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Now that today I am better, with the love of friends who truly know what I am and what I am about in this world, in this body, in this lifetime, and from the high desert soaking rain — the high tumbling multi-shadowed clouds — with the help of the wind and its companion breezes — sunlight brilliant against the blue outlining edges — and the rainbow I saw this morning as I answered a friend — the full low humble rainbow arching close to me in the north as it called to me “I am here” — as all called to me “We are here!  You are not alone!  You are befriended.  You can breath.  You can relax and move away from those so-sharp razor edges that tell you — you have gone far enough.  Come back now.  Back to your body.  Back to time and place.”

Yesterday I searched online for hours reading what neuroscientists in USA, China, Germany, Japan, Iran, India, the Netherlands, Israel — have found in the past two years about the brain.  About especially brain wave oscillating rhythms.  AH!  They say. 

Each single individual neuron responds and is responded to as these patterns of music play, region to region, community to community inside our skull.  “Synchrony.”  The scientists talk about.  “Asynchrony.”  1 – 400 Hz.  Do they know with their EEGs they are hearing the sound of the beat in the beta and gamma, alpha and theta music all seven-plus billion of us here on this planet (plus all of those animals) are singing together?  Do they hear it?  Can I hear it?

So focused I become when I search deep space through echannels.  I follow and follow each trail of information, tendril wisps of vapor.  Thoughts so small and ultimately so connected.  All those trails lead in gigantic loops so far I search also for where the trails of thought turn to loop over and into and through one another.  Sometimes this takes years.

The tiny little glial cells.  I learned about them, too.  (I want to learn more.  But not now.)  From the Greek word “glue.”  They take on many tasks, but the one that I followed yesterday has to do with how they are the first “pioneers” (the researchers call them) to travel during fetal brain development into new territory, new geography in the newly formed skull, creating molecular signposts and molecular trails into new regions where other new cells will follow.  The neurons segregate, congregate, speicialize and form communities that communicate with one another as they form our brain and our mind.  Little “entrymen” as homesteaders like my father were called.  Little homesteaders. 

I also searched about the corpus callosum, the region of neurons at the center of our brain as they link the two halves of our brain together — our left and our right.  Across this formation, through this bridge information is passed so our two brains can integrate and process and talk to one another.  They decide.  They know what matters, what doesn’t, why and how.

At the same time I know from previous study that early trauma changes all of this for its survivors.  Both our brain hemispheres, our corpus callosum – and so much more.  All changed.  We have a different kind of brain.  Always, I ask of mine, “Who are you?  What do you know and how do you know it and how do I find out what you know?  Different knowledge.  We know it in different ways.

Yesterday I followed with my left brain (I am quite sure) volumes of factual detailed information that is written and published in little tiny unrelated pieces.  My right brain was left far behind, unable to sing to me, “This is what all of this means!”  Sing loudly.  Sing insistently.

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But when I follow what intrigues me in the PubMed online database with my windows open and the research flooding my poor old worn laptop, it slows down, so far down I am forced to stop.  Close this world down.  Lose all of my trains of intent thinking, reboot my computer from dead stop-off, and begin again.  This is frustrating.  This slows ME down.

I dream of having a big room with large flat high-quality monitors covering its walls so I can put on them all those thoughts when I find them — sit back — walk around — read those research thoughts as the works of wonderous discovery of truth and beauty that they are!

As it is, I have no printer to even print them.  Which is just as well.  Last time I did this searching (about 5 years ago – so much new has been discovered!) I filled over 60 feet of running board bookshelf feet with binders full of reports on the state of a miniscule snippet of the cosmos that fascinates me — the human body, especially the brain.  Eventually I felt crowded.  I emptied it all into the ground and fed it to my garden worms.

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Today.  I am back to ink pen in hand, riding my writing as I would the perfect steed.  Wind in my hair while I empty 10-20 pens a week at least and think “What a frustrating waste of manufacture and resources.”  Pens are created cheaply today and sold with so little ink.  No longer can I find them refills.  Most of them don’t even open.  But, no, I have yet to sharpen a quill and find a pot of ink to ride with across lines on paper until long after sunset.

(I have 180-page spiral notebooks all over my house where I can lay my hands on one in an instant.  All purchased for two bucks each at our small town’s Family Dollar store.  No college ruled sheets to be found in this town.  I make do.)

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