Dear Reader:

In my memory of this latest “health escapade” in my life….the Hurricane/tropical storm Hermine will always be associated with the day of the surgery. So yesterday I decided to look and see if there was a meaning or origin behind the name…and it was.

Hermine is a feminized version of the German name Hermann, which means “Soldier.”

I felt just like “Alice in Wonderland”… suddenly things were getting “curiousier and curiousier and I was forgetting how to write and speak “good English.”

Early Friday morning I did feel like a female soldier going into battle as I left for the operating room. There should have been a chorus of voices singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

Rutledge has been right on both occasions, the eye surgery and now (especially) the breast cancer surgery, “Be Brave Boo Boo, Be Brave.” It does take courage to ‘come alive‘ when your health and existence are in jeopardy.

I remember my mouth and throat were dry, my heart was pounding in my ears like drums going to war, and I could feel my life flow pulsating throughout me like a jolt of electricity. I was immersed in the ‘most alive’ feeling I have felt in quite awhile… heading down that corridor to surgery.

***(I just had an “interruption” with the internet telling me it was off-line when my computer told me it was on-line…don’t you hate it when that happens? All I know to do is unplug the modem and hope for the best… that did the trick. It got me thinking, though, that wouldn’t it be nice if we humans, while experiencing health shut-downs could just unplug ourselves for a few minutes and then be perfectly healthy again?)

“To say clearly what’s alive in us
in any given moment
we have to be clear about
what we feel and what we need.”

When I came across this quote from the latest blog of Kate Wolfe-Jenson it made me pause and think about it. In order to feel alive we have to know and understand “what we feel and what we need.”

I am the worst possible case scenario for this thought process because I am always “fine.” And I honestly think I am….as compared to (let’s say) dead….but I have a tendency to skip over several degrees of  separation in that shallow response. I might be saying I’m fine in being alive and not dead, but to identify what is “alive in me” might be a harder task during difficult times in my life.

It I were to give you the straightest answer from my heart right now….I would probably say…what I feel is a sense of loss…a betrayal of my body that I thought was “fine” again…and my “need”  would be my mother… who I want to re-appear to me like she did when I was a child and reassure me that “everything will be all right.”

…Or as Joan Turner hopes…I see another dolphin this week… like the one who jumped up near me at Edisto after my first diagnosis….leaving me with the mental message that “All is right and just as it should be in the universe…and you are too.” Wonderful thought Joan!

To sort out our “true grit” response to our ‘feelings and needs in being alive’ takes, I believe, conversation with another person who really knows you. I was so blessed to have Jackson come stay with me Thursday and Friday nights because we did have time for some frank, deeper conversations about our feelings and needs right now…at this stage in our lives.

What are you feeling?

What do you need?

Tell me yours

I’ll tell you mine

and we will

find beauty

in the between.

…………………………

Don’t we always feel better when we  have honest conversations with trusted ones, on each other’s lives, in each of our stages along the journey of life? We do come “alive” again, free from secret fears we have kept hidden for too long. Breaking the chains of silence provides a new sense of “aliveness” in each of us….comparable to the beautiful day we all experienced yesterday after the storm. Blues skies and bright sunshine!

So until tomorrow….let’s take time to occasionally give ourselves a “spiritual spa” day to cleanse away things that form barriers between simply existing and actually living life to our fullest potential.

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

• Jackson with Libby’s youngest grandson, Rhett, while she lived with Libby last year following the 1000 Year Flood. It was almost a year ago, while at Edisto, that Jackson got the news her house had been completely flooded.
• Since then her life has changed upside down….but as we discussed…she came out stronger and her situation better in the end. We just have to hang tight and trust in God! (And “Be Brave”)