In the last few months I’ve been having a pretty hard time. First was dealing with low thyroid, then I had a bad fall and my ribs are still hurting from that. In fact, I’ve had a hard time since COVID started. Lockdown triggered my early trauma of being left alone when I was a baby, and the social distancing didn’t help. I went through a period of terror which turned out to be younger parts of me, and my therapist was able to help me. When I first came to Kendal, it was because I needed the support of regular meals being offered and people around all the time. Eventually I began to be comfortable with ordinary life in this community, and I was able to lower my anti-depression and anti-anxiety medications. But when COVID started I had to raise them again, especially to help with the terror. So things have been pretty tough for a couple of years. That’s why starting to feel good again was such a big deal.
My memory is that I read the DailyGood on “What Is Wanting to Find Expression Through You?” and I immediately asked myself the question and what came was “Teach Astronomy,” and I started feeling better right away. So I went back through my journal trying to find the entry where I described that process only to discover that it had happened over a number of days. That original DailyGood was published on October 1, so it took me at least two weeks to go through the process.
Actually, I did immediately know it was Astronomy that wanted to find expression through me. I started talking to people about it, and my energy and enthusiasm increased. That’s when I started feeling better. I began thinking about how I would teach. What seemed most workable to me was to do something similar to the class in Observational Astronomy I had done for SLL in the 1980’s, but not for credit. And to do it here at Kendal instead of trying to do it through OSHER. Then I realized that I didn’t want to bother with the more recent topics like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton, but just to do the video of the Sun Dagger and my audiovisual presentation, followed by a talk on Stonehenge, and then have star walks on clear nights.
It’s true that I have been feeling much better for what feels like a couple of weeks, but my journal entries suggest that it was more gradual. I find this fascinating. It’s not the first time I’ve found discrepancies between my memory and what I actually wrote at the time.