7:57am April 2, 2013

I keep reblogging redwoods.

I was born in Redwood Terrace, the settlement. Not the building ppl post pictures of. Never even seen that building. Anyway. Redwoods are my first home. They’re my protection. They play a key role in my spirituality, which is why I’m making prayer beads that represent that forest in San Mateo County. They represent everything that could ever be home in the most extreme way. I can never move back. But everywhere I go I take them with me. They’re at the core of everything for me. They’re the first place I remember ever.

I’m thinking of them now because I want my feeding tube badly but it’s the morning of the surgery and boy do I have the jitters, even with Ativan every four hours to keep me from totally losing it. Redwoods are familiar. They’re the most real thing in the world to me. Redwood Terrace is the most real place in the world to me. It belongs to that time when visually things were just textures, but boy could I feel how things felt like inside, and that’s most of my memories. Including a tree we all knew as the Mother Tree. If I can ever get my damn living will signatures witnessed, my wishes are for much of my ashes to be put in that one forest as close to the Mother Tree as possible. I hope that time is a long way off. But whenever you give up control of your body for surgery there’s always that question “will I wake up again”, no matter how safe it is.

But when I’m scared the redwoods are where my mind goes back to. It was the only place in the world I was ever protected. Not shielded from life. But protected from things nobody should deal with. Not by people but the place itself. So it still means safety and protection to me. It still means all those things. I was young but I have an excellent, long memory.

So sometime late morning early afternoon they will place my feeding tube. And I will enter a more extreme phase of not eating much orally except maybe a little light soup broth now and then. And maybe just maybe it will save my life by preventing aspiration pneumonia which I’ve had a zillion times this year it feels like and am recovering from the worst recent case now.

I can curl up on my bed and be curled up in the bottom of the Mother Tree right now. It feels like its here, because it exists in some place and time so it always exists and will exist in a way. I have no clue if its standing but it doesn’t matter. It’s here with me in my whole life always. And if its been there for hundreds of years maybe I can handle a little surgery.

7 notes