I gained a lot of weight in April. Over five pounds, over the big 90 for the first time in a couple years. More than I've gained inpatient at places that specialize in forcing people to gain weight.

The horrible irony: I was almost content. One of my scales said the "right number." I just wanted to lose two pounds so my other scale, which reads higher, would satisfy me too.

But this post isn't a pity party, nor is it a discussion about my weight. Having fallen into the weight-gaining dieter's oblivion, unable to look at what was going on, it's useful to put a spotlight on what happened.

The mechanism by which the diet pill involved facilitated weight gain might actually be helpful to other people in other contexts.

I haven't put out the next post I'm writing in the series on satiety, physical and metaphorical.
I haven't finished the thoughts on transformation as momentum through critical mass rather than singleton skip from black to white.
Several collections I've promised to review languish in the basket of my guilt.
I haven't taken courage to publish my horrific "gained weight from a diet pill" story, although I think the story might well offer benefits: what said pill actually does might be useful in other contexts.

So, big failz, yes? This post is about why. Also, perhaps, about why I've more or less kept some of "it" together despite.

This is going to be another metaphor post. Something I've been musing on for a while that, eyeballed the right way, metaphored appropriately, fits perfecly into the Independence Day discourse.
Sometimes you have to hold onto something in order to let something go.

Independence day? Or inTERdependence?

As reclusive as I'm drawn to be, no man, or woman, or alien-girl, is an island. Sure, I live alone, but I wouldn't be putting this out into the ether if you weren't there waiting to read it. Yes, I do mean you.  Meanwhile, I've been wretched of late over a scenario involving the scale, of which I may share more soon. And the accretal couldn't have happened were there no exchange of materials between myself and my environment. And on a different level of interdependence, I'd be handling the situation far less well were I not able to talk with my mom about it.

But back to the "hold on in order to let go."

My dry yard is feebly dominated by the standing carcass of a wild olive tree. An oleaster, I guess it would have been called. I've seen my neighbor's cat get up in it, but mostly it's a perch for birds, and those mostly doves.

Doves and olives together--symbol of hope since the time of the Flood, when the dove brought back an olive branch to the survivors of the human race in their Ark, a sign that there was dry land (with trees on it) somewhere in reach. The olive branch was a symbol of peace back then all over the Mediterranean and Near/Middle East.

And the doves, ubiquitous pigeons?

When I lived in California and Hawaii, I spent a lot of time pruning trees, climbing trees, harvesting trees, standing back and looking at trees. I was the fruit fairy, I was Ela-treela. Ultimately, I'm not built for it--too small and undermuscled, fast track to carpal tunnel and lumbar spine disabilities--and in order to do it "professionally" almost anywhere, I'd have had to adopt tools and a style of working that wouldn't suit me, and, I think, don't really suit the trees either. 

But I'm glad that I can continue to do the work as an amateur, which truly means a lover, working with sincere intent to treat the tree in best possible way. To my last post's point about taking the time to stand back and contemplate the task without being in a rush toward the next thing, working trees taught me a lot about standing back and looking--with all my senses.

It's hitting 110 degrees today. So yesterday I finally bought shadecloth to cover my sunken beds. "Bought shadecloth" is a deceptive to-do list item, as it involved figuring out which store sells the cloth, where in said store it's located (store, of course, being a very big box), and what sort of shadecloth to get.

This means there was some inertia toward that whole project, despite the fact that I'd wanted to do it for some time. Also in inertia limbo: fixing the fence, and cutting back dead weeds in order to reach the fence, for which I had to purchase the appropriate tool, a matter of $10 but still a matter of inertia.

It used to be called melancholy, which means having black bile. If a body fluid is black, that means to say it is stagnant--in the parlance of the previous post, the habit has become a straitjacket.  Melancholy isn't  bittersweet, slightly poetic, verklempt self-indulgence. If your liver's squirting out black bile, or your gallbladder's storing black bile, things are in bad shape.

Depression, though. The solution's suggested in the name. In fact, the name suggests that you're already solving it.