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Homemade espresso and vegetable soup

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This is not so much a title of this blog as what I am having for breakfast this morning before heading off to work. It is harder to fit in writing on a work day, although today is not so bad because I do not need to be at my patient’s house until 10AM. Tomorrow, however, the day starts at 6AM at the patients house. I may do the old yellow tablet at her house during a nap and then just transcribe at home, or if I am disciplined enough I will get up earlier and write a brief blog, which may or may not be lucid, before leaving for work.

Fits and starts towards running again, walked a quarter mile this morning and managed to breathe in a small flying insect while increasing my pace. Still incredibly grossed out by eating a bug, and not just cause I am a mostly vegetarian! The air was finally crisp and cool enough to make me want to break into a run, I refrained. The patient today is a pediatric patient in designation only and saving up my energy to keep him clean and dry. I adore his family and the patient but keep asking my agency to NOT assign me there because he is toooooooo big for me to do alone safely. However, they just care about filling slots and know I need the hours and if I say no they won’t give me anyone else. I may be job hunting again as soon as I am settled in my new home unless they are able to fill my hours again with patients for whom I feel comfortable caring.

So absolutely nothing meaningful or even enlightening in this blog; just random life being regurgitated onto the page but then that is the point, writing. Writing daily is like meditating daily, the habit is an important part of occasionally achieving the goal. Habits are created by repitition, habituation then allows my Ego to get out of the way and let my Authentic voice slip through onto the page.

In creating new habits, I follow the laws of physics. Getting up the initial thrust of effort to change behavior takes something BIG, like a crisis, unbearable pain or Nanowrimo. Then however once in motion the beginning is easy.  But days or weeks into the new behavior my motion begins to peter out, I find excuses to not do it, do something else, and slowly the object is again at rest.

Maybe I will try defying gravity this time……(hee hee, listening to Wicked) . Today I did OK so far. I started with my gratitude list, the dog and I went out for exercise, am eating a healthy breakfast and did my writing all before heading off to work.

…and now off to get ready to live my childhood dream of being a nurse yet again. Life today is good.

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A musing morning meanderings without a point but itself

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 ‎"..a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage." 1984 by George Orwell

Getting ready for Nanowrimo by writing daily again.  Seems everywhere I turn these days there are reminders of that past life, where I wrote and sold and performed for my bread and butter instead of my current occupation as nurse. Requests to read what I wrote keep confronting me and my desire to still maintain that wall of protection between what was and what is remains still too strong to accommodate. Luckily most of my published work was the throw away kind and published before computer technology made everything written or spoken immutable in form and at the whim of any editing punk for function. Yet it is ironically comforting that I do still exist as a writer on the internet. 

I entered the "New Era" writing contest while living with my foster parents the Urbanawiz’s (people who will ever be my example of what is good about Mormons) and my winning gave them the rights forever to my poems. They re-appeared again a decade later and hence their being readable on the internet. Two of my book reviews reveal more of my prosaic style under JM DeBiasi in archived Alibi issues. It used to be that this far right spiritual publication and this intellectual voice were properly triangulated by a third archived Gay travel article written in my perky, Girrl on the Go voice, but it has fallen off the cyber map now due to increasing age.

A poem written two years ago about a time when I was much clearer about my truth. And now Hilary Hahn, "my timer" is done so I will make breakfast and leave you with this tribute to one of many times I learned the size of the ocean of human misery.

Passive Resistance
We strummed acoustic guitars and sang in groups
Of missing flowers, blowing winds
As they approached with billy clubs and shields
Hurling insults and orders.
We met each others eyes and held ourselves in check with our chain of stares

The biting smoke they unleashed made even my airy soprano
a bit more Janis Joplin.
Our eyes streamed tears and nose dangled mucous tributes to
American justice
And voices quavery with chemical fear
Rose again in growing tides and waves
Unison, "Give Peace a Chance."

Until the boys in blue
roused the angry soldier in one of us
and he became at last what he had yet refused to be
And he rose up into contact with the billy club and shouted something back
and
that’s when the screaming started
and the bruises and the blood and the blame poured out
in American portions, service for one
but plenty for all to share.

I sat unmoving still keeping our three sets of eyes locked
Quietly caging our animal need to run, respond, fight back.
I had three stitches in my chin and two butterflies and my first bald patch on my head
You an armcast, and she with nothing broken
was witch green with healing bruises and a Jimmy Durante nose.
We were the lucky ones
Who knew peace could hurt so much.

Five days later we buried the one who fought, the one who fled
Ourselves quite alive, only our belief in justice was dead.

Read more: http://www.myspace.com/cassandracrow/blog#ixzz12XiORFhT

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Drink in the possibilities….

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Thirsting for knowledge
thirsting for inspiration
thirsting for love…… intense needs are often expressed as a thirst. Even the sound of the word in my mouth makes me reach for my Brita pitcher and a glass.

Thirst is such a powerful metaphors because our bodies need water more than food. Humans are 70% water. This is not really news to anyone living in the civilized dessert metropolis of Phoenix. Dehydration is a common cause of our daytime fatigue. With triple digit autumn temps this year, our cells are promoting the cause of clean water. And if our bodies messages are not enough, all the competing voices trying to sell their bottle or filtration device as THE one best answer for combating thirst remind us that we need water, clean water, and we want water that tastes good and is free of bacteria and poisons. All these billboards and television commercials and popup ads need also be a reminder that we are the lucky ones. More children, millions of them, die every day from lack of clean water than from disease or accidents combined.

As an American citizen clean water has been mistaken by me at times as a given, or a right. I am not alone in that mistake. Our marriage to resources abundance has made us complacent as a society and clean water has become the spouse we take for granted instead of cherish and protect. 

The official sites offer a plethora of political, donation and just do it opportunities. If you are interested in joining the Blue revolution just Google and begin, and in the meantime I offer up the five things I am doing in my daily life to help.

I turn off the shower while I soap and condition.
I water my plants with the used water in the dog dish and bottoms of portable water bottles.
I use a filtered pitcher and reusable glass containers for cold portable water (used to be POM and now its the Monkey drinks)
I only do full loads of laundry
I pick up my trash, minimize my driving and buy organic.

What are you doing to keep the rivers running clean and protect our most important resource?

Change.org|Start Petition

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Why read blogs….

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 I haven’t ever really needed a reason to read since I first realized letters formed together in order were a tool of communication. I have always read whatever I could get my hands on, from milk cartons to newspapers to road signs to mountains of books. As a child I actually got so bored with seeing the same street signs I began phonetically reading them backwards. So my initial reason to read a blog is because it exists and has words on it.

As I have aged and the block of time expended has amassed a size exceeding the block of time stretching before, I have become more selective. There are actual books I have started that I have left unfinished, words I have skimmed over or ignored as unnecessary. Words now need to inform, entertain or inspire to warrant my investment of time. Blogs make all three available to me: second reason to read a blog is the information contained therein and the entertainment value of how it is presented.

Finally, I am hungry for real human connection. Overscheduled, rarely alone, and gifted with an abundance of people I call friends, my life is still empty of much intimacy. I itch for the touch of one mind or soul sharing energy.  Reading Blogs simulates that intimacy, sometimes even stimulates it.  Blog reading is to intimacy in cyberspace what sexual attraction is to real time interaction.  In the right amounts and chosen wisely, blog reading (and writing) can instigate real relationships with the author’s ideas, but reading blogs can also just be a way to scratch the itchy edges of loneliness without  ever filling or healing the wounds. 

So to sum it all up, sometimes I read blogs for the pleasurable experience of reading, sometimes for cheap entertainment, sometimes to make and find connections with others, to find new ideas and understand the real stories of other lives; and sometimes, sometimes I read blogs just as an addictive escape from having to re-organize my life into a shape that accommodates real time friendship development.

Why do you read Blogs?

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The real me….

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 So I have a dozen filled or partially filled blank books, a half dozen other Blogs, although two are linked to social networks so don’t really count as Blogs, so why start another one? Excellent question, other self, let see if I, the authentic self can answer that for you. 

Why do we blog at all? Why do we journal? Is it because we are all so busy "communicating" with the plethora of instant electronic devices that we can no longer hear ourselves or anyone else and therefore find a Blog the only way to speak out truths? Is it a need to speak or a need to be heard. If it is the latter then Blogs are not the right approach. As of right now, we (the Ego, the Observer and the Authentic Self) are out only readers.

If it is the former, then maybe the answer to the question is similar to the answer to "why do we need mirrors?" I Blog to see myself from the outside, as others see me, and then adjust the necklines and comb the hair to bring that written image closer to the one inside my head.

So OK, I blog to produce a verbal mirror of my Ego so that Observer can adjust it to more closely overlay with Authentic Self, so why a new Blog.
I guess because the other blogs, like so many of my rediscovered half done knitting projects, lurk here in my cyber attic missing pattern and with clearly dropped stitches. It is easier in anything to start over than recover and repair a past whose threads are tangled and original inspiration lost.

And so I begin…

Schrodinger's cat lives, magic is science, and compassion and integrity are the only necessary ingredients for happiness.