Sleepless night

It is 4:26 am and my brain is jumping with information about the muscles and connective tissues of the knee and thigh.  I've been up since 2:00 am.  Pain in my back and legs refused me sleep.  It's still taunting me.  The pain meds I have are too strong.  I would go through the day in a fog, and probably shouldn't even drive if I took them.  Tylenol doesn't help.  So I guess I will practice some meditation and breathe through it.  That usually eases it to some degree.

The biceps femoris' proximal attachment is to the ischial tuberosity.  (The spell check doesn't approve of these Latin terms.)  But where is the distal attachment?  I know you probably don't care, unless you're another kinesiology student, or you have injured your biceps femoris.  I think it attaches to the head of the fibula.  And it is the muscle that helps you rotate your hip laterally.  It also flexes the knee and tilts the pelvis posteriorly.  Isn't ischial tuberosity a great name?  The three hamstring muscles attach there. 

If one listens, there is a peeper who has been singing most of the night.  It's on and off, and not a strong sound.  But then it is early spring yet.  Just now the haunting sound of coyotes howling nearby pierce the night and send a shiver up my spine.  I go out to the deck to listen for more, but the deep darkness of this time, just before dawn, is now silent. 

Guess I'll go check out the poetry site.  Have you ever been there?  It's called AllPoetry.com.  I recently discovered it, and have been enjoying myself immensely.  Other poets!!!  Some are seasoned, their words rich and expansive, filling me up to saturation.  Others are learning, and I enjoy offering feedback here and there, which encourages but deepens.  Anyway, my handle is cturtle there. 

Hope your day has a more reasonable start to it than mine has had!  Peace.

Chaos and Order

About a year ago a friendship which had existed for many years came to an end.  It was a rather emotionally violent tearing away, and though necessary, this has been a time of grieving.  I just realized that the anniversary of that ending recently passed.  And I think that it must be true that it takes about a year to come back from such a major loss.  I missed him in the beginning, but the healing has been clean.  I don't look back with regrets any longer.  And the thing that is most apparent about the healing is the bits of chaos that are creeping back into my life.

Does this cause a bit of puzzlement?  Well, my creativity has been put largely on hold this past year.  Oh there have been little pockets of it, but not the large amounts that are usually around.  Chaos means that I'm working at the things I love once again.  When I am managing grief, the thing that I do is to try and keep order in my environment.  It's interesting stuff.  I'm not obsessive about it, but cleaning out drawers and closets and keeping things manageable feels good when grief has come along and thrown such unutterable chaos into my emotional life.  I think the fact that things feel a little out of control again is a sign that I'm coming back to myself.  Because this is the way I usually exist, in a constant tension between chaos and order.

This spring certainly feels like spring.  But this very large loss has moved deeply into my bones I think.  The pain from the connective tissue disease has deepened of late.  I force myself to move, but there are times that the pain takes my breath away and leaves me feeling scared.  It's really scary some days.  So I try to set it aside and simply focus on what feels good.  I stretch, I walk...those things don't necessarily feel good at the time, but it helps me feel better in the long run.  Gingeroot has been a great friend in keeping the inflammation from the disease at a manageable level.  And then of course there is massage school!  The last weekend I was there, I was given a massage by another student, and slept like a baby that night.  Something that doesn't always happen because of the pain.  Gratitude!  The health benefits of massage are many!!!

Chaos Theory has always been fascinating to me because I see it played out so clearly in my own personal life and the lives of people around me.  It isn't just an idea that sits out in the universe someplace where stuff is thrown and tossed around and then patterns form out of the chaos.  It is lived out every single day in our lives.  We experience chaos at different levels, it comes to us in the form of loss and changes of every kind.  Sometimes it feels as though it will just keep spinning us and tossing us like so much sand on the ocean's shore.  But patterns emerge.  Again and again.  So, this year of grieving comes to an end, and my creativity is returning.  At the same time, the chaos of pain enters more deeply in my life, and the ways I will learn to cope with that will emerge in time. Chaos and Order.  One of the laws of the universe.

Go visit this beautiful site, full of fractals...the patterns that emerge from the chaos!  http://www.abstractdigitalartgallery.com/index.htm
 Also, thank you to Jozef Kosoru whose images are displayed above.  They are given to the public domain.