look out -- our new kitten coming soon

he worries...
will Simcha
look down from heaven
and hiss...
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Simcha, you are the alpha cat of my heart!

lessons learned - chew your food slowly

All right, I re-adopted the "lessons learned" title for this post. It is a lesson, and I am learning it. Now that I am nearly devoid of saliva, swallowing is always a bit of a challenge. If I do not pay attention to what I am doing when I eat, I invariably am startled into the realization that this bit of food that is currently lodged in my throat is not going down as it was meant to. Thus far, I have been able to quickly drink some water and resolve the situation without embarrassing myself, or worse.

Today, I had a ghoulish image of spending the last few moments of my life vainly attempting to perform the Heimlich maneuver on myself on the back of our dining room chair, while the little TV in the kitchen was spouting out the news of the day (the five thousandth story I've heard on the impact of the oil spill) and keeping me company while my wife was gone. Would I hear the voice of my dear deceased mother saying "I told you a hundred times to chew your food slowly!"...or would I have the thought..."this serves me right for watching TV while I was eating...I'm such an idiot!" or would I be thinking..."maybe I should use the upholstered chair, this wood chair is killing me..." or maybe my last thoughts would be..."I shoulda picked up some won-ton soup to go with the sesame chicken..."

Anyway...the lesson here...is to pay attention to what I am doing. Doing that when I eat may become life or death for me. But when I am talking to my friend, my wife, my client, PAY ATTENTION.... when I am watching the Robin feed the baby Robin in the nest just outside our window... PAY ATTENTION... when I am reading a difficult poem, or a passage of Scripture, or when I am in prayer, or washing the dishes... PAY ATTENTION.

Steven...PAY ATTENTION...your life is in this moment...and please, for Heaven's sake, chew with your mouth shut!

deeper things - life, after dying, revives

I feel like getting away from the title "lessons learned" ...it just started to sound very pompous to me. I also feel like adding a few poems. This poem may be about death or dying, but to me it is more about living, and the realization that even when we go through death, literal or figurative, there is life on the other side. There has been life before cancer, during cancer, there will be life after cancer... there is life after loss and grief; even in the midst of loss and grief, if I was willing to listen and remember, I was carrying all the large and small joys of my life in my heart...listen, if you are in the valley, just listen...there is another voice to hear, faint and distant though it may appear. Someone once anonymously posted a comment (after a post entitled "dayenu") and used the phrase "whispering dayenu." I am not sure what that person meant...but I know what the comment meant to me. Sometimes, in the midst of pain, I could not jump up and down with joy, and the best I was able to do (and only at best) was whisper with the faintest wisp of gratitude...whoever wrote that comment...I was so moved by it and those two words that I carry them with me.

Give a listen to this poem...tell me what it sounds like to you...I think it is recited quite nicely, (especially the pause right before the words "then journey on..." Hearing a poem gives such a different perspective than reading it...I will put the poem in print below the video, if you insist on reading it, but at least try to listen along while you read. It's an oldie but goodie, written by Emily Bronte in the mid 1800's. Be quiet, and in quiet listen to the poem. Please tell me how it speaks to you




There should be no despair for you
While nightly stars are burning;
While evening pours its silent dew,
And sunshine gilds the morning.
There should be no despair--though tears
May flow down like a river:
Are not the best beloved of years
Around your heart for ever?

They weep, you weep, it must be so;
Winds sigh as you are sighing,
And winter sheds its grief in snow
Where Autumn's leaves are lying:
Yet, these revive, and from their fate
Your fate cannot be parted:
Then, journey on, if not elate,
Still, NEVER broken-hearted!

lessons learned - silence

The sweetest song is silence...
--- Heart

Be still and know that I am God
--- Psalm 46:10


Trauma has a way of silencing a lot of extraneous noise. But it also has a way of drowning out everything else with it's own harsh voice. In the midst of my treatment, I sat in silence, but at times the discomfort was deafening. Also, there were the times I sought noise to distract me from the discomfort of the immediate moment. During my daily radiation treatments at the hospital, there was an oldies station constantly playing in the background while I was strapped to the table and immobilized. I learned to judge how many minutes I had left by the number of songs I heard...each treatment was roughly four songs (with all the radio commercials in between) worth of time. And during chemotherapy, there was awful daytime TV playing in the room where I and dozens of others were sitting on recliners with IV's hooked up infusing our bodies with poison.

There is a kind of silence, though, that I have learned to appreciate. It is the silence and stillness that I think is implied in the verse from Psalm 46 above. (By also quoting from a Heart song, I do not mean to elevate those lyrics to the level of the Psalms, but rather, they seemed to fit right there; I just happened to hear the song "These Dreams" from which those lyrics were taken, about an hour ago in my car...that, along with Heart's "Dog and Butterfly" always caught my attention.)

The type of silence that I have sought is the silence that allows the awful and wonderful presence of God room to dwell. Awful in the sense of the humbling that I have experienced in silent moments like that, and wonderful in the sense of an appreciation of His majesty and awesome presence. It is a silence that allows me to still my anxieties and regain perspective. It is a silence that fills what has been drained away by the world, it's noise and its demands.

I have been on a few silent retreats at a nearby monastery, and I know that simply observing the absence of sound is not enough. There usually is all sorts of internal dialogue and noise accompanying the "quiet." However, I have found that sometime during the second day of a silent retreat my inner dialogue begins to quiet down along with the outer silence. Then, the "stillness" of Psalm 46 gets some traction...then...I start allowing some room for God. It's not that He wasn't present all along, it's that I was so distracted by the "noise" of my inner and outer world that I didn't notice Him...

So...this cancer expereience in some way has taught me to approach that silence more frequently and more hungrily. Ironically, I think the hit my energy level has taken in some ways has also made room for more stillness...I don't know...maybe I'm wrong about that.

I was having a conversation with a friend today about the verse "pray without ceasing." I do not know for certain what that means...but without regular times of stillness and silence...I know it's impossible.

Be still and know that I am God.

Could anything be more profound?

Lessons learned - Rewriting the previous post

Here is a shorter version (in a poem and a quote)

If you can awaken
inside the familiar
and discover it new
you need never
leave home.

-----Ted Kooser



Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

----Thoreau