You may rest assured that limbs severed by the wind grow back again, and pain never hurts so much the second, third or fourth time...
This reminds me of something that happened over the holidays. I visited my family for the first time in two years, for the first time since my son was born. On January first, after days and days of my step father, my mother and my eldest brother (21) heavy drinking, a fight broke out between my eldest and youngest brothers, blood and crawling on the floor and screaming threats of death... I had never seen something like this. They took the little one away and a verbal fight that seemed to last forever between my brother, mom and her husband started, all the while refering to my brother having "emotional issues" and having spent "5,000$ in shrinks" on his behalf and there having been no improvement. I was hiding in the next room with my husband, listening but thinking it was not right for me to step in, because my step-father's energy is just too big and too drunk and too harsh for me to handle (I had had a taste of his drunken, poisonous rant two nights before). Drugs came into the issue as well, and when my brother accused the other two siblings of smoking weed too, his father did not believe him, even though I saw them smoking too. (Im not selling them out, that is not my party).
There is a fine line between emotional distress and mental illness, and maybe drugs are not as bad as other things. I think weed actually helps my brother, and I hope he will be strong enough to quit it when he stops needing it. I just wish my mother could understand that.
But mother's are made of some harder type of stardust, aren't they? For better and worse.
A distant hug for you in your dark hours.
I am ready to agree with you how drugs are not as bad as mental illness....but there is of course no compare in any of such things.... Often the two are intertwined, anyway (not in the case of my son, but is that a small fortune in the midst of a never ending pool of disorientation?). I have a passionate distaste of drugs, however, probably matching my loathing of autism, as a dark entity that may or may not have the one-so-disposed in its grip. (Not every one with autism is handicapped by it....sigh, I add this formally and routinely, but would rather trust my poetic, metaphysical writings need not always cover everybody's complex sensitivities.) It's the loss of freedom that gets me: how we give it away so casually; even in how autism is now in a pre-genetic stage basically because we are careless in who we love (super provocative statement based on personal observations only... but there will always be a head-preference over a heart-preference in matters concerning the autism spectrum).... Furthermore, mark my words, it's just a question of time before we have set autism in our DNA as if carved in stone. Our bodies being the temples they are, after all...
Your biographical anecdote is powerful, I can feel its tension (still) and it makes me wonder about the nutty karma we create for ourselve in our angst and frustration. Getting along in a Brotherhood of Man remains a hippie dream so far!
The hug works wonders!
Often thought about your last (unanswered) question to me about nourishing a child anthroposophically. It felt to me you are right on track in your own intuitive way. How is the little 'un flourishing? Any pressing thoughts regarding your general curiosity, or for specific tips just drop me a line, otherwise I wouldn't really know where to begin. In any case, I never left you "dangling". You know how my etheric field works!
The little one is less little every day and I grow bigger with pride. I recently (ten minutes ago) watched a video called How to not screw up your kids. It's an interview to Dr. Gabor Mate. He also speaks about adiction and capitalism and the poisons of materialism in other videos. I think he's right on target. He says the first and most important thing you must give the child is happiness, in the sense that you have to be happy yourself so he can learn what happiness is. This I knew from the beginning, that is why I haven't fled Venezuela in search for a 9 to 5 job and a poor-immigrant status that would bring absolutely no joy to me, to him or to my husband. I rather struggle with the lacks common to socialists regimes anywhere, and gain all the human warmth that comes from shared toils.
The second thing he says we ust give children is our presence and the unspoken message that they are welcome in our lives.
So after hearing this two things a lot of questions about potty training and weaning have just fled my mind at the moment. That is the one struggle I do have, though. I still breastfeed him even if he's over two, but he REALLY likes it and it breaks my heart everytime I try. So I've just reduced it to night-time waking and ill-temper in the mornings.
Are you planning to stick around for a while on steemit? With you and @ehr.germany around I have a better incentive to find the time and write articles.
I'm finishing the last touches of a (very) short novel. I hope you'd like to read it when it's done?
By the way, I don't hate drugs, I'm curious about a few, but I think they are to be respected. I don't believe in the concept of 'recreational' drugs. And I do agree with you: they hinder freedom. I'm writing about this subject for an article, maybe we can discuss the subject further then :)
Don't know about the sticking but for sure it makes a difference to find a few familar and sound writers/ musers around worth checking in for. If this small group of interested readers/moral supporters manage to pop in, at least, weekly my incentive is sound for now, amounting issues AFK providing....
Already placed a comment on drugs in a response to Kimberlylane to get the juices flowing on the subject. Needless to say I have studied this particular subject from an esoteric (anthroposophic) perspective to understand (really and not socio-politically) what these substances can do for us (positively/negatively, mainly the latter now, but definitely significantly positively back in the clairvoyant days, before the Dionysian cult fell into a decadent Bacchus cult .... ) but much of this material is quite heavy on the esoteric side. So I might sit this one out to avoid running into clichés. Equally needless to say, you write an excellent piece on how to start off by not being hysterically indoctrinated by stereotypical prejudices (damning the taker and blaming the drug is equally pointless).
It IS a very complex topic about deep things with the substance but a marker. Just don't get me started on Ayahuasca.... or I am going to have to get brutally polemic. Nothing happy-clappy about it (spend a week with a tribe, fine, don't get on their nerves, but it makes a fine anthropological experiment), otherwise I hope you get entangled by a love-vine and are strangled by it (yep, witnessed some bitter experiences with cult developments around this new trend of detoxing the soul).
(Somehow had you located in Mejico... signs of a deteriorating - or very exhausted - brain!).
Of course, I will read your novel! Long or short! Sticking an Orange (or mango) prize on it already. Not in audio book form yet?