VirusHead

“It seemed like this was one big Prozac nation, one big mess of malaise. Perhaps the next time half a million people gather for a protest march on the White House green it will not be for abortion rights or gay liberation, but because we’re all so bummed out.” ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

This has been a long, boring illness and I’m not out of it yet. Headaches and fever. Vertigo. Barking cough. Intestinal…distress. I’ve missed too much work. I haven’t been able to keep up on housework, either. We didn’t have any heat in the house for part of it, and the fireplace didn’t help very much after all. I’ve been in that foggy mental zone where I can’t focus on anything. I lost my glasses somewhere around here. Dishes are piling up. Everything is dreary and depressing and dreadful and reality has been hanging on to me like an extended family of leeches. The bright aspects in my life – love, light, friendship – have been keeping me from a spiralling tumbledown, but my engagement has been limited. Everything has been seeming pointless and hopeless and stupid. Every political story has me rolling my eyes or muttering vague noises of disgust. I’ve been irritable and supersensitive. And my ribs hurt.

At the same time, subtle transformations have been blooming -although they seem utterly paradoxical. A lack of ability to focus on anything has nourished a letting-go of self-centeredness. The sensitivity to pathology and conflict has engendered a deeper feeling of compassion, albeit a detached one.

“There is no pain, you are receding.” Is this what it means to be comfortably numb? The bracketing out – sensitive but insensitive, irritated but forgiving? Repulsed yet appreciative? It makes no sense to me other than as an illness-consciousness. Music transports me into endless trains of thought, and sometimes into floating experiences of spirit.

The full blue moon last night was a like serene guardian of beauty, hope and patience. The fractal gods and goddesses still crackle and sparkle and long for incarnations.

We keep finding and constructing and weaving threads of the beautiful and good and true, in the midst of horrible greed and selfishness and malevolence and proud ignorance. Sister Moon will be my guide.

God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice. ~ John Donne

People say I make strange choices, but they’re not strange for me. My sickness is that I’m fascinated by human behavior, by what’s underneath the surface, by the worlds inside people. ~ Johnny Depp

And as pale sickness does invade, Your frailer part, the breaches made, In that fair lodging still more clear, Make the bright guest, your soul, appear. ~ Edmund Waller

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in. ~ Leonard Cohen