Sold

It's all over. Almost. Will be, once all the subject-to's are gone, by May 29th. Then I will be officially in transition, not just preparing to be in transition.

I'm pretty satisfied with the sale. I got nearly as much as I was asking, and the buyers were people who knew what they liked and moved decisively, didn't burn a lot of fuel dithering around wasting everybody's time and patience. They came/ they saw/they bought, all in the space of a single day.

Hurray.

It looks like I'll be able to go where photons shine all year round, about mid-July. If I'm careful with money, I'll be able to afford a longed-for, self-assembled "sabbatical," during which I can rest one part of my brain (the treating part, which is so automatic it will never forget how) while I work on developing the conceptualizing, writing part. I plan to write furiously while I have the opportunity. Maybe less blogging, more actual book-writing.

Might have an offer

I just heard from my real estate agent - he says a realtor called him, wants to set up a meeting tomorrow afternoon to present an offer. How exciting!

A Friday work afternoon in May

This afternoon I had three new patients in a row, all very senior, a rare event - usually I treat people 20-ish to 60-ish..

Lady number one, age 85, recently hospitalized for food poisoning, a week ago. Had a cataract removed just on Tuesday. Said that she developed sharp pain in her neck and shoulders while being hospitalized for the food poisoning, that it was better but not gone, and didn't want to delay the cataract surgery because she didn't want to have to wait for the next available slot. So she toughed through it and turned up in my clinic, brought in by her daughter who I treated a decade ago. She definitely couldn't move her head on her neck much. She had never had any treatment ever before from anyone. Her husband had died 4 years prior, and she had moved overseas to Canada to move in with her daughter. Tough lady.

So, I worked carefully with her, and in the end she could move quite a lot better on one side but still had pain on the other, so I added a few pieces of stretchy tape, made sure the tape was holding her skin comfortably so she could move less painfully, showed her daughter how to remove them after a few days.

Lady number two was about the same age and had stumbled - although she had not fallen, she had sprained her ankle. She was wearing a brace on it, and limping. She had been to the PT her doctor had sent her to, but found she didn't like electrodes or ultrasound or the heat pack. She said her ankle had felt worse after. We had a provincial election here on Tuesday, and where she had gone to vote, a scrutineer had given her one of my business cards. She made an appointment and here she was.

She had lost her husband less than a year ago - they had been married nearly 60 years. She still could hardly believe he was gone. She was a treat to treat. Her nervous system responded extremely well to hands-on work, and by the end of the hour the swelling was way down and she had full range. When she got up she could walk normally. I asked her to leave the brace off. She hugged me. Twice. Might be back to have her fingers worked on.

The third new patient was an elderly man with pancreatic cancer, which had been diagnosed a year ago and treated with chemo. He looked really good. Thin but good color. He had pain in his belly. His son, who had been in for treatment for a few different problems, had made the appointment. I had been really clear on the phone that there were certain sorts of pain, like cancer pain, that my attempts wouldn't be able to help, but that if there were other kinds of pain as well, perhaps what I am able to offer could help with that. When he came in, I had the same conversation with the dad. As it turned out he had old shoulder injuries from sports, and very restricted shoulder range on both sides, so I took that on. I worked on skin (dorsal cutaneous nerve roots) along both sides of his spine, the sides of the trunk (lateral cutaneous nerves of the torso), the shoulder blades (many different nerves at different levels), and the front fold of the armpits (intercostobrachial nerves and supraclavicular branches of the superficial cervical plexus). Both arms were able to raise up all the way after. He still had the belly pain, of course. I reiterated that I didn't think what I did could help that, that the patches were his best bet. He said he was thinking of having acupuncture, that they offered it at the cancer clinic. I said I thought whatever they offered at the cancer clinic, under supervision, should be OK. We all shook hands and he and his wife left.

Quite the day, with three brand new elderlies all in a row. Elderly people make me go all soft and tender. They always have. Not sure why. They are living heroes to me.

I treated an old woman once shortly after I graduated. She was in her nineties, was being hospitalized for something I can't recall. Her hands bothered her a great deal. They were gnarled and thick-knuckled. She said, "Look at these hands. They are ruined. Whatever you do, don't use cold water to wash your vegetables. I used cold water all my life, and look what happened to my hands! Use warm water. It doesn't matter - you're just going to cook the vegetables anyway!"

I took her advice. I've never done anything under cold water that couldn't be done in warm.

Another 95 year old I worked with scoffed at herself one day about being a "dried-up old prune." I objected immediately. I pointed out that prunes were nothing but plums which had grown more condensed and had concentrated their sweetness. She was a poet. She got that in a deep place. I think she thought better of herself after that.

Once when I was in my mid-twenties, I was in a medical building for one reason or another, and caught one of those glimpses that lands like a snapshot, glued in the brain forever. An elderly man came off the elevator. He was short, but pulled himself up to his full height, as fully as he could. He was dressed impeccably, hat, jacket, tie. Shined shoes. For whatever reason, I suddenly saw him as living poetry, and my throat caught in that moment with the poignancy and beauty of it all. A life nearly all lived out. Fully. Upright. Dignified.

Still waiting

Still nothing. Still no offers on my condo..

I'm still in the transition zone therefore, feeling a bit bored, a bit restless. I decided to go where I had never gone before and put a few ideas out onto a taxonomy thread at IASP.

In a recent conversation about possibly renaming the syndrome currently known as fibromyalgia, a poster (MD) wrote:

">"Whatever we call tenderness in 11 of 18 spots with associated cognitive dysfunction is bound to be confusing unless there is an examination based on an agreed methodology (which currently doesn't exist) to identify specific muscles (40 % of tender points are thought to be TrPs in some studies and treatable with injections) that are the source of some or all of the patient's pain in distinction to CNS dysregulation."

I replied:

"Here is a thought (harboured for a long time) about the tenderness detection method used to arrive at a diagnosis of fibromyalgia: Please bear with me while I explain:

With all due respect, it seems to me, that unless the clinicians who originated this way of determining 'muscle' tenderness first physically removed the skin and its attached subcutis, then tested for tenderness, then placed the skin back on again, the idea that they actually found tender points in 'muscles' might be (dare I say) erroneous.

Cutis/subcutis is very thick, in case anyone doesn't remember. It contains a great deal of physiological tubing (nerves and vasculature and smooth muscle), sensitive structure and function, most or all of which is regulated by the sympathetic NS and efferent function of sensory nerves. Skin is closely read by the brain, and by the S1 sensory cortex, in full awareness by the non-anesthetized, non-hypnotized patients being tested for point tenderness.

I would like to propose, therefore, that tenderness in skin itself and its attached layers will always be a confounding variable to finding and being able to assert that point tenderness is from something wrong in muscle tissue. I'd say chances are rather high that some structure located within cutis/subcutis itself is what feels "tender" - a cutaneous nerve perhaps.

I'm speculating - however, I think my speculation is likely more accurate than the supposition that somehow one can locate tender points in muscles, by:
1. conceptually subtracting skin as though it did not exist, or was not sensitive, or didn't count;
2. forgetting that cutis/subcutis can be a good inch thick and is full of sensory neural structure, or that palpable hardness can't develop and then disappear within C/subC itself;
3. forgetting that a dense tough layer of fascia (hard to palpate through) surrounds and contains and separates 'muscles' from one another;
4. assuming the patient's brain/nervous system (already stressed and producing pain output) wouldn't read skin input first and regard exteroceptive pressure as something it needed to defend its organism from by making the patient flinch;

... all of which I think should be factored in long before the clinician/examiner assumes he or she has found a TrP in somatic 'muscle' tissue.

I respectfully submit that one should not rule out anything one has not already considered.

Diane Jacobs PT"

Maybe I am getting a bit ornery these days, or as a result of aging, or as I prefer to think about it, ripening while still on the vine, but I'm not going to sit back and stay quiet anymore about anything, anywhere.

As talk-show host Ellen is fond of saying, "ANY-way..."

Nothing yet

There have been 13 showings, and another open house is scheduled for Saturday. No one has put in an offer yet, but that's OK - it's only been two weeks. Could be any minute.

My income tax is ready - the part that I can get ready that is to say. The bookkeeper is working on the rest.

This leaves me in a weird, unfamiliar zone - it's the transitional zone. After so much hard physical work and planning and executive decision making and lugging and tossing, I live carefully in a pristine apartment in which I am careful to mop up my own traces every day. No sock is left on the floor, no toothbrush allowed to sit on the sink.


What this means is that I feel like I can't start any new projects, which in turn feels like I'm living in a mental waiting room. I am so ready to move forward geographically speaking, but am still stuck in Vancouver. At least the weather doesn't suck much right now.

Ready for the next lap

I'm a big fan of built-ins. They add enormous square footage, especially in bedrooms. Plus, the bed does not have to be perfectly made - one can just push the bed up out of sight and get rid of more visual clutter.

I had a cat once upon a time. Getting wall beds installed neatly solved the problem of cat hair/hair balls on the bed. The cat received her own cozy cat bed to snooze in.

I have two of these. They are very well-behaved beds. They stay at any angle I put them at. I can lift them with a single finger.











I hope whoever buys this place will want to keep these - they are "attached," so technically they have to be offered as part of the condo, as do all the built-ins.

This afternoon there will be a private "showing." It seems a bit strange, the idea that people I do not know will be examining my private living space in detail.. but I realize that's just an inner introvert adjusting herself to reality. The reality is, I've got to move and leave this whole part of the world, including my part, behind. Unfortunately, I can't just unzip my condo and take it with me to a brighter part of the country the way I'd like to.

Last night I had a brief talk with a woman who provided me with a little list of the sort of documentation I will need and must prepare in advance of selling my practice. It's tax time right about now, so no time to breathe - it's time to move my attention away from my personal space and figure out how to extract myself from the public one I built. Meanwhile, by pure fluke, suddenly my treatment list has swollen back up to full. I do not know where the energy to treat all these people is going to come from, as I am sleeping rather restlessly, but I am certainly glad that the awful winter work slump seems over along with the arrival of warm spring weather. A lively bustling practice should be easier to sell than a half dead one, especially with Adrienne close at hand.

The first lap

Wednesday last week represented a milestone in my race to live under brighter skies. Finally, I had chucked out enough books and furniture and clothes and small household items to see the back of every closet, the bottom of every drawer, the surface of every shelf. Finally, I had cleaned out enough cupboards, vacuumed up enough dust, washed enough surfaces and painted enough walls, windowsills and baseboards. Finally, all the blinds were repaired/cleaned, and new Roman blinds covered the venetian ones (something I had never quite gotten around to before). It was time to list.

And list I did. My place is now officially for sale. Hurray. Now, all I have to do is be a fastidious Zen housekeeper and keep things well-enough organized that the place can be shown anytime (once I squirrel the twenty-year-old stained coffee-maker out of sight, hide the dirty dishes in the dishwasher, put the toothbrush in the drawer, and generally remove my own "living" traces from the place).

The place looked nice yesterday for its first Open House - I even added flowers. It's not a showcase, but it's attractive, fresh, clean, shiny, all the things that attract buyers, hopefully some buyers are enough attracted by the lowish price to want to bite. The realtor said that 8 parties, including three agents with buyers, had visited in under 2 hours. After he left two more groups of people, residents in the building, came by to look. One group was a young couple with a baby about 2 years old, who at the moment have a one-bedroom.

I think this bodes well - already 10 groups of traffic through a place that's been listed for only four days.

From the waterfall to the desert

I know that I'll feel more like me again, in Weyburn, with its sunny days and semiarid climate. I was thinking this morning that at the moment I feel like one of these giant over watered coastal coniferous trees, top-heavy and ponderous. They grow huge, but have hardly any root system. They do not need roots, because roots are something a tree sends down to find water. When water is plentiful, successful trees just don't bother. However, when a big wind blows they fall right over.

By contrast, prairie trees are sort of scritchy and shrubby and short. The wind blows all the time, so the wild ones mostly just manage to cling to the least windy sides of coulees and ravines, and often appear tilted. But they have huge and extensive root systems. They are stubbornly alive - they clutch the earth with everything they have, hold the soil together, seek out every last drop of water no matter how deep they have to dig, and are very very hard to blow over, or even pull out with heavy equipment. I'm by nature and up-bringing much more a prairie tree than I am a coastal tree.

It will certainly be novel stimuli to re-learn to view a rain as a welcome relief from sun, instead of how it is now, the complete opposite.

Everything is moving fast at the Weyburn end - my mother located a condo for sale in her building, which will be perfect. Knowing her, I doubt she'll let anyone else have even a fighting chance at it.

Oozing toward the move

The process of decluttering seems endless, but progress has definitely been made. I now have three empty and mostly cleaned up rooms, awaiting painting. I have thrown out massive volumes of accumulated life detritus. The Canadian Diabetes Association's Clothesline pickup service must be liking me these days. We have dated regularly for more than a month. They have carted off more than a dozen, perhaps as many as twenty huge trash bags filled with what were once treasures and may well be for someone else, "clothing and small household items."

In the end, no one wanted to buy my edited furniture within the time frame I had for selling it, so I had it hauled away. It worked out better this way - I had one potential "buyer" come by to see an antique drop leaf desk I'd been using as a phone center, but it turned out she was not interested in "buying" at all - she already had a condo full of furniture and enjoyed going to strangers' homes just to stare at their belongings. This creeped me (an introvert) out so much that I decided to circle my wagons and simply jettison.

And what a difference a few days can make.

Up until Monday, I was still thinking I'd be moving to Barrie, Ontario.

I phoned my mother, age 85 and holding, on her birthday on Tuesday. A church-going Catholic, she has always considered herself to have been especially lucky to have been born on St. Patrick's Day (no matter that she's not Irish, but is a mainly Polish-French mixture). I've mentioned her before, here. About her being Catholic, she might be the only Catholic woman on the planet who has exhibited apparent life-long immunity to what is supposedly universal catholic guilt.

Anyway, I made one of my obligatory phone calls to her on her birthday and found myself asking her what she thought of the idea of me moving to the city she's living in; Weyburn, Saskatchewan.

Clearly the idea has been rolling around in my undermind for a long time. So it finally emerged.

There is background to this: a low hum of discontent all my life with our relationship, a "breakup" with her about 20 years ago, no resolution but a definite truce.. probably all falling under ordinary Mother/Daughter life-long tension. Anyway, I consider myself a grown-up now, and she doesn't seem nearly as big or scary or mean or unfair as she used to when I was a child stuck on a farm with her as my only companion.

My needs are simple. I need time to write, a sunny window, mornings that are clear instead of cloudy, a place where I can live clutter-free in every sense, cheaply, without necessarily having to go out to work just to support a business in order to have it support me back. I need an external environment that feels safe, unlike Vancouver these days with it's gangland shootings at the current rate of about one per day.

Weyburn is this funny little city in the southern part of Saskatchewan where you can see nothing for miles and miles except ... miles and miles. Oh, and a huge upside down bowl of transparent blue sky filled with sunshine most of the year. I must not forget to mention the extraordinary skyscape available to one's photon-starved eyeballs in southern Sask.

It has been the crucible for a few prominent Canadians - Tommy Douglas, former premier of the province and architect of Canada's health care system, and W.O. Mitchell, beloved and famous Canadian humorist and author. I met both of them personally at various times. Tommy Douglas visited our home when I was a child. My father, who rarely got excited about anything, loved this man and his vision, and would have taken a bullet for him. I met W.O. Mitchell later in life, at a dinner party in the home of his nephew. I remember that no one else in the room (about 10 people altogether, maybe) could get a word in edgewise, but that no one seemed to mind. He went on at considerable length about the enormous size of earthworms in Calgary.

Weyburn is also somewhat famous for being the location of a huge mental hospital. In the 1950's it was a scary place where someone we knew worked, I think as an orderly; for some reason our family was friendly with this man, Ab Ruler, and his family. One time he took us all up a shady treed laneway to the "mental hospital" and showed us around a little. We even watched a movie there, The Ten Commandments. The hospital was able to house 900 patients, a capacity equal to a tenth of the entire population of the city, a size that seems very disproportionate to the actual incidence of mental illness in the general population, then and now. It must have represented a collection center for all mental illness patients in Western Canada east of the mountains, and a source of income for many people during the desperate dust-bowl 1930's. LSD experiments were conducted there, in the 50's, 60's... It seems the place was closed as late as 1971.

Anyway, back to the phone call.

I found these words tumbling out of my mouth: "What do you think of the idea of me moving to Weyburn, Mom?" followed quickly thereafter by "I don't want to live with you."

She was taken aback a bit, but very quickly found her footing and sounded delighted with the idea. She started planning immediately. There were condos for sale up the street. She knew a real estate agent I could contact. She knew a spa in town, maybe they'd like to hire me if I wanted to work. The new current under the surface, a swift clear current of feeling, one I can ride until it's over, is that I'm the Oldest Daughter, and can help her remain independent, something she cares desperately about, until it's time for her to make an exit. This current feels congruent with the gravitational pull I have anyway of moving further east, back out from under the cloud, fog, rain and grey dreariness of the Wet Coast.

So, it looks like some day soon I'll be living in a small city, pop. 10,000 and holding, with average age that I think must be older than middle-aged, a speed limit of 40 km. Back to the roots. Arriving "home," just a bit burnt out, with nothing but myself, a laptop, a couple of flash drives, a few special books, in a position (I hope) to be able to take a year off, soak up sun and do what I need to do next.

Progress toward "impeccablization"

Yesterday I managed to get a lot done: I figured out how to post to Craig's list and supplied some pictures to it of furniture I have to clear out in order to attractively "stage" my "home" for a quick and favourable sale. I started cleaning off a large mirrored door I once painted to match the wall, in order to make the hallway not look like such a long tunnel. I still like the shortened look more, but realize the home buyer might not enjoy the prospect of de-painting the mirror some day. Anything to leave no trace of me behind...

I "swabbed the deck" - meaning, I physically hauled several large flower and plant pots and balcony furniture down to the dumpster (from where people eventually made them their own), and washed the railing and floor. It's an extensive balcony, wrapping all the way around a corner.

I think it's been at least 6 years since I've touched that balcony. I used to like to keep a garden on it, sit out amidst the flowers on a plastic chair beside a plastic table, sipping a coffee in the morning and watching bees do their thing, carve out and maintain a peaceful urban oasis. One day I found a package of cigarettes out there. It appeared that someone who had no business on my balcony had climbed up to hang out, enjoy my second-floor garden, or maybe try to break in, had become interrupted, and left abruptly without actually smoking. The cigarettes were a mystery, in that neither I nor the roommate I had at the time smoked. Whoever it was (and it could not have been anyone who belonged on my balcony, in my urban oasis), the experience managed to put me off gardening entirely. From that point on the garden was never restored. I never enjoyed hanging out on the balcony anymore, knowing that it was too exposed, too vulnerable to feel like my private refuge.

Mold grows amazingly well in this climate, and there was no shortage of it, clinging impossibly to even shiny painted surfaces. It was a bit of a dirty mess, but nothing that several pails of warm water with bleach, a scrub brush, and some springtime energy couldn't handle. Now it's spotless and I feel victorious over that part of my tiny world.

Being very active all day like this is certainly easier than it would have been a year ago, when I weighed 25 pounds more.

Adrienne and my cranky leg

I think I lucked out at Sherwood Physiotherapy... a few weeks ago someone dropped by and left off a resumé. Once in awhile people leave resumés, usually for a reception job, but this one was from a PT. I checked it over and liked what I saw. New grad but a mature thirty-two years of age, already through one career as a professional dancer, experience with sports injuries, has already done a research project.

It seemed curious that she would pick my practice to apply to, so I gave her a call to find out more. We decided to meet so I could show her the clinic, then go for coffee. Turns out she wanted to work from my space in order to be convenient for all the dancers that live in the 'hood, where yoga and dance studios are everywhere. She had done her homework, had moved into the neighbourhood three weeks earlier, and decided to aim for employment at my place, which is the only PT clinic for blocks and blocks.

To call it a "clinic" is a bit presumptuous of me... It's more like a room in a nice office suite. A non-PT practitioner also has a practice in that suite, who I get along with quite well. Our practices have no overlap, other than we share the cost of a receptionist. My practice is one-on-one, carefully teasing the pain out of people while accompanying them for one or a few sessions.

It was dreadfully slow in Feb, so there was nothing for her to pick up, but this week is going better. She will take over my normal Wednesday off. See patients. Help pay some of the overhead.

We have been busy getting some promo material together, chatting about pain, treatment... I loaned her some books, the treatment manual I developed. Today she tried out some manual therapy on me.

Well, all I've got to say is the woman has hands on her that are like butter. My cranky right leg (which has been cranky for over 50 years) very much liked what she did to it. It's still working with what she was able to get it to let go of. It feels like it has little happy faces mixed with 7-up bubbles running through its vessels instead of blood. Walking home it felt like it was looser, stronger, longer and didn't get as tired as the left leg did, so I know my S1 cortex must have neuroplasticized a fair bit.

My cranky leg/ankle foot stems from a sprain at age 5. Age 5. I vaguely remember that it hurt for what felt like months. It was never handled, never cared for, never treated.

Lucky for me, I have the right mix of receptors or something, because it never gave rise to CRPS or fibromyalgia or anything. Most of the time it hasn't "hurt", exactly. It just felt shrunken and tight, like the antigravity suit was a bit too tight in the leg zone. No amount of yoga ever helped. Nothing I learned to do (to or with it, on my own) in over 50 years, almost 40 of which was spent being a PT, helped. OMPT certainly didn't help - in fact it made it hurt a lot for awhile. I saw a massage therapist who helped the pain, but my sense of it feeling "wrong" remained. I figured out a lot of my imaginative tape techniques by using my own leg to practice on.

This is all a big lead up to what happened today. I had let Adrienne watch me treat a few people, with their permission of course.. so today she wanted to practice a tarsal tunnel treatment, and knee treatment. Long story short, the work she did felt remarkable, and still does; all the Barrett Dorko characteristics of correction (fondly referred to as C's of C) - warmth, softening, effortless(!) movement (quite a bit of that - twitching, pulsing etc.), surprise (I've not had those sorts of results from other practitioners who've worked on me) - developed during the session. It was like my leg had been waiting for this for a very long time and was more than ready to have its nerves treated instead of its bones and muscles and joints.

So, I'm sold on Adrienne. So's my leg. Here's a little write-up about her that I attached to my website. I feel really good about the prospect, when the time comes, of leaving my practice, and all the people who've come to it for 15 years, in her very, very good hands.

More about making progress

So, today was a serious book day. I spent all morning sifting the remaining 25% of the total, which took hours. I was able to list a few more. I have 144 listed, 5 purchased and off the list.

The entire process feels like molting. Molting is something that often comes as a surprise to a human primate, because we have no fur, really.. yet, most animals molt, and I think we do too, although more in a symbolic, non-conscious way perhaps. I tried to explain this recently to someone.

Apparently even primates molt, so I don't see why it would be outside the world of symbolic or even otherwise non-conscious expression of the human neuromatrix. I think another metaphor would be ripened compost - if it can't decompose any more, it either needs to support growth (die to itself while helping transform something into something else -birthing) or else it needs more scraps to take apart (feeding). If it doesn't move somehow, back into a flow, it is a waste of perfectly good nature. Human lives are long but still all too short to be wasted on regret or stasis. That's how I've always lived the one I've got, at least. A molt: when one's life no longer fits one comfortably, time to move it to a new sleeping nest. It's the human primate way.

Molting seems to be a not-very-enjoyable process for everyone who does it. Insects are at their most vulnerable as they push themselves out of their cocoons. Snakes have to strip themselves out of their own skins by first slashing their face skin on a rock. Birds look absolutely awful when they are partly molted. Dogs shed. Cats shed. Monkeys molt. It's a price critters have to pay. They don't look attractive while molting, and they must feel quite itchy and preoccupied. This all feels familiar to me on a mental level just now.

Last night, while in a wound-up, sleepless state, brought on no doubt by being preoccupied with trying to hold it together on the surface while feeling like everything is falling apart inside, and writing about it, sort of.. I wrote, regarding the mountain of books, "No one wants them - I can't even give them away.

Ha. What a difference a day makes.

I had noticed that whenever I put out a few loads of books they did seem to vanish fast. I accepted that. The neighbourhood is full of dumpster divers patrolling at all hours of the day and night, looking for anything they might be able to sell. This morning I took out a few bags full, went back in, came back out with a bag of garbage not five minutes later. Much to my surprise I found a car parked with its doors open, and a woman and two teenage girls merrily chattering and rapidly scooping up the books, putting them into the car. "Good" I said. "Someone is taking the books." She was about 40, very smiley and merry. "Oh yes, I've been finding piles of books here every day for the last three days. I've been coming over to rescue them! I love books! My mother loves books! I just live over there.." and she gestured across the alley.

So, it turns out that she's lived across the alley from me, a single mom raising her daughters, for years, since before I ever moved into my place. I told her I had a whole pile more and that she was welcome to them. Together we lugged the books over to her place and stacked them on the floor. About 6 round trips with my two plastic baskets and two cloth shopping bags for her. She was ecstatic. She was planning to go to massage school now that her children were nearly launched into life. Many of my discards were books she wanted but would have had a hard time affording, perhaps. Plus, she knows people who know people who can sell them for 50 cents each, or whatever, to raise money for battered women's projects, at used-clothing stores, etc. So hey, letting go of this burden is a good thing that benefits this very nice, nurturing woman and her social network, and helps feed her dream of being a self-sustaining body worker person in some community in the interior some day. It's all good.

A woman I know commented to me recently that I was good at manifesting. I said, "Well, I don't believe in that. But I do believe that situations do emerge, which require resolution, and that resolution of situations is a natural phenomenon." "Oh," she said.

Making progress

The story of this month of February was the story of climbing back up out of winter, fighting off inertia, figuring out how to start a seller account on Amazon and plowing through my biggest problem first - what feels like thousands of books, but which only add up to.. well, maybe one thousand. Which is still a lot of books to deal with.

I soon found out that I couldn't become a seller on Amazon.com. As a Canadian I do not have that privilege. I'm restricted to Amazon.ca. Okie-doakie. As I started to list I realized there was absolutely no point in listing any book for anything less than $20. It costs nearly that much to mail a book somewhere. One has to buy mailing boxes or padded envelopes, some bubble wrap to keep the book safe, etc. Postage varies according to how heavy or big the book is, but rarely will come in under $10.

I learned some things fast - like that I was going to have to face the fact that it would be necessary to toss out most of them. No one wants them - I can't even give them away. Unbelievable. This took some getting used to. I'm ordinarily a resilient person, but these books were my friends, lovingly collected over at least a decade, most of them read or at least scanned, all of them worth another go, some of them worth a great deal more time spent lingering lovingly over their content. It created great disquiet, having to get started on the painful job of deconstructing my library collection. I never expected I'd ever move again as long as I lived, you see. I thought it was safe to start letting things like books accumulate. I had no idea I'd become seasonally affectively disordered to the point of being E-ffectively disordered as well. And realizing the situation and that I had to escape it.

I keep thinking maybe this is what it's like to be old and facing demise. One has a lifetime of treasured moments that one simply cannot share with anyone anymore. One has lost one's ability to do so. Maybe one's life has gone up in a house fire, along with all the pictures. Maybe one loses one's own mind, and the memories have deleted themselves. Maybe everyone in one's particular circle, including family members, is horribly killed in a war or something, and one finds oneself alone in the world. Now, picture yourself having to be the one to deliberately destroy these relationships, be the agent of one's own severance away from the minds of so many others, be the bad guy. Every time I picked up a book, checked it out to see if it was worth any money on Amazon, then put it onto the Keep, Sell, or Toss pile, I felt like I was killing or saving or selling another of my own friends. Only about 1 book in 10 is worth any money, therefore worth listing. I am keeping only about one book in 40. (This is the grief talking.)

It wasn't all bad though - what a happy surprise to learn that a single ortho text I had (and had absolutely no attachment to) was unavailable except for a few listed as "used-good condition", for around $600. I laughed out loud! I listed mine for $100 (I have no idea what I had paid for it new) and it was snapped up within hours. A really old (decades old) joint physiology text I lugged around through several moves sold - I'll be sending it off tomorrow. It's Vol 2 - Vol 1 and 3 are still for sale.

There are other surprises. Some books I bought for 4 or 5 dollars used are worth much much more these days. Alrighty then. They are listed. I started this venture a week ago, and have sent off 5 books so far, made about $200. A side benefit is that I stared a special account for this and have learned to do online banking now. (I feel so modern. It's the pride talking.)

Every day I haul out the less fortunate to the back alley, two bags full. I have two nifty bright colored shopping baskets I bought long ago on a trip to Central America. They are made out of some absolutely indestructible plastic woven into bright stripes and have sturdy handles. I use them for recycle containers usually, but now they are for hauling books I must discard. I still have three large stacks of books to go through, each one as tall as my waist. I've managed to get rid of two half height bookcases about a yard wide. My neighbour snapped them up to hold shoes in her hallway. I'm about three-quarters through the book mountain. (This is the relief talking.)

This whole chapter of life is very much about relief mixed in with regret. It makes me realize that in fact, it is entirely within the capacity of the human system to be able to feel two conflicting emotions, fully, at once, and stretch oneself enough to be able to contain both, and find whatever it takes inside to plow along, move forward anyway. Even if it feels like swimming through quicksand. One simply says to oneself, You can do this. It won't be much longer. Think how much easier life will be once you live in a sunny climate again.

So, by now if you've been reading along, you may be thinking, strange woman, bonded to her books instead of to a family or to other people. Well, in fact, I think I must have seen this whole parting thing and the pain it brings, way in advance, long before I ever experienced any of the joy bonding to others supposedly brings, while still a child. Generally, I've seen that the parting part of intimately relating seems to last a lot longer and be a lot less pleasant than the joining and developing part. At least in my experience. Therefore I have always had a cautious heart - never let it get too attached to any person. Enjoyed friends but never got overly attached. But books - books and cats - those were different stories entirely. I have been very incautious about bonding to both. Both are still capable of breaking my heart, right to this day, when the inevitable parting comes. Perhaps one day I will learn to not be so attached to them either.

My fantasy is to move completely unencumbered by "stuff." Have everything on my computer contained in a couple flash drives. Move into a new space with lots of windows and never again accumulate. Bare walls, bare floor. Painted plain white.

Truth is more like I'll still have boxes of stuff to move. But it will be like the old days when I was a student - just a few boxes: some changes of clothing, some kitchen stuff, some personal things, photos, and maybe 4 boxes of books, the laptop. But no furniture. Sleep on the floor for awhile. Buy a new desk top computer at the other end. Read books online instead. Live light.

Other bits of progress: I have a real estate agent at the other end, and one at this end. I have a good reliable fix-it guy to handle minor repairs here, to help me get my place impeccable-ized. A young woman walked into my PT life and wants to work in my place. I might have even found a buyer for the practice, although it will take a good thorough investigation first. I would take these things as "signs" that I'm on the right track, if I believed in such things. It doesn't seem to help me sleep soundly at night, every night, however. Plenty of tossing and turning and that upheavaled feeling. I swear it feels worse at this age than it used to, way back a couple decades ago.

Humans, the neotenous primate

Deric at Mindblog posted about this essay by Alison Gopnik titled Never-ending childhood.

Excerpts:

"people will have to learn more and more. The best way to make it happen is to extend the period when we learn the most — childhood."

"We may remain children forever — or at least for much longer."

"Humans already have a longer period of protected immaturity — a longer childhood — than any other species. Across species, a long childhood is correlated with an evolutionary strategy that depends on flexibility, intelligence and learning."

"Children get to learn freely about their particular environment without worrying about their own survival — caregivers look after that."

Well, ideally anyway... I think it's debatable. Lots of children all over the world now wander in streets having to be self-sufficient far too young. They get "old" far sooner than they should have to. Meanwhile, "chidren" elsewhere live and grow up to and through sexual maturity in socially reinforced and rewarded bubble zones of childhood and postadolescent protection, until they reach middle age.

The essay ends with,

"When we are all babies for ever, who will be the parents? When we're all children who will be the grown-ups?"

Exactly. Who indeed.

Exceptionalism of the American kind

Human primate life is equal parts bio/psycho/social. Ordinarily I look at the bio part; sometimes the psycho aspect is interesting, but only very rarely (for this introvert) does the big-wide-world social matrix interest me enough to write something on it. This week, the Obama-thon had everyone, even me, glued to a TV set.

The Obama inauguration has come and gone leaving a very big wake. Ripples will come off that event for a long time. Probably nothing since the death of Princess Di has managed to rivet people's attention worldwide to such a single sustained focus for a couple whole days.
.....................

So, I heard Obama talk about American exceptionalism, and wondered what it was. I read a bit about it (including this), and have tried to figure out what its implications are.

As a Canadian, I see the US culture, its political construct, its way of organizing itself as a human primate troop, its behaviour and its impact, against a whole backdrop of older, tamer, more restrictive, certainly more ubiquitous, settled, and staid political systems, such as monarchy, or even dictatorship, where things settled into more less stable layers a long time ago. Boring, right? On the surface, the insistence on democracy sounds very very good, very refreshing. (I think 200+ years is a mere blink in social, human primate troop time.)

To me the term suggests pride in deliberate disinhibition of human potential, deliberately facilitated by a "human primate troop" (societal) political structure which accelerates movement between strata both laterally and vertically, horizontally and diagonally. It has always seemed to me that the "American Way" is self-congratulatory on its success at having developed a system that managed to un-lid human creativity, ingenuity, efficiency, adaptability, and effervescence. That is something everyone of every culture, country, age and color, is immediately addicted to. It's a manifestation of "people" power, and everyone wants to wear its symbols, eat the candy.

I watched Obama test the political part of the US electoral system, from the lowest P4 level deep down, on up to the pinnacle of the system, and prove it works - after all, he did go from being a potentially laid-back Hawaiian kid of a single mom, to being president of the US, in under 50 years. He proved that the idea that "anyone can become president" isn't just a myth - he figured out the trick! He studied, took apart the political machine, analyzed it, and was able to convince a majority that he is willing to and can put it all back together again, in working order. This says something about him, his choices, how he was raised, for sure, but it also says a lot about a system that anyone, REALLY, not just theoretically, can learn to manipulate, leverage to advantage.

He must be the world's most successful extrovert. He represents the people of the entire planet. He still smokes. That's got to make the tobacco lobby happy. Clearly he can think and plot. Read and write. Make great speeches. And look good.
.........


The dark side I see in American exceptionalism is this: It may have created its own demise from the beginning, due directly to having deliberately laid in political dis-inhibition, permitting social "upward causation" instead of functioning as social inhibition, keeping a lid on things, the way other political systems do.

I think this memeplex (which had never really existed, prior, at a nation level, start to finish), emerged as a raging cachectic economic fireball which started out small, 200 odd years ago, but which is now consuming everything, including everyone everywhere who was ever mesmerized by the spectacle of a country that gets-things-done no matter how much it might cost, whose business is business, whose might has rested on seeing how fast it can transform "nature" (which it calls "resources") into another second artificial circulation system of other stuff/money that isn't alive and is therefore hard for nature to take apart again. Runaway growth. Poking holes in the planet as fast as possible to extract oil as fast as possible. Using up nature. It all set an unfortunate example for the rest of the peoples on the planet, and they copied. (Damn those human primate mirror neurons.)

If Obama can manage to turn something like this around, green up US citizenry, grow the country a bit of a conscience, help it find some smooth way to stop acting like a reckless teenager banging the whole planet around, every human on the planet will be grateful to him. He won't be just another poser filling a job slot, he'll have been for real.

The Game he'll have to play, the thing that will keep all eyes riveted on him, is to stay suspended in mid-air (like this picture of him effortlessly playing basketball), so that no one spots his "tell", so that no one will know to the very last millisecond which way he is going to come down or which part will touch down first.

Mesmerize by continuous motion coupled with frequent reflection outward of attractive toothy grin, calm inner state, deliver all news (including the bad) in even soothing sedate studied tones, leave no stone unturned (take the oath twice just to make sure), report any progress, and obstacles, cheer on human creativity, ingenuity, efficiency, adaptability, and effervescence, but bend it toward solving social problems instead of making more of them through allowing the American memeplex to go unchecked with a social kind of "downward causation" - i.e., encouraging the sole objective of making more stuff/money => and fighting wars all over the place to maintain access to resources => to make stuff/money... etc.etc.

I'm so glad, if the perhaps overly optimistic US economic system had to fall apart some day, that it fell apart while Bush was still in office. The timing couldn't have been better, really, in that no one will ever be able to blame that on Obama. The political system may also collapse some day, but while it's still functional I'm glad that Obama is the one who has taken it on. It's as though he has volunteered to be the engineer on a freight train which has experienced sudden loss of brakes and is hurtling downhill. Maybe he can figure out how to steer it safely, maybe repair the brakes before it's too late... wishful thinking. The train looks like it's going to crash, but maybe he can save most of the passengers. At least he seems to care about them...

I say all this as someone from a more staid, less fast-moving, monarchist, pseudo- (by US standards) democracy slightly to the north of the US., with lots of resources, fewer people, which has never been in any great hurry to use them up completely as fast as possible. The pace is slower - we like to wait for nature to grow back a bit before we cut it down again..

Our head of state, Michaelle Jean, is a black first generation Haitian refugee, who (as far as I know) doesn't smoke. She was appointed to represent the queen.


Mostly she gets to travel and look good and attend tea parties, but if political trouble brews, as it did here last fall, she flies home, turns to page 57, section D paragraph 3, point viii, (or wherever) and does what's written in the traditional rulebook. Simple.
We have a protocol for everything, you see, and it saves everyone lots of stress, let's everyone get back to their respective tea parties.

The politicians of Canada are decidedly not noted for any creativity, ingenuity, efficiency, adaptability, and effervescence. They show up (usually) and (usually) keep things rolling along, but Canuck citizens are not required to participate in government in anything like the way US citizens are all expected to contribute. (I was amazed that the US ballots are several pages long, that each person who votes has to become familiar with every issue and its implications, that nothing much happens until and unless ordinary citizens haul themselves out to become informed about then vote on each item. Here, we, the Canuck citizens, hire politicians to do all that. We have all adopted our own versions of the "downward causation" tea party memeplex, instead, I suppose.)

I do not see that the citizens of the US have gotten much for their trouble so far. I see that, so far, the "democracy" they continue to have to pour effort and personal sacrifice into hasn't looked after them yet. Maybe it will start soon.

I also see that US citizens finally spotted someone who made them stop feeling tired and burnt out. Who has made them feel like maybe they can stop feeling oppressed, or like they maybe won't have to fight each other and the government for each and every scrap they have coming to them. Someone who might actually stop trying to hoover up all the remaining resources on the entire planet, and who might listen to them for a change, might try to re-route a few organized efforts their way to make ordinary lives a bit easier, less expensive, who might even help lighten the load on the whole planet for a change, make everything less expensive. Who might see "people" as integral bits of the earth, and the earth as the only place we all can ever "live." Who might see that it's time to stop acting like there's no tomorrow, now that there might not actually be much of a "tomorrow"...

Maybe even change the meaning of "exceptionalism" so that it more accurately reflects what US people are really all about, a very hard-working, self-democratized human primate troop, so we all get to see what kind of global conduct and capacity to carry responsibility they've really been training themselves for two centuries or thereabouts to have, and how they see what's going on/going down.

Can an entire human troop (the people of the US) lead all the other slower troops (every other country)? Can the supposedly less politically blind lead the presumably more blind? Out of a dangerous chasm it led everyone/everything into in the first place? Perhaps just by using up the planet faster than it could replenish itself?

I guess we'll all find out one day, in retrospect, if this is so. Maybe Obama will be able to arrange that. Meanwhile, I will continue to watch him, listen to him. I felt included in his address, because he included everybody, everywhere, and mentioned non-believers alongside other groups specified. It's a nice warm fuzzy to have one of one's primary groups be recognized, by name, by the newest politically alpha human primate of the entire world's human primate troop.

Additional reading:
1. Getting there from here (Atul Gawande on health care reform, New Yorker Jan 26/09)
2. Path dependence - definitions
3. Compatibilism from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
4. "If the world were a village of 1000 people"
5. American Exceptionalism - A Double Edged Sword (Lipset)
6. On America's Double Standard: The good and bad faces of exceptionalism by Harold Hongju Koh (2004)

Insular Winter Wallowing

I've been interested in the insular cortex for a long time now, thanks to Deric Bownd's Mindblog having introduced me to this brain part, and also the posts over there about Sandra Blakeslee's book, The Body has a Mind of its Own, about brain maps. Sandra Blakeslee follows the research of A.D.Craig, who studies the insula from the perspective of its relationship to ascending nociception. Awareness of what's going on on the inside of one's physicality and of oneself (whatever self is), is called interoception. The brain is continuously interocepting, and one can merely tune in if one wants. In my work, I teach people to become aware of their physicality, while mostly leaving it up to them to hook their new ability to perceive their physicality up to them"selves."

Deric Bownds has a new post, How do you feel - now? The anterior insula and human awareness, which describes a new Craig paper by the same name. The paper is in Nature Neuroscience Reviews. It's full of interesting ideas; like the hub of a bicycle wheel, spokes go everywhere from this paper. I haven't yet even begun to digest it, but might blog more about various spokes later.

Meanwhile, I found an old article, Flesh made Soul, by Sandra Blakeslee, on interoception and spirituality, which I found very interesting on re-read. (Here is a link to her articles page. You have to find Flesh made Soul, about fourth down the list at this time.) She talks about interoception and wonders if it has anything to do with spiritual feelings. She is an atheist, which I find reassuring.

I have been wallowing in my own insular cortices (one on each side and they do different things) for many weeks, and will continue to wallow into the indistinct future. Posts might be sparse for a little while as I sort through the prospect of pulling up an entire life that I had thought was finally settled, and moving on to a sunnier place. I will be back, but not right away, probably.

Vancouver photon levels

Pictures were taken today, at about 2 PM. Note the low light levels and black and white/colorlessness overall. Things could be worse, photon-wise, there could be no snow at all. At least with snow, photons bounce around some.
I don't know why I'm still living here. I do know I can't for very many more years.

"Can I be ill and happy?"

A PT friend sent me a link to an article called Can I be ill and happy? about a book he is reading, Illness: Cry of the Flesh, by Havi Carel, a philosopher, also the author of the article.

A review of the book found on the sales page says (abbreviated):

"This book is a tremendous achievement, as well as being a very moving personal document. It is a philosophical meditation on the nature of and social meaning illness, disease and death. It discusses philosophical and psychological literature, Epicurus, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. But it is also a personal memoir, it is about Carel's experience of being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, about what that meant for her presence in the world, about how she appeared in the eyes of others, and how she felt she appeared. It is about the encounter with medical professionals and their detached and external perspective on another's catastrophe; it is about the varied reactions of friends, some of whom couldn't maintain friendship. It is about how to confront the fact that all your assumptions about how your life is going to go: career, relationships, family, old age, can just be taken away. Carel was diagnosed with lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), a rare disease that affects young women, and for which the progosis is about 10 years from the onset of symptoms. The sufferer experiences a progressive decline in lung-function over that time. Life may be extended by a heart-lung transplant, but that's, obviously, a difficult business. .... She uses Merleau-Ponty's ideas about embodied subjectivity throughout the book to explore what illness is like for the sick person and how powers and abilities that are invisible to and taken for granted by the well person become all too manifest to the sick (or disabled or ageing) person. All the time, she is constantly moving backwards and forwards between this theoretical discussion and the fact of her own experience: the first onset of symptoms, "denial", diagnosis, treatment, the foreclosure of plans, projects, possibilities. The phenomenology of social situations gets explored too: how people react, their sensitivities and insensitivities, callous reactions, stupid injunctions from ignorant people to try faddish diets of exercise routines."

Another review.
Excerpt:

"The book seamlessly blends philosophical writings in illness (mainly those of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger) with phenomenology to privilege the first-person experience of illness. It begins with a discussion of what is meant by the phenomenology of illness, and by the end of the first chapter it is clear why Carel chose to adopt a phenomenological approach. We learn more about how the illness affects her on a personal basis, rather than a simple statistical charting of her decreasing lung function.

Next, Carel examines the social world of illness. She suggests that rather than viewing illness through either the first or third person (depending on your relationship to it), it should be managed through what Buber calls the I-Thou encounter, of one person genuinely encountering another. Using this approach to illness, Carel argues that the principal exchange between doctors and patients should be more empathetic and compassionate, rather than based on the "objective" method most commonly associated with Western approaches to health and illness.

Later chapters examine death and what Carel terms "health within illness". Here, the philosophical discussion centres on Heidegger's characterisation of human existence as "being able to be". Carel asks whether ageing and illness means coming to terms with being unable to be. Given that somebody might be ill, does being ill mean that he or she is unable to have a good life?"

Definitely looks like it would be worth a read. Looks like it will contain all sorts of extractable information useful to anyone embedded in a humanantigravitysuit complete with lifespan, whether short or long, coded into it.

Sensory awareness

So, I've been noticing my skin and how it feels since I got back. Well, all along really, but one thing I realize is how much more I am aware of it. I expect that my brain had become quite bored with 18 years of sameness and craved some new kinesthetic input.

Differences:

1. I became quite used to wearing light loose clothing (and not much of it) in Hawaii. The big difference is footwear. I absolutely hated the idea, two mornings ago, of putting on socks and shoes for the trip home on the plane. I thought about wearing flipflops until the last second, in the boarding lounge, but decided that would require too much effort, so put the flipflops in the luggage and donned the socks and shoes. But guess what I saw in the lounge? At least two people had worn flipflops from their condos, and were sitting in the boarding lounge digging out and putting on their socks and shoes. The first idea would have been the better one, and socially facilitated to boot.
2. Since I've been back, my feet, which have become reacquainted with the joys of perfect shoeless bareness and freedom and complete warmth, have been allowed to go without slippers. When they get cold, I can "feel" it, and they are put into slippers. I'm just more aware of my feet, period. They feel good!
3. My skin still feels warm from having had a taste of sunshine and direct radiation on it, in all the parts that had some. Back mostly. My back still feels deliciously warm, in the zone where it became tanned.
4. I feel better inside myself, whatever self is: my working hypothesis is that by stimulating the skin nerve endings with climatic warmth, and light, not just the ones in the eye-balls, there is a new congruence or even maybe reacquaintance of the visual sensory cortex with the kinesthetic sensory cortex, and some neuroplasticity has occurred, neuroplasticity of the most overdue sort. The thing is, I had gotten very very very far away from sunbathing. For so many reasons:

• Skin cancer. I don't care as much anymore about this, as I've gotten old enough that I imagine I will outlive the chances of it starting up then killing me.
• Having aged and fattened and become more shy about degree of body coverage. In Hawaii no one, and I mean no one, cares, or at least there is little or no gawking. The whole culture of the place is that the body is exactly where you live and operate from and it does not matter what it looks like. The culture there is not a snob, in other words.
• Here in Vancouver, even when it's hot out, it's such a rare event that most people are not in the habit of lying around in the sun. So the opportunities that do exist are missed, except I suppose for those with their own pool in their own yard to lie beside. Not a fact of life for most, so most everyone stays covered. Plus... it's always cool here, even on hot days, because as soon as you go in the shade or a cloud goes across, bam, it's immediately cold enough to be comfortable in ordinary cool-weather clothing and footwear. Poor brains! In cold climates they miss out on a lot of sensory integration! And then this behaviour gets reinforced by culture.
  
• I feel I reconnected to the sensory self I was as a child, with complete bodily freedom, few clothes and no shoes. More neuroplasticity there, through the arrow of time.

One little detail I forgot, a brilliant sensory cap to the entire vacation, was the big rainbow over the airport. It seemed to last for a very long time, at least an hour. As the plane took off it was visible out one of the windows in my line of sight. Nice send-off Hawaii - thanks for that.

Luck

Back home again. Lots of snow here. The plane landed about midnight. There were no cabs. Lucky for me, after schlepping my three bags about a quarter mile outside the airport, I saw a cabbie sitting, waiting.. I approached him, learned he was waiting to pick up his daughter. He was a nice guy and took pity on me - he and his daughter took me to my place anyway, and he kept us entertained with stories about all the novelty involved with driving in heavy snow.

It seems the city literally ground to a halt. Everyone's holiday plans went awry. No one could travel in or out of the city, which was buried under two feet of snow delivered by sideways winds. The airport could only operate one runway. Taxi drivers who lived in areas that got socked in couldn't get out to go to work, so they just laid low. No grocery deliveries could be made. Nothing moved for days.

Meanwhile, I was carefree in Maui with little or no attachment to the holiday part of the season, and therefore no plans ruined, having a mytai Christmas eve with the other carefree grey-haired people under a roofed area under a tropical rain, letting rum internally massage my spirit into something a bit brighter. Lucky me.

Last night's flight coincided with a lull in the weather such that there was only a two hour delay instead of a two day delay. Lucky me again. I came into my peaceful apartment last night, about 1:30 AM, tried to not wake up any neighbours, felt my familiar surroundings around me once again, noted that all seemed well, that my neighbour had very kindly piled my mail neatly, had watered the plant, and had made the place look lived in, in exchange for the promise of a couple boxes of those decadent chocolate macadamia nuts. Lucky me yet again for having a wonderful neighbour. Hello place - how strangely familiar yet novel, both at the same time.

This morning I checked to see what damage had been inflicted on the diet plan - only one pound gained, in spite of a steady diet of chocolate macadamia nuts, eggs benedict and mytais. Not bad I think. And it's been very easy to climb right back onto the former plan again today. Yet more luck.

I walked to the grocery store this morning, about a half kilometer there and another back. I loved the coolness of the air - just as much as I loved the warmth in Maui. It isn't cold out - I mean, no need for hat or mitts, just cool against a face that is still warm from direct sun. The sky, while not blue, is definitely letting sun through in some places. Way less bird song. No wind. No roar of surf. Very hushed, bright, peaceful. "Bright" is a new adjective - snow makes a huge difference to the overall photon level. I could even see my shadow, rare in these foggy dark edgeless parts.. lucky lucky lucky.

Yes, I think it will be possible to get through this winter in pretty good shape for a change. I feel an inner congruence that I haven't sensed in a long long time. Luck, my old friend, welcome back into my life. More snow is expected, and no complete melt until February. Sounds crazy, I realize, but I sincerely hope that's true.