Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Luminous

After a couple of months fretting about what this pain in my belly may be, I have an answer, opined by three physicians.

You have pain, they say, of unknown origin.

I'm sorry not to be grateful for the benefit of their collective wisdom, but I really was hoping for something more like "you have a little adhesion from your appendectomy, and here are some helpful ways to help bust it loose."

Or, "those fibroids are messing up your insides something awful, but fortunately now we can remove them and leave you organs intact - outpatient."

Instead, they said that I probably have over-active nerves. I am relieved. I am not ill, I have no disease process causing this. I feel like I've been told I am imagining the pain, or that I am a wee bit hysterical. Neither is true.

Strange how much more tolerable pain becomes when I know it is not the result of a disease process. I have mythic pain tolerance abilities. Walked on a broken ankle for 8 months, endured a perforated, gangrenous appendix for two. OK. Mythic and stupid. That's why I was very thoroughly checked out this time, to save my loved ones the anxiety that can come with caring for me.

What I also learned, is that I have three small, golf-ball sized fibroids. Nothing to worry about. Except that I really don't want to feel like Patty Berg's golf bag. Oh, and my ovaries and uterus are shrunken - perfectly normal for some one at my stage of life. Good thing my self-esteem isn't tied up in the size of my sex organs.

So, now free from the fear of ruptures, implosions, perforations and other possible consequences of exercise, I am back out walking.

Tonight, striding along Wirth Lake, my attention was gripped by the rose-colored moon. The cast was golden, so that it resembled in my imagination the battle-metal of the armor in Beowulf's great hall, made from gold tinged with red iron. The orb in the sky lit my path, and also lit up the dozens and dozens of autumn mushrooms in the woods. My favorites are the puffballs, shining brightly in the moonlight, looking, well, moon-like - both kinds. Or breasty. Or like a bald man and a baby touching foreheads, since in one pair I saw, one puffball was much smaller than the other.

It has been weeks and weeks since I walked in these woods, or in the wildflower garden. Thinking back to the Spring, when the hills' contours were visible, I am overwhelmed by the emergence of all the vegetation - all this biomass, built from sun, water, and nutrients from the soil. From what blueprint, what recipe, what spell or formula? What intention or what indulgence allows them to be? These blooms, these reeds, these fledgling birds eating seed from my feeders - they all appear from nowhere it seems. Yet I know better. They are wrought from strands of my heart, tears of my eyes and lightness of my being. We are, in very real ways, all made of the same stuff.

Same as that moon up there. Same as those mushrooms down there.

4 comments:

sweetpea said...

Next full moon, I am inviting myself to your neck of the woods for a moonlight walk! We see the same moon my friend and your writing touches me deeply.

twinsetellen said...

There you go, being all poet-y again.

hawksnestfarm said...

k, when you can't walk, write! i think your writing is the antidote...please keep writing, sista! am missing it lately!!!

btw, we've got a puffball that at first we thought was the kids soccer ball under a bush. upon closer inspection of course we realized it was a puffball. still haven't summoned up the courage to eat puffballs yet, and now it's too late. they are lookin like brown alien skulls scattered in the woods.

beegirl said...

pbird,

Thank you for your kind words. I miss your writing when you go dark, too. Have you every made puffball French Toast? Egg and milk batter, and you can use cooky cutters for fun shapes. Get the puffball very young and fresh, or it will taste very very bad......