Friday Ramble - Patience

As I started off on the Friday ramble this week, the word that came to mind was patience, although I have already written a ramble on that word.

This week's offering has its roots in the Middle English pacient, the Middle French patient and the Latin word pati, all meaning to undergo something, to suffer through, get through, or put up with something and do it with grace and dignity - no whining, screaming or going completely off one's nut. It's a fine old word for someone who aspires to authenticity or enlightenment, but it's not a word for wimps and sissies, and true patience is anything but limp, indecisive or docile. 

Himself has returned from the hospital, but he is fragile and tires easily after his recent medical setback, a tad forgetful.  No matter how rough he feels at any given time though, he is sweet, courteous and loving, and he is so happy to be home with us again.  We are all cultivating patience as we lurch and totter and scramble our way through medical diagnostic procedures, some invasive and uncomfortable, others no problem at all. Patience, we say as we make our way from one doctor to another, patience, patience, patience...

Medical diagnostics will not be completed until early August, and there is nothing we can do until then except breathe in and out, cultivate patience and wait for results. I can't permit myself to be unraveled by the fear of what lies ahead and I try to remember that, but there are times now and then when I freeze up entirely and wonder if I am about to go as mad as a hatter. Then the dark clouds roll by and my fearful moment passes - I pick up my camera or paint brush, brew a pot of tea, go walkabout with Spencer, curl up in my favorite Morris chair with a good book. I just breathe, in and out, in and out, in and out...

For some reason, the elegant keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti (Mikhail Pletnev's recordings) and the Bach preludes (Glenn Gould) tuck everything back into place, and so does the magnificent voice of Dechen Shak-Dagsay, especially her soaring, sung rendition of the Om mantra. Listening to Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik or Die Zauberflöte is always a joy. Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, and Grieg's Holberg Suite work wonders too, and in recent weeks I have also been listening to the creations of Sibelius.

Whenever possible, we head for the highlands and watch the sun rise somewhere.  We watch cattails swaying along the shore of our favorite lake and listen to the wind in the trees, lean against the old rail fence and watch dragonflies zooming around the hill like ecstatic whirling dervishes. Last evening, we watched a slim, radiant crescent of waxing moon dancing high in the purple western sky at nightfall.

I am learning that patience is a truly wild and fierce emotion. I am also learning that being patient and forgiving with one's self is the hardest thing of all, but as Spirit Rock's Jack Kornfield says, “If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.”