Update about blogCa

Who knew all this would happen afterwards! Autumn at Blue Ridge Apartments, Black Mountain NC 2023

Wednesday, October 8, 2025

Wordless Wednesday

 A few photos I've been meaning to share.

The hiking trail in entrance to the hoodoos at Bryce National Park, Utah,

By Todie Franklin Hess, Blue Ridge of NC


Sunrise at Toroweap - Colorado River, Grand Canyon, Arizona



Looking out through Treehouse Shop window at the pottery fair in Dillsboro, NC 2013

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Sharing with Wordless Wednesday

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Yesterday I had a sad conversation with my care coordinator, who I've spoken with monthly by phone for maybe 4 years. I was emotional. The practice is closing here in Black Mountain. I told Rob that he knows more about me than anyone else. It's like having a husband without the rigamarole! Well, only on the medical level of course. It was so hard to say good-bye to him. Like breaking up with a boyfriend used to feel. I had to count to 3 and we both had to hang up at the same time. I wonder why I'm still a teenager.

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The test of a democracy is not the magnificence of buildings or the speed of automobiles or the efficiency of air transportation, but rather the care given to the welfare of all the people. -Helen Adams Keller, lecturer and author (27 Jun 1880-1968)  








Tuesday, October 7, 2025

Tuesday's Treasures

 Tuesday's Treasures~!



An architect-designed home is being renovated. The previous owner had lived there ever since I moved here (18 years ago) and apparently died in the last year or so.

 And the property now includes a newer home being built as well.




There are several more houses on this street closer to town, one of which is a lawyer's office. And then the local Funeral Home is on the corner of State St. and this road, Dougherty.

At the other end of the street (on that side) are at least 2 B&B's. 

The Red Rocker Inn in summertime.

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Sharing a substack  story:

Make My Healing a Party Everyone Is Invited To

by Sophie Strand from Make Me Good Soil sophiestrand@substack.com


Healing is hard work. Healing takes dedication. Healing takes commitment. Doctor’s offices are private, fluorescent caves. Curtains divide the ill from each other in hospitals. Sickbeds are sterile, singular. Illness is a sign of weakness and must be hidden from sight. It must be managed and defeated. This is the myth that keeps the chronically ill and the disabled trapped within a life-sapping seriousness. If you are unwell, you shouldn’t be having fun. Fun is for healthy people. You should be working hard to get better, to improve, to fix yourself, so you can participate in the fast-paced world of progress again. Most importantly, you shouldn’t detract from our fun with your messy, complicated body. Hide it, hide your pain and struggle. It’s not invited to the party.

When I first got sick, I deferred things. “I’ll have a real birthday celebration when I’m better”. “I’ll go canoe in Canada when this is better”. “I’ll fall in love when I have a little more strength.” Those with serious illness will recognize from their own narratives the day you were hit with the nauseating realization that you won’t be getting better anytime soon. Is it after the tenth experimental drug fails? After the second birthday passes in bed? Is it when you finally receive the shut-door diagnosis? “There is no cure.” I think it happened the second year, hallucinating on steroids, shuttled back and forth to the hospital as I went in and out of life-threatening allergic reactions. The idea that healing happened behind the curtains, all the mess and anguish cloaked, and then you emerged, butterfly vibrant, even better than before, was making me sadder, sicker. What if I was never better enough to emerge? “I have to start living anyway. I have to start laughing. I have to start doing as much as possible with whatever energy, time, juiciness I have available.”

I was done approaching healing as work. It wasn’t even working. It kept me isolated from the laughter, the joy, and the nutritive relationships that I needed to give my immune system an emotional boost. Healing wasn’t going to happen in a backroom. Or even within my own atomized individuality. It needed to be woven into to Everything: to become a single thread in a dazzling tapestry of other stories. Stories of me falling in love. Stories of me hiking and travelling. Baking Bundt cakes. Hosting potluck storytelling gatherings with friends. Lying in a sheath of river water, watching clouds streak across the aquamarine sky. Leaning out of the fire tower at the top of the mountain, tasting the lemony tang of magnolia blossoms wafting up from the valley below.

My friend Mary Evelyn who also suffers from the same genetic illness as me, shared a helpful insight with me. “I’m beginning to understand that health has very little to do with the body. It has very little to do with disease. Health is the amount of joy you feel in your life.”

More and more I also think of healing as being the amount of connections you can feel in your life. The points of interface. The communal interweaving.

Healing for me isn’t a destination or a well body. It is community. Human and more than human.

Years of chronic illness have delivered me to a cautious mistrust of the clean- up approach to wellness. Minimalism reduces danger. But it also reduces pleasure and joy and mess and relationship.

My body is seasonal and relational. It changes as the plants and people and weather systems shift around and through it. Sometimes it need bitter herbs and ascetism. But often it doesn’t benefit from another elimination diet. Another ten day fast. Often is benefits from maximalism and mess. From delicious food shared with loved ones at a table set with beeswax candles and fresh roses. It needs more microbes, more dirt, more hands kneading the communal dough. It needed to touch and to be touched. To embrace. To run full speed downhill. I needed to use my body for love. For dancing. For joy. I needed to prove to my hands, my arms, my feet, my hips, my belly, my breasts, that they are here for more than just pain and for illness. They are here to experience pleasure and movement. They are here to hold babies and dogs. To hold other people’s sorrow.

Many years before Covid, I began a storytelling gathering as part of the final step in an herbal apprenticeship. We were told to make a promise to the earth to honor the gifts it had given us. I promised to create communities of people who shared herbal knowledge and nontraditional medicine that can’t be pressed static as a dried flower into a book or ordered from the pharmacist. Story medicine that needed to be passed in boats of breath overs dinner table oceans of shared offerings. These gatherings showed me that it wasn’t only physical illness that could be softened by embodied joy and community. Emotional distress was also cushioned and alchemized by communal storytelling and food-sharing. Everyone brought a bottle of wine, a passed-down family dish, a subjectivity flavored by their particular ecosystems and experiences. Topics that typically trigger shame and discomfort were allowed to mellow and move held within the ritual of food sharing and friendship. How do you talk about grief? About abortion? About rape? About terminal illness? You talk about it with flowers, with friends, with champagne, with candlelight, with fresh-baked cookies, with bawdy jokes, with grief-sweetened tears that are allowed to fall and flow into another person’s story, another person’s open hands.

I have a new prayer. I don’t want my healing be work and I don’t want it to be private. I don’t want it to benefit only me. I want it to leak. To overflow.

I want my healing to be a lemon-lit living room with the bay window open, bossanova pulsing from the record player, a new couple swaying in the corner, a pair of friends playfully debating on the dilapidated velvet loveseat. Make my healing the kitchen filled with the scent of a roasting chicken, crackle of rosemary, a child come in the backdoor with a handful of daisies, still dangling roots. Make my healing the strangers stepping outside into the orchard, constellations of fireflies fluxing in the shadows, stars stippled across the inky July sky. Let my healing be their easy intimacy, their first fumbling kiss. Make my healing the group of people seated around the fire in the backyard, trading ghost stories, secretly hoping to summon something miraculous from the gloaming. Make my healing a joy that leaks out of my life into the life of all my loved ones, my family members, my friends. Make my healing contagious and outrageous. Make my healing a party everyone is invited to.


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Thank you for such a timely piece! It hit home for this healing person. Joy here I come!



Monday, October 6, 2025

River focus

   The Hillsborough River, Temple Terrace FL

Family members, good friends, used to live on the banks of the Hillsborough River, and welcomed us to use their canoe. So on Thanksgiving Friday one year, my son and grandson and I did.


My digital camera was carefully carried as I sat in the prow of the boat.

Yes that was my season of red dyed hair! 2011, I believe.


It's amazing how quiet and peaceful a river is which has an interstate or two zooming close by.

It was wearing my shirt from the last place I'd been canoeing...several years before that. I haven't done such again. Will and  I give the same goofy smiles!


A bit later I visited the Hillsborough River in 2019, the year before my heart attack. But I traveled a lot in 2019, going to Colorado in the summer, twice to Florida, then Ohio that fall. And of course then there was the pandemic the next year also! I don't think I've ever had COVID. At least all the tests say not.


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Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.

EDITH WHARTON



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FYI

Disney saw more than 1.7 million total paid streaming cancellations during the 6 days they shut down Kimmel. The total includes Disney+, Hulu and ESPN. AMAZING!!

There are now over 2,200 peaceful protests planned for October 18. This is the most ever. HELL YES!


Sunday, October 5, 2025

More changes in life

 

The front of my doctor's office in Black Mountain.

I was visiting him last Monday (a week) and then on Thursday I received several notices that the business is closing in November. 

So I quickly made an appointment with a doctor's office that I had gone to before this one became my medical home. I am so sad to lose these dear care-givers...who I've gotten to know pretty well over many years. The office was just down the street from me also, so very convenient when I felt bad.

In other doctoring news, I saw a specialist to figure out whether or not I have a blood cancer, known as multiple meylanoma. I was diagnosed with neuropathy in my legs, without any known cause, so this is one of the causes to check out. So more tests will be run, and probably the new doc will be the one following up on things eventually.

I see the neurologist about essential tremors in my hands, and the pulmonologist about bronchietasis, and then have my veins in my legs given ultra-sounds before the end of this month. Dermatologist is next month. My friend has named these specialists B's Team.

And yesterday when I was going to go to market for fresh fish, I had a flat tire waiting for me in the parking lot. The insurance road side service was quick and efficient. I already needed to purchase 2 new tires, and this one had picked up a nail apparently. No fresh fish this week. I'm driving around on that little donut tire, and staying off the interstate till new tires are on the car. 

The flat.



From the internet


The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist." -Maria Montessori, educator (1870-1952)


The view from my windows last fall




The world is a place where the extraordinary can sit just beside the ordinary with the thinnest of boundaries.

JODI PICOULT


Change is brought about because ordinary people do extraordinary things.

Barack Obama

Saturday, October 4, 2025

Sepia and critters

First let's meet my Saturday's Critter:


Meet Winston. He was friendly and well behaved, but moved so fast I was surprised he was in focus!


Four Sisters Bakery has added these cheerful umbrellas.


It's time for Sepia Saturday! Miscellaneous old photos today.



1976 biosphere fire Montreal -learning the hard way that acetate doesn't make for good construction material.


Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid aka Paul Newman and Robert Redford




1899 Historical photo of the tree known as the “Grizzly Giant”in the Mariposa Grove in Yosemite National Park 3000 years old - probably the date at that time!



Swannanoa NC when the Beacon Blanket Factory was the biggest employer, and all these buildings are now gone. The huge blanket factory building had been brought from New England brick by brick, and was for many years the main employer in the area...but it burned after it had closed, just a few years before I moved here.

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To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation. 
-Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, scientist and philosopher (1742-1799)




Friday, October 3, 2025

Asters at the lake

 Flowers!


Symphyotrichum, New England Asters with Goldenrod


Lake Tomahawk

Sharing with Floral Friday Fotos.


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The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it.

SRI NISARGADATTA MAHARAJ



Thursday, October 2, 2025

Picnic spot survived the flood waters

 











I met friends here for picnic lunches a couple of summers ago. Now I can't locate those posts! Mmm, strange. It was good to be in the shade, I do remember, so must have been in the height of summer. Sitting by the little creek was lovely also.

And I know I took some photos.

Sharing with Thankful Thursday

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Make all decisions from pure love and the world will change.

Wednesday, October 1, 2025

October is here!

 


Rabbit rabbit!


I was sitting at my desk at 11:02 am yesterday when I heard a sound that's been missing over a year. A train whistle at the nearby crossing of Blue Ridge Rd. Oh that will be such a nice thing to return to. But the tracks that were damaged going east over the Old Fort pass and continental divide will take a bit longer to repair, I imagine.




Orlando Basturo, Cuban artist

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How does the moon cut her hair?
She Eclipse It.