The people reclaim May Day

 

On May 1 (International Workers' Day), organizers are calling for a national "No Work, No School, No Shopping" boycott to display economic power, protest corporate exploitation, and support worker rights. The "May Day Strong" initiative urges citizens to avoid spending money to protest corporate power and demand economic equality, building on a history of labor actions.

May Day Protest When: Friday May 1st, 5:00pm - 6:00pm Where: Black Mountain Town Square A community gathering will take place at Black Mt Town Square, from 5-6. This event—part of a national day of action— includes a "Love-in-Action" request for food pantry donations. Dry food products, such as boxes of pasta, are encouraged.

May Day parades used to be full of workers! I did a bit of historic research at one time, finding old photos from New York and other cities of support of workers, much like Labor Day kind of does now.

The laborers used to parade down the streets on May Day...here are a few photos of New York parades.

These laborers in mills, factories, and food processing plants would take the day to display that they were doing the work that kept our world going.  They might just do it again today...

Today people have been urging each other to not shop, not work, nor go to school. (Unless of course you're an essential worker.)

So here in Black Mountain, or in nearby Asheville, there will be gatherings. There will be music. There will be justice oriented signs. And schools are closed!

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Recent reading which helps my own attitude:

We are bodies. We do not have bodies... If all our ‘inputs’ are visual and textual, and all we touch is frictionless surfaces, and if we have not reinstated the rich and varied physical life that lockdowns and contemporary electronic habits have stolen from us, then we will, very simply, be somewhat ill. One birth right of humans is a place in the ongoing physical life of earth. Without it, we are without context, (literally - not in the fabric), sullen, and prone to dubious medications peddled by the Machine.

Am I asking you to roll on the ground in the sunshine or push your faces into the hands of willing friends? Well, that would be a good start, as it would deliver a life-enhancing dose of the a vitamin we are mostly all deficient in - foolishness. Pioneers such as Moshe Feldenkrais and Thomas Hanna based their lives' work on returning people to natural movement. I would encourage us all to urgently attend to the state of our tactile lives, to touching and being touched, to feeling things under our hands and feet that are not manmade.

SOURCE: 

A Low Slanting Ray - Antidotes to the Hubriscene part 4, from the archive

by
Uncivil Savant <carolineross@substack.com>

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New post Inner Workings 

The Miraculous from The Marginalian

 From today's Marginalian

FROM THE ARCHIVE | The Warblers and the Wonder of Being: Loren Eiseley on Contacting the Miraculous

Every once in a while, the curtain of the ordinary parts and we touch the miraculous — the sense that there is another world not beyond this one but within it, a mirror-world any glimpse of which returns our own more luminous and full of wonder.

This can never be willed, but one can be willing for it — a willingness woven of two things: total wakefulness to reality and total openness to possibility.

It can happen while strolling in a garden, as it did for Virginia Woolf; it can happen while looking at a dandelion, as it did for G.K. Chesterton; it can happen in stumbling upon a piece of blue glass, as it did for me.

For paleontologist, anthropologist, philosopher of science, and poet Loren Eiseley (September 3, 1907–July 9, 1977), it happened in an encounter with a bouquet of warblers during a fossil-collecting expedition. He recounts the experience in his essay “The Judgment of the Birds,” originally published in 1957 in the first of his many exquisite essay collections — An Immense Journey, which inspired Ed Yong’s excellent An Immense World — and later included in the posthumous collection of his finest writing, The Star Thrower (public library), in the introduction to which W.H. Auden so poignantly captures Eiseley’s core ethos: “The first point he wishes to make is that in order to be a scientist, an artist, a doctor, a lawyer, or what-have-you, one has first to be a human being.”

Reflecting on that unbidden moment when he touched the miraculous — or, rather, the miraculous touched him — Eiseley observes:

The time has to be right; one has to be, by chance or intention, upon the border of two worlds. And sometimes these two borders may shift or interpenetrate and one sees the miraculous.

Art by Matthew Forsythe from The Gold Leaf

An experience of this sort, which Eiseley terms “a natural revelation,” comes about most readily in solitude and in nature. He recounts the particular revelation of his encounter with the warblers:

It was a late hour on a cold, wind-bitten autumn day when I climbed a great hill spined like a dinosaur’s back and tried to take my bearings. The tumbled waste fell away in waves in all directions. Blue air was darkening into purple along the bases of the hills. I shifted my knapsack, heavy with the petrified bones of long-vanished creatures, and studied my compass. I wanted to be out of there by nightfall, and already the sun was going sullenly down in the west.

It was then that I saw the flight coming on. It was moving like a little close-knit body of black specks that danced and darted and closed again. It was pouring from the north and heading toward me with the undeviating relentlessness of a compass needle. It streamed through the shadows rising out of monstrous gorges. It rushed over towering pinnacles in the red light of the sun or momentarily sank from sight within their shade. Across that desert of eroding clay and wind-worn stone they came with a faint wild twittering that filled all the air about me as those tiny living bullets hurtled past into the night.

Warblers from The Edinburgh Journal, 1830s. (Available as a print and stationery cards.)

There is defiance in that many-winged rush of aliveness, of pure pulsating presence — a kind of stubborn insistence on the wonder of life, transient yet eternal, against the backdrop of the ossified past in Eiseley’s bag of fossils, the stratified time beneath his feet. With the knowledge that “we are all potential fossils,” he lenses through the birds the continuity of life across time, its consanguinity across the common chemistry that composes us:

It may not strike you as a marvel. It would not, perhaps, unless you stood in the middle of a dead world at sunset, but that was where I stood. Fifty million years lay under my feet, fifty million years of bellowing monsters moving in a green world now gone so utterly that its very light was traveling on the farther edge of space. The chemicals of all that vanished age lay about me in the ground. Around me still lay the shearing molars of dead titanotheres, the delicate sabers of soft-stepping cats, the hollow sockets that had held the eyes of many a strange, outmoded beast. Those eyes had looked out upon a world as real as ours; dark, savage brains had roamed and roared their challenges into the steaming night.

Now they were still here, or, put it as you will, the chemicals that made them were here about me in the ground. The carbon that had driven them ran blackly in the eroding stone. The stain of iron was in the clays. The iron did not remember the blood it had once moved within, the phosphorus had forgot the savage brain. The little individual moment had ebbed from all those strange combinations of chemicals as it would ebb from our living bodies into the sinks and runnels of oncoming time.

Geological strata from Geographical Portfolio by Levi Walter Yaggy, 1887. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

Once, walking through a centuries-old gilded cathedral in a small Mexican town with a beloved companion, I found myself in tears at the thought of all the people now dead who once sat in those pews and lit candles at that altar and whispered their hopes to those saints; at the realization that we too will have been, that the sum total of our prayers and passions will one day be a votive melted in a pool of itself.

It is a mercy that we walk through the world half-blind to the reality of time and transience, or we would be walking through it in tears — through the immense cathedral of time that Earth is, with its neatly lined pews of geologic strata holding the history of life, which is the history of loss. And yet the very fact that any one life exists against the cosmic odds of eternal night and nothingness is miracle enough — a triumph of the possible over the probable, a concatenation of chemistry and chance gilded with wonder.

With an eye to the atomic chemistry we are and will return to, with an eye to the birds now swarming with the full force of life above him, the birds that evolved from those long-dead dinosaurs, Eiseley writes:

I had lifted up a fistful of that ground. I held it while that wild flight of south-bound warblers hurtled over me into the oncoming dark. There went phosphorus, there went iron, there went carbon, there beat the calcium in those hurrying wings. Alone on a dead planet I watched that incredible miracle speeding past. It ran by some true compass over field and waste land. It cried its individual ecstasies into the air until the gullies rang. It swerved like a single body, it knew itself, and, lonely, it bunched close in the racing darkness, its individual entities feeling about them the rising night. And so, crying to each other their identity, they passed away out of my view.

I dropped my fistful of earth. I heard it roll inanimate back into the gully at the base of the hill: iron, carbon, the chemicals of life. Like men from those wild tribes who had haunted these hills before me seeking visions, I made my sign to the great darkness. It was not a mocking sign, and I was not mocked. As I walked into my camp late that night, one man, rousing from his blankets beside the fire, asked sleepily, “What did you see?”

“I think, a miracle,” I said softly, but I said it to myself. Behind me that vast waste began to glow under the rising moon.

Couple with Eiseley’s miraculous encounter with a muskrat, then revisit Annie Dillard on finding the miraculous in the mundane and Helen Macdonald on what a hawk taught her about the meaning of life.

Eve of Beltane

 

Walpurgis Night is celebrated every year on the night of April 30th into May 1st. Historically, it marks the transition from spring to summer and is associated with bonfires, dancing, and old seasonal traditions.

The name comes from Saint Walpurga, an English nun from the 8th century who traveled to Germany as a Christian missionary. She was known for caring for the sick, promoting education, and founding religious communities. Her feast day became associated with May 1st after her relics were moved in 870 AD.

The connection to witches comes mainly from German folklore. During the Middle Ages, people believed that witches gathered on mountaintops—especially at Brocken in Germany—for rituals, dancing, and spiritual gatherings. Villagers lit large fires to protect themselves from evil spirits and to welcome the warmer season.

Walpurgis Night also has pagan roots because it overlaps with ancient spring fertility festivals such as Beltane. Over time, older folk traditions blended with the Christian celebration of Saint Walpurga.

Today, Walpurgis Night is still celebrated in parts of Northern and Central Europe with bonfires, music, costumes, and spring festivals.

The is the night of fertility celebration, welcoming spring and all the wonders of animal and plant life that regenerate at this time of the annual cycle of life on our planet. I wrote about Beltane and bonfires a bit in the past on Alchemy of Clay.

A May Day tradition was for children to pick flowers and then distribute them throughout the town. Of course the gardeners were not always happy to have kids trampling through their roses!

Sharing with Floral Friday Fotos

Wild roses or dog-roses

Wisteria brought home!

Unknown source, with Stonehenge included

Wear some artificial flowers in a crown, it does make one feel like a girl for May Day!

Of course many traditions start with bonfires on May Day Eve. I haven't ever taken part in those, but have read about them! With droughts so prevalent in the US, I hope there are very few bonfires this year. 

Tomorrow is called May Day. Historically this was a day workers would have marches until the Communists made big parades with military equipment which stopped the holiday celebrations in the US.

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Health care update.

No news from the insurance debacle, except late Tuesday I got a call from that Dr.’s office from a new person (Bonnie) who said they would make sure I could keep my appointment with my PCP (primary care provider) and have the certification meeting the insurance requirement by next week.

I’m not holding my breath! But they did send me a confirmation this morning that I have the appointment.

As of 1:30 pm Wednesday…

Nobody had called me back and I looked at my trembling hands and realized I could not put a needle into an IV line to save me as the nurse practitioner had told me I needed to do.

So I called the infectious disease (ID) office and left a message for the nurse to that effect,and mentioned that the nurse practitioner (Amy) hadn’t called me back yesterday afternoon.

So another nurse called within an hour to explain that the lab results that Amy had looked at were from  the hospital before I was discharged and then took antibiotics orally for 2 weeks. So I didn’t need any more antibiotics.

At the same time the lab results from my bloodwork at ID were on my patient portal, with normal range of white blood cells! You all probably know when they’re elevated, it means you have an infection.

I sighed with such relief. And I said how worried I’d been that I needed all this treatment still.

I remembered telling Amy the sputum test which showed the fungus had been taken the 7th and not reported till the 20th, but she didn’t hear that as meaning I was still in the hospital. Glad she conferred with the Dr. before any more mistakes were made.

The best part was then being able to look at the results of ID’s bloodwork and talk with this nurse about other things that weren’t normal! So since I don’t drink alcohol, we figured my high liver enzymes are due to taking Tylenol for pain. Fortunately now I can switch to ibuprofen. Nothing that needs treatment showed as of first tests, but there may be more results and this nurse said she’d call me and let me know when they come in. I’ll also be checking  the patient portal!

And I’m feeling better day by day. Didn’t make it to exercise, but I joined friends for lunch at least!

I could rant...

 I could rant about health insurance not recognizing my primary care doctor, and listing someone that I've never seen nor heard of. I could rant about insurance telling me to contact the doctor's office to tell them to get the Dr. to send in certification to the insurance company.

I could rant but I won't. 

Well maybe a little rant. I am really tired of this situation. I have an appointment for a yearly exam which was made 6 months ago when I first saw this new primary care doctor. Today the parent company through another department called to say she wasn't listed as my PCP (primary care provider.) So I called both insurance and various people at the PCP office.

I thought, as I was on hold at one or another call, that I could just die of a heart attack and none of these clowns would know or care!

I still am waiting for the credentials to be sent to the insurance, and then the doctor's office will call ME to call the insurance again to make sure they recognize her as my PCP so I can see her.

I can't stress enough to the people (clowns?) at Advent Health, that these are their job tasks, not mine.

What happened to customer's being right? Why are so many of these folks in the midst of "that's not my department?"

It reminds me of checking out at the laundry re-filling-station...where you can buy non-scented washing sheets. I put the box of sheets in front of me on a tiny little counter, and the woman standing there continued talking with another young woman who works there (also behind the counter to define her roll.) Second woman left and the first asked for me to pay $38. I asked her why it was so much, and she explained the total was for an item sitting on the counter plus my box of sheets...and I said, I didn't want the first thing, it had been sitting there before I arrived. I didn't say when she ignored me and continued talking with the other employee. As a customer, I was not only ignored, then someone else's purchase was being added to mine. She finally took off the extra item and I paid my $24 plus tax.

It seems to be a day when I have invisibility. 

I'm even wearing red.

I'm waiting for important calls to set up more lung tests, and then probably more antibiotics. I may or may not decide to have that treatment. After looking it up on line, yes, the Mayo Clinic and other medical sites, I don't see that all the bother will actually be worth it. But I'll perhaps need to address this fungus. We shall see.

What do you think those squares in the foreground are?

I was looking out a second story window, and they are roofing tiles. Kind of neat optical illusion, eh?

Please forgive my rant. 

Nobody has called back that said they would today. Maybe tomorrow. 

I'm glad that I went to the post office, got my detergent, and had coffee with a friend at the second place we tried because suddenly the first one closes on Tuesdays. Well, suddenly to us, anyway.

May all who are over 60 stand up and wave that we're not invisible! We demand to be noticed! And don't close when we want to enjoy chatting over a cuppa! And please please please, get those other people to call back when they say they will.

OK, some of these things we have no control over. 

Spur of the moment

 What fun, its a Tuesday with differences.

First it rained, and is due to all morning! Even a smattering of lightning!

Second, I don't have a blog ready to go in the middle of the night, so I woke up, fixed breakfast, and sat down at the computer to write y'all. Immediacy. Take a bite, slurp a sip of coffee. Mmm. Write a sentence while chewing/swallowing.

OK, that's pretty dull.

Look out the window at wet wet wet happy leaves, branches, grasses, walks. Oops, best change to shoes that are more waterproof when I go out. Yes, I can't stay inside and dry. Have an appointment in a couple of hours in Asheville. A big doctor. Literally. I will meet one of his associates today, not the big doc. I met him while hospitalized 3 weeks ago. But I have faith (isn't that a strange word for medical care) that he knows (or she today) what infectious diseases do to one.

So I'll carefully drive my toadstool self (having grown mold in my lungs yet again) down the interstate to his office, which is behind the building. I had an address and went looking for it the other day, because I had an extra 15 minutes before an appointment. Located behind a strip mall of shops. Interesting pseudo tudor architecture. I can't help but wonder... What does this say about a medical practice?

At pulmonologist's check out I made my next appointment, and found it decorated for some island fun.

I did request someone to put on the faux grass skirt and do a Hulu. No takers. I left humming Don Ho.

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Yesterday I spent the whole afternoon readying an updated application for an apartment near my son in Colorado. Copying the documents, then scanning the pages after they were filled out...and following the commands for each document to be saved for who knows what. Just so I have a copy. I felt cross-eyed and confused by the time I was finished.

Then I searched for a pulmonologist near where I'm hoping to move. There are a few within one office, and one other affiliated with a different practice. But they listed 25, and had to go 200 miles to fill in that many pulmonologists. No thanks! I'm happy to see the specialists who are taking new patients. I'll call to see how long a wait it is to get in for a first visit.

Then I had a good visit with my son and daughter-in-law via facetime on the phone. I caught them up with the pulmonologist visit that had started my day yesterday. She had not only answered all my questions post-hospitalization for pneumonia, she gave me a few new things that will be helpful. 

She's the one that started me searching for my Colorado specialists. And she told me my oxygen that I currently have can travel with me because the home health agency is nation-wide. That's in case I need it. Moving to a higher altitude may pose a greater need for oxygen, at least until I adjust to thinner air. I'm simply happy the air won't be humid every night...since dry air provides most comfort for my breathing with bronchiectasis. I will always cough to clear mucus from my lungs, but I do hope to get rid of the mold I'm currently infected with (unless the antibiotic finally killed it!)

Pam (pulmonologist) also suggested that I try doing some of the rehab exercises at home which I formerly did at the gym. Of course I have a video or two, and smiled, yes, I can do that! But will I?

Environmental change is my middle name. I have lived in this apartment 10 years, and am not too happy with the dampness when it rains or each night living in mountains.  Oh and it's going to get down to freezing again this weekend! Whew, they always have said last frost here is Mother's Day. My plants are all outside on balcony or front porch, so I'll either cover them or leave things to chance. I don't plan to move them to CO anyway. 

Last evening I was able to still see the ridge across the valley. It has disappeared completely today, and with the lovely maple leaves, will not come back into view until October probably.

Hope your Tuesday is simply wonderful, whether wet or dry weather, and with maybe some of your intentions met for you!

Rhododendrons at the pulmonologist's office.

The toes knows

 

This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home...

Every time I see my naked toes, I start saying that nursery rhyme. I went to the podiatrist's to check on the health of my toes. I'd never even had a pedicure. It wasn't quite the same, as no soaking nor massage was included. I had to massage my own feet...when I got home. But my nails are happily trimmed, not the photo above which is the "before" shot. I'm waiting to find out the results of test on the left foot's big toe which may have a fungus among us.

And in the waiting room was an Easter Tree. It was already 2 weeks past Easter, so I'm wondering what the next decorations might be. Memorial Day? Nah. May Day isn't likely either, living in this Bible Belt town, even though some friends will dance a May Pole in a nearby park in a few weeks. Sorry I don't have a return appointment to find out what they do with the tree the rest of the year!

Outside the medical building were the faces of these lovely little pansies.

The building at the top of my hill has some nice iris blooming.

Today I'm going to check with the pulmonologist's team as to next treatments after being home from hospital for 2-1/2 weeks. Tomorrow I see the Infectious Disease team. There was a late test result which may still need treatment. I'll hope (fingers and toes crossed) I don't need more antibiotics.

When we feel safe, our creativity unfolds like a beautiful flower.

Beauty and food

 

After seeing yesterday's goslings at Lake Tomahawk, I was given a cheerful greeting by these bits of sunshine. 

The last azalea I've seen this week.

It took several days before I finally got these cooked. Threw a mustard/mayo and panko sauce with garlic powder on the salmon...steamed the asparagus, and plopped dollops of sour cream on the un-mashed potatoes. The potatoes were sort of smashed together but not totally mashed. Pretty tasty anyway. I found waiting till dinner-time meant I had really low energy, so Saturday I actually cooked for lunch.

It actually rained! Saturday was a stay indoors kind of day. Then the universal remote for the TV broke. Mmm, good thing I had an audio book to listen to while cleaning up the kitchen.

Earlier in the week I picked up some baby-back ribs at Oakie Doakies. This was to celebrate some good test results from waiting 6 months wondering about another possible medical condition.

I've got more doctor's appointments coming up this week. Fingers and toes crossed that I'm going to be getting better and not need more drugs. 

I liked this statement especially with the beginning of "Stardate"...which I first heard on Star Trek. I loved Science Fiction, but realized that I no longer keep up with it...while not knowing any of the answers in that category on Jeopardy.

Unknown author. I wonder what ,,,, means.