Scalding Hot Chocolate and other pointless ramblings

I have a probably unhealthy adoration of boiling hot hot chocolate.  Boil the water, pour over Carnation hot chocolate, stir and DRINK.  Waiting is for pussies.

Maybe it’s because of my constant coldness.  Maybe it’s a love of intense sensations.  Maybe I’m a masochist on many levels.

I don’t know for sure, but I do know that I can’t get enough of it when it’s in that blindingly hot stage.

NOM.

And yes, that’s right.  I have absolutely nothing inspirational to say and while some would suggest that such a situation calls for silence, today I choose to blather in my pointlessness AND share it with you, rather than sit quietly, twiddling my thumbs, and contemplating the misty rain that is encouraging me to stay indoors.

I’m sitting here, thinking about what I want to do with my life and how most ‘fun’ options involved less income.

But then, I don’t want to give up my current lifestyle.  After all, what if I couldn’t afford hot chocolate anymore?  My vocal chords might be saved, but my soul would be lost without access to the glorious agony of too-hot-liquid coursing down my throat into my belly.

And isn’t belly a great word?  Our bellies are wonderful things.  They hold food and scalding hot beverages.  They carry babies (think the broad arena of our belly area, not the specific organs involved lol) for some people.  Others of us just look like we’re carrying babies (recently took a trip with great friends and I came back with a “vacation baby” because the food was just that good).  Our bellies can move and dance.  They remind us with gurgles and grumps to look after ourselves by eating.  They hold our nervousness for us.  They know true satisfaction.

Bellies are good.

Bellies like to be stroked.  Well, so does the rest of our bodies, but let us not get sidetracked from the wonder of the belly.  Even the word has such a full and lovely ring to it.  It leads our mouth right into a smile, how beautiful is that?

Sometimes my emotions take over my belly and it transforms from a happy little elf or other such creature into a demonizing monster intent on culinary destruction of a grand sort.  I really shouldn’t blame my belly for that, though.  It isn’t my belly’s fault that my emotional issues like to smother themselves under a pile of food.  Wafer thin mint?

But today is not about the negative places the belly gets dragged to (and I mean dragged because it’s not like it’s a simple happy sensation being overfull from emotionally driven eating), it’s about the glory of the belly.  Particularly when filled with scalding hot chocolate.

Hail the BELLY!

~Saturn

Gorging

Had to do the grocery shopping today, part of life’s necessities, but I also do it as a once/week big shop and cook to see me through most of the week (too busy most days to worry about cooking and that pesky lunch thing!  just nicer to have leftovers to reheat).

I was in the grocery store and I wanted desperately to pick up something tasty and satisfying that I could gorge myself on.  That I could eat until the deepest parts of my soul were satisfied.  I wanted to slurp it up, shove it in my mouth, eat and eat and eat until utterly and completely satiated.

This is not a good feeling.

This is a feeling born of something deeper and nastier.

But I didn’t think about that.  I just wanted to satisfy the craving <little voice in back of head crying out “warning!  WARNING!!!”>.

Problem was, I’ve embraced a fiscally responsible world, with a budget for things like groceries, and I’ve been working on losing weight by being conscious of what I’m eating.

So everything I looked at either a) cost money I wasn’t willing to spend or b) wasn’t perfect enough for satisfying the gorge desire to warrant the calorie cost.

Went through the whole grocery store going, “hmmm?”  ummmm  “naaaahhh”.  It was a rather annoying and clearly pointless trip to the store.  I bought vegetables and meat for tonight’s dinner and this week’s lunches.  Cereal for breakfast.  A vitamin and fresh bandaids (Disney princess faeries this time hehehe).  No donut croissants, no bags of chips, no chocolate bar or candy or anything “bad” for me yet oh-so-tasty.

Why?  Because every temptation I picked up I did an internal test of “will this satisfy my need to gorge?  Enough so that it’s worth the calorie & financial cost?”  And the answer was always no.

And you know what happened when I got home?

I had my cereal breakfast for dinner (it was a weird and rather backwards day in many ways).  And I felt full.  Not utterly satisfied, but full and in no need of further food.  So much for the gorging desire.  A bowl of cereal filled me up to the “I don’t want to eat anymore right now” state.

This was an almost accidental handling of the emotional burning urge that underlied the gorging desire.

And I’m damn glad.

If I was really good I’d sit down with the feeling and get closer to understanding its source and its underlying need.  But instead, heading to bed, strangely satisfied with the results of my day.

It’s Your Life

It is, you know.  Just yours.  No one else’s.

You decide when to get up and when to sleep (don’t try that “I have to get up for work” shyte on me because working is still a choice, making it your decision ultimately to get up.)

You decide who to love.

And who to hate.  (You may be influenced by other people, but your emotions belong to you, and no one else.)

You own your life.  All of it.  Every scrappy, crappy, happy piece of it.

So sink your hands into it!  Go deep, into the wrists, the elbow, the armpits.  Sink down deep into your own life and wrap it around you like the smoothest fabric, the softest embrace, the best, most tangled, wrapped up, caught up, cuddled up enfolding of yourself into yourself.

Take hold so deep, so hard, that no one can ever separate you from yourself again.

Grab hold of your life and love it, hate it, feel it, share it, f*ck it, dream it, OWN it.

It’s yours.

Not your friends’.  Not your parents’ or your family’s.  Not your boss’s and not even your kids’, pets’ or fern’s.  It’s bloody well yours.

And absolutely no one can tell you otherwise.

Not even yourself.

You can try and toss away your life, your responsibility, your choices and decisions but in the end such actions always fail because no one owns your life but you.

Which means no one can ever take it away from you.

It’s your life.

Live strong.

~Abysmal Witch

The Power of Touch

a.k.a. the Power of Cuddling.

On real joy of being stuck lying down for months is the amount of cat cuddle time I’ve gotten in.  Particularly with my oldest cat, she’s 14, sweet and so neurotic she’s on Prozac.

The hours we have spent with her curled up on me during the bad months.  I’m sure she slept on my for 3, 4, possibly more hours on individual days during the worst of the pain.

She prefers to be up high on my chest so that the back of her head, her neck or her back is up close near my chin.  Many times right up against.  Then there was the odd day where she would be across my chest with her legs outstretched on either side of my head.  Okay, sure, there was fear that if there was some loud, startling noise, that she’d slice my face right open as she fled from it, it was still really sweet and cute and cuddly.

And ultimately soothing for me.  Keeping to a happy state of mind has had its rough moments over the past few months.  I also had to keep from getting too bored or frustrated or annoyed with my incapacitated and horizontal state.  I believe my sweetie really helped with that

Touch is powerful.  It is extremely personal.  It reaches straight through to our inner selves.  And it’s not just touch with other people.  It’s connecting with our pets and our environment, from our clothes, to bedding, to anything that our skin comes in contact with.

If I had more energy left I’d go on more, but instead I’ll leave the topic there for the time being and only add:

Go get your cuddle on!

Day 12? of Hell

I’m writing this out so that I won’t completely forget what the past couple of weeks have been like when (notice the optimism of when cf. if) the pain finally goes.

Yes, pain.  Agonizing, excrutiating, overwhelming, unignorable, incapacitating pain.

Apparently I have a slipped/herniated disc leading to sciatica.  Did you know that there is a posterior sciatic nerve (which is the agonizing pain straight down the back of the leg) AND an anterior sciatic nerve (which causes pain down the outside of the leg)?  I didn’t.  But now I do, and oh OW how I know it.

The onset was slow, inexplicable, no sudden movement or funny accident that caused a sudden burning agony.  Instead it was slow.  At first I thought it was just a muscle ache.  One that lingered for two weeks growing increasingly worse.

I finally dealt with it by going to the chiropractor who put my hip back in (apparently it was strangely twisted) but alas the pain didn’t disperse.

It got worse.

I saw the chiropractor again, then the physiotherapist, twice, then a doctor at work.  That visit was simply because the pain was too much by then.  Or so I thought.

HA!

There was such a remarkable scale of pain yet to be encountered.

So I got painkillers, tramadol.  At this stage sitting was pretty problematic and walking hurt, and I couldn’t stand still, but little did I know what was yet to come.  The tramadol helped.  Mildly.  Fyi, tramadol is a synthetic opiate.  Over the counter was doing shit all so it was time for the big guns.

But the big gun wasn’t really cutting it so once my doctor’s office opened again I went in to see her (This was about Dec 21?).  Thus the diagnosis of a slipped disc.  And you know what you can do about it?

Shit all.

Take drugs, stay mostly immobile, wait for the swelling to go down.  

So I got a triple prescription of more tramadol for the pain, cyclobenzaprine for a muscle relaxant and naproxen for the anti-inflammatory.  Did I mention that my doctor is in Vancouver but I live 45 minutes away in New West?  My head went woozy at least twice on that drive home from the pain of sitting.

I made it to the Pharmasave and got my prescriptions filled in under 8 minutes.  Yes, I looked that bad.

Made it home, got the medications, water and myself to the couch and I’ve basically existed between the couch and bed ever since.  Luckily for me, pretty nearly every day felt the same or worse (mostly worse).  The outside of my left foot went numb (I long for the day I can feel my baby toe again) and a couple of days ago the numbness migrated up the outside of my leg to my knee.

Do you know what you do for this?  You wait.  Because in most cases it goes away on its own.

Within a couple of days of when I admitted defeat and collapsed at home, the pain for standing and walking had grown to the point where I could only stand or walk for a minute or two before I *had* to get back to a prone position or collapse weeping.  I don’t remember the last time that I cried from pain (the tattoo doesn’t count imo) or nearly passed out from it.

Huge massive thank you’s to my friends and family for helping me out through this.  For things like groceries, the new pain prescription (I’m now on ‘real’ narcotics – oxycodone/supeodol) and kitty litter cleaning, etc.

Naturally with any action causing shooting agony followed by waves of scorching pain once I was horizontal again, I was very limited in what I could do, forcing me to consider what where the most necessary things in life.

Hair brushing didn’t make that list.  Teeth brushing only occasionally.  And everything had to be orchestrated for maximum time standing effectiveness.

My days have gone something like this, where this is the worked out most efficient morning when the pain has been at its worst:

• wake up and cringe because the first hour of the day sucks
• reach down and grab yesterday’s pajamas and put them on carefully while still lying in bed (if they were getting too smelly they would get changed out during the day if I had a shower or bath)
• grab the water bottle, pain medication and cell from beside the bed and head straight to the kitchen
• feed the cats as quickly as was humanly possible (they’re now on wet food but that’s a whole different story) and pick up yesterday’s food plates (picking them up the previous day would be an extraneous action, you see), and grab a banana
• limp frantically to couch, drop phone, pills and cell beside couch as I collapse carefully onto it
• spend 5-15 minutes (depending on the day) with waves of pain rolling up and down my body that I keep breathing through and consciously relax into so that they’ll pass faster.
• eat banana and take all three medications (anti-inflammatory requires food with pill)
• get up and go to the bathroom.  On a good day I would brush my teeth first, most days my teeth got brushed several hours into the day.  First because sitting down (and that’s what our toilets require) causes too much pain so after the bathroom it’s always straight back to proneness on the couch.
• spend 10-25 minutes recovering
• spend day alternating between couch on back and for short periods of time on stomach.
• getting a meal was usually get up, throw bagel into toaster oven, crash back onto couch and breath through pain, get up when ding said done, put cream cheese on bagel, crash back down on couch and eat
• there were occasional bathroom breaks, always leading to owie time on the couch
• if no one came over who I could convince to clean kitty litter, then I would do that at some point during the day
• I have read many books.  Hardcovers are easier on the wrists if you rest them on your chest when you read them.
• I have watched a ridiculous amount of tv.  Turns out that dvd’s require you to bend or kneel down to pick the next one and then y0u have to be in that same torturous position to change out the dvd.  Not worth it.
• I have had several visits, yay peeps!
• I have cuddled cats.  A lot.  I’ve also kicked them off me a lot when the pain was too much
• This is the first day I’ve been capable of spending any time on the computer typing, so not a lot of net surfing has been happening.  Okay, essentially none.
• I have waited for a positive change in my condition (ssshhhh, don’t tell anyone but I think today is better than yesterday!)
• I missed half of present opening on xmas day due to overwhelming pain.  There was an incident involving a 140 pound dog stepping on my breast (on the piercing no less!) causing back spasm on top of the pain of the 10 minute drive to get to mom’s house, not to mention the agony of walking from apartment to car.
• Each day has been measured in time chunks related to when I would next take a pill (one was 2 x/day, 1 was 3x/day, another was 4…you get the idea)
• And in the middle of it I got my period.  Wimpiest period I’ve had in probably two decades, for which I am eternally grateful.

Thankfully the drugs kept me from caring too much.  Sleeping’s been torture though.  Turns out that I have three sleeping positions:  they are all flat on my back and simply variations of how my legs are arranged.  I never sleep on my back, as in it’s practically impossible for me to fall asleep except on my stomach or maybe my side.  So I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in almost two weeks.  That doesn’t help I must say.

I have learned that looking after my cats’ needs is one of my basic requirements of living (it’s a responsibility thing), then that which may help me get better.  Food and water.  Everything after that, and I mean everything, was negotiable.  Because doing anything results in lying flat on my back breathing through waves of pain.  And that’s for things that took two minutes or less.  Washing hair is at least 8 minutes of standing = lamaz breathing agony.

Okay, done now, pain calling.

Oh, with one addition, this isn’t shared as a pity request.  I really do want a record from when I’m in the midst of this for later when I forget, and in case anyone wonders why they haven’t heard from me, well, this is why.

Ciao bellas/bellos.  🙂

Self-negotiations with a side of lunacy

Do you negotiate with yourself?  Make deals?  Body, if you do this, I’ll give you that?

As if we’re somehow separate creatures.  Though then again, with our component thinking, feeling, being parts, we kind of are separate creatures sharing one poor out-of-luck body.

But I digress.

Since I can’t wait for you to respond, I will continue as if you had agreed with me (oh, suddenly the megalomania of it!  Love it!  In my head you are all suddenly puppets and I’m in charge!  Oh, shit.  I’m in charge?  I don’t want to be in charge!  Don’t you dare be my puppets.  You had better all be free thinkers evaluating your own perspective of my ramblings. If you’re not, I’ll, I’ll…make faces at you and be most disappointed.)  Where was I?

Oh, yes, so I negotiate with myself.  This week was about food.  My knee still isn’t up to snuff and there have been many opportunities for lovely eating extravaganzas.  It’s a simple equation and it wasn’t working in my favour.

So I started negotiating with my body about this sugary, fatty food habit and how for the health of all of us it really needed to slow down.

Can you guess how that went?  Exactly, body snickered in my general direction and flipped me the bird.

But here’s the trick, I didn’t tell the body what I wanted and walk away thinking that it would magically listen to me and do what I say.  And I didn’t ignore the insults and walk away.

I sat down with me and let me emote all over the place.  I asked myself the question of why I wanted the food.

And then I FELT the answer.  I don’t know about yours, but my body doesn’t talk in words.  It talks in desires and emotions and feelings.

How did it feel about my healthy food plan?  Pretty fucking pissed.  How dare I simply assume that giving up the tasty treats was okay?  Don’t I know that it likes the extra weight?

Do you? I asked.  Why do you feel that way?  And do you remember how it felt when we were in shape?  That the workouts were hard, but how good it was afterwards?

A very reluctant agreement.  Further exploration of feelings and needs and desires.  Slightly better agreement.

It’s an on-going discussion.  But isn’t that the way it should be?  A shared multi-level experience of living.

Happy negotiating!

~Abysmal Witch

Life is Good – Savour it when tasty

You know those moments, right?  When you stop whatever you’re doing for a mental check in and just feel *good*.

And it’s not necessarily about anything in particular.  In fact, there may be a shit storm flying through your world, but right in that moment, in that centeredness of being, you feel and remember that life is good to live.

Okay, sure, there may be a few sweat-induced endorphins helping to inspire the sensation <ah-hem> but still, isn’t it great to be alive?  To know people?  To see the sunset?  To experience and taste and touch and giggle and shiver and feel so in love with life that your heart is going to explode with the joy of it all?

And if this sounds like over the top hooey to you, have you thought about how cool it would be to share my ecstatic/joyful/just-plain-satisfied sense of being?  You know you wannnnna.

Dance with some favourite music, smell some good smelling flowers, eat your favourite fruit, touch your skin with your favourite fabric (or person if they’re handy) and realize how damn good it is to be alive.

Booya!

Spirit and Body-Part 2

How do we reconcile the two viewpoints of:

1) I need to learn to accept and love my body as it is

and

2) I want my body to be healthier, fitter and, let’s face it, thinner than it is now?

I believe it can be done.

For any craft that we do, from writing to witchcraft or knitting or biking or whatever hobby or activity you want to insert here, we always have our current state of competence or being and our desired goal of competence or being.

When I did pottery I was ecstatic when I finally made a bowl that was recognizably a bowl.  I was very happy with it.  Just because I was happy with it didn’t mean that I wanted to stop learning and becoming better as a potter.  When I made my first big bowl, it was a huge deal and I was thrilled.  But it didn’t stop me from wanting to do more.

Each level of skill attained made me happy and I was pleased with where I was but I also wanted to improve myself.

The same applies to our bodies.

We can love our bodies for where they are now.  And honestly, dammit we should.  Without them there wouldn’t be flavours, touch, dancing or any incarnate experience.

And while we love them as they are now, we are welcome to seek improvement.

But it is improvement we need to seek!  And where improvement is becoming healthier.

If we recognize and accept that the ultimate goal is to be healthy *and none of the other measurements matter* then it is very easy to reconcile the two statements.  Because we are simply loving who we are now and working to improve, make healthier, our bodies.

And the best part about this reconciliation?

We can ask our bodies to help us with it.

That’s right.  It is no longer a war with our bodies, a constant battle to transform them into some intellectual (and sadly probably culturally determined) ideal.  It is a union, a partnership towards a shared goal.

Gods, what a wondrous feeling, to work with my body (who utterly adores me, btw, irrespective of how horribly I treat her sometimes) and spirit together to become the healthiest me I can be.

Let me reiterate this point.  When you love your body (who also loves you) and you accept that you can love your body as it is now then TOGETHER you can work towards becoming healthier in the future.

It’s not a constant battle of the mind thinking chocolate is bad and the body craving it or the body wanting to sleep in and you forcing it to go for a walk.

Instead, it is a recognition that the body has its things that it desires that isn’t good for it, but if you accept that and work with the body, it can release most times those desires and work with you on those things that make you both healthier.

This is not a master/slave relationship.  This is a partnership built on love and hopefully eventually trust.

The mind isn’t always right so as part of that partnership it needs to listen to the body.  Sometimes the body really does need that sleep or that chocolate, in order to be healthy (and happy).

Invite your body to work with you on becoming more healthy.  That’s what I’m going to do.

I don’t know yet how this will turn out.  But I do know one thing, I will be a much happier person now that I can go around not hating myself (after all, we are who we are and my body needs all of my love just as it gives me all of its) and still work towards improving myself but where improvement is in my health, not in my looks.

Being healthy is so much better and frankly easier of a goal than being thin.  Now getting healthier may result in some weight loss.  But as soon as the goal becomes weight loss, you run the high risk of re-entering that unhealthy mental zone that pits you against your own body and creates a warfield within yourself (and it ignores all the hidden issues that the body holds for us but that’s a topic for another day).  Yuck.

Health.  Isn’t that a great goal?  Attainable, realistic, in many ways measurable.

If a genie came up and offered you a choice:  “You can be healthy or you can be thin, choose now!”  What would you choose?

~the Abysmal Witch

Using spirit to understand body-Part 1

I would like to pose a series of questions/statements to consider.  I’ll put in my answers to them, but I invite you to think of what your response would be.  It will help when I moved to the second stage.  This post will make the most sense, potentially have the most impact, if you follow me down the rabbit hole.

How would you react if someone said to you:

a) Every person must reach a very high state of spiritual developent.

I would say you’re nuts.  Not everyone is interested and quite frankly capable of reaching the same lofty heights of spiritual development.

b) There is only one type of spiritual road to follow.

It’s not like there’s one type of spiritual development.  It’s a range of experiences that we pretty much all recognize but we don’t all get to the same place and we certainly don’t get there by exactly the same method.

c) You’re a failure if you don’t reach the highest level of spirituality possible.

Uh, no.  Some people will be very happy, very spiritual and very fulfilled (the key point in this one, I think) with having spirituality as a regular part of their day or perhaps their week without it being the most important thing in their life and/or without them having to reach any particular degree, experience certain Mysteries or otherwise reach notable landmarks on the road of spiritual development.  In other words, for me, the person who is blissful in their soul from tending their rose garden does not need to develop any further spiritually.  If s/he does, great!  If not, they have, by having their own experience of a healthy spiritual life, reached a good state for them and I see no need to force or expect them to go farther on it.

d) It’s okay to stop expressing and living what we would consider spiritual values in our quest to become more spiritual.

Uh, hell no.  If you stop behaving in a spiritually enlightened way then I’m sorry, you’re not moving closer to spiritual enlightenment (and when I finally do my post on harm, yes it’s related, you’ll discover just how interesting is the meaning behind this sentence, well in my opinion).

Now, go back and look at the statements again, but instead of spiritual development, read it as weight loss.  Here, I’ll do them again:

a) Every person must reach a very high state of spiritual developent. = Every person must be very physically fit and thin.

Seriously?  Everyone must be very physically fit?  No, not in the history of our race has that been the case.  Physically healthy, well yes that would be good.  But physically fit?

Or how about stripping the physically fit and making it:  every person must be thin.

Think about that statement.  If it isn’t resonating in you with a ‘hell no, that doesn’t make sense, then look again at the spiritual statement.  Do you agree that everyone must reach a high state of spiritual development?  If not, then why must everyone be thin?  Why must a single perceived ideal rule all people?

b) There is only one type of spiritual road to follow. = There is only one body type that is beautiful.

Okay, I’ll admit that I wouldn’t have agreed with the only one body type beautiful statement even before this exercise.  Or would I?  Pictures of various body types I’ve seen have been gorgeous.  But when I think of what I consider beautiful, is it a wide range of images?  Or is it a narrow spectrum, constrained by fitness, muscles, curves only in the ‘appropriate’ places?

When I reflect back on the idea of one spiritual road, which I completely reject (though there is the syncretist view that they are all the same that I can work with, but here I’m talking about the specifics of different roads – though if you take the syncretist path, then all body types are beautiful so it still all works together), and then switch my thinking straight over to there’s only one beautiful body type, I reject that too.  There isn’t.  There are many beautiful body types out there.

c) You’re a failure if you don’t reach the highest level of spirituality possible. = You’re a failure if you don’t reach the thinnest, fittest body possible.

Ohhhh, for those of us with body issues, doesn’t that just ring a bell?  Make your whole essence resonate in that nasty, hate yourself because you’re not the body you’re supposed to be kind of way?  Or maybe that’s just me.

I feel this one.  I feel that I’m a failure for not being thinner (though I’m not after super-thin, I’ve adjusted my thinking that much!), and gods help me if I put on a few pounds.  Then it’s not just failure of not being thinner, it’s the active failure of “back-sliding” down the bad road.

If I think about that train of thought and put it in a spiritual context, then sure I’d ben grumpy about backsliding, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.  As soon as I realized it I would decide if it really was ‘backsliding’ and if it was, and not somewhere I wanted to go, I would turn around and start going back the way I wanted to go.  No harm, no foul.  And I’d also be looking to see what the cause of this change was and how it fits into my spiritual view.

But all of that presupposes that I’m good with the first two statements.  That there’s no particular spiritual height I need to reach and neither is there one particular way I need to get there.

If there’s no particular state of fitness or weight I need to reach, that there are many different body types that are beautiful – *even for me* (i.e. that my body doesn’t have just one good state of being, that it is happy with a variety of such states) – then why the f*ck do I need to be the thinnest person possible?  Or the fittest?

Gah.

d) It’s okay to stop expressing and living what we would consider spiritual values in our quest to become more spiritual. = It’s okay to give up the health of our bodies in the quest to become thinner.

This is one that seems particularly obviously no.  Doesn’t it?  After all, we shouldn’t sacrifice our health just to get a few pounds less on a scale.  And yet we do.  There are diet pills that I’m betting aren’t that good for our health, but hey if they get us down that scale, they must be good, right?  And let me just say “eating disorders”.  They are not healthy, but they are a direct outcome of the pathological need to lose weight.

So it’s not so obvious after all.  Or perhaps obvious, but not so easy to work around.

And how do we work around it all?  How does any of this train of thought help change body image or our viewpoints enough that we are no longer plagued by the unhealthy, unreasonable, often unconscious thought patterns?

For me, this comparison of spiritual to body really helped.  It opened my metaphorical eyes to a different way of seeing my viewpoints on my body and I really had that realization or a deep-seated resonate click of sense from comparing the two and how unworkable and downright dangerous my body thought patterns are.

What about you?  Does any of this make you think a little differently?

~the Abysmal Witch

Fire dozing

The end of a long day, the tension of too much history and too much pain and too many turns just wrong enough that the feeling is that of being lost in the woods even though the road is quite visible still through the trees.  All of it sitting in the belly, solid and weighty, very separate from the marvelous meal that rests in the official part of the stomach.

Distraction calls with its usual voice.  So long as we keep dancing with the flow of constant information, there will be no need to rest deep inside with the fear and the pain.

The fire is lit.

I start the music and by will and choice stretch myself out before it.  Warmth envelops me but I do not relax.  Or do I?  I drop the distractions and settle into my stillness.

The fire calls, pops and sings to me.  Not to get my attention, but purely to savour its own ravenous existence.  It will consume everything until it dies.

And it does not care.  It is enough that it will be for as long as the wood shall last for in that time it will be fully satisfied in its consumption.

Warmth reaches out to me just as I crave it to do.  But as of yet I would not beg for it.  Not yet, not quite.

And there I lie, basking in its warmth, looking into its depths, hearing it murmur to itself without any interest in my existence whatsoever.  And I glory in its indifference.  And I start to doze.  Lulled by its heat, by its fast progression of life, by its beauty, into a place of rest.

In the deep warmth of the fire, I shall rest.