Back on Track

She has a lot of tracks you’ll be saying, and you’re not wrong. This particular track I’ve been on for only about six years and was off for over six to nine months.

This time last year I had a lot of nightmares, so much so that I thought to get some help figuring out why. First saw a dream analyst for about fourteen weeks. Fatigue reared its ugly head. The trip there and back by public transport once a week proved too wearing. I went to once a fortnight, then quit and looked for something online. (I am lucky to have so many good options.)

Found This Jungian Life podcasts and listened non-stop for a few weeks then signed up for their Dream School, Websites at end of the post. So for six months I painted my dreams and studied how to interpret them. That’s still going. The course is twelve months.

But once you’re taking notice, dreams come thick and fast and I only painted a few. Wrote the rest. The journal these days is a loose leaf folder with pages inserted when and where. And notes, because as you learn more previous dreams also suddenly get meaning.

The community committee organizes classes and groups. I joined a painting group. Two people are working in oils. Two in acrylics. The leader asked me what. I went home and fetched my watercolors gear. Painted a little scene.

Ordinary, compared to what came after, and there a few things I would’ve done different if I’d been more aware of what I was doing, and less concerned about where I was doing it. I’ve never painted in public.

Lol, there’s no planning in this landscape at all. I started at the top with the sky which worked OK. All the rest reminds me of the scenery of an early computer game, Robin Hood I seem to remember, forest in clumps suggesting paths where the merry men disappeared. A slope and a lake? River? Ice? That blotty bit in the middle? Was where I was distracted, painting in public as I said, and my brush hit the paper where it shouldn’t have, and I tried to blot off the marks.

Link to both Dream School and the This Jungian Life podcasts. This Jungian Life

What Happened Then …

What happened then … is that I inserted a blog post block on the Art Stories Page and one hundred existing blog posts from the Home Page loaded.

Aaarghhh!!!

That’s not what I meant! I wanted to write new art-related blog-posts, specific to that Page. Is it cheating to want that?

Not going to work, is it?

Is there anything wrong with the Brick Stories Page? It works. People read it. The proof is in the stats. Live and learn as they say, I should give up sooner this time. Not spend so much time beating my head against immovable objects. Just do what already works.

But I wanted an elegant, artistic solution! Talking to yourself also will not help. Delete the overloaded block, already.

Fish Pond is Leaking!

This morning early, everything OK, fed the fish and they loved their new food. Probably hungry.

Little time later, an hour, noticed water level descending quite fast from yesterday when I replaced about 3 litres.

Checked around. Oh no!

A lot of water creeping over the tiles to the balcony drop off.

Seepage not only from underneath … but also from the side! Ceramic side! Meant to be water-proof!

Every time I dried it off, couple of minutes later it’s wet again. Condensation? I don’t know how that works.

But started bailing into hopefully still waterproof plastic crate.

Transferred two fish so far …

‘Life Admin’

Decisions, decisions. Shall I let go my woodworking tools, or will still have use for them?

This is what my son calls it. When my well-structured time (writing and blog-posting) grinds to a halt, and I need to take care of big stuff that has somehow all conspired to happen in the same couple of weeks. That’s when I’m doing ‘life admin’.

So in the past week and the 2-3 weeks to come … I need to go for a Covid booster, and expect a couple of days of side effects. Have been for an eye examination, the optometrist said might as well wait with the cataract operations as you’re going to the cataract capital of Australia. Fine, I said, I’ll wait. And maybe go to the dentist.

Still on my health-jag, I recently began a comprehensive exercise program. This one has to stick. It means time-tabling … something I’m not good at … at least half an hour a day. Being the eternal night owl, for me that is in the late afternoon. Easy to run out of time. It’s taken me two weeks to complete the Week 3 activities. And not only because I run out of time.

Fatigue after chemo is big, and definitely a thing. So, some days I’m really better off communing with my lap-top rather than my milk-bottle weights doing a Strength Workout. Yesterday, I did the Warm-up and could not go on to do the Cardio Circuit. I’ll have to do that today and the Strength Workout tomorrow. That gives me a free day for my Covid shot.

I’m doing more down-sizing to prepare for moving to Cairns in a few weeks, some 2000 km up the coast, into the tropics. Down-sizing means getting rid of stuff. Making decisions about what to keep, what to let go. Books mainly. But also the tools …

The most stressful thing is organizing a place to live in up there, and wondering when to start with that? Do I really want to pay a bond (four weeks rent) and four weeks to hold it for me? I’ll be traveling with the family. They’re going beginning December. Three more weeks to get it all together.

And then there’s my house down south being sold. Rising interest rates and continual rain with its danger of flooding in that town has made this a nerve-racking time. Although the house itself hasn’t flooded, the yard shed and garage have all recently had a 30 centimeter inundation.

And finally, Lodestar has a chapter missing. Chapter 31, as a matter of fact. Kes doing the river miles. Getting infill on his tattoo, and discovering Show Town’s perfidy. I’m writing it from the notes that I have found amongst all the digital files and paperwork, in between all the other stuff going on.

‘Life Admin’ …

Installment 2

Dryad after the Clear-felling, mixed media by Rita de Heer

This gig … of dumping 20 years worth of my work online … is turning out to be harder than I thought it could be. I had real trouble today just going to a File, saving it as a pdf, then inserting it here. This morning I first trapped myself thinking up a good title for this project. “A Broken Universe” sums it up quite nicely, I decided, since I could never get the timeline to gel.

I spent a couple of hours chasing through my Documents File for the long version of the Half Shaman in Space for Installment 3. As if it matters whether I post long or short, or anything in the order of the events, or anything.

But it does. There seem to be a few readers out there. Installment One did quite well.

Could only find a very short version. And I edited a couple of Files. And I did Delete a few odds and ends. Not a wasted day. Finally found what I was looking for in the Trash. Did retrieve it.

But anyway … installment two of the whole story is Half Shaman. One of the two published volumes, as it happens. Go to this Page for the details. https://wordpress.com/page/ritadeheer385131918.blog/1007

In Health and in Sickness

These almost-gone tulips startled me with their sere beauty. A good metaphor for how I feel sometimes … almost-gone; learning to love myself in better times and worse.

The previous couple of weeks or three I sat around with a cold, fatigue, a heart scare, more fatigue. Knitting was it while I was forced to sit around. Fatigue is a thing to be borne. There’s no hurrying it. It can be calculated. Six days of sickness, 12 days of fatigue.

In between all that, I spent the day in an Emergency Department to have my heart checked. Which meant blood tests and an ultrasound on my legs to check for blood clots. Nothing eventuated. It was just a scare, that’s all, I was told. These are the kind of diagnoses meant to comfort a patient.

This patient went home, not forgetting to ask for a copy of the the blood tests. Getting that was the best part of the day. The blood results confirmed to me that my continuing semi-isolation is in a good cause. My white blood cells are still well below what’s needed to fight off disease, platelets also very low, and red blood cells only just dragging themselves into the average range.

Anxiety Rears its Head

So I read an article about World War III, how it’s already begun. I respect Stan Grant, the author, for his integrity so don’t find the content suspicious. Link included below for your interest. But the content of this article just aggregates with all the other anxiety-inducing news I’ve read since the Northern NSW floods.

I have an anxiety disorder and owe it to myself to not to step back onto the anxiety/immune system problems/inflammation treadmill after all the work I’ve done to get off it. I realize that to dampen down my increasing agitation, I need to back off from negative social media sensationalizing world problems.

I’m already doing what I can in relation to the primary challenge of our times–extreme climate change– and can’t do anything about the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. From this point on, I won’t be writing any letters to politicians, and I won’t be re-posting frightening, Earth-shattering scenarios.

I will be scrolling past all organizations asking for donations. I have my charities and will stick by them. I may post about real-world efforts towards mitigation, when and where I find them. I will continue to blog about science, art, story telling and story making, music and all the other things that tickle my fancy.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-04-10/russia-invasion-ukraine-rumblings-world-war-three-decades-ago/100977334?utm_source=abc_news_web&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_web&utm_content=link