Sunday, April 21, 2013

Fairy Rings

Today's Prompt: Adversity. “The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all.” – Mulan True or false? When do you bloom best?
Today’s post was recommended by sweet Christina of www.stickwithitsugar.com

When I began considering flowers that bloom against the odds, my first thought was not of flowers, but of mushrooms. This begs for a repost of my first ever blog post, on my 18th anniversary of type 1 diagnosis, on a blog that is since kaput.

----originally posted July 3, 2008----

Today makes 18 years for me as a Type I diabetic and my first blogging experience as a diablogger. So I'd like to introduce my blog.

There’s this species of mushroom, Armillaria mellea, that scientists kept finding growing along the northwestern seaboard back in the late 90s - mostly in Oregon. Anyway, they continually dug up the honey-colored stalks and killed them, hoping to save the trees from root rot in the national forests, but the growths would come back, again and again. What they finally discovered was that it was one giant fungus – growing under the state, spanning for over a thousand football fields and weighing in at over a hundred tons – and what they had thought were multiple occurrences were really just parts of this überfungus rearing its ugly honeyed head up above the surface of the ground.

So what I've always wondered is, when a climactic, traumatic, personality-forming event happens to you when you’re still a little, little child, is there any part of your adult form that is untouched by that? You can work to pull and dig and uproot piece by piece of your rotten core as it pokes out into your visible psyche, but what if we're made of it – the hurt, these events, the guilt, your baggage – what if your whole soul is just one spongey fungus? How far back do you have to go before you're at the beginning, before you went down that path? Who would you have been without that trauma?

And it's described many parts of my life, from abuse to bad relationships to...*drum roll please*...diabetes. Kerri's "Six Until Me" back-story reminds me of my troubled relationship with diabetes over the years and this analogy I've gone back to in multiple circumstances. The question "who would I be without diabetes?" is not a valid question. I am the only me that's ever been and that me comes with diabetes mellitus - the honey-sugared syndrome. I don't get to pull off the stalks for a day. It's underneath. Deep, deep, deep within.

---end post---

I heard the term fairy rings this week to describe the natural phenomenon of mushrooms forming rings above the ground as they interlock below. I have a three year old Tinker Bell fan in my house, so it warmed my heart. In the first film, she stands in a fairy ring when she discovers her unique fairy talent.

I much prefer that image to football fields of fungus.

Either way, I still pull off any ugly stalks when they pop up. But, like Tink, I think I have found my talent there, too.

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