Eating the petals of the rose

1.  What do you stand for?

August 12, 2020

Slipping into the space between fiction and truth, a blog. This virtually real place has been my way of playing the cards dealt in a world that too often makes no sense. One after another, with sometimes, weeks or months in between, I have used a communal space to replace hand-written journals. Piecing together the specifics of my roving life, challenged by chronic illness, and chemical injury it is to fiction or the conjuring of medicine stories that make the battles life-affirming, fun, and full.

While this medicine story is new, and yet to be eaten all the way through I stop here to learn how to use blogger's new software. I don't like it yet, but it works if I give it time. 

If you are here to read, curious to learn what next happens in a safety pin kind of life there is something to make your life worth standing for.  

  "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society" - Kristnamurti 

The other night as I woke from sleep a thought came to me. It made me chuckle, laugh out loud. The thought? "I know more interesting people who are dead than alive." It could be the aftershock of months in the Time of Virus. It could be the old photographs that I pulled from the red covered album before sending the album off to our son and his girlfriend. Faces of my long-dead ancestors, neighborhood aunties, faded with time they touched me so deeply in those places that I keep so carefully separated from my everyday. 

But these questions are the ones the ghosts ask, laughing at me, opening my heart like surgery for cataracts. "What do I stand for?" Milky eyes blink, blink again and hope to clear the present of the harsh edges of an illusion's infrastructure of community. 

We had to blink and try to clarify the news we received the other day. We're getting the boot. Life on the edge of a pristine rural, and very white island society cannot tolerate us. Us -- the long-term campers -- who pay a nightly fee, call our home on wheels good enough. In our various fashions we live our lives, walk our dogs, feed the rabbits, shop and cook our meals, empty our trash and dump our rolling rv poop tanks. 

Rules and regulations are meant to be bent, interpreted and ought to have been the place where all parties involved talk things through. Responsibilities and exchanges of 'currency' is one way of seeing things process through. But? What about the 'us' who challenge the 'legality' of a comfortable society? What about the 'us' who stretch the rules to survive? What about the 'us' who are neither 'here' nor 'there.' The in between people. More wild than tame. 

If I am more wild than tame, and more interesting than most of the people I know, or know of, who are alive today 

 

 

... the next question is

2. How does that make you feel? (TBC)

 

3. Can you feel that and let it change you or are you set on control rather than the wholistic mindset of imparital education?

4. Do your values make sense, or do you have to compress them in order to make them fit?

5. If you were lost, would you use a compass?