Breaking the Tyranny of the Streak

Or…there’s streaks, and there’s streaks.

 

not that kind of streak

Recently I’ve been a bit frustrated by my inability to continue streaks on certain software that I enjoy. After some thought I decided to ignore all their exhortations, encouragement, and pokes and prods and release myself from the tyranny of maintaining a streak on a number of things.

At first, I felt like I was a bit… not worthy. Less than. Online you see so many people who have blogged every single day for years – writing great articles every single day. Or who sketch every single day, or take photographs every single day. For some of these things it seems like it’s really not a big deal to remember to spend maybe five minutes on a quickie – although of course, more time is better for some things. So why can’t I manage to journal in my private Penzu journal every day, and make even a quick sketch a day – even after I put sketching apps on the phone so I sketch even on days when we aren’t home very much. Not finding time for a few minutes of Japanese study – even though that app barely nags (or rewards) is a particular frustration for me. I mean, I really DO enjoy and want to learn Japanese.

But here is my biggest stumbling block. I have actual responsibilities. Three days a week my hubby has a 3 1/2 hour dialysis treatment. When we ride the Transit bus they pick us up about two and a half hours early, and can drop us off as much as three hours afterwards. Which is one of two reasons we no longer ride the Transit bus. (The second is that they are not enforcing masks, and are actively making it impossible to social distance – so we get to pick someone up at the hospital, then sit less than 2 feet away while he hacks and coughs and sneezes for two hours. Complaints are answered with “you should be grateful for this service”). Now that we are back to riding the public bus, the transportation time is a little more reasonable so at least we are not gone from the house for up to 10 hours for a 3 1/2 hour treatment. Still, we often arrive home sick, tired, and very out of sorts. Both of us – even though only he had to undergo the treatment. At any rate, 3 days a week are quite focused on one thing.

The other four are the only time I have to go grocery shopping, walk down to the machine (about 1 mile) to refill water bottles, pick up prescriptions, go to the bank, do laundry, cleaning house, or any of a dozen or so other responsibilities I simply have to do. The fact that we no longer have a vehicle means that everything entails an hour or two or more of walking or riding the bus on top the of actual errand time.

Hey, I’m not complaining. I do have a 180 day streak going on the pedometer app! We walk a lot. It’s very healthy for us. This is a good thing. So I’m about half on half on – those are excuses, and nope, that’s just life.

After some more thought, I realize I have to give myself credit for those things that there is no app for that I do have a “streak” on.

I wash the dishes by hand. Every single day. Some days, twice. Admittedly, I often skip that duty on dialysis days because it’s too late and/or I’m too tired when we get home. We also tend not to make as many dirty dishes those days so I figure that’s okay.

I manage to take vitamins every single day. Yeah, I’m kind of a health and wellness freak. I’d rather take vitamins every day than a bunch of prescriptions drugs, and then drugs for the side effects of the drugs, and so on.  I also nag the husband to take his, poor guy. Then again, he is in remarkable health for someone who has been on dialysis for ten years. That’s not me bragging, that’s what his dialysis nurse and his nephrologist say. I’d guess our streak on this one is literally years without a break.

Every single day I pray, meditate, and make offerings to the gods and goddesses. Every single day I spend a few minutes to connect and send reiki healing to any of my friends who may need it. Every day I do some little accupressure treatments on the hubby that help with various little things like blood pressure or anemia or pain. Again, streaks that are years long.

A few days ago I added to my daily chores; feeding, watering, and cleaning a litter box for the new family member. She pays in purrs. It’s a more than fair deal!

So you know what, I’m tossing out all the frustration and the guilt for the streaks I can’t seem to keep up. And giving myself a little credit for those I do.

I hope by sharing this that maybe if you are feeling a bit of guilt, or like you are not as good as someone else because you just can’t keep a streak of daily whatever going that you will take a second look at your life and realize that we are all doing the best we can do with what we have and where we are at in our lives right now. We have to set our own priorities over those things we need to accomplish, and however “good” it might be to journal or sketch or practice our second language every day, there are things that can simply be set aside for things that simply must be done. There is no shame or guilt in that. In fact, you probably deserve some kudos for taking care of business. (That often is a lot less fun than journaling, sketching, etc.)

So there, hah.

Blessedbe.

Let’s Get Metaphysical About COVID-19

I am pagan. Specifically a Solitary Ecletic Neo-Pagan Witch and if you need that spelled out for you, you can find it here. I have no ill-will towards any living being. I believe deeply in The Law of Three, however you wish to call it. If everyone who claims to believe in that simple law which is part of almost every belief system in the world one way or another, and took the time to think before they act this would be a different world.

For most of my lifetime there have been people sounding the alarm about the growth in human population, and about the abuse of the Earth and her plants, her resources, her children. However, because that would cause them to have to think, or to sacrifice material goods or cash or a lifestyle they desire, the vast majority of human beings have chosen to ignore this advice, which is based on well grounded scientific facts (as well as Native beliefs). Some humans do make occasional small token efforts to live with the earth in harmony, but they are few and far between and often the efforts are far less than equal to their consumption of resources.

In our defense, modern life deluges us with information and advertising to create desires based on what will make the most money for people who already have more money than they could spend in a dozen life times. Most of us live our life at a pace that does not allow time for quiet reflection or deep thinking.

Our Lady loves us. We are her children just as much as the tigers or elephants or mosquitos are all her children. However, the human race has become that one unruly child who considers their own desires and needs to be more important than those of our brothers and sisters, let alone stop to consider our parents. Babies come into the world focused solely on their own needs for survivals sake. Children have to be taught empathy.

Perhaps because in the Western world we have decided that elders are worthless parasites, rather than repositories of wisdom and knowledge, we have lost that link that teaches children as they grow to also grow their circle of empathy from themselves, to their family, to their community, and to the world. To include plants and animals and the earth herself in that circle.

The Lady provides enough for all. No living being need go hungry, thirsty, or without shelter. But because of the fear and the resulting greed of a few who mistakenly believe that with enough money they will find safety and security there is a distribution problem. There are people vying over who has the biggest yacht while others are desperately hoping they get to eat today. This creates a situation where those who have much can dangle cash in front of those who have little and get them to act against their own interest and in a way that only enriches those who already have more than they need.

Human beings with their intelligence and technology have the ability to dominate nature. Human beings who are impoverished have the need to use up all of their available resources in an effort to survive. This leads to the burning of forests, and the steady push out into the few truly wild places left on Earth. The need to eat forces the poorest human beings to forage in the wild places and to come into contact with animals that carry diseases that have never met humankind before.

Hundreds of years ago, European people created an overcrowded human grouping that lived in close contact with their domesticated animals. Because of that they were exposed to diseases carried by those animals and in time developed immunities. When they made contact with the First People of the Americas – who lived in harmony with their surroundings and kept few if any domestic animals – those diseases found humans with no immunity.

The effects were devastating.

Through scientific research the COVID-19 pandemic has been traced to a single wildlife market in China. It resided most likely in an animal that was in the market to be sold for food. There is no evidence that the virus is passed by eating, so probably the animal was simply live, in a cage, sneezing on hundreds of people as they walked by. (The study information is linked here)

Our medical establishment over the last few decades has followed protocols that destroy the human immune system in the name of curing certain prevalent diseases such as auto-immune disease and cancer. Other treatments severely impair that same system, such as dialysis. Many elements of our current lifestyle also impair or damage our immune systems. I believe that there are other, more natural treatments and lifestyle changes we could make that would prevent or treat disease by working with our natural body defenses rather than by destroying them. But that’s an article for another day. This is where we are now. This situation creates a pool of human beings with little or no immune defenses for a new virus. Kind of like the First People, in a way.

Karma works.

We have overpopulated, outgrown our territories, invaded wild spaces, stripped the Earth of her resources and damaged her ability to provide for all of us. She has struggled to carry on for decades, maybe centuries, as we infected her like a plague. This is not the first epidemic or pandemic that our own actions have brought upon us. It is the most severe, and it’s the first to really impact the Western world – so we’re acting like this is something novel and amazing.

This is the Lady, in desperation, asking us to learn some self control. To slow down. To think about what we are doing. In fact, the only way to protect yourself and your family and your community is to be mindful of your actions. To think about it before you buy the last loaf of bread on the shelf. To think about it before you get in the car and drive, or hop on an airplane, or cruise ship that is fueled with the earths resources and returns only pollution to her. To be mindful of where you have been and who and what you have been in contact with and to clean your hands, your clothes, and your surroundings.

To stay home.

There is a new software to search movies that has literally billions of movies in their databases. Modern life and a certain level of wealth provides us with ample distractions. It’s really built that way so that we don’t ever stop and think about what we are doing to the Earth.

But at some point in time, you will have to stop and face yourself. You may find you have time to think. To use the marvelous human gift of reason and intelligence and the wisdom of the ages, the ability to read – and write – to share thoughts with those who lived hundreds of years ago or today. To use our unique human abilities to learn from the past, even the past of those you never met, to gain knowledge from those who know more about a certain subject – like epidemiology and microbiology – and natural healing, diet, creating good health and caring for ourselves. To stop and think about our actions and their effect on the Earth.

Or we can let the media drive us like the First Nations people drove panicked buffalo over cliffs to die.

Are you a frightened prey animal? Or a reasoning, intelligent human being? Your choice affects you, and thousands more. The time has come for us to slow down. To be mindful.

I know, it hurts.

The Lady never wanted to hurt us. She has tried to cope for decades. But we insisted on pushing further and further, to having every last resource for human beings only. She isn’t so much fighting back, as having a nice shower to get the fleas off. Any bird outdoors having a dust bath is doing the same.

You would know that, if you stopped and took time to watch birds outdoors and to think.

Blessedbe.

The Coronavirus Transformation

I notice many people and the media are using “these troubled times” or “these changing times” to refer to what others might call “the coronavirus crises”. Semantics, words, do matter. Today’s media is certainly aware of that and uses it on us constantly. In this case, I happen to agree that changing times, challenging times, or troubled times is much better than coronavirus (which points to the virus as the source) and crises or any related words. Because the many changes that are happening right this minute in the world are/were/have been initiated by the coronavirus, but the virus itself certainly isn’t causing them. All the virus causes is a lung infection – quite impartially making use of our animal body as a cozy little home. Everything else is the result of human reaction to that impartial virus.

When I began thinking about a title for this post I couldn’t quite find the word. I went looking in an online thesaurus and of the alternatives they offered I quite like “transformation”. There is no doubt this is going to change the world we live in right now – and for many years to come. Perhaps less than we think, in the long run.

This, too, shall pass.

Transformation points to a change that is for the better. From caterpillar to butterfly. From school girl to magical girl. From chaos and ego to harmony and love. That’s what I am hoping for anyway.

The reason I wanted a good title I could live with is that I am going to use it as a tag. I have a number of things I want to talk about related to these changes going on and although it is all interrelated, I feel that some of my thoughts would do better cut away into smaller bits for focus and analysis. I’m not writing a book of 50,000 words, but a series of blog posts that I’d like to be readable in a few minutes so that you can go off and think about it for a while if you like. Or comment and converse. That would be awesome.

It’s likely that I will return and edit this post as well with links to all of the later posts on the subject just to make reading them all, or selections, a bit easier. Consider this to be sort of a “main header”.

As such, I’ll be posting another entry today.

The more I think of it, the more I like the butterfly analogy. There’s a caterpillar going along with his/her life which consists entirely of thinking of oneself and stuffing all the food it can find into it’s gut. All about self, ego, and consuming. Then it builds itself a safe little home and holes up inside for a while. During that time it doesn’t seem to be doing much, but in fact, it is completely reinventing itself. And then it emerges, beautiful and able to fly. It’s life consists of visiting pretty flowers, helping them to reproduce and seeking connection. A mate, someone to love however briefly. Meanwhile, it’s very presence brings joy to those around it who admire it’s beauty.

That’s what I want this world to do with this opportunity to transform that the coronavirus has given us. Yes, let’s turn this thinking completely around. It isn’t a horrible, frightening disease – but an opportunity to change our thinking, and our way of life to something more harmonious with the world we live in.

No, I’m not so crazy that I think OH BOY a deadly virus! After all, my dearest beloved and I are very much in the most likely to die category according to the medical authorities. But I do have a turn of mind that makes me always want to look for the good in something, to find the good in every event, to look for the teaching and learning opportunity in every event. I won’t apologize for that.

And here we are, sitting at home, surfing the internet and/or sitting and thinking and learning so we may as well do just that.

Blessedbe. Be Well.

Good Intentions

As 2020 began I found myself having the occasional urge to write. Now and then thoughts come into my head – stories, characters, and opinions – and more or less demand to be allowed out onto the page. Then I think about whether I should foist them on an unsuspecting public – or even just my friends. After all, they ought to know by now what kind of strange words might come out of my head and mouth. So I guess this means that the major burn out is lifting, and the gut wrenching punch of being more or less forced to unpublish all my income producing work is finally healing – at least somewhat.

Recently I’ve also been inspired by some of the marvelous bloggers whose work I am reading. Sure, I may have found them for the book reviews or anime reviews, but the truth is there are some beautiful voices out there – and one in particular is inviting me to return to writing. (Pinkie, stand up and take a bow please)  

Her idea for SMILE force is irresistible for me. I do have to warn all and sundry that not all my posts will be sunshine, however. I have been known to rant when I feel it is necessary. Mainly when I feel that there is something being left out of the conversation I see online and in the media. It happens. But by and large I would just as soon stay out of it.

My primary responsibility these days is taking care of my husband. His needs will always come first. Because of that I can’t and won’t obligate myself to a schedule I may not be able to keep. I was going to title this “Mission statement” and thought – it isn’t a mission. I don’t really do “goals” anymore either – I am currently using “intention” as in, I intend to write three to four times a month at least. (If I don’t use the word plan, perhaps it will not make the gods laugh and then begin plotting my undoing)

But – I’m back. I can’t tell you quite what to expect. As always, Foovay’s Cauldron will be a unique, eclectic, accumulation. There will be opinions. Probably health stuff. Possibly some fiction – but I will most likely set up a seperate blog for anything long or serialized. Anime. Gaming. Science. Art, including possibly some original bits. All the myriad weird things I’m into.

It’s only fair to warn you.

Speaking of warnings. Some days ago I read this article in Japan Times. I expected to soon see it disseminated in US media – but no mention. I feel it has some information that is important to all of us regarding the COVID-19 virus. It’s good news/bad news. The good news – it’s easy to kill on surfaces. The bad news – it’s on surfaces touched by people who are infected. So social distancing isn’t going to stop the spread as long as you have to leave your house. Now don’t freak out. Just tuck a few bleach wipes in your bag and if you have to touch a door handle, light switch, toilet handle, faucet handles, things that are high touch surfaces – give them a wipe before and after you touch. Tada. But you have a right to know that.  I know businesses and so on are really stepping up to improve their disinfection – but once a day for a place with hundreds of people passing through isn’t going to do it.

Here’s a link to the article:

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/03/05/asia-pacific/science-health-asia-pacific/coronavirus-lingers-disinfectants-kill-it/#.Xm_TOKhKiM8

Be well and blessed be.