but what does healing look like?

Of course, having the time and space and energy to wander around and worry about the finiteness of existence takes a certain amount of privilege that I happen to have right now. If I was bogged down in school or a full time job there would be a lot more pressing things in my life to worry about than how soon the flowers might wilt. But then again, I have spent the last several years making my life one in which this type of perspective is possible. I could say that I am care-free, except that in the absence of more mundane cares these other more psychological issues raise their heads. So be it. At least a part of that "free time" is spent trying to figure out how others might be better able to address this stuff in their own lives.

As part of the community health collective Grace and I have started working on how to write up Wellness Recovery Action Plans, which essentially detail lists of personal early warning signs before breakdowns, symptoms of both good and bad health, and a "toolbox" of actions that can be taken when one is feeling down or in a crisis that could potentially be used to feel better (such as sleeping, eating well, talking to people, yoga, etc...). Ideally these WRAP's could be given to our closest friends so that when they see us getting close to a breaking point they can say "hey, why don't you do this instead of freaking out?" Because often in those situations of extreme duress it is so hard to keep in mind those simple things that actually help. Now to learn some new techniques that will. I'm excited that several hours of the next meeting will be spent learning some basic massage. I am craving being able to heal people with my hands.

Something else that has interestingly come up in this recent intensification of experience is an increased amount of visual synethsesia. I am immediately reminded of the tunnel dreams I had several years ago that I could never really wake up from and hung at the edges of my vision throughout those days, except that this is much less directly image-oriented. In moments of extreme presence, physical contact brings up the perception of colors and textures in my field of vision, especially when it is combined with appropriate music. Abrupt touches are a jagged red while brief brushings seem as a light blue field with white birds flapping across it. And sound itself has it's own looks. I got my viola back from the shop with new strings and the bow rehaired for the first time since elementary school, and the depth of the new tones at practice felt more like painting a picture than playing an instrument. I don't know how much of this is just a suggestion of my imagination but the multi-modality offers a pleasent change from more linear ways of interpreting the world. Perhaps it has always been this way, and I was just numb to it before, but it is certainly familiar, as if it were a part of the structure of human perception below the discrete partitions of the "five" senses.