Discovering Salisbury and Poseidon

Ah.  The things we forget as we grow older.  Our car keys.  The grocery list.  Why we ordered pennyroyal.  The reason for cryptic class notes.  The fact that when we go to the beach for the first time in (mumble mumble) years and remove our bathing suits once we’re back home, we’re going to dump the entire contents of the sandy beach onto our bathroom floor, sink, bath tub and everything else!!! 

Yes, I should have been standing somewhere safe – inside the shower.  On a newspaper.  I was standing there, remembering all of the various efforts to “protect the floor!” my late mother undertook with three sandy kids crawling indoors after a day at the beach in Brewster, and thinking, “Mom, you could have tapped me on the shoulder or something!”  But no, she’s off riding fire engines in another galaxy somewhere (she always wanted to ride in a fire truck) ... and of no use to me whatsoever.  I remembered all of her valiant efforts only AFTER I’d made a sandy mess of the bathroom floor.  Again, I say:  “D’oh!!”

But ahhhh, the beach.  Salisbury.  I got there just as it opened, for several solid reasons:  less chance of huge numbers of people and less chance of a killer sunburn if I left before noon.  And you say, “So wear sunscreen!”.  To which I say, “Have you ever read the contents of a bottle of sunscreen, you gullible idiot ... er, I mean ... you easily misled and altogether rather pitiful nice person??” (I’m trying to be more polite.  How’s it going?)

Given the choice between absorbing all of those toxic chemicals into my skin and spending 2 hours in the morning sun and building up a tan tolerance?  The sunscreen is more likely to kill me than Ra or Sekhmet (“Blazing Eye of the Sun”) ever could.  I can’t believe the vast numbers of people in this country who bought into the “The sun is BAD for you!” nonsense without giving it any thought.  If Mr. Signpost taught us anything, it’s the exact opposite:  it’s the NO SUNLIGHT option that is truly bad for you.  And according to a recent study cited in Scientific American, ¾ of teens and adults in the U.S. are now lacking Vitamin D, “whose deficits are increasingly blamed for everything from cancer and heart disease to diabetes, according to new research.”  I’m not even remotely surprised.
Source:  http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=vitamin-d-deficiency-united-states

Overdoing ANYTHING isn’t good for you, no matter what it is.  If I stayed out there all day and ended up getting a sunstroke, that’s overdoing it.  Try eating a bushel of apples all at once and tell me that eating a bushel of apples “keeps the doctor away”.  Not.  The doctor would be looking at you pitifully over the stomach pump.  That woman who looked like she spent her life in a tanning bed and could now donate her skin to the shoe leather industry definitely overdid it and even she’s not dying of skin cancer.  People have lived their entire lives out in the sun for millions of years without dying of skin cancer in droves. We are without a doubt the most idiotic, gullible country on the planet, seriously.  Dousing ourselves in toxic chemicals is safer than spending a few hours with the glorious, life-giving Sun???  OMG!

But back to the beach.  It was so beautiful.  So peaceful.  So calm and soothing.  I even thought I could learn to meditate to the rhythm of the waves.  I’m still relaxed from a mere few hours there.  I definitely have to go there more often.  I learned a few things about my own health and strength.  As the water rushed in and out, I found it difficult to keep my feet.  A few times I lost my balance, and let the waves push me in to and pull me out from the shore.  Which may or may not be unusual, but I recognized a difference in fearlessness in myself:  at one time I was unafraid of being pulled out – I knew how to swim sideways against an undertow and escape it.  But that was before the accident.  Now I wasn’t as sure of my strength and stamina as I was earlier.  First thought:  “I need to rebuild my core.”

I even found it difficult to walk on the sand itself, and when I returned home, discovered that my ankles and feet were sore and achy.  On one hand:  I should not be that weak in my legs and feet.  On the other hand:  YAY!  I can feel them!  The feeling did go away after a while, but for a time, I could feel the tingling of the water and sand on my feet.  I almost feel like going to the beach more often will contribute to a healing process.  Ahhh, Poseidon!  I’ve come home!

In between happy bouts of rolling around in and enjoying the water, I was reading Sorita d’Este and David Rankine’s Hekate:  Liminal Rites.  Word of the Day:  Apotropaic.  Protection against evil.  Literally from the Greek apotropaios "averting evil," from apotrepein "to turn away, avert," from apo- "off, away"+ trepein "to turn".

But back to the cryptic class notes.  Apple pie spices (i.e., cinnamon, nutmeg, mace) and citrus are examples of incense fragrances that draw higher frequencies ...!  (see last entry on incomprehensible notes.)  That was in the segment about preparing the magickal circle.  Now, if I could only figure out what “higher frequencies” meant.  I have this visual image of being aurally assaulted by a herd of crazed sopranos, and my head exploding from the high-pitched noise.  Maybe I should look that up.