Up and Out

Up and Out
More garrulous gazing at the navel of the world.

It was morning, one of a long string of them spent on the couch, post-surgical leg consistently elevated.  My eyes lifted to my favored screen—the trio of windows that frame a northwesterly view of roofs and remnants of forest in my suburban neighborhood. The sun enfolded the bare trees with the most vibrant golden glow. It was like there were stage lights planted in the ground around the base of each trunk, facing up. The mysterious power that had flipped the on switch allowed the dazzle for some brief minutes, and then just like that, they were gone. But I looked up and out at just the right time, and that is the pointed part of this share. I looked up and out. I saw this vivid beauty.

That was yesterday. Few days before that I’d had my second post-op visit, which was also my second car ride in nearly three weeks. (Hey, the days become beads on an abacus—easy to count when you have ever so much time to think.)  Cast-bound leg awkwardly propped on dashboard, my hips complained. My sore shoulder whined in odd harmony. I barely heard them as I took in the sights that have become unfamiliar, my gaze up and out. The roads…had they all been newly paved? Was that pink house always there? Why so many cars, rushing, rushing? Everything looked bright and new. I was a toddler in Toys R Us, dazzled by the sensory abundance.

At that visit, I graduated from the heavy cast to a slightly less heavy boot. “It’s called a walking boot, but you MAY NOT put any weight on that foot,” the doc pronounced. Still, I am now able to remove the contraption and allow the flaky, shriveled skin of my leg and the bruised tender foot to become reacquainted with water and soap. Ouch, but oh! The pleasure! I’m beginning to wiggle the toes, make small, painful attempts at the beloved flexion and extension that I pledge not to take for granted when I am fully mobile once again.

How amazing, these bodies of ours, able to survive ordeals like being slit open, having bone planed away, ratty cartilage hacked off. To have titanium plates pushed in and holes drilled down into old bones. To have screws inserted, slits sewn up like rawhide. The grace with which bone and tendon, muscle and skin accept the foreign bits, heal over and around them, is astonishing. If only minds and hearts—yours and mine— could have such equanimity.

I’ve written it before. Said it plenty. Taught it for years, on the mat as a Yoga instructor. Each moment is laden with possibility. I think of grapes hanging heavy in August,  low and ours for the taking. If we would only look up and out, crawl out of our self-imposed mazes of judgment and craving, our perpetual focus on the things and people we don’t like, don’t want, or want and can’t have. I’m wildly generalizing, but hey, we humans can be a sorry lot when we won’t stop to examine ourselves. Our self-perpetuating patterns combine well with the onslaught of media pressing us to do our part. Keep the economy going and buy our way out of whatever ails us. I’ve certainly been a part of all that.

I could sit on this couch during my interlude of healing, laptop and phone at the ready, and peruse sites for hours. I could google and click and drop shiny things into multiple virtual carts. I could scroll into the lives of folks I barely know, get curious about old acquaintances and colleagues. And if I did that, I’d surely miss out on those brief moments of tree-glow and bird-sing. I’d overlook the blatant and healing gift of bathing my senses in hours of quiet while Bink is at her day program or her volunteer jobs.

I guess this run-on is a thank you note to the silver linings that hide underneath hardships.

Tomorrow I’ll be sitting here again, and the days after for weeks. I can’t wait to see more tree-glow.

–Melinda