October 1, 2024

Tomorrow is October 1! This week I have a first visit with a gastro guy. GERD and Rosacea are apparently allied, due to secretions from the stomach mixing with secretion of the eyes. Sigh. It’s complicated. I have dry eyes and heartburn combo style!

One of my sticky notes to myself reads: Close. Pause. Open. Relax. Every 20 minutes 20 times a day. Squeeze lids often.

Frankly, being in your eighties is a full-time job for a lot of us. We get vaguer and vaguer in proportion to the medical complications. I can’t even remember how to upload an insurance card. Something about taking a picture of it on your phone….

I don’t have cancer or heart disease, I just have a…wait a minute while I close, pause, open, relax! Ah, I can tick that eye exercise off for twenty minutes….

The spiritual path was so fascinating for so long. Decades of earnest reading and listening. Thinking the penny would drop and I would be a different person. Turns out I am a different person, an eighty-plus know-nothing. I know nothing, not because I am enlightened, but because I am older now.

I think the gurus have the game figured out. Say you are enlightened and you can teach others. I think most of you have read my book, “Bigger Than The Sky.” Peter knew the truth and he shared it with me until he grew too weak to email me. He had found himself after a brain injury rendered him unable to walk. His memorable phrase: “For what it’s worth, I hold your hand in this.”

Then Bob died and ultimately Peter could no longer keep in touch with me. He is just a beautiful memory now. He never knew I wrote about him in BTS.

Now here I am, facing away from the sunshine.

I think I shall post parts of BTS (Bigger Than the Sky.)

“Sometimes people say they like the simplicity of my words. I had the complexity knocked out of me, thank God. Now the bare bones remain. But dry bones dance…now hear the words of the Lord, as the old hymn says.

Peter, dear Peter, in your absence you have become presence.”

Vicki Woodyard