Reading History in Everyday Ramblings

I just like this random picture of a private garden I took on a walk a few weeks ago. It has so much character. Lately I have been a little behind on noting as there have been things to do and distractions.

With the heat, (which they expect to break tonight), I have been focusing all my outside activity to as close to dawn as I can make it and the plan was to go down to the community garden soon after sunrise and spend an hour or so doing the things that need doing.

But my body had other ideas today. Three times a week now I am teaching twice a day, even if one class is only a half hour, it is still movement, and I have been doing this half hour resiliency training on top of that with all kinds of unusual movements, weights and bands and blocks and getting 12,000 steps a day and at least 20 minutes of cardio in there somewhere.

I prep for my longer classes too, and then there are chores. I try to mix these things up. Walking to the grocery is about 9,000 steps. And a few days, like yesterday, I skip the resiliency training. But still, over time, I get tired and sore, and the heat makes that more apparent.

Like the idea of taking a break when walking, I am taking days off, of at least some of the things. Today it was the early trip to the garden. I woke up zonked. The cats, wanting to encourage me to get up, scratched in the litter box and then tipped it over and knocked things over on the workstation and did little controlled leaps over me like the cow and the moon.

They do not like their routine disturbed.

And yet they adapt with ease.

This is all good to know. That I can still get major benefits out of being active but it is okay to tone it down a bit.

But the other thing, (can I just say), is that the news is horrid. I burst into tears yesterday when I heard about the earthquake in Haiti. And oh gosh, Afghanistan! And that isn’t even getting to the Delta surge and the fact that our Governor has called up our National Guard to help with all the rural hospitals here that are full of patients, more hospitalizations than ever here during this whole long deadly saga.

Here I am in my little bubble, worried about ripening tomatoes staying on the plants one day too late (granted in the middle of a drought and heat event brought on by climate change) while wildfires rage and people all over the world are losing their homes, their livelihoods, and their lives. Some of those like the female judges in Afghanistan must get out because they will be killed for being women.

There is so much tone-deafness going on right now out there. It seems like very few people seem to know how to strike the right note. (What was Obama thinking with that birthday party?) On so many levels.

And I find the evident cruelty in our current world incomprehensible. I was a wild and radical young person and then I think I went into a kind of I must survive and work trance. I appear to be coming out of that trance now.

It is one thing to read history. It is a whole other thing to live it.

Oh, baby are we living it now.

Last updated August 16, 2021