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[18 Aug 2008|05:58pm] |
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Instead of being able to stop my brain from feeling like a TV tuned into a blizzard of static and intentionally do something that'd help me feel settled (like cross items off from my to-do list), I wrote a new song and cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom and made my bed and etc etc etc etc.
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[14 Aug 2008|10:25am] |
Dear friends who have weathered my bizarre and arcing hormones these last few weeks:
No miracles have thus occurred, at least outside the usual. I'm bleeding now and feeling anemic.
I've tracked down Dan's Homeric Dictionary.
The Beehive Collective needs money (http://www.beehivecollective.org/english/ppp.htm).
I don't sleep whole nights anymore, but something about being close with someone with worse insomnia makes that seem less significant. Or harder to complain about.
And:
I vow to no longer try to use people to make myself more whole. Because that is stupid and cruel.
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[12 Jul 2008|05:32pm] |
"We at once seek connection with the mystery and freedom of the natural world, yet we continually strive to tame the wild around us and compulsively control the wild within our own nature."
Amy Stein, "Domesticated"
http://www.artistaday.com/?p=1652
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| everything will be okay |
[12 May 2008|06:58pm] |
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The change that comes with time is amazing. And the part that is work, that is an investment, is getting easier.
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| a cursory summary, rough draft |
[30 Mar 2008|04:39pm] |
I grew up half an hour out of the city, in a town with a population hovering around 500. It had a gas station, a library, and a restaurant. A creek cut through the center of town, and aside from my grandma's home it was my favorite place. My childhood was marked by a certain sort of wilderness-- I had an untamed imagination in a place far enough removed to hold at bay many of the realities of the larger world. School was easy, aside from the other students; I didn't have many friends. I read a lot-- mostly about wildlife, science, history, Indians and aliens. I would say that when I grew up I would be a doctor because I wanted to help people, or a writer because I always narrated stories in my mind, or an artist because I liked making pictures. Sometimes I thought I'd join the missions, because someone was always talking about the missions in my tiny little school. We'd have weekly mission meetings, the whole school-- sometimes fewer tan one hundred students from pre-school to 8th grade-- gathered in the cafeteria, counting spare change we'd begged off of our parents. I think that's part of why I never thought my family was poor until I went into high school-- I was surrounded with children whose parents all made the same sort of money (usually first-generation off the farm), and we all knew about folks who were worse off.
My childhood wasn't perfect-- I was often lonely because most other children, especially my sister, were cruel to me-- but I had faith in myself. I didn't value the approval of many people, including the adults, but I didn't get into trouble and it didn't take much for me to take care of what was expected of me, so I was allowed quite a bit of liberty. I was a little feral, and stubborn about it-- why did it matter that I have my hair cut or brushed? Why should I wear shoes in the summertime? Why shouldn't I spend all day reading under my desk and all night playing in the woods if I was getting all As in school?
What sustained me were books, my cats, my grandma, and the creek. My parents didn't have much time for me, and my sister constantly made me unwelcome at home (maybe I'll tell you more about that later). Sometimes I had friends around my age, but they were mostly guests in a life I created for myself. I read and studied the land around me well enough to understand where certain things grew, where other things lived, how to read prints, and how to move through the undergrowth. I would catch small, fast things, and let them go. I created rituals-- spontaneous, pagan worship of a beautiful tree or golden light of a sunset, and created mythologically proportioned stories about my favorites-- cranes, killdeer, grasshoppers, worms, walking sticks, milkweed and queen Anne's lace.
My grandma had a great yard on property that was once an orchard. It felt wild and secluded. And she loved me more than anyone. She would leave me to daydream by her windows, or to sort through the little curious things she and my grandfather had collected over the span of their lives.
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[25 Feb 2008|03:41pm] |
"...I started to wonder whether what I had taken to be a personal experience and resonance might in fact be part of a larger whole, whether certain basic forms of geometric art, going back for tens of thousands of years, might also reflect the external expression of universal experiences..."
http://migraine.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/patterns/
"Is 'Alice in Wonderland' a pathological product, the result of a single man’s 'nerve cells and associated molecules' run amock? The tendency to reduce artistic, religious, or philosophical achievements to bodily ailment was aptly named by William James in 'The Varieties of Religious Experience.' 'Medical materialism,' he wrote, 'finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as a hereditary degenerate.' And, I might add, Lewis Carroll as an addict or migraineur."
http://migraine.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/curioser-and-curiouser/
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[11 Feb 2008|03:28pm] |
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Outside of lj, the blogs I read are exclusively related to birthing and sex work. This was not intentional.
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[27 Jan 2008|01:10pm] |
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Her friend said, "When someone says they like everything they really have no clue what they want."
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[24 Jan 2008|08:50pm] |
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"I think you guard your inner life."
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[11 Jan 2008|01:15pm] |
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080110/full/news.2008.427.html
Why do chimps eat dirt?
Apes might eat soil to activate anti-malarial plants.
Ned Stafford
Dirty-mouthed chimps might munch soil for their health.Dirty-mouthed chimps might munch soil for their health.
Jean-Michel Krief
Chimpanzees in Uganda have been spotted eating dirt along with fistfuls of leaves. This might help to increase the plants' anti-malarial properties, say researchers.
Many animals, including humans, are known to deliberately eat soil, a practice called geophagy. Though the animals and people might not be aware of it, the main reason for this is that munching on dirt can have health benefits. Soil contains scarce minerals, such as iron, and can counter diarrhea, absorb toxins, and facilitate digestion. Eating earth can also reduce hunger pangs during famine.
Now, it seems that soil might also boost the pharmaceutical properties of foods.
Strange recipe
Sabrina Krief, a veterinarian at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, noticed that chimpanzees in Kibale National Park often ate soil shortly before or after eating the leaves of Trichilia rubescens .
After finding that the leaves contained novel anti-malarial compounds, the researchers suggested that the apes were self-medicating1.
The team collected 14 soil samples similar to those eaten by chimpanzees, along with T. rubescens leaves from the same area. They then replicated chewing and digestion using a pestle and mortar along with acid and heat treatments.
They tested the soil, leaves, and soil-leaf combination against drug-resistant strains of the malarial parasite Plasmodium falciparum . Only the soil-leaf mix had significant anti-malarial activity, they report in Naturwissenschaften.
Active ingredient
The team also looked at the samples using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC). This showed that mixing the leaves with clay reduced the amount of biologically available leaf compounds, presumably because they were bonded to soil particles.
Krief thinks that the anti-malarial compounds stick to the clay less than other chemicals in the leaf, and so become concentrated in the soil-leaf mixture. But her team didn’t isolate the anti-malarial compounds in their test, so they cannot confirm this.
Pharmacist Michael Wink of the University of Heidelberg in Germany suggests another mechanism. It could be that reacting with the soil activates the anti-malarial compounds, he says: “For me, that could be more plausible.”
Further work is needed, he says, to identify and quantify the compounds at work, to determine what’s going on.
*
References
1. Krief, S., Martin, M-T., Grellier, P., Kasenene, J. & Sévenet, T. Antimicrob. Agents Chemother. 48, 3196-3199 (2004) | Article | PubMed | ChemPort |
2. Krief, S., Klein, N. & Fröhlich, F. Naturwissenschaften DOI 10.1007/s00114-007-0333-0 (2008)
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[08 Jan 2008|11:53pm] |
"We were talking about tattoos earlier tonight...
and I admitted to having worked on a design last year."
"For?"
"For tattooing on myself, possibly."
"It was a revision of the sacred heart as a clump of Earth wrapped in roots and a little sprout instead of the flame. Which I'm not terribly ashamed of now but I don't think I'd do it."
"And I've thought of getting Queen Anne's lace and milkweed down my back. And 'Let us love ourselves gloriously and heal each other.' But maybe I should just make drawings."
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| Also |
[07 Jan 2008|01:25pm] |
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It's 64 degrees Farenheit on January 7th, in Northwest Ohio. And we're supposed to get a thunderstorm tonight. January 7th. Northwest Ohio.
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[25 Dec 2007|12:11am] |
I am daring myself. When I am brave enough to use my voice and loosen up my grip I can feel myself become sturdier.
And there is less need to fear naming what I know and less need to hold on so tight.
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| It seems important to remember this |
[02 Dec 2007|12:48am] |
From a few months ago:
"On the drive home, with my work done, I talked to Matt, gushing about metamorphosis. I feel more myself, I tell him, I'm becoming more myself. And I hope it's a process that's finally gaining momentum and not just this moment. But that's what I feel this moment, anyway.
"And I apologize for talking too much, like I always do, worrying about what happens when I let my guard down and emerge, but trying to stop worrying. He says, "It's fine. I understand." He's followed the stories as they unfolded, as we've grown closer and I've let him in on the background. I used to think his understanding helped me heal, like going back in time and having someone to stand by me when I was small and no one listened. Now I understand how storytelling is only part of moving on. And I'm working on the rest, the rest is on my shoulders, but having love in my life-- it makes me stronger."
When I am entirely honest and unguarded I feel like a child.
And earlier, yet:
"I am listening to the songs I put together for _____ instead of telling him that I was in love with him. That was almost four whole years ago-- it feels distant these days, which I'm grateful for. I don't think of love the way I used to, which I'm also grateful for. I think I understand better that there are no simple solutions-- no one person's affection or any single discovery is going to make living any less of a gamble."
"Even snails make love, slow and gentle and sweet. And life in the jungle is cruel."
"Whatever it is that made me feel like I needed you isn't answered by you. It is mine, and I am fine with it on my own."
"It's never the company-- it's just me. That's who I'm recognizing in those moments when something feels eerily familiar-- my self. Like a visiting ghost! And the feel of cool, fresh air rushing against my face and sunlight hitting the leaves up in the highest branches: I miss my grandmother, her apple tree, the little red squirrels, and climbing up above the crown of the weeping willow tree and looking around over the fields and believing that the abandoned farmhouse along the Michigan mile was haunted. It is revisiting enchantment.
"It comes up when we talk about babies. Pregnancy makes me think of peapods, swollen bellies and breasts and legs; I think of my own body's potential for pregnancy and the idea repulses me. And my mom says, 'But there's nothing like the feeling of having a life inside of you.' And I say, 'But you've already got your own in there.'
...
"And I've been watching things, now and again, wondering at what it takes-- the energy and resources-- to animate it all. Not just the requirements of friendly machines that plug into the wall, but what it takes a tree to build branches so high and what it takes a person to get through a day.
"And lately I don't expect anyone to romance me-- it just doesn't feel necessary. Love is a nice thing, a joy and duty, but wonder is my own job. And that's what I want."
"We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit."
-- e. e. cummings
"It is necessary, at times, for me to distinguish between retreat and rest. Today I am resting (though the sun just came out and I am supposed to rake up walnuts soon), reading upstairs in a big wool sweater and staring out the window for long stretches of time."
"And I feel fairly positive in the heart of it all that real (personal) life happens in the nowhere places, where people are like populations of microbes in the puddles of shoe prints. Not tied in to the "driving forces", but spiraling off the way all things eventually end and are erased. And I am hopelessly in love with the things that are mine, for no better reason than that they are mine (Jon Taylor said, "My life is a story that I like because it's mine.") and no one else can touch that.
"And what I am working on is trying to integrate conflicting impulses instead of being suspended somewhere between them, or lost on some other terrain altogether. "
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[23 Nov 2007|11:28pm] |
Evolutionary Principle
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
The evolutionary principle is a largely psychological doctrine formulated by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss[citation needed] which roughly states that when a certain species is removed from the habitat which it evolved in, or that habitat changes significantly within a brief period, the said species will develop aberrant and maladaptive behavior. The evolutionary principle is important in neo-Tribalist thinking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_Principle
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| I love time alone |
[19 Nov 2007|04:57pm] |
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Sometimes I forget the way I love running. Then I go running. And it's amazing.
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[26 Oct 2007|01:13pm] |
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I've had this weak resolve to let Matt get ahold of me, and I broke down last night and sent him a few lines in an email. He wrote back this morning; everything has the weight I expected. I do still love him, and probably always will. But it seems like we can both be our full selves better while we're on our own.
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