55> Learning from It (2)

The first lesson is that I Must get help on the hill.
I knew that all along really , but somehow enjoyed being the heroic lone  scyther.
Cutting the bracken and tending the garden are way beyond my physical capabilities at present. So I need to make and install a volunteer hut. Then when the bracken is really going for it, to organise a "bracken camp", to get a group of people to tackle the main clearings. The best time to cut the bracken is July, when it's invested a lot of its energy into growth, and hasn't got a lot of growing season left ahead of it to recover. It's also when people like to come on holiday, and this is a perfect place for that, being close to the sea. The growth rate this year, and last, has been amazing.  Now is getting to be too late. The stems are browning, and starting to go over.  Now I must go round and find the trees I planted this spring underneath before they get squashed by its collapse.

The second is more esoteric, but related.

My perspective of time is changing. In part I think, this stems from the nature of this pain I've been feeling, which has been a pulsing, neuralgic type, in my arm and shoulder, but not equating to any immediate physical activity. This has allowed me to think of myself as an impulse rather than solely as a being woven into a set of narratives.


I'd already been considering our individual mind sets within the past, present, and future, and what was the most nourishing balance, seeing for instance, friends for whom everything worthwhile derived from the past. The present is bad news.
Others put their lives on hold, until the weekend, or retirement, or an inheritance, or they eventually met their soulmate. The present was for them effectively, a waiting-room.

I concluded that the ideal was to be informed by the past, and inspired by the future, but embraced firmly in the present.

I came across some first edition Ordnance Survey maps last year, that show a pre-oil, pre-suburban, pre-forestry commission, pre- industrial landscape. Rather than just bemoan its loss, I find it exciting it was only two hundred years ago, and that what we do now can have just as rapid and radical effect on the landscape of the future.

But your impulse has firstly to let itself gain confidence, to overrule the rigour of precedent and conformity.
To some extent I've done that. 

Getting others to help me here could help them to get it too..

54> Learning from It (1)

It must be a lot easier to feel that you are a victim, or even a culprit, of events, than the way I've come to see things.

I have I suppose had a hard time recently though, however much I mantracise how much I'm learning from it.

We do like to recount everything in a causal narrative though, and this storyline is physical.
My body hurts.
My arm and shoulder, which is annoying as I have a Lot to Do.

I always have, in that my motto has been "We are what we do", so felt frightened by the idea of being worthless.
Also I didn't know the cause of the pain, so felt fearful.
It could have been Cancer or Heart Failure or any number or cocktail of Scary Ailments.
I went to the doctor, and that made it worse, as I no longer owned the pain, and was effectively on hold while they pondered, and organised Tests and Scans.

Time, they seem to regard, as a great healer. In the End I suppose it is, as we have either got better, or died.
Three weeks seems to be regarded medically as the optimum gap between a test, and it's result.

The low point in this train of events was finally getting an MRI scan, a great honour it seems, and then waiting for its diagnosis. It looks like parts of my neck are pretty'well-worn', and impinging on nerves.
Since then I have come to realise that there are limited strategies in how to ameliorate what is the damage and wear in the spine. Surgery has been mooted, which sounds like it amounts to gluing bits together so they don't rub on each on. It all sounds rather primitive and hit & miss. Like welding a rusty car.
Anyway, it's all still in the abstract. I'm just on another waiting list.

 Now I am having a weekly Chiropractor session, and am planning a regular massage.. Listening to advice from some friends who are, and know, amazing practitioners of healing skills.
Mainly though, I've reclaimed my own pain. I negotiate with it and make deals so I can get some useful stuff done.

I AM learning from it...