Sylvia's Journal

It has been raining for more than 48 hours and everything is damp. The edges of the paper in my office are curling up like they used to do in the hivernage in Senegal. And so, once again I wake up to the drip-drip of rain. I am glad I am not camping someplace in a tent. I have done that already, camping in the rain for an entire week. The rain drags me down.

I went to bed last night in a tender mode because of the acts of three people, one who wrote about her recovery from a stroke, one who was giving his last lecture and has died since, and one who apologized for something that did not need an apology – all the while with Linda’s spirit and her family hovering in the background. Together they twisted into a sort of braid that represented what we are and what we need – sacks of fluid and energy, vibrating in the cosmos with everything else around us, chasing something that can only be obtained at considerable cost, and reach it only with the help of others. So there!  It takes accidents and mishaps to find out who’s there for us. It also takes pauses that we cannot impose on ourselves to quiet, for a time, this chatterbox brain full of ‘should’s and ‘ought to’s and move into a slow place where we can observe the world that is otherwise racing by us, bombarding us with energies that we cannot possible pay attention to, even though we try.

Axel was in this place a little longer than I was in the immediate post crash days.  I do remember when the world shriveled up to contain just me and my side of the hospital room and hold the visitors and caregivers, while I was kept in a chemically induced state of bliss. Within days I took this small world as a negative, a restraining situation that needed to be altered. The state of bliss had been fleeting even though I held onto the chemicals for a few more weeks (I remember wondering what the big deal about oxycontin was until I stopped taking it but it never was about bliss, just dulling the pain).

Now my world is as vast as the entire globe again. I am connected to events and places as much as I want to be. I am buzzing with energy and to-do-lists to which to apply my energy but the connective tissue with people is stretched and thin. The three voices from last night were a reminder that some things deserve priority. I long for my vacation that will start next week. In my mind I am already sitting outside overlooking the ocean in Maine with my water color set in front of me and a pile of books next to me and spending countless hours walking and talking with dear friends and each other.