THE GOOD PUMPKINS, THE BAD & THE UGLY: Stalking Death & Sunbeams - Again.
When I go through the grocery aisle in the fall, these glorious pumpkins and squashes always make me so happy. The colors, the textures, the memories of pumpkin-everything. Latte. Pastries. Piiiiie. 🤤😻🤤 With the size and fill of these bins, my animal-brain is comforted and made joyous by the sight of Abundance.
Then my heart always gets stabbed, knowing that the ones who don’t get bought and taken home will be downgraded in an instant from Revered Poster Child of Fall Celebration to “garbage.” Why? Because of the date on the calendar. They’ll be thrown away, “useless” because they’re past their expiration date and there were far too many grown compared to the number needed.
Abundance peels off her autumn mask to reveal who she really is underneath.
The Bullshit Friday shenanigans have already begun. Ri-flippin'-diculous to hear those infuriating bells start jing-jing-jingalin' before Halloween. Once Thanksgiving has ended, I will be thrilled about jingle bells. Until then? STOP IT. It's still friggin' fall, as demonstrated by the number of leaves I'm still blowing, so get off me with your marketing hype crap!
Even the pumpkins who do find happy homes…how many will be eaten? How many will sit outside until they’re “too ugly” to be shown off? (There's a metaphor for ya.) How many will wind up inside plastic bags that our grandchildren are going to have to deal with someday because they're unable to disintegrate in the ingenious way that this planet designed?
How many of us will do the same when we die, pumped full of chemicals so we'll "look and smell good" for a few days more, then sealed inside a box that will preserve us for longer--even when nobody's looking--rather than letting us biodegrade and give back to life naturally?
I mean, CAN most of us in this country even biodegrade without seeping a gazillion chemicals into the ground, given how many of them we stuffed down our throats while we were still breathing?
And oh, I know. The sight of rotting pumpkins and squashes on the porch makes me uncomfy, too. I’m okay with the uncomfy. Especially at this time of year. That’s why I hunt Death with my camera in the fall. That’s why I try to find the beauty in it, to sit more comfortably with the emotions it arouses, to find the seeds of new life in it.
Because the death of my body is one of the only certainties I have for my future.
I always wish happy homes for the pumpkins, and I wish them honored, thanked lives. I wish them honored, thanked deaths and thoughtful burials where they can become One with the earth again. I wish their seeds joyous baking and ingesting or replanting for the next crop. I wish for them to have joy, to give joy, to be joy.
That oversized grocery store bin of them reminds me to wish this for all the plants and animals in the obscene torture chamber that is the American grocery system. I also wish it for the Barbies painted in this year’s fads and the clothing nobody wanted and all those plastic cups with somebody’s marketing slogan that flopped and I wish it for the other fall decorations, but I know that so much of it is just going to get dumped.
I wish it for us most of all. That we could remember that we were originally designed to become One with the Earth again. To be appreciated as we age. To be cherished as we show the signs of time’s creeping hands on our physical forms because it means we have experience and wisdom to offer from our years--provided that we've lived in such a way as to gain it.
If we could step fully back into the life-death-rebirth cycle without so much fear and revulsion, perhaps we’d come up with more harmonious systems for co-existing on this planet, rather than spending all our creative juice trying to conquer and outwit it.
Until then, I will marvel at the glorious pumpkins gathered in a bountiful pile. I will shudder, beam, and thank them when they slump and rot on my neighbors’ porches. I will mourn all the ones crying out as they tumble, unloved, into the pit. I’ll mourn for the pit, too. Most of all, I’ll mourn for us, for all we’ve destroyed in the name of greed, power, comfort, ignorance, selfishness, exhaustion, and overwhelm beneath the avalanche.
Then I’ll dance in ecstatic prayer at the sight of every little seed amongst the rocks and the decomposing leaves, every tenacious tendril clinging to inhospitable environments, every defiant sprout growing in a half centimeter of dirt. My hope clings like those single-root tendrils. It's tenuous, but the storms haven't struck it loose yet.
Imagine a world whose creation myth begins,
not with light, not even with darkness,
but with a vulture, picking clean the bones of a dream,
we finally admitted was dead.
The vulture, with her naked head, her naked face,
the comforting tent of her black wings,
discreetly enfolding our dying.
There is no shame in a body, no shame in our mistakes.
Every sinew, every organ is sacred in its undoing.
She scented out our grief.
She travelled down from the highest pinnacles
of the sky to alight upon our bare, helpless bones.
Her body is a crucible, that destroys every foul pathogen.
She comes to cleanse the earth of all its suffering.
She comes to ingest our unfinished stories.
The sweet intentions of our lies.
The meat of our devouring, the wounds of our losses,
our shapes that once cast shadows.
She comes to recycle them into muscle and wing
and remind us that they belong to the universe.
Yes, this is our time of belonging.
Imagine a world whose creation myth begins with letting go.
Letting the ugly vulture unbind our beauty
and letting the form unwind.
Letting her prepare us to become the earth.
She is going to live a long, long time, as vultures do,
because they eat truth every day
and for all the thousand ways that we resurrect into new lives,
new worlds, out of the green, heedless fronze of the earth,
we are also living up there, in her wings,
forever in the absolute stillness of her flight,
on the skies of forgiveness.
~ By Mindi Meltz
Forever hunting good shots of death and vultures. Sometimes I get light and cranes instead. 🥰
Did you notice the way I speak about the pumpkins anthropomorphically? It's because of what I FEEL emanating from them. Is it all in my weirdo, freako hyperactive imagination? I dunno, but I feel it with trees, water, rocks...everything.
Who are we to say that trees aren't as sentient as we are (or more)? Are we the authority on intelligent alien life? How we do know that there isn't plenty of it right here at home, just in a different form from what we recognize and can measure with our instruments? How do we know the rocks don't gossip with each other across the galaxies? How do we know that every drop of water on this planet isn't one collective mind?
If we found that out, would we treat "things" differently?
Probably only if we learned that they had formed a Rebel Alliance to plot our demise.
🤔😻😈
The extent of this is something hardly anybody knows about me. I rarely talk about it anymore. I learned to zip that up really young.
See, I don't merely have that classic HSP empathy and compassion piece. I don't merely have that piece for humans--even humans who do awful things (although I am a strange mix of compassion and iron-hearted "for the greater good" droid once the awful reaches a certain level). I don't merely have it for cute, fuzzy, affectionate pets, or even the mean little rat-dog that the neighbor boy sicked on my ankles for years. I hated that dog. I hated that boy, and yet if I had seen either of them in danger, I would have wanted to help. If I had seen either of them squished on the roadside, it would have gutted me.
A few summers ago, a trio of baby raccoons woke me up with their playful shenanigans on my patio. These little guys were adorable, swinging from the rafters and staring at me with their bandit masks and mischievous smiles. Well, little raccoons grow up into big raccoons and those assholes were destructive. Eventually, only one remained. He was a menace that required multiple creative solutions to keep him from breaking my stuff and stealing all the bird food.
One day, I drove up the hill to find a roly-poly raccoon splattered across the road near my house. My first instinct wasn't glee that he was dead. It wasn't even relief that I'd no longer have to deal with him. It was that gut-stabbed grief I feel every time I see that a kitten has been hit. The squirrels do it all the time. The deer, armadillos, those creepy, homely opossums. Even a buzzard gets creamed on occasion. Cute, majestic, ugly or annoying, it does not matter.
The grief sucker-punches me. Next comes the curiosity of where all that energy went after it left the mangled body. That gives way to joy, knowing how ingenious this planet--this universe is. Because everything that is born comes from the violent destruction and reorganization of something else.
Side-note: when I started leaving the hummingbird feeders out overnight again, I learned within three days that it wasn't actually my raccoon who'd been hit. Although disgruntled about the annoyance, a piece of me remained relieved and happy. I mean, he's my raccoon. They all are, just like I belong to all of them and we all belong to each other.
I've told you that I catch-and-release spiders. Sometimes even the dangerous ones if I have the guts, the correct vantage point, and the time. I also armor myself beforehand. And I do a lot of breathing exercises. When I do send the venomous ones up the vacuum shoot, I sometimes cry about it.
Yes.
They were right about me all along. I am a "big, fat crybaby" and I do not care that you don't like it.
I mourn when my family kills the copperheads in their woodpile or when they get into the garage. I mourn when the wasps turn aggressive and I have to destroy their nest on my patio or eves. (Mostly they don't. With me they actually do subscribe to the Smeagol theory - "We be nice to them if they be nice to us.") I apologize when I yank open my cabinet doors and accidentally destroy the orb weaver's web she worked so hard on, and I mourn when she packs up and goes to build somewhere else. (I am entranced with those spiders.) I mourn when I accidentally step on an ant, and I even mourn when I kill insect pests that will become a nightmare if not taken care of when the problem is small.
I get snarly with my people when they slam the perch onto the surface of the water because these are not the fishies you are looking for and they steal all the bait. I got downright rabid when that same neighborhood asshole slammed his fists down onto my fuzzy caterpillar friends. Or the ugly ones that covered the siding in a swarming, bluish mass. Same when he ripped wings off insects--butterflies or nasty flies that have been pinging and ponging between the rat-dog's poop and my picnic lunch. I do not care. You don't fucking pull wings off insects just to laugh diabolically over being cruel!
Can you not feel them screaming? Crying out in terror and agony?
Oh. That's right. You can. That's why you tormented me until I screamed and cried, too.
I also squawk when people stomp on perfectly innocent spiders in their own natural environment outside--even when they stomp them in the house when they could be pounced on with a glass and shooed out the door. Or just eyeballed with the request to stay off me, stay out of my stuff, and not dangle in my face, then thanked for eating pests. When I get startled by one and reflexively squish it in my screeching-cat reaction, I mourn it for days.
Daaaaaays.
The site of the murder hits me over and over between the eyes and in the heart every time I pass by it.
"Oh my Gawwwwwwd! What's the big deal? You're such a spaz! Freak. You need a chill-pill. You're fucking psycho, to get that worked up over a stupid bug?"
YES.
I do. Always have. For many years, I worked diligently to "toughen up." Fuck that. I'll leave that to all of you who do not possess my hypersensitive neurological system. You also have your place in this world and I would never disparage it because I love dandelions as much as I love all of we orchids.
And oh yeah. I also mourned my sea of miniature sun-friends whenever my dad did the annual chemical killing of the weeds in the lawn.
Know what else I mourn? Things that are not "alive." I once had the sweetest stuffed puppy. He was my favorite. He had a smily face with long lashes and floppy ears and a cute, pink tongue made of felt. I played with him all day. I hugged him and loved him and named him Sandy. I took him with me everywhere I went. That meant I took him with me to the sandbox. One day, a sudden storm came up with that icky warning green hue. My mom hurried me inside. We had to pack up everything strewn around the box and the yard so quickly that I forgot my puppy.
He was the same color as the sand. That's why he was named Sandy.
When I found him mangled in the mud the next day, I bawled and bawled and bawled. We tried to wash him. We tried to clean and dry him. We tried everything to salvage him. I could not throw him away. He was ugly and I still loved him. But one day, I did have to bury him--I couldn't call him garbage and put him in the trash. I did, however, have to let him go because the sight of him ripped me apart too much every time I looked at him on the shelf.
It wasn't because of the loss of the pretty. It wasn't even the loss of him. It was because the damage was my fault. I had been careless with something I loved. My innocent and perfectly understandable mistake had ruined him.
That's how it is with me. And yes, I can hear you now. "What a waste of energy. You can't spend your life in regrets. Chillllll... You need to forgive yourself. "
I do. I did. That doesn't mean the pangs didn't jab me every time I looked at him. Objects hold energy, and sometimes the only way to quit being gouged by the grief they carry is to get rid of the reminder.
"Gawwwwwd, just get over it. Suck it up. Let it gooooo. It's no big deal."
Shrug. Maybe not to you. But this is how I'm wired, and I'm done letting people tell me it's wrong and needs to be "fixed."
On the flip-side, some of you think I don't notice when my disability, my coping mechanisms, or my personality pour salt on your wounds, and so you think I don't care. Trust me, if I'm capable of it on any given brain-day, I notice. If I notice then I care. Even the damage I've inflicted amidst self-defense weighs on me.
It's supposed to.
That's the deal with responsible self-defense: only as much force and damage as absolutely necessary to get out alive and preferably un-mauled, and only after all other options have been exhausted.
So where does a preemptive strike in self-defense end, and aggression begin? That one is a fine line and very tricky. Often it depends on one's point of view.
One of the biggest things I mourn is what we humans do to our home in the name of safety, survival, productivity, and comfort. I mourn the chemicals I piss into the toilet while battling a tooth infection that's gone systemic. I mourn the existence of my glorious faucet and shower because of what it does to the system at large, and because of the toll taken on this planet by the manmade systems that keep it running into and out of my home. I mourn my vehicle's gas tank and its exhaust pipe. I bow my head to the ground in thanks and apology for my extravagant luxuries like central heating and AC, one-stop shopping, and two--count 'em, two flush toilets all for meeeee.
I mourn the blasting zone that has given me a blessed--thank the stars, hallefuckinluiah!--highway free of the traffic bottleneck that has plagued that road with an ever-worsening plug since I moved here. Each time I pass it, I mourn the sight of it like I used to mourn that mining scar that overlooks Colorado Springs. I cry out in pain every time the Townhouse Association comes through and zips down beautiful, thriving trees that have gotten too close to the homes and pose threats. Root systems can't dig deep in all this rock and ice storms are notorious for bringing them down, so I get it. I get all of the practical, human-centric reasons for why we do these things.
Except the ones driven solely by the glee of cruelty. That can fuck right off.
But the things that have these overarching "for the good of..." Yes. I get it. I give thanks for the fact that I have such luxuries, conveniences, comforts, and life-saving advances in medicine and technology. To have to live with my injuries and conditions PLUS go without these things? Well, it happens all over the world, doesn't it? Shit, it happens right here across my own first-world country, so I am grateful for the safety nets in which I live.
I am also keenly aware that this is a net, and I am caught in it as securely as that fly squirming in the dew-dropped web glistening so prettily in the sunlight.
These sensations run simultaneously inside me in equally passionate measure. Grieving/grateful. Relieved/outraged. Astounded by the ingenuity/horrified by the cost. One does not cancel out the other. I feel these things constantly. Every moment of every day, it runs like a background program, occasionally flaring up with a desktop warning notification that I have to deal with amidst all the other things I have going on.
But background programs take a toll. I'm sure you know that. I watch so many people shove it down, numb it out, close their eyes and refuse to look, because if they looked they would see and if they saw they would feel it and if they felt it they would have to DO something about it and we're all too overwhelmed by trying to maintain the sticky net because it's the only thing keeping us from dropping down the two-hundred foot ravine and splatting on the rocks below.
I don’t know what to DO about these titanic things that tear at my soul except recycle, reuse, repair, and prayer.
That’s another part of this camera Death-stalkery thing that I do. That’s why I write about it. That’s why I practice getting comfy with the discomfort. I make myself sit with the rot. I don't have to fuckin' like it. I don't have to be happy-skippy while I'm sitting in it. I simply make myself keep noticing every time I turn on my faucet, flush my toilet, turn on the heat or AC, shop in the only place I can afford to buy food, and run a load of laundry with my extravagant water system. Each year I look for a new better habit or few. I take small steps so they’re more likely to take root and become My Way instead of the wasteful ways I was taught.
I do not have it in me to do any big overhauls right now. The System is actually designed that way--to keep me worried about the cliff so I'll be grateful for the web and I won't notice what's creeping toward me across those silken threads. It keeps me grateful that my neighbor, that nasty asshole fly, got eaten instead of meeeee, the pretty-pretty butterfly. 🤨
Honestly, I'm just trying to figure out how prevent this tooth infection from killing me without wreaking life-threatening or debilitating side-effects upon me, while also continuing the twenty-one-year battle to survive--dare I hope to thrive?--with the damages wreaked on my body through time, hard use, other people's recklessness and abuse.
(I swear, half of my rhyming is unintentional. It's the fact that a bunch of my verbal center losses got rerouted through my right-brain. So I just go with it until I annoy even myself.)
One of the biggest things I do with all this mourning and angst is to keep questioning. Often it's the only thing I can do about it. That, and take in the fact that it hurts.
I don’t mind that it hurts. Something this important should hurt. Pain is nothing more than a warning sign that something is wrong and needs to be addressed. While scrambling to shut the pain signals up so I can continue functioning, I find it crucial to not numb it so much that I can just "live with it." If I can live with it, then often I will, instead of doing the onerous things that need to be done to eliminate the root causes. Of course, staying functional keeps me able to afford the price tags of addressing the causes of the pain.
Nice Catch 22 we're all in.
Pain is often the only way humans are motivated to make big changes to the things that keep us (seemingly) safe, comfy, and fed. Or at least distracted so we can do what we "have to" in order to maintain our spot clinging to the web. That's why I refuse to take heavy-duty pain killers when at all possible. Because if it doesn't hurt, I might not know something's still wrong and cause more damage. Some medications are life-savers. Some are gratuitous bullshit lining pockets of already rich people while making sick people sicker with side-effects. Some do all of those simultaneously, so I'm not here to lecture you about whether you should or should not take a drug.
Personally, I avoid them when at all possible because I watched the way the wrong prescriptions debilitated my mother, and I've experienced enough suicidal and anaphylactic side-effects to know that most of them are not for me. Plus, I have enough of a chronic numbing mechanism from the things I can't do anything about except "live with it," so I try not to externally heap more numbing agents upon myself.
Living in my Dain Bramage walking coma, one of my greatest missions in life is the effort to wake up. That means paying attention to pain, conflict, discomfort, and other warnings when they are nothing but seeds, rather than waiting until they've created a crisis.
Sometimes I'm good at that. Sometimes I'm not. Sometimes I preemptively strike and accidentally aggress.
It's a project.
This is why I pay attention to those tiny stabs of pain. It's why I don't work to "toughen up" anymore. All my decades of trying to do that are one of the biggest contributors to every long-term health crisis I've ever experienced. That goes double for abuse situations I've found myself mired in. If I can be "strong enough, loving enough, good enough, patient enough, forgiving enough..." I am, after all, a hypersensitive "weakling" so it's "not that big a deal."
None of these things that get me all frothing and worked up are a big deal, right?
Bullshit.
This degree of pain and sorrow is also why I stalk joy, light, and beauty. Often, I stalk them simultaneously with Death. Wonder and reverence are other the other side of waking up.
A few days after I hiked the cliffs of the Sally Trail between storms, I was irresistibly called back. There was still that part of the trail that I didn’t know where it led. A question mark remained in my mental map of how the trails all interconnected, so on a whim I had to go investigate.
There was a lot of death on that part of the trail. The forest is darker. More tangled. The path is windier. Naturally, that makes me curious. It brings out my fangs.
It also brings out my camera--always gotta whip it out.
Unlike that day when I kept getting the signal to turn around and go a different way every time I got flashed in the eye by a sunflare, this day the beams beckoned. "Here," they flickered. "Look here. Come over here. Now here." They kept leading me to all the familiar landmarks so I could piece together my mental map.
Eventually, I came to my old familiar friend, the No Trespassing sign with the purple marking. Since I knew where I was, I turned around and followed the sunbeams again. To my shock, they led me to an ingenious act of reclamation, repurposing, and recycling. There is so much old trash up in this area of the woods, along with the remnants of areas once used by kids--the small and large variety. Their overgrown toys and forts show how long ago they were abandoned.
But not all. The sunflares kept luring l until I came upon a most extraordinary sight. At first, I saw it peeking through the trees. "What IS that?" And then I saw.
Did you see what they did in there? Did you see the trail signs inside the camper and the ramps leading off it? Yes, indeedy, this old, gutted trailer has been turned into a Trail-er. Mountain bikers can either continue onto the trail, or they can zip down into the obstacle course that contains the biggest and most detailed warning sign I've seen out there yet.
Fascinating...
After this, I skipped back down to the river, to enjoy the dance between the sunlight and the water. The river was low that day, allowing me to venture further out than normal.
Death...life. Darkness...light. Ecstasy...grief. Rage...relief...
Down...up...down...up...down...up...
Persephone.
Can you look at it with me? Can you stand here with me, side-by-side, hand-in-hand and truly look? Can you stand hip-deep in this pain? Can you allow it to jab into your fucking guts and twist? Can you do that over and over?
Sometimes the only way I can allow it to hit me--to truly look at the horror and the wonder of these things we're all doing is to sing it, to dance it, and to write it in fiction. Other times, all I can do is bawl out my innards and vomit these emotions up my throat in ragged sobs and bellows of rage.
"How atrocious! Why would you ever want to do that to yourself?! You should take medication. You should meditate more. You need to do more positive affirmations. You should get therapy that teaches you how to regulate that shit. Did I mention that there are pills for that? You should learn to channel it into a positive activity or eight. Well, if you can't keep it under control, at least don't ever tell anybody about what you really think and feel. They'll think you're crazy. Cracked. Bat-shit. Psycho."
Thanks, I got this.
This is why I became an artist, over all the other avenues that were available to me with that gargantuan brain I was born with. I could have been a scientist or an engineer and hunted for solutions. I could have hunted the stars for a new place where we could start over and try again and do better. I could have been a politician and tried to change laws. I could have been a lawyer or a judge and battled to punish people breaking the laws we do have.
I had the smarts for any of that, but that's not what I was built for.
My emotional/physiological reaction to life has always been too huge for any of those callings to do it justice, and it has always been counterbalanced by equal amounts of body-rending ecstasy. Me? I simply call them sorrow and joy, but apparently my nervous system doesn't register emotions like the majority of people on this planet.
So only art could possibly scratch the surface of this agony and this rapture that is forever pulling me in five different directions at the same time. It tears me apart. It shoots me to the stars. It slops my guts out onto my feet. It burns me up, creates black holes at the center of me, and implodes me into silence and darkness, only to come exploding out in five dances and a novel series several years later.
"WTF, girl?! All this emotion over a few stupid pumpkins in the grocery store?"
YES.
Because it's not actually about the pumpkins any more than that broken-record argument with my husband was about where he put the spoons. At its root, that was actually about respect and boundaries, just like the pumpkins are only one tiny symptom of a horrifying global sickness that ravages me every moment of every day whenever I realize my part in it and how helpless I am to do anything about other aspects.
"Ohhhh, then you need to get out there and organize protests or at least join them and--"
No, I don't. Have you not met me? Have you not read any of my HSP posts? You know, like this one and the one I last posted. Have you not read any of my Dain Bramage posts?
"Ohhhh, you need to cut yourself some slack and memorize the Serenity Prayer."
I've already altered that extremely helpful mantra for my own needs, thanks. I use it all the time. Using it doesn't mean that I no longer feel these things, because I don't use it as a numbing agent. I use it as a cleansing agent in the aftermath. I use it like the temporary closing of a book after I have let the pumpkin bin delight me, eviscerate me, piss me off, and mentally crumple me over the cart with despair. After that, I accept that I can only do what I can do. So I do it.
This entire emotional sequence happens in about 1.72 seconds as I pass through the produce aisle. Then I am on to choosing bananas, noting how miraculous it is that I can even get bananas in Arkansas at the edge of winter. A ping of concern makes me wonder how denuded they are of nutrients so I can have this luxury. Next, I note that half of these suckers will wind up in the garbage too because they're rapidly approaching that ugly brown state that almost nobody wants.
Emotional chain reaction: ENGAGED.
Grief/pissed/concerned/disgusted/guilty over the fact that I help propagate the issue by reaching in there and putting four of them in my cart, thus alerting the Walmartian algorithms that I approve of their supply and demand rhythms. Then I push the cart on toward the kombucha. Rinse-repeat with packaging woes and gratitude for everybody who made it and shipped it to me. Nommm.
When I get it all home, I kitchen dance in glee that I have such abundance. I bow down to the blessed, aggravating, generous system of people who keep this disabled Lost Girl fed and warm as winter approaches. I relish in every bite of my nutrient-denuded nanners. Whenever they're ugly and brown, I transform them into baked goods and delight in sharing them. Every once in awhile they get too ugly and too brown so they become compost. When I add my own compost to the toilet, I mourn for what I'm doing to our water system as I watch the turds and my antibiotic-laced pee swirl down the Tidy Bowl of Doom. Then I come over here and turn on the computer, marveling at the wonders of the internet, gagging at its nasty flies and trolls, mourning the ridiculous amount of energy it costs to keep it running, and giving thanks that I have such a luxury as global communication.
Yeah. This NEVVERRRRRRRR ends for me. Ever.
It never shuts off, except when I choose to shut down, or the system crashes and shuts me down because I missed (or ignored) the seedling symptoms of impending overload.
It's more efficient and the system operates more cleanly when I let each emotion run through me as they happen. That's not to say they need an emotional expression in those moments. But sometimes the system gets clogged with residue or other things back it up, so it comes screeching to the forefront of my mind and I have to puke out several thousand words about it. First it goes into my journal. If it's bothering me enough, it goes onto this page.
So there ya go. That is what it means to live in this world with a nervous system like mine.
And you call me "weak" for it.
Hahahahahahah... Personally, I'll take my way of looking at life over all the, "Yeah? So? What's the big deal? Pffft. Who cares? Gimme a beer and I sure as hell won't anymore."
But that's what I'm wired for--to care. Just like we need those who aren't this sensitive to do all the amazing things they are wired for, we need my superpowers as well. It's just that much of the world disparages people like me as a problem that needs to be "cured" and "regulated", instead of valuing our offerings and making room for us to do what we were made to do--in OUR ways.
Ummm, note to the regulators: when I'm allowed to regulate my shit in my way in my natural rhythms, there's way less shit to regulate. I'm kinda like Mother Nature that way.
~Thanks from your friendly neighborhood Canary in the Mineshaft
When the tsunami of the world's sickness hits me, when the sheer volume of all that emotion has to go somewhere before it burns down the reactor, I put this song on and I dance to it over and over and over until I can breathe again. I puke out oversized blog posts about things that are worth an obscene amount of words. Then I regurgitate hundreds of thousands more about Persephone, Hades, Demeter, Zeus, the deities of Love & War, Dionysos, and Earth Mother.
And ooooh, sometimes I even share them.
Best I got today.
CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE
--UP NEXT: THE SEARCH BEGINS - Why I Still Haven't Returned to FB (excuse me, Meta)
--OR: If you missed my blathering about what it's like to be a Highly Sensitive Person, I've covered it in detail.
--OR: If you dig these adventures in the woods with my camera, you'll find more HERE.
--THE NAVIGATION TABLE OF CONTENTS
LINKS TO MORE THINGS ON MY MIND:
--Do Trees Talk To Each Other?
--Water: Our Most Precious Resource
--Largest Landfills, Waste Sites and Trash Dumps in the World
--Slow Fashion Guide: 21 Changes You Can Make Today
--Walmart & Waste Elimination - goals that would make me happy if they happen
--A Few Simple Recycling & Waste Elimination Solutions