Still waiting

The world is still not arranging itself around me.  This morning Laura called and gave me the phone number and name to ask for at OSU Transplant.  I placed that call, giving them my cellphone number so I could leave the house and not miss a call.  No luck.  No call.

They told Laura the tissue typing has been done, but the results had to be evaluated by someone else.  Sigh.  This is ever the way in a bureaucracy, things are waiting on someone else's desk.  It's June, so that person could be off on vacation this week.  As I say, the rest of the world is not in a hurry for me to get what I want, which is to get the surgery over with.

After I placed the call and put my cellphone in my pocket, I wandered around the house.  I didn't put on garden gloves or pick up a weeder or clipper - I was just there to see the hydrangea, the lilies, the hosta in first bloom.  It was a balmy moment, about 75 degrees, a pleasant breeze.  There are songs about this moment.  I found that I was just there, not doing anything with the moment.  I mean, not taking photographs or thinking about when a certain thing would photograph well.  Not composing a poem in my mind, not cutting flowers for the kitchen table.  Not planning dinner or how to do some autumn work in the gardens.  And I understood what we mean by "retreat" - retreating from all that, just being.  Inside the zendo we sit, doing nothing like that, and call it meditation - we call it "practice."  For not making anything, not going anywhere, not doing.