The Tum Chronicles... pondering my navel as it were. Weight or selflove...

Looking at my tummy, I am remembering that it used to create lips and eyebrows, fingers and spinal colums, brains and hearts. I am realizing that it used to house life. That the soft pulse of my veins kept my offspring feeling warm, alive and safe in there. It used to bulge to the size it is now because it had life burgeoning in it, eager to be born, definite in the eventuality that a birth was to occur. It housed and created three human beings.

I am realizing with the changes in my life, that I have moved myself into that warm, alive, safe space and that I am having a 'startover', a rebirth of myself. It is the same size as when I harboured life in there, but now I am the life in that space. I think that by working at CEDRIC and learning that I am not dealing with an eating disorder but a series of unfortunate circumstances, has led me to understanding better about once again having the tummy I used to have, back twenty years ago, when I used to carry my babies, prior to their birth. This tummy today, which has increased in size since the birth of my final baby, Grace, is now at maximum capacity for me. It has been creeping up in size and girth in spite of my lame efforts at eating wisely and trying to keep moving enough to avoid it. I've been dealt blows and benefits that have combined to affect my physiology because eating well and menopause, combined with knee / leg injuries have rendered me a much larger woman than I intended to be, or am comfortable with and that is what I am addressing now.

At 6 feet tall, my water weight has fluctuated 30lbs at any given day. Once I started exhibiting the swelling legs and ankles of edema in my 40's, I knew that I was going to have problems if I didn't get a handle on it. Root compounds from my chinese medicine doctor helped, but I stopped looking at scales as a result, because they could rarely depict an accurate representation of the state of my health. This caused me to subtly put on weight, for the fat to creep on a little at a time while I tried to get my feet under me. Its so disconcerting now that scales don't even go high enough to tell me what I weigh.

I look down at this tummy and think how I can get out of the shell of protection that I have wrapped around myself and realize that it is almost time for my own rebirth, for my own eventual inevitability that I will become chrysalis and butterfly in the imminent future. Enter hesitation and anxiety at losing the safe little nook I've tucked myself away in. I counter with the thoughts of new friends who don't let me withdraw. I remember yesterday when I tried to leave early from a monthly craft luncheon with a group of new girlfriends and got told to sit right down, there's no escaping, you're one of us now... lol

So now, as I sit in my solituded, tv on in the background with an episode of 'Hoarders', of all things, and I realize that like the people on the show, I'm hoarding my self, inside myself.

This brings me to the next question, and I'm wondering if I wait till the birth decides itself when it's ready, or if I take it upon myself to birth me at a time of my own choosing.

And I guess that why I am writing this, in wondering if there are any ideas or insights that my wonderful friends and family who read this note, can share with me.

I have two months in which to initiate changes that both honour me and create the steps I need to let go and let Goddess, to break out of this shell of comforting pudge and confront the things that have been holding me back, while my better half is out of town on a teaching course, clear across the continent. Shall I strike while the iron is hot?

I have had medical tests that reassure me that I am not diabetic, don't have heart issues, no cancers, no debilitating diseases. What I can do anything about, I will. There is a trauma specialist who is going to consider the pros and cons of my harbouring sharp shrapnel against my carotid artery, when I can finally get an appointment, at the end of a great long waiting list. Same with the orthopedic surgeon who will decide what my knees need. I feel caught in a conundrum. I can't get breast reduction surgery or have my knees fixed until I lose about 150 lbs, I can't lose 150 lbs very easily if I can't do any weight bearing exercise that involves my knees.

The bright light in all of this, besides that in spite of being morbidly obese, i am healthy. I was told by the doc's locum that my ACL was not torn completely and has since healed, but are showing stress because of having to carry my weight. Hopefully I will be able to get a handle on my weight now that I'm taking thyroid synthetic meds, She also said that I will likely feel my metabolism speed up and will notice that weight loss comes easier to me now. :)

So, do I take the proverbial bull by the horns and initiate my own rebirth, radically changing my habits and coping strategies, or do I approach it organically and let time take its course, so that I come to end of packing it on and turn it around simply by becoming more involved in the world, in getting more things done, in being more active... just asking...

Disintegrating Humanity -Plastic pthalate dispersal increases as built in obscellescence kicks in

I was posting to a friend's Facebook status this morning. She had put up a video of a home in South America made almost totally from recycled plastic bottles. It brought to mind a huge event facility I saw that had been constructed in China as the outcome of a recycling contest among architects. What both buildings failed to recognize was that the bottles were exposed to daily sunshine, the very thing that causes the built in wear out date to speed up, the very thing that makes the bottles leech particulates that include some very harsh toxins. Pthalates are renowned to have the ability to fool the human physiology to thinking that its being inundated with female hormones. This is causing a lot of problems in sterility around the world, and although I don't have any peer reviewed articles to refer you to to promote my claims, I encourage you to do your own homework on pthalates to learn as much as you possibly can about the world we live in these days.

Pthalates are contributing to women's issues from cervical cancer to menopausal symptoms, they are feminizing fetuses in the womb, causing boys to have a smaller testicular region, and decreasing sperm production. That's just what I remember from off the top of my head from what I've been learning about it via my research.

People are eager to change their lives and many have thought that by recycling plastic items, they are doing the right thing. Keeping waste out of the landfills is a good idea, but not if keeping them around and breathing their decay is detrimental to our overal health. Some strip grocery bags and then crochet this 'plarn' into shopping bags. A nice idea, and one my Auntie Nora used to do for decades, being an early free thinker and practical prairie woman. But what she died of could have had a lot to do with her constant handling of plastic as she sat day after day making her pretty shopping bags out of bread and grocery bags.

Plastic shopping bags can be filled with a lot of weight and then are carried fair distances. Palms are sweating and straining to deal with the weight, pores are wide open as the disintegrating plastic leeches pthalates through its oily particulate residue that is ingested immediately into the bloodstream through the sweat glands.

Same goes for holey soles and other knock off brands of the rubberized plastic sandals. You wear them barefoot, you sweat in them with all your weight on them, straining the plastic, ingesting that same toxin bearing oil that emits from the disintegrating plastic under your feet as your hands do from the shopping bag made from recycled plastic. If reflexology is the technique of helping rebalance the body through related regions of the feet, what is wearing hot holey soles on a steamy summer day doing through those same feet doing to your system?

How about your shower curtain? You are likely thinking a plastic shower curtain cheers up the bathroom and protects it. But what happens in a shower. Heat and steam. How are you protected from particulates that are carried by the heat and steam when you are naked with all pores wide open? Where is your nose in that heat and steam. By the ceiling. Where the the most of the steam carries the particulates.

Like I said, we don't think these things through.

Even in the case of sex toys. The stuff that makes plastic pliable is the toxic stuff that creates pthalate exposure in our bodies. Even porn is no longer any fun to watch as I now only see young women acting like breeders who wouldn't likely be doing it if they had any other self respecting way to get money, having softened plastic in the form of dildos thundered in and out of them, and where? Why, where they plan on having their new life emerge from someday...  which carries me to the use of disposable menstrual gear, all of which is plastic and chemicals...

So... how are you going to focus on your home now that you see plastic in a different light?

Dea said that when they build their plastic greenhouse using bottles that they will be enclosing it in portland cement to keep the narsties away, with ventilation holes in safe places... What will you do?