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My Cervix Is Not a Cloaca

17 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by emilypageart in endometriosis, health, humor, mental health, Uncategorized

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

birth control options, boils, cervix, Chris Pratt, cloaca, endometriosis, erythema nordosum, gynecologist, magic, mosh pit, superhero

My cervix is an asshole. I mean, not technically. It’s not, like, a cloaca or anything, even though it’s acting kind of shitty. It’s still a cervix. But it’s kind of being a dick. Again, not technically. It’s still a lady-part. What I mean is that, for the last 6 or 7 years, it’s taken its job as Guardian of the Galaxy waaaaaay too seriously – like, thin Chris Pratt seriously, even though we all know fat Chris Pratt is so much funnier (yes, my friends finally talked me into watching Parks and Rec and I’m part way through the second season so it’s virtually all I think about).

chris pratt

Gentlemen, you should probably look away now.

Ladies, does your cervix cooperate? Because mine is all, “You ain’t payin’ rent, so you ain’t comin’ in,” to my doctor when she tries to get a sample during a pap smear. She pokes and prods whispers sweet nothings into my vagina, but my cervix is closed for business. If it had a shoulder, it would give her a cold one. Then, when the doctor finally gives up, my body throws a dance party, but it clearly gets out of control and turns into a mosh pit which is all fun and games until someone pokes an eye out…if my cervix had eyes…or even just one eye…which it doesn’t…I’m pretty sure. Anyway, I’m sure the mosh pit is fun for my reproductive organs, but I interpret all that hurling itself around as painful cramping which is less fun. Also, I feel a little left out that I wasn’t invited to the party. I can rock a lampshade on my head with the best of them. But I guess you don’t really wear a lampshade in a mosh pit (etiquette and all), so maybe that’s why I wasn’t invited.

So, then I asked my doctor if my cervix had, like, super powers, and I no longer need birth control to avoid getting pregnant because it would stop sperm in their tracks, but she just looked at me condescendingly and patiently explained that sperm are microscopic, and my cervix isn’t magical. Then she also reminded me that when I go off of the pill, my endometriosis goes craycray and I get erythema nordosum, so I should really stay on it. But then I said that maybe my cervix was so magical that it caused the erythema nordosum just to give itself a break, which is genius and pretty much the best birth control ever because no man wants to be with a woman covered in boils. My cervix is smart, y’all. I suggested we make it a cape in case it also has the ability to fly. Then she noted something in my chart and left the room. I don’t know why.

So I dressed quickly and hightailed it out of there before she either ordered a psych consult or alerted the enemy about my superhero cervix.

P.S. Cross your fingers that the doctor got enough of a sample that I don’t have to go back again for another try and pay for it again.

P.P.S. I was going to draw you a little picture of my cervix wearing a cape, but then I Googled cervix images to work from, and now I need to go throw up. Or drink some bourbon.

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Mondays With Muddy

19 Monday Sep 2016

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized, writing

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art, Beatrice Allen Page, Landscape with Figures, magic, Mondays with Muddy, unpublished manuscript, writing

Here is the next installment from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape with Figures:

“I brought home from the library C. S. Lewis’s autobiographical book, Surprised by Joy, simply because my eye chanced to fall on it and I have enjoyed other books of his. I read most of the night and my astonishment kept me awake the rest of it, for there I found described far more vividly than I could ever do, the strange, haunting sensation associated with both ‘The Magic’ and ‘the northern mood.’

The magic was always evoked for him, I gathered, by something with a northern connotation. They belonged together as one experience which he calls ‘Joy’ even though, as he says, it might almost equally well be called a kind of grief: ‘an unsatisfied desire which is in itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.’ In each instance it only lasted a moment but it seemed to him of tremendous significance, something quite different from ordinary experiences, ‘something, as they would now say, ‘in another dimension.’ He speaks of it as a ‘stab,’ a ‘pang,’ an ‘inconsolable longing.’ ‘All Joy reminds,’ he writes. ‘It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’

He caught his first glimpse as a child of whatever-it-might-be through nature. His second glimpse of it came through Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin, which aroused in him an intense desire for what he calls the ‘idea of Autumn.’ He went back to the book again and again, not to gratify the desire because it was manifestly impossible to possess a season, but to reawaken the desire.

His third glimpse came some years later when, leafing through a volume of Longfellow, he came upon the lines from Tegner’s Drapa:

I heard a voice that cried

Baldur the Beautiful

Is dead, is dead –

(A ‘northern’ shiver runs down my spine as I copy the words.)

Lewis had no notion of who Baldur was but he was ‘instantly uplifted into huge regions of northern sky.’ He ‘desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale and remote).’

Later on he came to call whatever gave him this sensation, ‘Northernness.’ It might be a landscape or Norse mythology or Wagnerian music. The last surprises me: Wagner’s operas seems too flamboyant, too crushing to be northern, even though they deal with Norse mythology. He speaks of being engulfed in pure Northernness: ‘a vision of huge, clear space hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer.’

He wondered for awhile if the bittersweet longing he felt was a disguise for sexual desire – a possibility I, too, have speculated on – and came to the conclusion that sex might sometimes be a substitute for Joy, but no more than a temporary expedient. ‘You might as well offer a mutton chop to a man who is dying of thirst as offer sexual pleasure to the desire I am speaking of.’ (I doubt if he meant to imply there was any resemblance between a mutton chop and sex.)

He learned, even as I, that to focus on the sensation was only to frighten it away, and that it could not be sought for its own sake, for the ‘thrill’ of it. It came to him when he was least conscious of himself and his own feelings or state of mind. Eventually, after his conversion to Christianity, he came to believe that the experience itself was of no importance. ‘It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer.’ Since my recent glimpse of The Magic a couple weeks ago, I could almost go along with him in accepting it as evidence of ‘something other and outer’ – not just some momentary psychological state – but I wonder if I shall ever find the explanation or the word for that other and outer.”

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Mondays With Muddy

13 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, reincarnation, Uncategorized, writing

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, book, Landscape with Figures, magic, unpublished manuscript, writing

Here is the next installment of Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“Something happened this morning which I wish I could put into words and keep forever, so that to reread the words would be to rekindle the wonderment of the experience. I know I can’t. There aren’t any words. I can only vaguely suggest it, as if I were trying to tell what a tree looks like by describing its shadow.

I had taken a walk along the beach and then crossed the base of the Point to the rocky shore to sit for a little while in one of my favorite spots down close to the water. I could tell it was going to be a hot day – not a cloud in the sky, not a puff of air, the sea as smooth as China silk. But the sun had not been up long enough to warm the granite. It was still cool from the  night and the ebb tide that had recently washed over it. And no matter how limp with heat the day might become later, at that hour it was still fresh and slightly salty, and so clear that the cried of some terns diving for fish sounded as if they were being etched on it like a design on fine glass.

The water, too, was so transparent that I could look down through its green calm and see the wavy sand ridges at the bottom. The ripples slipping over the periphery of the ledge might have been liquid glass. The very sound of the water gurgling through gaps and hollows had a cool, limpid quality.

The whole world was suspended in such a serene clarity that I felt as if I were gazing into a crystal ball. My mind, too, felt extraordinarily clear and still. Not that I was thinking profound thoughts. On the contrary I was not conscious of thinking at all; I only felt unusually…awake, I think, is the right word.

Then out of the blue there brushed across my mind and senses, lightly as the flicker of a butterfly’s wing, an impression – my inclination is to say a realization – that a veil so sheer as to be invisible hung between the world I was looking at another world, or an unsuspected realm of the familiar world, and I could almost…almost…see through it. I was on the very brink of apprehending an incredible revelation and I was filled with an expectation and joy too deep for words.

The moment came and went in the span of an eyewink and I was left with a feeling of loss and longing but at the same time gratitude and astonishment that once again after all my ‘noisy years’ in Wordsworth’s phrase, I should have recovered for an instant a hint of the ‘visionary gleam.’ I can count such moments on the fingers of one hand.

The first – at least the first I remember – occurred on a day in early spring. I may have been seven or eight or nine, I don’t recall. It started out like any other day. I dressed and came downstairs at the usual time, but breakfast was not quite ready and I wandered out in the backyard to wait. It must have been April because the yellow forsythia bush by the back door (we were living in the winter house then) was in full bloom. I sat down in the swing that hung from a large elm. I remember the sensation of a little current of air laying itself softly across the back of my neck like a chiffon scarf. I remember other trivia: letting the toes of my shoes scuff the ground as I swung negligently back and forth, a window shade going up across the street. And a robin searching for a worm – the quick little run across the grass, the pause with head cocked to listen, the quick little run again.

Watching the robin I was suddenly struck with how green the grass was. I had never seen grass so green. I could smell and taste the greenness. It even seemed to me (probably fusing the signing of song sparrows with the color) that I could hear it. The yellow forsythia, which only a moment or two before I had thought of as ‘pretty,’ now made the same extraordinary impact on me.

Beyond or within these sensuous impressions, every individual blossom, every blade of grass, every swelling bud on the maples, every bird call held a secret that was about to be revealed to me. The whole world was on the verge of unfolding, of opening like a flower and I would be able to see into the very heart of it, into its hidden meaning. I would understand everything.

I felt an almost unbearable long and suspense. I was standing on figurative tiptoe, on the very threshold of something unspeakably wonderful. Then, as unpredictably as it had started to ‘open,’ the world closed again. Not with a snap; it was just that one moment I’d had a glimpse into heaven and the next minute I was standing in my own backyard again where the forsythia was ‘pretty’ and the grass was green and the birds were singing and my mother would be calling me any minute to come in to breakfast. That was all. I was more surprised than disappointed this first time to have had the door closed in my face, so to speak, because I assumed that whatever had happened once could happen again, or that I could make it happen.

Morning after morning I slipped out of the house before breakfast trying to evoke the mystifying experience by my own efforts. I stared at every tree and shrub and flower as it came into leaf and bloom that spring. I kept thinking that if I just looked hard enough, I would really be able to see into the heart of things and understand everything.  It seemed to me that in addition to my physical eyes, I had an inward, mental eye which I imagined as being inside my head between my eyebrows. If I could learn to see with this eye…And so I strained with all my eyes until the physical ones watered and the mental one ached behind my forehead, but all to no avail.

Then I tried to recapture the sensation, not what I had almost seen but what I had felt, of what I called in my mind The Magic, the only name I could think of for something inexpressible. In this context the word had no connotation of trickery. It meant, rather, something altogether mysterious and wonderful, which had given me a mixed feeling of joy and sadness. There had been a strange quality about the sadness, however, that made it far more to be desired than any ordinary happiness. I could remember this, that is I could remember that I had felt that way but I could not recover the feeling itself.

At long last I gave up. I still did not realize that it was my very effort to pry open the door that closed it tighter. I felt obscurely that nature had betrayed or deserted me. So, a little vengefully, I put nature out of my mind. I sought out the other children in the neighborhood, I played hid-and-go-seek outdoors and cut out paper dolls indoors and behaved, as my mother expressed it, like a normal child instead of mooning about by myself.

Months passed, perhaps even a year or so – I am unclear as to dates – when once more The Magic took me unawares. I had gone to my grandmother’s house for lunch. It must have been a cold winter day because, although I recall nothing about the walk to her house – whether there was snow on the ground for instance – I do recall sitting on the floor in her front hall tugging off my leggings and the bits of frozen snow clinging to my blue mittens, which I had dropped on the rug beside me.

If I was unhappy or upset or something, I have forgotten. What I remember, though, is the sudden lift of the heart as I walked into her sitting-room and my glance fell on the small globe, like a goldfish bowl, which she had filled with moss and partridge berries. I had helped her look for them in the woods that fall. I must have seen the little terrarium dozens of times. I have no idea why on this particular day I was suddenly so enchanted by the bright red berries nestled among the various shade of green. It was not The Magic – I had no thought of that – it was just a simple pleasure in what I saw. I walked over to it, and leaned over to smell it. One whiff and I was back in the autumn woods, down on my knees with my fingers probing into the moist earth to dig up a clump of moss, the smell of leaf-mold in my nostrils, and the stillness all around me broken only by a squirrel bounding over the fallen leaves, and our own instinctively subdued voices. The recollection was poignantly vivid, but it was still not The Magic and I still had no thought of that.

Then, without any intimation, for one ineffable moment the woods opened into all woods, all over the world, throughout all time, into the very essence of woods, into something beyond words which filled me with both an anguish and a rapture. It was The Magic.

It came and went in an instant but before that instant was up, I was certain this time I could hold it. It was caught, after all, in that small globe where it could not escape me. Again and again after it passed I took deep breaths until I was dizzy but The Magic had fled. It grew more and more remote in the way a scent loses its vividness when one smells of it repeatedly.

At long last I realized The Magic could never be summoned like a genie – as I was to learn later about ‘the northern mood.’ It happened or it didn’t happen. There was, at least, the hope it might come soon some day again when I was not expecting it.

A few times after that, at long intervals, I felt that I had missed it by less than a fraction of a hair’s breadth. In each instance I was suddenly astonished by an impression that the whole earth was covered with an invisible veil. I yearned with all my mind and heart and soul to brush it away because I knew that behind the veil lay The Magic. Then eventually I understood the veil as not outside me; it was the mental eye inside my head whose vision was obscured. I knew that no amount of straining and determination could make the scales fall from that eye. I could only wait and hope for that inner vision to clear so that I could really see and understand.

It never cleared quite enough. Always just as I was on the most delicate featheredge of the longed-for revelation, the world assumed its everyday appearance again. Yet strangely, in spite of the blighted hope there was joy, too, in the conviction that what I called The Magic was no fanciful notion but a reality – a conviction which faded with the years but which I almost regained this morning, and would have if reason had not restrained me.

I’m sure these seeming glimpses into something beyond or within ordinary observation must occur in every child’s life. What puzzles me is that no one ever speaks of them, and occasionally when I have tentatively mentioned my own experiences, it has – like ‘the northern mood’ – stimulated no responsive chord. You would expect people to cherish such memories and compare notes and speculate about the meaning. It must be that people forget, perhaps because they want to forget a joy they fear can never be found again.

There may be many examples in literature but only rarely have I happened on one. Wordsworth springs to mind at once. I think there was a time when, if I had known the poem, I could have believed with him that ‘the hour of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower’ is not an intuition of something never before perceived but a dim memory of a life before birth – hence the element of nostalgia and the feeling, as with ‘the northern mood,’ of something far away and long ago.

The only other description I have ever read of a childhood experience similar to what I called The Magic occurs in Bernard Berenson’s Sketch for a Self-Portrait. He tells of a morning in early summer when a silver haze shimmered over the lime trees and the soft air was laden with their fragrance. Sitting on a tree stump, happy in the outdoors, he felt suddenly ‘immersed in Itness.’ It was a moment of perfect harmony, an ecstasy, the memory of which remained his touchstone forever after, a reminder of his life’s true goal.

I wonder, could that nameless longing I felt one wakeful night not long ago have been for the long lost Magic?

Looking back over my life now, after this morning’s fleeting percipience, I know that if I could hold on to whatever gifts of graces a fairy godmother may have bestowed upon me at birth, the one I would choose about all is that sense of The Magic hidden within the beauty and mystery of creation.

And so July comes to an end and I realize with a little shock the summer is half over.”

 

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Fireflies Becoming Stars

17 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by emilypageart in gratitude, Haunt

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

being in the moment, fireflies, just being, learning to be, magic, stars

Sunday night, S and I went out to the haunt so that he could show me a shack he had just built for a new set. We headed out just before dusk, drove the truck over to the shack, and climbed onto the roof. We lay back looking at the sky and started talking and reconnecting in a way we haven’t in years. No talk about work, or future plans, or anything stressful. We talked about happy memories of camping as kids and young adults. In the distance, a train would go by periodically with its haunting whistle, making me think warm thoughts about my dad. And as dusk turned to night, we watched the property transform into something magical. The fireflies came out with a display like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I never realized how high they flew, because when we ran around catching them as kids, they were always down low and easy to snare. But they fly around even more in the tops of the tree line than they do in the field, dancing and twinkling and sparkling like something in a Disney movie. And every now and then, a firefly would rise above the tree line and appear to merge with the stars for a brief moment. And it felt like my heart was rising and merging, too. We lay there for over 2 hours, just watching and occasionally commenting, and for the first time in a long time, just being. Magic.

Fireflies Becoming Stars 5"x9" watercolor on paper

Fireflies Becoming Stars 5″x9″ watercolor on paper

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Emily Page

Emily Page

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