A form exercise I can live with, finally ! I think I will break out the old "Latin Made Easy" text books and start learning a new language - or, a very OLD one !

It's not a very good picture and I could have trimmed it some - but that is a picture of me at 28 years of age. That's the back yard of this house before we tore down the old fence and cleaned up the messy blackberries (what a job - it took 2 decades and they still grow back if we allow them to!) ... I think I was about 120 - maybe even less. Leon and I had just bought our first home and yep, that is my idea of a clever pose. No jokes, please!


I am keeping my sense of humor - sometime in the near future I will find out if I fell into diabetes or missed that horror. I suspect - because I am mostly feeling good, even great - and I am taking off the offending weight efficiently that I may have spared myself  the worse blow to my well-being, debilitating diabetes.   I wish, now, I had started losing when I said I was going to - about 2 years ago, I had finished the cycles of menopause and my body was balancing out, accustoming itself to Middle Age.
I knew a long time that I was overweight, obese to use the medical term - I kept saying I needed to lose but I also knew it was a hard, difficult path. I'd lose a few pounds, then gain it back. It isn't easy and anyone who tries to - has tried to - will tell you that it's one of the harder challenges of 21 st. century life. I send my affection and compassion to anyone who is struggling just as I am. BUT, Lets just do it - for ourselves, for our beloved friends & family and for our future. Most of us - those who struggle as I am doing and for the reasons I am l losing weight - are in the second half of life - I am 56 - but it doesn't have to be a bad time - this next cycle of this life can be glorious, a fine 25 -30 years which cumulates in an honorable end. We are skilled, intelligent human beings with an immense amount of experience behind us - we can give our lives meaning if we but try. That is what I am trying to do. Just be the best Kathleen Mary H. that I can be; develop the best virtues I can, be a good, loving Christian, a good friend and a good wife - give my life meaning and texture so people notice me while I am alive and miss me a little when I am gone... Be creative, curious, self-educated ... and never, never asleep.

As Christ says :Stay awake, you don't know when I will pop up and surprise you !

I would say, and this may puzzle some of you that I may be only another pearl on a long strand of pearls but I want to be a good pearl, not an embarrassment. Another way to say the same exact thing: I want to leave my soul in good shape for the next ego, so he or she doesn't have to clean up my errors and mistakes. How we treat our bodies during life is an important part of maturing as souls. Mistreating or abusing our bodies is as great a sin as mistreating or abusing the bodies of others.

Its not death that terrifies me - that will come, may it come quickly as a blow comes, sudden and without a great deal of pain : what terrifies me are years upon years of suffering, self denial and struggle - a loss of meaning and hope- illness that makes me nothing but an animal, an animal without dignity, at that. I cannot lose my dignity - that is the real killer of the self. I am not an animal, I am an immortal soul that is a fire that burns fire-hot though it never consumes itself. My faith - my gnosticism - informs all I do. I don't believe : I KNOW. The truest part of me is immortal and never dies. The problem is the mortal part : the desires, lusts & pleasures that the body demands as its due. My will is stronger than it. I promise it what it wants but with moderation and in good time - and I keep reminding it that it can't go back to being that young lady in the garden posing for her beloved husband - but I can be a middle-age lady that is mostly healthy and just as thin posing for her beloved husband for a new picture.

The problem with the body is that it is like an animal or a child. Too much discipline and you become a cruel ascetic towards it, a task-master who beats it raw, too little and you allow it to become a self-indulgent & obese, and ultimately, sick creature - a very bad and indulgent parent towards it  - I feel like I am riding a wild horse that I keep trying to tame. It wants to do what it should not do. I want to be kind to it but not indulgent. Merciful, but not to a fault. I am losing weight because I love myself and my body. This discipline is an act of kindness.

Humor : I asked Leon if losing weight means I lose years. He laughed and said he didn't think it worked that way.

What scares me is the time after the diet. I will get down to the weight I am supposed to be about September next year. But I have never quite mastered the after-diet or maintained diet period. I would gain, lose, gain, lose - the peri-menopause gain was just the worse, but, not the first. But how to you maintain weight when it doesn't come naturally to either you or your body? I am studying and reading about it and will continue to do so. I suspect it is going to be as much a struggle as the diet, itself, was. I have no idea how many calories my body really needs per day. I hate math - but its absolutely necessary - why - because the math is working. Calories per day, Basel rate per day ... its all the way things really work.
A final note : I know that to some speaking of me/body and me/soul can be a little jarring but it is basic to how I, as a Gnostic, think. For a Gnostic the body is not the True Self, the Soul is the True Self. The body is the vehicle - the car of the soul.

For a nearly two weeks I have been ill - suffering from vertigo, nearly constantly, feeling weak and disoriented - and most of all, completely exhausted. I am not sure any one really understands vertigo (and I don't mean the movie!) unless they experience it... imagine the room you are in swirling around you (sometimes it visibly does so as if your eyes were twisting side to side in their sockets - what an amazing effect! (you think, as you hit the wall.)) you can't think, you feel faint, and when it gets really unpleasant, you fall down and begin vomiting. (the inner ear is amazing when it functions - its even amazing when it doesn't function correctly! ) Sometimes its a little less than absolute disorientation, sometimes it can be far worse. Sometimes it is just plain dizziness - (Leon's been making endless 'butterfly over my head' jokes to get me to laugh!) Well, I am cheap, everyone knows it, so why lie? I hate going to the doctor, though my general practitioner is a sweetie but after the night before last when I woke up the entire house at 1 AM with my colorful illness, I decided it was time....
Well, the short and the long of it is that my blood pressure was 140/100. I've never quite understood blood pressure and how it works - my doctor told me he noticed it was moving upwards but I swear I don't remember knowing that. After giving me the necessary prescriptions he commented that it was genetic but losing a hundred pounds would improve my lifestyle and improve my health. ( broadside to port!! doctor 1, Kathy 0) I asked him again how many calories I would have to eat to lose weight - the answer? 1200. ( a cup of cherry yogurt is 260 !) I really wonder if losing weight is worth what ever life I would gain from doing so - what about quality of life? Do I really want to live to 105 - I accept that doctors seem to think that more life is always better, but ....?
He also gave me some super strong sinus medicine and a prescription whose name I think I recognize as a Valium generic... though, right now, I am in no mood for sanctimonious self- righteousness ... I think I will skip any mention of my disapproval of strong mood altering drugs. (Its amazing what a little time feeling utterly miserable and ill will do even -- to me ! ) And yes, Valium somehow disrupts the way the inner ear communicates its distress to the brain and can ease Vertigo, though I prefer to use less dangerous and less addictive antihistamines.

My birthday is August 23rd. I will be 56. It doesn't feel real or right, for some reason. I think it is partly because I remember my parents 50's so very well. I have always felt like a youth playing at being adult, always slightly afraid that someone would catch on I don't understand what this adult thing is really about, exactly what is an adult? Never having children I think has enhanced this - I never had to be The Adult to a child for any length of time. Do I have to be serious now? How exactly does a 56 year old act?
I have a strange mind, I always have - sometimes the way I think seems to isolate me from others, or, at least, makes me a bit of a puzzle for my friends, but what I am saying is the truth - the passage of time amazes me, the aging of my body amazes me, also, adulthood amazes me -
( someone said their 3 year old son called me grandma after I left their house.) I feel time passing like a river under my feet, it causes me to sway, to age, but not intrinsically - And yes, I am feeling mortal and slightly disoriented and not because of my inner ear or high blood pressure (which was quite a birthday gift but not one I really wanted. ) I don't in any way honestly feel older, as 56 years older - at the soul level I feel very young, I am still learning, growing, trying to understand, exploring & trying to master new skills. I have as many ambitions and desires as I did at 24 - though my real age inside my own head is about 33.
Another thing : How ever many more birthdays I am going to have they won't seem like enough time to me and I will never accomplish everything I would like to get done.
And, then, there are still those novels that rest on the bottom shelf of my library. It would take me two lifetimes to get them organized, mind you, finished !