Lungwort

 noun

1a bristly herbaceous European plant of the borage family, typically having white-spotted leaves and pink flowers which turn blue as they age.

[so named because the leaves were said to have the appearance of a diseased lung]

Oxford Dictionary

 

In the garden the lungwort is flowering under stress. It has been ambushed by the weather, having been lulled into a false sense of optimism by the few relatively warm days we experienced earlier in the month.  I'm fond of it. I was given a couple of plants about five years ago and they've spread like wildfire.  With its mottled leaves and small, delicate heads of two-tone flowers it makes for great ground cover, plus it's hardy and resilient with a long flowering season.

I've some fellow feeling with the lungwort. It's been a rough couple of days spent folded up in the armchair with gut and back pain, wrapped in a duvet and drinking lots of water and hot ginger tea.  According to the naturopath the root cause of all this is dybiosis (the GP simply doled out repeat prescriptions for industrial strength antacids).  It will take time and persistence to crack.   I was in a bad way - worse than I realised at the time - in January when I started the treatment.  There has been improvement but flare-ups happen, and may well always do so to a degree.  Persistence is all.

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At almost a month in I'm glad to be blogging again. I'm doing it almost entirely for myself, which for me is the only genuine motivation, though I'm always delighted and appreciative when old and new commenters drop by. But if one person reads what I have written, that's enough; in the real world I'm not one for crowds.   It's becoming a lifeline, the writing and the photography, that I'm grabbing onto to haul myself back to what passes for a more normal existence. No, I don't have exciting or deep things to write about but that's not the point.  The point is that I'm doing it.  Practice.  Like the Buddhists. The way I was put to the piano as a child morning and evening to practise my scales. 

Most importantly of all, it's a way of stepping into the current of life, of sticking two fingers up to pain and weakness and all that goes with it.   Each post, each photograph taken, builds momentum.