Anxiety and Fear

A complex topic I would like to research is anxiety and fear, pretty much the same things. I was talking with another nurse yesterday who said when she was in nursing school, she was taught that anxiety is the root of all psychiatric illnesses. Not all I would argue, but certainly it has been the obvious underlying cause of several problems I have witnessed in my work setting lately - a conversion disorder, a specific phobia, and is almost always related to depression. Many habits, ritualistic behaviors, and drug and alcohol abuse are to cover or avoid anxieties. Important decisions are unwittingly made based on fear. The Bible in one of its pithy understatements addressed it this way: "God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and of a sound mind." (2 Timothy 1:7) i.e. fear is in direct opposition to a sound mind or sanity. I like to ask my hospitalized patients what is it they fear. Sometimes they know or at least have thought of it - but often not. Anyway it is a good place to start looking when trying to understand what is going on in a person's head.

The fairest of them all

When I went to Lowe's to buy my tomato plants on a Monday morning in spring, I found they had all been sold on Sunday except for two scraggly plants left to wither and die in their peat pots. I took pity on one, bought it, kept it from the heat in the car and verbally nourished it on the way home. Then I gave it a big gulp of water, let it absorb and placed it in a nice hole in my garden. "You will grow to be a big, beautiful plant," I whispered. It took time to establish roots but then started growing by leaps and bounds. Now this fine specimen is my most prolific tomato bearer. With encouragement and belief in its possibility, this plant, a living thing, became strong and thrived. Analogous?

Happy Birthday Little Brother

I knew joy beyond measure fifty-three years ago today. About eight months before, I was excused from my fifth grade class because of a surprise visit to the principal's office from my mother. But it was good news. She had just been to the doctor's office to find out she was pregnant and couldn't wait until I got home to tell me. Later I learned that she had wanted another child for a long time and finally...it happened. We spent most of the time from then on talking about what to name the baby, and maternity clothes, and how her body was changing shape, and also preparing for the new arrival. Then in the wee small hours of August 6, 1955, I was awakened and whisked off to a neighbor's house to wait it out. When Daddy called in the early afternoon to say I had a little brother, nothing could contain my happiness! I went from door to door proclaiming the most wonderful news event ever! The next day, as I was too young to legally visit, Daddy sneaked me up what I think was the Presbyterian fire escape so I could see him snugly lying in the hospital bassinet. O happy day! When "the baby" - as Rob was called for many months - was brought home, I could at long last hold him, and sing to him and gaze upon him endlessly. I am so appreciative of the way my mother and daddy let me be a part of the wonderful event. I think it put an extra dab of glue in the whole bonding thing for me. Even now, if someone asks, "Are you and your brother close?" I tell them though we don't see each other that much, I have felt close, bonded from the very beginning.

Scenes from a Butterfly Garden

On the way home last week we stopped by a nature place in Virginia that had a butterfly garden aflutter with many of these pretty white butterflies and a couple of huge monarchs. One small "defoliaged" area had a few caterpillars like this fellow who looks like a train heading west over rough terrain. A web source said it will become a black swallowtail.

Coffee

If I had tried coffee before, I don't remember, but my first cup was the finest. The beans were from Kenya and had been roasted to perfection sometime within the twenty-four hours prior. I took out a handful, ground them in my Ditting, and brewed them the recommended conical drip way. It was my "crack" experience and I have been looking for another perfect hit ever since. My childhood and young adult homes placed little importance on coffee. Usually it came with a long shelf life, crystallized in a jar. But when I was in my thirties and sipped my first uniquely tasty cup, I learned not only to drink it but also about it. Coffee was coming out - of jars and percolaters - in the late seventies/early eighties and a certain elitism was forming around it. Where were the best beans grown? How were they graded? How was the best coffee made? French press vs slow drip? What temperature should the water be? How to store it? Which roast was preferable? How to recognize certain aromas? Coffee is now the biggest of businesses, one of the top three traded commodities, I have been reading in Javatrekker by Dean Cycon, the fair trade coffee guru and owner of an organic coffee business. Large plantations and small indigenous villages in over seventy countries grow the trees that produce the berries that are harvested, cleaned, fermented and dried, that we depend on today. Since that first elegant cup, I am still a bit of a coffee snob in my heart though I drink the bitter commercially packaged stuff for the drug effect when I am at work at the hospital. How kind of them to provide the stmulant free of charge. At home though I continue the search for a really good cupajava. This morning's coffee, beans from a Rainforest Alliance brand, was decent and satisfying and will send me on my way, but I couldn't help but wonder which part of the world grew the beans and whose little brown fingers picked the red berries that eventually flavored my cup.