Fallen Trees and Rising Spirits
Drinking from the Grail
Comes a time when you’re drifting
Comes a time when you settle down
Comes a light, feelings lifting
Lift that baby right up off the ground
Oh, this old world keeps spinning ‘round
It’s a wonder tall trees ain’t layin’ down
There comes a time…
You and I, we were captured
We took our souls and we flew away
We were right, we were giving
That’s how we kept what we gave away
By Neil Young
I was letting the dogs out a couple weeks ago when I noticed something seemed to be missing. There was too much sky when I looked straight ahead towards the tree-line of the woods out back, behind our house. Too much light was shining through. What was going on?
My gaze drifted downwards, then I saw it. A huge tree, the tallest one in the woods back there, had fallen down overnight. No one had heard it fall — but I tell you, it was definitely down! It had just toppled right over, roots and all, just like it had tried to jump out of the ground before realizing it was a tree and couldn’t really jump. It was just laying there, suddenly no longer a living, breathing being, roots exposed, totally powerless. Just a dead tree, now. It took my breath away.
I went down there and measured its length by walking off the yards from roots to fallen crown — it had been 70 feet tall, when it used to stand! Next I walked off the distance from the gaping hole in the ground where it was once safely rooted, to the back of our house — just 60 feet. Damn, it would’ve crashed right into our house had it fallen in our direction!
I knew we’d been lucky. I felt grateful. I wondered how long that tree had been standing there before it fell. What caused it to just up and fall like that? Had it simply had enough, and just decided to lay down for a rest?
Last week I woke up early for my 6:00 a.m. cardiac rehab class. Something felt funny in my chest. I began feeling nauseous. These were the same symptoms I’d felt before discovering I had a 98 % blockage of my widow-maker artery several months ago. I had a catheterization procedure performed in February to install a stent, which kept me from having a fatal heart attack. It allowed all that blocked blood in my veins and arteries to begin flowing freely again to my heart. I haven’t felt this way since then, so I called the cardiac rehab desk and informed the nurse there what was going on with me. I wouldn’t be working out that day. She told me to call my cardiologist to report what was going on.
The cardiologist told me to come into the emergency room of the hospital, where they decided to keep me overnight for observation. There they slathered some “nitro-paste” on my chest and covered it with a patch. This gave me immediate relief, melting away the chest pain and dissipating the nausea. I immediately felt better.
After they conducted a battery of tests on my blood, performed an EKG and took x-rays, they sent me back home the next day with adjusted medication levels. The cardiologist explained that I had other arteries and veins with blockages, just not enough to warrant another stent procedure. The added medicines, including increased blood thinners and a nitro pill, would aid the blood flow and help keep me from having another major blockage.
I breathed a sigh of relief. I also discovered a renewed sense of appreciation for my life. Not that I didn’t appreciate my life before all this, but now I appreciate a lot more of the little things that I normally might take for granted. A hospital stay can do that for you. There wasn’t much I liked about being in there, but returning to the comforts of home was glorious.
It felt good to get back to work today. I’d missed 3 days last week with my cardiac drama. It’s a little bit slow right now, so I didn’t miss that much.
I’d also suspended most of my sessions with sponsees over the weekend. Not so much because of my health issues, but because our son was coming down from DC for the weekend. He hadn’t been able to get down last weekend for Mothers Day, so this was his “make-up” for that. His mom put him to work, building a needed sidewalk from our back deck to the driveway, to provide an alternative way for Kathy to get to and from the car, just in case something happened to the elevator and she couldn’t get down to the garage.
One of them called yesterday with some wonderful news. This is a guy I started working with a couple years ago. We meet once a week to discuss spiritual principles, and how to apply them to one’s life. When we first began working together, he was a bit of a white supremacist. He’d been filled with a great deal of hatred. He was trapped in his life. He reminded me so much of myself about 39 years ago. Like me then, he’d been clean for several years, but was having a really hard time with life. Despite his freedom from drug addiction, he was still not free. That hatred he was filled with was eating him alive.
It would have been easy for me to say I don’t deal with hatred and just walk away from this man. But he had a desire, just like I’d had way back then. A desire for true freedom. Freedom from hate, from anger, from rage, from wanting to just lay down and die, sometimes. He was also very honest, and he was willing to change. That was enough. Enough to work with. A man once stuck with me when those things, honesty, and open mind, and a willingness to change, were all I had going for me. Today, this man is living a life of freedom, a life filled with love, and daily developing a powerful sense of compassion for those for whom he could only feel hate and fear towards.
If we only have love,
Then tomorrow will dawn
And the days of our years
Will rise on that morn’
If we only have love
To embrace without fears
We will kiss with our eyes
We will sleep without tears
If we only have love
With our arms open wide
Then the young and the old
Will stand at our side
If we only have love
Love that’s falling like rain
Then the parched desert earth
Will grow green again
If we only have love
For the hymn that we shout
For the song that we sing
Then we’ll have a way out
If we only have love
We can reach those in pain
We can heal all our wounds
We can use our own names
If we only have love
We can melt all the guns
And the give the new world
To our daughters and sons
If we only have love
Then Jerusalem stands
And then death has no shadow
There are no foreign lands
If we only have love
We will never bow down
We’ll be tall as the pines
Neither heroes nor clowns
If we only have love
Then we’ll only be men
We we’ll drink from the Grail
To be born once again
Then with nothing at all
But the little we are
We’ll have have conquered all time
All space, the sun, and the stars.
by Jacques Brel
