Headed back to the hospital this week for surgery. If you’d told me a few weeks ago I’d CHOOSE to go back there, I’d have said you were crazy. But I guess it doesn’t feel like that much of a choice. I know it has to be done. And I’m ready to get it over and get on with my life. At some level I do feel like this is an ending to much of what’s been going on with me for so long, and hopefully the beginning of a new cycle. I feel like something is literally being removed from me that needs to be gone for me to be well, at both the physical and energetic level. And I think I knew it would come to this even back in late spring. So many leaks kept happening in my house, in odd places. And dreams of leaking pipes in my basement, with toxic liquid oozing out. A sense of unease about it all that I should be listening, getting something that I didn’t want to know. Something serious wrong with my body that I just didn’t want to have to deal with.

I’ve learned a lot during this process about my lack of willingness to see things as they are rather than how I wish they could be. And related to that about my needs and how hard it is to let people be who they are when your need for them to be otherwise is great. Not sure I’ll ever be above and beyond that, but hopefully lots more aware.

I hate leaving Tiger again. I don’t want to be back in that cut-off-from the natural world environment, and I’m afraid of being anaesthetized and operated on for 3 hours. But I still feel it’s right. Sometimes when I’m in a good place I can see the surgery instruments as made of light as they remove the darkened damaged parts of me. But no matter what place I’m in, I am ready for it to be over, because limbo has been really difficult. I want to feel I’m healing, not just in a holding pattern. Even in that holding pattern though there have been moments of grace. The ruffled and lacy web -bedecked remains of last summer’s orchid, glowing in a beam of sun. Two wrens wildly singing across the woods to each other one morning as I fed the birds. Tiger spending lots of time by my side every day. A moon so big and full of lush coral color one night this week, I thought it was the setting sun. A magnificent young hawk or merlin perching right outside my window (though I have mixed feelings about him as he’s poaching my songbirds!) And most wonderful of all the grace of knowing John is coming back and Tiger will be well taken care of.

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So if you’re reading this, send whatever it is that you think is positive my way this Wednesday around 1p.m EST, be it light, love, a prayer or good wishes. So many lovely people have offered to do so—and it really feels good to imagine all that coming my way at once. Along with those offers have come heart-touching advice and support—to take something with Tiger’s fur on it with me so I can have him there, to call whenever I need, to bless all those working on me that day, to get an EZ reacher for if I can’t bend to pick stuff up, and a belly wrap for sore tummy muscles….so many ways of caring. And an image from one of my online friends about a broken pipe in her yard, “ I kept thinking about the big pipe repair I had to do in my yard 8 1/2 yrs ago. A big section of old cement pipe crumbled 8 ft underground… had to bring in a backhoe, plumbing contractor- oh the joys of home ownership.
Ever since they fixed it up, my the plumbing is working just dandy. And the garden is all grown in & pretty where the holes once were.

That’s how you’re gonna be, Ellie. Better working plumbing, & all healed up & extra- beautiful.”

She didn’t know about my pipe dreams (ha, what an interesting phrase), when she wrote that. So I’ll take it as a sign that my own feelings about this whole phase coming to a conclusion are not so far off. I’m looking forward to my foundation and “plumbing” being “fixed”, so that as I begin building what’s next, the base is solid.

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