The times they are a-changing

When Jon first got hurt I thought I was in some sort of deep dark well. I knew there was light somewhere, some answers about brain injury and coma but I didn't know where to look. Now if you do a Google search for traumatic brain injury you find all kinds of articles and stories and web pages. It's a lot easier to find things out. I think a lot of it is due to the people coming back from the War with various degrees of brain injuries. With a sudden upswing of people needing to know more about what to do the MSM is sniffing up a good story. After all, it's insidious. You never know what symptoms might pop up. On the support group I read about a man dealing with his wife's tendency to bite him when he tries to help her. There's always the sudden personality changes that happen with TBI, like the church going kid who suddenly starts shoplifting and swearing. Now multiply these problems by tens of thousands and you get an idea of what is happening in American families all over the country.

We're getting ready to start making more soaps and taking them down to Lake Katrine to try to sell to Jon's nurses. I figure I need to get my back to a place where I can drive down again with minimal pain. Hell, just sitting here typing is hurting me pretty bad, but I want to try to lay out the basic story here and then take the posts and compile them into a book on the family, assuming my big sister will finally honor her promise about sending me those diaries. Otherwise I have to just write about Jon and frankly there isn't a lot to say after the big seizures he had. He hasn't moved much at all since then, except for those occasional rare episodes that get me all excited again but never happen for the doctors. It reminds me of a paranormal problem I read about years ago: what if ghosts never can appear in front of somebody who does not already believe in them? What if your locked in loved one only moves when it's just you and he? Well, then you sound like an idiot when you try to explain the look on his face or how this movement was more obvious and deliberate. Yeah right.

Well as I said in the previous posting I'm trying Scribefire for Seamonkey and it seems to work pretty good. Oddly enough, though, "Scribefire" is not in the dictionary. Now let's try to add a picture and see how well that works. This is mom's puppy "Mighty Mouse".

Trying something new

This should be exciting if it works. I'm just checking in briefly with the news that I added an add-on to Seamonkey and the crocuses are up in the front yard. This add-on is called Scribefire and I am hoping it will make posting to my blog that much easier. Let's just see.

Nearly Spring

Alongside the path between the frozen garden and the frozen studio door, a maple leaf-shaped tunnel bores into about eight inches of snow. At the bottom, seen best by aligning your eye with the direction of the leaf-shaped hole, you see a small maple leaf, plunging toward the ground like a paraglider in free fall. It's a distant brown, a far cry from the bright red it was a few weeks ago, maybe more than a few weeks ago. This skeleton of life has but one job yet to do before disintegrating into compost and giving up all the parts, all the elements, all the love. So she sails down through a slowly melting patch of snow and ice, frozen water, little interrupted raindrops yet on their way to the ground, kinda like those slow-motion scenes on TV and the computer as the camera pans 360 and the drops are frozen in mid air. Now, if you saw everything in infra red how odd wouldn't everything be? Same frozen bundles of water, same slow motion paraglider, same soil beneath awaiting, but now it's all in red and black and shades between. In the summer there will be yellows and whites, but for now the world is in darker tones. The sun in the sky is a white dot surrounded by a orange haze and trees still cast shadows. The face of the man in the black jacket is yellow with a white gob in the lower middle, and plumes of slowly fading yellow coming out of the mass. The man would appear to be a specter, glowing in the shadows of winter. And you know some poor slob of a life form gets that as it's main visual input. Maybe rattlesnakes get their attitude from that viewpoint.
The maple leaf has no reason to know that the water alongside it is at 32 degrees or that water at this temperature expands slightly and with great concentration since it has no water to speak of to worry about. So it just catches what light streams down the hole behind it and aims for the earth, an easy target. The drops of water may be distracted by their frozen condition, but the important thing is that they are on their way to the earth, to sink into her skin, explore the dark unknown and return to the air as the breath of a maple tree.
For Her part, what does the Earth think of all this? She must be itching to get going with all that growing stuff She does so well. Still, if each season was an eye blink to the Great Mother, then a year might be a few seconds. Maybe She pays more attention than that. Maybe each day is like a heartbeat, a second of Her time. So sixty seconds, a minute is about two months. A season would be a minute and a half, a year is six minutes more or less. She sees us for eighty years or so which translates into 480 minutes or eight hours. One day of sunlight and then we pass into the dark night. Well, you can certainly see how the Great Mother might have Her favorites from time to time, but by and large we must look pretty much the same to Her by now. For our part we should pay attention to the brilliant metaphor offered by an Earth-centered paradigm.
Our day upon the Earth is starting when we are barely more than a drop of squirming chemicals and tissues. We can't feed or protect ourselves, we can't communicate our needs and we wipe ourselves out fussing so much that we sleep most of the time. Our potential does not appear for quite some time, about noon I guess. But in the Dawn of our day when all is dim and quiet, we are helpless. Only Love preserves our life, and Love is one of Her great epiphanies. When we are capable of doing something noteworthy to our Mother most of the time we do something in the way of changing something into something else and or moving something from one place to another. We dig holes and stack rocks, sometimes lining them up. We kill far more than we can eat and we do it when we aren't even hungry. We do this under a hot noon day sun, working up a sweat, moving air and water around. We plant things, we let them grow, then we kill them and
eat them. We are just like all the other living things that move across their Mother under the Sun. She shines down upon us, She supports us with Her form, She feeds us from Her flesh and Her blood. There's more than enough of Her to go around if we just respect Her and not screw things up.