Sylvia's Journal

One comes to New Orleans for the trio of food, drinks and music; this is not usually the kind of vacation I take.  The food part of the trio is always there, the drinks less (I generally don’t do cocktails) and we rarely go out to listen to music back home or on vacation. But here I am getting into this wonderful combination of the three: we eat very well, we try out all sorts of interesting cocktails and we listen to music.

Of course there is music everywhere: on the streets, in restaurants, in historic settings and in clubs or dance halls. We have found our favorite place, Snug Harbor, which is indeed a snug little place with small chairs and tiny round tables and a small stage.

After a fabulous show earlier this week at Snug Harbor of Mahmoud Chouki, we returned to see one member of the Marsalis Family (Delfeayo) with his big band on the tiny stage. It was a most playful and enjoyable show of brass band artistry.

Compared with the soulless and uninspired performance at Preservation Hall (a tourist attraction), this was how music should be played – to the enjoyment of players and listener alike. At the end three high school students from Little Rock were invited onto the stage to join the band and show off their talents with their baritone sax, alto sax and trombone. You could see that this was a rather nerve-wrecking experience for them – they could not yet be playful like the established players.

Delfeayo  and the members of his band showed me how they were mentoring the next generation of great jazz musicians – talking to them with their eyes as jazz players do, and encouraging them to stand up and play their solos. I was very impressed, these kids are talented. I imagined them being big fish in their Little Rock high school, going to swim in the big pond with the real big fish.

There was much joking about the boys’ hometown (‘country boys’) and the clothes they wore (sneakers, one with a hat and dreadlocks and T-shirts).  The band members all wore coats and most of them ties as well.  Still, you could tell there was also great respect. Later one of the players told us that this is now what he lives for – passing the baton and grooming the next generation of great jazz players.

The first snow has just started to fall, on the wintry December 10 day. I was just in time planting 20 tiny Winter Aconaite (Eranthis) bulbs. They look like nothing, little shriveled up dark things that blend in with the debris from frantic squirrel activity over the last few months. As I was digging small holes in different parts of the yard I always found nuts from this or that tree that had already claimed the space. It is rather amazing how the squirrels remember where they put stuff. We would call that smarts, but I am not sure what it means for animals.

I am listening to a book about cephalopods, among them octopus, giant squid and tiny squid. It is a philosophical treatise about consciousness and what the amazing behavior of cephalopods teaches us about consciousness. As with most books I am reading or listening to these days, it is about the brain. But the brain and nervous system of the octopus is, I learn, not in the head but all over the body. In my coaching course the word ‘embodiment’ is often used and I am trying to figure out what that means for us humans – but for the octopus it is clear. The body and brain are one. And maybe we are like that too, as there are neurons (some 500 million) in our gut and (less) in our heart. And neural activity takes of course also place in our small toe.

At work things are quiet – which is always true just before the holidays – but I also have little project work to do and charge much time to overhead. This I don’t like, and I am sure my superiors don’t either, since I am relatively costly. I am using the time for self-care related to my arthritic ankle: cupping, a massage technique that separates the fibers in my traumatized ankle with all its scar tissue, massages and physical therapy. On Fridays this can take up half a day.

I also use my down time to read up on professional literature that I have put aside. As always I am amazed about the knowledge and experience that is constantly being accumulated – but I am also heartened that by the fact that the so-called soft stuff of development is now being acknowledged as important (above and beyond what is usually referred to as ‘technical skills’). I even saw the word ‘co-create’ surface here and there. Now I am in my element – it’s time for me to write about how one can do this. I have some ideas.

On Sunday I passed from 65 to 66. I told Axel we should have taken a ride on Route 66 but it is a bit far from here. Instead he took me on a surprise birthday trip to Portland (Maine) where he had created a feast that went from fabulous lunch to fabulous dinner to fabulous hotel to fabulous breakfast to fabulous lunch before we headed home via Tessa and Steve.

They whipped up a fresh pasta meal for us with leftover sauces from their annual friends dinner where some 18 people come together to enjoy each other and great food. It’s a wonderful ritual that reminds me a bit of our periodic taco nights when we lived in Georgetown (MA) and the guys vied with each other for who could eat the hottest taco – sweat drops running down their foreheads as they pushed beyond limits. Was it fun? For us not engaged in this contest it was great fun to watch the men in their self-imposed suffering.

Back in July I started an experiment related to an auto-immune disease called Hashimoto’s that I inherited from my mother. The disease is common among light skinned and blond haired women of European descent. Mothers pass it on. It was diagnosed rather late in life and rather surprised – I had never heard of the disease and had none of the associated symptoms. I didn’t notice any difference before and after the diagnosis was made and after taking the pills to up the performance of my thyroid.

Tessa turned me on to some books written by a pharmacist who also had the disease and made the relief of her and others’ severe symptoms her life’s work. I learned that there are some foods that exacerbated her symptoms. My goal was not to alleviate symptoms, since I had none, but rather to get off the medication. I started a four-month experiment, first by removing gluten from my diet – gluten is a known inflammatory agent.  When tests were done after three months there was no difference from a year earlier – some values had gone up a bit and some down. So much for the gluten, though it has been nice to support Tessa for whom gluten is turning out to be really a bad thing.

Then I started another experiment, with the doctor’s consent, to stop taking the thyroid medicine altogether. Again, I noticed no difference. But when my bloodwork results came in today both my primary physician and endocrinologist told me to immediately get back on those pills; the values were wildly out of range, in the wrong direction.  That ended the four month experiment and I am back where I started.

Now I am starting a new experiment, also to get off medication, this time off the statin I am taking for high cholesterol. With about 17 pounds lost and on a daily exercise regime I am wondering whether I still need the medication. With the doctor’s consent I pushed the pill bottle to the back of the shelf, until early February when bloodwork will tell me whether I can continue without or need to get back.

The last experiment is to get off the Neurontin for my ankle zings and prickles. I have started a treatment of cupping – the creation of space in the mass of scar tissue in my left ankle – a dense mass that my overexcited foot nerves can’t seem to penetrate. The first treatment was encouraging – increased mobility and range of motion, less pain.