Re: [at-l] Where do you feel most spiritual?

[Sloetoe <sloetoe@yahoo.com>]

--- Eric Primack <eap0758@garnet.acns.fsu.edu> wrote:
> where do you feel most spiritual, and why?

1) Alone? Moving? Then hiking/running through tall, thick, dark, mossy,
ferny, forest -- probably hemlock, even though I LOVE the fragrance of
spruce/fir/BALSAM. Best connection to "earth."

2) Alone? Not Moving? Then sitting up in the direct warmth of first
light/sunrise. (Perhaps out of the breeze, in the back of a leanto...) Best
connection to "God."

3) Not Alone? Then holding one (or both) of my children while they're
sleeping. Best connection to "humanity."

On that last one, I held my son Cole for two weeks once, 23 hours a day, in a
wooden rocking chair in a toddler ICU. Cole had a nasty go with Respiratory
Syncicial(?) Virus ("RSV") badly enough that at 19 months old, he was back on
100% O2 and nearly intubated/medicated/respirated. (His lungs simply did not
want to carry the load that they were presented, and he worked his chest
mightily to keep up -- on the order of 100 breaths per minutes (and more). I
figure he ran, at one point, 4 marathons in 2 days. My God.) For Cole to cry
meant watching his O2 plummet and his CO2 jump, and all he wanted was to be
held and to sleep. Anything else was presented with a breathy-soft version of
a 19 month old's no: "newwww." "Would you like some ice cream?" "Newwww."
"TV?" "Newwww." The answer seemed easy enough to me: cry: bad; hold: good. So
I held him! Through aching shoulders, square butt-cheeks, numbed legs,
rushed/infrequent showers, DAYS of subsisting on bagels, and a neck
permanently wrenched from craning to watch a TV up too high and on too
softly.

But I was a happy man to all of humanity, I'll tell ya. Some of it was
because I was *not* watching my son slowly die, sure. {Ugh.} But a *bunch* of
it was being charged by gravity with supporting a sleeping human life -- an
embodyment of promise and innocence.

Have just an outrageously humane day.
Sloetoe



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