It's Waining

Third day of rain here in Colorado, with flash flood warnings popping up on my phone at all hours, and the steady deluge prompting Daniel to ask, "where is all this water coming from?"  On the walk to school, worms splayed out on the sidewalk in Rohrshach patterns, desperate to escape the sodden soil, while sirens faded in and out with much greater frequency than normal, as commuters tried to understand these foreign conditions.  My daughter persistently texts me for rides to and from the bus stop, with the line "it's waining!"  I'm headed out soon to build the ark, but I thought I would get a last blog entry done.

Sometimes in our lives and in our health we feel like it's raining cats and dogs. Rob and I had that kind of year last year, with my health balanced on a knife's edge and Rob's knee surgery requiring months of rehab. Our fathers were both in and out of the hospital, and truly it seemed like the water crested way over flood levels. In my physical and emotional recovery from the last eighteen months I have been reading Full Catastrophe Living, by Jon Kabat - Zinn. It's a guide to meditation and healthy tactics used by Kabat-Zinn at his Stress Reduction Clinic at U Mass Medical Center.

The book is long and detailed about meditation and yoga, but I found myself most fascinated by the chapter on the Mind-Body connection. How we think about life and people and our health has a transformative effect on the body itself. Not necessarily causative, but certainly linked. Far from using this info to point the finger at myself, as I am tempted to do, Kabat-Zinn insists that "acceptance and forgiveness are what we need to cultivate to enhance healing, not self-condemnation and self-blame" (209).   He also points out that, instead of seeing yourself as "ill" or "well" in a black and white fashion:

"It makes more sense to think of health and illness as opposite poles on a continuum than to think that you are either "healthy" or "sick." There will always be a flux of different forces at work in our lives at any given time; some may be driving us toward illness. others shifting the balance toward greater health. Some of these fores are under our control, or might be if we put our resources to work for us, whereas others lie beyond what any individual can control." (217)

So I am moving along the continuum towards healthy, as are the people I love most in this world. May we cultivate the power that we have to change the things under our control and be at peace with the rest. We can always ride out the rain.