Tying Up Loose Ends

I’ve been away from here for awhile with my regular posts, and I am coming back now for the final time – indefinitely.  It is time for me to destress and focus on the things in life that make me feel peaceful and truly happy.  For the most part, being on the computer isn’t one of them.  I’m prioritizing and right now, I’ve idenitified some ways to cut back without cutting anything I enjoy out.  It’s really important that I take it seriously.  My computer time is limited to 1 1/2 hours a day, which is more than enough to keep up with online advertising for my birth work, researching homeschooling for the girls, and typing the stories and articles that will be the focus of my writing for awhile.  I’ve come to a point where I feel better expressing myself through my more formal writing – my short stories, my novels, and I’m branching out into essay and articles, but all for publications.  I don’t know how successful I will be at it, but I have hope.  I love doing it.  I’m feeling good about being less personally an open book, and more creatively one.

I may come back to blogging one day about our lives, but I think it will be in a more professional way.  Maybe a more journalistic way.  Doing the radio piece made me realize I really enjoy documentary storytelling.  I’m going to be working on some more stories for the Community Correspondence Core, hopefully.  I will continue blogging on my birth blog.

For those of you whom I call friends, we will not be out of touch I know.  And I hope we will continue to meet on the haunts where we first discovered one another. 🙂  Email is something I will always check, and I will be around.  It’s really a bittersweet time for me.  I’m excited about changes I’m making to my life, but there was a huge part of me that enjoyed sharing it here.  However, I think it’s time for me to bow out.  I think it the best choice. 🙂

We will still be homeschooling, homesteading, living and being in our east Kentucky mountains.  I will be playing with my girls, baking bread, enjoying the fall breeze, and spending time with God in yoga and my day to day.  I will keep this site online as well for awhile, until I find a way to do something with the posts I feel have been important in the broader scope.  The rest I will print off for us.

Please enjoy these Appalachian blogs and stories:

There and Back 

Blind Pig and the Acorn

Kentucky Hollers

I will post here if I get  a new more permanent website for my writing promotion as well.  I may blog on such a site from time to time.

Thank you for reading my work, and supporting my life.  I’ve appreciated your words this year and a half.

Be blessed and adieu…

More Time

“With the explosive growth of smart phones and social networks in the past few years, people’s lives are more saturated with technology than ever, which is a challenge if you want to stay connected with your peaceful nature as well as your text messages. Constantly checking your computer and phone for updates isn’t just distracting – it also induces anxiety, according to Linda Stone, a former technology executive at Apple and Microsoft, who has researched the effects of computing on human health. “The desire not to miss anything, along with our poor posture and compromised breathing, can evoke a fight-or-flight state,” she says.

– You’ve Got Connections by Jenn Shreve, Septemeber 2010 issue of Yoga Journal, http://www.yogajournal.com

Be Back Soon

“Quietness is indeed a sign of strength. But quietness may also help one to achieve strength.”

-Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

I Will Lift Up My Eyes to the Mountains

I will lift up my eyes to the mountains; from whence shall my help come?  My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.  He will not allow your foot to slip; He who keeps you will not slumber.  Behold, He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.  The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand.  The sun will not smite you by day, nor the moon by night.  The Lord will protect you from all evil; He will keep your soul.  The Lord will guard your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forever.

-Psalm 121

This week has been a rough one, but also one of joy.  I was witness to another birth of a baby boy. 🙂  We celebrated Deladis’s fifth birthday (pictures to come), and I received my test results for my bloodwork.  I haven’t had a lot of time, and this next week will be busy as well.  I’m just trying my best to keep up.

The bloodwork says I have low blood sugar, my adrenals are shot, of course there’s my thyroid, and a few other minor things.  The low blood sugar is a shocker.  From what I understand it is connected to the function of the adrenals as well.  So, one is causing the other, or one is the symptom of the other.  I think the adrenals came first.  Anyway, I have to see another doctor Wednesday that is about an hour away.  I’m supposed to eat every two hours, which is going to be very difficult for me to do.  I just don’t get hungry like that.  I’m one that eats breakfast at 8am and doesn’t eat again sometimes until 2 or 3pm.  I do have this shake stuff to drink in between meals to help regulate my blood sugar, so that will help.

The most depressing thing for me is that I have to be off of dairy for 3 weeks.  I didn’t show an allergy, but she expects that I might be having some sensitivity to it because I’m not digesting well.  Have I ever mentioned that I love dairy?  I truly don’t know what I’m going to eat now.  I live off of milk products.  Now, this isn’t good from a traditional foods standpoint, because pastuerized and homogenized milk is so tampered with that it is hard for any human being to digest or utilize properly.  I don’t have access to raw milk products, and that is one piece of eating traditional foods that I have never been able to adopt.  Rather than go without dairy, I just ate conventional dairy.  I have been pointed in the direction of the PETA website called Milk Sucks.  I suppose I need to check it out.  I know conventional dairies are cruel.  I know these three weeks won’t kill me, but…. Did I mention I love dairy????

I have been having these episodes of dizziness and such that is related to my blood sugar, and I’m tired.  I’m lifting my eyes to the mountains, and pushing onward.  Whatever manifests in our body has its beginnings in our inner work.  I believe that thoroughly.  Healing is a time of inner work as much as it is getting well physically.

I posted a comment on Mama-Om and she was gracious enough to share with me some of her experiences with being a parent and not feeling well.  I wanted to share them here.  Sometimes I think us mothers tend to hide our pitfalls, and things that aren’t just so.  There’s nothing to hide.  Mothers are people afterall, and we all have work to do in this life. 

Mama-Om:

Thankful Anyway and Unraveled

A Day Canning

I call it just a day.  A real day.  I spent time away from the computer.  I opened and learned the new pressure canner I bought.  We have so many tomatoes, and I know I need to learn to put things up.  It’s part of it.  Though I have heard the stories of pressure canners blowing people up, I know they must be relatively safe, and it is time I got acquainted.  Tomatoes are supposedly easy to put up.

I hate reading manuals.  I like my reading to have a narrative quality even if non-fiction.  I’d much prefer learning my being taught by a breathing being, but time has not allowed me that, and none of my family that lives closer to us cans.  I withstood the reading, working through the text step by step, trying to be hands on instead of reading and then doing.  I readied 7 quart jars.  I knew I’d fill those and have left overs.  Yet, when I smashed in the tomatoes as instructed by the manual, I found that I could only fill 4 of those.

As soon as the jars were prepared, the girls and I got the best surprise.  At my back door, stood my daddy.  He had come just in time to be present for my blowing up the house.  But, it all went off without a hitch.  The best part is my daddy was smiling and seemed at ease.  He has a job that carries with it a huge responsibility, and sometimes I wish he could leave it behind.  I always remember my happy daddy fondly.  Nobody else can be happy like him.  When he is happy he can hold the world on his back and go with simple movements, unhindered, laughing.  Oh, the laughing.

Dad helped me fix the air conditioner away from the stove.  Our little wall unit blows the flame on my gas stove, so I had turned it off.  It was like a sauna in the cabin.  He couldn’t stay long and we were alone again.  The jars finished processing.  I did my yoga practice.  Ivy napped.  When I got the jars out of the canner, I got this…

Floaters.  I should have poured off the juice I got after packing and put in more tomatoes.  The jars are sealed though, and John’s Mamaw – canner extraordinaire – says they are going to be just fine to eat.  They will be used for soups and sauces this winter.  I’m so pleased that the blight didn’t wipe them out this year like our last year’s crop.  We are making progress even if baby steps.  We’ll eventually walk with few stumbles, then glide.