Morning of Wonders

Nor love, nor honour, wealth, nor power,
Can give the heart a cheerful hour
When health is lost. Be timely wise;
With health all taste of pleasure flies.
~ John Gay


The complexion of my life has changed greatly over the past several years. While I can say I am now healed from CFS, it is still a life which veers from health to sickness and back again while my immune system tries to pick itself up. It's a long road. There's no point in rushing it.

The last sickness has just been a cold, a standard cold, one which lasted several weeks. No biggie, but my tolerance for even the most basic of sicknesses is so low that any kind of ill health steals my delight these days. Still, there are things to be learnt in even a small thing such as a cold.

This morning, the April light is gentle. It's laying the back of its hand softly against all the surfaces it touches, the wood of my house and the pergola, the sleek darkness of Lester's fur. Everything, this morning, seems priceless to me. The most basic of things. The cold has retreated and the joy has returned. The joy of a small, everyday morning of cooking and eating oatmeal, swimming in the gravelly honey of Ray LaMontagne's voice and music, admiring the basic greenness of the grass, blue of sky. It's all so beautiful, so simple, so infused with the loveliness and pleasure and anticipation of a life that God inhabits.

Sickness always takes me out of myself, steals my joy, spirals my anxiety. Such an evil thing. But would I appreciate everything so much this morning without having lost my health for so long? I don't think so.

Today I am venturing out to Hanging Rock, scene of novel and movie about disastrous girly picnics. But I don't anticipate such drasticnesses to happen today. Today I get to hang out with some rocks and some trees and replant myself into the earth, my feet into the ground.

Happy Saturday, bloggers :)

Socks and pyjamas and heaters and soup and unseen dimensions

Suddenly it's winter here ... well, just about. Well, not Winter Winter with snow and minus temperatures. People go on about how cold Melbourne is but really, compared to Siberia our Winters are a piece of urine. Still. Last night I wore pyjamas and socks to bed. The heater has been fired up. I am hopefully going to make a batch of veggie soup tonight if I can muster up the energy after a day of workish boredom. It's time for umbrellas (it's raining again) and coats and all of that stuff is nice and cosy (and a football team that is sitting on top of the ladder after round 1 and looks like some kind of amazing oiled machine), but I know it won't be long before I begin to pine for barefoot weather and dry heat. But in its time. It will swing back again.

I am feeling so much better. I have walked around for the past few days feeling content with feeling low-level crap because compared to Monday I feel great. Last night on the train home I stared out the window at the sunset and caught my reflection in the window, a goofy smile on my face.

After a few days of low-level crap, though, I'll start getting discontented with that and want more. The memory of Monday will fade and I'll be left with the memory of the day before. But really, when I look at all the bad health I've had over the past 10 years, the way I'm feeling at the moment is pretty easy to deal with. There's no doubt I'm on the upward trajectory; I just need to keep reminding myself of that 'cause every time I slip back my perspective buggers off.

I was thinking yesterday, if in some future age we shall be living in a time of golden light but no bad stuff - no death, no sickness, no causes of tears - then how shall the momentum be kept up? How shall we go on enjoying everything without getting bored? What would happen if constant joy became tedious?

Then I thought ... we have no idea what it's going to be like. Presumably we would be experiencing life in more dimensions than we do right now. And God, also (or maybe they're the same things). Those two things in themselves ... what do we have to compare them to? How do you envisage dimensions that you don't know what they are, and elements of God you haven't experienced? (Well, maybe the second is easier than the first, in some ways, if you compare the minutest touchings of God in this life, the whispers so subtle you can wonder whether they are you or God, the things that s/he has made, that gentle voice ... bring more on, whenever you like, Starfield God Dude).

A future of more God and more dimensions, a future of learning and continual growth (not the unimaginative sitting around on clouds in heaven crap but someplace amazing, someplace that takes all the best elements of learning and growth here and amplifies them out beyond belief. Someplace that makes the best music we have hear sound like a baby beating a plastic xylophone). It's a tantalising prospect to envisage ... and knowing that I'm nowhere near the mark is tantalising in itself. Like trying to work out what the amazingly wrapped Christmas present is that I'm not allowed to open yet. It adds rock-on edges to boring moments. The thought of how we could be ongoingly happy with no dark to define the light makes me think that the light is going to be very amazing indeed.

I knew much more then than I do now

The present moment is beginning to unfold itself as something far deeper and broader than I ever thought possible. It's like something I knew once, unlearned, and am now relearning once again. In many ways, I knew more when I was a child than I know now. Children know the value of the Now. But it's in an experiential way - they don't know any different, so how could they articulate this?

Swimming in the present is like having a protective coating around you of losing yourself in the moment. Paradox. Losing your life to save it. The alternative is sitting out lightly on top of each moment. There are reasons for this. We learn self-protection. We learn that being immersed in the moment can mean that we get taken unawares by things out of our control. Problem is, sitting out too lightly on the surface of the present means that not only do we miss the deeper rumblings of God but we are easy prey for the past and the future to come pick us up in their talons and deposit us, further down or further back from where we are right now. The only reality. Now. The only place where we can make a difference. The only place where God is. The only real place of safety that we have.

Sitting out too lightly on top of the present, approaching unpleasantnesses loom bigger, casting longer shadows. Compare that to your experience as a child. Say you're at school this morning knowing that this afternoon you have to go and have a vaccination. Each time you think of the approaching doom, it fills you with dread. But still, as the day unfolds, you can't help but just throw yourself into the now that is here now, and you forgot the approaching doom. Until suddenly it's 15 minutes to go, and your teacher rounds you up to herd you off to the Injection Room of Doom. Before that you were oblivious, immersed in the playing of a game, giving yourself to it in a way you haven't unlearned how to do yet, so that when the teacher's voice pierces into your consciousness you're rocked with the jolt all over again. Sometimes as adults we forget how piercing it is living close to the ground.

I think this is the seed of our beginning to learn to sit out on the surface of things, a fear, a wariness of the buffettings of childhood that are the penalty for Now immersion. We think sitting up out there means that we won't get as many nasty surprises because we are forearmed. We can see the future stretched out before us, and we have a better chance of knowing when the bad things are coming. But we don't. Sitting up out here is very windy, and we get pecked with the crows of fear much more than we get shocked with the jolts of remembrance further down below. Down there, hidden in the earth, we learn communion with Him, learn that He didn't resist the jolts and calamities, that trying to arm ourselves against them is not done by arming ourselves with fear. To do so, we unwittingly cast our love and wonder and mystery aside in our quest for ultimate safety. We can't have both. We never could.

Happy Saturday.