Soul Power

Somewhere in mid-April I packed a whole lot of activity into a week. It was bookended by that weekend where she ordered shelving and built herself a nice closet. I was in constant motion during the daytime from Tuesday through Sunday of that week. It took me that much movement and that long to crash. How did I have that much movement in me at that point in time, and I don’t now?

Three things:

1. It was rainy in April. It rained constantly. There’s probably more allergens floating around out there now. Much more pollen. You can see the pollen on the car. I have asthma in the mix now.

2. Soul power and a positive shade of ignorance. I had absolutely no idea about Post Exertion Malaise. I would only find out about that after the crash. I learned from an online reddit board. My thinking directed my actions. My thinking at the time was, “I’m going to get my life back! Hell yes! Whoo I’m going to start exercising again“. There were hints throughout the week that this wasn’t going to work, but I ignored them.

One day I did 2 walks instead of 1 around the neighborhood and that night I came on here and wrote, “You know… I think it’s going to be one walk a day. I am awfully exhausted right now.” I had not yet reached a point of total non-functionality. So, I kept doing those walks once a day and constantly doing chores. Again, I had no idea about PEM so I kept moving as much as I could outside of that one walk a day. During the weekend there was a great deal of running back and forth to the hardware store with her. That Sunday night I started wheezing hardcore for the first time in a while. I was standing in Lowe’s trying to hide the wheezing and coughing fit. I then excused myself and ran out to the car to use my inhaler. It was too late. I coughed so hard I puked. Not fun.

Stubborn and still ignorant, I kept moving constantly the next day. Wrote about this in an earlier on my blog. Cooking, cleaning, moving moving moving like most relatively young and normal healthy humans do.

But. Around 7 p.m. that Monday night I crashed. Brain fog took over. I looked at her and asked, “What did we do this past Saturday?” I could not remember the thing cats do when they’re hyper. “You know, that thing they do. What’s it called?” It’s called “zoomies.” She was watching TV and I came out to chat for a bit but I was so foggy headed and could barely sit up that I retired for bed around 8 and got on the reddit boards. I needed dark, I could not sit up. I tried to journal and I could barely think. I rarely experience brain fog, but this was undoubtedly brain fog. The level of exhaustion was not workable. It was like I suddenly had flu. Then I got on the subreddit and I saw an acronym frequently referenced: “PEM”. I looked it up. What I was experiencing matched to a T. This began a period of grief. One I’m still not entirely over. But I have instinctively learned to do the pacing thing. You fuckin’ rest when your body says to rest. You don’t try to be the way you were in the before times, unless you want to experience a crash and be non-functional for a night. I was probably wiped the next day too.

Getting back to the point of this particular number in the series, however, I want to focus on the good part of this. Soul Power. Look at how far it carried me. Tuesday thorough Sunday. It took 6 DAYS for me to fully crash. Of constant movement. It was my attitude. It was my physical health in comparison to some others in this boat. It was 2 meetings a day. It was 15 days of zero poison. It was gratitude. I had a positive attitude and I was soaking up the good spiritual messages from 2 meetings a day. I was forward thinking. When I’m open, I connect to what they are saying. When I close up like a spider, it all sounds like bullshit and things get ugly with my thinking real fast.

Once I learned about PEM, I couldn’t un-learn that knowledge, and I started to grieve and limit movement. It’s confusing because I needed to learn so I could comply with the rule. The rule is simple – learn your limitations and don’t overdo things. But what if there’s a middle ground? Observe the rule but re-embrace soul power. That’s where my thinking is at now. There’s a third aspect to this:

3. I hadn’t started the anti-depressant yet. This time around it causes the same tale-tell sedation it always has, but now that old layer of day time sedation worsens depression. This is new. It’s the two health conditions interacting with the drug, in my opinion.

But oh well. I’m sticking with it because I’ve got to see if it’s going to help offset the mental problems that come from hormones in a couple weeks. or sooner. 18 more days. If it doesn’t work, I try something else. I can’t go it alone and I can’t avoid medical and therapy staff. I came to terms with the need to be monitored on several fronts, health wise. I used to avoid doctors like the plague and I could not get movitated to get back on this drug and see it through. Until I reached a point where I had nothing to lose.

Blogging may be excessive for a while, especially if I wake up criminally early like this. It’s one of the tools.

I woke up and there was immediate resistance to what I’m supposed to do. I had to work toward submitting to it. I laid it all out in the last post. Arguments about the archaic language. Mental gymnastics are necessary. Ultimately, I compared it to the Jody Whitely credo, and how they are similar. I started by reducing it down to the simple directive of compassion and kindness. So I sat there in meditation or what some of these folks call prayer.

It told me to go outside. There’s an It behind the her of the imagination that I’ve always known. I thought the she… inside of all this… was it, but this morning it felt like the goddess is more of an angel type figure, and she has an it behind her. It said to go outside. So I went outside. It was like, “you who like the outdoors so much. Go be in it.” So I did that.

I stood outside surveying the beauty of the morning. Birds, sun rising. I looked at her beautiful lawn work. Freshly mowed. For a moment I then veered into sadness again. Thinking about B she does more than I do now. She is lately more active than I’ve ever seen her. Being envious. Worrying that she judges me. Forcing myself to trust that she does not judge me. She may understand better now. She sees the inhalers. She must know I wouldn’t lie about this. As active as I used to be. As much as I used to glory in hiking. A few weeks back I tried explaining the PEM thing and she wasn’t fully getting it at that point in time, kind of saying to me well we’re older now. I responded that this thing happening to me isn’t just natural aging. But I trust that things are a little different now. Anyway I do what I can. This morning I’ll be washing her car. I can do activities like that in the morning. I’ve thought of going for a hike some time soon and just dealing with the blowback. Sometimes I can get away with it. Hey, I got away with it for 6 days. As long as the hike is the only thing I do, I may get away with it. And as long as there is not too much elevation. LBA park nearby is about perfect.

Anyway I’m getting off topic at this point. I am conflicted because the text says to avoid self pity. I view it as a good thing that I can cry now, and I think a therapist would agree. Is there an element of danger in handing this off to folks not professionally trained? Or is it possible that the “professionally trained” folks are no better in the run… we’re all human…and they get to hide behind a long period of focused study and credentials?

I guess one could say that being vulnerable and learning to cry isn’t really the same as self pity, there’s a difference in tone there. Self-pity is closely tied to resentment and that’s something I need to get away from. It’ll take time.

I started the process yesterday by letting go. I told B that if I got a cancer diagnosis tomorrow, I would hardly be concerned by some of her recent choices…. and my mission would just be to love her until my time is up. That kind of thinking is how I started my day. And that kind of thinking is what ultimately lead me to open up my face in a meeting, awkward as it was, and actually do the thing I’ve needed to do for over a month.

So I did my morning thing. It was hard at first but the thing about going outside and being kind was good. It’s already 8 a.m. so I better get off here and plan my day. I think the general point, winding and twisty though this post has been, is to re-embrace soul power within limitations. I can’t unlearn what I’ve learned but I can keep having gratitude about the things that matter. There will be moments of depression again but I’m teaching myself to reach out instead of wallow in it. And people don’t have to understand every little thing about my physicality now either. People not understanding was a resentment and a hangup before, but it cannot continue to be. Nothing good comes from mental isolation. There’s also support groups and shit. Hell, reddit can be looked at as a support board.

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Starting the process

All right. It’s real now. And I’m solidifying it by typing the pages she said to read on my blog. Hey, it’s my space. I’ll do what I want with it. Blogging while I eat, step work on here sometimes, whatever I want to do.

She said I’ll already be doing a bit of inventory every day. Doing this inventory every evening before I retire and setting an intention every morning. They don’t mess around… They make you work, and I’m ready for that. Because, you know, I just haven’t had a good handle on my emotions when I spiral. So. I had to take some direction. That’s kind of how this is done.

1. When I read these pages, review my day at the end of the day and answer each question asked.
2. Then read it again the next morning and set state/intention for the day and follow what it says about how to address my day. Mostly this gets done in my paper journal.

I’m doing this now because I’m more likely to read my own blog post first thing in the morning with coffee…. rather than pair together text messages with the book and put it all together when I’m still waking up. So this may be the first thing I look at each day for a bit.

At this moment, it also helps me to type it all up because nothing solidifies lessons in text for me better than re-typing it. This is true now and it’s always been true.

“When we retire at night, we constructively review our day. Were we resentful, selfish, dishonest, or afraid? Do we owe an apology? Have we kept something to ourselves which should be discussed with another person at once? Were we kind and loving toward all? What could we have done better? Were we thinking of ourselves most of the time? Or were we thinking of what we could do for others, of what we could pack into the stream of life?

But we must be careful not to drift into worry, remorse, or morbid reflection, for that would diminish our usefulness to others. After making our review, we ask *our higher power’s forgiveness and inquire what corrective measures should be taken.

On awakening, let us think about the 24 hours ahead. We consider our plans for the day. Before we begin, we ask *our higher power to direct our thinking, especially asking that it be divorced from self-pity, dishonest, or self-seeking motives. Under these conditions we can employ our mental faculties with assurance, for after all our higher power gave us brains to use. Our thought life will be placed on a much higher plane when our thinking is cleared of wrong motives.

In thinking about our day, we may face indescision. We may not be able to determine which course to take. Here we ask for inspiration, an intuitive thought or decision. We relax and take it easy. We don’t struggle. We are often surprised how the right answers come after we have tried this for a while. What used to be the hunch or the occasional inspiration gradually becomes a working part of the mind.

Being still inexperienced and having just made conscious contact with our higher power, it is not probable that we are going to be inspired at all times. We might pay for this presumption in all sorts of absurd actions and ideas. Nevertheless, we find that our thinking will, as time passes, be more and more on the plane of inspiration. We come to rely upon it.

We usually conclude the period of meditation with a prayer that we be shown all through the day what our next step is to be, that we be given whatever we need to take care of such problems.

[skipping some, this is getting long]

As we go through the day we pause, when agitated or doubtful, and ask for the right thought or action. We constantly remind ourselves that we are no longer running the show… we are then in much less danger of excitement, fear, anger, worry, self-pity or foolish desicions. We become much more efficient. We do not tire so easily, for we are not burning up energy foolishly as we did when we were trying to arrange life to suit ourselves. It works – it really does. We alcoholics are undisciplined. So we let our higher power discipline us in the same way we have just outlined. But this is not all. There is action and more action. ‘Faith without works is dead’”

*It says God but I’m still having to do mental gymnastics around that word. Spirit or higher power works fine for my purposes. I have to do mental gymnastics around some of this other big book language as well, but I accept the general spirit and intent of what they are saying here.

Ah yes, that last part gets into ruminations. The authors are not wrong when they talk about the amount of energy that eats up. And I don’t have a whole lot of energy to waste these days, let me tell you. I pondered doing my inventory right here, but I’m due for a paper journal session soon and the night is getting on. So I’ll do my little inventory on paper. Anyway that part is a bit private and I doubt anyone is gonna care except my new sponsor if she reads this.

-Z

Reblog: Creative Flow — Thought Doula

After lamenting my difficulties in creating art in this space yesterday, the universe proved this was nothing more than a self-limiting belief. I had a lot of work to do, but I couldn’t shake the desire to draw. In the time before my journey… that other life which I am seeking a concise name for… […]

Creative Flow — Thought Doula

Magnificent Quotes (Inspiration)

“I think society is moving a little bit, but I think it isn’t moving near that fast. There’s always gonna be a large, huge bulk of straight people that aren’t going for it.”

“Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, they are so subtle.  They can milk you with two notes. They could go no further than from an A to a B, and they could make you feel like they told you the whole universe… but I don’t know that yet.  All I have now is strength.  Maybe if I keep singing I’ll get it.”

“I always felt that way about the blues, even when I didn’t know anything about it.  When I listened to it, I always felt there was something there – an honesty that Peggy Lee was lacking. And now the kids are open enough to say, ‘Now, wait a minute, let me listen for myself’, and those kids are getting into Indian music, getting into black music, getting into any kind of music they think is telling the truth to them.”

“This success thing hasn’t yet compromised the position I took a long time ago in Texas; to be true to myself and not play games. To be the person inside me, not bullshit anybody, be righteous, be real. So far, I’m not wearing cardboard eyelashes and girdles and playing in Las Vegas.  I’m still being Janis. It just happens to be on a slightly different level.”

“It’s slightly inhibiting, but it doesn’t force a game on me.  Because I don’t let it force a game on me.” (The interviewer asks if the camera is inhibiting, and this is her response).  

-Janis Joplin

Hunter S. Thompson

“There was madness in any direction, at any hour… you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, we were winning.  That sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail.  We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.” 

 “’You found the American Dream, in this town?’ [he asked].  I nodded. ‘We’re sitting on the main nerve right now’, I said. ‘You remember that story the manager told us about the owner of this place? How he always wanted to run away and join the circus?’ Bruce ordered 2 more beers. He looked over the casino for a moment and shrugged. ‘Yeah, I see what you mean,’ He said. ‘Now the bastard has his own circus, and a license to steal, too’.  He nodded.  ‘You’re right, he’s the model.’”

“The room looked like the site of some disastrous zoological experiment involving whisky and gorillas.”

“The rear windows leapt up with a touch, like frogs in a dynamite pond.”

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2008) Documentary Directed by Alex Gibney Shown: Hunter S. Thompson

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby

“She was not only singing; she was weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song, she filled it with gasping, broken sobs, and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks – not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sings the notes on her face.”

“The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot. The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher… the groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wandering confident girls who weave here and there and become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices under the constantly changing light.  Suddenly, one of the gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage, and moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform.”

“The wind has blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life.”

“Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees – he could climb to it if he climbed alone, and once there he could gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.  He waited, listening a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star.”

Grace Slick

“A startling presence, both visually and vocally.  An Oscar Wilde in drag who combined insight and sarcasm that was sometimes light, sometimes dark.  A provocateur.”  – Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane

Somebody to Love?  1998 Grace Slick Biography

“There’ll always be people who are afraid of living and afraid of dying. And there will always be more of them than there are risk-takers, the people who bring innovation into every area, with our without drugs.”

“Since all changes, no matter how small, are absorbed into and add impetus to the ongoing paradigm shift, nothing ever really slips away. The old themes and styles persisted as stitches in the unfurling tapestry, but they were hard to see. What caught the eye was all the newness.”

“As we lay on our backs in the tall grass on the mountain, each person made a brief awestruck remark about the diversity and synchronicity of the clouds, the air, the trees, and the animals.  It was on that mountaintop where I first understood that you and I are only separated by one channel of a limited thought process.  If I looked long enough, colors on the same object would slowly change in accordance with my ability to take in the transformation. My usual focused perspective was expanded.  Instead of viewing certain things or people as passing scenery, as something inconsequential, the peyote made everything, and everyone seem equally important.  Suddenly I could see no isolation, no overabundance. It was just energy exhibiting itself in infinite dimensions.”

“Four gigantic Altec speakers were set up so we could literally feel the playback, the technology could squeeze or explode a sound… there were countless knobs and dials and wires to mold a song into an aural vision, and I was fascinated by all of it.”

 “When a band is in sync and everybody is playing well and feeling good, there’s nothing like it. You, both the audience and performers, become the power of the music.  It’s a biological as well as spiritual phenomenon and it still happens to me when I’m riding around in a car or sitting at home listening to 130 decibels of speaker-cracking music. An almost tangible shift in feeling happens as I go from thick to weightless.”

“Imagine it’s a Saturday night, and there’s a line of what looks like a bunch of young multi-colored circus freaks waiting to go into the Fillmore Auditorium.  The crowd is animated, everybody is talking to each other even though they may have just met for the first time. The only visible sign of color on the outside of the building is a poster drawn in Day-Glo swirls.  It reads ‘Jefferson Airplane, The Charlatans, Moby Grape and The Great Society.’  When the door to the building opens, the last of the grey vanishes. At the top of the steps that lead to Fillmore’s main hall there is a wall of bright, intensely colored posters.  They’re so numerous that the wall itself is invisible. As you walk onto the dance floor, you have the feeling you’ve just entered seven different centuries all thrown together in one room.  The interior of the building is turn-of-the century rococo, and a man in red briefs and silver body paint is handing out east Indian incense.  A girl in full renaissance drag is spinning around by herself listening to some baroque music in her head while several people in jeans and American Indian headbands are sitting in a circle on the floor smoking weed. Close by, a good-looking man in a three-musketeer costume is placing ashtrays on the cheap fifties Formica tables that circle the edge of the room. In the corner, people are stripping off their clothes while the acid is taking effect. This is The American Dream (for a few hours) with no color barriers, dress code, moral imperatives, and only one keeper – the show’s intense but smiling dark haired promoter – Bill Graham.”

Jack Kerouac

“But there was a wisdom in it all, as you’ll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house on both sides of the street, each with the lamplight of the living room shining golden, and inside the little blue square television, each family riveting it’s attention on probably one show; nobody talking; silence in the yards, dogs barking at you because you pass on human feet instead of on wheels… I seem him in future years stalking along with full rucksack in suburban streets, passing the blue tv windows of homes, alone, his thoughts the only thoughts not electrified to the master switch… the millions of the One Eye.” -The Dharma Bums

“It was a mad crowd. They were all urging that tenor man to hold it and keep it with cries and wild eyes, and he was raising himself from a crouch and going down again with his horn, looping it up in a clear cry above the furor. Everybody was rocking and roaring… boom, kick, that drummer was kicking his drums down the cellar and rolling the beat upstairs with his murderous sticks, rattley-boom! The pianist was only pounding the keys with spread eagled fingers, chords at intervals when the great tenor man was drawing breath for another blast… The tenor man jumped down from the platform and stood in the crowd, blowing around, his hat was over his eyes… he just hauled back and stamped his foot and blew down a hoarse, laughing blast, and drew breath, and raised the horn and blew high, wide and screaming in the air.” -On the Road

“See, the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, dharma bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming all that crap they didn’t need anyway. All of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work.  I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks going up to the mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad.”  -The Dharma Bums

Wayne Coyne

Some interview.  Original Source not recorded in the notebook these are typed from.

“’The good times, it’s hard to make them last.’ – I think what people are hearing somewhere along the way is that the good times don’t just come at you. You almost have to create them.  You have to make sure that you’re searching out some sort of meaning and some sort of happiness throughout.”

“It just makes you stop in your tracks and go, ‘What’s it all worth?’ We’re all just hurtling through space. At any moment the whole thing could just run into some asteroid out there and we’re all gonna blow up and how insignificant and meaningless and what a speck of existence our life is, and I think I sing about that a lot.  When I sing utterly with fear about how insignificant I am, that’s the only time we sound significant. Isn’t that funny?”