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There is no question about it. I actually am an idiot, and it's gonna cost me big time. I have wondered whether or not cinnamon acts as a food allergy for me, and is responsible for my sore tongue and swollen lips. I stopped using cinnamon and took some prednisone to hurry it out of my system in order to find out if cinnamon is the culprit or not. That was probably a big mistake.
The problems with my mouth did not go away with the cessation of using cinnamon. After I eased off the prednisone, and my tongue got even sorer, I decided to look up the side effects of prednisone, and I'm pretty sure this drug is behind my problems. It may have caused me permanent health problems. It kills gut bacteria both friendly and unfriendly, and completely undoes my probiotics regimen. That won't never do.
I started taking the methotrexate again. At least I know it's not the problem with my mouth. My bones and joints started aching in a serious way. I got enough problems as it is. I'm gonna take the prescribed medicine and hopefully wait it out.
I'm writing while listening to the meditation software and binary beat videos again. I need to do something positive. Realizing that I might have actually hurt myself by my cavalier attitude is a little depressing. I gotta get a local doctor I can turn to.
The VA Hospital helps a lot with medical expenses, but it's difficult to get good advice there. Their cavalier attitude is more decadent than even my own. At least it's a go to, and many people don't appear to have even that. They might be better off without knowing it.
I stopped writing and went for a walk. Movement seems to change my mood. Usually for the better. I walked out to the paved road to check to see if I'd received any mail in my Rural Free Delivery box. Nada. Empty. Nobody loves me. I strolled on down to the private drive named Copperhead Lane. Copperhead snake says "Don't tread on me."
My youngest brother, who lives further back in the woods than me, installed a steel gate with a lock on the entrance to Copperhead Lane to keep strays out and to indicate they got no business trespassing without his say so. A body can't be too careful when you live out in the wasteland.
I wrote "wasteland" intentionally. What I'm calling a wasteland is a portal to the wilder side of nature. Our family property literally has 'a river that runs through it". The local people call it a river, but the state maps call it a stream. It's more than a stream. It might be more descriptive to state that there is more than one stream.
This "stream" changes from one description to another depending on how much rainfall feeds it from it's hinterland. It's located within the Cape Fear River basin. It drains a bunch of swamp land into a real river that eventually joins the two Cape Fear rivers where they conjoin together at downtown Wilmington.
I call it a "wasteland" in a more rustic sense than I think TSE used the term. Where I live is a perfect description of what a mountaineer might call a flatlander. There are no hills around here. Only inverted hills called pocosins. That's where the water collects at the small end. We get a lotta rainfall some years. It's in the right place geologically for dragons to fly over.
It's the Oriental version of dragon I am is indicating. Not the Saint George kind of dragon. Oddly enow, the effects of a dragon passing is pretty much identical by description. The Asians in general seem to label electrical storms dragons. They spit fire as lightning, and huff and puff and blow everything bye bye.
Both the Western culture's idea of a dragon, and the Oriental culture's version of what a dragon is resolves to the adage "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." This place where I live gets a lot of the rainfall it needs to not be a desert comes form tropical storms and hurricanes. Thunder storms.
Thor's bolts of lightning that are really a magical hammer is neat for exciting mythical eddas and comic books and cartoon careactors, but for everyday life on the coastal plains of the southeastern corner of the continental United States, electrical storms and tropical storms and hurricanes galore; act just like the dragons of Asia for me.
My outlook probably has a lot to do with my thirty year study of the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching. I used it almost daily as a book of wisdom and as an oracle until in an early morning dream one day an authoritative voice spoke to me and told me enough was enow. "Stop using the I Ching!"
It wasn't a bully's voice. There weren't any scary tone reminiscent of a threat of hell and damnation. No punishment was indicated. I knew when I heard it that I would stop. I didn't know how. Worse, I didn't actually believe I could keep my stopping still. It was easier to quit smoking tobacco, and that's a hard row to hoe.
Part of my attraction to studying and using this book is that a huge group of people on the other side of the Earth considered the I Ching, and four other Chinese classical books, holy. I'd had it up to here with the mideastern tribal Gods. I needed to know the same secrets the Aramaic world (including Jews) taught, but in other words. I'm a cross-referencing fool.
I've known less than five people who actually took up the I Ching cross and bore it as just another something to do. I met one person in passing in a busy airport, and another person on a movie set who claimed to have this obsession. It's gotta be an obsession or that path would have had no heart for me. Life ain't worth living if I am is has no thing to obsess about.
That's the God's own truth for me. Sometime I have conversations with myself about needing some/any obsession to make my life interesting to me. I used to think my true purpose for using some classical system to contemplate my own life was a behavior I should be ashamed of.
I gave it a shot. I tried my dead-level best to feel the burn. To feel the pain. To be-co-me the epitome or essence of shame. That's what shamed men do. Shamed men become shamans. I talked myself right out of feeling bad about being a shaman. Why would I not? It only takes two bowls.
Some cockamamy, idealistic urge to being is all it takes to give it a try. Being is the opposite of nothingness. To have being one must have a leg to stand on. To stand up, you gotta have a ground for being. The KJV has Jesus stating that to have a ground for being it should have a firm foundation. Stone on stone is the best of all.
Well, according to some Mediterranean basin tribal characters as described in their holy books. I don't live in no place like that. The metaphors designed for nomadic tribes wandering around looking for a permanent home don't take root here in the coastal plain where there is fresh standing water enough to be a real problem at times.
For some reason I'm not too willing to explore I like the Moses story of the Exodus and the Ten Commandments above the other nomadic tall tales. In my way of interpreting the me-and-thee-ing of the story is to view it as a Grail tale and an excuse to ramble around the various cultures to see the world in other words.
The Ten Commandments are Moses' theory of how to be-co-me in the same manner of Gautama Buddha's Eight Noble Truths. Both are systems for thinking about things in order to live a life of no blame. Neither are exclusively vegetation oracles, yet they both contain several each.
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