The design shown here showcases Part II of III of my prose poetry published here titled, The Moon’s Say So.
“And to my end this may be the most these soles know: to grow old in the hum of an ancient song & wait for the next expression of love, to know that only those gifted with fortunate favor & a timing divine make it beyond the mountain and across the sea…”
At this rate, 2022 is coming to a close and I’ve managed only a few posts. ME/CFS sidelined my progress as I scrambled to re-establish a baseline that appears to be taking shape now. But this isn’t the first time that baseline has appeared to be showing itself. So I’m semi-encouraged, but mostly holding my breath. In the meantime, I’ve been gradually developing a shop on Etsy and how I’m going to tie everything together remains to be seen/known. But I’m proud to have persisted in the fits and starts available to me here and there along the path.
What is a baseline, you might wonder. For someone with ME/CFS, it’s the level of activity and alternating rest that can be relied on, for the most part, to not trigger worsening of already existing/perpetual symptoms, a crash or relapse. It is found by mostly resting. Rest, good nutrition, supplements and medications take all of your time and can persist for months or years until you find you can get away with something like prepping a meal once a week (not doing the dishes afterwards or putting leftovers in the fridge, but hey, progress). So, you do the thing you can get away with, the one thing and it’s added along with resting, nutrition, etc. What’s glorious? Finding you can shower once a week without severe backlash. But it’s important to maintain the one new thing for at least a month before adding any other new things. The tenacity required shames every doctor out there who presumes this illness is psychosomatic or a result of mental illness. It asks for a level of mental stamina and willpower most never have to discover. Not that I’m bragging? I’m just fed up with what I see now emerging for folks with Long Covid. The same b.s. with people in key positions concluding the problem is the patient, not the lack of knowledge about post-viral illness. So, baselines. I had a beauty of a baseline before my 2nd Pfizer jab. That was over a year and a half ago. I’ve avoided the boosters for obvious reasons and having come close to a baseline previously, I’m clinging tightly to the progress made at this point.
I’ve managed the gradual work towards the shop on Etsy over the past 12 months by eliminating outings, cutting down on basics like meal-prep, dishes, laundry, avoiding news when it’s especially stressful (if possible), curtailing lengthy conversations, literally insisting on no-communication days sometimes and other things folks just take for granted. Multi-tasking has mostly gone out the window. One thing. At a time. And I have been sure to take long stretches of rest without doing the one thing I can do. I say no to others more often than I ever knew I could before and I say yes more often to my needs and desires as I’m able.
Can I just say…so few realize how precious each breath, each habit, each thing taken in stride is. I see pictures of a hike I went on a few years back with my sister and I just grin and catch my breath. It’s almost like you might expect someone to react if they’re coming across the photo of the time they met their most beloved actor or writer or athlete. Hey, look, I did a thing called living that day. I paid heavily for it. It was worth every ounce of pain and backlash.
Life is incalculably valuable. And that is all I have to say given the winding down of this day and my need to conserve.
Here’s a link to my humble, but gradually growing, shop: Digital SoulSpeak
Happy Holidays!
“This is the living vow: to show up with increasing presence for the moment. To make an honest encounter with your longing at every turn. To listen to it, learning which way the energy of your life wants to go. Paradoxically, it is in our emptiness—another way of saying willingness—that we become full. It is in our being fully where we are that we are put in touch with our next becoming. This grows you. You begin to understand that your life belongs to more than yourself alone. It belongs to a momentum which is set in motion towards its destiny through longing.”
Excerpt from “Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home” by Toko-pa Turner
“What posturing and performance share in common is a deep disconnect between the inspired heart and our gut instincts, between rising up and sensing ground where all life dissolves into the rich humus of earth. Make no mistake white bodies are capable of sensing deeply and can become conscious of the insidious ways that colonization is held within our flesh and blood. We may squirm and distract ourselves, but we have what it takes to dissolve these century-old impulses to cage, control and power over body. With awareness, we can begin to recognize our conditioning and through attention we can allow our primal impulses to grow a capacity to dissolve the distortions and claim life-supportive gestures and expressions.” Liz Koch, excerpted from the post on her website, Core Awareness, titled “White Bodies, Psoas, & Gesturing Power Over”
We colonized the land and the people of the land we now call the United States of America and we colonized our own bodies. Power over is the rabid beast created when we divorce ourselves from being soft, hairy animal human. We infused our religious beliefs with power over. We insisted on obedience like we insisted on this land, raping and violating the bodies of children in the name of discipline and good behavior and, for some, godliness. I can say that my daughter and two sons have birthed me because they broke my heart open and opened me up to my own tenderness and the validity of the wild human. I could not fathom how the sort of discipline inflicted on me, and on my sisters, in the name of Jesus was anything remotely connected to love and that realization occurred when a baby girl came out of my body. Everything changed. Who was this sacred creature? How could you thump her on the forehead for speaking her mind or challenging you at the dinner table? How? You must be divorced from your own body, colonized from head to toe to soul if you do this and you must be addicted to power over. Dethroning the inner tyrant anchored on the seat of the heart and placed there by fear, that is a work on which to commit a life. Enshrining love as a fully-muscled set of doings and thinkings and makings of solid evidence of love and value decolonizes the body, rids the mind of toxins long dormant. And the work never ends. There is no arrival. I don’t know what I’d do without people like James Baldwin who lives though he’s gone and Liz Koch who is here and now shining light on needful truths.
Here’s to freedom from power over and losing all the baggage that goes with it.
Each step taken, every chant and cry,
every movement for justice,
every insistence on equal rights,
every standard and arm raised for safety,
for the end to brutality and racism at the hands of…
police, government, the system,
each one land home, right to the heart
of what brings true change, what sets aright
the system set in motion against humanity itself.
Revolutionize hope, radicalize grace.
Every effort met with heaven’s support,
earth’s nurturance and the flesh and blood strength
of all who embody truth and justice.
Each one held safely by love.
“The world needs your rebellion and the true song of your exile. In what has been banned from your life, you find a medicine to heal all that has been kept from our world. We must find the place within where things have been muted and give that a voice. Until those things are spoken, no truth can find its way forward. The world needs your unbelonging. It needs your disagreements, your exclusion, your ache to tear the false constructions down, to find the world behind this one.” Toko-Pa Turner
“I love Jesus. I love the Pagan Solstice Christmas pine. I love Mother Earth, I love Goddess Shakti. I love my Buddha-heart. I love freedom from religious authority. I love the perfect consistency of my contradictions. I love luscious berries of fire and mistletoe clustered on the cross of paradox. I love the tree of life, where I am ripening fruit. I love the newborn sun.
And I love what my body says to my soul. ‘Every particle of me is made of Matter, Mater, Mother Dust, each atom a cathedral where pilgrims arrive from the stars to celebrate the miracle of flesh. O my soul, You irradiate the world through me. I am your dance. Let there be no more talk of our difference.’ And so after thousands of years of religious combat, my body and my soul are Christalized in one magnum mysterium.
And where does this mystery occur? In the nameless roadside shrine of my chest, in a flame that never stops burning yet has never been lit until Now. Here I celebrate the birth of God, who is this Breath.” Fred LaMotte
