Archive for April 2013
Familiar Mystery
.
senseless
making no sense
unthinkable things
manifest
mangling order
illogical actions
forcing extraordinary reactions
pulling the rug
that was our foundation
of reality and reason
used to compare
with everything
sunshine warmth
breezy tree leaves
moonlight
stars
clouds
earth
waves
.
There are different ways to react to things that disturb a healthy normal. Sometimes all that is left is a new normal. Even when I don’t know how to react, my mind and body are reacting. I am tired, and I don’t want to expend the energy to effect any outcome. I ride the wave for a while.
The world is large, and the world is small. A breath is nothing, a breath is everything.
Being able to reconcile that, makes room for mystery. Hold mystery in the palm of your hands and find a way to accept it for what it is. Is it mysterious? Or, is it familiar?
Some days we are able to wake up and laugh at our burdens, the ones that we carry through our lives. Broken hearts will heal, if we let them. It isn’t always a function of doing something to bring about healing. It can simply be a matter of getting ourselves to allow the healing to happen.
We are all connected, to each other, and to everything, …our healing, and others who are not. There is always a constant force influencing the web of life, with pushes and pulls. So, the healing of one person has impact on all others, just as the wounding of one, pains us all.
I cannot make sense of the senseless. It is a mystery that is familiar to me. The wounds of the people of the world are the source of a pain that I feel. I will ride my wave, conscious to breathe, and allow space for healing to happen.
.
light
dances
on everything
subtle influence
of changing color
like laughter
a song
vibrations
incantations
gripping
intangible strength
a healing balm
soothing
a place
of need
.
Double Diagnosis
I was giving the hand specialist the full history of my thumb pain, and arrived at the part where I went to urgent care.
“The urgent care doctor told me the x-ray didn’t show any arthritis.”
“She was wrong,” he said.
“She said my whole hand falling asleep wasn’t what they see with carpal tunnel syndrome. It would be the thumb and first two fingers.”
“That isn’t right,” he said.
“She thought the joint looked odd, and that it might be a subluxation.”
“It’s not a subluxation.”
That was some visit to the urgent care clinic, wasn’t it? The specialist had full respect for the work the urgent care doctors do, and mentioned that they are a jack-of-all-trades, but master of none.
It seemed to me he already had a diagnosis, before he even listened to my whole story. I asked if he had reviewed my x-ray. He told me that he had, and saw my arthritis immediately. He did a few follow-up tests to confirm, and then told me that I also presented the symptoms of carpal tunnel.
He said that it is not uncommon to see the two afflictions together.
There are a few options available for managing my pain. Of course, there is no cure for arthritis. I am starting with the least invasive of choices: using braces.
It’s funny, just having a positive identification of the cause of the pain provides some relief. As long as I know what it is, and what I can do, or can’t do, my mind is more at ease, and the rest of me relaxes along with it.
Maybe by relaxing, Mozyr became inspired to get a little closer last night. For the first time since we brought him home, he hopped up on the couch by me and then laid down on my leg where I could reach out and scratch his head.
Either that, or he just feels sorry for me.
Helping Hand
It’s hand specialist visit day! Wish me luck for a definitive diagnosis, and hopefully, a plan toward fixing whatever is going wrong in there.
I think my brace has been helping in the last few days. I’ve been wearing it selectively, and when it is not on, trying to do normal activity with that hand, as much as possible. I’m noticing just enough improvement that I worry it won’t present well for diagnosis this morning. I may have found a way to self-treat this recent flare-up, but I still am hoping to learn why the thumb joint has been a chronic nuisance for the two years prior, especially if it is determined not to be the arthritis that I assumed it to be.
When you are feeling kind of punky because you have an “owie” hand that makes it hard to do pretty much everything that you can think of to do, you just might find yourself crashed out on a bed for a sulking nap. Either that, or the napping cat just looked so irresistible that I succumbed to joining him. Cyndie found the visual irresistible, and grabbed my camera.
That’s about as close as we can get to Mozyr, before he takes his leave. There’s no snuggling with that cat, yet.
Pequenita is another story. There’s no not snuggling with her. She walks right up on top of us, steps between our face and anything we happen to be doing, and demands hands, pushing her nose under our fingers, while kneading our chest.
She will probably be as happy as me to have my left hand be freed from pain, and available for full strength use again.
Hurried Tidbits
I’m short of time, and seem to have just bits and pieces of news and thoughts, so I’ll take a shot at just tossing them out for today…
• Worked a 12-hour shift at the day-job yesterday, and thus had a chance to drive home after the daily rush-hour traffic jams. There was noticeably less traffic than I commonly face in the mid-afternoon time slot I usually target. That’s not a bad option.
• Minor, but exciting, progress on fencing yesterday. The area is too wet to work in, except up near the barn, so that is where they confined their efforts. They installed fences that create a channel out of the door, which will lead to gates at the entrance of the two paddocks.
• I got a call while I was at work, from the fence contractor checking if it was okay to put all their equipment in the barn, as more precipitation is predicted for the next few days. Rain and/or snow. There is a possibility for heavy rain. Due to that, and the snow that has yet to melt, our region has been put under a flood watch.
• After a brief period where our two cats seemed to be getting over their unexplained spat with each other, they resumed the hostile animosity a couple of days ago, and have us rather confused. Also, the wee one, female, Pequenita, seems like she doesn’t feel well. She doesn’t always keep her food down, and seems to have less of her usual energy. It may or may not be related to their relationship troubles. A check up with a vet is in the plans.
• My thumb pain continues to debilitate most of my actions. I bought a brace, which has helped to protect from exacerbating the problem, and I am eagerly awaiting an appointment to have a specialist look at it on Thursday morning.
• Thursday’s weather could make the driving to the appointment a little challenging. I’m going to do everything possible to get there. I sure hope the specialist has a similar level of determination.
• In light of the recent terror bombings in Boston, I want to echo something that I read, credited to actor, Patton Oswalt: (paraphrasing) “There are more good people than bad. We outnumber you, and we always will.” For every tragedy that bad people unleash, a much greater number of good people respond, giving care, soothing others, spreading love.
Those are my bits for today. Stay warm and dry, and do something good. Spread some love.
Plowed Slush
Every once in a while, I end up with a picture I really like, which I figure will probably work as a “Words on Images” piece, but later, when I get it opened up on my screen, I can’t bring myself to interrupt the image with text. This is one of those images.
.
I think the close-up shot looks a bit like the super-magnified images created by electron microscopes.
Dangerous Beauty
The spring weather has been one storm after another this year. I think the last two have overlapped each other. Sunday turned into a day-long rainstorm, with temperatures hovering just below freezing. That meant ice buildup on tree branches and surfaces.
In the middle of the afternoon, I tried stepping out to see how our trees were holding up. Unfortunately, it was very windy, which had to have been putting extra strain on the branches that were getting heavy with ice. At the time, there were only small branches that had begun to accumulate on the ground, but the ones still in the air were definitely becoming shimmering beauties.
I almost didn’t get our front door to open against the ice that had formed along the bottom. The handle was covered, and dripping icicles. Luckily, though the rain seemed to be pouring down, the icing of limbs didn’t appear to growing at an equivalent rate. I can only hope that our luck endures through the end of this weather event.
Futile Search
I came up empty this morning. Not for lack of trying. I trudged our woods and beyond, into the neighbor’s section of forest adjacent to us. I found no obvious evidence that revealed what all the coyotes were howling about last night.
Just about the time we were turning in for the night, the racket of coyotes in a tizzy, which we are now familiar with, after our initial exposure last October, filled the darkness from down the hill below our house. I cracked the window to better hear the chorus, and Pequenita leaped to the window sill to join me, her interest piqued.
Grabbing the spotlight that we now keep handy in our bedroom, I scanned the distance. It didn’t do much. Since the land drops away so quickly, the only view I get is of the open space near the house, across the top of the hill. I am including a daytime shot of the area we are able to see from the bedroom window.
From the sound of things, and from the fact the howling continued on and off for some time, we expected the coyotes had captured a meal.
My search this morning was for tracks that might lead to the remains of their prize. Last fall I hadn’t put two and two together to realize that what we had heard might mean there would be a carcass. It was mere coincidence that I was exploring our woods, days later, bushwhacking off trail, and came upon the fresh skeleton of the 8-point buck.
That was before there was any snow cover, and the scene hardly stood out at all. This time, I figured such a kill would be much easier to spot, since there is still so much snow on the ground. What I discovered was that the woods still obscure the sight-lines quite a bit, and it wasn’t easy to positively identify which tracks were fresh from the night before.
The coyote tracks I did find seemed meandering, certainly not racing after prey. I was also looking for evidence of more than one set of paws, because we definitely heard more than one animal yipping. There are plenty of tracks from rabbits, squirrels, deer, and one very definite and obvious trail of a single turkey. None of them looked to be on the run. Eventually I did come upon a pair of coyote tracks, side by side.
Maybe there wasn’t a chase. It could have been a surprise attack from a stealthy hunter. Whatever it was, I didn’t find the results. They were heard and not seen.
There remains the outside chance that it wasn’t a new kill at all. During my trek, I wandered past the spot of that kill from last fall. Enough snow has receded to expose the old carcass, and the legs and hooves that were left as undesirable last fall, had been pulled up and freshly gnawed.
It is quite possible that the reason my search was futile is because there was no fresh kill. Maybe they were just excited to have found the remains of that old kill. But, I’ll be keeping an eye out for a new carcass, because I’m not quite convinced.
Seasonal Dyslexia
Yesterday’s unwelcome weather event did not turn out to be one of the ominous “top-10 historic April snowfalls” that was being touted as highly likely, but it still scared me away from trying to negotiate Thursday’s traffic. I didn’t go in to the day-job. Both Cyndie and I stayed safely off the roads and tucked in our home, protected from the elements.
Thus far, we have experienced heavy rain, then sleet, then sloppy wet snow, then falling temperatures, and then wind-blown snow, out of this winter storm. It is still going strong, continuing to ply its wrath over us this morning.
Winter storms that occur in the springtime can be rather exasperating, especially when they cause postponement of an already delayed fence installation project. Doesn’t do much to accommodate our brush-pile burning project, either.
We have an important meeting in the cities this afternoon, with our tax accountant, so must bite the bullet and get behind the wheel, regardless the conditions complicating the morning rush “hour.”
The things we do for love.
We are head-over-heels in love with this place we now call home. It easily makes our driving hassles worth the trouble. Even when it is covered with snow in the middle of April, it is a wonder to behold.
Uncertain Outcome
And then there is the plot twist where something is expected to happen, but nothing happens.
Now what? Carry on as usual? That feels like such an injustice to all the energy that was put into anticipating the future that didn’t quite materialize as planned. I resort to making a list.
the periodic ticking of the hot fireplace
pecking of a bird breaking open seeds outside on the ledge of one of our log wall ends
clacking of keys on her laptop keyboard
gusting wind against the house and through the pine tree branches
radio songs from 1983
furnace fan cycling on and off
crunching dry food that a cat is munching
iPhone text message received alarm
distant whine, felt more than heard, rising from the base of the neck to between two ears
What’s happenin’? The unexpected non-event, that’s what.
Extend hibernation for a little longer. The explosion of spring will not be denied, but it can be delayed.
We’ll be patient. What choice do we have?
Relative Something 