Art Triumphant

I have passed up two excellent photo ops lately, one at Kashwitna Lake, and another a week or so after that, when I was leaving Wasilla late, after a meeting, and there was a beautiful shaft of sunlight streaming through some picturesque clouds.  Both times traffic was heavy and it was not only inconvenient to pull off the road, but I was intent on a mission each time:  getting to town the first time, and getting to my dinner and rest the second time.  I had started asking myself if I was losing my artistic edge, passing up such beautiful scenes, but I guess it was just a temporary lapse.

I have a bunch of new pictures I took Wednesday in Wasilla, and I have a weighty topic to blog about, unrelated to the pictures, so don’t expect the text to follow the pics. I’ll caption the images whenever that seems necessary or useful.  This first shot is my Subaru, Streak, parked at the Best Western Lake Lucille Inn, where I took all of this first series of landscape shots.

So, do you think you’d like to lose some weight?

Have you thoroughly thought that through?

Weight loss can be complicated, and strange….

I know I hadn’t really thought it through, although I’d been sorta wanting to lose weight for most of my lifetime.  As a pre-teen, I wasn’t seriously overweight, but thin was in and I felt fat.  I was dieting by the time I was eleven.  Not dieting intelligently or with much real information, just trying to restrict calories… some calories.  I’d skip the potatoes, but I was addicted to pastries and soda pop.

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As I grew older, weight became more of a problem and I did more dieting.  I tried many different diets, I fasted, and I used amphetamines and other diet pills.  I screwed up my appestat and put my body in famine mode so that every spare calorie I ate went to fat to be stored for the next famine.  What my body considered “spare” calories included, I guess, a lot of the ones that might otherwise have gone into energy.  I got shaky and irritable and depressed from low blood sugar by the time I was thirty.

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Then I stopped dieting to lose weight and started trying to eat healthily.  I saw a little bit of improvement in my blood sugar, temporarily, but then the carbohydrate addiction asserted itself.  There was also a matter of several food allergies of which I was unaware until I was in my fifties.  When I had studied enough nutrition and learned how to determine what my allergies are, the only problem left, the only thing keeping me from staying on a healthy diet were the cravings for the addictive foods. 

I would start the diet, stay on it a few weeks to a couple of months, and then relapse like addicts often do.  Meanwhile, my weight had peaked somewhere around 230 pounds.  I was wearing size 20 jeans.  Those were Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, FYI, for purposes of standardization, as I know that sizes vary by manufacturer.  GV jeans are, in my estimation, the best there are.  Gloria knows how a woman is built and cares how we feel in our clothes.  They fit. 

Greyfox calls them Glorious Vanderbutts.  When my old faded pair got threadbare and I wanted a new pair, I looked in vain in all the local thrift shops.  Desperate enough to spring for a new pair, I checked Google and learned that GV had sold her clothing line, and that the fabulous Vanderbutt jeans were no longer in production.  I found a slightly used pair, size 20, on ebay and won the auction for only 75 cents over the minimum bid.

I was happy in my size 20 Vanderbutts, if not entirely contented in my obese body.  But I wasn’t really healthy.  I was taking four different kinds of meds for asthma and had a lot of discomfort and incoordination and such from myalgic encephalomyelitis, plus other problems associated with systemic candida infection and chronic fatigue syndrome.  For all those reasons, I needed some help with the awful food cravings so I could stay on the healthy diet.  Then I got the help I needed.

I learned of amino acid supplement therapy for addictions, and applied it to my food addictions.  I started feeling more energetic immediately.  Without sugar to feed on, the yeast died off.  I was able gradually to get off the asthma meds, and the flareups of the ME (“fibromyalgia”) became farther apart and less severe.  Then my still relatively new fabulous size 20 Glorious Vanderbutt jeans got baggy.  Before they actually started falling off (although some of my other pants, notably my PJs, did fall down a few times) I found a pair of size 16s in a thrift shop.  I had shrunk right past size 18 without even noticing.

When I noticed how my butt was shrinking, I also observed that my ankles and calves had more of the shape I remembered from my youth, and that my thighs were slimmer than I remembered them being before.  I had always had fat thighs, but now they are tight and hardly fat at all.  That came as a surprise, until I thought it through.  I attribute it now to the “fibro” and CFS, which cause pain and fatigue due to the muscles being tense even when “at rest”.  I’m working out when I’m just sitting still.  Once I discovered how to read the bathroom scale, I also discovered that I’d lost about seventy pounds in six months.

The next series of shots was taken at the Farmer’s Market in the “old Wasilla” section of the Dorothy Page Museum, where some of the oldest buildings from Wasilla’s past have been gathered.

The one at right is the Old Fart himself, showing the wares to a customer.  We had a good day at the market, and my ArmsMerchant  was grateful for my help setting up and for my arrival back there after my photographic excursion to Lake Lucille, to help him serve the rush of customers just before closing time.

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I started paying closer attention to the scale once I’d noticed the first 70-pound loss, to see if the weight loss continued.  I didn’t expect much because the only exercise I get is housework and driving back and forth to town, walking around a little on errands, no purposeful exercise program at all. 

I shed maybe ten more pounds in the next three months, and that didn’t seem like a lot. Then I also started noticing that I could get into old clothes I hadn’t worn for years.  A few wraparound skirts came out of storage, and I purchased a few “new” pairs of used jeans.  I noticed first that one of the skirts that had fastened in one buttonhole when I got it out, now fits in a tighter one.  I also noticed my beloved size 16 GV jeans were loose.  They must have stretched, I thought, since I haven’t been losing that much weight.

But occasionally, I’d look down and see that, for example, the roll of flab that had remained at my waist after the first 60 pounds were shed was now gone.  Once again, my legs look like dancer’s legs.  Greyfox exclaimed once when he hugged me, “you’re shrinking!”  A pair of slim, tight Jordache jeans had “stretched” until they were no longer skin tight.  The Vanderbutts were getting gloriously baggy in the butt.

Today, I found a pair of size 14 GVs at Sally Ann.  I tried them on, and THEY were too loose.  I put them back and looked a bit farther south on the rack, and found a pair of 13s.  I decided to buy them, even though they were a bit loose, also.  I thought… “hmmm, if 13s are loose, I wonder if I could get into a size 12….” 

Fortunately, there just happened to be a pair of size 12 Gloria Vanderbilts a bit to the south of those 13s, and they fit like a second skin.  They are black, too, which is a change from blue, fershure.  I got them, also.

The last time I went to the clinic, my health care provider was alarmed at my weight loss when I told her I hadn’t been trying to lose weight.  Even after I explained about kicking the food addictions, she was concerned about my tapering off and cutting out the asthma meds… but why take drugs I don’t need?  The money is better spent on newer, smaller Glorious Vanderbutt jeans, I think.

In the last shot from the Market, Babushka here at far left is laying some low-key ridicule on the Anglo girl at far right who is asking how many beets she needs to make borscht.   Of course, as anyone knows, that depends entirely on how much borscht one wants to make.  Babushka is one of the Russian Old Believers who live in this area, after having fled the USSR a generation or two ago for religious freedom.

The next series of shots were taken in front of the Fred Meyer department store.  In the parking lot, I had noticed several swallows flying around, chasing the mosquitoes and the dragonflies that chase the mosquitoes, too.

In the shady area at right, under the overhang, three airborne adult birds are visible, bringing insects to the young in their nests and returning to the hunt for more.

The cliff swallows have built mud nests in the overhang, one on the right and two clustered together at the left.

Mud marks at other locations in this overhang show where previous nests have been removed.  The reactions of onlookers varied.  Most seemed to enjoy watching the birds as I did.  A few appeared to be offended by the droppings and worried about being shat upon.

Here the baby birds can be seen at the openings of their nests, waiting to be fed.  Below, the wait pays off as first one and then another of the parents returns with a bug.  A passerby warned me to “watch my head” as I stood practically under one nest to get these shots of the other two, but I was really more concerned about my lens than my head.

I enjoyed taking these pictures.  I hope you’ve found them worth waiting for the page to load.

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Therapeutic Talk

Those who have never been in therapy probably won’t relate to this at all.  Most of those who have never been in therapy would have no reason to give the matter much thought.  To those who have not experienced it, there is often some stigma attached to having been in psychotherapy.  Paradoxically, there are a lot of neurotic normal people running around (neurosis is the norm in this culture) who think that having been in psychotherapy somehow brands one as nuts.  That’s about as reasonable as assuming that having had a wart removed means you’re warty, or believing that going to a barber lengthens your hair, but people do think that way.  As more of us get more experience in therapy and more people become therapists, etc., perhaps there is less of that stigma.  One hopes.

That’s beside my point, but if you’ve read me before you may know that I digress… frequently and often at length.  What I came here today to express is a disorderly pile of thoughts about the therapeutic aspects of self-expression.  I hold nothing back.  By that I do not mean that I never hold anything back.  Sometimes I do delay expressing thoughts and feelings, but never with the intent of keeping them always to myself.  When I wait to speak or write, it is only to wait for a better, more appropriate moment, or for the best audience.  If the feeling demands expression, if I feel I might burst if I hold it in, or even if I only feel as if not telling someone right now would be in any way detrimental, I may not wait for the proper audience, but spill it here in a blog or to whomever is near at the time.

Then, when the person who needs to hear it comes around, such as when it is my husband or my son who has triggered some emotional upheaval I needed to vent in his absence, I say it again to him.  Sometimes that is even better than if he had been present for a spontaneous burst of venting.  I will have had time to reflect on the feelings and I may have had feedback from whomever got to listen to my venting in the first place, to help me refine the rant.  Feedback is one of the more important reasons for bothering to express feelings at all.

One of my new friends likes to say that perfection is not as easy as he makes it look.  Therapeutic talk, the “spontaneous” spilling of emotional baggage, is not as easy as I make it sound.  I certainly do not feel that it is any easier for me than it is for anyone.  If anything, I just think it must be that I have greater courage than most people because I don’t let the fear of self-disclosure stop me from letting it all out.  Experience has taught me that it is less dangerous to reveal my inner self than it is to try and conceal it.  I have discovered that courageous self-expression is its own reward.

I was recently the delighted eavesdropper on one end of a therapeutic conversation between my soulmate and his mother.  For the first time, he asked her if she knew about his suicide attempt at age seven, which he had believed that his father concealed from her after cutting the boy down from where he had hanged himself.  He not only learned that she had known all along, but he got from her some background regarding his motivations that has the ring of truth although he had not recalled it that way.  In that same conversation, he brought up to her the lack of adequate early “mirroring” interaction that is widely believed to be behind his narcissistic personality disorder.

I know it was difficult for him to bring those things up with her.  It has been difficult for him to talk to me about them and he has had many difficult moments of overflowing emotionality as he has processed and reflected on his condition and how he got that way.  The “work on self” to which E. J. Gold referred when he said that if it was easy we wouldn’t call it The Work, but would call it the play or the relax, is primarily spiritual development.  I feel that one cannot entirely divorce psychological healing from either physical healing or spiritual growth.  Thus, I am willing, for the sake of body, mind and spirit, to do The Work on myself, hard as that may be from moment to moment.  I am also willing to the best of my ability to share my insights and help along the Work of those I love….

THOSE I LOVE… that just happens to be all of you, in case you didn’t know.  At least in my most lucid moments, when some errant fear or another hasn’t blinded me to my own enlightenment, I do feel, experience and practice universal unconditional love.  It’s a good feeling, for me, from my perspective.  The feedback I receive, however, would suggest that it is not so universally well-received as it is sent out.  Loving, in my mind, translates as being frank, open and truthful, fully expressing myself, my perceptions.  I have heard many times (although this is not my own experience) that the truth hurts.  I can but wonder how that could be.

I love a mystery.
It gives me something to think about.

I’ve been thinking and thinking and consulting reference books and family members, and yet this remains a mystery–several mysteries, really, such as how it came to be and what it means.  The most likely solution I can come up with for how it came to be is chemical impairment, although an afflicted Mercury comes to mind as another possibility.  As for what it means, I’ll take my examination of that question paragraph by paragraph.

Quoted below is a comment left by PotFeet on my “Dualism versus Monism” blog from yesterday.  The single “[sic]” in there was supplied by the author.  Just as in the quote from John J. Coughlin in yesterday’s blog, I have opted not to put a “[sic]” after each of her errors in grammar, spelling or syntax.  I think her prose is sick enough as it is.

to me, the outstanding binary of western [sic, but give me better] thought is not good/evil, but rather praise/blame.  we elevate or condemn by words, and the value structure follows from our actions.

I’d try to supply a “better” alternate for whatever she’s asking for, if only I knew what that is.  Her “[sic]” follows just after “western” (Why not just say, “dualistic”, since that, and not geography, was my topic?), so perhaps that’s the term of which she was unsure, but “binary” presents some problems for me… and “the outstanding” in this context is a bit questionable, too. 

If we were only discussing binaries, not dualistic opposites, it would relieve some of the problematic issues, but we are, in fact, discussing opposites.  A binary is simply a set of two and can be a dyad, two of a kind, as well as a pair of opposites.  That semantic quibble is completely aside from the question of whether values follow from actions or if it is actually actions that proceed from values.  Who knows what she meant?  Perhaps she is implying that society’s “value structure” is a result of the actions of a few who speak out in praise or blame of whatever.  That I find questionable.  I think people are more likely to act upon their values than they are to form values based upon their actions.

i guess that although monism as you quote/describe it does remove the absolutism prescribed by JCI tradition, it does not touch the inherent ‘purity’ of the binary, or why the notion of opposite is required so much by thinking.

I don’t see how monism would remove anything.  What it does is, by contrast, point up and make obvious the absolutistic nature of dualism.  Whichever binary is “the” binary to PotFeet, I don’t see where “purity” is inherent in “binary” as a concept per se, nor even in those binaries that happen to be opposed pairs since much has already been said by many humans for a long time about the gray areas between the black and the white.  Alternatively if this is what she meant: that binaries are necessarily pure, I say that is nonsense.  What could be more purely absolutistic than purity, and what word in the English language is a less pure expression of dualistic extremism than, “binary”?

Anyone who followed my links yesterday to those entries where I have addressed this issue previously, knows my take on the question of why we think dualistically.  We tend to think in dualistic terms because we are a bisexual species with bilateral symmetry, which has evolved on a planet that rotates in respect to a light source so that we spend about half our time in darkness and half in the light.  Add to that our single satellite at a distance that makes it appear to be about the same size as the daystar appears, and you have quite adequate bases for much myth and copious dualistic speculation.

The notion that “opposite”, that dualism, is “required… by thinking,” is nonsense.  I suppose there could be many people who have never thought outside that particular box.  Speaking as one who not only thinks outside that box but lives and works in a monistic universe, I know the nonsensical nature of that statement.  True, our language, and some but not all other languages, are mired in dualism.  Many people (mostly men, I’m afraid) do tend to think only in words, numbers and symbols.  Our schools generally teach only linguistic thinking.  I think in pictures, diagrams, holistic ideas… and then sometimes try to put them into words.  Due to the limitations of language not all of my thoughts fit into words.

a game is played were if anything is named, you must name the opposite.  charity, greed.  America, Russia.  walk, run.  it is a rhetorical device, strong in that it makes the audience hear if you use opposites: “i am not telling you tall tales as i am a very short man”.

It degenerates as it goes along, that comment.  The dictionary search box in the left module of my main page goes to an indexed collection of 950 dictionaries, some of which include a thesaurus.  I searched not all of them, but all the main ones.  Nowhere did I find “charity” as the opposite of “greed”.  And that was the one out of her three examples of “opposites” that to my mind seemed nearest to fitting. 

Joe McCarthy might have viewed Russia as the opposite of America.  If I were looking for an opposite to something such as a nation, which truly does not have either an equivalent or an opposite, I would probably choose a geographical opposition.  For America, the pair of continents, (this nation here is the United States, not “America”), I would pick a continent in the Eastern Hemisphere–say Asia or Africa.

Walking and running are a dyadic pair, not opposites.  To either of those ideas, immobility or vehicular travel would be nearer to opposition than the other one is.  A school child conditioned to hearing the hallway monitor shout, “Walk, don’t run,” might see them as opposites.  If one is going to play a game, let’s give that game some rules that make some sense.

Her, “rhetorical device, strong in that it makes the audience hear if you use opposites,” just leaves me asking, “Huh?”  Is she saying the game is a rhetorical device, as implied by her syntax?  Does she mean that the usage of opposites in rhetoric would strongly draw the attention of an audience?  Whatever she means here, I think her argument is weak. 

so, if anything can be taken with the self-obsessed movement that is postmodernism, be it the questioning of all opposite and binary pairs.  the purest form of opposite is the spartial, everything else is metaphoric.

After a while, I just had to give up on this final paragraph.  It uses words that are not words, for one thing, and the first part of it, which I hesitate to dignify by the label, “sentence”, might make some sense if one substitutes “by” in place of “with”.  Out of OneLook’s 950 dictionaries, only nine even recognized “metaphoric” as a word fragment and they did so with reservations, as in OneLook’s quick definition:
adjective:   expressing one thing in terms normally denoting another (Example: “A metaphorical expression”)

“Spartial”, on the other hand, is not one of the 5,906,621 words indexed in OneLook’s 950 dictionaries.  Maybe it is too new to have made it into a dictionary and we are all just ‘way behind PotFeet.  Maybe she meant “spatial”, which would make a sort of sense, if one ignores that, “everything else is metaphor….” quip.  What she wanted to say, and why she felt the need to say it, remains somewhat a mystery to me.  If I had to bet, I’d lay money on the chemical impairment.  It was the weekend, after all.

Dualism versus Monism

Anyone who doesn’t immediately get the joke in my title could end up at the end of this blog either getting it or scratching his head saying WTF.

In response to my “Life is Good!” blog a few days ago, I got some comments agreeing with my somewhat reluctantly arrived-at judgment, plus a few from people who sadly disagreed, and this, from HennaBoi:

I dont get it.Why avoid value judgements?I thought thats what we were here for.Have experiences, analyze them, judge the usefull from the non usefull, test the decision against new experiences.Well thats what I do @ least.[sic]

That’s not only a good example of the “masculine” mind (as discussed briefly in yesterday’s blog) but typical of mainstream Piscean Age Judeo-Christian-Islamic thought.  It is a dualistic philosophical system that sets up light against dark, good against evil, male against female, etc.

I have had a delightfully informative trip around the web this morning via google, seeing what other people have to say about it.  I’ve touched upon the topic both here as SuSu, and in one context or another at KaiOaty.  I have enjoyed thinking about it, stretching my mind around it, ever since my introduction to Zen through some beatniks I met in a coffeehouse in Wichita, Kansas forty-some years ago.

One of the most concise and coherent definitions of the problem of moralistic dualism I found today not only defines it but illustrates it:

“How pagans see the duality of light/dark is not the same as how the Judeo-Christian-Islamic (will abbreviate as JCI from here on) cultures see it. The JCI worldview is based on dualism where the world is broken down into two very separate and distinct parts. These parts are independent of each other and can be either complimentary or in conflict. In the case of JCI thought, light and dark are in conflict and are associated with the battle of good (light) vs. evil (dark).

Paganism on the other hand has adopted a worldview based on monism, where all is seen as part of one encompassing whole. Dualities such as light/dark thus exist as polarities – two aspects of a whole, best symbolized as a Yin-Yang. In Paganism light/dark is no longer the same as good/evil, but rather associated with such complimenting principles as creative/destructive, external/internal, attracting/repelling, clarity/mystery, active/passive, solid/flowing, static/dynamic to name a few. The moralistic connotations that were opposed upon the light/dark dualism by JCI thought simply do not apply under the monistic approach. (Don’t confuse “monism” and “monistic” with “monotheism”, that is another issue completely.)”  [emphasis added]
from ecclasia
by John J. Coughlin

This symbol, dear readers, is NOT a “yin-yang”, although that IS the name I tend to see used most often for it in English writings.  Mr. Coughlin seems to be caught in the dualistic trap he is defining, even though I get the impression he defines himself as a Pagan.  The symbol is the Tao.  Give it its due.  It is an ancient and clever rendering of someone’s idea of the reconciliation of opposites, the idea that All is One.  Within its perfect circle is the suggestion of constant motion and balance, and that at the heart of one extreme lies a core of the other, opposite extreme.  Seek the heart of darkness, and you will find the light.

If anyone in this relativistic universe has ever beheld an absolute, it has not, to my knowledge, been recorded, expressed or communicated.  Everything we can perceive and express in our limited systems of awareness and communication is relative.  “Good” and “bad” are too limited, too absolute, too black-and-white to be totally real to me.

Some of the most interesting stuff I found on today’s search was written by John Beloff.

An exhaustive general discussion of dualism can be found in The Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind.

Entitlement…
 among other things….

On the days when I don’t go into town to be with Greyfox, and between his Monday-Tuesday “weekend” trips up the valley, the morning phone calls are our times “together” for talking about what’s on our minds.  We often talk about our dreams.  Last week we were both a little surprised to learn that we’d had similarly themed dreams the previous night.  Details differed, but we both had public nudity dreams–and both of them indicated that our unconscious feelings about self-disclosure have evolved.

That same night we also had drug dreams.  Drug dreams are common for addicts in recovery.  We often hear them recounted and discussed at NA meetings.  What was unusual about these drug dreams was the drug involved.  We weren’t dreaming about crack or crank or booze, but about sugar.  In context, it makes sense.  Sugar, for both of us, was our first addiction.  It has been the hardest of all for me to kick, too, but that’s probably only because I never got addicted to nicotine.  In Greyfox’s dream, he resisted the sugar; in mine, I indulged.  I was so relieved to wake up and find that it had been a dream!

This morning when he called, Greyfox was telling me about his latest session with his other “therapist”.  I’m helping him with his work on the personality disorders and addictions, the intertwined “double trouble” that seems to occur together for many people.  He also gets help in nightly shamanic journeys, from Raven, one of his spirit helpers.  A few times Greyfox has expressed the feeling that it’s a bit weird getting therapy from a bird in his mind, but “whatever works” is what I say.  This has been working, working out well for all of us.  That bird knows his beans.

During the conversation, he brought up the issue of being “special”, which had come out in his latest blog.  We both got plenty of the “special” treatment in our youth, being exceptionally bright as well as having “special” challenges, such as illness and pathological clumsiness and incoordination on my part, and being short and legally blind on his part. 

Until recently, I hadn’t a clue how he had come to translate that “special” quality into greater entitlement, extra privileges he granted himself, and a lower status for everyone else’s desires and needs compared to his own.  Where I came from, being sick and clumsy meant I had to try harder to pull my own weight in society, and being smarter than average meant greater than average responsibility.  I placed greater expectations on myself than on other people.  That difference in perspective between us has caused many misunderstandings.  Being “special” was never all that great for me.  While I was yearning for normality, he was exulting in his special status.

Today, as we were talking about it, I had a flash.  What if… what if the reason I interpreted my “special” status so differently from the way he did, was because I’m a woman and he’s a man?  We all know, don’t we, that women apply both brain hemispheres to processing sensory input, while men listen with only half a brain?  Okay, I’m not assuming that this is the only factor involved in this vast difference between the ways we interpreted what it meant to be “different” from the norm, but I think it could be a factor, along with the neglect he suffered, the lack of “mirroring” during the critical period of his infancy.  The fact remains that we took very similar premises and reached virtually opposite conclusions.

I definitely “think like a woman”. <<That link will take you to a test where you can determine the gender of your own brain.  Women tend to use both logic and intuition, and probably some more subtle senses that men don’t even acknowledge the existence of and most women fear their ever finding out about.  The fact that we can bleed five days out of every month without dying, and that we swell up occasionally and produce new people, is enough cause for superstitious fear… think what it would be like if they understood how our minds work.  Then we might really see a war between the sexes.