DStilled

Sickly

Have you ever had salmonella poisoning?  Let’s hope not.  Cuz it’s possible I just did and it was awful.  The reason I don’t think it was salmonella is that the chicken in question was eaten almost a week before I got sick.  But I had a fever and that generally means infection.  I won’t bore you with all the wonderful details but it started Sunday and I think I’m just now officially over it.  It is of course possible that this debilitation was psychosomatic.  What that means is something happened or was perceived to about to happen and my body freaked out.  Yes my brain was overloading and the onslaught of stress was onslaughting.  I say that I’m immune to stress because I don’t get tense.  Maybe that’s true.  I honestly don’t get tense in my muscles at all.  That doesn’t necessitate the absence of stress though.  As I look back in my life and specific times when I would cry randomly (almost always during a song while I was driving) or get real jittery (when I let Spanish homework or work at NTB get to me) then I see those as my body releasing the stress that I experience as a normal person under sometimes more than normal situations.  The crying was cathartic but the shakiness wasn’t cool.  I usually (and still kinda do) thought it was a lack of sugar, calcium, or other nutrients in my system.  All this to say that I think my body is under a tremendous amount of stress and I am flippant/neglectful about it.  Shortly after I arrived here I watched the film A.I. and bawled during the last half hour of the movie.  Sure it’s a powerful film and worth crying with but I hadn’t let go that much since The Passion.  My most natural reaction to stress is to sleep.  That certainly would explain why I’ve spent most of my life capable of sleeping 10-14 hours a night.  I release my worries out through the unconscious.  I escape.  All this to say that we don’t know the power the mind has over the body.  Buddhist monks can meditate themselves warm in a freezer.  They can virtually stop their own heart beats.  It is possible the test I was supposed to take and the class I was supposed to lead on Tue added on top of returning from home mixed in with the other 11 things I’m struggling with (some of which are of theological significance) just tripped the circuit.  One of the most common advices I get in this seminary experience is to live in the tension.  It is only through adversity that I will grow and discover when and who I am.  The thing is, I believe that and for once am embracing it.  So if loud music and sleeping all day on a Sat keep me from imploding, so be it.  If I don’t have my health then I don’t have anything.

By the way, the two pics are of my enjoyable trip into Lex this weekend (wahoo Ashley’s new house!) and what I missed by not staying on campus (yeah, balloons were actually on campus).  Oh, and I saw 3:10 to Yuma.  WOW.