Northern Mississippi through a Child's Eyes

1978, Picking Cotton near the farm my father grew-up on

1983, this is a photo I took of Grandmother Moss when I was 8 years-old.

1983, Grandmother Moss, Christmas

Clear Memory

West Pier (burnt down), Brighton, U.K., September 8, 1995

When I was home in November 2012 and experiencing what I kindly referred to as my near-enlightenment, my mind rushed back through all of my timeline unlocking all of my memories. Then, it rushed forward to the strangeness of the present. I don't wish for anyone to ever have to relive their life in that way, but it did flood back a lot of the great memories in crystal clear detail, complete with sound and smell memories. I was literally there, in my mind, with a friend in his old car with the glass of ice water on the dashboard. I was there on the pebble beach of Brighton perplexed by the strange swimming pool.  I was walking the pedestrian path through Bournemouth to Boscombe, walking past the Salvation Army Hall.

Now, some of the memories have been rearranged and refiled and are not just like yesterday, as I think they should be. But, do you remember a golden Buddha at a closed drive-thru restaurant in Gainesville?

Debbie, age 20, Royal Pavilion, Brighton, England, September 8, 1995

BT Phonebox, Brighton, September 8, 1995  - Quite a contrast to the phoneboxes of Bournemouth.

Chaos of Sound and Sound of Mind

crispy, dry leaves

Over a year and half later, and my mind often revolves around the events of late 2012:  strange feelings of unwell, couple of days in and out of daymares, hand-balances and arm balances and my near-enlightenment, imprisonment and the Alliance Health Center.

I returned home with a lot of hope.  I came home to a world that was changed and chaotic.  

My parents argued over placing Christmas tree lights on the tree.  So, in the hope of silencing them, I volunteered to untangle and place Christmas lights on a Christmas tree for the first time in my life.  I was thin and unsteady, but decided it did not matter.  I could not explain how hard it is to dangle upon a ladder with an aorta pulse swaying your whole body off balance.  I wanted to make the world better.  I wanted to be better.  I knew I could not explain how unstable my body was; it might be mistook for my brain.

This was to be the first Christmas with the first grandchild for my parents.  But, my youngest sister and her family had become estranged from our piece of the family.

Christmas Tree 2012

Baking Christmas treats to try to prove my cognitive function and to regain my patience and composure.  The whole world is more frustrating;  I'm absolutely overwhelmed by everything.  Sound is the most disturbing.  It is all amplified beyond my belief.  I just want to hear the natural world as it was.  I cry that I am lost in this loud place.  The subtlety of tree leaves moving in the wind, of crickets, of cats trudging gingerly through fallen dry leaves, are lost when all of them become exaggerated.  I hear electricity for the first time in my life.  I must be crazy, but I test my reality.  I plug the portable DVD player in, and I unplug the portable DVD player.  I hear the static, the charge.  I do this again.  I confirm it.  I am overwhelmed.  I jump at a sound that's too loud.  It is truly terrifying.  It is nearly impossible to tell where sound is coming from when it is all louder.  Is there someone in the garden or across the street?  I don't know what is wrong with me, but this is not something anyone should ever have to manage.  You can learn coping skills, but you cannot manage or control the modern or natural worlds.  

To see is not to hear, but we know what sound belongs with what image.

When you live in survival mode for weeks as I did, it is a great challenge to be patient and understanding with other people.  I just can't put up with squabbling over little things.  I can't deal with people who catastrophize everyday events.   I hold myself to a higher standard. I want to embody la petite yogini, who honors the yamas and niyamas. I struggle with my own bitterness and wonder what went wrong with my karma. Discovering and experiencing a darker side of humanity and a new level of ignorance is very difficult to come to terms with as my reality/our reality.

sleepless at home November 2012

sleepless at home November 2012

In November of 2012, I just knew I was feeling strange.  I could not sleep after November 10.  It was an odd reality for someone who spent previous years lethargic and sleeping at least 9 hours a day and needing a nap.  So, I sat in my bedroom with a restless, strange mind.  I thought meditation could calm my mind and rest my body.  I did not understand not sleeping and what it would become.  From restlessness, my mind turned to overly active and playful:  delirium?  My imagination took over where dreams would exist.  Unfortunately, an active imagination cannot change the reality of memory. 

We have all heard of "your life flashes before you eyes," but how we view this has been informed by loads of television programs and movies.  My mind did the time-warp, and it was an odd and fascinating experience which I hope will never be repeated.  I fell back through my timeline with every memory unlocked moving towards my birth.  Everything was super-realistic, as I sat on the bedroom floor where I had crumpled from exhausting myself in a hyper-dance.  Just as quickly as I fell back, I then fell forward with a rush to my head:  vvroop.  I was back in the present mind, confused and strange.  I tried calling this period near the end of November 2012 my "near enlightenment," partly because my mind and body were running and working faster than ever linking words and topics and data stored . . . Others call it my nervous breakdown.  I don't know.  I wish I could still access those notes from Biology, Trigonometry, European History, or English Literature where I scrawled in the margins. Between the energetic awakening, there were lulls where I felt lost in my bedroom suite.  I misplaced a brush, a piece of chocolate; time was incongruent.  This disturbed me immensely.

Missing time.  Missing mind.  Missing things.  Missing thoughts.

I try to write to a topic because there were so many layers to this experience, most of which were unusual for me.  I could note them.  I could put them into memory, but I could not figure out what had gone wrong with me or what had gone wrong with the world.

. . . . to have a pensieve like Professor Dumbledore

Posting from January 8, 2013 - Chapter 1: thinking in old fashioned hypertext

This story begins the night of my cousin Elizabeth's wedding, the second week of November 2012.  The wedding was outside of Hammond, Louisiana.  I did not sleep that night.  I could not remember sleeping a full night's sleep from Saturday, November 10 through about December 10 or 15.  I can't remember the first night I actually slept more than 3 hours straight.  

The night after November 10 (the 11th, I believe) I remember my mind and heart racing.  I remember dancing the dances from the Buffy episode "Once More with Feeling," which was the musical put together by Adam Shankman.  I was in my bedroom probably wearing some just below the knee length leggings.  I dance both the parts of Buffy and her younger sister Dawn.  I danced and danced.  Adam Shankman is also a judge on my favorite summer television show So You Think You Can Dance.  So, I went into a Bollywood style dance, as well.

I was having the best time of my life playing in my bedroom.

Then, I thought why is my mind working so quickly?  Why am I linking all of these memories and facts that are stored in my mind?  I am thinking in old fashioned hypertext.  Why are all of these memories of my life coming to the forefront of my mind?  Why am I thinking about experiences of my past with such great clarity?

Is this enlightenment?  I had been meditating instead of sleeping the night before (the 11th or the 12th?).

Then, I thought about one of my favorite television shows Doctor Who.  It is a science-fiction show in which the Doctor travels through time and space trying never to double back on his own timeline.

There was an episode in which a daughter is made from his DNA sample, and she skips childhood.  She dies at the end instead of regenerating - as far as he knows.  But, the show ends with her being brought back to life after The Doctor has already left and moved on to his next destination.

So, I was thinking am I a daughter lost in time and space?

Perhaps.

In the show Doctor's Daughter named Jenny does gymnastics through a laser beam grid.

I began doing what any yogini would do.  I began practicing my inversions:  handstands and armbalancing and headstands, too.  These came with greater ease than they had ever come before.

This was one of the best experiences of my life.

However, I was really hungry and thirsty, too.

All of the food and water began tasting strangely.  I felt like it was poisoned.  Some tasted, perhaps, like rat poison (no, I've never tasted that before).  Some tasted like iodine or formaldehyde.  I kept searching for water and food that tasted correctly - like how I remember.  It was very confusing.  And, I panicked at this point.

Finally, I found some dark chocolate and that was my safe food along with sardines.  I dumped the sardines in a bowl for me and a bowl for Orlan and did my best to keep us hydrated.

I worried that the cats were dying.  I worried that I was dying.

My heart was racing and beating arhythmically.    

I tried listening to my CDs and none of them sounded correctly.  They seemed all garbled and tortured and ruined.  The lyrics were changed.

Was this a living nightmare?  A day-mare? This is what it seemed to me.

One point in time I was a fabulous yogini.  The next point in time I was in a panic to save myself and all of the cats in the house.

Dad laid in his recliner with his cat Flash; she keeping watch over him.

Mom was speaking like a frightened girl who had just lost her father to cancer -- not allowed to visit him in the hospital and say her goodbyes.

What really happened?  Perhaps my story is the truth.  It is after all my story.

The food problem freaked me out the most.  My safe foods kept becoming unsafe, tasting differently.

I'll end this posting here.  There are a lot more details and things I remember.  I'm just taking my time writing them down.  The chronology probably will never be perfect.

©2013 D. Moss