Snow, and Blessing

L decided to join the church choir. All it took was a handwritten invitation from the music director. I have to laugh because you'd never imagine a son of mine--a grandson of my mother's--would be draped in choirboy garb with a big cross resting on his chest. M wants to do it, too, but she's not sure this step is in keeping with her larger requirement that all endeavors further her on the path to cool. Plus, the robe doesn't cinch at the waist and so she disapproves on pure aesthetic terms. All a challenge, in any event, because we are motivated to attend church once in a blue moon. Discipline runs top down, and mine is all used up by Friday night. What can I tell you?

Still waiting on word; the pathology report--which showed nothing beyond this pre-cancerous condition--went to a review board at Yale on Tuesday. Nobody's communicating anything with me, though I'm being as on it as I can be. These inefficient doctors, who take days off and don't return calls and don't seem alarmed that weekends come and go without delivering resolution. I'm becoming distrustful. With no new information--with no diagnosis of cancer--this doctor started talking to me about a huge abdominal incision and the removal of lymph nodes in addition to all the other works, and a six-week recovery period, which (the latter) is the most impossible of all of it. It set me into something of a tailspin, I admit, because whatever else I know, I know lymph nodes is cancer talk. But today, it's been three weeks, and nobody's told me I have cancer. So the worry has seeped away; worries burn themselves out. They peak.

Another snow last night; it's hanging off the branches--my favorite landscape. Seems like there's less and less of it--but then, Thomas Jefferson noted the same thing, so I think it's the observers who are changing more than the thing itself. The cat is possessed--there's something in the air--attacking space rugs, dashing into paper bags, chasing feet, as if she's a baby, which she isn't. The kids have head colds; the cartoons are on. Saturday is the best day.

***

Beannacht

On the day when

the weight deadens

on your shoulders

and you stumble,

may the clay dance

to balance you.

And when your eyes

freeze behind

the gray window

and the ghost of loss

gets in to you,

may a flock of colors,

indigo, red, green

and azure blue

come to awaken in you

a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays

in the curach of thought

and a stain of ocean

blackens beneath you,

may there come across the waters

a path of yellow moonlight

to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth by yours,

may the clarity of light be yours,

may the fluency of the ocean by yours,

may the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

wind work these words

of love around you,

an invisible cloak

to mind your life.

John O'Donohue, Anam Cara