Intimations of mortality...(with apologies to Wordsworth)

That's it, isn't it..all this cancer business brings our own possible suffering (not so so scary) and death (scarier) into sharper focus. It shortens the distance between now and then. At least, we think it does. But you can't even hold the fear. It is so amorphous, changeable. What's that word that means "keeps changing shape"..I'll loook it up later. It pops up all day long in those thoughts that constantly stream through one's mind...the blah, blah blah of our poor brain's conversations with itself. Stream of consciousness is a perfect word after all.  And then in our dreams. Like last night when I woke up after dreaming my aunt had fallen from a balcony and was folded over below, deflated,  like a rag doll. And I started shouting , 'Oh, no, oh no, call 911,  ' torn between running down to her and finding a phone. But I knew it was too late.

That and reading on my walk yesterday with Prill to a new cafe in Parkdale. In that Free Paper (No Dollars, no Sense (sic). The front page shouted 'YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE AND YOU ONLY GET TO SAVE ONE THING'. That set me off for a bit...

I love Parkdale. It's becoming even more fabulously eclectic. We found stores that had been there for five years..new to us. Like the "general store" with everything from second-hand videos and political little buttons to organic almond cashew  butter and organic biblically cited cereal. And it looked like building were getting sand-blsted and even some of the hideous wires cleaned up along Queen Street. All the Tibetan shops and cafes, as great new art gallery in an old hardware store showing contemporary art...and me hoping I wouldn't be missing all this...that I'd  be here to see it all keep changing and keep rejoicing in it as I was then and there.

Let me see this, let me see this...I want to be here to see this.

Susie W. has put me on her distribution list for great poems by Mary Oliver, Hafiz (?) and Wendell Berry among others. Most of us on that list are dealing with some sort of illness. Most, yea ALL,  are new to me. Every poem has at least one line that can keep you going for the day, like those mystics said to survive only on the Eucharist (peace be to you, Catherine Emmerich!)

Yesterday, mine was the line from Wendell Berry at the end of his poem:  'Practice resurrection."