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This morning, on the couch. Cast-bound leg duly elevated, I was contemplating the merits of ice pack vs. heat for the unhappy shoulder/neck. I’ve been working on surrender as fighting the pain has been futile. I’ve tried initiating conversation.

Me: Pain, what are you here to teach me?

Silence.

Me: I am open to your presence. I’m trying to trust that you’ve come for a reason and will leave when your work is through.

Silence.

And then I noticed it. T’was early enough on Christmas morning so the too-near roadway was fairly empty. There was no audible evidence of the usual rush-rush. It was quiet, as much as it can be in a house surrounded by other houses and cars and filled with refrigerator and boiler and anything that, plugged in, might hum.

Outside, a bird. Maybe crow. A simple, homely sound stroking the early blue air like paint on canvas. And then quiet again.

This was the first miracle of the day, except for lungs that breathe and heart that pumps and body that keeps healing, healing even in the late afternoon of my life.

This is my song, tapped out from memory on a little blue-clad box that turns humble thoughts into strings of letters, tiny text necklaces that will sail through the mysterious air and drop into your inbox. That may, upon landing there, splatter and splash into your eyes and—further miracle—up into your brain, where they may be sorted and dropped down into your heart. Wordlings that might have just enough resonance to ping a wee chord inside you, which might inspire your own beaded letters that could spring forth into that air and arc across the street or country or even across an ocean, dropping mysteriously into one or five other sets of eyes and sentient beating hearts.

This is how each day is artwork, how each being of flesh and feather and scale, bark and fur is an essential collaborator in the glorious musical composed by Source, heard and seen only against the backdrop of silence.

Is this the message Pain intends? That answers are just questions wadded up like paper balls and flung high into the firmament? Perhaps it doesn’t matter where or whether they land, only that they are tossed up and out in earnest, over and over.

 

 

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