Take what you can get

Some magician friends wrote recently on the power of nature. It is wonderful for pretty much all of us... there's power and beauty in nature, and even healing!

This is one of my doctor's favorite prescriptions: Go into nature.

Of course if you've got "real" nature, like the Everglades or Yosemite or any such place, those are the best... But unless you're stuck in the New York City subway or somewhere like that, nature is everywhere.

Ram Dass writes extensively about "be here now," and one of my own rituals is to simply say to myself, "Where am I? Here. When is it? Now." And then... breathe, and smell the air.

A moment of quiet beauty. And healing, especially healing the spirit.

So; go thou and heal.

Right now, I just want to lie down, listen to cartoons, maybe sleep. Oh yeah, Alan (the name I've given my bladder, after the balloon in the Gumboil cartoons) is about to call for a trip to the Cath Club. I did my business-y work this morning, sending stuff to people whom I hope will help me de-bollix my main computer but I expect won't help at all, so I gotta call somebody and spend more money to get my machine de-bollixed. If he can.

I presume I'll have to bring it to zero and have all sorts of stuff reinstalled.

MS by now should have brought me more than enough experience with "Things are different now," and certainly I should be used to "You THINK you made this better, but actually you've not just made it worse, you've destroyed it," you know, the whole unintended-consequences life-is-very-different-now "surprises." Well, that it has...

And I've hit the wall, so I'm going to get a snack and go to bed.

Although, as much as one can say about the MS Life, snack and bed have their own charms.

Take what you can get, right?

Culinary metaphors and the power of "when"

Saw the sunrise this morning! Well, sort-of sunrise, there are all sorts of trees between me and the actual rising of the sun, but it was still a beautiful moment.

Did the Morning Ordering via the Internet, headed here while I still have typing abilities (which ain't much and ain't gonna last, I fear), plan (hope) to make my wife's Good Morning Matcha, squeeze the last typing into some e-mail, maybe will communicate with These People regarding my misbehaving computer--they are free to call their latest OS something poetic like "Yosemite," but from my experience, it should be called "Clusterfuck."

There are a lot of things in this world that are offered as a "help," but turn out to be quite the opposite because, as a friend of mine puts it, they know what they want, but they don't know what they're doing. And to be fair, people only solve their problems, those being what they think they understand. Which they usually don't. And then things get worse. But that's another show, as Alto Brown often said.

I see a few really quite encouraging entries on my fellow MS Blogger's pages. The grandkids are coming, we're getting ready for a nice dinner, the more-than-occasional Issues with things like wheelchairs or other medical interventions. Hmm, what is it that I do, nowadays?

Answer e-mail, order things, make my wife matcha or other teas during the day, send messages to a friend of mine who is not on the MS Path but has more than enough "humanity" issues, including getting out from under the thumb of people who were basically making his life worse--fortunately, he escaped those travails and is now in a very, very good place, employment and "doing things" wise. From what I hear, he is doing something he is very very happy about: He is the chef at an "old actor's home," and he is making people very, very happy (as well as doing the Lord's Work in making the kitchen safer).

But, "doing things" in the Outside World is not what I'm called on to do, right now. Would I maybe like to do some things? Yeah, I even have things I've been considering doing for many months. But said things do take a lot of "getting things together" work, which is it's own "doing," and since I very infrequently have enough gusto to feed the cat, there ain't a lot of gusto to do all sorts of things that will make something else doable.

Think meringue; you can do amazing things with it, and it's reasonably easy to use it, but you gotta do a lot of work just to make it.

And if for whatever reason you can't make it, you can't work with it because it doesn't exist yet.

Ah, the MS "Meringue world"... interesting, no? Culinary parallels... very much in the model of Hell's Kitchen, more often than we'd like. The "hell" part especially.

Ah the things to do... I wouldn't mind putting a couple of CD's together, I even have much (if not all) f the music & stuff that's necessary, but it involves sitting at the computer for quite a while, which isn't always fun (odd pains and inability to work my hands well enough to operate the computer, irritatingly or not). Well, when I do have something to report, I will.

And you can tell that I would truly like to do it, because I describe it happening by saying not "if," but "when."

Even that is a powerful commitment.

"When."

Live with joy

Morning work takes many forms... the usual bathroom stuff, making tea, first day of the month so pay the mortgage, pay the car loan, fiddle with my music web site to make the front page show stuff that's suitable for today, May 1, or Beltane as the Celtic calendar calls it.

Chat with you, and two-ish hours after getting up, I've hit the wall already. I think I'll snag something to snack on, and call it "done," for the moment. Probably won't touch the computer again until tomorrow.

Well, yes my iStuff is a computer, but typing on it is odd, and typing and I don't seem to get along like we used to, but you know what I mean.

Some medical things to share... My urologist told me that UTIs can exacerbate MS-supplied physical sillinesses, and that I should--and this suggestion I can share with you, with anyone--drink more water.

Now, with the bladder issues I have already, asking it to deal with more liquid doesn't strike me as a quiet, inconspicuous change to its operations, but except for that, it's good for me so why not.

Although as Urinetown does remind us, it's a privilege to pee, but looking at my stack of catheter boxes, gauze, povidone wipes, lubricants, and all that and just imagining what that pile o' stuff costs, it puts that musical's songs about "paying to pee" in a different context.

I don't think the authors of the musical's book had us members of the Cath Club in mind.

But my current experiences certainly put new meaning to the word "important." Things like your elimination system... those things are important. If your elimination system stops helping you, you die. Or at the very least, feel very very unhappy. Being properly nourished is important--actually, as soon as I save this I've got to go eat something. Because if you don't eat, you die. Eating is important.

The Chinese called them the Four Necessities: Food, clothing, shelter, medicine. They're definitely necessary. If you don't have them, you die.

"Have it or die" is pretty much the epitome of "necessary."

Ram Dass writes on the difference between wanting and desiring, and there's certainly a very interesting world in the realm of "making life worth living," and one can only imagine what people like Ram Dass or the Dalai Lama or Buddhist after Buddhist adept would say about what it is about the whole "worth living" concept, and I use medically prescribed herbs to pull me out of darkness and back to the light of "life worth living," but it's a very useful place to take one's self, to really observe, to even witness, feeling "not worth living" and then feeling "worth living."

Personally, I find "worth living" a significantly more enjoyable place. So, make the choice; and, if even in the most humble, quiet way...

Live with joy.