Moving Out of a Dry Spell--Month of Posts Coming up!

Today's is the last of the scraggly, infrequent posts. Like many other scraggly, infrequent posts this month, it is also rich in visuals.
Scraggly infrequency is about to be replaced by abundance, and the move to self-hosting and a new platform I've been talking about for over a year may be imminent. I beg compassion for my limited programming skills and pray I lose not one fellow traveler along the way.

April is a huge month for blogging and for writing in general. It's National Poetry Month, including the NaPoWriMo option--write a poem every single day. It's also Wego Health's Health Activist Writer's Month Challenge, a series of prompts for a blog post every single day of April. Not too late to join in on that one, actually. April is also the month of the Healthy Weight Summit (I like that it's not called the "Healthy Weight Loss Summit," btw; I'm starting to get so tired of the obsession with that in self-improvement circles). A different speaker every day of the month, promising some interesting discussions and take-aways.

So. Am I crazy? As I did last year, I signed up for the HAWMC. I'll be sharing a blog every day for the month of April with not just a health but a health activism focus. This will include (if I am able) writing frankly about what my diagnoses are and what they mean. About common misconceptions. About what caregivers should know and do.
I've never thought of myself as an activist.
On the other hand, simply being open is activism. I haven't even been all the way open about events in my life on here lately, whereas my preference is normally toward almost blatant transparency. 
So, instead of hiding in the snow cave...

I'll overcome my claustrophobia and birth myself out into the light: head first would have been better.

And if this flurry of blogging regularity and health- and poetry-centered writing involves a migration, I will leave good signposts.
My trip to Anchorage last week was only an overnight, and when I returned to Homer a disproportionate amount of snow had run away. And so begins the migration (as I've said before, seasonal changes in AK are experienced like travel). Fair-weather person though I am, I've come to love the snow and in many ways prefer winters to summers here, so I feel glad to be staying so far up the hill. Snow will be on the ground awhile yet here. 
Loving the woods and snow, often when we're hiking around up here I have lain on my back, snowshoes and all, just looking, feeling the snow down the length of my body. Yes, and my little friend is right there between my snowshod feet.

Oh, how I love those trees.
Even up here, though, the snow is softening. This fissure runs along the trunk of a fallen spruce where a moose had punched through and broken the snow layer. I'd have walked right over it a week ago; this time required caution.

This is steeply downhill, and the little snowballs my snowshoes knocked loose as I crossed the draw patterned the snow as they ran.

Still, the huge low tides where the beach extends practically across the bay say "Spring" loud and clear.

Roxy's paw with clam worm. That's more congruent with the color scheme to come.

I confess, I'm nervous on the eve of a month public as health activist (the poetry part I am happy with). I'm nervous to talk about my diagnoses when I know some of the readers closest to me don't believe in that kind of thing and perhaps feel threatened by it. I'm cautious of elaborating on some of the crazy behavior and where it's ended me up. But I remember how encouraging my workshop was at residency last year about a section of an essay displaying a psychotic episode.
I offer these revelations as a humble gift, and am always ready to take correction on the appropriateness of the gift.

Of Snow and Pressure

I never imagined my spirit döppelganger would be a little white dog with tan markings, who lifts her leg to pee like a boy dog but is easily as freaked out by loud, high-pitched noise as am I.

Cool picture, though, no?

We followed snow machine trails, which meant we heard snow machines a lot, since this was on a weekend.
Trust of brazenly striking forth into snow, sometimes happening upon a house or cabin unexpected breach of private civilization, sometimes hurtled at by a territorial (but thankfully harmless) dog.

Trust of Roxy for me, so scared by the snow machine noise that no matter where the sound was coming from, she regarded "safe" as behind my back, in my footsteps. 

Trusting of deep and late-winter snow after a week of sunshine, going off trail.

This beautiful hole in the snow was on an old snow machine trail, where the snow was deeper and slushier. 

A look around showed we were about five or six feet off the ground!
No surprise, then, that the next step I took after that photo, I punched through thigh deep (yes, that is my crotch).

And there's my mini-me trying to help--or maybe just get in as close as possible--as I endeavor to pull myself out of the canted hole (and take a picture of it all).

Oh yeah, and when you punch through, you come out with a bootful of snow.

This was an old snow machine trail, as I was saying. In other words, a machine ten times my weight went by here and didn't fall through. And I did. Don't worry, that didn't lead to even a moment of self-flagellating "I'm heavier than a snow machine." I know better than that, at least! It's all about pressure. It's all about spreading the weight. When we came back another time, I brought the snowshoes.

What am I saying here?
I drug my foot (the other one stuck in the hole) for so long writing and publishing this post, mostly held up by the photo uploading phase. Since what I really want to do is write, and since I wrote in my head at least two posts that never got written up here, getting blocked by the visuals seems ludicrous and typical self-sabotaging logic. It's also about the pressure--focused pressure that makes me sink rather than spread pressure that would float even if ten times my size. Guilty as charged, and awareness will help me do better in future. 

Lately I've been feeling not like a mirror but a portrait, being constructed and created by a plurality of people, places, animals, ideas. It's as if my own emotions are in suspended animation, reacting in a gesture that palely mimics the emotion of a real person. As if I'm Pygmalion's Galatea, except Pygmalion is multiple and I am muzzily self-aware.

I am cast loose on the sinking snows or watery eddies of relationship, as a marriage turns to friendship, as a friendship turns to a work relationship, as acquaintanceship possibly turns to landlord-tenant, as my relationship to this town and the land and water surrounding it take on a growing tint of future past. 

And I'm forgetting basic things. I left a tap running one day, the stove on another; sometimes I completely lose a recent event that I know all about. Perhaps I'm going to start forgetting names and to eat or sleep. Or perhaps it's "just" stress.

I'm not in the crucible this time, nor am I the phoenix, as has been the case in the past. This is all about water. 
All I can do is trust. Maybe, like Roxy, look for something to hide behind. The only somethings I can think of  are my journal and my notebook.

Another Perspective on Sharing Suffering

It's been so long since I last posted--again! That outflow onto the beach that I pictured bearded with ice a week or so ago...

...is now shorn of snow and flowing freely.

As should I be, I can't help but feeling.
I don't know what's preventing me from writing more here.
It's true, I'm not settled on where "here" is right now. I've been talking about migrating this blog and changing its appearance for months now. The superficial blogger-internal face-lift I've given it recently seems only to have rendered it buggier and less user-friendly (user-unfriendlier?) so I may undo that.
And the blog displacement and stagnating migration intent are only highly convenient metaphors for what's going on in my own life at the moment.
I did just see 22:22:22 on March 22, which should have told me it's time to get ready for bed, but it made me superstitiously happy and excited to write at least "something." I do have a pretty neat photos post almost ready to go, too.
But the truth is, I had far too much work this past week. And my faculties seem to be diminished and less than equal to overburdened weeks. Apprehension of loss of my own particular brilliance on which I've always been able to rely has rammed me further into the posthole of despair, the tunnel stopped at one end.
Manic seems such a long way away, and meds only make the posthole tunnel less deep and final.
And I confess it's been so long since I've eaten or drunk anything without accompanying punishing nausea and pain, I'm starting to drive myself crazy with the frantic mental scrabblings of what I might add in or (more likely) take out of my diet. And this without "indiscretions" or castor oil punishments for well over a week.

I can't see the woods for the words, as I am saying a lot at the moment (quoting myself from a half-written poem). But I am recognizing how right my wonderful naturopath is in emphasizing that words can be my salvation. As I've been trying to think through my creative thesis for my MFA--it really is coming to that time already!--and suffering through everything I laid out above and many other life stresses, which make it harder to focus, I found a path by meditating on words. Passion is a tense of "suffering," and compassion (from Latin) or sympathy (from Greek) mean suffering together, sharing the experience. But if you choose to be a victim of your suffering, your passion, you are christ on the cross, excruciated, a grand and solo passion that can only be venerated or turned away from in pity and horror.
In other words, I need to acknowledge my sufferings as normal for someone in my circumstances rather than thinking of them as extraordinary and specific to me (even if my behaviors sometimes exacerbate the pain)--and then I can write about them in such a way that my readers will see themselves and suffer together--sympathize. Without the possibility of sympathy, what I write will be alienating; the crucified figure left alone in a desert place, the paradox of standing out when no one can bear to look. (After I came out of my worst period of anorexia seven or eight years ago, which was beyond excruciating for anyone who had to be around me, let alone for me, some friends and colleagues came up to me and shared that they had had to look away during that time; watching me die was too much to bear. The book of my life unreadable.)
I am learning to write a book for companions (sharers of sustenance) and compatients (sharers in suffering).

Other Implies Another

A week since I've posted.
I've been other in one way, other in another way.
Good Orderly Direction. Abject chaos.

Helping others' creativity pushing me toward clarity regarding my own and its importance.

A day in the ER.

A party.
Hikes on the beach--
In order to spill from fill, must be empty first.
I emptied my pockets, feeling myself bound to the ground by the bones of the earth.
See how many of them are somewhat heart-shaped? See how many contain holes?

And au randonee on snowshoes around here on higher ground, the bones of winter. A baby moose, perhaps.

Meanwhile, this isn't supposed to be a good photo, but there were two moose, not just this one, outside the library this morning--smart moose to come down to sea level where things are threatening to grow.

I'm still having periodic dry heaves from the castor oil I made myself drink for some supposed food indiscretion three days ago. Up-thrusting energy like new plants--if I go abstract enough I can make it positive. Except that...hmhm...

I translated a hundred dictionary entries today all having to do with the concept of  "otherness." (And a bonus dozen over lunch to do with "heaps.") "Other" is different is more is less is parts of a whole is past is future is alien is heretical, abnormal, bad-tasting, somewhere else, special, foreign, hostile, divergent from the norm, less, less...

How much needs to be stripped away for radiance to enter, for light to shine through?
Breakfast in treatment last year: two packets instant oatmeal, with a whole bunch of other stuff (soy yogurt, nuts, shredded coconut, soy milk, fruit juice, raisins), and a cup of coconut cream. And more coconut cream if didn't finish all within 30 minutes.
Pumpkin is so good with oatmeal. With half a packet of instant oatmeal and maybe some coconut cream.
Pumpkin is so good with two tablespoons of instant oatmeal and a teaspoon of psyllium, and lots of liquid and maybe some coconut cream. With one tablespoon of oatmeal and half the amount of pumpkin. Etc.
A teaspoon of psyllium is so good with the pumpkin spices, lots of liquid and really some of that coconut cream.
One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.
Other begat one.

Open my lips to speak praise--it's not what goes in but what comes out that matters.
See the luminosity through those rocks and bones.

While you weren't looking

Meanwhile, it became spring. Water gushes out, flows over and bites into the stalactite bearding the pipe. Snow recedes into redoubts and enclaves. We scan for hidden ice, and keep hands free so we can use our arms as wind-braced counterweights.

The green dot at 10 in my tide table says we "spring forward" this coming Sunday! Despite the signs of spring, I'm as irritated as every year that the clocks go forward as early as they do, a full two weeks ahead of the planet's cycle. 

And in our special place, I haven't forgotten the blizzard mid-March three years ago, when the whole town came to a standstill, with three or four feet of snow dumped in 24 hours. This old post has a couple photos of an emblizzarded moose down near the bottom.

Puts me in mind, too, of how special a thing it is to live in a place where what the tides are doing is important information, where tide table booklets are handed out by local businesses. How amazing it is that they can publish the tides for a whole year ahead and have them be so accurate. When the very word "fluctuate" comes from the word for "wave," amazing that the big-picture ocean is that predictable. I almost wish there were tide tables for other things in life, but that much predictability wouldn't be so good.

As this inkling-spring comes, even with temperatures getting up to 40 degrees, the big picture is frozen earth and frozen lake.
In summer the float planes take off and land here. In winter, people drive, skate, ski, and hike.

 A stunning blue sky, but I spun around 180 degrees and took a photo facing the other way... 

That's a lot of lake. You can't always tell where the lake begins, and there are patches at the edge where tussocks of grass are holding the snow up  between them quite a way above the ground. Often that suspended snow is strong enough to hold me up, but sometimes I punch through. Sometimes even the dogs punch through. Since we're so close to the lake, it's quite alarming when that happens.
I learn to fluctuate myself, a little: 
-Best time to hike is low tide: most sand, so the dogs can really run. Best part of the day to hike, before lunch: otherwise I'd get nothing done all morning with antsy dog(s). Ideal time and tide coincide only part of the time. There are some beaches, and other places (like the lake) where the tide is less critical, so we go there if there's a big morning high tide. 
-I shed some of my aversion to following in tracks. It's a false pride, since as a moderately civilized human all I ever do is some form of following in tracks, but there is something delicious about the illusion of going au randonee. Those tracks in the photo above are snow machine tracks, and they were helpful for finding ways on and off the lake as well as other ways down to it than we had used. Following vehicle trucks on the beach in sloppy gravel can be the difference between moderately impeded walking and frankly stumbling along, one step forward, three steps back.

As water drains over the pipe's ice-beard, as ice continues to cap the lake, I wonder what form my own springing forward will take, and where I am going next. I'm hoping I can create my own path or be guided to it, because otherwise most likely I'll be treading in my same coil of tracks that take me to a seemingly blue-sky place with storm clouds at my back. 
My mom says it's time for me to stop being a vane blown with all winds; to have a base from which I can journey forth. I'm grateful for the advice, and I'm grateful in a way my awkwardness can't register for the stability and rootedness of my parents' home. But even before I left that home, I was a stranger and a sojourner in the land; no one could ever place me. Not even I.

As I type that, Jesus' words about the wind whose sound you can hear, but from whence it came and whither it goeth you cannot discern, come into my mind. And so it keeps happening when I'm trying to work on a poem or essay right now. I'm working with an image or sound, and here comes something out of the Bible, or out of ancient Greek or Latin literature. I bat them aside, fearing they'll take me "into my head." But they persist. These are my anchors, even now, living here, in a state where I might be the sole Classicist. Perhaps, vane blown with all winds, I am instead the wind itself. Perhaps these texts and canons are my base to which I can return. Perhaps, even if no one else can discern it, I-the-wind must come to know from whence I come and whither I go.

New starts and directions always involve some destruction or composting of the previous. "In the beginning" at the beginning of Genesis should actually be read "In A beginning"--that's what the Hebrew says. This is now recognized as if a theological equivalent to quantum physics theories: there are many possible universes, many possible beginnings, many modalities and conditions, many lives simultaneous and serial.
This old root wad of a dead spruce tree has given life to several new trees.

Meanwhile, another beginning.

Some Small Realizations

New Year 2013. Chinese New Year, the Year of the Snake. My birthday. Check, check and check. We're already into March, for crying out loud, with the nicely palindromic 3/1/13.
And I still don't know who I am or what all my choices, intentions, achievements of this year will be! You'd think it would be important to find that out, in a time so tessellated with transition. The question of where I should live runs alongside the question of how to structure my mixed genre creative thesis and which of the many themes I'm so excited to write on will really fit, and meanwhile my mental flywheel spins questions of what "diet" I should consider myself as being on; what foods I'm currently eating I should quit, as always..
But some things I have come to know, and I've come to know them through listening to myself.
Some people say they prefer the beach, some the mountains; some don't like the outdoors at all. I've generally felt my usual frozen inability to locate a preference or decision among all the outdoor places I love to be.
But trailing the dogs one time recently, I came with them into some woods atop a bluff above one of the beaches we hike (I had to lift them down from bluff to beach swinging from the sea wall later, but that's another story). I felt myself in that light and presence. And yes, there is truth to the "Ela-treela" and "tree fairy" appellations I've had over the years. 
I love direct sunlight, but I also love the dappled light of woods; of jungle, even, and I love just being amid trees, feeling all that expanding-upward energy, vertical earth, almost.
This photo from those woods looks exactly like a poem I had been working on shortly before. Its title? Simply "Ars Poetica."

For another thing: I spent most of yesterday, my birthday, driving home from Anchorage, grateful for good roads and a good, comfortable, reliable car. I spent yesterday--and most of today too--feeling very sick...because of some things I chose to ingest that I shouldn't have (and knew it), and consequently, that I failed to ingest and should have (was already feeling too sick).
OK, my bad, etc etc... But here's what I learned!
As I was acknowledging to myself at one point that I felt truly awful, a voice inside said I wished I didn't feel like that, wished I could feel more like I normally do.
If I wish not to feel awful, and to feel more like my norm, a fortiori that means I wish to be alive, to be here feeling at all!
Syllogism aside, that was a huge recognition. For most of my life off and on, I've felt apathetic resignation toward being alive, with an apathetic preference not to be. And that's not talking about when I'm in a depression. So, maybe this is moving into one of those spells where I feel an element of active electiveness toward being alive.
Good.