An Imperfect Orbit

“You have fungus in your brain,” she told me.  My arm had stayed strong throughout the muscle test of other causes, but collapsed pathetically at the mention of systemic yeast.  She had been sitting at an empty table during my dinner clean-up shift, so when I began to implode I sought her out instead of going inside.  Joking with him for the first time in months, on top of honey cornbread and five cookies, was too much.  She showed me a pressure point under my wrist for the heart, and as I dug into the soreness, the tears rose, but nothing she was saying connected.  I was pulled between a struggle to understand and a struggle to simply feel.

“It’s as though these states pass over me,” I began, “each with a particular flavor that infuses everything I think, feel, sense – a complete self-contained world that distorts everything it perceives.  And then in a moment it all evaporates and I’m back.  When I feel a state getting triggered, the main thing I feel is fear – fear that I’ll be trapped there and lose myself completely.”  That’s what tipped her off – a colony of yeast hijacks everything in order to be fed.  If I clear them, she promised, I will feel like a completely different person.

I went straight back to my room and started researching.  My on-line quiz for systemic yeast came back indicating a severe case.  The questions linked together everything that plagues me – irritability, depression, suppressed immune function, rashes, cravings for sweets and alcohol, fatigue, sensitivity to smells, being cold, digestive issues, weight fluctuations.  I eat one cookie or take one sip of alcohol and immediately feel a physical burn and a scattered, impulsiveness in my mind.  I always have and those who know me best see it.  The treatment to starve out the yeast is extreme, but I know I can do it.  I’ve been here before.  Nearly two years ago, it was SIBO.

I often feel like a planet gliding through space in a wide elliptical orbit – pulled in, swung around, shooting off into infinity, only to slow and gradually curve back along that familiar path.  And I orbit not one, but many bodies, the pull of each feeling stronger or weaker depending on our relative positions at each given moment.  I orbit my health, one moment feeling attentive urgency to my discomfort, relaxing into trusting moderation as I heal, and then swinging back toward vigilance as my relaxed habits trigger symptoms.  I orbit this community, security shifting to boredom and frustration, and growing into rebellion and paranoia as I align myself with distant dreams and confidence takes flight.  Then I glance back in affection and gratitude for the blessings and perfect challenges, and return back towards the heart of our galaxy.  And I orbit men – drawn by the whispered promise of depth of connection, repelled by the fear of burning up in their atmosphere, then saddened that the momentum of my journey outward may destine me to a comet’s long and lonely path.

The more I write to you, the more I become aware that I’m telling the same stories over and over, sharing the same struggles with minute adjustments in circumstance and insight.  Sometimes I feel certain a pattern is coming to an end only to find myself right back in the middle of it.  I worry that I bore you.  My pride is embarrassed that my victories seem superficial.  I wonder if this process of reflection is helpful or if I would be better off just sitting alone in silence, feeling, setting aside the need to describe, explain, find a thread of sense for comfort and direction.  Nothing in reality is linear except our stubbornly misguided minds.  So many things are in orbit around each other that nothing is fixed, nothing is predictable.  I can know there is a harmony inherent in it all, but do I need proof?  Is there any point in trying to navigate my course when my path is influenced by so many things beyond both my control and my understanding?

The only point in the universe that seems not to move is the point at the center of my core.  Everything I perceive radiates outward from there.  I can be at any point in an orbit, with the bodies around me in any position, and I am still composed of the same elements.  Still.  And composed.  Why focus on where all these stars and planets came from and what their fate will be when I can simply acknowledge I am surrounded by a dazzling display?  When I can realize we are all caught in this matrix of movement, together – disoriented, frightened, restless, amused, amazed?  All of us regard one another from our core as we sail past – whatever we think or feel about the approach and parting is irrelevant.  It changes nothing about the dance.  It merely becomes part of what we carry with us or what we leave behind.

My orbit is imperfect because I am not alone.  The force that pulls me away from what I love one moment is the same force that brings me what I need the next.  There is no judgement in it.  We are simply adrift in an ocean of abundance – the tide carrying us along towards and away from whatever we focus on.  One moment regarding a body from afar and the next realizing we have taken its place.

After almost a year of believing this community can’t honor my grief or my darkness, I watched her cry through a whole kitchen shift.  She was vacuuming, moving chairs, softly sobbing.  Her heart was breaking in my same way mine did, but she didn’t hide it.  She simply floated, beautifully fragile as dried leaves and tumbling pebbles, red-eyed and dignified and subtlety yielding.  I caught her gaze and felt the empathy rise to my throat, and told her she is not alone.  We each acknowledged her in our own way because she had surrendered.  My grief rages resentful against my weakness, my ignorance, the injustice and inconsistencies of the world.  And that energy sends comfort and connection scattering beyond my reach.

Everything in the universe, I’ve been told, including us, tends to become denser and heavier unless we stay buoyant, keep moving, open ourselves to what is coming through us.  While I was distracted by guarding my heart, my physical body was colonized and overrun by something that wasn’t me.  During these early days, the yeast will do everything they can to make me believe I need sweets and simple carbs.  It is an archetypal battle of wills – the gravity of their orbit set against mine.  It is simply the nature of the physical universe.  But it isn’t the only reality there is.  Inside my core, I am remembering what it means to feel vital in body, mind, and spirit.  What it means to not just be drawn along through space, but to make a choice from the strength of knowing we too repel as well as magnetize.

Nancy

“When I run after what I want, my days are a furnace of stress and anxiety; if I sit in my own place of patience, what I needs flows to me and without pain.  From this I understand that what I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me.  There is a great secret here for anyone who can grasp it.” – Rumi