A quarter of a year: debilitating, connecting

Sobbing on the floor: On days when I don’t get even a half hour, 30 minutes to engage with something worthwhile, it is truly heartbreaking.

Head, heart and hara. It’s an old framing yet deeply relevant to your-my-our condition. If you are like me and our modern world mindsets you’ll tend to privilege head—making sense of ourselves and everything around us cognitively and logically. For us all, stepping into new ways of being, for flourishing through meta-crisis, entwining hearts and haras again in our cultures seems essential. 

Head

3 months ago I literally ended up on the floor and I’ve been thrown thrown there pretty much every day since. I’m often significantly incapacitated during this and that leaves plenty of time reaching for logical explanations—allopathic analysis, doctors and myself, trying to disentangle what happened to me post vaccination.

In some ways the complexity of interactions and symptoms in me mirrors our world. There is no one label that fits more than about seventy percent of what I experience and feel. Similarly, to label our meta-crises as based in climate change, inequity, colonization, consumption or biodiversity overlooks the deeply entangled interactions of all of these and our own agency—as individuals we matter.

Heart

I matter, all the doctors around me step well past dispassionate tests and machine imaging. You-our-my world comes with huge emotional pieces—our hearts are pulled and guide us in many directions. At a personal level this is very sharp for me—suddenly finding myself unable to engage with most things, regularly forced to do nothing hurts, hurts a lot. 

Clearly it is not just me. You-I-we care about all sentient species. There are existential threats to so many of these from the meta-crises around us. The pain, loss and suffering from this is real for us and surfacing that in our hearts helps.

Hara

Which is a call to power, our hara’s and gut instinct. In all our analyses, certainly the western medical sort as they scan me, interpret results, draw more blood for further tests and try and fit complex symptoms to known frames and diagnostic names, we’re partly leaning on our intuitive insights. 

I certainly am and—as an extreme outlier, you could calculate the odds of what may have happened to me as 1 in 50 billion—perhaps it is time for more power, more hara, more intuitive exploration alongside the evidence and feelings. 

There is agency here in connecting past our crises even while deeply embedded in them and disabled by them. While my experience is immediate and personal it intimately connects with our global and kosmos cares and hopes. It offers some capability and capacity to feel the pain of multi-sentient-species loss, climate emergency and extending inequity more ably, deeply and usefully.

Your-my-our hearts 

Me: I usually get to do one thing a day, one piece that involves cognitive effort, reading, writing or talking to a group of people, for between 30 to 90 minutes.

On days when I don’t get even that, even a half hour to engage with something worthwhile, it is truly heartbreaking. 

It leaves me in tears. It has left me sobbing on the floor on more than one occasion. Even just writing this is a powerful experiences, those feelings are surfacing and yet crying is cathartic. 

Quite possibly doing this with our world will help too. Grief coexists with beauty. For example see Hope and disappointment: simultaneous possibilities? here> on those pieces together in a tropical climate, on climate and coral reefs

This is not abstract. For me I’m living with searing body sensations—floating, spinning and endorphin-adrenaline like rushes. Every once in a while it gets extreme. I climb into bed and can feel like I’m literally hanging onto the bed, shooting rivulets running through me and out the walls as I merge with æther. 

Your immediate may be less extreme? However, you-I-all of us have a felt sense and understanding flowing through us, as an entangled emotional experience resolving as feelings of our whole world systems, life supports and interdependent beings all around us in crises.

Your-my-our heads

But surely there’s a diagnosis for me? Well, yes and no. The story weaves and ducks, like any good story does. Our lives do too. The intricate ecosystems around us—relationships, ecologies, universes—do as well.

A short version of this story is I’m not great yet there are many silver linings and insights in this space. I’m laughing as that fits with the theme of this written story too. All is not well in Gaia and many facets of this-her-him-it including across intolerance, injustice and inequity. Yet we must be learning with this.

3 months later, after my first crash, after the vax, I can pick some patterns in what happens to me. I have some probable allopathic diagnoses, names for what’s occurring and what happened, and I have a few strategies that show promise as some viable workarounds. Moreover, the crazy porous boundaries of myself, a connected felt sense of quintessence, are surely offering something. A teacher? And what are we all learning together?  

A longer version of where I am at follows—concrete and kosmocontineo across head, heart and hara: Part 2 Western medical logic here>