Monday, Monday

On the first Monday after the New Year, the start of another decade, on Facebook and the road outside my door, people charge forward with resolution. Determination is rampant and optimism runs high.

Deep from another perspective, I see for myself ahead a day of solitude, a week of finding work, a half-year of recovery, challenge over abundance. My heart flirts with both ecstasy and despair in the very same beat.

Outside, driving my son to a new semester at school, Burlington digs out from its biggest snow in forty years, while a few miles away in the mountains, hardly any fell at all. Disappointed yesterday at the ski area, I looked around this morning with wonder.

Roads were plowed, sidewalks clean, sharp and deep like canyons through the high banks. Thirty plus inches of powder puff settles into a wintry deep quiet. Post storm winds howl as a few last shovels clear the walks, heads bent to the work, warm under Gore-tex and down.

Having rested all afternoon and evening from my weekend at the Mountain with the Skatter Monkeys, I became inspired to get out in the snow. So much of my youth spent with skis, it seemed just too cruel to remain couch-bound with so much fluff in abundance. I thought I might dig out my cross-country skis and slide along the sidewalk as far as my energy allowed.

With that idea came the inspiration that I should treat this surgery like a marathon, a race of endurance for and against myself, an approaching, all-consumming event requiring discipline and fortitude. By shifting my focus from the past months of recuperation to the approaching months as preparation, this ordeal could better become a positive experience. It is evident, even in my own slow recovery that being in good shape physically and mentally will speed the healing process. Excited and involved with life, one accelerates.

Finding the equipment was easy, sorting the clothes nearly as. I stretched yogically despite the pull of the tube in my belly and the bag strapped to my leg. With a straighter back and more opened chest, I felt stronger and vowed to head out on skis just as soon as I jotted down the structure of this essay.

Equally, I thought, my voice lessons with Shyla could be the emotional exercise to build the stamina necessary to succeed in the coming months. As my body strengthens around the injury, the work on my core can solidfy the will to find the notes that will sing beyond this time of healing.

Shyla has suggested I study the legends of Parzifal, a knight in King Arthur’s court in search of the Holy Grail. Again, it is no coincidence the next day when “The Fischer King” with Robyn Williams appears at the front of Netflix, a variation on the variation of the tale.

Lane sends me the story of Chiron, the Wounded Healer of Greek mythology who Christlike leads the way through his own pain and suffering to become a brilliant constellation guiding all mankind. Mercury is once again retrograde and the Tarot cards are amazingly consistent.

Nothing is new under the sun. We live our own little stories, day after day, leading ourselves and each other forward, even as we seem to be falling back. Two days later the skis still stand unused where I set them on the porch. The effort to stay optimistic sometimes is just too impossible, collapsing me back onto the couch, a painful paragraph at a time, examining the struggle deep within that I share with you, my friendly readers, one soul to another.

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