Maelstrom

I keep wondering how I have gotten to this level of debility and while there is no answer I suspect a perfect storm of certain triggers occurred. I had already been in pain for years, and the last three months the pain had been pretty much nonstop. I tried the antibiotics which seemed to lessen me and make me sicker the longer I stayed on them.

Then I saw Dr. Chenitz and he elicited in me an agony and so since that moment something in my nerves has been deeply flared up.

Then Friday before last I went to the wonderful gathering with the goddesses and there was a little light yoga at the beginning. How I enjoyed the cat cow poses and then the motions of ‘washing the inside of the peanut butter jar with ones body’. But my body had refused to go the gym for weeks so why would it like any yoga? And then there was standing on the concrete floor for two hours while I was mesmerized playing with paint.

And then there is the chronic sleeplessness.

And then my period started, which is always guaranteed to make everything worse.
It is like a brutal intruder.

And then I start taking medicines, which are also not very medicinal for me.

The sea is sick. And it is me, and I am it.

My mind hangs on to the image of Miranda by John William Waterhouse. Long ago, in my early twenties, when I caught a killer case of adult chicken pox and lost my mind and skin to it, I had that on the wall beside my bed. My mind turns to it again now. Some of my only escape at that time, as I lay quarantined and plagued in the modern world, was to look at that painting, and to read Helen Thayer’s book about her trek across the North Pole. For a moment each day I was with the polar bears, as I lay there with my skin blistering off and my mind popping. Thanks to my mother who brought me that book, autographed by the author, and who checked in on me smiling each day, and took the photos of me I requested so we would never forget what a virus can do to a human.