In the Beginning...

Bouncing around this afternoon, trying to gather a shitty day into a tidy package to be thrown away later tonight. belly is empty, head is full of all the stuff I should get done and thinking of N.'s advice to do something after class to de-stress before I try to study. sounds good - like get out of bed if you can't sleep within a half hour so that you won't associate the bed with tossing and turning and kvetching, but with soothing, silent sleeping. mmmm, sleeping. I worry, though (of course), that i'm giving myself an out, and that's the last thing this procrastinator needs - I used to tell myself I could read fiction while I ate lunch, and then I'd get up and do my chores, but instead, I'd keep getting up and get more food, and lunch lasted two more hours.

I started with the newsletter from my women's group, timed for Imbolc, which happens to coincide with the full moon tonight. There's a note in my WeMoon asking how I can honor this full moon in Leo (my sun sign), with the barest buds of Imbolc? To me, I think the answer is in all the stuff I've done in just the last few weeks - big changes that were tiny at the time, things that represent a lot of work in the past and microscopic shifts of perspective, and then bing, the whole knot falls apart in my hands. Finally figured out how I could shift the problem I had with arranging kid custody - I stopped ending the conversation when the kid's dad tried to sidestep. magic! Looked at this whole "Be a Good Person" thought spiral from a totally new perspective with a workshop on Byron Katie's Work - and realized that when I'm invested in how bad someone else sucks, I'm waiting for them to stop sucking to start Being a Good Person. poof!

so, anyway, newsletter, yada yada, good stuff, but I want a copy of that poem by Alice Lovelace. She performed it at the beginning of the Praises for the World concert/event in Atlanta a coupla years ago, and I can still hear her voice ringing. In hunting Alice on the web, I find Project South, which I need to know more about. These days, everything is spinning in terms of nursing school - can I work this into a project for an Honors class, can I take my Nutrition book to the elementary school and answer questions from the kids about why mama says some foods are good and some foods are bad for you, can we do some sort of Healthy Behaviors event at the school (with a much much cooler name than that). My disciplines class is really motivating me to think about why I wanted to do this, what I'd like to do as a nurse, and how many of the same reasons that I rejected nursing as a high school senior still hold true. I have this weird sense of pressure to get all those things wrapped up and eradicated before I graduate - gender roles bullshit, racial disparity in education from a myriad of causes, socioeconomic hierarchial limits. So, I'm reading this site in those terms - how can I get in with these folks and learn the stuff they're laying out, with the plans to apply it to prevention nursing, community health, equity of information kinds of ways. And, as always when I'm reading very carefully phrased mission statements and such - what is it exactly that they do?

So, on the eve of Imbolc, with the barest buds of spring, I know I've got another six weeks of winter (at least) and another three week Mercury retrograde period to get through before the action of spring really begins. I also know that the seeds I'm planting now are what will bloom then (hopefully), so I'm going to spend some time thinking about what I'm flinging out into the field.

I ended up with the last few paragraphs of this speech by Alice Lovelace, given this time last year about some stuff that's close to my heart (the role of artists for change) and something coming up this summer apparently that I want to know more more more about.
From Chaos to Clarity: The Price to Be Paid by Alice Lovelace

now, i will go do my Nutrition homework and start studying for Health Assessment.