@EricTopol Does metformin for type diabetes have the same positive side effects as above?
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Claudia Knowles
6.8K posts
Claudia Knowles
@Ellibound
The roaring of the sea is beckoning to me...
Texas and Newfoundland Bergabung Şubat 2013
284 Mengikuti184 Pengikut
Updating my Table on weight-loss independent effects for this class of drugs, which doesn't include their reduction of substance use disorders
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Adding to the GLP-1 drug weight-loss independent effect benefit : impact on liver sinusoidal endothelial cell GLP-1 receptors for liver protection in mouse MASH model
@Cell_Metabolism @DanielJDrucker @ChusaGzlzRellan cell.com/cell-metabolis…
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@GrayMarker99 Me too! Your home is so beautiful💜Are you still having snow? Take care…see you in June…maybe breakfast at the pub!
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Cape Bonavista, NL
Respect, thoughts and prayers from one coast to the other. 🇨🇦🙏
#TumblerRidge ❤️
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@GrayMarker99 My PA Dutch Grandma’s favorite hymn. Beautiful!
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@GrayMarker99 Beautiful photo! Love the Skerwink and Trinity. Also, Fort Point is a nice short walk with good historical markers.
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The land way in the background is the popular hiking trail known as the Skerwink Trail. Very well known and great views from beginning to end of that trail.
Trinity, NL
#Newfoundland
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Another snowstorm…no problem!! Gonna relax and enjoy it to the fullest ! ❄️🤣
Hope you’re all having a great day!!
#ShareYourWeather #Newfoundland #SnowDay
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@Bigdazw Yikes! I’d choose Austin, TX! It should warm up in a few days!
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-33c here in Miramichi and I have outside chores to do, it was +42c in my hometown Adelaide South Australia today. If you had outdoor chores to do in Miramichi or Adelaide with those temperatures which one would you choose😂. #nbweather #Miramichi #NewBrunswick #Adelaide
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@mikep_lbi Mike, I love your writings. Are they published?For William, I would enjoy it but it doesn’t seem to include your most recent stories. How can I purchase your wonderful stories?We summer in NL.Are they available near Elliston?
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On some winter days on resettled Little Bay Islands, I set out with no plan that would satisfy a calendar. I go because the light is doing something honest on the snow. I go because my legs want the long, steady work of a trail. I go because the island, in its quiet season, asks less of me and gives more.
The woods do not care what day it is. They do not care what I promised to answer or what I failed to finish. They do not keep a ledger. They keep only what is real. Wind. Cold. Hunger. The slow turning of sun across the birch trunks. A crow’s single remark from somewhere above the treeline. In winter the world is pared down to essentials, like a truth you can hold in your bare hand. And in that simplicity I feel a kind of freedom that is rare in modern life. Not the freedom of escape, but the freedom of belonging.
I leave the settled part of the island and walk into what remains. This Island is a place that has been loved hard, and then emptied. The houses that once held supper smells and VOCM radio sit back from the road, quiet as closed eyes. The old routes, the shortcuts, the paths that were made by feet and need, still exist, even if they have grown in. Snow covers them like a clean sheet. It hides the old stories without erasing them. You learn, living here, that absence is not nothing. It has weight. But the woods have their own weight too, and it is lighter on the heart. The trees do not mourn the way we do. They simply continue.
Somewhere along the way, when the cold has settled into my cheeks and my breath has taken on that sharp taste of iron, I choose a spot. Not randomly. The body knows what it is looking for. A bit of shelter from the wind. A small opening where the sun can find me. A place near spruce or fir, where there are boughs to spare, and dry deadwood close by, and no risk of the fire wandering. I stop. I stand still long enough to hear how quiet it really is. The island hush is not empty. It is full of fine sounds. Snow shifting off a branch. The faint creak of trees rubbing shoulders. The small, steady tick of my own blood waking up in the cold.
Making a campfire in winter feels like speaking a language older than words. It is not complicated, but it is exacting. You gather what the woods will give you. You break dead sticks that snap clean and bright. You find birch bark, papery and pale, curled like small boats. You build the first little architecture: the tinder, the kindling, the larger pieces waiting their turn. Your fingers grow clumsy if you rush. The cold punishes impatience. So you slow down. You pay attention. You become the kind of person who notices the difference between dry and damp without needing to test it. You can smell it. You can feel it in the lightness of a stick, in the way it wants to break.
When the flame finally catches, it feels like a small miracle that never gets old. The first lick of orange looks too fragile for the work ahead, like a candle in a church made of winter. Then it gathers confidence. It begins to chew. It begins to sing. Smoke rises straight at first, and then it finds the wind and drifts sideways, blue and thin, carrying the sharp sweetness of resin. Woodsmoke in cold air is one of the cleanest smells I know. It is both comfort and alertness. It says: here is warmth, yes, but here is also responsibility. Pay attention. Keep it fed. Keep it safe. Do not be careless with this gift.
I break fir boughs for a bed, and the act itself is a kind of devotion. The boughs are green, alive with their own scent. When you break them, they release a bright, almost citrus smell, like the forest exhaling into your hands. Needles cling to my mitts. Sap gums up my hands. The boughs are supple, full, generous. I lay them down in a thick mat, overlapping them the way shingles overlap on a roof, creating a springy platform above the snow. The bed rises as I add more, and the green against the white looks like something you could eat. It is a small island inside the island, a place made for one human body to be held.
There is a moment, kneeling there, arranging branches, when I feel what the poet Mary Oliver meant when she wrote about wild places as a kind of salvation. Not a salvation that arrives like thunder, dramatic and public, but a salvation that comes by returning you to your proper size. Out here, I am not the centre of anything. I am a creature among creatures. The trees are not scenery. They are citizens. The snow is not an inconvenience. It is a season doing its work. And I, with my little fire and my bough bed, am simply participating.
That word matters. Participating. In most of life now, we are spectators. We watch the world through glass. We receive news of storms without smelling the weather. We scroll past images of mountains without ever feeling the burn in our thighs. We live in squares of artificial light. The woods demand a different kind of presence. They ask you to do things with your hands. They ask you to be accountable to your own body. They remind you that comfort is not a default setting. It is made. It is earned. It is shared between a person and the place that allows it.
When the bed is finished, I sit near the fire and let my back loosen. The heat comes in waves. My face warms first, almost too quickly, while my knees still hold the cold. The air is sharp enough to make my nostrils sting, but the fire softens everything it touches. I hold my hands out and feel the ache of returning feeling. The crackle and pop of the wood is close to music. The smoke drifts across the snow and leaves a faint grey veil that catches the sun. For a while I do not think at all. I just listen. I just breathe. I just exist as cleanly as the trees.
Then I lie down on the boughs.
There is something deeply human about lying down outdoors in winter and trusting the world to hold you. The boughs press up against my shoulders, resilient and kind. They insulate my back from the snow. The needles make a soft, whispering sound when I shift. Above me the sky is a cold, brilliant blue, and the branches stitch it into pieces. Sunlight falls in bright patches, and the shadows of trunks stretch long and blue across the snow like slow rivers. The fire, a few feet away, is a living thing. I can feel its breath on my cheek. I can smell it on my beard. Every inhale tastes a little like spruce and ash.
A nap comes differently out here. It is not the collapse of exhaustion in a room full of obligations. It is a surrender to the fact that the day is wide, and I do not have to force it into shapes. I do not have to prove anything. I do not have to hurry. The body, when given that permission, becomes honest. It sleeps when it wants to sleep. It wakes when it wants to wake. It trusts its own rhythm again.
This, to me, is one of the great joys of having your time be your own. Not laziness. Not avoidance. Something more deliberate and more sacred. It is the choice to live at the pace of attention. To spend an hour building a fire and call that an accomplishment. To stop when the light is right and refuse to keep marching just because a part of you thinks you should be productive. To lie down on fir boughs and let your thoughts drift like smoke, thinning, thinning, until they are no longer a burden.
When I wake, it is often to a deeper quiet. The fire has settled into coals. The heat is gentler. My face is cool again. For a moment I do not know where I am, and then I remember, and the remembering feels like gratitude. I sit up slowly. I watch the small sparks rise and vanish. I look at the bough bed I made, this temporary shelter, this green softness against the snow, and I feel something tender about it. It will not last. By next snowfall it will be buried. In spring it will brown. It will become part of the forest again. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is permanent. That is not a tragedy. It is the arrangement.
Out in the world, time is measured by clocks and tasks. Out here, time is measured by warmth and light, by hunger, by the angle of the sun, by how far the shadow of a spruce has moved across the snow. Out here, I remember that a life can be rich without being crowded. That a day can be full without being packed. That you can do nothing, in the way the world defines nothing, and still be completely alive.
Eventually I rise, stamp my feet, tend to the last coals, and make sure the fire is gone the way it should be gone. I scatter snow, watch the steam, listen for the final hiss. I leave the place as clean as I can. That feels important. Respect is a form of belonging.
Then I shoulder my knapsack and start walking again, carrying the smell of woodsmoke with me like a blessing. The cold meets me, honest and sharp. The island opens ahead, quiet as a prayer. And I go on, not because I have to, but because I can. Because the woods are there. Because wildness, even on a resettled island, is still a kind of home.
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@GrayMarker99 Favorite place! Ice cream, sunset,whales and icebergs
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Claudia Knowles me-retweet
I am sad to report that, after being especially good all year long and after lining my stocking with foil, Santa did NOT bring me a chicken fried steak or a brisket. All that virtue, wasted. Sigh ...😃
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@Bigdazw OMG! Such a handsome, charmimg lad. Our grandson is the same age and also loves to dress up! Got his first dress shirt, tie, and a navy velvet suit for Christmas! I know he would love a Christmas boutonnière like Chester’s! You rock, Chester.
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Chester would like to wish everyone a merry Christmas and appreciates the constant prayers and encouragement people send him.
Today was a good day. #MightyChester
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I’m sending out a very Merry Christmas 🎄 to you all and I’d love for you to reply with the town, city or country you are from!!
Wishing you all a wonderful day!! ❤️❤️
#MerryChristmas
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