I call this eddiesandcurrents because I’ve found that life flows along, interconnected in ways I often can’t see, ways that take place under the water and through the water and in the water.  My days are like those currents, sometimes seeming, on the surface, a smooth flow.  Sometimes a little eddy that seems apart.  But ultimately all connected.  Saturday’s “bad” day became Sunday’s unexpected “good” day while yesterday just was and today is.  What distinguishes one from the other?  A meal or a phone call or a visit or a sick cat or a walk in the battlefield or nausea or appetite.  Many small events and feelings and thoughts coming and going.

Now’s eddy is part of a late-in-bed morning after a restless night of post-midnight falling asleep and pre-dawn awakening.  I didn’t have particular thoughts to keep me awake.  Sleep just didn’t come.  So I got back up and watched Paula Deen on Leno (she should have known that meatloaf wouldn’t go over well with an LA crowd) and then got up early and checked the news on my computer (Maks “lashed out” on DWTS).   Often I wonder where the days go.  When I was teaching, I’d come home and would have interacted with at least 100 people a day, and I’d be tired from all of that interaction.  Now I’m tired on days when I might have no face-to-face interaction at all.  Chemo does that to me, makes me unaccountably tired.  Well, perhaps not unaccountably.  Being poisoned can have that effect.  But tiredness is a part of my current right now.

I can feel the weekend coming, this Sunday when my sister arrives.  She’s driving down from New Hampshire this weekend to be with me for the last chemo round and a while after it.  It’s a comfort to know I’ll have a caretaker, just as I did last week when my cousin was here.  Though there’s a part of me that is hermit, almost anchorite, the other part of me needs people and connection.  And that connected part of me really enjoys my sister’s company.  A friend’s visit today, maybe a trip up the mountain tomorrow to my centering prayer group, the currents run along toward the one that brings my sister down and my last chemo treatment (of this round), while further downstream is surgery and even further is more chemo and further yet radiation treatments.  Just as we are all connected, so are all of the events of our lives.  I can feel that connection when I think of it, when I can rest in an eddy of now, pausing in the flow that takes me inexorably onward, through cancer treatments into whatever follows them, a time of no-cancer and health or whatever is beyond the now.  But all that I truly have IS now.  Today’s eddy.  Now’s eddy.  So I rest in it, glad to be here.