Carol of the Woods

I’ve been taking St. John’s Wort for three weeks now and I’m doing well! The first two weeks my moods swung very low, with a few anxious days and a few good days mixed in. This week my overall mood has been stable and very tolerable, and my energy keeps increasing too.

I have three main emotional states and they are happy, sad, and anxious. I rate my moods on a scale of one to ten, with one being just aware of the feeling, five is feeling the mood too much and into the ouchy range, and ten is nearly unbearable. Three weeks ago, my depression hit the 8 or 9 range and that’s what finally drove me to make an appointment with my doctor. When I first started taking the SJW, it was like my body went through what the SJW was giving me too quickly and I needed more and my moods swung quite a bit. At three weeks, my moods all stay within the 1 to 2 range. I still feel angry, anxious, sad, disappointed, and happy but all those feelings stay within that tolerable level.

I want to mention that I’m taking Kava too. I’ve always enjoyed taking Kava Kava and have a good supply of quality stuff stashed away. It relieves anxiety and gives a pleasurable feeling. I mentioned the Kava Kava to my doctor and he didn’t freak out, and my liver test came back ok, so I feel safe enough continuing to take the Kava until the SJW kicks in all the way, and maybe beyond. (St. John’s Wort is supposed to be fully effective at six weeks.)

I’m very sure that I do need to take something for my anxiety and depression now and if the SJW ever stops working I won’t hesitate to go on prescription drugs. I don’t think I’ll ever be “cured” and my brain’s structure is made to feel things too severely. The SJW does not seem to have any side effects and does seem to give a more gentle moderation of my moods than the prescription drugs I tried did. I’ve got my fingers crossed that it will continue to work.

Some helpful links from my travels on this journey:

Highly Sensitive - A few articles about highly sensitive people and anxiety.

Depression and Creativity - Several ideas about how depression and bipolar disorder influence creativity.

The 10 Paradoxes of Creative People - Heh, you’ll recognize yourself since Pagans are some of the most creative people on earth.

The Psychology of Creativity: Redeeming our Inner Demons - Purpose and passion.

Help For Depression - Down to earth suggestions about how to cope with and / or come out of depression. (It’s different for everyone.)

It’s working pretty well too. I started taking it ten days ago. I was tired all the time so I went to my doctor because I thought my thyroid medicine needed adjusting. He said it was most likely depression, although we did do a blood test to make sure. (It took two technicians five tries to get the blood and I came out of there with both arms covered in bandaids!) Anyway, the doctor and I had a long discussion about anxiety and depression and how they can coexist, and about my mother. I did take anti-anxiety meds a few years ago and didn’t like them. They cut off the super charged feel good highs I have. It turns out that those feel good highs, and also miserable feel bad lows, might be inherited from my mother who was Bipolar.

My whole family is a little nuts. Mostly they’re alcoholics, bless their drunken hearts, self-medicating themselves into numbness. I tried that myself for a while, but stopped before I hurt myself too much. Anyway, as I age, I just turned 54, I see my moods becoming more extreme and, more often than not, settling into deep depressions.

So, my doctor suggested that I try St. John’s Wort since the anti-anxiety medications always seemed to have some side effect I didn’t like, along with putting the kibosh on my lovely hyper highs. I feel it working already. My moods are much more steady and don’t swing so wildly. I have more energy too, and that must be because I’m not spending as much dealing with gleeful highs and painful lows.

I did a lot of reading online and found a neat free Electronic Mood Chart that works in Excel. (The site was put together by J. Phelps, M.D., and has a lot of information about Bipolar and “Soft Bipolar.”) I’ve been using the mood chart for ten days and see how my sleep patterns reflect, and maybe predict, my moods. Knowledge is good!

I’m sorry to say that I didn’t find a lot of reliable information about St. John’s Wort on the web. Kelly’s St. John’s Wort Pages was about the most down to earth. If you’re interested in trying St. John’s Wort and you haven’t done a lot of research, please be forewarned that there are a lot of misinformed folks out there and an awful lot of stupid thinking going around about taking anxiety and depression medication.

I settled on NSI brand St. John’s Wort. All my reading did make it clear that quality varies a lot, so it’s best to stick to one brand and adjust the dose until it works. I’m taking quite a bit more than recommended on the bottle, but my doctor ok’d that. I won’t give the NSI site’s url here because I don’t want anyone to think I’m an affiliate or anything like that. I just choose them because they were convenient, affordable, and I couldn’t find any bad reviews of that brand which I took to mean they were a fairly respectable company.

So, now you know what I did with my summer. I found out that I’m willing to trade my heady highs for a middle-of-the-road steady state. And I’m happy now. Pleasantly, calmly happy.

We went to Lake Michigan yesterday and walking in the sand and across rocks near the shore was exhausting because I had to concentrate on keeping my balance so hard! I could have really used a staff.

I discovered the joy of walking with a staff at the Pagan Spirit Gathering last year. During my Croning there, I acquired one and immediately felt a new sense of balance! A staff gives you a third point to distribute weight on and is quite handy in crowds too. People make room for you when you’re carrying a big stick.

I’ll be 54 next month and the truth is, my knees and ankles have seen better days. Sometimes I lose my balance for no reason at all, and I have a hard time rising from a squat, but I’ve never been brave enough to use a walking stick in “normal” public situations. Well, I just read a great article called Quarterstaff Revolution and I feel fully empowered to take up a staff and proudly carry it whenever I need to! (And a lot of other elders and near-elders are feeling empowered to do so too.)

I’m thinking about getting two different kinds. A telescoping hiking stick with a camera mount would be very handy, and a lovely brightly painted staff for other occasions would be wonderful. Think I’ll make the painted one out of one of our trees. Our trees wouldn’t mind contributing a nice stout branch to the cause.

Rocks are slow moving spirits and they are all Elders. Rocks may seem cold and unfriendly but they’re not. You just need to be patient until they speak. The most talkative Rock Elder I know lives next to Grandmother Ash and, when the light is just right, he has a human face. I often look at him when I sit under Grandmother and he gives advice occasionally. He tells me to work slowly to build what I want. Be steady and firm in the basics so that the imagination and intuition can wander wherever they want and always have a safe home to return to.

I often get so involved chasing one idea after another that I neglect the foundations of my life. I have to remind myself of the plans I’ve made and check to see if the current glittering idea that’s caught my imagination’s eye is part of the plan or a diversion. Diversions are important too, but they can be a lot like cotton candy; delicious and fun, but not very nourishing.

Rock Spirits are about stability, building foundations slowly, home, and safety. If you suddenly find yourself attracted to rocks, you may need to pay attention to these areas of your life. If you’ve always been a rock hound, then honor the Rock Elders by giving thanks for the guidance and balance they’ve brought to you throughout your life.

I’ve changed the name of my blog to match my domain name but the address is still the same. I added this blog as an afterthought to my main site, so I gave it a different name and tucked it away in its own directory thinking I wouldn’t give it much attention. To my surprise, the blog turned out to be the area of the site that I love the best and all my energy goes into it, so I’m rearranging things a bit. I’ll be slowly moving the content of the other part of my site into the blog so I’ll be able to take better care of everything.

I wanted to mention, too, that my old host was so awful that hardly anyone was able to leave comments and I’m delighted that so many of you are leaving them now, but I’m still figuring out how they work! So if you posted a comment and it never showed up it was probably stuck in the spam filter. I’ve just now noticed that some of them get caught there, so I’ve released them and will check it more frequently.

Our crazy neighbor has been very quiet since the shooting incident two weeks ago, but we heard more gun shots from his yard tonight. Our house is several hundred feet from his, so we’re safe enough here but it’s still unnerving after what happened. My husband is seeing about registering an old handgun that’s been in the family for so many years that it never had any paperwork.

Thank to you all for posting here throughout this mess. You reminded me that were sane people left in the world, and that was extremely important to me.

I’ve had The Animal-Wise Tarot by Ted Andrews for two years but never worked with it much. I’m not very good at Tarot card reading. It’s never clicked with me. I’m better at runes. Anyway, with all the excitement from last week still percolating through my mind, I’m doing a lot of Rune work and some Tarot work trying to get a better perspective on things, and the Animal-Wise deck is helpful.

I work with animal spirits a lot in my particular form of witchery. They speak to me very clearly and I have several totem animals. From working with them and the cards, I see that my Big Ally (who shouldn’t be called upon unless my life is in danger) has been on patrol. And I think he was an appropriate response to the situation, but now it’s time for my more rational Allies to take over.

Reading after reading has pointed out that I’m out of balance and that’s my real danger now. So, I’m working very hard to follow my old routines even if I don’t feel like doing them. I’d rather be out patrolling our property like a wolf, but I’m doing all the mundane things that keep my life on-course. It’s time to leave that extreme level of guarding to my helper spirits while I move on with my life.

One of the most comforting things about being a witch is the many different tendrils of reality that I’m now aware of. They give me a sense of expansion when I’m calm enough to feel them. When I’m frightened or angry, I lose touch with the tendrils, contract into a hard ball, and strike like a snake. I’m sure that’s a survival reflex and it’s awfully hard to uncurl from. I’m learning from this experience that calmness can be a form of defense, too, when all your senses are relaxed out to their farthest and most sensitive reach. This relaxed but alert mindfulness takes much more control than tightly focused protective postures do, but it makes you aware of so many more possible options in any situation that it’s worth the effort.

Here’s what Clarissa Pinkola Estes says about expanding our outward feeling senses in Women Who Run With the Wolves:

The Power of the Haunches

What constitutes a healthy body in the instinctual world? At the most basic level — the breast, the belly, anywhere there is skin, anywhere there are neurons to transmit feeling — the issue is not what shape, what size, what color, what age, but does it feel, does it work as it is meant to, can we respond, do we feel a range, a spectrum of feeling? Is it afraid, paralyzed by pain or fear, anesthetized by old trauma, or does it have its own music, it is listening, like Baubo through the belly, is it looking with its many ways of seeing?

This week I’m listening through my belly and looking with all parts of myself.

Just when I thought this thing couldn’t get any weirder, they dug up the dead horse. Our neighbors have a backhoe and buried the horse in the field right where it fell when they put it down Sunday. Tonight, four days later, they dug the poor thing back up and cut off the broken leg. I suspect they want some sort of proof of what happened.

We’ve lived here nearly twenty years and the neighbors with the horses were here when we moved in, but we’ve hardly ever talked. Everyone is like that around here. We wave to each other, but that’s all the socializing we do. So, I don’t know for sure what’s going on. I’m very curious, but this thing has been so stressful that I’m wary about what might come next.

I’m finally coming to terms with what happened sunday and why I felt such guilt over it. I was assertive and something bad happened, and that triggered all sorts of old programing from my childhood. My father and mother always required that I be “nice” no matter how I felt. If I was not nice, there was hell to pay. That was, in fact, not a very “nice” thing for them to do to me, but that never occurred to them.

For the last three days, while my rational mind told me that the horse’s death was not my fault, the very irrational five year old who still lives inside of me knew it was because I’d demanded my rights in a “not nice” way. Today something finally clicked back into place, though, and I’m making a slow recovery. I think it started with the biker’s key chain I found in the garage.

I’ve been cleaning out the garage as a form of physical therapy, hard work to take my mind off Sunday’s disaster, and I used the biker’s key chain I found to hang pepper spray from my belt loop. (The pepper spray is for the neighbor if he shows up again.) Then I attached my keys and they gave my walk a sassy jingle. Next I added a tool belt to hold my box cutter and other implements of destruction and garage maintenance, slipped on leather work gloves, and topped it all off with a cap. I caught a reflection in a window and I do think anyone would pause a bit before they approached that person. She looked so serious, and well armed, and butch. I like the look very much and think I’ll keep it. (It turns the husband on, too, as an added bonus.)

The dark gray dappled horse who lived across the street was killed yesterday, and it was my fault.

It started with an argument between another neighbor and me. Back in my woods, I was drawing wildflowers and the neighbor’s children were hunting mushrooms and disturbing my work and the flowers. I asked them to leave our property. Their father came at me screaming. This spot in the woods is my place of power, and I was sitting on the ground and very centered. His screaming didn’t move me or scare me and that made him more angry. Still I sat there, unmoved and this enraged him. He finally left, went home, and started shooting his shotgun.

No one knows exactly what happened next, but one of the big beautiful workhorses suddenly had a broken leg. The neighbor who owns the horses suspected the shots caused it somehow. That neighbor had to put down his beautiful horse. It was horrifying to see and hear. I had called the sheriff to report the angry confrontation that ended in shots fired, so the neighbor who owns the horses was able to confirm that part of my story and added his own.

I caused this chain of events to happen. There are oats and apple slices on my Epona altar today.