...positive stuff.
...good stuff...
***
May, our sweet canine friend at the farm, had a successful surgery on her injury.
Aidan sent over the following that Keoni put together for May...
So many things are happening at once.
Where are we going?
How did white turn into black?
What turned up to down?
Who wants this chaos?
When will senseless spin/lies cease?
Is it a bad dream?
Search to find the What
And the When and Where, the Who
Stop tearing your hair.
We are our answers
Large or small, find your to-do
The work is worth it
Together we'll build
So it's stronger and better
For all, near and far
And after a while
The tones will sound different
When healing hearts sing
Peace, Love, Compassion
Abundantly freed for all
And our blue planet
***
Waging Aging:
The following is a personal screed on the subject of hearing loss. Read at your peril.
The movie "Surf's Up" plays in my living room a few hours after I leave Costco wearing my new hearing aids that replaced the eight-year-old ones. The movie begins in the middle, where I left it some weeks ago when I grew sleepy and went to bed. I've seen it many times for a sweet breather from the serious stuff of living. This time, there are no closed captions because I turned them off to see if my brain cells can now hear the words, and the answer is, "Yes!" Not perfect, but wonderfully, gratefully better. Soon, even though I've seen this movie multiple times, I realize I am now seeing many more visual nuances on the screen because I'm not reading the dialogue! Wondrous.
A week later: The new aids have made clear that some of my brain's hearing perception is lost because even though the new aids help me to better hear others' words, some words remain garbled sounds. This was true in the sound-booth testing, too.
Meanings get lost. I am sad about that because I am missing some of what others are saying. Especially frustrating when I hear others' laughter in response to something said, and I miss the fun. The hearing aid tech says that once that has happened, it is not reversible.
How is it that my hearing aids are not as good as my Apple earbuds?
Time for some research. Again.
OK. I researched it. (NIH is still functioning. All praises.) What I learned in my very, very lay terms is that when sound enters your head, all that intricate stuff between your eardrum and your brain changes the sound waves into electronic impulses then read by your brain. When there is damage in that in-between space, varying parts send slightly off-kilter electric pulses to your brain processor, so the info sent to your brain is slightly different from your stored data from your once-upon-a-time healthy in-between area.
Since the brain has stored your former correct sound, what you get is a garble of certain sounds in words, depending on your individual in-between area damage or age-related deterioration. Researchers are working on ways to improve the wave-to-electronics variables with hearing aids, but that is not a done deal. At present, we are getting improved hearing aid amplifications which help, but don't yet fix the in-between wave-to-electric changes.
All this being said--I know, TMI--my iPhone earbuds are superior amplifiers with wildly differing costs. And, I'm not yet convinced that my brain cannot learn some word sounds in the changed forms just as it long ago learned and stored them.
Say, does anyone speak emojis?
***
Here's an appropriate quote from John Lewis: "We will find a way to make a way out of no way."
ReplyDeleteYour comment is totally great to see. Yes, John Lewis found a way. We will, too.
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