It is the season for persimmons.  He cured one for me in a paper bag for a week, came to see me armed with a slicing knife.  He is thirsty, climbs the staircase in stages because the cancer in his thigh is growing itself a formidable pouch.  The sac ruptures twice, lands him in the hospital, where they pretend that it will get better once the pus is completely drained.  But of course in the meantime he needs rest and it is I now who comes to his room.  I hand him a glass of water.

"I want more life, that's what I want." He always asks me to draw the curtains, to see me better, he says, because of the glare at my back, and I feel guilty every time because he is missing the radiant spring outside.  But he is more interested in hearing, and I must fish out the batteries for his hearing aid amidst the rubble and bottles of medication.  One day they disappear for good.  I am reminded that in his dream the strap for his saxophone breaks and he cannot play anymore, so we might as well stop pretending that we understand each other and sit quietly together, listening to the stirrings of my pregnancy, which, when all is said and done, is drowning all the noise of the outside world anyway.  We are both sick and exhausted with the conceivings of a new life, panicked, in fact, in need of painkillers and tranquilizers just to keep the gaping yawn of infinity at bay.

At last his hallucination grows a black box on my head and he commands me to remove it.  I obey, careful not to let the lid fly open as I balance it between my fingers.  This would have been the ultimate disaster but we avoid it.  I never learn what is inside and I am glad: the season for persimmons is here, as it always is, and I must yet taste their sweetness.

Our feet were wont to stand in thy courts, O Jerusalem: Jerusalem, which is built as a city at unity with itself.

Absence is the mother of desire...

Beauty is a snare God sets out for the soul to draw her nearer in love

The deluge #3

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Is "here" a dimensionless point, or the space extending as far as my vision allows? Where does "here" end and "there" begin when the "here" could be indefinitely extended? In this moment, R comes to me, and my whole sense of existing shifts and extends far beyond the volume of my body. "Here" extends over continents and oceans, encompasses even the sense of "now" to include the moment when he looked up at me with his four-year-old's gaze. Even if his questioning eyes are conventionally understood to belong to the past, to my memory of what had been,and even if those eyes are, in the linear "now" forever closed in the black silence of his grave, the fact remains that space-time shrinks and expands indefinitely to make way for our relationship - for relationship: the current between I and Thou.

The deluge #2

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A newly-discovered joy: reading poetry to an infant. We are currently on the poet-hermit Ryokan:

Once again the children and I are fighting a battle using spring grasses.
Now advancing, now retreating, each time with more refinement.
Twilight - everyone has returned home;
The bright, round moon helps me endure the loneliness.

The deluge #1

The discovery of the foot

Her room, stage 2

Her perspective #5

Her perspective #4

Her perspective #2

Her perspective #1

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OK, but blogger keeps cropping edges off these perspectives. Specifically the landscape ones.

What, I ask, is so heinous about a dress change?

Her room, stage 2

Her room, stage 1

The Empress... displeased (frequently)

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It is amazing to me that human beings come into this world knowing basically three things - how to suck, how to eliminate, and how to cry. Of these three, crying is the only one that is not a purely somatic function - it expresses emotion. Thus it appears we are born knowing how to experience unhappiness but have to learn anything beyond that. Contentedness only comes while asleep. I wonder what this means... existentially.

My own private Knox

The Empress...

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...is my own personal crazy wisdom teacher:

She is totally unpredictable. One moment she is smiling broadly, but that big grin turns into a pinched, about-to-cry face in a second. OK, three, maybe. And I have no clue why this happened. And there's nothing I can do to prevent it. I can't freeze her at happiness – she just flows from ecstasy to wrath and back again.

She is unreasonable. If she wants to be fed at 2:46 am, even if she just fed at 1:31 am, then fed she will be. So what if "they" say babies eat every three to four hours at this age. Huh! Then again, she might want to stare at that black picture frame for twenty minutes, and please don't shift her position while she is preoccupied with this.

She insults those who love her most. I am reading right now that the real purpose of a spiritual friend is to insult you. I had no better example than when I kissed her and she let out a big fart in response.

And to all this I respond with unquestioned devotion and commitment. A true spiritual relationship – intimate, surrendered, and filled with tears and excrement.

Parent in Love #4

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Last night's sleep schedule:

8:30 PM - midnight: Scheduled solo sleep shift; baby and husband in the living room. Woke up at 10:30, however, panicked - WHERE IS THE BABY???? Frantically pawing through pillows and bedsheets, convinced she should BE THERE. Can't calm down until I check the clock and verify that this is my sleep shift alone. This keeps happening every night for the last four nights.

midnight - 1:30 AM: She feeds, midnight to 12:45. Long, drawing sucks, accentuated by occasional pleasure aaahs. I let her fall asleep on my chest, half reclining against the oversize pillow, watching her grimace, smile and yip through her newborn dreams. I pray she won't start fussing the minute I lay her down. Then I remember the diaper - damn! That's going to wake her up all over again. But she slumbers through the whole change, and I am beginning to believe in miracles.

1:30 AM - 3:45 AM: She sleeps. I wake up sometime during the shift and remember my own dream: I stand on a sunny beach and watch the magnificent waves of the Pacific Ocean lap at my feet. They grow larger and larger, until they are as tall as buildings, then small mountains. The water turns from shimmering blue to threatening gray. One of the waves rises like a dark beast and becomes a hand, its gargantuan fingers towering a mile towards the sky, then falling and merging with the roiling waters. I think, this is a tsunami, and scamper to higher ground as the water washes over the parking lot. Oh, I think, my car is gone, under the ocean now. I climb again, onto a rocky ledge, confident the water won't reach this far. A small country church is ringing its bells in alarm, warning the people of the onrushing water. I take a sweeping look and think it is still beautiful.

3:45 AM - 4:30 AM: She feeds. This time I'm convinced there will be an hour of fussing; things have gone too smoothly so far. She falls asleep, then wakes and remembers she is still hungry. Her eyes wide open at first, scanning, looking decidedly worried, then yielding to the pleasure of the feed, the eyelids slowly begin to droop until she is fast asleep again. I do my slow slide twenty minutes later, armed with a pacifier in my left hand, propping her tiny head in the crook of my right arm.

4:30 AM - 7 AM: She sleeps! She SLEEPS! I do my worried wake-ups every hour to check if she is still there and breathing.

Parent in Love #3