health and care

First you decide what you've gotta do, then you go out and do it
and maybe the most that we can do is just to see each other through it

--Ani Di Franco, Hour Follows Hour

UNM Hospital is like a city unto itself. I wonder what the population of that place is at any given time, if you include the four stories of full parking for visitors.

I brought my viola to visit my friend, Abbey, who just got out of Intensive Care after 3 weeks. She had been in a terrible car accident, and had broken a lot of bones, including her neck and pelvis, from what I understand. She is recovering, but of course things are very slow.

I hadn't been informed of the accident until a few days ago, and finally today got around to seeing her. She seems okay considering the intensity of her recent journey. I was glad to visit gently, and play a little on the strings, which she found soothing while she dozed.

The hospital environment is one I seem to enjoy for some reason. I find it very humbling, in a good way, reminding me of the temporal nature of these physical vessels we inhabit. I enjoy all the compassion there is all around, from families visiting patients, to professional caregivers, to everyone else seeking to be of support.

I'll come to visit again, hopefully play a little more. I wonder how to get some Indian food in there, I bet she'd like that.

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My mouth still aches on and off from the tooth extraction I had this week. So the viols, with their pressure on the jaw, are a little uncomfortable to play right right now. But my energy is great--so much toxicity has dissipated.

I had read a lot about focal infections that can often take place within root canals, and their effects on the body. But I still wasn't sure how much the achy tooth was responsible for my widely varying degrees of unwellness in recent months. It turns out it was a very good call to have it--and the root canal--removed. Pain and pressure in my upper jaw, sinus and eye orbit are all greatly relieved.

The root was visibly infected, even after a course of penicillin. From what I understand, there is little circulation within the root canal area, so antibiotics sometimes do not address infections there. One can clean it out and redo the root canal, but that did not seem a useful course for an already damaged tooth.

In holistic dentistry, focal infections are said to affect the heart foremost, and then the brain and joints next most. I can say that my heart feels much more relaxed, a marked difference since before the surgery. My brain seems clearer and calmer as well, although that may be harder to exactly quantify. It helps to not be drinking alcohol, smoking anything, caffeinating, or eating sugar I'm sure!

My joints are definitely somewhat better also--my hip pain is gone. My heel pain remains but may also be loosening up. All such a curious journey in this body!

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At work today, a friend wrenched his back lifting that awkward sack of potatoes early in the morning. So he's out a few days to rest and recuperate.

Later, a customer came into my line with a bandaged hand, and I asked what had happened. She said a bug got into her shoulder and infected her whole arm down to her hand. I asked, so then are you on antibiotics? She said, no it's past that, they want to cut it off.

She started crying a little, and said I'm usually okay with it all. I'm not gonna let them take it.

I was guessing she was in pain, and maybe her life itself could be in jeopardy. I just quietly empathized, while continuing to scan her yogurt and juice. Wow, what a journey you are on, I offered in a gentle, compassionate tone. She said yeah, the physical is just so hard, but the spiritual path becomes very strong.

After a breath, talk turned to the Pride parade just had just been to, and other lighter topics, and I wished her care on her way. I was grateful for the moment of empathy.

Seems to me a large part of why we are here is to see one another through it.

Native wisdom

I am noticing an increase in exposure to Native American cultural input lately, which I am enjoying.

Much of it is coming through public radio, where I have enjoyed listening to Native music programs on both KUNM 89.9 and KANW 89.1 here in Albuquerque the last few days. I've also caught parts of Native America Calling over a couple days, one show featuring a healer using a process called "somatic archeology."

There was another show this morning from a Watersheds as Commons series, which can be found at www.loreoftheland.org. It featured Navajo speakers discussing right relationship to the land and water, and I found it quite moving. At the completion of the show, I was surprised to hear that I knew the narrator, Celestia Loeffler, whose voice sounds polished far beyond her 20-something years, and who co-produced the show with her father, Jack, a musician friend from years past.

The most moving of inputs came from a new friend of mine. who mentioned attending a ceremony at Navajo the past week, a type of ceremony I had not been familiar with. It was a blessing ceremony for a Navajo child she midwifed recently. The ceremony involves a feast put on by the person who has made the child laugh for the first time, in this case the child's uncle. Much of the interaction involves others helping the child laugh again throughout the feast. There is also a ritual involving generosity of food involving the baby holding salt which people receive from him or her for their food.

The child is thus affirmed in the cultural values of generosity and laughter, in a very real sense actualizing the blessing "may your life be abundant in sharing food and laughter". I share this respectfully with absolute wonderment, as the kind of world I wish to belong to and co-create as well. Imagine how much richer our lives could be with this kind of approach to things.

reality check

Frustration has lifted. I am no longer beating myself up. I don't know how to put things poetically, but I've been in a better place the last two days. I think I have cleared out some toxicity. And I have been keeping my attention on the here and now.

I have found the most meaning in letting go not only of obsessing over struggles, but in letting go of the beautiful visions and hopes that have caused more suffering than anything--when I find I cannot afford them, when I realize they are not happening, etc. Life is better without hope. Sartre's No Exit exactly.

There is greater freedom without desire.

I've even begun to become curious of how the real conundrums will resolve. There is satisfaction in dealing with reality. That's the scoop.

depression report

This is what they call depression. There is lethargy, the fatigue, the hopelessness, the inability to make decisions. Whenever my thoughts turn toward a sunshiney moment, I am smashed down with the reminder of all my ineptitude and unworthiness, as i get nothing done to help myself. After that, it's just an ongoing daze.

Maybe a) I didn't get out in time, out of some HAARP-based fukushima-irradiated chemtrail-laden atmosphere and NWO mass-mind-control plot overtaking the northern hemisphere, while money goes hyper-inflationary and all social systems begin to collapse.

Or maybe b) I just suck.

I know I only function when I am assigned some specific thing to do, when I agree to show up to play a gig, when I go to work. Other than that, I imagine doing something...and ten possible strategies come to mind, and then I flop on the bed, overwhelmed. This behavior fits into both a) and b) hypotheses. On the one hand, right in line with their ostensible environmental poisoning, I can't think clearly. I suddenly long for authoritarianism--just make a functional health care system and I will obey!

On the other, I do just suck. Lousy lover, failed at everything I've ever tried work-wise, weak sense of humor, not even very nice really, more self-centered than anything...

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I find there are times when I am reduced to catalepsis, a complete inability to move for extended periods. It's about once a week, or maybe every other. Often this is actually a useful state. It is one of the few moments left where my mind is free to roam, beyond the constraints of the next moment's pressure. In catatonia, there is no future at all. I am sure I am going to remain there for a couple weeks, until someone searches me out and takes me away to some hospital. Nothing more to worry about. It is very nice actually.

But something has snapped me out of it each time, sometimes after 30 seconds, sometimes 30 minutes. It's generally a random surge of energy without any thought that shifts things, and I hop up and move on.

There is a glimmer of a moment of lightness there, in the thoughtless movement. Then the dread returns, like a familiar friend, around all the hopelessness of illness, a barren lonely life, aging and death. Plus all there is to deal with every single day. One day I am unexpectedly cycling in the wind to and from a full day of work. The next, exhausted, I work a full shift of labor and paint a kitchen for four hours afterwards. Another day I am moving. Another calls for laundry, trying to converse with the landlady, and chores--again after a full day of work.

Underlying it all, there is very low self-esteem. There is also the penicillin I am on, killing off all the bacteria in my body, both malevolent and beneficial. I am sure the internal dying-off affects my admittedly sensitive psyche. I remember to pray sometimes and, while it never brings the cavalry, there is usually soon after a little bit of lightening that allows me to continue on.

I felt some intuition after praying the other day, that maybe there would be some meaning to just going to Tijuana and getting it done there--screw the dental insurance coverage, just do it.

It made me wonder more about whether I was meant to live in San Diego again, where there is water. A friend then called asking me when I am moving back, as our mutual friend's house has a nice room available for $450. Four blocks from the ocean, paying less than I am paying to live here in the dustbowl. On some dimension, it all came together, and I was sure I was meant to at least go out and check it out on this trip.

I can't afford the trip.

I am several hundred short. I'd be mortgaging the rest of my summer even if I somehow shuffle or borrow the money to do it. It is the money I never seem to have anymore to get the basic things I need to do done. So this morning I left a cryptic message for the dentist in Tijuana I had an appointment with Monday, indicating I probably couldn't make the trip.

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The penicillin is damping down the dental infection I have been unable to resolve despite obsessing on it for a month. I want to call some empathy friends to try to unwind some of the psychic pressure that has built up. There is the sense that everything I do or think is wrong. There is a massive should lodged in there that helps nothing. But I never call anyone. That would take self-esteem, I guess.

None of it makes sense, and I am returned to a rather infantile escapism. I want someone to make it all go away. I want to extract the tooth and failed root canal, but it is a nearly mystical epic journey apparently on the other side. Because twice I have choked when two dentists have asked me if I am sure I want to pull it. Apparently there is a slippery slope of partial dentures and moving teeth and all sorts of other unthinkable things in the modern world.

They would indicate aging.

Some part of me freaks too. What if I can't eat...anymore...ever again? Am I insane to pull a tooth?! One that could be cleaned out and patched up...maybe...with another round of canal chemical sterilization--even though it is broken...and has ached on and off for five years...and is suspect in other ailments I've had in that time...

I worked with a guy once who was under such stress in his marriage that he would go out to bars and get into fights, because he felt better when he got punched in the face. That is how I feel these days. Someone just punch me in the face, strap me to the chair and take the freaking tooth.

Please. While I've still got a couple days of penicillin. I'd hate to have to go through another course of this dying off.