Solstice, Christmas, Remembering the Deceased

This was sunrise on solstice day. Just had to share. From inside this house's arctic entry, complete with icicles. It warmed up to 12 degrees this morning!

When I was growing up, my family celebrated Christmas in a non-religious but spiritually aware way, although "spiritual" is a scare-quotes word for my parents. I'm just using it as a quick index of the tapping into collective consciousness of the stasis and preparation for forward momentum lent by the Solstice, as well as harmonization with the celebratory mood all around us.

But one tradition I want to honor is this: we always made a toast (regardless of what was being drunk) to "absent friends." Christmas is obviously a celebration of birth and new beginnings at the darkest time--in Romance languages at least, the name of Christmas refers to birth (Noel, Natale, Navidad, etc...) But since it's the time where energy, life force, dwindles, diminishes to vanishing point, it seems right to me to remember those who left us this year as well. 
So, here I am wearing a jacket that Larry gave me as a gift some years ago.

Around my neck is a chain from my grandmother, and on it an old Iraqi gold ornament intended to be worn, several of them, in the hair. There are little leaves of beaten gold at the bottom, together with an old coin, and they would have jingled in the hair slightly as the wearer moved about. And check out the intricacy of curled gold on the main "bulb" itself.

It's a little too three-dimensional to wear all the time, I'm finding, but oh my I love it so much. Christmas, remembering my Iraqi-Jewish grandmother, my artist brother in law... I feel gratitude and warmth; gratitude also for my home away from home friends and family here, who fit me in so graciously.
Love, warmth, renewal to everyone. 

And Finally...

Final Prompts from HWAMC:

 You made it! 30 posts in 30 days! Today, write a recap of your experience. What was your favorite prompt? Least favorite? What have you learned?
 Describe your HAWMC experience in one word!

Recap: April has been an extremely transitional and often uncomfortable month. I transitioned away from two months of dog-sitting in a comfortable, large, somewhat remote home. My grandmother, who is very important to me, died--age 93 and ailing, but suddenly nonetheless--and I found myself dropping everything, including an enormous amount of money, and flying to Israel. Then I returned to AK, spent less than two weeks alone in the water-less cabin that has been my home for several years and is no longer, and thence out to Athens, GA, where I am now. Even without the extra trip provided by those few days off my meds, the month has been a whirligig of displacement, recollection, keen emotion, and uncertainty for the future. Nonetheless, there have been some glimmers of optimism toward that future also. 

Additionally, I finally got my own domain and started this wordpress blog, as I'd been talking about doing for about two years, thinking I'd have time this month to learn/teach myself how to do all sorts of things to make it just how I wanted it, as well as migrating the original blog over here.

Was I crazy? I don't even have my blogroll in my dashboard, let alone the comments set up, such a big reason for me to move... -- But therein lies much of what I've learned in this month. Life is full of ironies, and:

• No matter how pretty or not-pretty it looks, the blog comes with me everywhere.
• Sometimes having a prompt helped get me to write a post even when the day was basically over; other times the prompt was a turn-off to my creativity.
• Paradoxically, I think I may have lost readers during this process. I don't think anyone has come over to my blog from HAWMC either. Paradoxically, I'm not feeling too hurt right now. As I breathe life into this new blog, I draw on my new sensitivity to and understanding of audience/readership and feel I'm honing it even when I suspect no one's reading at all and 24 out of the 24 comments I receive are spam trying to make my nonexistent readers buy sunglasses, solar panels, or penises.
• Despite being a constant companion, my blog hasn't taken over my life, not remotely. But I think I only skipped one day the whole month, this past Sunday, despite all that long-haul travel.
• I'm learning how to talk frankly and openly about having bipolar disorder and beginning to recognize that if I am willing to be frank and open, my eloquence as a writer may turn out helpful to others. May turn out to be helpful to me, too!
• I'm (back) in the "Well, I don't really have anorexia" frame of mind. Do you think I do?

Prompts: I liked the "day to day" prompt because of how it invited us to look at our conditions integrated into the rest of the world and life, as they in fact are. Adversity the day before got me going, so perhaps I liked it in that sense. I didn't like the prompts about social media and making compilations of those. I'm simply too ignorant.

The HAWMC experience in one word? Sidewinder.

Wordless Wednesday HAWMC #10

PROMPT: It’s often hard to like pictures of ourselves – post your favorite picture of yourself.

Favorites change all the time, just like our faces and the stages of our crosses. Many more photos of this trip to come when things are more settled.

HAWMC #2--Witch Diagnosis; Diagnoses Culturally Mediated

So. HAWMC Day Two. The beat goes on. However, I might be on my way to Israel and if so, I may not have sufficiently reliable internet access to keep the beat going every day I'm gone. And (should I be ashamed about this?) I haven't had/won't have time to prewrite all the posts I can't write on the day. I plead special circumstances.

Today’s Prompts: (I picked one)

• Introduce your condition(s) to other Health Activists. What are 5 things you want them to know about your condition/your activism?

I shared yesterday that I'm just coming into realization that using my writing for health activism is part of my life-responsibility. I also shared that the simple salt, Lithium Carbonate, has been a salvation for me. The fact that it's helped me so much suggests I have a condition for which it's a specific.

Sooo?

Five hundred years ago, I'd have been diagnosed as a witch, or else a saint. I'd have spun weird herbal spells, lived on weird broths of herbal twigs, flown on broomsticks, raved and then eaten worms and lurked in a cave far from humanity. Or I'd have borne self-inflicted stigmata, fallen down in faints and seen visions, receiving the voices of the divine, temptation of the devil, given food away away away to the poor but refused to eat anything besides Holy Communion. 

I'd have died young (as I expected to in this life), either burned for witchcraft or expired from malnourishment or disguised suicide through religious ecstasy.

Today, under the aegis of modern medicine, I'm diagnosed (with the full ceremonial title) Bipolar 1, Mixed Type, Psychotic Features, with the comorbidity Anorexia Nervosa. 

As a surgeon who stitched me up said, that's quite a moniker to have attached to someone.

Five things I want people to know (spread over two conditions):

(1) As shown above, diagnosis is predicated on the age in which we live. 

(2) However, today's medications can work. Example: today is the first time I've experienced a grandparent dying when I've been on lithium. (My grandmother was the last to go.) And my reaction has been very different this time. I feel how her death affects me and my mother. And my relationship with my mother. I feel how my other relatives are feeling, and her carer who lived with her the last few years. I'm happy she died suddenly and quickly, but I feel a huge sense of loss. With my other grandparents, I was glad for them and their peaceful departures, but even with my other grandmother, whose bed I was standing beside when she died, I didn't feel anything. 

I can't explain this in terms of maturity--when my other grandmother died, I was in my mid-twenties--nor in terms of closeness--my other grandmother lived next door to us for several years! In addition, the flavor of empathy I feel for myself and for my relatives is a certain connection I only became aware of after getting on lithium.

(3) Many anorectics don't care about their appearance at all but paradoxically desperately want/need to be thinner than everyone else, feel competitive with other anorectics. Even I, appearance-oblivious as I am, have sometimes had those feelings, and there are few things of which I'm more ashamed.

(4) I can't have kids. Sometimes I have a death wish that causes me to do dangerous things impulsively. I have almost died several times, and people whom I care about in many different places I've lived have been in stressful fear of my life many times. I haven't been able to finish or curate things I care about. I have a trail of personas, domiciles, vocations I've spun away from; the only thing persistent throughout has been way-with-words. On the other hand--I was in the top of my class at Oxford University, while playing classical music at a very high level.  I passed all my PhD exams first time at Berkeley, which hadn't been done in the department memory. Why I didn't complete (haven't yet completed) the doctorate is another question for another day. But I learn fast. Especially when words and language are involved, but versatility involves quick learning and just from looking at all the places I've lived you couldn't say I'm not versatile.
The good news: I have found ways to work meaningfully without having to be within the conventional framework, which I wouldn't be able to hold down.

(5) Despite (4), and especially with the help of meds and therapy, those of us with these conditions can learn to do better, be less crazy, less depressed, find a sustainable nutrition strategy. It's called condition management and it means things like making sure one gets regular and adequate sleep (like I haven't been doing), having good relationships, taking medications regularly, eating properly. It may include the odd hospitalization or ER visit, but please see that as part of the learning process. And I for one am not going to be offended if a friend of mine encourages me to manage my condition, whether by reminding me to get sleep or just by talking and listening. I find it harder to talk about food and eating, but I am trying to be more open to doing so.

Grandmother, Blessings on your Journey

HAWMC Day 2...but post is on hold for later today.
After staying up most of last night finishing up essays and poems constituting snippets of my MFA thesis and composing my final packet of the year...
But barely a half hour ago...she left the world.

Although she had "come back" many times before, I think we felt it coming. Which doesn't make it any better. Why had I been thinking so achingly and so often of my ties to Israel, of my desire to write about my family's move from Iraq to Israel in the upheavals of the establishment of the state? In my newly untethered state, why had I been entertaining seriously the idea of up-and-moving to Israel, for an extended period or even indefinitely?

What opportunities missed!
True, I have myriad close relatives in Israel, but my grandmother was the closest. Her love might have been mediated by insistent giving and scarce receptivity. She might have been averse to the words I love you and given to asking why your course of study was worth anything. She might have been quick to shout and escalate as soon as politics came into the living room, as it did at least daily. She might have been comical cursing and gesturing in Arabic at Arafat and Ahmadinejad on Al Jazeera in her living room.
But she loved.
I believe she gave me my culinary flair, together with my preference to serve the food and hide in the kitchen (she let me hide with her, but usually never let anyone in there with her). My mispronunciations of several words are her Iraqi accent. I can curse in Arabic thanks to her versus Arafat. As a child, I couldn't understand why there were two words for so many common things until I realized Arabic and Hebrew twined together in her tongue, from one word to the next.
I can't believe she's gone.
I've been writing poems about her for three years now. More to come.
My grandfather died 25 years ago, when I was tiny. I remember the phone ringing, picking it up, hearing my aunt's voice, having known even before I picked up the phone what the message would be, and trying to prepare my mum as I handed over the phone. That was an out-of-the-blue sudden death, whereas this one was sudden but expected. So how did I know, as a little kid? No matter, I remember starting to worry then, what would we do when my grandmother went too--where would we go when we came to Israel, what home away from home?
That time has now come.
Blessings, grandmother, on the next stage of your journey. Born Basra. Married, moved to Baghdad. Expulsion of the Jews, to Haifa, three kids. To one transit camp, four kids. To another transit camp. Finally, to Herzlia, to a small house with a macadamia nut tree nearby, and then to the apartment where she lived until today, first with husband and four children, then with husband, then alone, then with carer. Always thronged with daily visitors.