Entry Penned Beginning
Saturday November 16th 2024 C.E
10:00 GMT+7
Today is shaping up to be another quiet day I think, I am settling into a pleasant routine now of waking up, eating breakfast, doing my gym workout, then my shower and self care, take some notes here and plan my day.
The bulk of yesterday was spent working on this blog, setting up the pages and writing my first entry before dinner of a spirulina bowl with berries, cacao nibs and granola
The spirulina is blended and frozen and eats rather like a gelato, but is actually a seaweed / algae incredibly high in protein and very nutrient dense.
Like almost all my meals since arriving in Thailand I have leftovers as I find myself getting full much faster; the same thing happened in Ireland and my belief is that the food is simply of higher nutritional value and my body is getting the fuel it needs much more easily.
After dinner I watcher the celebration in the village greenspace for a while, a Thai festival of lights. I am sure I would have been welcome to join in as it looks like it is an open event for all, but not speaking the language I did not wish to risk disrupting the celebration through miscommunication or placing additional labor on folks who were celebrating.
Today I will do a little shopping, probably just online, which is pretty much par for the course here, most folks use a service called grab for their convenience shopping and meal deliveries. Just a few odds and ends we have found we are missing, like a broom.
As I spend more time listening to my body and giving it more of the care it needs I am starting to embrace a truth that those nearest and dearest to me have been trying to get my stubborn self to see for some time. My greying, thinning, receding hair, my tremors, my cPTSD, even my diabetes to an extent are not failures and weakness they are battle scars. In some of my public lessons I have talked about the way that being a warrior can look very different in our world and time, that putting oneself in harms way for your community and being prepared to do harm to protect and preserve that community does not always mean physical confrontation. By the same token the wounds taken are not always broken limbs or missing eyes but rather the other tolls that are taken on the body by being the one to take the phone calls, to do the late night drives, to live with the uncertainty of the repercussions when you take a stand and say “across the line you will not cross”.
I am not a veteran, I have no military service and I would never claim otherwise, but I am a warrior of a different sort and have served as a protector for my clan and my community in many ways; legally, spiritually, physically and emotionally I have placed myself into harms way, and done harm, to preserve those who need it. In many ways I have done disservice to those closest to me by being pig headed about recognising the toll that has taken on me but now, at last, I am beginning to see these not as my failings but rather a part of my Work that I need to be honour and embrace.
That turned rather unexpectedly introspective there, I choose to blame, or credit as the case may be, the fact that my husband is in their room sinking into a writing space and the shift of energy through the house while I was journaling swept me.
So wandering away from my introspection there today I am going to try to pickup a few things for the house here and then take some time to play some video games. Without my PC I have more limits on what I can play but thanks to the ridiculously fast internet here I can use the NVIDIA GEforce Now platform to stream most of my games to my very (very, very, very) old laptop; I cannot mod them, which means I simply cannot play Skyrim, but I can manage vanilla Baldurs gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2077; and of course my old staple of LOTRO is perfectly playable even on this laptop without streaming(honestly it is playable on virtually a potato at this point).
-Robert James-Noonan O’Wayreth
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