This Week

This Week

Monday Morning Osteopath appointment. He can't help, refers me to someone else.

Tuesday Morning Therapist appointment.

Tuesday Afternoon Osteopath appointment. It's a miracle I got in last minute! No, it's not, the front desk made a mistake and only booked me for a brief consult, not a full appointment. But someone cancelled for tomorrow...

Wednesday Morning Full osteopath appointment.

Wednesday Noon I am supposed to go to a Feldenkrais class - osteopath #1 recommended it - but I can't summon the energy to drag myself out of the house again, so instead I nap.

Wednesday Afternoon PT appointment. 

Wednesday evening Now. I still hurt.

Blerg.

So. That has been my week.

It is that kind of day, inside that kind of week, inside that kind of month, which is turning into that kind of season: months, plural.

Back in December I flew to the East Coast. Stood up at the end of it, only to have my left knee buckle under me; it has hurt ever since. So I started PT. That sent me into an insane v pain episode (because to help the knee, they needed me to increase my core stability, which meant engaging my glutes, which sent my pelvic floor into an insane spasm...now we know why I wasn't so stable to begin with, I suppose.) I finally got it to calm down and resumed PT, but this time the deep right hip rotators and pelvic floor muscles and SI joint all started freaking out, bouncing the pain around my left hip area like a ping pong ball, until at the beginning of March it lodged in my SI joint, where it has remained.

Since then, I have been in constant pain, made worse by any kind of flexion (i.e. bending) in my right hip. So anything other than standing or lying on the floor makes it worse.

I open my eyes and sit up to get out of bed in the morning. Worse. I bend to wash my face. Worse. And so on and so forth. I have had to cancel or get subs for all but two of my yoga classes since then. I eat standing up.

On top of this, I keep having Mysterious Vomiting Episodes. They don't follow any pattern, other than that all of a sudden I will have to retch like crazy - doesn't matter if I have food in my stomach or not - and they generally end after 15 minutes or so, except for one that lasted five long and miserable hours.

Of course, it is near impossible to vomit standing straight up without bending, which means each Mysterious Vomiting Episode makes the SI joint pain worse.

And my three months of diligent knee PT exercises, the ones I stuck with no matter how much I had to modify or reduce them in order to accommodate the SI craziness? They have not helped my knee one damn bit.

* * *

I feel like I'm living in a bombed out city of a body.

Nothing's really working. I keep trying to live my life, do my routine, make plans, set goals, only to have to re-schedule (again and again), and cancel (over and over), and make the goals smaller and smaller and smaller until that task or project barely exists.

I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I start the week with a schedule and then it gets slowly eroded until its unrecognizable. Haircut? Erg - gotta reschedule, doctor has an opening. Helping a friend while her husband's in chemo? Crap, I managed to get there fine a couple of weeks ago but this week it's worse and I can't sit in the car long enough to get there. Maybe I can re-schedule? How far out? When will this be okay again? 

Nothing in my extensive kit of self-help tools is working. My old routines and schedules and Stuff That I Do has mostly fallen away; teaching, working on this website, the morning yoga practice, the bike riding, Tuesday afternoon grocery shopping, sitting, and writing or reading or watching tv.

I used to be building something: my yoga classes, the website. Now if I so much as drop a hair clip, instead of picking it up I look down and think, how much do I need that hair clip? My feet are cold - but are they cold enough to warrant bending down to the bottom drawer to get socks? My days are stilted, each movement careful, the pros and cons of any and all action weighed. Building anything beyond my breakfast is a thing of the past.

Amidst this maelstrom, it seems as though everything has gone along for the ride.

My former favorite lipstick looks oddly off now, and after decades of loving tank tops and not liking tee-shirts I only want tee-shirts, and as of nineteen days ago I play the guitar. 

My mystified husband says sometimes I change so quickly it's hard to keep up with me. I hear your pain buddy, but lordy, try BEING me.

He asks me if playing the guitar makes me happy. I wouldn't say that, but it is soothing. It is medicinal. It keeps the screaming banshees of insanity at bay.

And if amidst this hell something will keep the screaming banshees at bay, I'll take it.

(Rosie lounging in the backyard. Many thanks to our friend Carlos for abandoning her in our garage when he moved to New York. I love her.)

My Teacher, Oxalis

Oxalis. This photo was taken a couple of years ago, on a sidewalk in Oakland.

A couple of weeks ago, I asked the weeds in my garden to leave. They did.

I asked them gently and politely, explaining as I pulled that I did so to make room for the madrones. Not yet two feet high, these madrones will grow to the size of a small tree, and they are the foundation plants for the California native plant garden that already grows in my imagination and will soon grow just out my back door.

"I know these madrones don't look like they need room," I whispered, "and that the space around them looks like it is available, but it is not. Madrones need elbow room, darling. I see that you came to say hello and give me a much-needed reminder for me to spend time here in the corners of the yard. I hear you. I'm listening. Now go tell your brothers that this space needs to stay clear for the madrones and the other natives I'll be planting."

I got the bulk of my weeding done that afternoon, but when I went back to finish a couple of days later the remaining plants were wilted on the ground, the life force no longer there. A few here and there still looked alive, and so I gently pulled them only to find anemic roots, ones that wouldn't have sustained them for long.

* * *

For the record, these particular weeds were oxalis, one of the most notorious weeds in my area. They look like clover, but they sprout bright, bright, yellow flowers in the late winter and early spring. Looking dainty, they are so persistent that they will crowd out and therefore kill everything around them. When you pull them up, they leave seeds behind. They are, by local lore, nearly impossible to get rid of, a gardener's curse. I know someone who as a test cut them at the stem and painted Roundup on the exposed part (conventional Roundup application doesn't do anything.) She said it worked. Impractical for obvious reasons, but that should give you an idea of how tough these plants are. Other methods I know of for getting rid of oxalis are no less elaborate, including the classic, "Move."

And yet the oxalis in my yard were happy to bow out with a simple request.

* * *

I wrote recently about how my concept of healing is changing; rather than trying to fix myself, I am instead aligning myself with reality. 

The afternoon that I surveyed the wilted oxalis in my yard, I felt, on behalf of mankind, like a complete jackass. We drive ourselves nuts, cursing and dumping all kinds of chemicals on our lawns, gardens, and farms, when apparently all we need to do to get rid of weeds is start a conversation.

"Use your words!" we admonish our cranky three year-olds, and yet here we are, having forgotten not only our words but an entire way of being.

* * *

My talking with the plants did not end with the oxalis. As a person in search of healing I am a person in search of wholeness, and in watching plants respond to my thoughts I felt my role in the web of consciousness like I never had before. Something that had been there all along was suddenly apparent. 

So this is living through wholeness.

Remembering.

* * *

Original photo of a Pacific Madrone on Orcas Island, Washington, by and (c)2007 NaJina McEnany. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic License. Our little baby madrones in the backyard are too young to have developed their signature bark just yet.

April Reflection

I haven't written in what feels like ages, and to tell you the truth, I don't know what to write about. A lot happened in March, twining together my personal, professional, and medical lives, and I am feeling a bit shellshocked. Too much information to digest at once. My brain wants to shut down.

I have been thinking a lot about what it means to heal: "to become sound or whole," or rather, to live through my wholeness. My wholeness is already there, but I have been living alongside it, not in it or through it.

I have been making health decisions based on the belief that something is broken and to get well I need to "fix" it. I am coming to see that I am not broken, and instead in my case healing is the process of aligning oneself with a greater reality.

I recently heard a student of Ayurveda say "Live with Mother Nature, or she will come and live with you." She meant that when we get off track, Mother Nature lets us know by showing up in the form of illness, disease, chaos, imbalance. We do not have the power to do as we wish without consequence. There are greater powers out there, and it behooves us to work with them rather than against them.

Happy April everyone, and I hope the spring is treating you well! (The photo above is from my garden - we had a visitor hiding in the lavender yesterday...)

No Title

Husband icing his ankle after turning it when stepping off a sidewalk:

God, this sucks. I have so much more sympathy for you now. It must be really horrible to ice your va-ja-jay.

Thank you dear for realizing that after ten years.

Yes, Virginia, There is a Connection Between the Papacy and My Pelvis

Recently one of my Facebook friends kindly posted a link to an NBC article for one of her Facebook friends, a devout Catholic who is a big believer in home births and breastfeeding:

Feel Free To Breastfeed Here, Pope Tells Mothers in Sistine Chapel

The post got a number of likes, and four comments praising the Pope.

Not only did NBC pick up the story, but the New York Times carried a similar AP story,

Pope Baptizes 33 Babies in Sistine Chapel

that found this invitation to breastfeed so noteworthy that it mentioned the fact twice in a brief eight paragraph story.

I am happy to see progress of any kind, and glad to see Facebook comments supporting much-needed change.

But...

Another title could have been:

"Organization that Promotes High Birthrates has an Event for Babies, at the Event Babies are Allowed to Eat."

The fact that it is noteworthy a Pope has encouraged breast feeding highlights the entrenched misogyny and hypocrisy of one of the planet's most powerful organizations. Their 1.1 billion members make up 16% of the world's population and are found in substantial numbers on almost every continent. 

As I see it, this Pope, rather than being super awesome, is meeting minimum standards. Praise his actions if you wish, but in my opinion the cries of "Yes!" would be more effective if reframed as "Yes!...and..."

Apparently Catholic mothers are so accustomed to NOT being allowed to feed their babies when needed that they require assurance to proceed with this most mundane act. Did I mention that this event was held in one of the organization's most sacred spaces? A place that logically - given the importance of babies in this religion - should have a tradition of babies being fed without the bat of an eyelash?

Apparently that logic is not so. This incident made worldwide news because the leader has broken with 2,000 years of tradition. Two THOUSAND. Not only is this leader only barely meeting minimum requirements, the previous 265 men who held his post did not. 

Oh my lordy lord.

You may think that I am taking this rather personally, and if so, you are correct. I was raised in a conservative Catholic household and community that aligned itself completely with Church doctrine.

One of those doctrines is that of Papal infallibility: the Pope is always right no matter what. When I was little I was taught that should I ever disagree with any of the Church's teachings, I must pray to God for the grace to see that I was wrong. No thinking allowed!

Despite my parish's exhortations of "Don't hide your light under a basket," if someone's light consisted of exposing hypocrisy, misogyny, rascism, sexual abuse, homophobia, transphobia, people-who-belong-to-any-other-religion-other-than-Catholicism-pohbia, and all other manners of violence so counter-intuitively perpetuated in the name of God was, as you may expect, stuck under that basket more often than not.

When some people get angry they tense their jaws, their fists, their bellies. Over the last ten years I have come to realize that when I am angry - especially when I feel angry and powerless - I clench the bejeezus out of my pelvic floor, the most hidden part of my body, the place where I can hide this anger and therefore protect myself from repercussion the best.

I recently read (on a blog, I can't remember which one, tell me if you do) a pelvic pain patient comparing her musculature to that of a clenched fist, held for years on end. Of course, when that hand begins to relax, it will not be the same as before. It would be exhausted, weak, painful, tense.

And after 18 years of living in a Catholic household that is exactly what happened to my pelvic floor.

I don't blame the Catholic Church for my pain - I don't blame anyone or anything, as a matter of fact.

But I do acknowledge the fact that any and all illness is due to a dysfunctional relationship between our outsides (environment, stressors, etc) and insides (diet, physicality, emotions, etc.) So yes, I see a clear connection between my Catholic upbringing, the Papacy, and my pelvic pain. 

It's not only me. I have known other Catholic-raised women, some of whom continue to identify as Catholic on some level, who make the same connection: misogyny (or any violence) disguised as spirituality is a sickness. And, not to pick on Catholics, I'm guessing many women connect their pelvic pain to experiences or beliefs they have had, religious or otherwise.

* * *

I am not opposed to Christianity, or any other religion. My spirituality is dearly important to me, and I wish to respect the culture and structure of others' spirituality.

Yet it is incumbent on all of us to resist and speak against the violence that threads it's way through our religious institutions. They are not perfect, nor should they be. But like all people and organizations, religious establishments should be held to high standards, striving to continually evolve into better versions of themselves.

Religions carry an even heavier responsibility than other organizations because they purport to connect humans to divinity, The Meaning of Life, afterlife, our interconnection with everything on this planet and beyond. They are with us in joy, but also take a deep responsibility to be with us in dark times, offering us hope and healing. Their reach extends far beyond their adherents, molding broader society's ethics and values.

Introducing violence, hate, and exclusion into these places of intense vulnerability and importance magnifies that violence beyond the effect it would have had elsewhere. Should a religious institution break it's covenant to care for people, it must take the violation seriously and correct it. This should not take 2,000 years.

This planet and it's inhabitants deserve better.