Hotel Retreat, Day 6

I'm so sick today I didn't feel connected enough to the external world to take any pictures.  This is a photo of the raw-ish buckwheat porridge I've been making every morning.  We get passes to the hotel breakfast buffet ($13.95 without coupon), but I've yet to try it.  My cereal looks like vomit, but it's delicious.  If you're ever in a hotel and lug along a travel blender, you can make it too.  You soak 3 coffee scoops of buckwheat groats overnight.  In the morning you rinse the buckwheat, then blend it, along with some currants (for sweetness), a pinch of salt, and lots of cinnamon, with hot water from the hotel coffee maker.  The hot water makes it warm, which I find soothing.  Then you add in a glob of raw almond butter and blend again.  I top it with chopped fruit and a sprinkle of sunflower seeds.  I know this is boring and geeky, and if I wasn't sick and had something better to talk about, I wouldn't bother you with it.

I'm having a hard time with being ill and holding it all together.  This is what I wrote to a friend this evening:

"Being sick is making me depressed and abject.  I feel like a hideous swollen monster who nobody likes.  So thanks for sending me an email where you act like you like me."

Pathetic.  But on the bright side, I'm lucky to have friends whom I can write such foolish things to.  I long for a mother to wipe my snotty nose.  Thinking about being sick as a child, how caring my mother was, lavishing on me a sweetness I didn't experience much of otherwise.  In our home there was a myth that I was a healthy, rugged child, when in fact I had recurring bouts of a kidney infection that can kill little girls.  I got all sorts of attention being sick and I didn't have to go to school for several weeks.  The problem was I loved school and it was boring having to lie around on the couch and eat food with no salt, and I got a shot of penicillin in the ass every week.  This is exactly the kind of episode where the child, loving all the attention, turns sickly forever, but maybe that only happens to middle class children.  My mother did not believe in "babying" me.  Life was rough and you dealt with it; there was no room in her world for a sensitive flower, which I was emotionally.  I once read in a Jungian book that the daughter sometimes embodies the shadow of the mother, and I was yes, yes, that's she and I.  Emotions are the enemy of the life is rough and you deal with it mentality.  As I got older I came to admire her strength.  Even when she was dying she was bossing me around, which is awesome, that spirit.

So this is where I'm at right now.  I wouldn't be writing this, except for some reason it's important to redo the 10-day hotel retreat series I did a year ago, a version of which is in the buddhist.  He was still very present in my consciousness last December.  Doing the series again is like erasing him.  And yes, it's not passed my notice that Thomas Merton is a sort of substitution for him.

Here's a bonus pic, the persimmon and apple I chopped up for my buckwheat gruel.