when he came to himself he said ...

My left arm has permission to roam from my chest, so it's welcome back to capitals, when needed. The permission was granted by my physio, h.p., the same person who helped me stay mobile while I waited to be fixed. Now she says I can move my hand away from my chest and my arm up to shoulder height, with the help of the other one. It's all a bit creaky and slow.

But slow is good. The only thing that happens fast around here is the occasional bid on eBay. (P was amused to find that the section of the hospital ward I was in was called E Bay.)

Slow stops multitasking. Slow lets you be. Slow stops the fizzing, popping brain. Slow says, Take it easy Bud, you don't know nut'n. Which is about right.

The busy, busy me would be waxing lyrical about Us Now, the More 4 programme by Ivo Gormley which examines the revolution in the way people join up to help one another on-line, and the virtues of self-organising systems. But you can check out these cool new developments for yourself: Horsesmouth (a social network for informal mentoring), Slicethepie (on new ways of organising the music industry) and Zopa (new ways of organising finance). I'm too chilled to push. Things will probably have moved on by the time you read this anyway.

Have a nice life.

the mystery of healing

bless me father, it's a week since my last blog, and me with so much to confess, yet it all being so trivial, i hardly like to bother ye.

this week i've realised that healing is mostly about waiting; waiting for the mystery of what goes on while you sleep between your body and your maker. yet we also serve, a bit, who only rest and wait.

today two personal events made this real. rather routinely, i had 15 staples removed from my shoulder. i breach all canons of taste and decency by showing a picture of how my body has been fixing itself after repairs by the maintenance team.

much more momentously, my great nephew zach (hi zach!) arrived at 3am, amidst worrying complications which rushed him into neonatal icu for treatment for mas. as i write there are many people praying for him, as the icu and specialised medical staff provide the best conditions for his body and his maker to mend him.

the mystery of being made of living tissues of flesh and blood remains. the staples or the ventilator can hold us, but life, fragile and wonderful remains beyond our ken.

medics and mystics

just had my dressing changed, with a chance to see the body art traced for 4-5 inches across the top of my left shoulder, neatly tacked together with metal staples. we laymen don't see this very often. a really neat job. just as well, as it's more permanent than any tattoo.

a good job then, but as so often with technicians, there is no discussion of its meaning. this implies that they think, 'it's just what it is.' a physical, even mechanical problem, now fixed.

but is it? it is certainly not just mechanics--the blood at the start and the slow knitting together that follows tells us that. it is a paradox: intervening with steel into the living web of life, with dexterity and discernment. an art then, certainly.

so, what then does this art signify, for the artists and their living media? a quick web check reveals relatively little, just one or two books or articles. hmm. time for medics and mystics to talk to one another, facilitated by a philosopher.

sleep, drugs and rock 'n roll...

... is the other combination beloved of the flower power generation and it suits me, one day back from the hospital. more poems should be written about sleep, beautiful sleep, it's an underrated activity.

caught a bit of glasto on the telly; crosby, stills and nash on the tame side, but neil young was blistering. must have a word with my friend k who failed to attend his gig at the isle of wight!

time for s, d and r&r (on the radio) again; a body could get used to this.

peace and love -- keep on rocking in the free world.

Pic credit: Guardian

somewhat okay

i only have one arm to use for the next two-three weeks, so headline l.c. 'style' continues in body.

how hard it is to experience something, reflect on it and then express this elegantly; they are three different tasks. i cant do this yet, one day after surgery, but i hope that the memories will be accessible later.

two impressions: that entering hospital as a patient is like making a trip to a foreign land, and that the night shift is another country again. watching most of a shift last night, i wondered how far each of them walked!

with one working arm, i marvelled at how everyone else used two with ease; and i felt the envy of those with only one working leg as i went to the bathroom unaided.

waiting to be hurt and mended

From my window I look over to the garden next door. There is a garden chair there, with a full-length faded pink cushion on it. From the corner of my eye it looks like a person, but when I look directly at it, there is nobody there.

Waiting for surgery later this week, I feel as if I am living in a world of illusions. Do my arm and shoulder really need to be cut open to be repaired? It depends what I try to do. Most of the time I don't look or feel like a need fixing. Till I try to hang out the washing. Then I notice myself compensating in a dozen small ways.

But how strange to be inviting people into your body on the basis of a ten minute conversation three months ago. I do not know, and may not meet, them. They do not know me, just my body, and then only in part. The nearest analogy I can think of is casual sex.

Above all is the waiting. This story started in early February with waiting four hours in A&E on the snowy night of my accident. Then six weeks for healing. Then another for a consultation, a another for a scan, another for a consultation and another for a pre-op. Twenty weeks measured out in pain and pain relief, waiting for this week. Waiting for a short (how long? I don't know), sharp, violent, intervention.

I feel my shoulder. At the top, the bone is just below the skin, but further down the rotator cuff is dense with muscle. How will they find their way in? Will they find the ruptured tendon in a state to be reattached? Will the repair hold?

Some of these questions could be answered quickly by an expert. But there is no expert here. So I have to wait. And others can only be answered by time. Time, imperceptible yet insistent as a moving glacier. There is much more waiting to be done before I will know what I will be able to do again.

So, I float suspended in the still air like a dandelion seed. There is life in me, but I am unable to direct my own course. We living things have to learn to take our chances.

priesthood and spiritual maturity--how often found together?

I came across the Anglican solitary Maggie Ross quite by chance this week, and have started reading Pillars of Flame: Power, Priesthood and Spiritual Maturity. My copy does not have a date of publication, oddly, but much of the literature is from the 80s. I was reissued in the USA by Seabury Press in 2007.

A lot of what she is saying is consonant with the emerging church movement. So, this is another root to explore. I'll write more on this when I understand more.

A review, dating the first edition to 1998, sums up her call to "spiritual maturity which embraces interdependence, self-forgetfulness, living with ambiguity and paradox, and acceptance of suffering with an appreciation of God's presence working in us through it."

Her blog is Voice in the Wilderness.