I sleep with a phantom quartz wand under the pillow and my dreams become free of menace. Just as seemingly pointless, but at least a sense of place. The ground beneath my feet seems more solid when I am inside. Or my legs are thicker. Or both. Depending on my mood I might lose my balance a wee bit in the parking lot and threaten to topple over in those days where speaking coherently at the market is hard, and I say 'You're Welcome' instead of 'Thank You' to the clerk and stumble out the door. The other mood is where I can speak and smile and connect and glow with everybody, every car, every bird above, every inch of the road as I drive home with my figs or my four dollar succulent from Trader Joe's, which have for some reason made the world unutterably beautiful and approachable and solid yet again.
Seemingly thus equipped with the sanctuary, the hibernaculum, the personal spa also known as 'the house' in order I allow my maladies free reign in hopes they will express themselves as needed and then subside.
From head to toe, I am paying all the pipers who have their hands out for all the years of ease and comfort. I have saved my shekels for just this time and have no complaint in paying the bill. I've been saying it was coming and that's not a psychic gleaning, but simply the consciousness of knowing that age brings dis-ease and the boredom of aches and pains, decay, decay, degeneration and decay. It's beautiful in buildings, less so in skin, tissue and bone.
All issues focus on my right side. (Remind me to ask some sort of new-age Reiki empath or whatever about this.) List as follows of negative energies manifesting themselves as debilitating(to some degree) degradations of the flesh:
Mouth and tongue ulcers, open and stinging, right side.
Right shoulder, torn muscles, no more ping-pong in this lifetime. No more scratching the center of my back with my right hand. No more reaching.
Right hand, from dull ache to sharp agonizing jolt of surprisingly intense pain from muscles surrounding the thumb. Hair ties, opening jars, and so forth.
Right heel. My fifth month of hobbling like an octogenarian. MRI results to come this week. If karma was more accurate it would be bone cancer and I'd have three days to live. However, it will only be some ridiculous soft tissue damage with little to be done, and so my body says, 'Get it? See? Here we are. Relax' and so I will.
There is much to do inside the nest, but the time for attempted introspection and finding my inner independence is past. It is found, it is here. It is a disappointment and a relief at the same time. It is as middle-class consumer ravaged as ever it was, maybe more so. But it is sincere, it is me, and in my mediocrity, my humor, my small compassions, my wit, I can thrive anywhere, as long as I can still complain, bitch and moan in my spoiled little life, in my fortress by the road, in the bunker rental house surrounded by life itself, in all its simple sweetness (the parents walking by the window with the stroller laughing in the after-dinner twilight) and its annoyances, (the ongoing crash of bottles as the recycling center gets more and more business, not for the sake of the environment but because people need the money!) And lastly, and most poignantly, its absolute deadening and rotten vitriolic and apathetic modern energies that pervade everything, even the trees. See how the branches rot and fail? And yet who can deny the beauty that continues? Not me, not me, not me.
