Feet out the Window

 This afternoon, reading with a headache, I was inside in my reading chair set-up with as few lights on as possible.  It was okay.  I was relatively comfortable.  The headache did not have me in bed.  I was able to focus just fine.  I read for about an hour . . .

But honestly, I enjoyed my reading more yesterday morning when I was waiting for my teenager and parked on the far edge of a school's parking lot so I could be in the only tree's deep pool of shade.  I rolled all the windows down.  It wasn't too hot (only about 80F), and there was a light breeze.  I hiked my skirt up and took my sandals off.  I put my right foot out the car window, and my left foot on the dashboard.  I could feel the breeze on my toes.  I read happily for about 45 minutes.

On headaches: 

I get migraines.  They are not as bad as they were two years ago when I was getting 17 a month of which 3 or 4 confined me to bed for the day.  I am very glad they are not so bad, but they still slow my life right down, which is hard for me.  I'm a doer.  I'm not necessarily productive, but busy-ness is definitely my go-to coping strategy.  

To not do.  To sit.  To wait, To let things get better with time.  To just be in one spot, and feel the various discomforts, and wait them out . . . is very very hard.  

It's also good for me.  In that messed up way one can have gratitude for lousy experiences, I am grateful that migraines remind me that sometimes if you are still things do just come and you see them, experience them (e.g. the young sparrows on the windowsill, wings aflutter, still demanding their parents feed them, or e.g. my own teenagers who might share an extra word or two with me if I am sitting still on the couch).

Also, I am reminded that any day I am not in bed is a good day.  Doesn't matter what else does or doesn't happen.  Am I out of bed?  Yes?  HUGE WIN!

On the book I just finished, Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood:  

Ooo.  This is understatedly interesting.  It is a kind of secular soul searching.  Instead of gospels we get a snippet of Joan Baez ("Action is the antidote to despair") and of Hippocrates ("First, do no harm") (26).

There's a moment to which I relate profoundly in which the narrator, retreating from trying to engage with the world's problems and solve them, unsubscribes from 25+ newsletters: Threatened Species Rescue Center, Human Rights Watch, Aboriginal Legal Service, Greenpeace, Green Living Australia and more (152).

There's this gem of an observation: "I used to think there was a 'before' and 'after' most things that happen to a person; that a fence of time and space could separate even quite catastrophic experience from the ordinary whole of life.  But now I know that with a great devastation of some kind, there is no before or after.  Even when the commotion of crisis has settled, it's still there" (210).  

This one helps me understand what sometimes feels like frustrating "stuckness" in a dear friend whose wife died suddenly of a brain aneurysm five years ago.

And finally, I hope this is true of me in this moment:

"A feeling that something is coming, waiting to be born, out of this time.  Almost physical, like before a period, or a pregnancy, or vomiting.  Something is getting ready to resolve itself" (254).