If you’re like me, then you have trouble falling asleep unless you are listening to “the news” of some kind. (Weird, I know.) My mind has gotten used to the drone of voices demanding to be heard, with the latest “breaking” news . . . The “worse” the news, paradoxically, the easier it is for me to fall asleep . . . until I awaken again, and the pattern repeats.

But of course, my long nights waking and sleeping mean that I rarely get “enough” sleep, have trouble staying awake (unless fully engaged, like now, composing this post), and so must take an afternoon nap, lulled again by ipad tuned to something to help me fall off, at least for a few minutes . . .

Yes, at nearly 80 years of age, I’ve finally vanquished my “substance” addictions (coffee, cigarettes, marijuana); and I’ve outgrown, or I should say, transformed, my (intense) addiction to romance; what remains is this, still gnawing at my being, what I call my root addiction, to “the news.”

Forgive me if you’ve already been pestered about this, my “origin myth” . . .

Here goes: my own, still (apparently) stuck, PTSD started when I was two years and nine months old, listening to the radio with my Mom and her sisters and parents. Dad was gone, as an army surgeon in the Phillipines — which is why they listened every day to the news about the war. On that particular day, August 6, 1945, the announcement came in over the radio: the Japanese city of Hiroshima had been destroyed by an “atomic bomb.”

Instantly, the adults around me rejoiced! For it meant my father would come home again.

Me? I don’t know which was worse, the news on the radio or their reaction to it. Maybe the cognitive/emotional dissonance of the combination, was what got me. In any case, I, as a tiny child, was instantly seized by horror. And from that moment on I knew, with every fiber in my tiny being, that the world would end in my lifetime unless — with a child’s magical thinking: I personally was able to stop it from happening.

By the time I was five, I was running to get the daily newspaper off the porch, and scan the headlines for news. No news was good news. I could run outside and pretend to play again, pretend I wasn’t Chicken Little..

Though I gave up personal responsibility for this — what does seem, now more than ever, not just an eventual, but a near-future global extinction event — back in the early ’90s, when I met Sekhmet, in Egypt, the addiction to the news has remained.

So yes, ever since I was a little girl, I’ve felt continuously starved for “the news” of what is going on in the wider world beyond my own experience. Really weird, when you think about it . . .

Even more than generations who’ve grown up with the internet and screens, I’ve lived nearly eighty years continuously starved for (the latest) information . . . but why? for what? As my deceased husband Jeff used to say, “What can you do about it?” I.e., if there’s nothing you can do about it, then why get obsessed?

The best I seem to be able to do, so far, is to funnel my addiction into sharing my findings, mediated through my own awareness and experience, with others. At least that way, this addiction finds a purpose, and every day, when I’ve completed my daily post, and pushed the button to publish, I feel both satisfied and temporarily relieved.

Okay, now I can go on and attend to what’s real for me in this world, the one I personally live in, here at home, in Green Acres Permaculture Village. I spend a good part of each day that way, attending to what personally, interpersonally, materially, spiritually arises in the year 2022, its continuously frissoning turbulence that infects each of us as it courses through the collective unconscious and sparks lightning flashes of more or less extreme disturbance via screened info, disinfo, misinfo, porn, memes, on and on, via, especially what we call “social media,” given that so many of us now completely ignore what used to be “mainstream.”

It’s hard for me to remember that I held a printed daily subscription to the New York Times up until the end of 2010! — when I underwent a sea change more quickly than even I am used to, and found myself creating exopermaculture.com, at the end of January 2011.

So here I am, nearly 12 years later — one Jupiter cycle later — still going strong in the blogging department, even though I changed to this, more personal site, in August 2021, leaving the other up as an archive. So that’s one continuity amidst the turbulence. That’s the mental continuity, along with ever-changing relations with a variety of fascinating and totally unique humans in my life.

The physical continuity is provided by hands in the soil and by my practices, what I call my two hours of “physical culture,” via walking, yoga, chikung and taichi.

The emotional continuity is provided constantly by my two small animals. Thank goodness for puppy Shadow and Tiger Kitty! They keep me at least relatively sane, attending to their very predictable needs for food, water, shelter, human attention, and comfortable places to sleep. Loving their immersion in the natural world, and their constancy, through it all, grounding my own flighty being through long daily walks with curious Shadow and moving my eager hands over Tiger’s fabulously formed thickly furred, body, as he luxuriates, totally relaxed, in my lap.

Last night, around 5 AM, I think it was X22 Report that I was trying to listen to for the fifth time, having been awakened every few hours by either Shadow scratching at my door, wanting to come up on the bed or outside to pee, or my own bladder calling, or Tiger needing to come inside, having not succeeded, apparently, in stalking rat, or rabbit, or mole or vole, and so starved for food. Which I dutifully dug into the fridge for him, before realizing I had to open a new can, while he waited, tail swishing, on the counter next to me in the dimly lit dark.

So, yes, I think I had actually listened to the whole of X22’s current (as always, optimistic) analysis and perspective, when all of a sudden, a new video of an entirely other kind appeared on my ipad. Huh? How did that get there? Lazily, assuming it would help me fall asleep one more time before rising, I began to listen. And then couldn’t stop listening. In 19 plus minutes, this man describes exactly what I “am,” what I have discovered, uncovered, recovered, in living, hopefully consciously, so long on planet earth, beneath the trivia detailed in this post.

Mea culpa, if you found yourself wading through it!