Ma Wa Gray

 Our beds are unmade. Laden bags full of sports stuff, The morning has begun. 

Ok it has definitely been more than 40 days since I started numbering my blog posts. This was no Lent feat. But this conscious numbering of blogs was a way for me to clock my progress. As I've said before, I am on a journey to try and find ways to manage my central sensitization and help my nervous system cope with the day to day challenges of over stimulation. Part of my therapy has just been to stop, shut off noise, and get my body and head to reconnect. It has been immeasurably helpful. Every morning, once my family have left for school, I have tried to do something mindful. Write a blog, reach out to someone with a prayer, breathe. Book marking times of predictive overstimulation with intentional stillness really does wonders for the nervous system.  Like I've said numerous times my view has been a huge part of grounding me. So has the bird song and the slow swelling of our garden with the spring rains. Things have regenerated, and sprouted and bloomed.  And thats what thi...

 Eva: 'Mom you are looking old. Is it because you're going through the ramapause?'

Eva and her cousin Benjamin are in a hockey team. They are the Mighty Cubs. They are 7. Eva has never played a game of hockey in her life.  My impression of her on a hockey pitch is a little ferret motoring around, stick held high in the air, her mind in a dimension that makes no reference to hockey. When I ask her about her contribution to the game she says, 'I just spend so much time thinking about what to do next. That I don't do anything.' I would concur.  The tournament that these small people are playing in has different age categories. Unfortunately the first category includes 7, 8 and 9 year olds. The difference between a 7 and a 9 year old on a hockey pitch is quite startling. I wasn't able to watch the Mighty Cubs in action last week but based on the very sweet and encouraging messages on the parents group afterwards that they 'tried their best' I suspect that our little team won character points, and not actual points.  Yesterday, on the side of the n...

 There's a popular meme going around saying that 'Nobody has embarrassed me more than myself when I posted statuses on my Facebook from 2009 - 2012.' I would like to counter that with, 'There is nobody that I recognize less than myself in my matric school magazine.' Cringe. That's literally all I can say. This weekend I had lunch with a school friend who has been doing a deep clean and came up with the dirt from high school. I haven't read my school magazine since I left school. Boy oh boy was it triggering. And again, God's timing is perfect. I have really been battling to process the behaviour of some of my matrics in their final days at school. Impulsive, selfish, entitled, irresponsible. And then this weekend I was reintroduced to Emily, circa 2001, and it has brought up so much because my frontal lobe was also short circuiting all over the place. And I was miserable.  My matric year was kak. I was freshly diagnosed with panic disorder, was taking he...

I have a friend who, for many years, lived in a beautiful flat on Durban beachfront. Most of the pictures she posted during the years she lived there were of her view. Sunrise, sunset, full moons, celebrations in the waves, beautiful days.  I'm not going to lie, they did get a bit long in the tooth.  But for her this view, and capturing it in pictures, must have given her stabilization. Must have grounded her and positioned her back into her natural environment.  And now I feel the same about my view. I could write about it every day. Specially on days like today where I feel that things are falling apart and the centre cannot hold. Days like these will come and go. But my view won't. It will continue to anchor me and remind me that God's natural world will always be the centralization that I will seek when all else feels flimsy.