Out on the work site, up a ladder, I’m wiring an LCC panel.  The print is easy to follow, and all the cables are well labeled so my mind is able to drift around in thought.  I’m thinking about AED’s (automated external defibulators).  In my electrical apprenticeship program, it was stressed repeatedly, (and this question was even on the final exam) that only 0.1 Amps can stop your heart. Then when I took my level 3 first aid, I was trained on an AED.  It is a very simple machine, with a computer voice telling you what to do.  It is to be used only once the heart has stopped beating, just like CPR or better.  Because CPR (cardiopulmunary resuscitation) cannot restart the heart like an AED can.  Like a machine, the CPR will prolong you from getting brain damage, keep the blood and oxygen flowing.  You can only go 4 minutes without oxygen before you start to get brain damage and tissue death.  But for your body to work on it’s own, you need to send an electric shock through your heart.  A standard defibrillator can apply an electric pulse of about 60 Amps at 5000 Volts to the heart muscle! That is quite a ZAP!  Zeus, god of electricity, you giveth, and Zeus you taketh away.

A wasp flies around me.  It hovers a little and almost spooked me right off my ladder with fright.  I’m not sure why but I’m really scared of wasps.  It occurred to me that some people are afraid of god, but I’m afraid of wasps, so maybe to me wasps are god.  If I had a wasp shrine in my room would I be braver up here on this ladder?

I was relieved the constant aching pain I had been having in my knee had gone, because a fear shudder like that would have made my knee buckle when it hurt, potentially plummeting me down off this 8 footer.  My neighbor Hona who is a healer, recently helped me with my knee.  It was such a sore sore knee joint, that it would take a while to warm up in the morning and ache all night long.  Hona knows about energy work, herbs and acupuncture, and has a unique way of combining all these things.  So I went to her for help with my knee, and came away realizing I needed to relax more.  I was tense.  I was stressed.  I had a blocked energy pathway.  Immediately I envisioned my robot body with a broken cable as Hona described what was happening to me.

‘Do you know much about acupuncture?’ she asked.

‘I guess not really’ I replied.

‘The basis of Chinese medicine uses meridian lines.  That’s very important.  Meridian lines are energy pathways.  And along those lines are  acupuncture points, when the person has energy blockage we use these acu-point to treat.  The main goal is to treat someone who has an unbalanced body.  In your knee what you are experiencing is stagnation.  Do you know what a Yin Yang is?’

‘Sure I’ve seen one before’ I say.

She tells me the Yin is the negative and the Yang is the positive.  The moon and sun.  The shadow and the hot.

‘In acupuncture you must balance these lines.  There is always an access and deficiency.  So acupuncture uses the energy already in the body to heal.  We believe everyone has their own ability to heal.  The Qi.  That’s the Chinese ‘life force energy’.  I also do energy work.  It’s called hands on energy healing.  It’s not rheiki.  There is a lot of energy out in the universe.  Vibrations.  Like cell phones.  There is a lot of free energy out there that is not being used, like for walky talkys.  In energy healing, the vibrations come to earth, and the universe.  For example. I am like a battery sort of, get a charge from the universe and the earth, I am a catalyst.  And then I give it to client.  I know how to get and give.  It’s different than acupuncture.  It’s the same sort of energy you feel when you walk into a room after a recent fight.  Intuitively you feel the tension.’

There is a pause while she adjusts  a needle in my foot.

‘Only the client can heal themselves, but the healer can give them more energy to do that healing.’

‘Do you think of the energy that flows through meridian lines like electricity Hona?’

How fascinating.  Electricity is everywhere and is in everything.  Sort of.  Atoms make up elements that make up matter and matter is everything.  And electricity is everywhere because atoms are tiny balls with even tinier balls inside of them called protons, neutrons, and electrons.  The positively charged protons and none-charged neutrons are all bunched up in the very center of the atom, holding and pushing and spinning the negatively charged electrons all around them in orbit, and the electrons that are the furthest away from the center, in the outer valence shell, can get away from the atom, free itself, as they say, ans cause an electric current.   Some atoms are just better at letting the electrons free themselves, like the ones in copper, and some are very stern atoms, that give electrons a very hard time at freedom, like the insulation they wraps around copper wires so you don’t get a shock when you plug things in.  But why then, in western medicine, is this never really talked about.  If we know so much about the tiniest atoms, why is there no mention about the tiniest trons in a living cell?  Is it called something else?  Aren’t nerve cells sending info along the nerve cell tin can phone lines from your owch to your brain and wherever else the info needs to go?  A synapse it’s called I think.  I imagine a synapse as another word for a cell’s cellular telephone:

Toe to brain: ‘Oh hey there, you stubbed your toe’

Brain to toe: ‘No, really? Shit! Blood! Get down there!’

Toe to brain: ‘No! Too much swelling! Pain!’

Brain to brain: ‘Ice! Ice the pain! Ask someone to bring you ice to get that swelling down!

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Joe interrupted the dialogue in my brain by asking me to go get some dunnage.  I didn’t know what dunnage was, S o i ask him if this is a gaelic term.  I know, I’m not funny.  But it sounds like an Irish City to me, it just does.  Dunnage.  Drogheda.  Dunderry. Dunnage. (There is not actually a place called dunnage in Gaelic lands by the way, I checked.).  And then I found out what dunnage is.  Its bits of wood, long skinny wood, 2 by 4’s of 4 by 4’s.  Used to put under things you want to get forklifts under to transport.  I’ll never forget what it is now though, due to my bad joke.  I climb down off my ladder and go off on a wood finding mission.