Shrinking/Expanding World

(Reprinted from my Mystic Angel Healing blog found at http://www.mysticangelhealing.com)

There is a universal principle that states that whatever you focus on expands. It's also been framed as the statement "Energy flows where attention goes." A great illustration of this principle is found in the experience of health challenges. Few things in life stop us in our tracks as quickly as a health challenge. When we suddenly have to focus on our bodies, or even a body part, our worldview will rapidly shrink to fit this redirection of our attention. Let's say for instance that you step funny and slip and fall, breaking your ankle or your foot. Suddenly your entire world telescopes to the region of your injured body part. Not just in the next few hours while you get to the doctor and get it set and casted, but your whole world will shrink down to figuring on out how to deal with the world with a broken foot or ankle in the process. Most of your attention in the days to come will focus on crutches and casts and keeping your foot elevated. While times in our lives such as these can provide needed down time, we must be aware of their potential to cause a permanent shift in our lives to the four walls around us. In this case, a shrinking of our world manifests in a smaller part of our world capturing our attention. The larger world shrinks while the smaller world grows in our awareness. In order to pull ourselves back from this shrinking perspective, we have to focus on it only as long as necessary to move beyond that stage in our lives. We can't afford to get mired there. If we do, we risk spending more time there than necessary. 

In recent years, I've had to focus on navigating different health challenges. Because of this needed change in the moment, I found that it began to impact me on a larger scale. A larger scale that kept reinforcing my need to shrink my focus. The more I focused on the smaller picture, the more life supported this refocusing and created more reasons to shrink my worldview. I suspect that if left unchecked, this shrinking focus could continue indefinitely until all I was left with was the existence of health challenges. In the beginning, the change in focus was caused by an extreme attack of vertigo that had been brought on by sinusitis. During this event, my worldview got very small and continued to be small as my needs in the moment changed. While living in a place of great and expansive beauty, I had to narrow my vision to what was directly in front of me in order to maintain my equilibrium. Eventually I was able to expand this view to cover more space. As that expanding view was reinforced by the world around me, I was able to cover more ground, eventually shifting my focus to driving across the United States in a pickup truck with my four feline children. Because of other mitigating circumstances, I shifted my focus inward and had to reverse my path and after a trip back across the USA, I reshifted my focus to recovering from that trip, which was accompanied by other health challenges that required me to continue narrowing my focus. Eventually my life became all about my physical challenges. That's pretty much where I am today. 

Only today my mind is opening up to the fact that this is something I can choose or not choose. I may not currently have my expansive view of Puget Sound right outside my living room window, but I do have windows to look out of that incorporate nature. There are trees and a peekaboo backdrop of skies out the main window that is my view. I can also open some windows onto other views and now is the time of year in Florida that it is good to open up the blinds and see what all is waiting out there. I suspect that looking will lead me to go explore what is out there, which will lead my feet to get on that path again. As soon as I put my feet on that path, there's no telling where it will lead me. Right now, my looking needs to lead me to get up out of the wheelchair I'm using right now for mobility and get my feet moving towards a future where dancing and walking and biking and standing strong while I do my yoga and tai chi routines is part of my daily experience again. Part of my daily expanding worldview. I hereby declare that my world has gotten as small as it is going to get. From this day forward, my worldview and accompanying life experience will be expanding again. Who knows? Maybe you'll be reading about my travels with my kitties again before you know it. 

Better Than Therapy

(Reprinted from my blog Mystic Angel Healing)

Combine Pharrell Williams' "Happy" video and Masaru Emoto's teaching about The Hidden Messages in Water and you get a recipe for changing your life by shifting your mood that's better than hours of therapy and a lot less expensive. I have actually played some of the videos that repeat the song for a full hour while a series of different people dance to the song. It illustrates that moods are contagious. It is definitely an argument for hanging out with happy, well-adjusted people and for listening to upbeat music. I could tell the difference not only in my emotional state but also in my physical state. After listening to the video even a couple of times activated a mood shift. After an hour of it, I was downright high from it. Plus, I felt better physically. 

So next time you're not feeling well or happy or strong, try listening to that song a few times. After a while, you'll have it hard wired into your brain and find yourself playing it in your head even when you're not actually playing it. You'll be amazed at how much it affects your outlook and even your physical state of being. You are exposing all the cells in your body to the words happy and happiness dozens of times. It definitely has an amazing effect. I suspect that we have Pharrell to thank for changing the mood of millions of people around the world. Stand back, anti-depression drugs, the "Happy" song is the ultimate mood elevator and there are no known side effects. Pretty soon all we'll need to do is take two views and call a friend in the morning to pass on the happiness.

Giving Thanks for Burnt Toast

Most of the time my life is really good and fairly peaceful. During the years I spent living on the Kitsap Peninsula in Western Washington, I'd described it as "idyllic" for at least three quarters of the time. I lived for about five years either on the banks of Hood Canal or Puget Sound. The cabin where I lived overlooking Hood Canal accorded me jaw-dropping sunsets, while the house on Puget Sound yielded stunning sunrises, both of which I spent countless hours admiring, photographing, and capturing in prose and poetic writings. While I haven't been living at that level of serenity a lot of the time since I relocated to Florida, I still have a fairly peaceful and pleasant life, that is, until recently. Some time in the fall, the wheel of fortune began slowly turning me upside down. It finally ended in a dramatic turn that landed me suspended in air hanging from my toes. I'm glad to say that is starting to change. Things have shifted enough that I know that the wheel of fortune is moving up and about to smile on me again.

Since this blog is called, Slices of My Life, I'm entitling this entry, "Giving Thanks for Burnt Toast," because it is about finding the silver lining in one of the worst slices of this life oft examined. Seldom is my life aptly described such, but recent days and weeks it has made me wish I could chuck it in the trash, since no amount of scraping with a butter knife seemed to do anything towards making this slice any more palatable. While it hasn't been terrifying it has been, in so many ways, quite odious. I'm way past ready to cut my losses and move on now. While nothing that has occurred has been horrific by itself, it has been the combination of so many little things, with a few big things added to the mix, that has made life barely tolerable.

I'm disinclined to list all the things that have gone wrong in the past few months, because I prefer to focus on the positive aspects of my life. Bearing in mind the adage: "What you focus on expands," I am finished dwelling on all the stuff that went awry and looking instead at those things that remained steadfast. First of all, while I have been working to help all of my cats and my housemate's cats recover from a recent fungal infection that impacted each of them to a varying degree, I am grateful that they are all young enough to weather this and arrive on the other side in tact. I wondered for a while about one of them in particular, but he is now doing so much better that I know that he is very close to being back to his perky and lovable self. Despite it all, I am happy that they are alive and that our love for one another remains. They'll forget (eventually) all the times I had to capture and corner them for the application of medicine. They'll remember the love that drove me to do it (hopefully). Even though they have eluded me dozens of times during these medicinal moments, I will remember the times they allowed me to catch them so they could be treated. I know they allowed me because I know firsthand what Houdini cats they can be.  Bear in mind that these four cats and I drove from Orlando to Seattle, from Seattle to Minneapolis and back, and finally from Seattle to Cape Cod, and then back down to Orlando again. We have been through a lot together and know each other well. There is a lot of love and trust amongst us. For that I am very grateful. I am also grateful for the help my sister and her nephew gave me in getting the house sanitized to help with the recovery process. Sanitizing our living space was important to keep them well once we got them there.

Another thing I'm thankful for is having a roof over my head and a place to live where I can stay mostly warm and dry. One room in the house has sprung a leak recently, and getting someone out here to fix it has been not only a challenge but an act of futility. Technically we started calling roofers to repair it back in the summer, but no one ever came out. During the rainy season, this is not too surprising, but in the fall and winter, there's no reason not to be able to find someone to do the job. This should be their slow season. However instead of dwelling on the one room in the house that needs repair, I celebrate the other 90% of the house that is dry and cozy. Someone will show up eventually, and in the meantime, I'm grateful that this is the dry season. I also feel that we are fortunate for discovering the leak during the dry season so we could have it repaired. We had been warned that it was likely to leak, given the way the original job had been botched, but we didn't actually spring a leak until a couple weeks ago. So I'm thankful for the timing of the discovery of the leak so we can get it taken care of long before the next rainy season returns again.

I'm also grateful for the progress I have been making towards better health and mobility. I have made great strides towards reclaiming my strength and health. While I've had to start using a walker to get around, I've graduated to one with four wheels and a seat, so I can do more. Not only can I stack things I need to move from one part of the house to the other on that seat, but I can also start a task and know that if I get tired, I can always sit and rest before finishing it. That empowers me to attempt to do more, which keeps me active. That is really good for keeping up my strength and muscle tone, but it also encourages me by making me feel that I can still contribute to the upkeep of the household. The kitten and kitty rides have been worth the price of the chariot alone. Six of the nine cats in this combined household have allowed me to give them a ride at one time or another. So I'm thankful that I'm getting stronger and that I'm able to use this helpful aid to get things done and entertain kitties all at once.

While there have been lots and lots of small and large annoyances of late, I know that "this too shall pass." I have finally been able to stop struggling against the current and instead go with the flow, knowing that there may be moments when I need to be mindful of the rapids and hold my breath when I feel myself going under. During less stressful moments, I've been able to lift my head and look around, momentarily enjoying the scenery as it passes by rapidly. There have been a few moments of grace and laughter, as well as an awareness that this kind of testing is rare and that some good will come from the difficulties themselves. Even in the case of burnt toast, the charcoal from the burnt bits is purifying to the system. Why do you think they use charcoal in water filtration systems? It captures and draws out the impurities, so even the trials themselves work towards our growth and benefit. I may not be able to discern those benefits right now, but in time I will. I usually do, although sometimes it requires a lot of time. While I'm waiting for those revelations, I will give thanks in faith that somewhere some time, I'll understand the whys for the circumstances. I'm already figuring some of them out now. While I'm not likely to say, "Pass me some more burnt toast," I have at least swallowed the serving I already had and lived to talk and even smile about it.

Driving Miss Pixie to the Gecko Cafe

This morning I had a cute moment with Pixie, my youngest cat. While recovering from a back injury, I have graduated from a regular two-wheeled walker to one of those four-wheeled walkers that has a seat and saddle bags. I can definitely do more with it since it enables me to carry stuff around the house more efficiently while I regain my strength and balance. One of the "things" I had to carry around the house the very first day was Pixie. Pixie is the traveling cat in this household. When I drove my katz 14,000 miles around the country last year, Pixie was thrilled. She took to traveling in the front of the pickup like she was born to be the companion of a long-haul trucker. It was amazing really. Anjolie and Bootsy? Not so much. They rode under the seats the whole way. The thought bubble over their heads read, "If I can't see where we're going, then I can pretend it isn't happening." Not so easy to do when it goes on for days and days, but they persisted in this practice. Pixie, on the other hand, loved every minute of it. From the very first day, she climbed into the litter box for pit stops while we were in motion. Li'l Grey was almost as comfortable with driving. He just wasn't thrilled with transitioning from truck to hotel to truck to hotel, etc. He wanted to do one or the other. Pixie was game for anything, including hopping out of the pickup at our Phoenix hotel and taking off across the parking lot towards the gas station. I don't know what she thought she'd find there since she doesn't go for kitty treats unless they are organically grown and very green. Perhaps she thought they sold cat mint, catnip, and/or wheat grass at the convenient store. My dear friend, author Lynn Ames, who was helping me to get the katz upstairs to the room despite a cat allergy, sprinted off after her and reunited the runaway with the rest of the katz. Pixie was just as happy to be captured, snuggled, and carried back to her family.

Back home to a more stationary life, Pixie has had to stick to her four legs to move about the house. Enter 4-wheeled walker with a seat. Recalling her penchant for travel, I invited her up onto the seat and took her for a ride around the house. The house is fairly large so I was able to give her a pretty good ride while getting more exercise for me. She seemed to think it was fun, although probably not nearly long enough. Then this morning at 5 am when my housemate didn't get up at her regularly scheduled time, the cat alarm committee sprang into action. When Jan doesn't get up at her regular time, they don't go to her and wake her up. Oh no, they seek me out. Me, who doesn't ever have to get up with the chickens, but who is sometimes seen clucking around at that time in the morning.  Today was one of those mornings when I was already awake and lying in bed wishing I were still asleep. I looked up and noticed that Pixie had jumped onto the seat of the walker. Ahem. I took that as a hint that not only did I need to check on Mommy Jan to make sure she was going to get up for their feeding time before she went to work, but I also needed to drive Pixie to our destination via the purple walker kitty cab. I got up and started pushing her out to the kitchen but stopped along the way at the bathroom. I invited her to join me in the Gecko Cafe, our new name for the bathroom, since tiny geckos have taken to hanging around on the outside of the window in there. After studying them for a few days, Jan noticed that when the light was on, little moths fly up to the window, trying to reach the light inside. The geckos have decided that this is a lovely opportunity to dine on moth meals in a relatively safe environment. I say "relatively safe" because the katz who can fit on the window sill have started sitting there in order to have a front-row seat for watching the geckos munch moths. They can't reach the geckos, but the geckos were not certain of this at first. Now they're more comfortable with the fact that they are merely being observed while dining at the Gecko Cafe rather than being mentally stuffed and dressed to wind up as a kitty snack.

Pixie declined to engage in her regular habit of gecko gazing and chose instead to wait in the "car" for me. Only I wasn't fast enough because Mommy Jan's kitty breakfast noises were getting too much to resist. By the time I came back out, she had abandoned her roost and gone to the kitchen to await breakfast. However she did come back for a ride after she ate, so I drove her up and down the hall and around on our usual route so she could get her promised ride. Hopefully I'll be able to build up to more and more laps around the house as my balance improves and my endurance increases. I'm looking forward to being completely ambulatory on my own, but in the meantime, I can be found most days, driving Miss Pixie to the Gecko Cafe.

Winking Angels Signal Me from On High

I got the signal yesterday to start pulling the next installment of my memoirs together. I've got most of the contents already, but I knew I couldn't finish it until it became more true than it is now. I know, that made you scratch your head, but you see, I've known what the title would be for years now. How little did I know just how true it would be. I thought it was more metaphorical than literal, but it turns out that it is both. My first book in the autobiographical genre is Slices of My Life: So Far, a gathering of stories from my blog, Slices of My Life. Volume 2 is entitled, Slices of My Life: Still Standing. I knew that was connected to the physical challenges I was battling, but when I named it that, I didn't yet realize how much of a challenge it was going to get just to stand up physically. I have a lot of it written already and more that can be added to the mix. Only I knew that I wasn't yet ready to write the final entry. The book is subtitled after the Elton John song, "Still Standing," and is intended to be a victory song before I start the next phase of my journey.

So what was the signal I got? Elton John appeared on Ellen yesterday afternoon, and of ALL the hundreds of hits he could have sung, he sung "Still Standing." Later he sang a song from his new album. That song was "Home Again," which was also telling but not the signal. I am indeed home again in Central Florida after having spent 25 years very much away from my childhood home. On top of that, when my housemate came home from work yesterday, I pointed out to her that I was in pretty good shape still by the time she got home. Many days, by the time she has gotten home from work, I've been pretty well spent. I've been able to get up and around the house, cleaning or doing little things, but by the time she's gotten home, I'm pretty exhausted from the day's battle to stay vertical and ambulatory. More on why this has been so in the book. Anyway, I even started singing that song while I was standing in front of the walker she's been letting me use for many months now. Sort of like, "look, ma, no hands!" from the commercial decades ago. Does anyone even remember what that was about? I don't.

But I digress. If I were to have a tombstone, which I won't since I plan to be cremated, my epitaph would read, "But I digress..." because that's what I do--in my writing, in my speaking, and in my everyday life. I think it's good if you simply embrace that kind of stuff. It's how my brain works, so why fight it? Eventually I do get back on topic, and since I've been doing this my whole life, no one can blame it on the aging process as I get older. Nope. It's just how I think, but I digress...

So having sung that song, which I hadn't heard in weeks, if not months, it was rather humorous that while watching Elton on Ellen, that he should sing that song. My song. Not "Your Song" or any of hundreds of his other hits, but my song, "Still Standing," after I had just been singing it by way of victory for having a really good day physically and having been standing pretty darn strong all day. Yay! While I'm not quite back yet to doing the Snoopy yippee skippee dance, I'm standing more on my own again and toddling around more sans walker. That song was the signal that I am coming back, and just in case I hadn't twigged on yet, and I hadn't, my housemate pointed out the fact, "Hey, Elton is singing your song!"

Now I plan to sing that as my song of triumph every day and claim the victory of being able to stand and walk and dance again. It helps that I already could dance. I just haven't danced very strong since before the vertigo attack, and everything else ensued since my fiftieth birthday, that I've been really strong in the dance department. I'm polishing those dancing shoes now and breaking in some new walking shoes so I can get stronger and stronger from now here on out. Perhaps if I lose this weight that I gained while being so sedentary, I might even earn the title "Tiny Dancer" but enough Elton John puns and digressing. Time to get back to dancing and singing and walking about the house, building up my strength again. I got the signal from those winking angels on high. That's my cue.

Life at Ground Zero

I came across an old journal that had some entries in it from when I first moved into the cabin on Hood Canal, about which I have written blogs in the past at this site. I thought this entry was interesting enough to share with my readers. It is dated February 11, 2005, two days after I first moved into the cabin.

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It's strange to think that in the midst of all this natural beauty and wonder, there sits a nuclear submarine base. The same view that grants me free and easy access to a breath-taking panoramic view of snow-capped mountains and an enticingly meandering canal also reveals the docking place for the nuclear submarines that call this place home. It is a truth that feels neither menacing nor comforting. It is a given in these parts. People grow up here, knowing and accepting that we live at Ground Zero. Never has that felt so real to me as it does now that I live in sight of one of the reasons why this place in the world as Ground Zero.

Ultimately, that concept feels less threatening to me than the thought of surviving a nuclear holocaust. Much better to be obliterated instantly than to survive to face the nuclear winter of human history. To be in heaven or try to make a life in hell? Ground Zero is probably the best place to be. Let the subase be. I'll take the mountains and water today and heaven for the "day after tomorrow."

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Sunset at the Cabin on Hood Canal


Nuclear Submarine Passing the Cabin on Hood Canal

It was nearly a daily thing to have submarines going in and out. It wasn't as frequent when I first moved in, but as more subs relocated to this subase, the activity increased greatly. I knew some of the people who worked on those subs because they came to the book store I managed in Silverdale to buy lots of books for the long hours underwater when they went out on extended tours of duty. They were my customers and my friends. This is a way of life here. I sometimes wondered, when a sub went by, if I knew any of the submariners on board. Below is a shot of the canal with Bangor subase in the shot. It was taken from my yard too looking in a northerly direction. The photos above were shot in a southerly direction. In the photo below, the brown dock sticking out into the water is actually a submarine dock. I'm guessing that they used that for repairs because in two years of living, I saw them dock a sub there only one time.



Bangor Nuclear Submarine Base on Hood Canal

Beth Mitchum is the author of five novels, one collection of poetry, and one music CD. Her works are available at Amazon.com through the following link:

http://tinyurl.com/bethmitchumbooks

Update: My New MyFaceInSpaceTwit+ Account Address in Case You're Interested

In a lame attempt at keeping up with the times, I have updated my profile photo at LinkedIn so it matches the one at Facebook and Google+ finally. I've been trying for years to get them all in sync, but some of these networks were rather limited when I first started dabbling in them. I tried within the past year or two to update that profile pic at LinkedIn, but the photo was still deemed too big. Really? It was taken with a 2.1 megapixel camera about ten years ago. I'd think we'd be way past that by now. Okay, so I could have fixed that by saving it at a smaller dpi, but most of the time I'm doing stuff on the fly and don't have time to go back and doctor photos. Eventually I'll have to update this one, but I'm waiting until most of the world is caught up so I don't have to make a whole lot of effort to sync them again.

I have also synced several (although not all) of my past email addresses. I've been online for nearly twenty-five years now, so I have more email addresses than pairs of underwear, and I've got a lot of those too. I know, TMI, but whatever. I no longer use a couple dozen of those emails, but I've been online for so long that every now and then I run across one of them still listed in some obscure MS-DOS database somewhere. The point of this blog being: if you're on LinkedIn, then I have now closed out an old duplicate account and added that email address to the current account, which is, oddly enough, the more up-to-date address. In the closing and merging of accounts, I may have fallen off a few of your LinkedIn rosters. If you're still on LinkedIn, and you'd like to reconnect, by all means, let's do this thing. If not, then chances are you aren't reading this because you have gone into information retirement and no longer give a flying freak-out who is on your LinkedIn account. Either way we should be good, yes?

Now my old email address is my born-again address, since my current address is now what I consider to be all junk mail. I have dropped Gmail for the most part because Google has taken to reading all our email. Double really? *shakes head* I'm okay with leaving those accounts associated with junk only. It's pretty much all ads these days anyway. Does anyone ever email any more anyway? Argh! That is far too many words that begin in vowels! I think I might have sprained my vowel muscles just typing that. Anyway, emailing is so 2012, don't ya think? Not only is it not as private as talking loudly in public places over a cell phone, but it is just so slow compared to pushing a button on my ear and simply talking. Texting is more private, but you have to type a lot of keys to do that. I have yet to figure out how this is an improvement over anything other than the courier pigeon. Alas, this is much ado about nothing since, eventually all of these accounts will feed into a single Terra-Giggle account called MyFaceInSpaceTwit+ account. Oh my gawd, I am so ready for that. Where do I sign up? Oh, wait a minute. I bet that's when we have to get a barcode tattooed on our right hand or our forehead, right? Never mind. I'm not ready for that yet. Surely we have another week or so before Apple rolls out the new iPhone 666.