someone wrote that this music is all existentially reflective and shit,  and that the artist is his favourite navigator of the softening grey landscape of the dying brain
I forgot to save a link. Sorry. I think it was one of the Irish music bloggers. One of the multitudes out there.
Anyway, I  sort of agree.

as if

The night before last. The volcano erupted. A little bit. 

Some time back, one of these experts examining bits of me while I - foolishly - opened my soul and with it all my hopes, one of these healthy medical experts told me in his expert voice that he would be inclined to compare heavy vertigo of sudden onset to an epileptic fit. Not that he ever experienced vertigo himself.

Not that it really matters.

The night before last I woke up suddenly from a very deep sleep and the darkness around me was turning. This is such a unique sensation, like falling through space. As if I'd know what that feels like, anyway. Flat out on my bed. At first, I curiously watched the little strips of light from the street lamps that are coming in through the blinds move rapidly across the ceiling and speeding faster and faster whenever I turned my head this way and that.

As I tried to sit up, a heavy wave of nausea washed over me from somewhere behind the bed and I carefully groped my way along the bedroom wall to the bathroom and back. Stupidly noting the time, 4:03, as if it was something crucial.

Eventually, of course, panic seized me. Shit, shit, shit, I whispered holding onto R's sleeping body. 

Just then the dawn chorus set in and obviously, I started to fret about my hearing, which was perfectly ok. And I decided to listen to all this birdsong as if it was the last time. Which is very melodramatic because the top notch expert had told me that with my drug regimen deafness was highly unlikely now.

When I decided to get up some hours later, the world was at rest again. My head was throbbing and the familiar pressure noises were hissing inside my head. Felt as if I had just crossed from Dun Laoghaire to Holyhead in a winter storm, which I have done in the past more than once, each time expecting to die from sea sickness. And yesterday was such a lovely day, summer, lilac flowering everywhere, R brought fresh green asparagus and the first local strawberries back from the farmer's market. I sat in the deck chair watching him pot the geraniums and the fuchsia and replace some of the raspberries, the cat curled up on the hot stones under the little olive tree and in the evening after dinner on the patio we watched the bats flying low. 

And the phone rang to tell us that a little baby boy was born into the family in Ireland, one of the kids I still see in my mind's eye forever running along the beach. climbing garden walls and pinching grandad's flowers, now a young father. 

Today my muscles are aching as if I'd climbed a mountain. Muscles in my neck and face are slowly relaxing. I no longer have to hold onto the walls. Keeping my fingers crossed.

reading the Sunday papers

Humans have allowed money and its acquisition to over-run and conquer them. The rule of money is itself a dependency culture. Like all dependency cultures, it's an ever-tightening trap, and a con. All you need to do with money is give it velocity - keep it circulating through as many hands as possible, as quickly as possible, going round and round. All people really need to know is that there's more where it came from. Which there always will be, as long as no one breaks the circle by sitting on their profit instead of spending it.
Money is just a cargo cult, one that has been wrongly and wilfully elevated to the status of a pseudo-science. "Confidence" is what economists call willingness to spend, even as they destroy the confidence of so many people by leaving the market to inform them that they are not worth much, and never will be. That's why "globalisation" is stupid, and why off-shoring, hoarding and hiding your wealth is immoral. It's why high-interest lending steals from everyone. It's why high-risk investment is what it sounds like - reckless. It's why valuing only work that generates profit misses humanity's point. It's why we're all in this miserable, needless mess. It's why we are not getting out of it, and won't for some time, if ever.

 Deborah Orr

Lyrics and spoken words in a lovely soft Dublin accent by Paul Durcan

the days of rhubarb crumble

The lilac is at it again, winking at me through a sudden hail shower this afternoon, the black currant bushes are full of promise, the transplanted walnut tree is showing the teeniest bits of life after we had given up all hope, and we moved the figs outside as the weather radar is predicting a warm front by midweek, coming up from Africa.

I have been editing the most gruesome manuscripts, there are dreadful infections out there, twisting and turning the immune response and my heart was aching when I got to the list of side effects of one of the treatment trials. I carefully replaced all "subjects" with "individuals". I have never worked with these authors before and they are fairly young, so I'll push my case.

I had to drop the idea with the choir, rehearsals were great fun, but on most days every time I went away from them in a haze of vertigo and exhaustion. My days of singing and clapping and silly dance steps in a group of jolly women (and one man) are over. It was fun, we did the Timewarp and Blame It On the Boogie. Ah well, that was that.

We decided not to go to the Bob Dylan concert, open air, near us later in July. Not for 95 Euro p.p. standing somewhere way back and beyond. You don't want to know how much they are asking for standing a bit closer, but not much, to the stage and seating costs about as much as a week's holiday in Sicily. We may join the crowds sitting down for a picnic by the river trying to catch the sound from a distance - provided they won't close off most of the area. Obviously, there's costs involved and I am not begrudging anybody a decent profit after covering costs, but why are tickets for the big shots so expensive? Are they all broke like Leonard Cohen? I must be naïve or maybe I am a bit thick. There are people who think I am mad and that I will be missing a life changing event. Yes, there are.

 

I kept trying to rearrange my life so that illness was only a feature of it, and not the whole, but illness insists on its pre-eminence.

Hilary Mantel

so much

I want to sit at an old table outside after sunset, insects, candles, warm, warm air. My arms tired from a long swim in the lake.
I want to wrap an old soft blanket around my legs when it gets cool.

I want to get a bit drunk and later on, some 70s music, something with elaborate guitars and long meaningful harmonies. I want to hum along and get up and throw my arms wide and dance.

Monday morning, get a move on

money is an illusion

The new philanthropists are a rare breed, really they are, not like in the olden days, when condescending rich men (and a few women) built libraries or set up universities or model villages to spread their idea of what's proper, keeping purgatory at bay at the same time.

I just listened to some of the new ones being interviewed, the earnest art collector who buys up department stores to enforce his own labour laws (if you want to compete with China you must work like the Chinese), the IT wizzard who believes in team work problem solving and frustrated with the way this generally is not done just started his own institute, the French noble woman supporting fair trade cocoa growers in Central America so that she can eat chocolate truffles with a good conscience in her gilded salon, the ship owner who believes in educating African villages in his own schools.

How twee, how ever so. How simple and "good".

And then there are these three: the billionaire who eventually realised that he and his entire family will never be able to spend even a fraction of his ever growing wealth in their lifetimes (and maybe that cost him a couple of bad nights with no sleep) and the shiny couple of do-gooders. They are so good, they glow, they decided to pledge half of their wealth to help the poor and make-the-world-a-better-place. Boy scout honours pledge. And so they set up elaborate programs to feed the poor in India and Africa, to vaccinate their undernourished children, to find cures for water borne diseases, etc. with a bit of their money. We can see glossy spreads in the thick and important magazines of how they fly out to the poor unfortunate continents in their private jets to mingle briefly with their victims, all shiny faces, surrounded by nurses or singing school kids, while all this is financed by their wealth which continues to grow and is created, inter alia, by this and this.

And here we have spring and clear nights and the birds are soo loud and active, my cat doesn't know what hits her when I open the door to the wild outdoors for her.
Mustn't be so mad, I tell myself.
Persistence, gentleness and a view of the whole picture as someone said recently.

Werner Herzog's Bavarian accent and existential penguin

from an interview with him in today's Guardian:

"Saving the world is a very suspicious concept," he replies. "I'm as responsible as it gets in my situation. I drive my car less than 10% of what I used to drive 20 years ago. I'm not into consumerism. But when it comes to the end of the human race, there are certain suspects. Microbes can come and wipe us out. It can happen fast. Avian virus or mad cow disease, you name it. Microbes are really after us. Or a cataclysmic volcanic eruption which would darken the skies for 10 years - that's gonna be real trouble. Or a meteorite hitting us, or something man-made. I don't believe we'll see a nuclear holocaust but there are quite a few scenarios out there."

What about a good-old fashioned breakdown of society? "You mean anarchy and cannibalism? Yes but there would be survivors. Maybe 10% would survive, enough to replenish the species. I'm talking about total extinction. We are not sustainable."

Walking through the garden and naming the plants coming up right now is like opening a book of fairy tales:

Männertreu (men's fidelity)   blue lobelia
Löwenzahn (lion's tooth)    dandelion (from the French dent de lion)
Vergißmeinnicht     forget me not
Storchenschnabel (stork's beak)   pelargonium
Tausendschön (a thousand beauties)   daisy
Gänseblümchen (little geese flower)    daisy
Märzenbecher (March's cup)    spring snowflake
Wiesenschaum (meadow foam)    lady's smock
Buschwindröschen  (little bushy windy rose) anemone
Küchenschelle (kitchen bell)   pulsatilla
Rittersporn (knight's spur)  delphinium

               

And my mother would have been able to spot many more (plus she would have reeled off the Latin names just like that). She had no time for children's books or  silly nursery rhymes, but by naming a flower here and a weed there, she could kick start my imagination any time.

yesterday evening's cycle home from work

45 min of going down memory lane
mixed emotions
some cringing
still proud
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01fhnt4

I am getting our little baby ready for bed when A calls up the stairs, need anything from the shops? I am driving up to Wilton..  Get me this album by the Waterboys, I shout back. R shakes his head, we are totally skint. But I keep my fingers crossed. A couple of hours later A strolls into the kitchen, no luck with your waterbabies, any dinner left?

It is fine to have opinions about culture; and many people across the world do honestly believe that their culture is vastly richer or better or more noble or more sacred than other cultures. This position implies nothing more than pride and limited perspective. And there is nothing really wrong with it. It is an opinion. But what is dangerous, and morally indefensible, is when opinions of cultural superiority are espoused within a dominant culture about other cultures, and then acted upon; this mix of arrogance and power are the essential ingredients of conquest, colonialism and imperialism.

 

Mitchell Anderson

cycling along the Ruhr river

The bicycle is man's purest invention; an ingenious arrangement of metal and rubber that liberates the body from the dusty plod to ride on a cushion of air, at speed or with leisure, stopping on a whim, travelling for free. Its design is simple and its maintenance inexpensive. Yet for all the ease and economy the bicycle possesses a greater quality. It offers the possibility of escape.

Rory MacLean

Four days, 274 km, no punctures, no real rain, but at times freezing cold, spectacular scenery, odd sights, bone tired.

I'm on holidays, since yesterday as I had some leave left over from last year which my employer insists must be taken before end of March or else. My annual holiday allowance is perverse, 35 working days plus ten public holidays. Such riches, if I could I would distribute some of it to the needy masses, but instead I have to fill out complicated applications which need two signatures and an extra form specifying my cover plan and as much as I try I usually get something wrong with my figures or I have to wait until some of my colleagues with school children had their turn etc. There is someone working in the administration whose sole job it is to double check these forms and send stern emails to all of us who get it wrong.

Anyway, I have been told to take six days now or else. And add to this Good Friday and Easter Monday and two weekends, this comes up to probably 12 days but I wouldn't bet on it.

Which is all very well.

So I have this delightful image in the back of my head of me curled up on my sofa with the cat and a fresh pot of tea, reading my way through the stack of unread books. Someone recently told me that I was only inches away from a kindle. Actually, he said millimeters, we are in metric land, but it translates poorly. I get the benefits, especially if I were to travel for months etc. but I like second hand books and second hand bookshops and libraries. Although, libraries make me kind of dizzy what with bending my head to the right reading the spines of English books and bending to the left for the spines of German books. And then there's the smell. Books smell good. And didn't I only last week find a voucher for two coffees from the Artistas Restaurant and Bar in Lagos, Portugal, in a second hand copy of a Northern Ireland thriller. It is a bit smudged, the voucher, but maybe one day I will find myself in Lagos, Portugal, thirsting for coffee.

Instead, there is the prospect of setting out to the Sauerland mountains, pushing our bicycles to a small rock circle high up in a forest which marks the spring of the river Ruhr and then spending the next couple of days cycling along it until it meets the Rhine. Weather permitting, i.e. anything except rainstorms, sleet or snow. Or sloth. And it's a thrilling prospect. I am nervous and excited. It's a short little run really, compared to the cycle tours in my previous life, but We Shall See.

" ...and then the guy at the garage said, interested in a trade in? Upgrade to the new model, this one has park-assistant sensors. And I thought, why not? But don't tell your sister yet, she will be mad soon enough.  Anyway,  I think this could be my last car." I try not to laugh out loud and soon we are talking about other things related to his recovery or rather, to his getting used to the fact that at age 83 your body does not recover from multiple fractures, that it is all a matter of adjusting to stiffness and aches and having to use walking aids. Which he dislikes. Instead, he usually shuffles along with two Nordic walking poles totally convinced that he could be mistaken for an athlete on his way home after a long trek.

Next, he wants to discuss explains his plans of dropping the floozie which are so cruel that I almost try and defend the woman but instead make an effort to Keep Out Of It, pretend the line is bad. "I will probably never find myself in a decent relationship," he says. Not a hope, I want to reply, try taking a look back at the ones that didn't work. But instead, we crack another joke and laugh about it.

When I put down the phone, for the briefest of moments I am overwhelmed by memory, a smell, a taste, I see flashes of my grandmother's grey silk blouse with tiny mother-of-pearl buttons, I am licking crumbs of something good off my fingers, there is a strong adult arm holding me safe on a lap, the murmurs and laughter of adult conversation around me. And then it's gone, like a sigh.

I have a box of black-and-white photographs my father took when he was a junior research scientist involved in agricultural field work. Lots of machinery and lab equipment and large weighing gadgets. And then there is this picture of a very large herd of goats, lots of white Saanen kid goats, and in the middle of it a frightened looking toddler. Could be my sister, could be me. It's too grainy and none of us can remember a thing.

Whenever I looked at that picture, I would see all these goats and this cute/uncomfortable toddler but only now have I started to imagine a lanky young guy, not even 30, putting his little daughter just so between these goats and stepping back to take the picture. Laughing like a schoolboy.

stuff I've been reading

Without the moon the earth axis would tilt at 60° (instead of today's 23.5°), without the moon, the tropics would be covered in snow and ice, without the moon, the polar regions would be up to 80°C hot. In Central Europe, the sun would not set for months. No chance for higher developed species.
Our existence in the cosmos is completely accidental, I tell you. When our solar system was starting to be formed, a giant rock of about a tenth of the earth's size hit our unfinished planet. Accident, pure accident. It could have missed it just the same. But there it was, it changed the earth's crust into lava and spun it into space. There it rotated around the earth and solidified into the moon - which at the time was only about 20 000 km away (today 380 000 km). 

In an interplay of mutual attractions, the moon slowed down earth's rotation resulting in the tides. The length of day expanded, the lunar orbit grew larger, the lunar breaking effect diminished.

This goes on even today. A day on earth increases by 20 micro seconds every year and the moon moves away from the earth by 3.8 cm every year.

In about 500 million years, the moon's supportive, life giving closeness will come to an end and the earth axis will tilt further and life as we know or imagine it will cease to exist.

There you go. We are just tiny spots of accidental happiness.

When I look west on my way home, this is what I see these days:

almost forgot, Patrick's day

Nor life I owe nor liberty
For love is lord of all.

... the muffled longing of a woman watching rain fall.

 (from a  short story by Amy Bloom)

This exquisite sentence has been baffling my mind since reading it - oh at least a week ago. It hums inside me while I take a break from working on this long dry paper on evidence levels in randomised controlled studies. Standing by my kitchen window watching the birds messing up the compost R spread on the vegetable beds yesterday. I am eating a banana, which gets me thinking of this time last year when I was translating the eco-feminism book. During a long editing session, one of the authors - the one who wanted me to help her cheat on her tax return - explained to me why eating bananas was bad for you. I forget why, maybe something about carbohydrates and sugar. Couldn't care less.

I don't particularly like bananas, not the ones we get here, dry and unripe, nothing like the little sweet ones we used to pick in the mornings from the slope behind the house in paradise. But I am a sucker for these fair-trade stickers, the promise that by eating bananas I am supporting some grand workers co-op deep in the jungle of Central America and I see a row of low but neat houses and kids running around and smiling workers coming along the hard mud path carrying big bunches of bananas still stuck to the branch.

Some years ago I was translating an exhibition catalog for a fairly famous painter who had spent a year on a tiny Pacific island playing to be Gaugin, a female Gaugin. One of her paintings was of a banana tree with ripening fruit and this magnificent purple blossom. The picture in the catalog was the wrong way around, with the blossom pointing upwards and of course I did the arrogant I-know-this-is-wrong routine and got them to reprint all of the catalogs. They probably still hate me. 

No rain today, none forecast all week. We will have to water those seed beds by Wednesday.

My top boss, the smart one who zooms around the globe picking up awards and fat research funds, has done a big blunder. I saw it coming, I checked back with him in writing three times beforehand and still, he tried to blame it on me. Teenage tactics. Almost feel motherly here, but mostly I am mad, because who is now stuck with getting it sorted again? Three guesses. The big man himself is off to bigger and brighter fields, incommunicado as befits his important standing. Soon, he'll discover the cure to cancer or maybe MS or Alzheimer's or his bank account or all of it in one go. There is a lot that's wrong in scientific research and every time we get a new batch of junior assistants I want to sit them down and tell them about long hours, no weekends, very low pay and no recognition of all their efforts for years and years to come but usually, the stars in their eyes are already starting to shine back at me.

Do not feel lonely, the entire universe is inside you. (Rumi)

 ...which I just found here. Thank you.

Watched Cry Freedom again last night and again I cried at the closing credits and memories came flooding in, of the night in 1982 before I started labour prematurely after I had danced and sung at an anti-apartheid benefit until the early hours, of the time we watched the movie for the first time with the two South Africans I knew (one just sat and cried, the other dug her fingernails so deeply into her hands that she drew blood), of my union's strike action in 1984 and some years later the first week in paradise sitting under a jacaranda tree reading Biko and watching S swim in the pool of the posh hotel we were put up in until we could move to our house, while fancy tourists watched us from behind their expensive sunglasses and S would stare back in wonder, wow, real life Barbies. It was a bewildering time and one day I asked my little girl who was splashing around the pool whether she wanted to go home, back to Granny and the dogs and all she said was, what? now? no way!, and shook her head in disbelief.

And now, this movie is just another soppy historical epic.

be here now

I was playing observant gardener, i.e. wrapped in a warm blanket, resting on the sofa and observing my gardener outside, when the cranes flew in their noisy v-shaped formations across the sky yesterday.

I remember watching them two years ago while I was high as a kite on cortison and my liver and heart were kicked around by the first immunosuppressing drug that almost buried me. 

There was a time when I would run away from memories like that. Still have the urge but where to? No place left to run. Not after two years of this. 

And yet, every time I come up from another blow to the system, another yuk inflammation here or there, a couple of days under that heavy blanket of fatigue, whatever - there seems to be an endless supply of things that can go wrong -, every time my silly childish mind cheers up and tells me that now, finally, things are getting better. The feeling that a good rest and a couple of early nights will see me right.

Bless your innocence, I want to hiss back, watch me come undone.

Some nights before sleep I run through all my fraying edges, down to counting all of the open sores in my gums, like a pilot getting ready for flight.

Other nights I just lie back, thankful that this blasted fatigue will drown out any thoughts. 

Compared to two years ago, I am coping. Occasionally, I am coping splendidly, efficiently, even with a sense of humour. You'd look at me and you'd think, why, she is fine, and I am sure many people think that (and suspect me to be a bit of a hypochondriac). But still, sometimes I can see this woman peeping out from behind the dark blinds, this middle-aged, healthy, energetic, active woman... she is fading fast. Sometimes I pick a book from the shelves and I remember that I read it in that gloomy period between getting ill and being diagnosed and I remember how I joked to my GP that I was rereading my way through our book shelves, starting from the bottom right hand corner, and that by the time I reached the top left end, surely I'd be well again.

Two years ago I had just come home from four weeks in the specialist clinic where twice a day a friendly woman would guide a small group of us seriously/weirdly ill patients through a half hour of relaxation, with gentle music, breathing and muscle movements. I used to love that music but now when I hear something that sounds even the faintest bit like it, I want to run. 

There is no agenda, no sense of direction or purpose, instead I simply make it through another day, another week without getting anywhere. And then again, why would I want to get anywhere at all. Be here now, I used to tell my impatient daughter when she was small and spinning towards a tantrum. And I was feeling ever so grand and superior and wise.

Ah well. She tells me it worked for her.

forver mad, the lovely Sinead

   4th And Vine by sineadoconnor

The little cat woke us up before dawn. She was very polite, scatching the bedroom door ever so gently for quite some time. She usually never comes inside at night. Eventually, the smells hit me and we spent a while clearing up her mess. She screamed like a baby when I tried to touch her, with her ears all hot, and went off to hide in some place where I would have to crawl on my belly to try and grab her. Which I didn't. R mumbled something about nine lives and cats and fuck this and that was that.

Instead, I tried to get back to sleep while the dawn chorus set off at full force and I counted how many days until I can pick up S from the airport and then I thought that maybe downstairs a poisoned little cat was dying and then we overslept, incl. the cat who is very well, thank you.

So now I will do the ironing, which at times can be a calming and contemplative exercise, and I will dream of becoming  a woman of great courage. 
After that, I have to get on with translating some stuff on lipomodelling (which is the process of relocating autologous fat to bla bla bla). Argh.

What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Just do your shit.

Paddy Considine in today's Guardian.

almost spring

 

forest at midday, awake and very noisy - in the evening with just a glimmer of light left in the western sky I feel safe cycling here again

Ten days after my 16th birthday. Fresh snow in the night and I am late for school, my bus was stuck in traffic and I missed the tram. When I sneak into the classroom all eyes are on me. The seat next to me is empty, M must be late, too. I know she went away for the weekend with her family. Maybe they didn't make it back in time with all that snow.

A in front of me turns around, beckoning me to move one row up. I sneak next to him and he takes both of my hands and I notice he is crying, that almost everybody is crying and staring at me. 

She is dead, he says, in the car, no, no accident, her neck it sort of snapped when they hit the brakes.

I see M's neck, her blond hair touching the collar of her favourite blue shirt, like the one I am wearing myself. We bought them last week on a mad shopping spree, giggling and running through town. 

Mustn't go into details of the day, no. Nothing about the teachers turning their eyes away, about a bunch of crying teenagers sitting on the stairs, about her big brother, the one I had a serious crush on, hugging me. Her big brother, who drove the car, who hit the brakes. The one who killed himself a couple of years later.

In the end I just walked out of school and sat at my bus stop staring into the dirty snow. A woman living on our street picked me up thinking I was drunk or had fainted. She held my hand on the bus and walked me to our door.

When I let myself in, my mother

my mother

my mother

she was mad because I was early and I must have upset her careful morning schedule of resting in her hazy valium world and doing nothing. Oh, I don't know. I have come up with too many versions of my happy childhood, imagining emotional scenarios, excuses, trying to accomodate the fact that all she did was tell me to go upstairs and stay out of her way until lunch was ready, and to clean that trashy mascara off my face.

But this all happened a long long time ago.

lifelong learning

This is the path we take in cultivating joy: learning not to armor our basic goodness, learning to appreciate what we have.

 Pema Chödrön

no snow, no frost, no wind, just fog, for a moment the air is still except for the birds, I can almost hear a long haired Germanic warrior shouting abuse from his hilltop across the river to his enemies on another hilltop, long before the Romans arrived building harbours, aqueducts and sewage pipelines, cultivating the hillsides with vineyards, and now, the tuk tuk from the barges, a heavy goods train speeding along behind the trees on the other side, builders' noises from one of the large villas behind me, this is a very busy place, all the world lives here, it seems

Looking out of our kitchen window into the wet and messy garden.
In about four weeks time, R said, trees and leaves and budding lilac.

This nasty little war between the person I think I am (the healthy superfit person I so desperately want to be) and the woman with itsy bitsy pain and itsy bitsy discomfort and a catalogue of agonies, general agonies, way too supersensitive towards potentially dramatic symptoms and all that shit. 

Get off it. 

Waste of time.

Let's see.

(Infinite space expands.)

From the window of Klaus Staeck's gallery in Heidelberg.

Last Sunday I read this article in the Observer and my heart stopped for a moment here:

When your tools for interpreting the world stop working, you cease to feel like the same person. You are not the same person. Not really. And you know that things may well get an awful lot worse before they start to get better - if they're to get any better at all  - and who's to know what "better" might mean, because no one's telling you anything anyway. "Better" might just mean "no worse". And that's when words like "disabled" start to incur on your thinking.

You then stop thinking.

And here:

What do you learn from such experiences? From losing faculties? You don't learn anything  - you just do the losing and then carry on. For sure, you discover that words like "better" and "worse" have infinitely more calibrations than you ever thought possible before, and you become almost infinitely patient in your study of what those calibrations reveal. But there isn't anything to be learned; only endured.

Yes, I have been there. I am there.

Today, the immunologist sends me her latest conclusions on my state of health. Precise wording, a neat list of the various shortcomings and irretrievable changes, history of medication and trials, suggested proceedings etc. etc.

While I am standing there in my kitchen with the letter in my hand, watching the snow falling from a grey sky, my house of cards comes tumbling down. For a while. With a heavy dose of self pity.

the river is a silver band

pink frosty air

just before sunset yesterday

today it started to snow, -14°C

Don't go into the tangled jungle
looking for the great elephant
who is already quietly at home.
Nothing to do,
Nothing to force,
nothing to want -
and everything happens by itself.

Lama Gendun Rinpoche

Heavy frost for the last ten days and more to come. Stories of frozen canals and schools closing due to burst pipes, while ice breakers are clearing the waterways to the coast. And records: coldest night in 20 years, thickest ice under this bridge ever, etc. I find it too cold to cycle. Good grief, this is the weather of my childhood winters, we simply walked to school when the air was too icy for the downhill runs on wheels.

I am fraying at the edges with stiff muscles and painful neck movements, another eye inflammation, sore throat and a general feeling of yuk. Ophthalmologist warned me yesterday that the immune suppression will have to be upped if I continue to have these inflammations. Ah please no!

So I watch the clear bright frosty world from indoors, shuttling my sore body to and fro in the car, waiting this out.

In a dream last night, Jenita walked up towards our house under the mango trees, Ki i dir?  she shouted all the way with a big grin on her face, her kids running along beside her.  Aw, mwan fatigue!   I replied.

This day sits half way between midwinter and spring equinox. The ancient Celts called it Imbolc and celebrated the beginning of the light, spring, the first lambs etc., the catholics obviously had to have their own spiel on it and made it into the feast day of an elderly abess, Brigid/Bride of Kildare, Lá Fhéile Bríde. The various rituals overlap and whatever you feel like doing (weaving the straw cross, dipping your hands in the well, dancing at sunrise or having a drink...) remember it's all about the light.
(Luka always makes me cry.)