... and moving to where the rest of the blog universe resides:

Discombobula

Come and join me there :)

My brother has been living in Balranald for the past couple of months.  (Balranald is country New South Wales, about six hours' drive from Melbourne).  He came back down to Melbourne for various chores and things he had to do, and stayed with me last night and the night before.  What a difference in his countenance from the last time I saw him.  When he left he was pinched, depressed, hulking in his skin.  Now, he's relaxed, open.  Farm life suits him.  He couldn't wait to get back there this morning, and get out of Melbourne again.  He's always hated living in Melbourne; always loved the bush.  I'm so glad he has made the move; it has been the right one.  Now, if only he could find some work.

I've always thought I'd like to live in the country, even temporarily.  Every time I get out of the city, even for a weekend, depression whacks me in the gob when I return and hit the outskirts of the city and get the first traffic light .  I'd like to see what it did to my spirit to be somewhere with heaps of wide open space.  Now, that is probably a ridiculous thing to say living in Australia, renowned for the suburban quarter-acre block.  But that is becoming a bit more of an anachronism these days.  Many of those quarter-acre blocks have been halfed and had a townhouse stuck on them, a way to some easy cash.  It feels a bit squashier now.

I know that environmentally, my love for masses and masses of space is really quite untenable, if you're going to apply the "what applies to one must apply to everyone" rule.  So lucky I live in Australia, I guess.  Because, damn it, I love space.  I love it.  I have a house with two bedrooms all to myself.  The only problem with where I live is that I feel a tad landlocked.  I don't have a great deal of garden space here, being as I am in the backyard of my landlord.  But still, the space I do have would be amazing luxury for a lot of the world's populations who slum it in cities.  I have a whole patch of grass to myself, an area that gets the morning light (it's just hit the ground running at 9am and will stay until 2pm or so; perfect time to go and recuperate into wellness in the sunlight).

My favourite house I ever lived in had 13 foot-high ceilings with massive rooms - and it felt right.  I guess I just like my architecture with a touch of the dramatic (or, alternatively, give me a rustic bush cabin.  One or the other.  But the old AV Jennings three-bedder in the middle just leaves me cold, really).

So I'm really happy for my brother.  And a bit jealous.  His dog is in heaven, being on a sheep farm that has countless old sheep bones buried all over the place, just waiting for her to dig them up and get into some maggotty goodness.  She has space to roam.  She's given up chasing the emus since she's realised they chase her back.  And eating bullants, seeing they bite.  Hopefully, once the weather heats up, she won't meet any redback spiders or snakes on her journeys.

I wanna move to the country and eat a lot of peaches.  Just as long as I could come into Melbourne once a month or so for some friendship and some reacquaintance with my town.  I do love Melbourne town.  I love the bustle, the food choices, the buildings.  But gee, it would be nice to get away from it, too.  The pace is so frenetic here we don't even notice it half the time.  Inoculated.

"There is a power in God's kindness that can literally carry you to freedom.  It's a supernatural power because there is nothing behind it to make it stand.  It stands on its own.  We have been taught to believe that the fear of God's wrath is what brings us to repentance.  Hell has been held over our heads by preachers who sincerely believe that fear is the greatest motivator to the human spirit.  Fear has gained such respect over the years that most people would attribute more power to it than to the power of kindness.  The problem with this way of thinking, is that fear pertains to the flesh, and everything of the flesh will soon pass away.  It's temporary, but kindness is eternal.  Our Father uses eternal things upon His eternal creations.  Kindness has a force behind it that literally crushes the power of fear and stimulates the hearts of His children ... His kindness is beyond the realm of reimbursement; it transports the human heart into a sphere where nothing but bare acceptance is possible.  Only when the heart is touched can this be accomplished.  Kindness is the only means to touching the heart, and God is the kindest one of all."

"The great counterfiet of kindness is manipulation.

"The moment manipulation is present, true kindness becomes voided out completely.  Why, because kindness MUST have nothing behind it for it to exist.  There must be no ulterior motives that hold it up.  It has to stand on its own for it to be authentic.  This is the most important attribute of kindness, and without it, everything else is a sham.  The moment a hidden motive supports a kind act, the act itself ceases to be kind and suddenly becomes manipulation.

"This is precisely why so many people's response to a kind act is, "what do you want from me?"  We have grown accustomed to the lie.  It is beyond our comprehension why anyone would do something nice without wanting something in return.  It just never happens any more. We don't believe that kindness stands on its own, because it never has in most of our lifetimes.  We even get nervous in the face of real kindness.  We become skeptical and even angry if we can't immediately see a manipulative motivation behind someone's actions.  We think to ourselves that the person who did this or said that to us must be up to something no good.  It just doesn't stand to reason.  In this world you don't get something for nothing.  And so the authentic truth is almost more than we can bear because it mysteriously stands on its own.  It needs nothing to hold it up.  It is suspended by love and nothing else.  There is no explanation for it.  It just is ... There is a power in kindness that resists anything thrown its way.  It topples over strongholds and crushes addictions.  It changes the minds of stubborn people and deflates the pride of humanity.  Kindness is more powerful than anything the flesh manifests.  Nothing can stand up to it and everything turns to dust in its presence."

Goodness gracious - third post for the day.  That must surely qualify me as addicted.  Actually, this is my 122nd blog post, which is pretty good seeing I started this blog on 11 May.  Which is basically a post a day.  Not too shabby, I guess :)

My eyes are gritty.  I got this book The God's Honest Truth by Darin Hufford in the mail today and can't put it down.  I'm up to page 100.  The drink I've had from the well today was long and it was good.  I've been very thirsty lately.  It's good to be back.

There's a bit about the patience of God I can't resist posting:

Imagine if you worked in the emergency room of a hospital and one evening a two-year-old child was brought to you that had boiling water spilled down the front of his body.  The child is screaming and wailing at the top of his lungs.  As you delicately cut away his clothing, you see that his skin is literally falling off his body.  My question to you is this: What are the chances that you will lose your patience with this child for screaming?  Would you secretly wonder why his mother wasn't quieting him down?  Would you even attempt to quiet this child down?  What are the chances that you would even start to get irritated?  You wouldn't, would you?  Why, because you have understanding.  You can see with your eyes the exact reason why this child is screaming so much.  You would scream as well if it happened to you.  So you don't lose patience.  You don't even start to lose your patience, because you understand.

Love is exactly the same way.  When you love someone, you will always see the "burnt baby" in everything they do.  Love's eyes look beyond the flesh and into the heart.  People who lack patience are blind to the heart.  This is why they don't understand the person they claim to love.  Love sees everything in a person's heart.  It doesn't even begin to lose patience, because it understands completely why a person does what they do.  When looking for patience, we must always turn to love to find it ...

Loved ones, please understand this: God is patient with you because He understands you fully and completely.  When He sees you struggling with sin, His eyes see past the sin and straight into your heart.  He knows exactly why you do what you do.  He understands every tiny facet of your heart.  God even knows the things about you that you have long forgotten. He knows the very things that have made you the person you are today.  The Heart of God says, "I understand why you do this or that.  If I saw things the way you did, I would struggle too.  I want to help you to see things differently because this sin you are struggling with is killing you."  His patience with you is not a case of God holding back His boiling anger toward you, but it is simply God knowing you so well that He doesn't even begin to lose patience.  Your Father sees the "burned baby" in everything you do.

It's been raining here all afternoon.  We need the rain so much.  It's a lovely day to be inside.  I have only ventured out once, briefly, to the library to return some overdue books.  I returned three books and borrowed two, so I have dwindled my stack down by one.

No, wait.  There was also a book I ordered that came in the mail today.  So my stack remains the same teetering Tower of Pisa that it was yesterday.  I really, really can't afford to be buying books.  But I bought this one.  It's called The God's Honest Truth by a guy called Darin Hufford and already there is that sweet scent of an adoration-worthy God about it.  I am becoming convinced that unless my ideas about God are that he is just too good to be true ... then I am not having true ideas about God.  He is so wonderful, so patient, so kind, so inexpressibly beautiful that the only response to him is to fall all over him blubbering, and for the overflow to bear expression out into the world.

Which is kinda what the book is all about.  He is talking about the lies we have been fed in Christianity about God, the lies that have made us believe that God is closer to a devil than to a being worthy of the title, one that shows in the human embodiment of Jesus what his character really is, and who demonstrated in him what life joined to him looks like for a human.  It also talks about having the ability to hold the completely opposite idea of God in our hearts to the one we consciously have in our heads.  It's pretty good stuff, so far.

I feel like I've burst up out of the fog and taken a great good gasp of pure water.  Sickness really is an evil thing.  Sinking down into it, I lose perspective and focus.  I am so grateful that I am getting better!  I am so grateful for God.  I feel like when I get a glimpse of his real character, it's enough for life to suddenly start shining.  It hasn't happened for a while and gee, it feels good :)

Coming as I have through the trials of illness and then dragging myself back into health, with the help of a few choice people along the way, I have come to a real appreciation for how my body works. 

Getting well has been a real battle - and I have slipped back quite a bit lately with winter illness and marriage breakup stress .  These days I find myself unfortunately back in the land ... well, definitely not of CFS, but maybe of some far distant cousin.  Everything is a struggle as I try to recover and get some sort of health back.  I forgot how bad the terrain is here.  I forgot how much being unhealthy affects my mood.  I guess if I'm going to be stoical about things I will say that I appreciate the slip-back in one way, only because it is renewing my appreciation for how bad it feels to be unhealthy, and how fantastic it feels to be healthy.  I seriously didn't know, before I made this venture, how good it feels when your body is working properly.  There was a mental consent to that in my head before I got healthy, but the reality is way, way better than I thought.  I didn't realise that my body was meant to sing.

I'm talking mainly here about the gut and digestion. Ah, the poor old gut.  One of the less sexy organs, really, but it's probably my favourite these days.  Mine was in seriously bad shape when I stumbled accidentally (and providentially) across Guru Ed from the health food shop a couple of years ago.  I had just come off five years of ill health followed by a year-long antibiotitc ritual which saw me take them for one week out of every four.  And even though I had been taking probiotics, I was in a seriously unhealthy way.  Ed recognised the candida signals straight away, having had his own problems with massive candida overload in the past.  It causes things like 'brainfog', fatigue, vaginal thrush in women and jock itch in men, headaches, bad breath, impotence, moodiness, depression, hyperactivity, hyperthyroidism, adrenal gland problems, congestion, coughs, arthritis, prostatitis, canker sores, heartburn, sore muscles.  Hard to diagnose because those symptoms are so generalised that they could be related to thousands of other things.  But I knew it was candida once I started treating it because I felt so much better afterwards.

Ed was so helpful, describing things to me I hadn't known before.  I was attracted to his holistic approach - he sees the body as an amazing instrument that will naturally do its job if only we give it the right ingredients.  Unfortunately these days, we aren't getting the minerals we need which we used to get from the soil, because it's so depleted now.

It was quite daunting, facing the challenge that if I wanted to not only get well but get healthy - and I desperately did - then it was going to cost money, time, and energy relearning what to eat and retraining my taste buds.  My diet at that stage wasn't terrible, but it was far from good.  I was eating a lot of junk.  I had quite a high carbohydrate diet.  When I was ill, it had been almost imposible to resist the carbs.  My body was screaming for more energy, and what better way to give it a quick buzz than with some carbs?  Switching to low carb has been a real boon for me.  But I don't think it works that way for everyone.  It's really a matter of learning to tune in to what our bodies are telling us they want.

So Ed put me on this anti-candida regimen to get my gut health going.  It involved a truckload of money - but like the cliches say, there is seriously no price on health (I will spend money guilt-free in the health food shop even more than I will in the bookshop, which says something).

So I started taking all of this stuff - colloidal silver to help clean my blood, grapefruit seed extract (a totally evil tasting stuff that kills candida in the intestines), chromium to help manage my sugar cravings, xylitol to replace cane sugar, etc etc.  And a food regimen that involved no yeast and no sugar for a month.  The die-off effect was pretty horrible.  And the sugar cravings were bad.  But I guess I was just at the right time to do it (isn't timing just everything?  It's so pointless doing things if it's not the right time; it's like driving a car without oil and everything just grates.)

Afterw I treated the candida and started getting some kind of gut health going down, I discovered this stability in my body I hadn't felt before.  And I also discovered much more why the term "gut feeling" is in our lexicon. The gut has the same neurons in it as the brain.  Indeed, it is often called the "second brain".  The brain and the gut are in constant communication.  Since my gut health has improved, I can see this in action far better than I ever could previously.  What I have discovered is that the gut is the seat of intuition;  this part of my body gives me extra confirmation that I am heading in the right direction in my decision-making.  What a comfort it has been to find this out.  I have learnt to trust these "gut feelings" because their pan-out rate is just so incredibly high.  I feel like God speaks clearest to me in this way.

Since I've been sick, I have kinda lost that, a little bit.  And boy, do I miss it!  When my gut is functioning well, I feel in tune with my entire body.  When the connections are clear, I have a much greater sense of what my body needs and wants to eat at any given time, and the food that I eat feels ... oh, clean, somehow.  Gut-friendly stuff aids the whole process of being able to 'hear' what my gut is saying. 

Lately, with stress and winter and candida flare-ups and eating badly (chocolate bars in the morning, for crying out loud), I feel like I have lost the capacity to 'hear' what my body is saying to me, again.  Dinnertime comes around and I drag my feet, not being able to feel what the best thing for me is to eat.  My choices are generally much more crap than they have been when I've been healthier.  It's like at the very time when I most need to be eating well, I'm drawn towards the bad stuff.

The good thing about being in this position is knowing how good it will feel once I've got my digestive health back on track and so having that hope to work towards again.  So yes, I guess these days I must be classed as a 'health nut'.  But seriously, now I know how good it feels, I'm happy to be considered a nut.

Wow.  I didn't realise I was going to bang on and on about the gut.  I hope I didn't bore you :)

I know some of you reading this don't believe in God and are maybe a bit sick of hearing me bang on about him.  Especially when it's that nasty Christian God.  The frustrating thing for me is how differently I see it than how I used to.  I know the perceptions that people have about the Christian God but the reality I feel and move in is so completely different as to be like being on another planet.  If you want to get some kind of a grip on who I think God is, then take a look at Wayne Jacobsen talking about God's affection for us.  It seriously is the only thing that has changed me and healed me in some measure.  Not doctrines or principles or any of that stuff.  It is really all about lurve, baby.  The Beatles were right ;)

(Excuse the poxy piano playing music at the end.  Blergh).

Whenever I'm tempted to cast God as a slightly dull, old white man, I stop and think: he made poo.

On top of that, he made sex.  And surely that is the most bizarre, crazy thing there is in the entire world ;) 

God, you are totally weird.  And quite beautiful.

Dear God,

?  Last question for the moment:  Will you accept my apology for being petulant again?