and it’s been a huge challenge to be there to help her out because he is so difficult to be around. I’m skating around it all because it feels so dangerous to badmouth the nearly dead. But I can only say what I know, which is that he’s one of angriest people I’ve ever known, and witnessing his behavior over the years, I’m frankly, all out of sympathy.

At the same time I try to remember that some light lives within him, too. That he did the best he could, and all of that, whether I think it was good enough or not.

But the big wheel keeps on turning, right?

I thought this Tansy might not make it, but look at the green fronds waving beneath the skeletal remains of last year’s plant.

The earth beckons endlessly.

Technorati Tags: life and death, spring, garden, consciousness

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Too much thinking, though I believe I’m tracing patterns that all lead back to the source of my stress, which leads to the source of my discomfort. I think. I don’t know. Yet. Dear Cathy called on Sunday to see how I’m feeling, to remind me about the stress factor, to suggest a few things like acupuncture and lowering my expectations for myself.

See, I look at my last post and see this long list of things I accomplished, and rather than giving myself a high-five (which I really can’t do without knocking myself on my hind end) I immediately turn my attention to the long list of things that went undone. All things that should get done, have gone undone for too long. It seems I never stop giving myself some kind of grief about something I’m not doing (at all or well enough).

Would not working full-time really solve that particular problem? I think not. I think it’s a disease of the culture that has infected me, made me robotic in my response to—my slavery to—the ever-present, ever-growing To-Do list. The cultural code is bracketed with the tag {not good enough}. t’s an open tag. No {/notgoodenough} sitting at the end of a task to close it up neatly and leave me feeling satisfied.

Sure, working full-time adds to the stress in the sense that I have less free time to deal with that To-Do list. But if I had the free time, I’d squander it, just like I did when I stayed home. The tape ran an endless loop then, too, it’s just got a spotlight on it now because I have so little time for me and want to spread that time between so many things that need doing or that I want to do, making it impossible to finish any of it to my true satisfaction.

Add the intense stress at work itself and no wonder I’m in knots. Then, Lisa brought up an interesting point in her comment. When I had the root canal work done, I had to take massive antibiotics for close to a month. Right after that is when my digestion took a nose-dive. It had been building up to this for a lot longer, but at that point it developed a rhythm and that rhythm has stuck ever since. It’s possible that the bifidus/acidophilus cultures I took weren’t strong enough to fight the drugs. I can get something stronger and see if that helps along with my dietary changes.

But really, what I need to put at the top of my To-Do list (and to hell with everything else) is work on changing my conversation with myself to one of support and love and good enough. So I don’t pass it all on again.

Technorati Tags: consciousness, wellness, women, work, stress

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