Recognizing Love

Feeling clear enough to have a second cup of caffeine and think about blogging.  Yesterday I went off the Percocet and just on Tylenol.  Some healing in the night - this morning I have not felt the need for the Tylenol (you have to monitor it - too much hurts your liver).  Maybe it was from Nancy van Deusen's lentil soup - she appeared on my doorstep with it yesterday morning, an angel in a gray hoodie.  She was so happy to be doing this for me, giving me the best she's got, her own homemade soup. 

I have had something else beyond price from all this - I have learned to recognize love when it comes my way.  This has followed directly on Laura's gift of her kidney - I think I wrote about that here back then - it seemed the universe opened up a golden track, that there was this benevolence, this giving, even this taking care of me, a friendly universe instead of the sad threats I experienced in childhood, like so many children of broken people.  I have begun just seeing and feeling the love that is in front of me.  I feel it as healing in the center of my body.

Tom came into my study a while back to tell me I coughed a lot in the night, and he is concerned about me breathing deeply and exercising my lungs.  I have a little machine for that, a spirometer I think it is.  But also, in the hospital I was walking 10 minutes or more at a time around the halls, and I'm not doing that here.  As I listened to him I felt the love and caring that this came from.  How astonishing - to have a husband like this.  I have to dress, put shoes on, and do some walking meditation around the house.  If the sun comes out, I might walk outside for a few minutes.

I think a lot about the oxymoron:  a Zen Blog.  The Way is beyond words - so what is it I do here?  A kind of art form, I guess, like stacking stones at a crossroads.  A kind of appreciation.  Also, I try to just present myself and say, Well, this is Zen too. It's not about preaching anything.  It is very ordinary.  I am convalescing.  That sounds like a journey from A to B, from surgery to Being Well Again.  But there is no end point to this particular journey - no assurance, we're done now.  Actually, my experience is that whenever you reach one of those, it's highly disappointing.  Remember graduation?
(image:  Rainbow sunrise at Grailville)