One Hand Clapping

Moderation. The Middle Way. Serenity.

Those are the touchstone words of the survivor...usually.

They were never my lodestones until after my fiftieth birthday. Until I had wrecked a European sports car, made hamburger of my physiognomy andbroken three vertebrae in my neck. A long time after, in fact.

Because I was on fire, and plunging ahead to...whatever,...as the youth say nowadays.

Lookung back, I see myself as a waterbug skeetering around the tentative, tensile surface of a stagnant pool, driven by thoughts, nightmares and rude empty awakenings.

Through it all, I had a Guide, who had at the age of 15 the wisdom of the Ancients, and for 59 years, she, my Betts, husbanded me. She saved me from a hundred deaths, and never forbade me. Never curbed me. Just loved me.

How did she know I would survive...and survive her, too?

Now, to me, "moderation" is not just a word on the Great Seal of Georgia. The Middle Way is the subject of my sermons to grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

And, Serenity (which is really liking what you get and liking what you got) is not foreign to me as it once was.

I can even recognize it in others. My sons and blessed daughters in law. There is no provocative issue in our lives today..except illness.

The one who calls herself my "daughter-in-love", Jeannie Malinda, saved my sanity today, with her serenity and her tungsten will.

These days, suffering bitter pain most hours of the 24, Jeannie makes scented designer soap when she has what she calls "a window through the pain" of sarcoidosis. But she was a software specialist when she could work. She taught Calculus at Georgia Tech, too.

Last week, AOL suspended service to me because I had emailed more than 50 people at one time---a breach of AOL guidelines. They thought I was a commercial "spammer". When we got them straightened out about that and the service was restored, something had happened and I could no longer send email.

That lasted four days. Then I could no longer reach my template to post a Blog. As some readers here know, I am legally blind and somewhat deaf. There was little aid and comfort, and no progress. Both my sons and Jeannie could post on my Blog. (I gave them the credentials. This family is, well, CLOSE.)

But, until Jeannie, in great respiratory and ambulatory distress came over and dove into my I E, my browser settings, my "cookies" control and reestablished my creative connection with my Blog dashboard, I was without much more than a somnambulant relationship with moderation, the middle way or Serenity.

She shared hers with me. She restored my sense of absolute confidence without which life is difficult. For some, unliveable.

In such a mundane exercise as tap-tap-tapping keys and searching a monitor screen it is obvious to me that, as Betts Allen used to quote "we are spirits pure, making a pilgrimage through a physical interlude....Not physical specimens isolated from a far off Great Spirit. It is all One...."

Gifts of self surmount all other efforts. To receive these gifts with grace is tumultuous restoration for a soul.