Spring and the Trial Moon

Sunday gratefuls:  Ghosts. Shadow. Liminal times and places. Dawn. Dusk. Holywells. Doorways. The Shadow Line. Near death.

Rene Good. Alex Pretti. Say their names.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Torah

 

Kavannah: Netzach. Perseverance. Trial begins on Wednesday. I need netzach as I enter this latest round of treatment.

Tarot: paused

One brief shining: My body heals. Slowly. Stomach flighty, keeping me awake last night. Even so. Gradual changes. Gut inching toward normal. Less resistance to food. Coffee feels too far. Sensitivity. Two days ago. Felt good. Less so now. Forward. Backward.

 

Illness. Health. Mind scanning the body, the original imaging technique. Elbows ache. That sore on my left big toe. G.I. tract signaling caution. Bland foods. Reminds me with twitches in my stomach. A few back pains.

Maybe I should say, the mind/body scanning itself. Reporting to my conscious self and, always, to the subtle engineer crafting changes to endocrine levels, heartbeats. Kate used to say that the wonder was not that the body, on occasion, got sick. The real wonder? That it worked so well almost all the time.

When did you last consider your breath? In. Slight pause. Out. slight pause. No conscious mind at work. The body. Heartbeats.

How about my eye? Taking in light and, like Plato’s cave, projecting an image of this computer screen onto my occipital lobe. I act like the screen is real though I’m responding to light processed through my retina and onto the brain which interprets the message. Mediated at least twice removed from what Kant called the ding an sich, the thing-in-itself.

Or, my cancer. Known only to me through indistinct images of radioactive uptake. Affecting my life, yet unseen.

Our whole lives we move and breathe and have our becoming in this vessel of flesh. My body. My self. Evolution.

I am unique. This splotchy skin, road mapped with blue vessels against pale white. That scar on my left hand from a careless day breaking bottles at Pipe Creek.

No less me.

Turned away at the border station on the Ambassador Bridge. Guilty of long hair in 1967.

When I was born in Duncan, Oklahoma, my body/mind breathed air for the first time. Uniqueness elaborated. Marked by life. Again and again.

When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. Yes. Just so. A life gone, a life of experiences, knowledge, wisdom housed in the library that is our body.

When Kate died, I mourned her as my lover, my best friend. I also realized how stunningly inefficient death is.

Her medical knowledge and experience. Gone. Her many skills: cook, quilter. Just. Gone.

This self, this body/mind of mine, my carriage will fail. Whether soon or late. Until then, I notice my stomach. And await its return.

 

Notice.
The carriage has changed.
Again.