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Being stuck in the house so much sucks! So this week I’ve really pushed myself to get out a bit. Sometimes getting outside for some fresh air helps, but I’ve found out that one of the side affects of prednisone is that it makes you photo-sensitive (if that’s the right word). Hardly any exposure to the sun and I turn into a lobster! So I’m not spending time outside at the moment. Especially in the 100° weather which turns my muscles to mush.

So yesterday I settled down to watch the movie, “August Osage County” with Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts. It’s one of the most intense family dramas I’ve seen. (Actually saw it when it was at the movies years ago.) And there’s one scene in it that really captured how I’ve been feeling being cooped up in this house.

You see a lone car driving on this long, straight road running out through the middle of a very dry Oklahoma. The sky is kind of pre-muggy-stormy color. It looks like it goes on forever. Boring, drab… And yet you KNOW the trauma that’s going on in this family “emotionally trapped” together in this car. The plain starkness of it made it, with it’s underlying tension, a very unsettling scene for me. (‘Scuse the crappy pix. It’s a screen capture…)

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Well this morning Plato (Plato’s Groove) updated and added audio to one of his recent poems. When I read it again it made me think so much of that scene in the movie I had to reblog it. (His blog doesn’t reblog the normal way, so thanks to him for permission to use his words. 🙂 ) But DO go over and listen to his reading. It adds so much to his work.

The poem speaks to me because even as I’m sitting here going through this what feels like a totally “infertile” time, I can see changes taking place in MY life and MY family that have come about because of the necessity of dealing with a chronic illness. And I have to say, I’m surprised at some of them. Plato’s poem reminds me I don’t KNOW what all is going on beneath the surface, but I need to pay attention…

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Mountains Nor Molehills 

I sense the vibrations deep within me
Foundations quake, shaking that which once was firmly held
What was assumed to be eternal falls around me in pieces
Like glitter in a globe it slowly swirls, gravity accomplishing its work
I watch it crumble and tumble, down, down, down
Currents of anxiety keep it aloft past its time
It needs to settle, I need to settle
An active passivity restrains my impulse to jump, to move, to seek distraction
Let it settle, it needs to settle, don’t stir it up again

New awareness is finally breaking the old making room for what is not, yet
But the birth is like the grinding of hard stone and dust
Shifting of the plates, a new geography is forming
It threatens home and kin. They feel it too
But crisis calls for calm, don’t feed it, don’t jump
Old rifts will be mended, new vistas will emerge, danger and hope coexists
I can make neither mountains nor mole hills
The power is at work in me, I am not the Maker, I am being made
I will not jump, I will wait, and watch, and listen to the stillness