LJ Idol Week Something: Blood Harmony
Blood Harmony
The hot water from the shower feels so good. The whole bathroom is steamy and you are all rinsed and clean, but you doesn’t want to move. Your headache is finally easing a bit. Maybe you’ll be functional today after all. Maybe your sinuses just needed some steam.
When the headaches are like this, it’s all you can do to stand up. Every once in a while, you read up on migraines, from actual articles based on science, to memes and clickbait on social media. But you only get a headache this bad once every couple of years or so, so you’ve never actually been diagnosed with a migraine.
The pain feels like synapses firing in chaos. You remember a meme that recommended putting feet and legs in a steaming tub and ice on the back of your neck as a surefire migraine cure. As if exposing the blood flow to two disparate temperatures is some kind of reset button. You know you’ve got a bag of frozen okra in the freezer that’s probably expired, but the thought of placing it directly where there’s a lot of blood flow just seems uncomfortable and wasteful and crazy. As if the discordant neurons firing in your head could somehow be shocked back into harmony by making blood temperature discordant instead.
You breathe in the steamy air and think about a story you heard on a science program once where someone restored Parkinsonian mouse brains to order from tangled protein woe by exposing them to light sources at a rhythmic frequency. It wasn’t actually as simple as that, but you wonder what about your own harmonies is so out of synch to be causing this pain today. Light sensitivity is definitely a factor. Maybe you just haven’t got the energy to process the strong signals of the bright light.
***
You lean against rock outcrop, aware that it still holds warmth from the sun that set not long ago. By morning it will be holding the night’s chill. But for now it’s a warmer-than-air embrace if you squeeze yourself against it. Muscles in your forearms and shoulders let you know where the pockets of lactic acid still burn as you squirm into a new position, soaking warmth through your layers. It was a good day, despite a few bloody knuckles that burn as you flex them.
For a little while your rhythm and the rhythm of the earth were one. You moved smoothly across a rock face not far from the one you sit atop now, making progress that felt, between a few of the bolts, effortless. Harmonic. Your mind didn’t question your trust in your belayer. You didn’t think about whether a fall would be scary. For part of the day, there wasn’t fear. Just the joy of upward trending motion, the rough texture of the southern sandstone and striving along the rock. There was the warm sun and the breeze off the lake below- the feel of the breeze and the sound of it through the leaves. The best seasons for climbing here are spring and fall, the liminal seasons. The seasons when the breeze is a harbinger of change.
Sometimes it’s hard to connect and feel yourself a part of this wide beautiful world, but you’re finding that these simple climbing and camping days, where you can disconnect from anything that isn’t on the pitch in front of you for a time, recenter you within it.
And friends are an important part of it, too. You aren’t just soaking up the residual sun-warmth in the rock now. Your friend is playing his music here, sharing it with the group you climbed with today. You’re all a little swept up in the harmony, sharing a bottle of wine and the last of a hobo’s feast of a dinner.
“C’mon and sing with me,” your friend half shouts and you rack your brain as you pick out the notes he’s starting to strum. What song that he does can you contribute energy to that’ll make it a happier thing for everyone?
The hot water from the shower feels so good. The whole bathroom is steamy and you are all rinsed and clean, but you doesn’t want to move. Your headache is finally easing a bit. Maybe you’ll be functional today after all. Maybe your sinuses just needed some steam.
When the headaches are like this, it’s all you can do to stand up. Every once in a while, you read up on migraines, from actual articles based on science, to memes and clickbait on social media. But you only get a headache this bad once every couple of years or so, so you’ve never actually been diagnosed with a migraine.
The pain feels like synapses firing in chaos. You remember a meme that recommended putting feet and legs in a steaming tub and ice on the back of your neck as a surefire migraine cure. As if exposing the blood flow to two disparate temperatures is some kind of reset button. You know you’ve got a bag of frozen okra in the freezer that’s probably expired, but the thought of placing it directly where there’s a lot of blood flow just seems uncomfortable and wasteful and crazy. As if the discordant neurons firing in your head could somehow be shocked back into harmony by making blood temperature discordant instead.
You breathe in the steamy air and think about a story you heard on a science program once where someone restored Parkinsonian mouse brains to order from tangled protein woe by exposing them to light sources at a rhythmic frequency. It wasn’t actually as simple as that, but you wonder what about your own harmonies is so out of synch to be causing this pain today. Light sensitivity is definitely a factor. Maybe you just haven’t got the energy to process the strong signals of the bright light.
***
You lean against rock outcrop, aware that it still holds warmth from the sun that set not long ago. By morning it will be holding the night’s chill. But for now it’s a warmer-than-air embrace if you squeeze yourself against it. Muscles in your forearms and shoulders let you know where the pockets of lactic acid still burn as you squirm into a new position, soaking warmth through your layers. It was a good day, despite a few bloody knuckles that burn as you flex them.
For a little while your rhythm and the rhythm of the earth were one. You moved smoothly across a rock face not far from the one you sit atop now, making progress that felt, between a few of the bolts, effortless. Harmonic. Your mind didn’t question your trust in your belayer. You didn’t think about whether a fall would be scary. For part of the day, there wasn’t fear. Just the joy of upward trending motion, the rough texture of the southern sandstone and striving along the rock. There was the warm sun and the breeze off the lake below- the feel of the breeze and the sound of it through the leaves. The best seasons for climbing here are spring and fall, the liminal seasons. The seasons when the breeze is a harbinger of change.
Sometimes it’s hard to connect and feel yourself a part of this wide beautiful world, but you’re finding that these simple climbing and camping days, where you can disconnect from anything that isn’t on the pitch in front of you for a time, recenter you within it.
And friends are an important part of it, too. You aren’t just soaking up the residual sun-warmth in the rock now. Your friend is playing his music here, sharing it with the group you climbed with today. You’re all a little swept up in the harmony, sharing a bottle of wine and the last of a hobo’s feast of a dinner.
“C’mon and sing with me,” your friend half shouts and you rack your brain as you pick out the notes he’s starting to strum. What song that he does can you contribute energy to that’ll make it a happier thing for everyone?