DatingGod

Conversation With A Friend

 

From: Sean

Subject: Death and decisions

Date: September 27, 2009 3:56:34 AM EDT

To: Kate

 

Hi Kate-

I don't want you to die. Seems like there's a good chance that the reason you have health insurance at this very moment is exactly so you can get your Hoohah burnt and walk around in pain oozing stuff for a while. 

Sure, I realize my preference for you remaining alive is all about me and how I fear losing other people. That's something David S. recognized a long time ago - that the main fear I had to face and surrender to was the fear of the loss of other - specific people, civilization, the environment, etc. Right now that fear is manifesting as a strong negative reaction to losing Katherine.

When I told S. about your cancer, she immediately suggested I tell you about my uncle's friend R. who took the natural route to curing his prostate cancer and ended up dying this year. He was a good guy - an Australian who loved to tell stores and take apart and reassemble airplanes. I said there was no way I would ever suggest that you do anything. I'm quite aware that you have an intimate connection with life that precludes taking advice from anyone else but your own deepest understanding of what the next step is.

Still, life does involve other people, and I have no clue about how various patterns influence the decision-making that are happening within you. So this is the best attempt by the collective patterns that make me up to influence you to make a serious effort to keep Katherine alive.

While I'm aware of the powerlessness I have over your decision-making, I'm also aware of the stupidity and arrogance in suggesting anything. Thinking that I can read one blog post, understand the situation, and make a judgment about what decision is best? Ridiculous. Even if I could make all of the cold calculations with the available facts and they pointed to "burning the Hoohah" as the correct path, no one can predict the outcome. Maybe there would be a complication in surgery and you would die right there on the operating table. Maybe a granola-head treatment will work and cure some of your other issues. Maybe on you do end up dying and that process helps me wake up (now there's a fucked up, ironically selfish thought).

Anyway, deep down I know that whatever happens will be right, and whatever you action you take will be the correct one, and somehow, Katherine having cancer is exactly what is supposed to be happening right now. But that knowledge still doesn't remove the preference for wanting you to stay alive a while longer. 

-Sean

 

From: Kate

Subject: Re: Death and decisions

Date: September 27, 2009 8:45:39 AM EDT

To: Sean

 

Sean . . . It's funny because I really wanted to hear from you, because for whatever it is that you think about yourself and where you are on the map, you and I seem to be at similar places. Have been for a while. Hearing from you feels like echos and reflections and I always end up clearer. I'm glad you wrote. I'm always glad when you write - emails, posts, all of it . . .

 

Every single thing that you said in your email, all of the points you make, are the exact same ones going through my mind the past few days. The mainstream insurance, the odds of staying alive with differing treatments. I think about that woman in Jed's book, the one with the broken neck who refused treatment at the scene of her car wreck, and it changed her life, how her quest to stay alive, but on her own terms, made her a powerful healer. And Brett and her cancer and her treks around her pond. And then I think about Christian Scientists and Amish, dying of simple bacterial infections or appendicitis.

 

I think that what is happening with my body is more than just the cancer, it's the lock down with my spine, the incredible back and neck pain I've been living with every day, that keeps me from sleeping, has my days be filled with so many blocks - where I can go, what I can do, how long I can do it. It's the digestive issues, not being able to digest food any denser than whole grain rice, and not being able to face my food addiction enough to only eat fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and so having to take dozens and dozens and dozens of digestive enzymes a day just to stay out of too much systemic pain. And then dealing with the pregnant belly, the weight gain of a body trying to figure out how to cope.

 

But the digestive issues, and the back pain, are actually beginning to get better. After trying dozens of different treatments and practitioners and exercises, I've found a guy with a machine they use in Germany and Russia, that pulses differing electrical vibrations into cells, one of those things that sound like pseudo science and very well might be. But it's working. For the past two weeks, it's been steadily getting better, and for the past five or six days, I've been sleeping and waking up pain free for the first time in many months. Of course I had to go through a whole other set of garbages in my head to be able to be treated by him, and I'm sure I'll post about it at some point, but the real point is that I'm better, that up to the place where I heard the word 'cancer' I saw that there might be a path through the pain and blocks to more movement and mobility.

 

Mostly though, it gets down to how this is mostly still a mental exercise, that the debate is still going on in my mind: should I go for the 90% cure mainstream savagery or should I opt for the alternative treatment that means serious diet and supplement changes? But a beauty of what is going on is that the cancer growing in me is in situ, and can take many years to become invasive, so I have time to come to the place where it's not about thinking, but about knowing.

 

And I've suspected, but reading your email triggered it deeper:  this whole cancer thing isn't about fear of dying, but how much I desire to die, how painful I've found being alive, how much it hurts. I have been in so much pain - physical, emotional, mental - all of my life - and I've prayed, begged for death thousands of times. In the past few months, as I've wound my way through the pain I've been dealing with, I wake up again and again in varying states of mental anguish, anguish that is gone from my days. But at night, it shows itself, comes rising out of my sleep.

 

It's the physical pain that wakes me, but it's the emotional and mental pain that has been shocking to witness. I wake up afraid and alone and scared. I wake up crying. I wake up with the knowledge that I am dying and there is nothing I can do. I wake up and walk around the house, knowing that at this moment, people are being murdered, raped, people are dying in alone and in pain, animals are caged, being tortured. I can feel them. Feel their pain. Feel the hopelessness. The fear running through me in those moments is a reaction away from the world. I can literally feel my cells, my muscles, my being, pulling away from the world or horrors, into itself, to collapse inwardly, like a black hole. I don't like it here, in this world, in this placed of horrors. I want out. I see the world, I feel it, and I want out. I have for a long, long time.

 

And so now I've been given a diagnosis. I've finally been given an out. And now I have to face: do I want to take it?

 

Maybe I have no choice here. Maybe the choice itself is illusion. Maybe the cancer isn't meant to grow deeper. Maybe it's on its way on a tour through my body and there isn't anything I can do about it. But it seems to me in this moment that the real fork in the road is: do I want to live? Or maybe it's even deeper: do I want to truly open myself to Life? Because the thing I've been doing with my back and my stomach and my mind is about curling in as I prepare to die. Of course I'm going to die, but when?

 

I'm getting pretty practiced at this whole Human Torch thing, and so I'm going to do the things I've discovered reveal the next things: keep watching - Life and my mind and body and heart. Because more will be revealed. And at some point I'll know which way to go, not because I'm afraid or because I hope, but because I'll know, because the way is clear . . .

 

Your pal :)

Kate

 

 

 

 

From: Sean

Subject: Re: Death and decisions

Date: September 29, 2009 7:00:23 PM EDT

 

 

Hi Kate,

I'm glad for your clarity and grateful for these interactions. I may respond with more later after some time processing what you've written.

Wish I had something useful to offer that could make the dream better on your end. Too bad the stories of never-ending bliss aren't true.

- S

 

From: Kate

Subject: Re: Death and decisions

Date: September 30, 2009 6:49:17 AM EDT

To: Sean

 

 

. . . i read the last sentences of your email and thought: dude, all is well, no need to feel badly. the stories of never-ending bliss *are* true, and the whole point is to look at the things that we think, believe aren't blissful and keep looking until we see they are. and when it's done right, done true, with an unflinching gaze, it always turns up blissful. or maybe blissful isn't a word i'd choose to use for it . . . more like quietly, humorously joyful . . .  the dream i'm having is fine, it's perfect . . . more will be revealed . . . what better thing to do with a life than to find the joy that lies on the other side of cancer, of death? or at least our feelings and beliefs about them . . .

 

 

 

In Situ

I had a message on my voice mail today: call my doctor's nurse for results about the biopsy they did on Monday afternoon. 

It was for the biopsy that hurt like f*cking hell, where a guy with eight years of grad school went up my Hoohah with a microscope and a thin bladed knife so that I could make a $20 copay for a small robbery of tender tissue. And afterward, when the guy had left the room, it was just me and his nurse, the one with the utterly hip haircut, you know the one, the back all shaved up and the front looking like blonde frothy fern tendrils. The room looked like a small homicide had been committed. And after his nurse left, and I navigated my way around tiny pools of my blood and pieces of tissue that had, not fifteen minutes ago, been attached to my body, I thought: this is some crazy, savage sh*t.

So when I got the voice mail message I knew it wouldn't be good. 

Actually I've known it wouldn't be good for while. For a couple of years. And when I got this fulltime job a few months ago, when I was signing up for the supplemental insurance, I chucked every cancer related insurance product into my enrollment package at the highest level allowed. 

I've felt the cancer growing inside of me, knowing it wasn't a huge deal yet, but feeling it nonetheless. And since I haven't been able to scare up cash any other way, and having this state employee insurance at my disposal, I've gone the western medicine route to see what the deal is in my female parts. 

I haven't taken antibiotics in close to fifteen years, and I can count the number of times I've been to an MD in the new millennium on one hand. As a hardcore granolahead I've always thought the MDs were a little narrowly focused, a little lost, and a lot cash-focused. But again, as a state employee, I have all this insurance at my disposal, and so why not take it for a test drive?

But this sh*t is just so weird. The guy who did my Hoohah expedition was so odd. He was kinda good looking, so was comfortable using a bit of charm, which to me and my hyper-removed perspective, was a little skeevy. And he'd also obviously been to a recent sensitivity training where he must have been told to keep telling the patient what a good patient they were, how well they were doing, how great they were, and so he would say: you did a great job! you're a great patient! and I would say, ummm, thanks, thanks a lot. 

It was all so f*cking bizarre for a person who has so little experience in the modern western medicine world. To my perception, it was this machine, and my Hoohah was the widget, and my brain was attached to the widget and so the medical factory worker felt he had to placate my mind in order to get paid for the Hoohah adjustment.

And so the conveyor belt has moved me on down the line. I spoke to the nurse earlier today, and it was all bidness as usual - severe dysplasia, come in for a consult, we'll need to do surgery, etc. i jumped on the net, did some searching, jumped on PubMed, saw that most likely they'll want to burn off some/most/all of my cervix with an electrified wire, and that it may or may not impact sexual enjoyment, and it most likely will have things draining out of me that I'd rather not be party to, and will most assuredly hurt like holy muthafrakkin hell, and it may or may not stop the cancer creep, but will at least remove the pre-cancerous cells that have been found in the skin that lines the cervix, the cells that have yet to permeate into the deeper levels of tissues, to spread this ivy that is abnormal cells, the cells that say: No Yes here, in this place where you have had so very much sex, so very much love going out, so very little love coming in, where you have imprinted again and again the hammer song of human existence: pass on our DNA, woman. 

Or the pre-cancer may be classified, post burn, as Real Cancer, and they will remove more parts of me, slowly chipping away, one organic chunk at a time.

But all I can think of in this moment is: f*ck this. I'm not afraid of death. Dying I'm not looking forward to, but death? Come and get me, whenever you feel like it, you big dark mysterious tunnel of Who Knows.

I'm supposed to meet with the eight year grad school dude tomorrow afternoon. But I think I'm gonna cancel. I want to let it all marinate and see what it is I really want, how I want to handle what is coming for this body I cruise around in. I don't think I want him up my Hoohah with a torching device. i don't think I want to be a part of the savagery. 

But I just found out that the cancer that grows in me is in situ, is hanging out, and the real question is: do I want to interfere?

So, I'll do the things I feel to do, which right now is collect data. I've put out phone calls to my two friends who have been doing psychic work for the past couple of decades, to see what they see. And to my landlord's girlfriend, who headed up a Planned Parenthood clinic for several years, and who can turn me on to hip, granolahead gyn eight-year grad school granolahead chicks. 

And relax. 

And laugh. 

The kitties are so snuggly these days, so incredibly sweet. My job is so filled with Yes and space and room to move and hilarity.

I had a client sit with me today. He was with his lovely girlfriend and luscious two-month old baby, and I was intensely scanning the system for cash for them, and he said: you are so lucky, you get to be in air-conditioning all day. And it took a moment to sink in, what a luxury it was for them to sit in my pink cubicle and partake of the recycled cool air. And I looked at them, how gorgeous they were, and how he was fresh out of prison, and how radiant her face was, how the baby stared at me the whole time they were there, and I thought: how lucky we are to be together right now, in this moment.

And I got that I will most likely opt out of the burning of my Hoohah, and that I will find a way to help these luminous folks, and that none of it matters, only what we feel to be Yes in the moment, and that it is all okay, and that Life is so dang good when we surrender to what it is bringing us . . . seriously . . . how good it all is . . . I am so dang grateful in this moment . . . tears and swelling heart and all . . . thank you Life for this wild f*cking ride . . . 

Dark Matter

A huge portion of what I'm processing through right now is around my physical body. The past year was about dropping a f*ckload of emotional weight, toxic fat that lived inside heart and mind. Now I face the physical Not Me, the bloat and block that the emotional and mental set into motion inside the skin and bone and nerves and in-and-out of cellular motion, the fascia that knits it all together.

I've been waking up every morning to two things: pain and kitties. Pain that roars through spinal cord, hot fire on brain stem and coccyx bone. Kitties leaping on me. Low back locked down. Kitties leaping past me, using my belly as a springboard into pre-dawn night-tinged infinity. Skull lit up with No. Kitties washing me like they do one another, sticking sticky little tongues in nose and eyes and ears. 

And this morning I realized how far I've come in the whole surrender thing, and how this shows up with both pain, and with kitties. I used to fight my kitties, saying "noooooooooo" to so many things. I used to want love from them, and would seek them out, and love grip them, until they forced me to release them. Now I just hang out with them. They come, they go, and we dance, an ongoing love dance where I let go of my ideas of human love, and learn the deeper Way of The Cat. 

And so this morning, covered in kitties, but a cramp deeping in my neck, I had a realization. As I shifted to relieve the neck pain, and the kitties didn't run away but instead shifted around me, and the love bubble grew more luscious, I saw that it really is about staying in the moment, that there is no recipe, and that no one can ever tell anyone what The Right Choice, The Correct Response is, because we ourselves never know which way is up til we orient ourselves in the moment.

And I got: this is what all the Be In The Now bullsh*t is about. It's been turned and twisted, had the Yes beaten half to death out of it, but it's true: if you make your "decisions" in the moment, based on what is truly indicated, you'll never go wrong, and you'll always do the right thing. How could it be otherwise?

So as I navigate this (seemingly) treacherous current path of physical pain, where my back goes into spasms, vertebrae pop in and out like loose beads on a string, where neck and shoulders get so tense that it hurts to hold my head up, I watch. And learn. I discover all sorts of things about how my body adapted to the rigors of grad school at 40 years old, or a state cubicleland job and it's bargain basement ergonomics, or attempts to hide the fact of double chin by lifting my face upward, or four years without making love, or lugging around just plain stoopid amounts of unresolved past trauma. 

I see that it isn't just about stretching, but about strengthening. That a body needs to be supple and strong, flexible and fierce, surrendered and ready to take flight at a moment's notice. That the tensions in my body are about the past that is stored in them, and also about how much of the present I will and won't allow in.

The only way to go through this is the same way I surfed the emotion, the thoughts: don't make any plans, just stay awake, alert, and keep noticing what is really going on. Because if I make plans, either with a food plan or an exercise regimen, something always happens to blow it, be it spasm or what's served for dinner at a friend's house or other such stuff of Life.

And so the only way to do this is let go of the recipe book, and say Yes to every last single moment. Because the truth really does set us free . . .

And may I share with you how grateful I will be to be free of my fat ass?

Looking

There have been many many times over the past few years that I've asked myself: is this holistic stuff I do genuinely assisting people or is it more of the shell game, just one more expression of New Age Pap? I still ask myself this question at least once a week, and I still don't have a confident answer.

Six years ago, when I swam away from apartment, boyfriend, teacher, career, friend, and life to go and live in a cabin on a mountain in Virginia, part of the wind chapping my ass was around this very issue. I was clear that in body, mind, and spirit I was f*ck ed, flustered, and far from home, and so therefor, what gave me the right to set myself up as "healer" to other people? If my "healing" skills were so awesome, and in fact awesome enough to ask people for cash in exchange for them, why was I myself so very not healed?

 

And out of those looming questions, while I was on the mountain, and then in school, I did no real healing work beyond lending out my psychic ability to people, and then only very very part time with readings, most of them by phone to old clients who would reach out to me to look at things: their daughter was missing, they had a health issue that the docs couldn't pinpoint, things I couldn't really say no to as looking into the abyss for people is pretty straightforward when it comes to simply passing on the facts.

 

Then I got out of school, moved back to the coastal NC town that I grew up in, and immediately landed a job. Within weeks of starting said job however, things went deep south as I realized that the bad feeling I'd had in the initial interview wasn't just a case of my twanging I-haven't-been-on-a-job-interview-in-years nerves, but a hardcore sign of things to come. I didn't give myself grief about it, though. Because seriously, when you're offered a job fresh out of public health grad school, for 42K plus bennies and bonuses and your own office and autonomy to add in your holistic background, how do you say no to it? I didn't, because I had no idea that it meant working 70-hour workweeks and dealing with a crazy dry drunk administrator, and two ex-drug addict, mentally ill bosses. But six weeks into the job, horrified at the ratcheting premonition-flavored nightmares and escalating anxiety and seriously bad juujuu that flowed each day from the folks I worked with, I walked into the administrator's office on a Tuesday morning and said "You know, this really isn't working out". I was released from working out a two-week notice, and suddenly, there I was, out of a job.

 

And in the wake of that huge house cleaning, within hours, it was like a bountiful idea and action filled bomb of YES went off. By Friday I had advertising, office space in a local holistic center, a brochure, a business card, a To Do list, and a three-month business plan. But even more than this, it all came out of a vision of what I could offer, what I genuinely could do for people and genuinely be of service, and the whole Integral Shamanics thing was born.

 

Now, almost two years later, I'm still asking myself: are you really assisting folks? And what I get is this: it is perfectly legitimate to go see a doctor if you are ill and don't know what's causing it, don't know how to deal with the rash or the pain in your pancreas or the ache in your head. If you get a cavity, it makes very good sense to go see a dentist. If your vision is fuzzy, seeing an optometrist and getting a new pair of glasses is probably your best bet. Why not the same for emotional and mental and spiritual confusion and angst and infection and dis-ease?

 

Last week, I was on my massage therapist's table. We've been doing some bartering - me getting massages, he getting shamanic healing sessions - and it was my turn to receive. We were in the middle of one of his mind-bending three-hour-long extravaganzas and I was, as usual, actually howling in pain. He's a six-foot-five gladiator of a guy, with a rain-manish ability to see into a body, know exactly how to unwind the tangles with his hands, and the firm boundaries to be able to go in and do what needs to be done. It's outrageously painful, but afterwards, in the car on the way home, I'm always blown away at the mobility in my neck, how I can actually move my shoulders up and down with no pain or clicking, how my back shifts and turns and glides.

 

But as I lay there, his fingers buried two inches deep in my traps, I drew enough breath to be able to ask the question: hey Erik, do people actually get their bodies back because of this? does this ever really, genuinely work? And he stopped, pulled his fingers out of my traps, and was silent for a long long minute. When he spoke it was as if he were just realizing the truth of it. I'd like to say yes, he said, but I can't actually think of anyone this is true for. No one? I asked. Well, he said, there was a woman who came once a week for a really long time, but other than that, I'd say that mostly what happens is people come and for a little while it helps them feel better but they don't change anything and so it all just goes back the way it was. And then he put his fingers back into my traps and I howled some more and after the massage he spent a half hour gently massaging ginger honey sugar into my skin and I left feeling bruised and expansive and floaty and wanting to lick my own skin for dessert.

 

And as my body slowly but surely tightened back into place, as the neck solidified to it's small range of motion, as the right knee clicked, and the spine lit up with inflammation I realized something. Really, no healer helps in the long term, that at most what we do is assist in dousing the flames of an acute flare up. A physician can prescribe a topical steroid, or a chiropractor can crack the spine back into place, or a shamanic healer can facilitate energetic flow into a rainbow of Yes. But unless, until, the person makes genuine change in how they see the world they've created, until they jettison the belief system that set the imbalance in motion in the first place, it's all just feel-good band-aids on existential bullet holes. And we're all marching towards death anyway, so perhaps all we healers do is help keep us all more calm and comfortable as death chips away at us, one tiny chunk at a time.

 

Maybe this sounds cynical or negative or hopeless, and I'd probably agree. But it's also very straightforward and as close to the truth as I can express in this moment. We're all f*cked, and in acknowledging that, that really, what we all are is compost in motion, it somehow allows me to take a deep breath, and my shoulders to release a little, and my neck feel a little less stiff.

 

Perhaps if I were having s*ex, and the healing energies of that male-female polarity and hormone-exchange cruising through my system were doing it's job, I might feel differently. Or maybe if I stopped stuffing cake into my face and gave my body the six-month fruit and vegetable cleanse it's begging, literally begging me for, I'd see it another way. Or maybe doing that 45-minute a night dance and weight lifting and yoga session I know without a doubt my body desperately needs would shift things.

 

But can I do it? Will I do it? Does it matter if I do it? Will the chiropractor and acupuncturist and gastroenterologist help? Will the godforsaken "spiritual retreat" I'm going on in October make a difference? I ask and re-ask, but what else can I do but take another dip into the maybe, the possible, the tiny stone left unturned?

 

Yesterday was the slowest day I've ever had at the holistic center that I still work out of two days a month. Not one single client from 10:30am until 3pm, when in walked a guy who wanted a half hour session. He wanted one of the "Shamanic Soul-Retrieval Half-Hour Power Sessions" I've been doing that are inexpensive and down and dirty, like shoving a person through a hole in space, catching them on the other side, and sending them on their way with a kleenex and a prayer that they open to the Almighty Yes that they just said howdy to.

 

The guy was decked out in a tie-dyed shirt and granolahead shoes, and was seriously squirrelly, had just smoked an American Spirit cigarette and sucked down a huge Port City Java coffee. He had puffy dark circles around his anguished eyes, clearly in the middle of being ripped apart, tendon by tendon, from the inside out. Of course, I can't give details, but I can give metaphor. Do you remember that scene in The Matrix, where Neo wakes up in the pod to find all of the metal cables inserted into his spine, arms, legs? And how in a hot second, they blast off of his body, his eyes roll back in horrific pain, and he's jettisoned from the pod, shooting down the waste drain into the filthy sewer water? That moment of waking up in the pod was what happened in my session space, in that holistic center at approximately 3:15 yesterday afternoon. This guy woke up and felt in excruciating detail every single tube attached, every single metal clamp on nose, mouth, vertebrae, heart and mind, how he was locked down and trapped inside of the horror that is his "self". And for an hour, as he stayed with the horror, as he refused to look away, I did the only thing that could be done in such a situation: I said over and over and over and over: There Is No Spoon.

 

And he got it. He saw it. He felt the untruth inside of himself, and in the face of that blew past it, jettisoned it to reveal the truth. And an hour and a half later, he sat on the holistic center porch in the sun, looking at a flower, smoking a cigarette, his eyes filled with Holy F*ck, Yes.

 

And as we parted ways, I wondered if he could sense how he was just beginning, how the worst was yet to come, how eventually he'd have to burn out his own eyes, and how he would most likely turn around and ask to be reinserted into The Matrix. But instead of saying anything to him, I hugged him, because if I could get as far as I've gotten, so could he, and why not? What the f*ck else is there to do? And I got in my car and went to the movies and ate an enormous bucket of popcorn and bag of peanut m/ms and came home and didn't dance or exercise and really is that bad or good or neither or both?

 

I have no answers. Except to say that it isn't about More, but Less. In that we think we just need that One Perfect Ingredient to make our life right, but in truth, it is letting it all go, piece by piece, until Nothing remains.

 

And so I'll go to the acupuncturist, the chiropractor, the massage therapist, the physician, the retreat. Until I don't go anymore. And maybe I'll dance my way out of the prison of skin and bone, the sinew of No and the fascia cemented with Past that I'm thrashing around inside of. Or maybe that's just a euphemism for death. Maybe yesterday I offered that guy a red pill, like Jed did with his books, or that crazy wild email David sent to me back last fall did, that one particular sentence that gave me the shove I needed to leap off this latest cliff.

 

Who knows? Who cares? I'm just following the breadcrumbs, like anyone else, going down path after path, on and on, until I get that there is no path, or all paths lead to No Where, or death taps me on the shoulder, or I get the soulmate and the cash and fame and laugh about how I used to have a bad case of The Sour Grapes, or I wake up in a mental institution drugged and shamed, or Bill Compton walks into my bar, or I succumb to cancer of the HooHah, or some other scenario that I haven't thought of.

 

The thing is, I don't care anymore about the how. Only about The Now. As in what is occurring right now? In this moment, what do I absolutely know for sure? And then I dive into it, and explore it, until it crumbles to dust and I move on to the next thing.

 

Yeah, I have no answers. But I do know this: everything I need, Life has given me, has placed right in front of me, inside of me. If I feel to find mirrors or hire mirrors or use mirrors to see what is inside of me, so be it. And so I do the next thing, which in this moment is stop typing and acknowledge that Baby Emmaline is licking my eyebrow and I wish to squeeze her round belly and let her play catch with my braids, or that my home is a dirty disheveled mess and I feel to clean it, and that I am more and more comfortable and curious and excited about just how deep the rabbit hole goes, and that, yes, that, is enough . . .

Still Life with Barcalounger

I think about writing from time to time, but not enough to actually sit down and post. Maybe it's that it's more dramatic to write when the caacaa is whirling in the turbines, or afterwards, during cleanup duty. 

Or maybe it's that I've written a few posts about this new period of neutral-middle-chill that I'm currently cruising and what more could I write about it? Except for maybe to say that Life has presented many many opportunities for drama and I just simply shrug and walk away, and if it follows me, I turn and walk another direction, and if that doesn't work, I sit and remain very, very still until it gets bored and skulks away.

So seriously, what else could I write about? Why, yes: Kitties!

But not tonight most likely. Because right now, baby Malcolm is standing in my lap, a paw on either side of my neck, breathing his love breath in my face, which is his signature "snuggle me" move. And really, what sort of human could say no to that? Not I, kind folks, not I . . . 

To the barcalounger!