Here to write another great blogpost and my mind is “aswirl”. Just discovered this word and it tickles me. OK, it seems to describe me some mornings when I sit down to do the blog. Too many topics to choose from to write about or more likely too many half baked ideas to write about. But wait a minute, what’s wrong with half baked?
Half baked is sort of like not ready for prime time. Maybe it is like not all totally thought out. Or maybe it’s just been discovered and it is too early to jam it in a pigeonhole. Yea, unformed or still birthing. See, there are dozen good ways to think about it.
Anyway Ron CABC, that’s Astorga baby, had a nice post on FB this morning which I put up top of this post. Encouragement is oh so important and maybe the best thing that we can come up with to do these days. We are the Encouragers!
Just hoping that your day is the bestest! Love, don Felipé.
Sorry, John O’Donohue we had a typo in the title of your poem yesterday. It did sort of still make sense to me with a “in” but upon looking at Catherine’s book of the blessings the right little two letter word is “on”. I will go back and edit the blogpost now. There. So it is, “For A Friend On The Arrival Of Illness”.
But the thought remains how come it took me five years of writing to get half way to what John said in one poem? See that’s the “not fair” part. But I am happy none the less for I found the trail even though I had to do it the hard way and crawl it at a snail’s pace. I understand what he is getting at in other words, it all looks familiar.
Hat’s off to you John for this piece of poetry, this blessing. You have enriched the conversation immensely. You have pointed the way to something different, something positive, something that we can work with.
OK, walking in minutes. Tomorrow is just hours away, we you then. Anon, Felipé.
That poem that I just posted was amazing plus. What the heck? How can one human come up with that? Some of that we have messed around with here on Caminoheads but how can one guy shoehorn all that into so few words? And with such clarity? It isn’t fair really.
Please go back and read that if you haven’t. I am afraid that if I write this second post in one day you might somehow miss the first one. But I wanted to write my muddy thoughts on another post and not right up next to John’s priceless poem.
I was going to write about something else today but it will have to wait for tomorrow. A rainy day today. I’ll head to the woodshop to make some progress on the cabinet for church. Thinking of Wiley who has his archery camp kids this afternoon.
Maybe the weather will improve for them by then.
Now is the time of dark invitation
Beyond a frontier that you did not expect;
Abruptly, your old life seems distant.
You barely noticed how each day opened
A path through fields never questioned,
Yet expected, deep down, to hold treasure.
Now your time on earth becomes full of threat;
Before your eyes your future shrinks.
You lived absorbed in the day-to-day,
So continuous with everything around you,
That you could forget you were separate;
Now this dark companion has come between you.
Distances have opened in your eyes.
You feel that against your will
A stranger has married your heart.
Nothing before has made you
Feel so isolated and lost.
When the reverberations of shock subside in you,
May grace come to restore you to balance.
May it shape a new space in your heart
To embrace this illness as a teacher
Who has come to open your life to new worlds.
May you find in yourself
A courageous hospitality
Toward what is difficult,
Painful, and unknown.
May you learn to use this illness
As a lantern to illuminate
The new qualities that will emerge in you.
May the fragile harvesting of this slow light
Help to release whatever has become false in you.
May you trust this light to clear a path
Through all the fog of old unease and anxiety
Until you feel arising within you a tranquility
Profound enough to call the storm to stillness.
May you find the wisdom to listen to your illness:
Ask it why it came. Why it chose your friendship.
Where it wants to take you. What it wants you to
know.
What quality of space it wants to create in you.
What you need to learn to become more fully
yourself
That your presence may shine in the world.
May you keep faith with your body,
Learning to see it as a holy sanctuary
Which can bring this night-wound gradually
Toward the healing and freedom of dawn.
May you be granted the courage and vision
To work through passivity and self-pity,
To see the beauty you can harvest
From the riches of this dark invitation.
May you learn to receive it graciously,
And promise to learn swiftly
That it may leave you newborn,
Willing to dedicate your time to birth.
Cris CSABC in her comment yesterday put this piece in from John O’Donohue, a blessing for a friend on the arrival of illness:
May you find the wisdom to listen to your illness:
Ask it why it came? Why it chose your friendship?
Where it wants to take you? What it wants you to know?
What quality of space it wants to create in you?
What you need to learn to become more fully yourself
That your presence may shine in the world. John O’Donohue
That probably will make no sense to most people especially to ones that just got a diagnosis of something serious. It doesn’t fit with the anxiety and the fear. It doesn’t fit with the fighting and the battling that one is supposed start doing. But it points the way to something else.
And this is the something else that I had fallen into and that we have been kicking around here at the blog for five years trying to figure out. The idea that disease is something more than disease. Or that suffering is something more than suffering. That all this rigmarole has a purpose beyond…
Off I go. Henriette and some other visitors coming this afternoon for walk and tapas. Time now to get things done before that.
“Willow Goldfinch” This is a card done by a friend Janis McElroy. The local market has a rack of cards by local artists to compete with Hallmark.
It is a good morning for blogging with the rain coming down. I am less likely to think of charging outside to change the world. I think maybe changing the world from my couch is totally possible.
Though it is not like winter when the couch calls the heaviest and I might think of the blog all day long instead of for a precious hour. Summer is loaded with distractions. This and that need attending to. Annuals grow to eight feet tall. The Californians venture into the Northwest looking for adventure or enlightenment and clog up the 4-way-stop in the center of town. It’s a mess.
So writing a blog can seem simple compared to the summertime complexities out there in the world. We just had blogpost number 2000 on The Fourth of July with the post Holy Schmoly. Yea, who would have thought? So, I thought that I would just talk/write about blogging today just to celebrate.
Basically I think, from the readers side of things, encountering a post should be akin to a goldfinch sighting. The sighting is short in time with a max of 500 words and shorter preferably. No one has time. And it should be noticeable with a consistent look and style. The pic is an important part of that. And not too many pics, quality over quantity here. The goldfinch, at least the male, is bright yellow and has a particular flight path and way as it flits from plant to plant. And the male and female seem to always be close together in proximity but the male you see first. So, the whole package is distinctive. The blog and the pair of birds may move through different territories but the basic look and feel are the same.
It really helps that the trilogy of my three main topics are so mysterious and thus so open ended. Cancer, Catholicism and the Camino are each a ever expanding world. No shortage of questions or areas to work on.
What else is there? I just pick one small thing to work on each day. No need to reinvent the wheel daily. Just wrap around one thing.
Joy and celebration are important. Support and buoying up are important. Consistency is important. Always keep it coming. Posts vary in quality from day to day but that is the price of the practice of producing it on a regular basis. Readers look forward to it to be there every day like the old newspaper at the front door.
See, 443 words right now. Maybe one more item. It seems to take a lot of coffee to blog, that’s important and I almost forgot.
Time to walk and I think that the rain has calmed down out there. And here we are back in the saddle after the big Fourth weekend.
A blast from the past: Gracie on the Camino almost five years ago.
On the road right now. Wiley and I are going down to Cabela’s outdoor store on a sort of pilgrimage. I for years ran an archery summer camp for young folks and Wiley is taking it over from me. We are going down to find a few items that we need yet.
Went to Mass this morning. It was lovely as usual. Father Paul gave me a blessing. That was an unexpected boost. I missed going with Catherine who had to watch the women’s soccer finals. And USA won so good job cheering Catherine!
Almost home and in time for the walk and tapas. Expecting some company today from the mainland and some locals. Sunday’s walk is usually social and fun.
I will be around this week working, weeding and walking. The three w’s it looks like. What is the weather going to do?
Just noticed a few days ago with the post of the Fourth of July that was our 2000th post. Yikes! It was entitled Holy Schmoly by the way.
Time to go and be the hospitality guy. See you tomorrow.
Working, weeding and walking loves, Felipé.
The sky, the water, the trees and the fireworks on Vashon. Taken by Jeannie Bumgarner- Black.
Yesterday’s blogpost seemed so good to birth after all these years. It was short and sweet and understandable. There were a couple of things that occurred to me afterward though that could be mentioned now.
Kicked fear out is an important concept and goal. There is way too much of it around. And definitely way to much swirling around cancer the disease. As a matter of fact cancer the disease should be written with a lower case “c” while that ugly thing which results when all the fear is added to it is another animal altogether and could then be spelled with a capital “C”. Yes, how about that?
There is a reason why the Christian Bible (the New Testament) is always saying “Fear not!” Fear is a tool of the darkness and it abounds in our environs now and then. It is a hindrance to us to say the least. It is more like a burden which can overwhelm us.
Anything that we can do to lessen it for ourselves and others is a major step in the right direction. It is necessary to be aware of this continually, day in and day out, minute by minute. Wack-a-Mole it for yourself and for me please. You have my eternal permission, whenever and wherever it appears.
The other “mole” to wack is the idea that death is a defeat. Cancer patients can get wrapped up in hopes of cures to a frenzied degree. And to be finally faced with death and then feeling that cancer defeated them. This is so common. The point to me is to do what one can in the curing department but to balance that with living life. We all have a unique life to live, for ourselves, our family, our neighborhood, for God. This is what I was getting at yesterday. To miss out on our life is tragic and is the real defeat.
Waist high corn on the Fourth of July. Thanks Jim for the pic.
I boil it down and I boil it down like maple sap in the spring to finally get to the point where there is something significant left in the pot, something sweet enough to brag about. It’s been years now of this process to make some sense of my life with Cancer.
What is it after all this time and all this walking, after all this talking and all this writing that my effort amounts to? What does all that seek to accomplish? I think I have an answer and I want to spring it on you momentarily. It seems the only thing that I have power over. The only thing that is worth the fight. The only thing that I seem to be good at, my gift maybe. What is that?
What if it amounts to waking up each day and figuring out how to kick a little more fear out of this massive mountain called Cancer. That’s it finally, in very short form. It appears to me that at this point I have accomplished walking around it, this mountain of my personal Cancer, to say, “Ha, I see you are not infinite and I am putting boundaries on you.” That is where I find myself.
And so I am not just going to be on the defensive anymore. It is time to say things will be different from now on. I am reading the Riot Act to Cancer to say I am in charge of this situation. I may very well die in the process but dying is not defeat, not living is defeat.
feeling feisty on the Fifth of July loves, Felipé.
