Spring and Kepler’s Moon
Tuesday gratefuls: The Cyberknife. Kim and Patti. Ruby. Going for radiation trips again. Ivory, now at home with Ruth. Good sleep. A Mountain Morning, Sun, blue Sky, alert Lodgepoles. Black Mountain. And its ski runs. Marilyn and Irv, brunch at 10. Radiation #6 today. Good workout. That Landice treadmill. Hiking. Burning Bear Creek Trail. An excellent resting heart rate. Perry Mason on HBO Max. James Pogue’s Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: This Day, this Wild and Precious Day. The only one we’ve got.
One brief, shining moment: The Lodgepoles this morning put their best Bark forward, Branches swooped down as always, drinking in the true food, the only food, the radiation that feeds us all wrought in the massive fusion furnace of our not too close, not too faraway Star.
Continuing a theme from my Robot Overlords post. Radiation #5 was the first of three targeting my thoracic vertebrae. My third.
It creeped me out. The beak of the Cyberknife’s head, fitted with a camera like aperture that opens and closes with clicking sounds, hovered the whole time near my chin. Aiming beams of radiation from 50 different positions determined by Dr. Simpson and the medical physicist.
Irrational, yes. I felt under attack. Not to the point that I felt actual fear, but it was too close to my head. As long as the beams got aimed at my abdomen, well. I had 35 sessions of experience with that. We protect our heads from harm, both a learned and instinctive response to perceived dangers. Remember duck and cover? Putting hands over your head in case of nuclear radiation from a bomb. See.
Also, I could watch the aperture open and close. What its leaves held back was radiation that spilled in the wrong spot would do me harm. So close to my head.
After a bit of that I closed my eyes and listened to Bob Dylan. Who added this to the mix in my mind:
How does it feel, how does it feel?To be on your own, with no direction homeLike a complete unknown, like a rolling stone
Triggered a moment of self-pity. Yeah. On my own here. Like a complete unknown. Just me and the Cyberknife clicking away. How does it feel? How does it feel?
Self-pity. I prefer self-empathy. Chesed for myself. So with loving kindness I ratcheted myself back from the clicking of the Cyberknife, the feeling of mild dread, and recalled this. I do have a direction home. Back up the hill. To Shadow Mountain and Shadow Mountain Home.
I’m not on my own. I’m being walked home by so many, so many. Family and friends. Wild neighbors. Lodgepole Pines. Aspen. Black Mountain. The Sun. Orion. All those Dogs of blessed memory. This ancientrail we all walk together winds further up the hill until we reach the cloudy summit and disappear into the fine, dark realms. Realms we know not at all because they begin where this world ends.
Oh. BTW. On the way home on Hwy 470 a jet black Escalade passed me. I thought it was a hearse. In big gold Gothic letters on its back window though was this: FUCK CANCER.
