Camel Secrets

“You can work a single camel for many years … and there will still be 70,000 secrets you will never learn from it. The Ambassador of Yemen in Djibouti told me this.”

This is a quote from Out of Eden walk.  I did not talk to the Ambassador of Yemen and have never been in Djibouti.  I would like to go but feel like my chances get slimmer by the year.

However, more importantly, I would like one or two secrets from a camel.  I can’t imagine what they might be.  Could he or she describe the millions of stars whirling in the sky over the desert and the sounds they make, celestial music only camels can hear?  Could they describe the feeling on their soft padded feet of following in the footsteps of millions of caravans on the Spice Route, on the Hajj?  Do they talk when they are hobbled close to camp, of Lawrence of Arabia, other camels they have known, stories overheard around the campfire far into the night?  Do they have favorite drovers who rub them behind their ears and whisper encouragement?

What are camel secrets?

There are things I will never know.

Going to ground

 

There was an article in the New York Times this morning that showed a slice of a kidney stone.   Isn’t it beautiful?  The accompanying text said that “they resemble nanoscale coral reefs or limestone formations: complex, calcium-rich rocks with strata that accumulate and dissolve over time”.

We tend to see nature as outside of ourselves.  I looked at these beautiful images with rings like tree rings, and I thought, these are rock formations.  The processes that form these within our bodies formed the hills and mountains around us.  We are made of the same stuff.

Now I know, so what, we’ve known this forever, but really, I had never felt this connection to my Mother Earth so strongly.  Seems like we’ve seen the world around us as simply that, around us.  It is a field where we play out our little lives.  But it is not so simple, is it?

The earth is not a tabula rasa, a screen we’ve been given to live our lives upon. The constituents and processes that built the earth built us.

I don’t know why this effected me so strongly.   But is did and it does.  Talk about going to ground.

 

 

 

Gravy

Kate called this morning, as she does to check in.  After we had chatted a bit, and said goodbye, I sat with myself and thought “I love her.”

You might think this is not particularly revelatory, we all love our children don’t we?   Let me make this clear.  I mean love her unreservedly, with open arms and open heart.

The last ten years of Kate’s anorexia was horrific.  We waited for the call that said she was dead.  I was steeling myself for her death so had to die a little myself.  Because I couldn’t love her with an open heart, my heart dried up.

Life does drop you to your knees doesn’t it?  You want to survive, so you just shut down a bit, your emotional arteries constrict.  As you constrict, your life narrows.  It is a sad thing, but inevitable.

Kate is my prodigal daughter, the one I yearned for, the one I mourned and the one who came home.  Everything else is gravy.

Addenda

…Rob vociferously denies that he called me a fat pig.  He said I never said fat.  Is this better?

Sole Perfection

Spent the day in town searching for the perfect shoe that will be long enough, accommodate my orthotics, and not be completely dorky looking.  Why do I worry about looking like a dork?  I know my age and my general appearance.  I am an elderly woman.  Don’t even try it—“Oh, Kitty you’re not old.”  Bullshit.  I’m old and I have grown into the need for dorky shoes.  But I refuse to put up with this without a fight.

Rob and I go to a shoe shop called Sole Perfection.  What horseshit.  However, I found my perfect shoe.  Long, as my feet are, wide, to accommodate my bunions, soft in the foot bed, and sturdy for my arch, and not dorky or at least not overly dorky.  The inside is lavender which is kind of cool.

Robin said in response to the sales woman who mentioned that I was pronating (who says that out loud?), “Is that because she is heavy?”, but he quickly tried to swallow that last word realizing at the last minute that this was not even close to PC, in fact unnecessary and rude.

I held my tongue although god knows this was trying and waited until we got back out to the car.  I brought up what he had said and he said “I never used the phrase fat pig…”

I had to physically attack him even though I couldn’t stop laughing.  He is such a shit.

Me too

Well,well,well.  Here we are again.  A blank page.  I’ve been reading like a maniac and not writing.  I find that if I don’t sit right down in the morning in front of the machine, I find many things to do.

Inspiration is not enough.  Writing takes patience and discipline.

Inspiration is one of those wonderful words.  It comes from the Greek “pnein” (don’t ask me how that’s pronounced), to blow, to breathe.  Can’t you just see one of those striking paintings with God in his heavens filling his lungs with air to blow the universe into being?

He’s a jolly old soul.

Inspiration:  immediate influence of God or a god,” to inflame, blow into, …to animate and fill with a purpose.

There’s that wonderful painting of the Annunciation by Titian showing that same blowhard with full cheeks inseminating the Virgin Mary with his breath.  Now, I don’t need to create the impression that my writing  resembles Mary getting impregnated by God, but look at the words.  Ideas are like seeds blown into our minds inspiring us to create.

I don’t claim that my writing comes from god.  It comes, however, from the deepest, most profoundly satisfying part of me.  It is me.  And in the sense that I am just a tiny bit of God (as we all are), then I am inspired and inflamed

Just one additional question.  Did Mary give her consent?

 

One can, tou can

Robin drives me crazy, he maddens me, and then he fills me with delight.  Sometimes I think I’ve been cursed and then other times I think I’ve been blessed.  When I told him my beloved brother-in-law had a-fib, Rob said “Aphids?”

Laughter is never far off at our house, but there is a bit of melancholy as well.

I was speaking to a friend recently who said “I look around at all the stuff around me, you know, the accumulation and I think “…is this all there is?”

I think the drive toward meaning can sometimes lead to surfeit.  Isn’t gluttony one of the seven deadly sins?  The thing about gluttony is that it never is enough.  Nothing is ever enough—stuff, food, experience, sensuality, whatever.  Nothing is ever enough.

We are not just eating, sleeping, shitting, machines.  It has never been about enough for some of us.  It’s about finding the something (could be anything), that completes us, that delights us, that disarms us, that allows us for one brief moment to be full.

It’s like happiness.  It is not a steady state unless you’re high or blissed out.  Even then, it only lasts so long.

Rob woke up blue this morning.  He is rarely blue, mostly he is too revved up by anxiety to feel blue.

Struggling with who he is without the benefit of distraction is so difficult for him.  Here he sits, after a year of being immobilized by a sore on his foot that won’t heal, on his way to his endocrinologist,  and then on to the wound care doctor.

I believe, although I am not in his head, that he is experiencing that strange lucidity that hits when you are medicated for anxiety and open to reality.  This is my life.

Now, I don’t say this to be bleak or depressing.  I have also thought that I need to accept that diabetes brings with it certain associated problems that will effect Rob’s life and health.  It will effect my life and health.  That’s just the way it is.

We are both getting older or as the nurse at the clinic said “you are considered elderly.”  Our bodies will break down and eventually we will die.   We hope not, but know it is true.

There is no cure for this.  Live as vitally as one can for as long as one can.  As Rob might say “tou can.”

Touche’, my dear.  Touche’.