Accommodation and Picking Mushrooms at the Edge of Dread

A relentless southwest wind blows in the Laramie Range of Wyoming. It has blown for eons, scraping the mountains bare of soil, carving out the landscape. It causes trees to grow at an angle and lifts into the air things that ought to stay on the ground. It complicates all manner of human activity. People who live there successfully have reached an accommodation with the wind; some who couldn't, went insane.

Disability is a steady west wind in our lives. It permeates our existence, altering the topography of our days and causing our family and our life to grow at an angle. Without judging the wind as good or bad, we can observe the truth of it, acknowledge the force of it in our lives, and take the measure of our accommodation.

from Changed by a Child by Barbara Gill 

Someone I know who was angry with me about one thing or another said, You need to get your head out of your ass, spouting poetry. I know the person who said it to me, and it stung, but not for much longer than a moment.

Your head is just too much in the clouds. You should probably stop reading and go outside. There's validity to that.

I suppose.

I've always read to accommodate my thinking self to the world. Words -- particularly those strung together as poetry -- help accommodate my imagination to the world.

My boys are back from Switzerland and with them come buckets of chocolate and laundry, addiction to Pokemon Go, deep man voices and walls that can't contain the loudness. I'm not sure whether it's seeing them again or the circus-like atmosphere of the RNC and the swirl of clips and memes and Tweets, but I feel giddy. Like I can't stop.

I have to stop looking at videos and memes and visual things. I have to read. Words.

I take the measure of my accommodation.


What Kind of Times Are These

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows
                  uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but
                 don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light —
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.

Adrienne Rich, from What Kind of Times Are These

Saturday Morning West Coast Re-Post

Here's a bit of an update from Silent House (silent because The Brothers are not here), and then I'll post something I wrote on the old blog years ago. Sophie is doing all right these days -- having more seizures than she was having in past months but still dramatically fewer than before Charlotte's Web. We continue to believe it's not because of a "tolerance" for the medical marijuana but, rather, a need for a higher ratio oil. We tried the THCa for a bit, but we didn't notice much of a difference, so we stopped that and are waiting to hear what the next harvest brings us. Sophie has always been exquisitely sensitive -- as many people with epilepsy are -- to changes in their environment and to medication. It's not too big of a leap for my tired brain to imagine she actually needs the higher ratio oil in order to get maximum seizure protection. But, as Sophie's old osteopath, the estimable Dr. Viola Frymann used to say, We shall see. 

I've written before that my favorite book in the bible is probably Ecclesiastes and that's mainly because it seems almost Buddhist in its incantations. I've actually memorized my favorite lines:

Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity! What does man gain by all the toil by which he toils under the sun? A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises, and the sun goes down and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north; around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness, a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.

I don't know about you, but that passage gives me comfort -- it's that acknowledgement of one's relative insignificance in the grand scheme of things that makes me feel not just relief but gratitude to even be here at all. As I wrote that out, though, I felt a tiny pinprick of fear that I generally don't feel -- and that has much to do with the environmental degradation of our planet, how the phrase the earth remains forever could very possibly be presumptuous.

Anywho.

Here's the re-post of an old post:

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Changed by a Child

You know how when you're ambling around, sipping a cup of coffee from Starbucks, sitting in the driver's seat of the car with the door open and not wanting to get out because the sun is shining perfectly on your face and outstretched leg that's perched on the handle of the door and you know that inside are unmade beds and bills piled up and the thought, forever lodged, about what to do with Sophie, about Sophie, for Sophie.

Well, five minutes ago, there I sat. And I sighed (there's nothing like a good sigh), stood up and out of the car and went inside. When I checked my email, one of my dearest friends had sent me this on Facebook, and if that isn't what Jung calls "synchronicity," I don't know what is.

Accommodation by Barbara Gill

A relentless southwest wind blows in the Laramie Range of Wyoming. It has blown for eons, scraping the mountains bare of soil, carving out the landscape. It causes trees to grow at an angle and lifts into the air things that ought to stay on the ground. It complicates all manner of human activity. People who live there successfully have reached an accommodation with the wind; some who couldn't went insane.

Disability is a steady west wind in our lives. It permeates our existence, altering the topography of our days and causing our families and our life to grow at an angle. Without judging the wind as good or bad, we can observe the truth of it, acknowledge the force of it in our lives, and take the measure of our accommodation.