Recently the Chewelah golf course played host to a benefit tournament and silent auction for a local high school girl fighting cancer. Talk about memories. After nine years there are times when I forget how it felt, but when it comes back it feels like it all happened weeks ago rather than years. Harder for the parents, siblings and friends in so many ways. Someday I will write it all into a novel, or a memoir. Everyone said I should then, but until recently it still seemed too close. It's odd, but these days it is mostly the good things that I remember: the kindness of friends and family, nurses and doctors; making my oncologist laugh; the warmth of the heated blankets they wrapped around me; the feeling of peace when everything else is gone. Especially the last. For a year the future meant nothing. The moment was everything, all there was. It was the aftermath that was most difficult in many ways, learning how to plan again, to think of my life as something beyond today.
Of course I remember other things: weakness; nausea; allergic reactions which led to waking up in the ER stuck full of needles. But these things don't last. The pain subsides, until all that is left is a weird sense of wonder. I am alive. In my more philosophical moments I wonder why, then I realize that why doesn't really matter. I am here, now. It's the old lesson, still the same. Apart from past pains and future worries, here I am. Now, this moment, always.
Showing posts with label belonging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label belonging. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Belonging
Song lyric of the day, from Deb Talan's The Gladdest Thing:
Doesn't each of us have a place where we belong? Could be a sidewalk crack or a sad song.
The song came up on Pandora this morning at work, and that line caught me. Everyone can think of a place like that, somewhere they felt at home, at peace. Elizabeth Goudge, in Green Dolphin Street, referred to it as one's own "special country", as a state of mind given shape as a place.
For me as a child I found it in the branches of a particular tree. Since then I have found it many places, from the banks of the Teifi in Wales to an empty parking lot, a full auditorium to a dim cedar grove. They are the places and the moments when I feel I have most truly lived, times and places where doing was not required, when simply being was enough and more than enough and the distortion of life as we know it was gone, when action became superfluous and speech banal.
To live always in those moments would be to live in heaven.
Doesn't each of us have a place where we belong? Could be a sidewalk crack or a sad song.
The song came up on Pandora this morning at work, and that line caught me. Everyone can think of a place like that, somewhere they felt at home, at peace. Elizabeth Goudge, in Green Dolphin Street, referred to it as one's own "special country", as a state of mind given shape as a place.
For me as a child I found it in the branches of a particular tree. Since then I have found it many places, from the banks of the Teifi in Wales to an empty parking lot, a full auditorium to a dim cedar grove. They are the places and the moments when I feel I have most truly lived, times and places where doing was not required, when simply being was enough and more than enough and the distortion of life as we know it was gone, when action became superfluous and speech banal.
To live always in those moments would be to live in heaven.
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