Summer and the Lughnasa Moon
Monday gratefuls: Clean floors, bathrooms. Good wonton soup. A Kate good day. Rigel’s eating well. Kep’s eagerness in the morning. Brother Mark in his old haunt, Hail, Saudi Arabia. Ragweed misery. Rain, more rain. Keep it coming. Bacon. Eggs. Covid. The revelations about us it is revealing. The USA, humbled. The vasty deeps and the airy heights.
Ruth sent us a video of the garden at her Dad’s. It’s growing. Lots of rain recently has helped. Jon’s got so many skills to share with Ruth and Gabe. He’s an artist, first. And, a good one. He has remodeling skills which he’s using to renovate his house. Ruth and Gabe are learning along the way. He’s a good cook. A maker of skis. A skier. A teacher. A gardener. A man filled with love, too. They both need it.
Kate had a better day yesterday. Her stoma site looks good, healing. She sees Lisa this week for a cortisone injection-bursitis-and a DEXA scan for osteoporosis. They’ll also discuss a focus on nausea. If we can get the nausea under control, then she can gain more weight. She’s hanging on to what she has, but to gain weight she needs to be able to eat at least some during the day. Tough for her with this recurrent nausea.
She’s moving through my fiction library. Her goal, she says, is to read it all. She just might at the rate she’s going. Yesterday, she read Recursion, a sci fi novel. Yesterday! Science nerd turns liberal arts major.
The weather has turned monsoonal. Although Weather 5280, my best source for weather in the mountains, says we’ve not made into the monsoons. The monsoons, typically July and August, feature a flow of moisture north from the Baja that gives Colorado afternoon rains. That flow is not set up. The monsoons used to mark an end to the high stress part of the wildfire season. Not so much now, though they help when they come.
Considering what to do with my mini-sabbatical, as Paul called it. I may extend it another week. I’ve gotten a lot of different sorts of things done. Finished the final touches on the loft, cleaned out the living room, coordinated several trades people for electrical work, tree felling, mowing, window washing, got rid of the pallets, supported Derek.
Chop wood, carry water. The Zen adage. Realized that first comes the fireplace, the pots for the water. The house is my fireplace, my pots for water. Mop floors, clean bathrooms. Daily life, as the Zen masters knew, is daily life. We are in it and of it. If we treat it as a burden, then it burdens us. If we treat it as a spiritual exercise, then we receive nurture.
Choosing nurture.
