Reflections

I can't get enough of my new dining room set-up. A lot is changed around here. Oliver gave me that sitting Buddha with the pot that holds incense. I don't like incense, though, so it's empty which I think is more fitting. To be empty. Emptied. I remember being a little girl at church on Sunday and nearly fainting and certainly gagging when the priest walked down the aisle swinging that thing around with incense wafting out and around. I felt as if I were suffocating. Perhaps that's symbolic of my wrestling and then fleeing the Catholic Church. Perhaps it's just that I hate incense. When Oliver gave me the little Buddha incense holder, he included a box of cheap incense, and he lit it and immediately the house smelled like one of those stores that sells things for the spiritually materialistic. I'm actually prone to spiritual materialism -- I love mala beads around my neck and wrists, my red Buddha necklace, my turquoise Buddha ring, the Mother Mary cards, my Book of Changes, the Poet Tarot Cards. But no incense.



I took a shower tonight, and while the water beat down on me, I thought about jinxes. I thought about Sophie doing so well for the last couple of days, and maybe it'll only be the last couple of days, but it's been a good couple of days. Have we found the sweet spot with the strain (ACDC) and dosage ( a little higher)? Or is it something else? Is it the hot, dry weather and absence of pressure? Is it just -- well -- just? It occurred to me as I leaned my forehead against the tile and closed my eyes that despite the passage of nearly 21 years, I still know so very little about what makes my daughter's brain tick -- and tick too much. Despite those 21 years, and countless showers where I had very similar thoughts, where I crouched down and cried while the baby screamed in the bedroom, where I leant into the tile, exhausted, the tile perhaps like Roman stone, trod on, trod on, trod on, I still know so little. My sighs and tears and musings are always the same, an endless cycle, samsara. Suffocating. To be emptied. An empty vessel with room for gratitude.

Two Good Things

Sophie's turned the proverbial corner and appears to be responding to the new strain of cannabis.  I'll provide the details if you leave a question in the comments below, but for those who are still struggling with getting cannabis or using cannabis, know that patience is in order and that much tinkering has to happen. I still believe that this natural plant medicine is vastly preferable to anything offered by pharmaceutical companies, and I'll be able to write more about it as I learn more (which is a given very soon because I am starting a new and full-time job in the cannabis information business). More on all of that at some other time. Can I hear an Allelujah? 

Within one week of switching to this new strain, Sophie's seizures, which had become near constant and were characteristically worsened by a virus, have dropped down to -- well -- next to none, and that's with a full moon shining in the Los Angeles night sky. I, too, was reduced to a wreck or to a sort of full-figured wraith, transparent, despairing. It was like days of old around during the last few weeks, the days before cannabis when I plead on my knees to a god in whom I had no belief. My night-time psychotic self had returned, the woman who lies in bed churning over years past, convinced there is something I've done wrong, a dark hours before dawn narcissist. The boundaries between Sophie and me are porous at best, and if I were to be totally honest, I'd say my identity is so entwined in hers that there's no getting out. Singing the blues, really.

when my baby doing bad, I turn sad.

Speaking of blues, Mary Moon suggested that I attend a house concert last night featuring a friend of hers, Spencer Bohren. It turned out that the house was literally in my neighborhood and about four doors away from the original house we rented when we first moved to Los Angeles eighteen years ago.

This man could sing and write and play and spin stories and spun me into a mesmerized state. I talked at length to his beautiful wife Marilyn, also a friend of Mary's and felt as if I'd known her forever. I also sat on a couch next to a legend -- Harry Tuft -- considered to be the godfather of folk music in the Rocky Mountain region and whose center was visited and revered by people like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and the Mamas and the Papas and all manner of blues and folk musicians. Holy mackerel! He introduced himself to me and said it'd been a long day, that if he fell asleep I was to poke him awake, and when I told him that I wouldn't do that, he told me that he had narcolepsy and I very well should. Spencer dedicated the first song to Harry, a Bob Dylan tune, and Harry whispered in my ear that it'd be amazing, and it was.  The whole night was amazing, a perfect cap to and for a week and a woman turned glad from bad.

If you want to listen to and buy Spencer's gorgeous music, go here.