Twenty Minutes

I ordered a A Year with C.S. Lewis from Amazon (thanks, Matthew!) and have been reading every night, right after I jot down my day in the Charley Harper Engagement Calendar. Above is a picture of Harper's Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve, Costa Rica 1999,  which is on the cover of the engagement calendar, and I love studying it after I write.  It's full of details, surprised, layers, color--all the things I love in a visual piece. (Can you see the chimp?)

Back to the Lewis: I read all the days up to today in January's readings in order to catch up and be on track for the rest of the year, then couldn't resist and read a couple more.  Here's January 26th's thought, from Lewis' The Great Divorce, Preface:

"We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the center: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a pool but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good."

What else, this January month?  I upgraded our computer OS software; we now have Lion installed so it will work with our iCal and our Mail and our iPhones and the iCloud (and our iBrains).  I will have been to the doctor seven times before the month is out, eight, if you count the 3 1/2 hours in Urgent Care on the 31st of December.  Two other people I care about were also hospitalized and they are both home.  I started teaching again in the new semester; a friend who has had her battles with cancer says that initially she had much less patience for the complaints of the students, a side-effect of the experience.  I know what she means.  I miss feeling like I could conquer the world, but that may be just having a birthday.

Oh, a birthday!  And this is how my mind works right now: like a trying to take a walk in the night with no moon and a dim flashlight, feeling my way through all things, recognizing some only after shining the light on it twice.  I find "lost" things in strange places and am surprised by where they are, as I don't recall putting them away there.  I intensely miss people.  People exhaust me.  I tear up too easily.  I tire by mid-afternoon and stand in the laundry room looking at cans of Barq's root beer, trying to decide if I should drink some caffeine or go take a nap.  I can do either, at my stage of life.  Usually the nap wins.

And now like to say I had cancer for twenty minutes, but that someone has imbedded a hatchet in my upper thigh.  That's about how it's going around here these days--with new dressing change routines, the asthma kicking in (esp. today with its high winds) and the gratifying realization that I don't have to do chemo or radiation like my other friends with cancer.  Hence, the 20-minute cancer.  Just need to get rid of that hatchet now, and although changed, life will go on in its branching ways.