recovery

to friends and followers:  Lots of "uppers" this week:  feeling well, with more energy than I can remember having for a long time.  loving my new downsized life style.  most important, starting to write again! here's the latest.  love comments.  

Recovery:  July 2015

The room grows quiet, the rustling of pages in our prayer book stilled

As we each rise and collect the threads of our prayer shawls around our fingers....

There is a stillness and quiet that settles us....we open ourselves up and invite into our sacred space the loved ones lost to illness, accident, old age..

I’ve changed over the past months, almost lost to a series of bacterial infections.

Memory, certainty of where I am within my space, within my life is slow to return.

I have to quiet those stray thoughts, quell the anxiety, let stillness fill the gaps, trusting that I will stay rooted in the moment, the place, the experience.

Many years ago while still in College, a few friends and I  would often engage in word play at our daily “commuter breakfasts”; I wrote the beginnings of a poem one day, or one of us did, and my memory of those words has suddenly returned:  “the mirror blinked blindly back at me this morning, containing not a me.” Not sure where it went from there, but it remains a teaser to me, especially now.

So I stop and look at my surroundings; furniture, books, paintings familiar but now inhabiting a new space.  I have “downsized”, moved a short distance from my old house into an apartment complex for those of us 55 and older.  I wake up most nights, knowing where I am, (no confusion here) but somehow certain that someone else is sharing the space with me; usually Ben, although sometimes I have been extra quiet so as not to awaken overnight guests; no one is present but me, yet it takes a few extra minutes to remember that I am the only one actually inhabiting the space; the others have most likely slipped into the tail end of a dream.