Sensitivity (a little too much)

In many ways, things are going well at the moment. My students are happy. The PowerPoint presentation on "putting power and the point back into PowerPoint" went over very well, especially the South Park pictures I put in for their enjoyment. I just finished a new piece, something for Advent IV, for mezzo-soprano, handbells, and organ. More pieces, this time for theater, are in the works, and are allowing themselves to be written reasonably well (when I'm able to work on them). For the first time in several months, I made dinner from scratch, a roasted carrot/ginger soup (roasted the ginger as well as the carrot as an experiment, and that worked quite nicely).

But I'm taking next week off from work, at my doctor's orders. The first time I've had to take a longer-than-one-day MS break.

I'm not having an attack (whatever that is), but I am very dangerously over-sensitive, to pretty much any sensory input--especially abrupt noises. The only Western med I use is Inderal, a beta blocker, simply as a buffer between my under-insulated nervous system and the world. And it isn't doing its thing any more, and I'm at the maximum sensible dosage. But I get jarred/startled/derailed by the smallest things: Cat knocks over a pile of laundry, and the noise the pile of clothing makes when it hits the floor jars me. And that's not good. I'm also nastily fatigued, and that just makes things worse.

I'm going to try to get qi gong'ed next week, that always does me good. Doc says some rest--some true rest, not the "pretend" rest I usually take the few occasions that I take time off--may help me reassemble myself. I think this is a good idea, I'm going to have plenty to do very soon, and if I start it depleted, it's just going to get much, much worse.

On an unrelated note, one thing I've been noticing lately is that my walking problems get better if I'm walking "mindfully," in the Zen sense. My kyudo shisho(u) (from whom I haven't directly taken a kyudo lesson in way too long, but who continues to teach me daily both via the miracle of the Internet and by things that he said to me years ago finally coming to full realization) has started a blog on Zen walking, and that's very much what's help keeping me upright nowadays. That, and the kyudo saying, "Eye out there (target), mind down here (dan tien)." In that state, the air is beautiful, the world is joyous, my head is high and my back is straight, I am simply present in the world and my walking simply is what it is. But somehow, without me having to expend an erg of additional energy... it's better.

Not a bad result, for the small effort of getting your mind into yourself and out of yourself, and just breathing.