Great news on my grandson. The antibiotics are working. His mother writes “He loves hotels. This is like a hotel plus movies and he’s the center of attention.”
Now, we just need to keep him entertained. I’m going down with “The Complete First Series The Prophecies Begin: Warriors”. He has a window seat in his hospital room with a view. He’ll be there tonight and maybe another night depending how quickly the infection is wiped out.
Modern medicine. Wow! We live in the best of times when it comes to medical care. Now it needs to be health care for all, not just for those who can afford it. I’m waving a flag of gratitude.
A month ago I bought my grandson a book called That’s Good! That’s Bad by Margaret Cuyler and David Catrow. It’s essentially the “Is That So?” story about the back and forth that happens in our world, and how we meet it. It’s about perception.
Today we got a call from the physicians that our grandson needed to return to the hospital. Obviously we united in what I might call “false cheer”. “Oh, the tales that you’ll tell when you go back to school” etc. Meanwhile I drove home in tears.
But then we FaceTimed with him. He was still in the ER as they waited for a room to open up for him. He was hooked up to an IV and excited about all the machines. He bounced up and down to show us how the machine showed his heart rate increasing and decreasing. With sign language, he signed the whole alphabet for us, and showed us a drawing he did, and explained the complexity. He shared how excited he is because he gets to go in an ambulance from one part of the hospital to another, and he gets to have an “overnight”.
Talk about a lesson in perception. I’ve spent the night in the hospital three times, twice for the birth of my children, and once for a lumpectomy. I never greeted it as an “overnight”. I’ve never been in an ambulance but I doubt I would have seen it as an adventure. These last days dealing with the fear and sadness in the ups and downs of this with my grandson have been a huge lesson for me in how I might meet life now. For one thing, all that matters is family, friends, connection, and perception. Everything is so precious, every moment, exchange, breath.I’m precious too. Can I let myself feel that?
I still read the political news which is staggering, and yet surrounding that is the Love we share, the Love that is tangible and matters, and will carry us. I don’t post photos of my grandchild but I have one here of him strapped in ready to go to the ambulance. He has a huge grin on his face as he holds a small carton of milk. He’s wearing his Valkyries hat, and his Grinch pajamas because he loves Christmas so much he wears Christmas pajamas all year. He’s my example of resilience, and how we meet what comes. Life is an adventure. Children show us the way. They give us Joy.
Living in the mist that unites tears and laughter in Receptivity, Resilience and Joy!
My grandson just got home from Stanford pediatrics. It’s been quite a weekend but he’s been diagnosed and is on the mend. We live in a country where every person deserves excellent health care, especially children. Health care brings us all together in the deepest connection, gratitude, and trust. To see health care taken away from so many when this country has the money breaks my heart. Perhaps my grandson would be alive without the care he was given this weekend, but I can’t say that for sure. He was given test after test, and doctors discussed and discussed. What a gift this was, and is, for him, and his family and friends. Every child and every person deserves this. We have the resources. Let’s use them to save and enrich the lives with whom we share this time on the planet, this time, a gift, connecting and enlivening us all now, and now, and now.
We were all set to go to my six year old grandson’s baseball game when I learned he was sick with a fever. Okay, but then, other things were happening and his dad took him to the ER. They responded immediately and an x-ray showed an infection in the soft tissue. He’s home now resting with a prescription of antibiotics. We’re hoping they’ll work or it’s back to the ER.
I sit now with the shift from excitement to worry and concern. Understatement. I lit a rose-pink heart candle and visualized my heart as a lotus rising from the mud, opening in unknowing, needing to trust.
Iris named for the Greek Goddess Iris who personified the rainbow and acted as the messenger between heaven and earth.
In May, 2022, I read about Dawn Prince-Hughes who has Aspergers. In wanting to understand human communication, she began sitting outside the window of the enclosure for the silverback gorillas at the Seattle zoo. One day when she arrived upset, Congo, a silverback male gorilla noticed and rushed to the window. He motioned to her to put her head on his shoulder. They touched through the glass and felt the glass as fluid.
She writes: I probably stayed with him like that, with my head on his shoulder, for 30 minutes or so. I think it was probably the first time I was genuinely comforted by another person. Congo really set the standard for what social interactions should be like between me and another human being. You just can’t worry about looking like a fool. You can’t worry about getting hurt. You can’t worry about whether you’re right or not. It just boils down to wanting to be connected at all costs, at all risks. I no longer wanted to allow the permeability of my spirit to seek smaller and smaller shelters. It requires a completely open heart. I felt like I found a way to go home through the glass.
Bathing in the FountainHummingbird feedsFountain dances with itself
I return to a book by Jeanne Achterberg, Woman as Healer. Civilizations decline when they devalue women. From prehistoric times to the present, there’s been peace, growth, and prosperity when women were honored and revered for their role as healers and creators, as essential beings in this world we share. When they were held down, dishonored, and demeaned, there was war.
And here we are, again.
Tennessee Valley yesterdayA Great Blue Heron stands stately by the path!
In Erling Kagge’s book, Silence: In the Age of Noise, he writes of “how it feels good to share a joy”. He also writes of how words can interfere.
From the book:
Early one morning the war hero Claus Helberg, who later became a respected guide in Norway’s mountain region, led a group out from Finsehytta, a Norwegian mountain cabin.
“The summer light was returning, winter had released its hold, and new colours were emerging everywhere. The conditions were fantastic, and instead of commenting on it he began the hike by handing out slips of paper to each of the participants on which was written: “Yes, it is totally amazing.”
When the pandemic began we rarely drove and didn’t drive one of our cars which sat outside. The battery died. When we opened the hood to put in a new battery, we discovered this beautiful nest.
I’m re-reading Erling Kagge’s wonderful book Silence: In the Age of Noise. I know stones. As a leader and student of Sensory Awareness, I know how holding a stone or placing in on our body, or passing it to a friend and receiving a stone in return can wake us up. I feel each stone as individual and unique as each of us.
I resonate to these words of Erling Kagge:
Americans have built a base even at the South Pole. Scientists and maintenance workers reside there for several months at a time, isolated from the outside world. One year there were ninety-nine residents who celebrated Christmas together at the base. Someone had smuggled in ninety-nine stones and handed out one apiece as Christmas gifts, keeping one for themselves. Nobody had seen stones for months. Some people hadn’t seen stones for over a year. Nothing but ice, snow, and man-made objects. Everyone sat gazing at and feeling their stone. Holding in their hands, feeling its weight, without uttering a word.
Holding a StoneStones rest in a bowl shaded by Azalea and Pine
I was in my local grocery store, Good Earth, excited to see the beginning of summer season cherries when I turned and fell into the eyes of a little boy in his stroller. His dad was checking out lettuce but his son and I shared a smile wide enough to embrace us both. I felt the arrow and target connect as one.
I walked around him, and he turned with me and again it was such a connection, an expansion of openness and oneness. It was communion that continues even now, hours later. There is such beauty in this world we share, such trust, and we do what we do for the children, for all children, and that’s why the gentle protests continue, nourishing what we believe in, bringing forth what we know is true.
For those of us who love A.A. Milne’s story Winnie-the-Pooh, it was good news to read that Queen Camilla gave a replica of Roo to the New York Public Library. Roo had been lost and now has been reproduced by Merrythought, Britain’s oldest surviving teddy bear manufacturer. Roo again joins Pooh, Kanga, Piglet, Eeyore, and Tigger. The group is complete like childhood, stories, and dreams.
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