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After the Lawnmower

8/23/19

The back saga continues. In short, the new MRI of my low back issues did not convince my surgeon that I needed surgery and he was singularly unhelpful in having any solutions or understanding of how I could be having the symptoms I am experiencing. I think he did a very good job with my cervical operation, though his narrow view of my current presentation was puzzling to me. However, he did recommend that I see a D.O.,who is a non-surgical spine specialist. Because this other man is so highly sought after, (as I found out from other Kendal residents) my appointment with him isn’t scheduled until October 31st. I have also found another local lumbar surgeon recommended by residents, for a second opinion of my MRI. Him, I will see on September 12th.

I am still quite certain that a bulging disc touching the nerve root at L4 is largely responsible for my pain and constant inflammation. I am hoping that someone with new eyes will either confirm or deny this. If I am wrong, I hope to learn how to interperet what is happening correctly and offer me other solutions to deal with my issues going forward. In the meantime, as soon as I understood that my relief was not forthcoming from somebody outside of me, I began to renew my own resurces of self healing. My nutritionist continues to send me supplements that have reduced the pain level, I have summoned my own “mind over back pain” visualizations with deeper focus, and I am finally a legally registered medical marijuana user in Ohio. Cannabis is a great help to many with spinal pain and MS damage, and I am no exception.

All of the above tools do not eliminate my pain, but have brought it down to manageable levels. I still am very careful and cannot accomplish as much I would like to every day, but I am not in agony. It is tolerable, and for that, I am very grateful. Over time, I am having more pain-free moments, which I try to use as a template to calm my overworked hyper-alert brain-immune system-inflammation cycle. Slowly I am retraining my nervous system to communicate more quietly. Once again, my body is a Teacher for me to disengage from the physical trauma/drama of living in my body. As I have said many times before, I’d like to learn my life lessons from a different textbook, but this is the only one I have. I respect it, and so far I am learning to love it over and over again. Love is healing, active, patient, strong, and kind.

Here is an August poem.

After the Lawnmower 8/19/19

Stillness

Intermittent trill of cicadas

the slightest breath of a breeze

swishes leaves of the viburnum bush

small birds twitter below 

loud honkers above

conversations flutter through the open window

air conditioning units hum across the way

At Buttonbush Pond, no rain

abandoned shores of mud 

frog eyes float in the shallows

Still, quiet, camouflaged

startled, their strong legs

push them deeper 

into what is left 

of the dark fermenting brew

Crickets chime me to sleep at night

Misty nostalgia

swirls a cloak

around another passage

evoking the past

anticipation rises 

shedding

unhurried tapestries of seasoned gold

I need only sit, and watch, and listen

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Anniversary

8/8/19

Our would-have-been-49th wedding anniversary is today.  I do not feel touched by sorrow but rather I am amazed to revisit that long ago memory from 1970. Those two young people (I was not yet nineteen, and Richard had just turned twenty) standing there in their modest hippie-ish finery, seem now so innocent and brazenly confident of their life course. We had been living together for two years, but the time had arrived to take the next step.

The ceremony took place outside in the woods at the home of my mother’s long time companion, with our families and friends gathered loosely inside a circle of newly planted hemlock trees. Our minister was my grandmother’s neighbor who lived just down the road from where we were to be wed. Reverend Adolphus Bryant, then in his 80’s, stoically climbed up the dirt path approaching the mountain plateau to officiate.

Given that he was a staunch Methodist, he and Richard and I had worked hard to create a ceremony that also wouldn’t offend Richard’s Jewish family. I believe the biggest concession was saying “according to the life of Christ” as opposed to, “in the name of Christ.” Truthfully, I think that my in-laws were simply relieved that we were no longer living together unlawfully, and that no unwanted babies had been an unfortunate result as of yet. 

It was a lovely August day in Woodstock, NY, and as field wildflowers offered little but Queen Ann’s Lace for picking, Richard and I reluctantly agreed that I would carry large daisies from the florist for the occasion. It took him longer than expected to fetch them on the morning of our marriage, and he was a tad later getting them to me and into his place further up the hill above the circle than anticipated. There were two glitches. First of all, the daisies were dyed lavender to match my handmade purple dotted Swiss white dress (how unnatural, those dyed flowers, and not what we asked for!), and secondly, Richard’s visual cue to descend to me was for everyone to be assembled inside the circle. Human beings acting as they do, a few people were not obedient to that request and hung around the outside instead. Richard waited. We all waited.

My mother, who was anxious and impulsive at the best of times, shouted up to him, “Richard, you can come down now!.” He never 100% forgave her for that embarrassing moment, but it did get things rolling after that. We finally stood side by side as two childhood friends sang Dona Nobis Pacem with my mother in a lovely round. Then we both proceeded to stand together in front of Adolphus. There is a great photo of us and everyone else looking very somber while the minister spoke, and a second one (the photographer friend of my brother’s being one of the un-circled participants), shows the two of us grinning widely at each other while the rest of the group was still looking soberly down in prayer.

It was a potluck reception, there against the stone wall beneath the trees, presented on a covered piece of plywood placed on top of two sawhorses. I had made a wedding cake out of  various cake pans from my other grandmother’s house who lived right across the small valley appropriately called, Shady. The cake was layered in a, um, charming, way, and decorated with blueberries and grapes. I remember little of the subsequent chatting and eating until it came time for my family and most of our friends to take out our many guitars and start singing songs, which of course you did in Woodstock, in the 1970’s.

Richard’s more traditional immediate family all attended this ceremony and his mom wore a Jackie Kennedy style navy blue sheath dress with smart white piping. I remember her sitting cross legged, on the arm of a chair, nodding and smiling at the young people, (well, my mother was included), all singing songs together. When we got around to singing some blues, up came the classic, “Cocaine, running all ‘round my brain.” I watched my dear mother-in-law’s smile fading to a slight frown as the lyrics of that chorus came by again. 

Somehow we all survived the event with lots of good will. Best of all, none of our elders twisted their ankles on the way up or down the hill. After a night of more singing and storytelling with our friends outdoors under the stars, we fell asleep in our sleeping bags, one by one. Lacking refrigeration, the next morning found us scooping out by hand, our favorite thoroughly melted ice creams that good friends had brought with them for the celebration. It was a sweet and sticky, spontaneous, dairy filled pre-breakfast. Rinsing off our hands in the pipe-fed spring at the base of the hill, we were further fortified by toast and eggs when my mother appeared to summon us all indoors. And that was our post wedding brunch. Richard and Judi were officially wed. 

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Kintsukoroi

8/4/19

Inflammation is caused by chemicals in your white blood cells rushing to the point of injury and pain. Emerging from your bone marrow, that puffy swelling around your recent knife cut while chopping vegetables, is courtesy of your immune system at work. It is there to protect you as your cut heals. Because my pain is from a long term accumulative compression of my spinal cord, my immune system has been on the job 24/7 for years. It is a chronic pain condition, not an acute one. The inflammation never lets up and only increases my pain to red hot acute sensations that radiate throughout the length of the nerve pathways involved.

My neurologist knows all about this. When I saw her last week, she put me on a week of oral steroids to bring me some relief before I see the surgeon on the 14th of this month. One effect of steroids is to reduce inflammation. She knew that I am not a fan of drugs but I readily agreed to take them. Ice packs, Ibuprofen and herbs would only take me so far, and I knew my body needed help. Steroids affect us all differently. In the early days of my MS diagnosis, steroids were the only drugs available at that time to halt inflammation in the MS brain. 

One neurologist put me on three days of intravenous Solumedrol which was a standard procedure. I felt so exhausted on a systemic level from the MS exacerbation I was experiencing, and was so overwhelmed with the unknowns of this disease, I agreed to sit in a room in the local hospital hooked up to an IV drip for several hours each day. After I came home, I felt more and more jittery, anxious, and agitated. I remember swatting Richard’s hand away in an irrational rage that he dared to help me out of the car. I felt like an angry empty paper bag.

This time, it is just the right dosage and amount to begin to soothe my mini lava flows of pain. It is not all gone, but it is much more manageable. Pain is not running my life and that is a huge relief. Meanwhile, aside from feeling a little too buzzed to sleep well, I am given another opportunity to explore my pain now that I have some distance from it. “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional,” arises once more as an invitation. My pain is real but how I choose to deal with it can either create or release the emotional and psychological burden that is quick to attach itself to my experience. Most of my suffering, now and in the past seems to be based in the strong belief that; “This is wrong and should not be happening to me.” 

Opening to hold my body in love, injured exactly as it is, brought me to remembering the Japanese art of Kintsukuroi. Broken pottery is reassembled with lacquer containing gold, silver, or platinum powder. The resulting object shines along the cracks with exquisite beauty. That which is broken is made whole, the new and the old, the damaged and the resplendent, are indistinguishable as separate states.

When I can love myself in all my broken human ways, the cracks are filled in and made whole with soft shining light. It is humbling and I am given a meaning for my suffering, which in itself is a rediscovery of wholeness and health.

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Fusteration and Surrender

Diary 7/22/19

Last Night I Prayed for Mercy

I drop my small diamond

into the overflowing

cup of your hands

I drink to the Light

so my eyes can see

I drink to Love

so my heart can feel

to know

how to live

as above so below

as within so without

this one world.

My back is very unstable. I believe it is my stenosis at L 4-5 (compressed spinal cord in lumbar region due to vertebral collapse and bone spurs) and spondylolisthesis (overlapping slippage of those two discs) that causes radiating nerve pain. Sleep was at a minimum again last night as there is no single position that is stress-free for very long. This morning my PT asked what position I sleep in. I answered that I am in rotisserie mode with a pillow that travels from beneath my knees while on my back, to between my knees lying on either side, to beneath my chest when flat on my stomach. No position is comfortable for long, and releasing my already weak muscle tone during sleep leaves me in rough shape upon awakening.

Fortunately, napping is available at any time that I am free and I do manage to catch up. By day and by night, I take my mild pain or sleep meds and herbs, as stronger ones affect me very badly the next day. I manage enough sleep overall, but at night, sometimes prayer is called for. The earnest act itself helps, and I do sleep intermittently as a consequence of the soothing effects. Last night’s petition stayed with me all day and showed up on this page.

I have upcoming appointments with my nuerologist and my spinal surgeon in August. Hopefully they will concur as to what is happening and what to do about it.

Meanwhile I am in fine spirits. People always ask the inevitable “How are you?” and I say, “I am fine, but my back isn’t.” “But you look so good!” I thank them and I know that I am still walking taller and more naturally for short distances, due to the success of the first operation. If I sit for too long, or walk as far as I used to ( just two months ago), my back is on fire with inflammation and I must lie down. As my daughter used to say, “I am fusterated!” with how limited my mobility is once more. Perhaps my condition will remain as it is or perhaps it will improve. I will continue to surrender as best I can while strongly advocating for more intervention.

“I drop my small diamond

into the overflowing

cup of your hands…”

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Signs and Synchrony

Diary 7/11/19

I know this post is longer than usual, but I wanted to share further ripples from my retreat with the signs and synchrony I saw. Human beings are pattern makers. We connect dots of everything from stars in the sky, to the implications of Chinese fortune cookies. We may or may not take them seriously, but it seems to be a way that we endeavor to make personal sense out the vast impersonal universe in which we find ourselves. I no longer question, “Where did this come from? What does it mean? How did this happen? Is it real?” The experience of honoring my response is enough. It takes me out of the logical concrete world and opens my intuition and imagination alongside my left brain dominion. I don’t know that there are answers to those questions, or if there need to be any. I more easily allow myself to be tickled or touched or grateful as “messages”appear before me.

July 4th, with backyard fireworks taking up airspace all day and into the night, was when animals at the retreat center began to show themselves to me. Because I could not traverse their territory out of doors, they had to make themselves known to me through windows. That day, I had a conversation with Richard; my first. I have not sought out such communication, it simply arose in my mind and I chose to listen. He teased me by saying, “What? Did you think that just because you have a body and I don’t, that we are separated? Remember what Emilia wrote down for me to give to you when I was still in the hospital, when I could hardly retain coherent language, let alone hold what I had just said?”

This is what he dictated for her to put down on paper: “Adoration for my Beloved, I am always with you. I will always be with you. Forever. Thank you so much my darling. I’m here with you forever.”

I told him that, no, I hadn’t forgotten. I keep that paper and its sentiments as a treasured gift. He replied, “ Well, it is real, I am here with you and always will be. I know you can feel my love right now.”

I put down my pen and sat still again. There it was, a warm, visceral sensation in my heart. The sensation of warmth and heart feelings expanded and swelled until my whole body felt like I was immersed in a warm bath of love. I thanked him for this physical reminder and we went on to speak of other things. He said he had been learning how to appear as animals in the embodied world, and assured me he was going to visit me soon. Speaking of bodies, I told him I was having a hard time with my body at this retreat. It was also unpleasant to be the only one who showed their infirmities, whereas at the Care Center at Kendal, I am one of many. Here at the retreat, people would wince as they saw me struggle to get up from a table and were always rushing to open doors for me or take my food tray to the kitchen for cleanup. My pride was a little aggravated by all this solicitous attention.

Richard reminded me that I owed my life to the kindness of strangers. When I was born eleven days after my father died, my grandmother took me to live with her on Long Island for a year or so. My mother, with my three and five year old brothers, returned from Kansas to live in Woodstock, N.Y., the summer home of her teenage years. My grandmother had poor health and the neighbors across the street, in the upstairs apartment, and friends across the hall, often took care of me each time she fell ill. Richard’s reminder helped me to readily thank those long gone strangers by more graciously receiving the help of those who were caring for me in the present.

When all was quiet within me again, I went downstairs to sit before the open windows of the library room outside the dining hall. I still felt embraced by Richard-love and sat quite still until I had a nudge to open my eyes. Immediately one of the resident does ran across the front of the building and away into the woods. I closed my eyes, and again came the nudge. A squirrel ran up the trunk of a tree and out on to the end of the branch directly in front of me. I chuckled as he stared at me for a few minutes before he turned tail, ran down the trunk and ran back up to stare at me all over again. “OK, Richard, I see you,” I thought.

I went into our silent dinner, and afterwards did a double take as I saw something large and brown outside of a glass door on the way back to my room. It was a doe, lying on a patch of tall ornamental grasses, planted to block our inside view of two electrical transformer boxes facing the parking lot. She also stared directly at me, poised for flight. But she didn’t stir. I tried not to have predatory eyes in gazing back at her. Then I saw her mouth was slightly open and she was panting. I saw her entire belly rolling and realized she was in early stage labor. Her teats were swollen, and when not staring at me, was lifting her back leg up to lick at herself. Richard and I had birthed enough lambs together to know a laboring ungulate when I see one. I kept telling her, over the ten minutes we were communing, that she had to find another place for giving birth. “I know there are fireworks going off all around here. It seems safe behind those boxes and on this grass, but this is also a place where many humans traverse every day. It is too exposed for you. Please move on now.” She looked at me intensely, shook herself, and bounded off into the woods.

Touched by that encounter, I went back to my room. Immediately, as I sat down in my meditation chair by the windows, a female cardinal perched on the closest branch and looked at me, one eye at a time. When she flew off, two American goldfinches alighted next. Their feathered sunshine danced and flittered together until they both stopped to gaze back at my laughing face. When they departed I felt thoroughly in touch with Richard.

I only looked at my phone now and then to check the time and eliminate too many emails from piling up to answer on my return. To cap off these these animal encounters, there was an email from Dennis, our good friend, and a Jungian oriented sand-play child therapist, sending me a chapter that he was dedicating to Richard from his new book. This chapter was about encounters with Pan, the wild element in us all, and how Dennis works with panic attacks that he has helped so many children resolve.

Dennis and Richard had gone on a trip to Tuscany together years ago. I think he said to me they had climbed some hills and crossed fields to find a spring burbling up. They were delighted to happen upon it until they realized that the hoof-prints all around it were those of wild boars. It was, according to Dennis, “the hour of Pan”, and they beat a respectful retreat. Make of it what you will, but for me, these overlaps of my world and the animals around me deepened my sense of physical communion with Richard.

‘

In my second floor bedroom, there were two, side by side 3’x8′ windows. They looked directly into a cluster of very tall Balsam fir trees, maybe 80-90 feet tall. Two different thunderstorms invoked such intense downdrafts that they set these giant standing people into visual chaos before me. I felt seasick as both the vertical and horizon planes of my ordered world were thrashed violently with the arms of massive green carwash rags on my windshield. Accompanied by rollicking thunder and lightning, I could not help but regard these trees with awe.

One night, just before I climbed into bed, I was thinking those trees were like Christmas trees with post doctoral degrees. Not only do balsam firs have that classic curved-up bough design, but instead of tinsel or glass icicles, these had slender green pinecones hanging down to decorate their branches. Just then, a firefly slammed into my window with a single blip of light. I looked out, and there were a dozen fireflies zooming up into the deepening dusky green depths. Now the trees were completely decorated with blinking lights. A Christmas treat delight in July.

Miracles? No. But surely a result of slowing way down and paying attention to my one amazing world.

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Falling in Love

Diary 7/10/19

I am back from my silent retreat. More of that below. My younger daughter is 33 years old today. Amazing. We had a psychic friend who channeled a delightful entity named Emmanuel. Our friend gave us a reading the first week we brought Marion home from the hospital after her traumatic life and death birth and Emmanuel told us, “An altar for your faith is born.” Marion was certainly a family life-changer for Richard and me and her older sister. As her biological challenges (mild brain damage, Autistic Spectrum Disorder, epilepsy) were slowly revealed to us throughout her childhood, we found our own vulnerabilities and strengths to support and learn and love her through her struggles. Love’s altar has been a beautiful one, and today Marion lives independently with aid from a variety of agencies. She paints extraordinarily colorful and fantastical images, and finds her life full and under her control. We communicate daily through video cyberspace, and that makes it tolerable for me that she is still in N.Y. state while her sister and I are now in Ohio. Happy Birthday, my dear, wise daughter.

My week of silence was wonderful. It is not easy to put into words such an internal non-verbal experience. There was one day of signs and synchronicity which is easier to share which perhaps will show up in my next post.What I can say about the rest of my time is to acknowledge the spiritual muscularity it requires to face yourself honestly, minute after minute, hour by hour, and day after day. It evokes exactly what you can imagine of listening to and observing all the subtleties of your personality. The thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and sensations fly by and you can pack heaven and hell into the space of an hour, let alone during the long, dark mysteries of the night. Navigating this in a context of healing, of the longing to be whole, brings you to face to face with the need to surrender a lot of what you thought necessary to defend yourself from the world “out there.” Instead, you find the startling lack of difference between “in here” and “out there.”

Many hours of intermittent deep peace and joy balanced the work with suffusions of stillness in mind and heart. This Jesuit retreat facility itself was lovely in all ways. It was spacious and comfortable. With 57 acres surrounding the main building, it is an ideal location for a retreat center on the west side of Cleveland. Every window looked out into greenery of forest, field, lawn, or landscaped areas.There were pathways that led all over; to a grotto here, statues there, with many benches and even a fountain dedicated to forgiveness. Though I could not go far away with my rollator, my fellow retreatants would disappear outdoors flowing in every direction, with journals and backpacks to sustain them on their journeys.

By the fountain, there was a plaque with the following quote on it. It summarizes my own discoveries of finding out that I have recommitted to live in one world where the sacred and mundane are one and the same. Staying in love is my chosen work.

Fall in Love

Attributed to Fr. Pedro Arrupe, SJ (1907-1991)

Nothing is more practical than
finding God, than
falling in Love
in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.
It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read, whom you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in Love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.

From Finding God in All Things: A Marquette Prayer Book © 2009 Marquette University. Used with permission.

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Richard’s Birthday

6/24/19

Today is Richard’s Birthday

Entering this day

through the womb

of his memory

is painful

as all births are

I draw my first breath

and another

and another

the day is manifestly

beautiful

as every day is

were I to always

treasure breathing

on my own.

The day unfolded sweetly from the first thing in the morning poem above; with loving support from family and friends near and far. I am held and loved and swaddled in kindness. Gratitude for what is, nourishes and comforts me. I am truly blessed in both my sorrow and my community.

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Water and Spaciousness

The pond at Buttonbush Bridge is a magnet for me. My friend, Linda, and I are going to spend a week in silence during the first week of July at a nearby Jesuit retreat center. I am drawn into silence more and more deeply as the time approaches. I have done ten day word-fast retreats in groups before and with Richard from time to time, but this is the fist time I am going only with one friend to a place neither of us have been. Since we declined their proffered religious instruction, we will be totally on our own, in our private side by side rooms, sharing silent meals with others. Linda and I have yet to sit down to make loose plans together.

There are beautiful grounds surrounding the facility, with woodland trails that I doubt I will be able to access using only my rollator for stability. We need to agree on signs- Do you want to walk outside after lunch? Do you want to sit together this afternoon? Do you/I need a hug if we are stuck and are going through a hard time? How are you doing?

My personal choices for myself abound as well. Hopefully the facility will respect my vegetarian- no gluten diet as they indicated, and I don’t need to bring any food. My biggest focus for this retreat is about releasing the wordsmith in my brain. I’d like to get to a point where I can sustain longer periods of time without words constantly naming, labeling, judging, reporting, and shaping my experience. That is a real challenge for the writer in me.

We all have quiet moments after vigorous activities, both mental but especially physical, when we lean on our rake, or knees, or desk, and simply stare out into the space around us. We are not particularly focused on anything, we just allow the quiet reflective moment to be. We don’t have to report to anyone but ourselves in those times. They are restful and nourishing and complete in and of themselves.

Meditation is like that for me. Lately, I find that as I practice sitting in meditation, I am less and less interested in the thoughts that stream by. They are there, but I am on a different wavelength below them. If I am caught by a daydream, I find I am simply less concerned about how it turns out, and drop it like Alkaseltzer into a glass of water. The fizz doesn’t even grab me anymore. The sound track dissipates into silence.

For that reason, sitting by the pond is as close as I can get to an open sky, gentle stillness, and absorption in something other than myself. It only takes a few minutes to get my “pond eyes” working. There are no big dramas; only very small ones that are revealed as I become more still.

Buttonbush Bridge Pond

Bodiless swans

feather the breeze

cottonwood tree puffs

skid along the surface

edging delicately down

to the algae mats

Small birds appear to

walk on green carpets

fluttering along twigs jutting up

between water soaked roots

A single frog glurks

another croaks repetitively

triggering a belching circumference

amphibian territories

rounding off into silence

Ripples

subterranean turtles

water striders

the swift dip of a bird wing

gentle circles of doomed cottonwood seeds

Like a watercolor painting

stillness beneath

blends

stillness within

I take the landscape with me when I go.

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Having and Losing

Diary 6/13/19

I have exciting news! I am now a grandmother-to-be. My daughter and son-in-law’s baby boy will be born around December 20th. It is a time of awe and urgent patience. Waiting is not the right label for this state of hope. Time will invisibly unfold its wings, cell by cell, revealing a human child when the stars, the hormones, and my professor daughter’s semester is over on December 12th. If the little feller bides his time, she will somehow get all of her grading done before his arrival. She can only plan so much in advance, tailoring her syllabuses accordingly.

I am gaining a new role to play, one which I have long desired. My eyes have been misting over beautiful baby clothes in catalogues for the last twenty years. The entry of a new family member into our midst is as astonishing to me as it is to every family. The continuity of emerging generations is becoming more palpable as I age. I know of my recent ancestors and a smattering about more distant ones, but living with three generations is something to experience. Plenty of my friends here at Kendal are great-grandparents. My own grandmother got to hold both of my daughters before she died. Photographs are faded proof.

Did you know? Because a female fetus is born with all the eggs she will ever have in her small ovaries, when I carried my daughter, she already held the egg which is now becoming her son. So he was potentially there inside of me as well. This biological connection helps to underscore the powerful thread of family bonding, partially constructed of mothers and daughters and eggs. Of course fathers have their own paternal bonds, DNA and otherwise, and I am so grateful this child is born in the time of equal co-parenting.

Which leads me to the losing that is happening simultaneously with the having of such wonderful news. Richard so looked forward to being a grandfather. He always operated within long arcs of time. He anticipated sharing his loves and passions with the next generation on our sixty acres of land. He wanted to share his love of the earth with gardening, animals, and farming. His love of skiing, hiking, and riding, and his love of the arts would have been communicated in his wanting to discover and support whatever his grandson would come to love. As a therapist, Richard was steeped in the wonder of connecting early childhood development through the adult stories people told of their lives. It was a miracle of love to him; unraveling the wounds of the past to better heal the pain carried forward into the present. To share in the earliest journeys of evolving personhood with a grandson would have been a great blessing.

Since my son-in-law also lost his father in childhood, this child will not have a living blood relative grandfather. I will not have a partner to share this new role with. My daughter and I both feel a tinge of sorrow concurrent with our joy. The early factors of my grandson’s life are already being written. The state of our country and our threatened world is part of his story. I can only imagine what his generation will face and what his contribution will be. What will be called forth from all the new members of society as humanity faces our dire legacies?

The upcoming dates of Father’s Day and Richard’s birthday heighten our nostalgia in this month. Already my unborn grandchild heralds the unity of having and losing, joy and sorrow, and the reality of Love. A new being to love is coming soon to a screen very near and dear to me.

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The Daisy Masacree

Diary 6/1/19

It was a “massacree”, as Arlo Guthrie called it in his famous Thanksgiving Day talking blues song. This was a slaughter of the flowers in my tiny garden beneath one window. I heard this morning at breakfast that I was not the only one to have lost their plants. This doesn’t make me feel any better. Everybody’s gardening work was whipped down by an ill informed wielder of the weed whacker from the grounds staff. In my case, we are talking daisies and day lilies, quite common flowers, and considered weeds in some places. I chose them carefully from the plant sale precisely because they are hardy, and need little to no care. Their nature is to spread rampantly over the years and that was also my intent for their future.

To me, those plants represented hours of investment. I dreamed a small garden into a possibility by buying a few necessary tools and bringing over my hardy Swedish outdoor walker (Veloped) from Emilia’s house. This has large wheels designed to travel over grass and woodland paths. I purposefully strained my legs and back by getting the flower bed ready, transplanting the plants, watering them and keeping my eyes and heart on them many times a day. I got permission from the nurses to occasionally deactivate the alarm on a door leading outside that is meant to prevent wandering residents with memory issues from disappearing. It opens directly onto the outdoor cement patio where I store my Veloped and tools. It is only fifteen feet away, as the rollator rolls, from there to my patch of earth. I considered the subsequent stress on my body as “functional PT”. From this experiment, I learned that I would recover from each round of gardening in a couple of days. This is a positive new development in my reaction to inflammation.

The daisies were just starting to bloom: three, count them, three! were already open. I walked back across the hall from our breakfast eatery and my jaw literally dropped in shock to find them gone. I made fast tracks (for me) down the halls and round about outside to find the unwitting culprit and not in anger, but in sorrow, to let him know what he had inadvertently done. He was clearly ignorant of plants altogether to not have noticed how carefully spaced my babies were, with no other weeds around them. To him, he saw only juniper bushes and some random green stuff in between that had to go. He looked stricken as he heard me out. Back in my room, I saw few minutes later that the head of grounds was there with him and I spoke to her through my open window staring down at the now barren dirt.

She apologized for not instructing Mr. Weedwhacker better and said she would have the plants replaced next week. When I heard others in the apartments on the other end of this main building had sadly complained of similar destruction, I realized this young man had blundered his way through the morning. Well. Obviously, this is no terrible tragedy. It is merely the loss of my anticipated pleasures. I already had the satisfaction of a job well done, as the plants were clearly going to thrive in their relocation. I will enjoy their relatives when they arrive, and presumably the young man in question will have gained some knowledge, and/or, someone better equipped will take over weed whacking.

All spiritual practices warn of worldly attachment, which does not mean that we shouldn’t love our lives and all that we encounter. Rather, it is to remind us that nothing is permanent. I love the Buddhist saying, “The cup is already broken.” To fully live this concept means that we can choose to deeply invest our love and enjoyment of everything and everyone, right now. The objects of our love will not last. Nothing does. Above all, it is only love itself that endures. Because my garden was decimated on the anniversary eve of my life at Kendal, the incident momentarily triggered my far more serious loss of husband and home. By the afternoon, I managed to incorporate the whole experience and let it go. I wasted nothing in creating my small nursery- soon -to- bloom garden. We come and we go in our seasons. May we learn to passionately love them all in the time we are given.