a love thing.

the spot warmed by grace has gone cold.

but just for now.

in my piassa apartment.  sun beams warm through a window, then a cloud.  partly cloudy is the best kind of weather because what’s not to like?

tree outside my window bursts from the ground.  if you were a mountain, you would be, like, whoa, so fast?  this place is out of control! the moon, watching the mountains crash like waves, then smooth, then crash again, would say, slow down, let me get my breath.  the sun…well, she would have better things to do than watch us.

busy at the hospital.  busier and busier all the time.  you build it…

a man had his leg taken off.  it was blue to the knee.   i saw him this morning, the day after, wincing in pain.  he looked better, somehow.  more himself.  he has a fever now.  i’m worried.  his remaining foot is not looking so good.  dusky.

today, as every day, on my way to the hospital, i walked past the coffin sellers that line churchill. i try not to take it personally.   beautiful swoops of gold weave on the red felt that covers people’s final box.  outside of one the shops, a father scooped last night’s injera onto his son’s plate.  father to son, cradle to grave, even these people, one day, in their beautiful boxes.

a shroud, my mom said to me, when i asked her how she wanted to be buried before i left, just a shroud. let the worm’s dig into me, straight away.  good idea, i said, changed my will from “a pine box, buried somewhere beautiful” to “shroud”.  she’s still teaching me, after all these years.

when i went away to cambodia for the first time, to do this kind of wore more than a decade ago, i made a CD on which i wrote “play in case of emergency: funeral mix”.    i like plans, what can i say. it’s a youtube playlist now. don’t get sad: the afterparty is more of a dance thing.  maybe you’ll get a chance to hear it if they can’t fill the part of my will that says “if technology allows, transplant my living head and brain, even temporarily, onto a giraffe’s body”.  i just think the galloping would be INSANE.

this afternoon i walked a group of visitors, ferenjis, foreigners through the emergency.  in the background,  a woman screamed, someone pushed a patient by, shroud over his face.

one of the women who was touring paused, turned to me “what is YOUR self-care plan?”.

work with what comes up, i guess.

the world might not be bad or good, but it does ask you certain questions. like: can you see through the lattice of self reflection straight into the outside where bird song takes up empty space in large gulps?  do you get that the only guarantee is that you are born to die, that it’s a matter of time before the other leg starts to look a little purplish too, and the living that happens between then and now, is in your hands, all of it, so how are you going to do it?  in the absence of answers, you can only live questions and the best one i’ve found, the most sincere and direct path towards disappearing completely, is to ask myself if i can give love, and only it, at all times, in every gesture, to myself, to everyone i encounter on this kaleidoscope merrygoround that i get ride for the time being, and perhaps even for a few glorious days galloping clumsily across the savannah, choking down bitter leaves.

i can’t.  i mean, with the love thing,  but i’m getting better, and there’s no perfect anyway, and even if there was, it would last, just change like everything.

at one point, when my practice was stronger than it is now, when i had done a few retreats  months apart, and sat every day for an hour so, first thing in the morning, after i woke, after I stood up from my cushion and winced at the slow electric  feeling in my leg, i would forget who i was.  it was weird.  i would look for glimpses, but there would just be pieces fluttering, disappearing as i tried to to pull them together. i could not even find where to start looking, so i would just hobble down the stairs.  by mid afternoon, the story of myself that i tell myself would form into a sense of “here” and “there”, but until then, there was no difference between the two.  my sense of suffering, during these months, was as close to zero as it had ever been, because there was no one to do it.

there is now.  i’ve a hangover. they have them here too, i was sad to learn.

the smell of a jubilee, once faint, grows stronger.

first here, then here, then here, then, on june29, toronto, here.   you should come.

as i look back on the last months, it’s tough to say i’m proud of anyone, as I have had nothing to do with making them.  still, daily, i feel something akin to that, when i watch the doctors we’ve trained navigate a floor full of sick and worried people with skill and compassion.  maybe it’s awe.  maybe that’s what pride was supposed to be in the first place: an awe one feels to participate in something beautiful.

here is their facebook page.  i like it.  actually, it’s more of a love thing.