New House

Today I am not as ill as I was yesterday. Is it the addition of new medicine or the second night in a room outside this house, or just that it took this long for some virus to work its way through.. in any case, I'll take it! I am very weak. But better.

We found a new casita for our final month of this trip in Santa Fe. It is in town, three blocks from the Plaza and very clean. It has a lovely little kiva fireplace and two sweet bedrooms and baths and a nice open kitchen-dining-living area. The owners are charming and friendly and work hard to make it a pleasant space. It is teeny. And there are no views. And I am saying goodbye to my mountain. And to the birds that have come to depend on the seeds I lay out for them. And to the beautiful fireplace and the goodness of this house, in all of its neglect, and it's possession of this particular piece of earth. The man who built the house 13 years ago has become a friend. He cared deeply about how to place the house and how to make the windows lovely and the way the clouds form behind the Ortiz mountains in the afternoon. It shows. You can feel it here. And I will miss this space.

And I will be so glad to feel better. And we will be close to restaurants (for which Santa Fe is famous) and walks around town and close to the galleries, the library, the video rental. If the casita is too closed in, I can carry my laptop to the library and work there.

We said to one another today that we would have had to leave this house in a month anyway so there you are. It is just the timing that has changed a bit. Bless it. Bless all that has happened. Release it. Welcome the next chapter.

Oh how we like to hold on to everything! So much so that there would eventually be room for nothing more. So even though it is feeling like something being wrenched away from our grasp, we ask for the grace to release it freely and welcome the next moment.

Like breath. Like the breathing in and breathing out that I have come to value and not take for granted so much.

New Day

We are learning so many things. The cute little mice that inhabit this part of the country (of which, we hear, there are 10 different types) have infested our beautiful little adobe rental house. We first quarantined the den when a mouse died in the ceiling, and the owners allowed the property manager to move the television to the living room. Then the master bedroom started smelling funny. Well, not funny, really, but bad. Very bad. So we moved to the guest room. The guest room smells sweet. And the window there has an exquisite view of the mountain.

We still had 4 rooms out of six. Not bad. We don't need more than that.

But I have continued to be more and more compromised and especially unable to get enough air at night. It is frightening to awaken feeling as though you have been holding your breath a long time and need to get some big gulps of air in a hurry. And it kept getting worse.

This house has ceilings made of latillas. The mouse droppings and bacteria fall through the cracks between the small pieces of wood. The pest man came yesterday and said we have a medium infestation here. He set traps outside the house for the mice to go into when they leave the house in the day time to get food and water. These traps are filled with poison and should kill all the mice they trap. Then, after a few days of this, he will return and fill all the holes in the outside walls through which the mice are entering the house.

It is all beginning to have a rather surreal quality about it.

So John asked a friend who has lived here a long time for a doctor recommendation. He got one and called only to be refused treatment. "We don't take Medicare." they said. "Most doctors in Santa Fe do not." So for people 65 or over, the option is a walk-in clinic or the ER. Many people in this country are unable to receive adequate medical care. People over 65 are just one group of them. But even for people who have been aware of the problems and adamantly in favor of healthcare reform, like us, it it shocking to suddenly become the ones who are marginalized.

Just now, we have returned from spending an entire day at a clinic where you sign in and wait. We waited the entire day there for the doctor, the lung xray and the blood test. We need to rule out Hantavirus which is spread by mice through airborne bacteria. You can't spread it human to human. It is a very serious illness and kills around half of its victims. We probably don't have that one. But there are a myriad of illnesses caused by this same problem.

I became very faint at the clinic after several hours of waiting. When I told the young doctor that I was feeling faint and my knees felt as thought they would buckle when I stood up, he asked if I thought I needed physical therapy. If I had felt any shred of confidence in his ability before that, I certainly had none of it remaining. He sees an old woman. I am describing a symptom that is very frightening and to me a sign that something is seriously amiss. He apparently assumes that it is just an age-related problem that I have chosen to bring up as long as I have an appointment with him.

There is no triage. People get in line. First come, first served. There also are appointments but they fill up. And that is a return to the walk-in line.


The story is longer. I am afraid. I think of myself as a vigorous woman who rarely sees a doctor. When I do need one, I think I should be treated with respect. Where is it I got that idea? I am learning that it is not the way of my new age group, the elderly.

Passive Diminishment

This is a good time to learn humility. The illness reigns dominant and expectations of accomplishments must be adjusted by these factors out of my control. Teilhard calls this "passive diminishment."

I now have added to my inventory here, an oxygen condenser. It's a big blue plastic box that chugs and thumps sending enriched oxygen down a long clear plastic tube, which I affix to my head and put the little breathing nodules into my nostrils. Then, I can breathe comfortably all night long. It's a litle complicated when I roll over, but not too big a deal.

The overnight oxygen test machine determined that my levels of oxygen, which should range in the high ninety per cents, was dipping as low as 61 per cent. Low levels of oxygen can have a deleterious effect on the organs so that in itself is a bad thing. But the really big deal is that when the airways are compromised past a certain level, there is a danger that the lungs will collapse.
Not good. You die.

So here I am all night, sniffing enriched oxygen. Then I take all that off and sit with my other machine, my nebulizer.

This morning I took my last Prednisone tablet and am feeling a bit nervous about it since it seemed to have the most effect of anything. It is perscribed to reduce the inflammation of the bronchial airways.

The pharmacist says that this is the worst virus he has seen and people are remaining ill for upwards of two months.

Humility is the rule of the day. We make plans. We are here in the land of beauty, every direction we turn. While my car trips and hikes are limited for now, I can look out the windows of this perfectly situated house, and take in the sights of that mountain, sitting steady and strong...of the sky which keeps moving in endlessly fascinating unfoldings..of the birds feeding at the courtyard wall, including finches, bluebirds, junkos, titmice, pine siskins, and two pinion jays who seem to have been left behind by the mob.

My hero has been, for some 30 years, Flannery O'Connor. I am now finding strength thinking of what she was able to do, even though her body was severely compromised. She found comfort in Teilhard de Chardin's lines in submitting to passive diminishment. So then, can I.

Confinment

Not much blogging, but tending to illness, has taken up these recent days. After thinking I escaped the virus that got John for a month, I began to feel incredibly achy and within a couple of days was coughing and had the roster of symptoms.

However then I began to labor with breathing at night which provoked John to get me to a doctor and that led to the realization that I had a low oxygen level and warnings from the doctor about how serious this is. Now I have a machine, a nebulizer, which makes steam and disperses a drug called albuterol into my lungs when I breath. I get to do this every 4 hours. It is called a bronchial dilator. And some prednisone for reducing lung inflamation. And a little gadget that measures my oxygen blood level overnight. And instructions to take my blood pressure every day.

It is a fairly traumatic transition from feeling that I am a very healthy strong woman to a sickly one who is dependent on a whole bunch of meds and equipment to stay safe.

It is also embarassing. I am ashamed of being sick. I am ashamed of being seen as a sick old woman. Just being an old woman is shameful enough.

Why is that? Age, as we know, is what you get when you don't die. So it seems it would be a positive thing.

And the words that come to my mind in association with illness are: dependent, boring, needy, no longer relevant, and so on.

Wow. This is severe.

And yet when I think of Flannery O'Connor, I think of a brilliant, relevant, interesting, strong and relatively independent woman. And she was very ill most all of her brief 11 years of adult life.
As I continue to work on my book, I think of her often and say to myself that this is how she felt in her best days and yet every day she kept writing and she has a whole catalogue of work to show for it.

So my task for today is to forgive myself for being ill and accept its limitations without making critical judgements. That sounds right to me. And write what I can.

Spaces

In the space between night and day, and in the space between day and night--twice in our 24 hour day, at dawn and dusk, are the openings of energy for us to slip our prayers through. That is what people like Rumi (who is like Rumi, you might ask?) have told us.

Another description of this moment is the space between breathing in and breathing out. Does our earth breathe in and out, once a day? Inhale the nighttime and exhale the day?

Some meditation schools say focus on nothingness. Some say the breath. Some have you do little scenes of the beach or the mountains or a tree, for example. The ancient Christian Jesus prayer is the repetition of a mantra, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, Have Mercy on Me." Other eastern schools use mantras as well, such as "Om namah shivaya."

I am currently focused on the way that uses feelings and a sense of the request being granted, if that makes sense. Picture the prayer being already answered and totally feeling the reality of that complete with emotions of happiness and peace and gratitude.

It is said that this is even more powerful when you do it just as the sun goes down or just before the sun comes up. For me it is more likely that I will do it just as the sun has gone down. I have witnessed a lot more sunsets than sunrises. It's just my nature.

And here in this high land of ridges and junipers and mountains and clear air, the sunsets are spectacular and draw you outside. So it's an invitation. Let's go!

The Blank Page

Here is this blank rectangle. What shall I fill it with today? Let's see. I think I will put in a mountain, a courtyard surrounded by an adobe wall, a flock of bluebirds sitting in the tree just outside the wall, the junipers again and again, the sky filling with clouds, the voice of Bruce Cockburn singing about Kit Carson, while sitting in a valley that Kit Carson used to ride through on his missions for the President.

This part of our country has arguably the oldest known history in America of outsiders messing with the indigenous people. The Spanish started arriving here 500 years ago. Some stayed. More of them arrived 300 years ago. More stayed. In the 18th century, Bishop Lamy arrived from France, via Ohio, and more more settlers of all backgrounds. There is a balance between the cultures here, often tenuous, but worked out over time. Water, being most precious of all, has been closely regulated with a system of water rights and acequias (ditches). Again the balance is in danger since the wealthy anglos have started arriving from California and Texas, with their desires to flaunt their money with super large houses and LAWNS and unlimited water expectations, disregarding the balance.

How much of the common resource pool is fair for each person? How much water? How much beef? How much oil? How many plastic bags?

It is time to change the paradigm. How about if we start to value how much we can give away, how little we can personally use, instead of how much we own, how big, how expensive?

It is so easy to say and so easy to point the finger. John and I are in a magnificent house, surrounded by exquisite views and land, plenty of heat when it is cold, plenty of privacy, food in the freezer, and two more houses in Tennessee which we own, one of which is enormous.

Not intentionally, really. Just rolling along in a country with a booming real estate market, making plans to change from one house to another Life happens while you are making other plans, is the old saying. So as we rethink our priorities and want to lighten up our footprint, we actually are committed to a very large one.

This is another blank page we have been filling for our entire lives. What we do, how we grow, where we live, what we buy, who we love. John and I started a new book about five years ago and we have filled it with love of one another, love of our children and grandchildren, the houses we have lived in and the cars we own. The new friends we have made and the old ones we have kept. But in the process we added a lot of baggage which we now wish we could unload. Keep the people, dump the stuff. We would like to dramatically change our footprint.

We don't use plastic bags (much) anymore. Does that count?

Waiting for the Pinon Jays

Just about this time of the day, there should be a clacking, squaking raucous crowd of about 50 large birds who come crashing in, and clean up all of the birdseed. A month ago, they were hard to recognize because they were solid gray. Yesterday they were a beautiful color of periwinkle blue. They stay blue all summer and then darken up for winter again.

The finches, bluebirds and juncos are there with dependability each day as long as I put out the seeds. The mountain is a purple shadow today. The snow is nearly melted on the north side of the ridge bewteen the junipers. The sun is shining. We are listening to Bruce Cockburn on the ipod. And there are very small occasional bits of cloud fluff floating by.

Why worry about whether Citibank just bought a 50 million dollar luxury jet with our bailout money? Why care whether Vilsack is now the Secretary of Agriculture? (He from Montsanto, heavy into genetically engineered seeds and mis-labeled roundup which is, in fact, not biodegradable.) Why care whether the Republicans are going to make a stand against the stimulus package because the 300 billion dollars of tax cuts is not enough?

After JFK, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy were murdered, after the Viet Nam War, after Nixon, I was among the many of my generation who backed out of involvement. I grew an organic garden, got my consciousness raised, became a psychotherapist, created music and focused on family and friends. I started reading fiction rather than non.

But with this new guy, this Obama, I somehow got charged up again. There is a glimmer of hope which opens a little window of invitation to come and get going again. John and I canvassed for him in Indiana and worked in the polls there. Now we are determining which service area we want to be involved with.

I'm working on my novel here in the mountains. It needs a second draft. And watching the birds. And wondering if this will be another false start or whether our new President will match his actions to his words.

P.S. Here they are! It's 2:24 pm and blammo! incoming jays!