River Sketches

Today was the first day that we got out to the trail. Our trail. I got to sit out at the river a bit and get a few words onto paper. It's nothing much - just the things that float through one's head while listening to the water flow:

Softly the waterfall of thoughts turns

to white noise, gurgling and flowing past me.

Slowly beneath the surface fish spot their prey

settling on the surface tension

                                    PLOP

                                    nothing left but waves

---

Leaves drop one by one into the current

drifting lazily, then picking up speed,

never knowing when the tipping edge will come

to toss them, turn them asunder.

---

From among the greens a peacock flutter,

dragonflies cloud my vision

Book Challenge Update

Yesterday saw the end of Little Women and I have now moved on to Jo's Boys. I had read Little Women before. I love, love, love it. There is always a new lesson to take in and moral to learn and a reminder that some things about people are truly timeless. I think this time I learned more from each of the sisters than I have before. Instead of focusing on the story most like my own with small additions from the others, I found different and more well-rounded traits in each story that felt applicable to my life. It is always nice to have a reminder that we are all pilgrims who bear our burdens, but that there is some hope that those burdens will be lifted and it is within us to lift them. 

I have never read Jo's Boys, but I am enjoying it thus far. It's so different to read about boys in this similar setting, but interesting nonetheless. Little Women gives you boys and men that are exemplar - they are the kind you look to have in your life as a woman. Jo's Boys seems to be giving you all types of boys to see how they turn out. They won't all be Laurie's or Mr. March's or John's or even Mr. Bhaer's. Some might turn out to be more like Ned Moffat or Fred Vaughn. 

12/30 books for 2011. 

Book Challenge Update

I did not get a chance to update my book challenge yet this week. I finished The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. 


I must say, I really love this story. It's, of course, a great growing story full of morals and directives about how to be a good person, how to help children be good people and the loveliness and lessons we can learn from gardening. LOVE IT! 


It makes me want even more to start my own greenhouse. It's a pet idea that I've had floating around the back of my mind for a few years. 


Anyways - back to the book. I finished it Tuesday and began reading Little Women for the third time. It's another book I love. Alcott has such interestingly eternal thoughts. Plus, it is hard to pull me away from the transcendentalists (but not as difficult as it is pulling them away from Unitarian thought... hahaha ha ha.... no one gets my literary joke or finds it funny.


Thus, I have completed the twelfth book on my journey to tri-deca-dom. Or something like that. 


12/30 books completed.

Pushing my limits

I just got Blogger to start working again. It's been having some loading issues that have been stopping me from posting. I don't even know what that's all about. 


The last few days have been pretty full. My husband's birthday was Monday and we decided to do a hike in Hong Kong. We underestimated the hike by quite a bit and found ourselves up a certain creek without a certain paddle to help us. It ended up being a 4 hour hike up and down set of mountain peaks. There were three main peaks, the highest of which was over 800 meters high (and we pretty much started at sea level). NUTS STUFF. I've never done anything that difficult in my life. Ever. 


We did make it to the world's largest sitting Buddha at the end of it all. It was a lovely afternoon. It's good that we could still enjoy it after four hours of hiking and what turned out to be some pretty bad sunburns. 


I did learn something about myself. There was no way of getting out of there once we'd gotten in, except to turn back or go forward. There were a few times where I felt like giving up, but since there's no other real option but moving on, there was no giving up to be had. It was a tough struggle for both of us. I can barely move today and we're both nursing the sunburn on our arms, but we did it. I wasn't sure I could do it. I really wasn't. There was a high ridge that we thought was the last, but when we arrived at the top we realized we were only just over halfway through. I had already had to stop and have two significant resting periods to deal with my breathing. I didn't think my body could handle it, but I pushed myself to a new psychological and physical limit. I was overly ambitious in picking a hike I knew my husband would enjoy and most of the planning sites did not indicate the length of this hike. Maps can be deceiving. 


Things I learned:
- Approximately 1280m of vertical climbing is A LOT.
- My husband and I make a good team. 
- I can push my body through a lot more than I realize if I can pace myself. 


That last one is huge. I've been an asthmatic since I was a child. I couldn't run the mile and I get winded climbing to the fifth floor of our building to get into the apartment. We climbed about 5km worth of distance (not including the vertical). It was a long, hard slog of a hike. But we did it. 


I gotta say - I impressed myself. 

Getting My Write On and Proud of It

This week's RemembeRED was to write about something that you're proud of.


I've got to say, the things that I've done on this blog - my little bits of writing and art - are things I am proud of. 


In college, I had an abusive boyfriend that I stuck with for way too long. I developed severe depression and went almost two years before I sought any professional help (which didn't really help, but there you are). I had always been a writer, just as I had always been a reader. I really started coming into some better poetry just as I got into college, but then the depression and the suppressing of emotions and experiences. It was all I could do to hang on for the ride.


Needless to say, my writing dried up. Even when I tried to use it as a creative and therapeutic outlet, nothing came. I used to joke with my (genius, novel-writing) roommate that I had the longest bout of writer's block in the history of man: four years. 


It hasn't been until recently that I've found my way back to writing. Two years ago, I started kicking around an idea for a novel, but nothing much has come of it - a little world building and some random notes and doodles. It wasn't until March, after reading the writing/literary blog of a friend of mine that I started really pushing myself to write and express. I may have started the ball rolling a few months earlier, but pushing myself to write everyday and post to the blog a few times a week has really gotten me expressing in a way I haven't in years. Not only that, but it's taken me back to a way of seeing the world that I haven't in a long time. It's nice to start to see things with an artist's eye again. Pushing to express and finding new creativity where I suspected that it might have dried up forever is something I am proud of. I am proud to have pushed and found myself capable of getting there again. 


Fruits of my labors:
Found in the Sea off Cape Artemision, ca. 1920
Thai Fare
Vapid Aphrodite
Heaven Bent
Orphic Mission

Book Challenge Update... Again

Another book down. Today I finished Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I had never read it. I think I've read Through the Looking Glass, but I'm not quite sure. 


I loved the sense of child-logic and frustrations of having to change one's outlook on the world as one changes. It's such a growing up story, but dressed in such fantastic nonsense that it's just as easily hidden as it is revealed to the reader. It's almost like a fast-forward dream of being a teenager. 


This is book 10/30 read this year. 

On Feeling Guilty

When we do something wrong, we often feel guilt.


From the American Heritage Dictionary:


(gĭlt)  n.

1. 1. The fact of being responsible for the commission of an offense. See synonyms at blame.
   2. Law. The fact of having been found to have violated a criminal law; legal culpability.
   3. Responsibility for a mistake or error.
2. 1. Remorseful awareness of having done something wrong.
   2. Self-reproach for supposed inadequacy or wrongdoing.

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/guilt#ixzz1KmK8WLRz


The dictionary gives us the two different meanings of guilt: 1) moral responsibility and 2) the feeling of self-reproach that we feel after a wrongdoing. The thing about these definitions is that there is a WORLD of difference between the two. Being morally responsible for something is not always a bad thing, but guilt is used to describe the specific moral responsibility for some wrongdoing. So guilty people - they are the ones that have actually committed wrongdoings. We're square there, but the psychological state of guilt is where the real problems lay:


Guilt is a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person realizes or believes—accurately or not—that he or she has violated a moral standard, and bears significant responsibility for that violation.

"Guilt." Encyclopedia of Psychology. 2nd ed. Ed. Bonnie R. Strickland. Gale Group, Inc., 2001. eNotes.com. 2006. 31 December 2007


The self-reproach version of guilt is not always felt by those who are morally responsible for the wrong. Also, self-reproach is often felt by those who have not deviated from a moral standard, but perhaps merely a particular person or group's SOCIAL standard. It is not morally wrong to wear white after labor day, but a fashionista might claim this to be a cardinal sin.The confusion of some guilt-feeling parties is that they have broken a moral code. Sometimes social matters do yield morally charged situations:  


For example, it may be in poor taste and not socially appropriate for me to tell someone that I don't like their haircut or that I am so bluntly honest with them in general, but that does not constitute me as a morally bad person. If I am saying such things with the intention to cause them mental or emotional harm, THEN I am a morally guilty person, but not for merely being honest with a person. 


Now, the party that feels wronged (and not just by their hairstylist) may view me as a guilty party - I am "to blame" for their poor attitude or sadness. It would be quite rude of me to have told them how crappy their haircut was, which might be worthy of an apology. I am assuming that I did not intend this person harm, and therefore upon realization that I did cause them harm, I might go through the appropriate guilt sequence (my action caused them harm, I am morally against the mental, emotional, and physical harming of others, therefore I am and feel guilty of causing such harm and need to make amends). That being said, harm was not intended but was caused. Consequences have actions - understand that good intentions do not absolve you from responsibility.




Real problems come in with true conflation of  expectations/social standards that do not have moral force. I think many people feel guilt over behavior that is not particularly a matter of morals, so much as social behavior and manipulation. The fashionista example was one, but a reaction of resentment and vengefulness on the part of the "wronged" party often results in the feeling of guilt beyond the call of morality.


For example, it may be in poor taste for me to tell someone that their method of washing dishes is ineffective. I might have been trying to help them improve their method in order to promote my acquiring clean dishes in a timely fashion. The dishwasher might take offence to this. Rather than having been caused emotional or mental harm, this person has instead taken damage to their ego (they were a dishwasher for many years in a fine dining establishment! how dare I suggest that using bleach was better than just soap for things that have held raw meat! they know how to clean the damn dishes - the nerve!)


Now, the party feels wronged. One could argue that I HAVE emotionally damaged this person in that their feelings were hurt and I should go through the above sequence of guilt and amends-making. Good. We're square.


BUT (you knew there would be a but) this does not require me to feel guilty every time this person washes dishes, pointing out how appropriately they were handled and cleaned from now until the day I die. That feeling of guilt does not come doing moral wrong - it comes from being punished or the fear of being punished cruelly and unusually for one (or very few) altercations. Killing someone might make you suspect for life, but a comment about dish washing or any other trivial matter such as this should be dealt with and dismissed. 


In fact, I'd like to posit that the dealing out of incommensurate punishment on the part of the "wronged party" constitutes a wrongdoing. They are behaving in a way that intentionally inflicts harm on another party - which is morally wrong. 


The point is that the person who is continuing to be punished and made to feel guilt ought not to feel guilty. The psychological presence of the guilt feeling does not indicate that a moral wrong has been done in this situation. This makes guilt a particular and nefarious feeling to deal with.


The moral of the story, here, is to be aware of yourself: own up to moral responsibility and feel remorse for that guilt, but know that feeling guilty is not always the same as being morally responsible. Protect yourself from the emotional damage of inappropriate guilt-feeling and punishment.

Autumn

Autumn 

It just happens one day, I wake up

and I can breathe in a deep breath

the air is different, heavy and moist

with the smell of dying leaves

never do humans find death so beautiful

as they do each autumn

the earth slowly shutting itself down

for the hibernation months ahead

this – this is when I come alive,

when all else is veiled in tragic beauty




Comments welcome.


Photo by author.

Dear Life

This week's Red Writing Hood prompt (one of them) was to write a letter to your character's fear. I have a fictional character I've been writing for a while in a fantasy setting who is human but has an unnaturally and somewhat unusually long life.

Dear Life,

To most, you are just that – something held dearly. It seems strange, but the longer I go on, the more I get the feeling that you hold onto me. Too long have I walked this earth, the lives of three women, end on end, and too many generations to count or remember. Death is not your opposite, but humans cling to you to avoid it. It is not death I seek, but rather the resting end of you. It is not even that you have been bad to me and I am wishing the torture would end. No, it is the weariness of a traveler who has walked too far on a road that has no end in sight I seek to escape.

Even if I expire along that road traveled so long, I fear that the priests, shamans and mages might be right. If you do not simply end at death, if you are eternal in some other form after all of this time I have spent here, then there is no rest to come. Everlasting life sounds so good to them. It comforts them as the go to sleep at night, that there is no reason to fear death for it all goes on afterward. How can they not be weary? How can they not want that same sleep that they go into after such a long day of mundane tasks? I watch others go about their daily lives. They work to gain something for themselves in their short time on this earth and age faster than they wish, all the while shunning the wisdom they have gained and ignoring the exhaustion that comes upon them until the surrounding vigorous youth forces them to see – you force them to see. And then the strangest thing of all – they cling to that your youth as though their decrepit bodies could ever again achieve such activity in you again. They fall apart trying to live beyond their means, but all in the comfort that they will see youth in everlasting life.  Is that all a human can crave? To never end the busyness, the going and the doing?

Am I even still human? After going on like this for so long, I do not think I know anymore. I do not want as these humans that surround me want. I hunger for food and drink, but I hunger more for rest to come, for some sight of the end of the road, even if it lay at a cliff on the ocean. If that be the case, I shall make my bed in the sea as did the eternal being, with the rocks as my pillows and the seaweed as my cover. If I must see you again at the end of that road, then you shall only see me in despair.

            My one hope is that you and I will truly expire together at the end of all this.

Your grudgingly obedient,

Tanith

This pov is fairly early on in the development of this character. Ever the romantic, I revive her human connections and she realizes she can still empathize - that she still is human.

Comments welcome.

The Visitor

The Visitor

I fold the napkins flatter and adjust the china:

willow pattern on the left, handle to the right.

My annual visitor seems to hover at the door, but I wait

for the knock that I know will come – never failing.

I smile in greeting, but it is hard to be genuine.

I prefer the normal distant correspondence – a pen pal

of sorts. The table is laid with biscuits and honey –

my guest doesn’t like scones and takes two lumps.

The coffee drinker’s brew fills the air with an earthy

smell that compliments his own. I sip my tea mildly.

We chat at first, nostalgia and reminiscing coming next.

Soon the tears run down our face in laugher and memory

and sadness when the time comes to say goodbye again.

Come back soon, the thought sits on the edge of my mind.

Missing him already, with a deep breath I am free again.




Comments welcome.

An Idea

I threw an idea over to my friend Erica at free fringes that she might start a small bloggers community. What I didn't expect is for her to throw that proposal right back at me. 


The thing is... I don't know anything about how to go about doing such a thing... but I have started looking into the process. 


Thoughts anyone?

Here and Now

I was reading at The Yawp about an ekphrasis project (poetry inspired by images in this case) and thought it sounded like a great idea. I did a free write at Sans Serif about the picture before I started writing. I'll be pulling some of my ideas from that free write for this poem. 


Here's the image I started out with:

(Photo from "Getting Pregnant Over 40 - Is it possible?" http://www.squidoo.com/get-pregnant-over-40  Copyright © 2011, Squidoo, LLC and respective copyright owners)

With a free write under my belt, I sat down to write a poem. I'm not sure it's quite there yet, but here's (at least) a first draft:

Here and Now

Our minds dwell on future and past

Where will we leave our footprints

behind? Where have they gone before?

A child lies restless in the belly of a woman

who is on her path to starting a family.

The child tosses and turns, the mother thinks

“Where will he go – a mover like this?

Will he be a doctor or lawyer or teacher?

Where have I been? Here and there.

And now I am going to be a mother.”

She smiles to herself at the future path

laid before her, brick by brick 

in her mind.

This woman is already a mother.

Her child inside her is already her child.

He is living, experiencing her care,

her movements, her strange food desires,

her inhale, her exhale – he takes her breath.

Placing a foot behind her belly button,

he presses – Know I am here. She knows.

Tickling toes that she will soon see bare,

she hums to herself and to him – 

living in the moment.

Comments welcome.

Please excuse the silence

The last few days have been a hectic, emotional whirlwind. Lots of things involving governmental forms, bureaucratic tedium and major thesis revision have fallen into my lap suddenly. I promise a response by the end of the week to the Red Writing Hood and at least one more post before next week, at which point I am hoping to be back to a(n almost) daily schedule.

Heaven Bent

P&W prompt number 8 for me (as usual thanks to Angelspeak):


Choose a cliched phrase (“fit as a fiddle,” “think out of the box,” “running on empty,” etc.) and turn it around. Use the new meaning created by this reversal to fuel a poetic meditation.


I decided to use the phrase "Hell-bent for leather" which is sometimes shortened to "Hell-bent", meaning to be going very fast. I changed the phrase to "Heaven-bent" and slowed it down a bit.

Heaven Bent

He walked the trail upward ahead of me

taking the landscape one pace at a time, 

slowing his stride imperceptibly to give me

the chance to catch up as I panted behind

"Why do you always pick the highest

climb you can find on the trail?" I asked,

wondering if I would get any reply this time

 mentally counting the hundreds before

Patiently he climbed, taking time to breathe,

time to live and experience each moment 

of the unhurried ascent, early afternoon sun 

shining around his blonde locks like a halo 

Puffing to catch up where I'd fallen back

I scrambled up a yet steeper, shorter path

only to stumble and scrape both knees 

with a tight wince, but not a sound escaping

A solid hand reached out to help - I took it

gratefully after my rash moment, pain subsiding

the steady calm of him capturing me completely 

"From up there we can touch the heavens."

Comments welcome.

Stolen

Someone has stolen something from you (or your character). Something of tremendous value. What will you do to get it back? Or will you give up?

Write a post - fiction or non - and tell us about it. Word limit is 600.

Today's prompt comes from Red Writing Hood. I had a pretty hard time coming up with an idea for this one, which I found strange. Shouldn’t this be one of the easiest things to come up with? Maybe…

Stolen

I sat up in the night, not from a dream or a nightmare, but from the sound of the door of the apartment opening. I listened for a moment, breath held tight. The door shut and someone giggled, another voice shushing the first.  Another late night out for the flat mates then…

I lay back down, closing my eyes but not to sleep. What was it that was happening before I woke? It felt like there should have been something going on. I was asleep and… I reached out in my mind, willing myself to find anything there, but no. Just darkness. Emptiness.

It had been this way for months. I didn’t remember when it had started, but no those are the wrong words too. I didn’t remember when they had stopped – my dreams. From an age before I was cognizant of such things, I had dreamed – vivid dreams, subtle dreams.

“Why don’t you write them down and make them a novel?” he once asked, “You have more ridiculous junk happen in your dreams than these silly vampire novelists have all put together.”

Ridiculous junk. He had always thought so. Other people called them “strange” or even, in my mother’s words, “nightmarish”, but not to me. To me they were just something that another part of my being was trying to tell me.

I sometimes used to wake up with a sense of urgency – the need to remember, to know what had happened in the dream, because it was real and meaningful. Other times I would awake confused – how did that end up in my head, where did it come from? Only once or twice did I wake up in fear. Dreams that frightened others at the thought were no source of terror to me. On the few occasions I did have a nightmare, they were memorable, but thankfully not re-livable.

But this seemed all in the past to me. What had once remained in my waking life had now invaded my dreamscape – a pressure, a dampening. As my daily self lost its vigor, its intention, its vitality, so did my dreams. I could manage the day to day, but the loss of my nightly reflections was unbearable. I mourned.

The doctors called it depression. My friends called it “a damn shame that someone like that could hurt someone like you.” I didn’t really call it anything – not until it was much too late.

The life that I had been living and pursuing had become a confused muddle of daily routine and wandering. I had dealt with this before – losing my way, but then I had my dreams to ground me, to help me reflect, to turn to for understanding. Now they were gone too. Stolen. 

Alarm Sounding

Today I addressed another P&W prompt (picked up from Angelspeak). 

Write a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem made up, typically, of three stanzas of four lines, and a fourth of two lines, or a couplet. Use the following rhyme scheme: In each of the first three stanzas, rhyme the first and third lines and the second and fourth lines (a, b, a, b, c, d, c, d, e, f, e, f); and rhyme the lines of the couplet (g, g). For a traditional example, see Shakespeare’s ”From you have I been absent in the spring….”For a contemporary example, see Denis Johnson’s ”Heat.”

For the record, I really dislike this prompt. Sonnets – what a pain in the butt. Really. I spent more than a hour counting and recounting feet of poetry on my fingers while trying to think of rhymes that didn’t sound silly. I’m not sure I succeeded. I will, no doubt, re-write this poem to capture something much better in the near future. (Note – this reads better if you add a brief caesura after the word stillness of line 5.)

Alarm Sounding

The silent snowy hills of arctic light

are full of trees immeas’rable in worth

The summer days leave so few hours of night

or living things to walk upon this earth.

Through stillness now suddenly emerges

the sound of living earth, it tears and rends

Earth shattering, through stone and rock surges

a force that more than mother natures bends.

The cry – the breaking of an arctic shelf

a severing of earth sounds the alarm

a crime on nature in and of itself

a thing it seems no living thing could harm

A crime that we should kill the wilderness

by living lives that venture to excess.

Comments are welcome, as always.

There's nothing like anxiety in the spring

I'm not sure why, but every spring my anxiety kicks up a few notches. I've been trying to figure out what might cause this sudden upswing. I've come up with a calendar of theories, but they may not stand up to the test of applicability:


1) January: New Year's resolutions


Everyone seems to make this list of things that they're going to do in the New Year that they didn't do before. This is one of those cultural rituals that is an expression of our continuous search for perfection and designed to make those with high blood pressure or anxiety worsen their conditions. Instead of relaxing and doing small things to help ourselves change, like adding a 15 minute walk to our day, we feel the need to set a goal of hitting the gym an hour everyday when we don't believe we have enough time anyway. What's worse is when we've done well for the first week of January, we think "I'm getting the hang of this" and then promptly stop going to the gym and/or start eating more calories (because we worked it all off, right?). When we suddenly notice that we're not meeting the completely unreasonable goals, we start worrying - which only stops us in our tracks to good health more. 


2) February: Valentine's Day


Another holiday for those who are exceedingly happy in their romantic relationships. It tends to make everyone else just feel worse that they're 30 and not married, or remind them that their mother wants to know when they're going to produce come grandchildren and also worry about how there are too many curves in their silhouette.  Luckily, I don't have either of those problems, but then I don't really celebrate Valentine's Day either. 


3) March Madness


This is usually a term that is reserved for those of our country that are already diagnosed with a serious disease (Basketball Fanaticism), but it doesn't make it untrue for the rest of us. There's something about March that it's just the time when things start picking up and you feel even busier than usual. When you're a student, your midterms are coming around and the papers are due. If you watch television, then all of your normal relaxing me-time shows are being cancelled for someone's basketball obsession. Maybe you share the basketball obsession and have decided that gambling money is a good way to exercise that obsession. This means that you'll spend an entire month worrying about something that is in no way dependent upon your behavior that you're most likely going to lose your hard earned money on. It also seems to be a month for evaluation. You have to start doing the self-assessments that are required for ...


4) April: Tax Season


Everyone that has spent the last two months ignoring the W-2s that reside in the growing pile of mail at the end of the table, on the kitchen counter or in that corner of the office starts to sweat. It's time. You've got to pay your taxes. But to do that you have to go through the most confusing and often unintelligibly meaningless jargon of tax law. If you have any idea what most of that junk they ask you about in your tax forms means, then you're ahead of the game. I usually look for keywords like GI, military, train, miner and disability to help me decide whether or not I am required to fill in one of the boxes. At any rate, you've got the first two weeks to get all of your finances straightened out and make sure that you're accurately representing (and certainly not over-representing) yourself on paper to people in the government who won't think twice about rubber stamping your tax return, unless they see something fishy. And something fishy can be as complicated as not paying taxes on all of the money that you're taking off the top of your multi-million dollar corporate income or as simple as not understanding the language in which your accumulation of assets (otherwise known as your bank account) in being described to you. After the taxes have finally been filed, envelope licked, stamp attached and placed in your local letter carrier's trusty bag - you have two more miserable weeks (at least) to wait to see if they have been received, accepted and (if you're lucky) you'll actually get the return your state owes you or (if you're not lucky) they've removed the funds from your account. 


5) May: Light at the end of the tunnel


Perhaps I've been a student too long, but this seems to be the point at which spring just can't be spring anymore - it has got to start heading toward summer. All that worrying you did in April led to binge eating that is now starting to show around your thighs and the bathing suit season is creeping up faster than you'd like. Everyone's back in workout mode a little too late to get into the shape they want to be in on the beaches, but hey - at least it's almost time for a little vacation - a little R&R time right? 


In my family, all the birthdays have come around and by mine (mid-month) the anxiety has started to break up and leave me again until January.


So here's the thing... none of these things really apply to me. I didn't set New Year's resolutions this year - I was adjusting to being newly married and living in Hong Kong. I didn't celebrate Valentine's Day other than to eat some chocolate sent to us by my father-in-law and to say to my husband "Happy Valentine's Day" once. Also - not sad and alone, so no worries there. I don't care about basketball, nor do I own a television, nor did I gamble any money in the month of March. As I am abroad, I didn't even do my own taxes this year and they're already filed and I've already received my return (yay!). As for May, I'm just looking forward to going home for the summer. So how is it that all the things that usually give people anxiety don't apply to me and yet, here I am feeling it?


Sometimes life doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I am currently trying to apply Daoism liberally to the affected area to see if I get any results. Thus far there has been no increased inflammation, but no reduction of what's already there either. 


Advice welcome.