Daniel's Weblog

Blessings on a Rainy Day

Date: 2005-10-14 13:40

Subject: Blessings on a Rainy Day.
Mood: thankful
Music: A Love Supreme

Bonnie is rocking in her glider, our grandson Jackson on her chest. The fire is crackling in our ersatz fireplace. Penny is asleep on the carpet. The rain is making trickling sounds in the downspout and pip pipping as it falls on the leaves. We are warm and secure in our little apartment on the EDS campus, four blocks from Harvard Square.

Debrah suggested that I drive her to work at the Harvard Science Center Building this morning; She holds office hours in the Greenhouse Cafe to help her students in BioChemistry, Cell Biology, etc. In the meantime, we get to care for Jackson. He is walking a little more each day, in this his ninth month on earth. Oh blessing of blessings.

We are one day shy of the 36 month-iversary of Bonnie's durable remission from MDS / AML; In another life, just 36 months ago we took Bonnie for dialysis every other day. Bonnie was on a walker, in physical therapy, recovering from her treatment-related heart failure and resulting heart damage and trying to hold down 900 calories a day.

Now Bonnie is on a ordination track here at EDS and asleep with our newly toddling grandson in her lap. My Mom just left and her bed is still down in the guest room. She loved playing with and observing her great-grandson learning to walk and playing his tambourine to the live Cream concert at the Albert Hall; Jack rocks out when Cream plays Spoonful: "that spoon that spoon ... that spoooooonful...just one spoon of your precious love... satisfy my soul."

For all these blessings and so many more, I give thanks to God or Reality. I think of God as the Infinite and the All, and as Reality; I try to avoid any "Guy in the Sky" anthropomorphism. We may be made of the original stardust of the universe, but I do not hold that God was created in our image.

God is One,
There is no God but Reality,
To seek Him elsewhere Is the action of the fall,
From the garden into the abyss.

All praise to God, A Love Supreme.

On this day after Yom Kippur, when we pray to be forgiven for our transgressions against one another and to be forgiven by God as we forgive each other and when we pray to be written and sealed into the Book of Life in the coming year, I am so grateful. I am so glad, I so am glad, I'm glad I'm glad I'm glad.

Everyday this week I have had Jackson here to hold close to my heart and feel his little hands holding onto my shirt. He touches my beard and reaches out in his touch-to-acquire-the-world way.  Where he once put everything he encountered into his mouth, now he points and pats and feels everything with his little hands. Oh that little boy: that blessing of blessings. I think it is not so much that we share DNA, but that we share Life, he and I: I am called and able to care for him and he calls and is in condition to be cared for.

Oh how very sweet. How glorious this is. Like a sunrise or like the everchanging colors and growing richness of a sunset, he is growing each day and changing and changing. New behaviors like walking 3 and then 8 steps on his own, but more, he is hugging and pushing himself up to just where he wants to be --- face to face with me, sometimes with his head just a bit above mine or snuggling into my chest and sighing. When he rubs his ear and then 5 minutes later he rubs his eyes, oh it is time for Granddad to pick him up and help him get comfortable and rocked off to sleepy time land.

Bonnie and Jackson are asleep now and the fire is crackling and the rain pip pip pipping on the leaves.

Oh God for this and our myriad blessings and the very beauty and vastness of the universe, I give thanks.

Thanks to God. A Love Supreme.

Return of Leukemia ?!!

Date: 2005-10-15 12:50

Subject: Bonnie's Blood tests indicate the return of her Leukemia 

Mood: distressed

Music: Tocatta and Fuge in D minor

Bonnie went to the Harvard Medical Clinic to get her blood tests to confirm that she has entered her 36th month of remission from Leukemia. WBC =2.8   Normal is 4.0 to 8.0  ... Oh NO.

This is a devistatingly low White Blood Count. How can this be?

I drove Bonnie to her blood draw in Bellingham this summer. She was required to have blood drawn for a drug test and a TB test so she could work as a Chaplain at St. Josephs Hopsital in Bellingham WA. Bonnie passed those tests with flying colors. Only now have I discovered that Bonnie elected to not provide her prescription requesting a CBC blood test on our regular 90 day schedule.

She has confided that she sensed that there might be something up this summer and simply did not want to know.

Bonnie served as a chaplain to the sick and dying in the Cardiac Unit, but developed amensia around caring for her Self.  We were both shocked by her low white blood cell counts which fell from a perfect normal count of 5.6 last March to way below normal at 2.8.  On the other hand, neither of us was truly surprised.

The other shoe had now dropped; Bonnie had been feeling stressed and anxious for most of the summer months: again trying to control what could not or did not need to be controled. I could see and noticed aloud that her sense of deep peace and well-being was eroding. When this happens I fear she will slide toward the precipice. But we were living and planning for a future with a decade or two or three ahead of us. Thus we were shocked by the sudden inversion of our situation.

You can not be truly surprised when a durable remission from Leukemia dissolves. We find our selves weighing whether Bonnie and her higher power will effect a miracle again, or whether her fatal disease would overtake her biology this time.

We continue to go up and down the emotional scale quickly for days. Dread, fear, anxiety, then determination, hope and thankfulness. We each remembered that we have been around this track before. We know sooooo much more about how to work with this disease and the doctors and hosptials and the research and our friends and family and our selves and each other. We can do it again.

Bonnie says thoughtfully that she felt she had made excellent use of her three year bonus/grant of life. In response I ask Bonnie if we should change any of our plans. Is there a "cruise" Bonnie would like to take?  Bonnie is quiet, thinking for a while. Then she says "No, we're doing what's most important to do in our lives, now."

We become deeply grateful and feel blessed with our children - and grandchildren - and our communities - and our friends. Being with our children, taking care of our grandkids, and studying what is bigger than our selves, is how we find meaning today. This IS our cruise.

We are grateful for life in our community at EDS and our little warm apartment in Cambridge. And then one or the other of us slides into the statistical realites ahead. Oh shit. Which treatment to choose. Chemo again. Chemo nearly killed Bonnie last time and apparently did not make a dent in her Leukemia.

Most of the most promising drug options offer a 15 to 20 percent chance of improvement and an 80 percent certainty that any treatment will make one deeply sick. Kidney issues are common. Just what we do NOT need.

We need a miracle again, as that is the only 'treatment' Bonnie is likely to tolerate well. Then one or the other of us think, 'what if Bonnie simply dies this time?' How much time do we have? Six months? One year? Could we hope for two years? How do we create quality for whatever life is ahead?

There is nothing to do, but to do our best and love one another. We have never been given more than we can bear.

God will see us through.           /Daniel

Sunlight and Gravity

Subject: Sunlight and Gravity -- Mutual Attraction of Humans and Being. 

Mood: thankful

Music: You are the Sunshine of My Life

Bonnie's love and care for her grandson Zachary and his care for his GrandBee reveals each other's essence.  But in the everydayness of life neither seems to be conscious of the love they radiate, as they orbit around one another.

There is a light in which we can glimpse the gifts of the other:  Caring for the Other has radiance we can feel; maybe this wavelength is what we call 'Grace'.

Zachary backs up into his GrandBee's legs to touch her when reading a book or eating a snack, just to be close to her. Bonnie touches Zach's head as she goes by to put the dishes up. Zachary looks up at Bonnie when they are throwing rocks into the ocean. He seems to be looking for more than clues as to what is next, as if to see what posture to take in respect to the Ocean in front of them.

Bonnie is awakened by Zach to go watch TV in the living room. Bob the Builder seems to be a common ground. Can He do it? Yes He can. And so it is. He and they did the impossible together and Zach and GrandBee buzz around each other in everyday life somehow knowing the incredible gift each is to the other: unspoken even when it is spoken. "Love ya" Zach singsongs as he closes his side of a telephone call.

The wavelength and gravity of their relationship is not in the words, but in the regard they share as they orbit around the Other.

"But where will GrandBee sleep?" Zach asks.             /D

Dreams of White Light

Date:	2005-11-21 13:20
Subject:	Dreams of White Light and deep peace.
Mood:	Deeply Peaceful
Music:	A Love Supreme

Before Halloween, Bonnie went to North Carolina to help with the harvest of Jennifer's second son, by Cesarean section. Bonnie was delighted to be there for Jennifer and our 4 year-old grandson, Zachary.

By phone, Bonnie regaled me with stories of the day-old baby and how she and Zac went on their annual Halloween trek around the neighborhood in the dark. Zac could not see anything clever about giving people the choice of "Trick or Treat" -- so in exchange for their offered sweets, he would look up and sing out in his four year-old voice, "have a happy halloween".

The night of November 1, I slept alone in our bed in Cambridge. In the morning - I think it was at dawn - I was visited by the following dream.

In the dream, I am talking with a fighter pilot and "Boss" of the Blue Angels.

This pilot regularly landed his jet fighter on the deck of aircraft carriers pitching in 30 foot seas on moonless nights with no landing lights. If he did not catch the arresting wire with his tail-hook on every single landing, he would die in a fiery explosion and sink into the coldest depths. 

In my dream I am talking with this retired fighter pilot and he is telling me about Jesus. I feel a familiar awkwardness around the conversation; I was raised as a Jew and have always felt like the foreigner, and sensed some nameless forbidding around discussions of Jesus. Further, the pilot is a very private man; conversations about Jesus are just NOT part of his normal speech. Yet, there we are and the former Blue Angel is telling me some THING about Jesus.

As I listen, I sense light coming over me, as if rising within me. It is an indescribable light, and feeling of lightness. As the light rises and expands, I lose orientation to the world. The world disappears. I disappear.  Whiteness and light that obliterates everything.  There is only white light.

After some long time in this state of statelessness, I begin to observe the light again, and then get that I am a self, a self observing light.

As I come back to self/consciousness I say something aloud; maybe "I believe", but whatever words I uttered, the words do not mean 'I take a leap of faith'. Just the opposite; the clear sense of my utterance is "I have experienced:  I can not say anything, but I have experienced."

I am then going along in the dream. The scene is just everyday life, but I no longer feel the dullness of everyday-ness. I see a woman. I sense that there is something missing or incomplete about the woman. Spontaneously she is enveloped in light. I did not DO anything, or will anything. The light spontaneously flows to where it needs to be. The woman moves on. She is no longer incomplete.

I begin to awaken. I replay the dream for myself. I am aware that I have both had a dream ... AND that I have had an experience that is NOT a dream. I have a pronounced sensation in my body, distinctly around my heart and throughout my body that I have been filled with light - at once emptied and filled.

I find myself thinking, how perfect; If I were ever to have a religous experience about Jesus, it would HAVE TO come to me as a dream, for I would reject any such event in a church, with the rationale that I had been overwhelmed by some rhetoric. Likewise if I had the experience using drugs as a sacrament, I would attribute the experience to the drugs themselves.

I find myself deconstructing the dream. I see that the fighter pilot is not actually the man I know in my everyday life, but rather a warrior archetype portraying a kind of consciousness.  In the dream, the fighter pilot manifests  'zero-state consciousness' that allows one to fly a gossmar line in the teeth of a gale, through the blackest night and land on a tiny steel deck with an economy of motion and emotion:  He neither forgets nor focuses on what happens if he bounces or misses the arresting wire. 

As I unpack the dream, in my mind's eye I see the Tarot card of the ancient man with his lantern raised to light the path at his feet. I see that God/Reality HAS been a lamp unto our feet so far. All we have done is observe where the path is illuminated and follow where our feet carry us.

As I unfold and replay the dream, alone in our warm bed, I sense that the woman is both Bonnie, and not Bonnie. The woman is Bonnie in that I feel assured (not guaranteed) that all will be fine with Bonnie's health. And the woman in the dream is not Bonnie, as she does not have a distinct face, but rather she is simply the Other.

I think again how we have been following that path of caring for the Other, and the synchronicity of being given a residence at 15 St. Johns to live when we came to the Episcopal Divinity School. I looked up John 15: where Jesus sums up his teaching; "Love each other" He says. This is our address now, and our path forward.

So I am now awake in our bed. I am alone. I am different. I am not alone.

Over the next day or two I think I must go tell the Bishop about my dream, as if there is something more the Bishop should do to somehow confirm me or my dream.

As I hold this thought, I see, on the very face of it, just how silly the notion is.  There is no thing any man or priest can say or do that alters the dream. The experience is the experience. There is no sprinkling of holy water or incantations that can add to the experience, nor authority who can nullify it.

I find myself settled;  I see I need no outside confirmation to seal the dream; Only now do I have the sense I can share the dream.

I love to josh Bonnie by saying I can not understand why she would want to work in a Church for a Bishop; Our God makes house calls. /D

I lost a friend and patron - here is how I remember him

Bill Buckley’s Uncommon, Common Kindness 

I came to know Bill Buckley from an unusual perspective; I fell into taking care of Bill’s succession of computers, starting back in the olden days when CP/M, Kaypro computers, and Wordstar were Bill’s favorite tools. Over the course of a decade, I had the pleasure of spending many weekends with Bill in his study in Stamford. Bill would show me what he was working on, and how he wanted to be able to do it. A week later I would install some new gear or software and teach Bill how to use them.  And so it went, season after season. 

Bill’s study was a large, converted carriage house that overflowed with books and music, and stacks of papers. There were always clear zippered bags full of correspondence Bill had dictated, awaiting his signature. Bill sat in a slightly broken, high-backed swivel chair on casters. He would wheel from his huge C shaped partner’s desk across to his bank of computers, and whatever was then the fastest “letter quality” printer.  Bill would jam the luggable computer he had used in Switzerland to write his Bradford Oakes spy novels, next to his desktop computer, next to a precariously balanced laptop or two. When one of his Toshiba laptops took a drink of saltwater during a trans-Atlantic crossing, we got his writing back: In any event Bill’s enthusiasm would not have been dampened. 

Bill was NO conservative when it came to technology. Bill Buckley was a true multi-tasker. He was using a 9 window, multi-tasking, electronic desktop on his computer, years before Bill Gates shipped a useful version of Windows. WFB had his favorite Oxford English Dictionary on two CD-ROMs, a CIA Factbook CD and an Encyclopedia on CD, all accessible via a 5 CD jukebox attached to his PC. Yet Bill was not a follower of computer fashions. Dick Clurman interviewed him for Time magazine, and asked why Bill still used Wordstar, instead of a “modern word processor” like Microsoft Word. Bill characteristically replied “I’m told there are better programs, but I’m also told there are better alphabets.”

Bill was generous. He recommended me to Stephen Sondheim, Tom Wolfe, William Rusher, Werner Erhard and Leo Rosten: I am clear that what I learned in pursuit of making new technologies work for Bill, prepared me to work in Paul Allen’s research and development lab in Palo Alto. But as grateful as I am for the doors opened to me by the accident of becoming Bill’s computer guy, it was Bill’s everyday humanity and Grace that has contributed the most to my life. 

I would quietly pull open one of the huge carriage house doors, trying not to disturb Bill’s telephone call. Bill would leap to his feet, cover the phone with one hand, extend his other, and exclaim “My friend! Good to see you”. He did the same when Jose, his house handyman, entered his study after having a grandchild. Bill was in a lengthy conversation with Ronald Reagan’s Chief of Staff who had called to ask Bill for a favor. Bill asked the “caller” to hold for a minute. Bill then turned his attention to Jose, and asked in Spanish for the details of the newborn child’s weight and health. When Bill had fully listened to Jose’s proud report, Bill returned to the phone to ask the President’s Chief of Staff to hold for another minute. Bill went in search of some of his elegant cigars to hand to Jose. Only when he had taken care of his houseman, did Bill return to White House business. 

When I would work in his study on Sundays, Bill would often insist that I join him and Pat for supper. If I demurred, supper was brought to me on a plate with ice water in a crystal goblet. During the summer months my daughter, then 5 or 6, would be with me.  If I got stuck working out a difficult bug, she would get bored and fall asleep. Bill would pick her up and carry her across the lawn and into his music room where his wife Pat would baby sit. 

I used to exchange stories of Bill’s uncommon, common kindnesses with his driver, Jerry; and his cook, Julian; and his inestimable assistant, Frances Bronson.

When I had moved on to work in California, my father was diagnosed with cancer.  I sent Bill an e-mail. Bill was racing for an airplane, but he had his driver wait, so he could send a fax before he left the country.  Bill’s message was waiting for my father when he arrived at the Mayo Clinic. Bill promised to pray for my father. My father was both Jewish, and a Kennedy democrat; Bill, not so much.  Dad was deeply moved by Bill’s compassion.   

Bill, I thank for your challenges, for your kindnesses and for your Grace. 

May God Bless you and keep you.   Daniel Shurman, Cambridge MA.