Spiritual Medicine

I was feeling very productive early this morning.

I changed out the light bulb yet again in the kitchen and managed to a) finally find a bulb that worked and b) not shock myself.

I walked my trash to the dumpster, and despite having felt a little puny the day before, felt well enough to go ahead and walk my mile just as the sun was coming up.

When I got home, I grabbed a bill and a box that I needed to drop off at the post office, and of course my camera.  I figured I would drive the Wetlands today instead of walk.  That mile I had already walked was weighing a little heavier on me this morning.  My legs were feeling rubbery and I wondered if maybe yesterday hadn’t been a fluke.  Maybe, after roughly six healthy years on immunosuppressants, my luck had run out and I was getting sick.

An hour after my walk this morning, I was pulling out of the post office when a friend called to check on me.  I lasted about two minutes on the phone with her before I said, “I gotta go.”  I was exhausted … suddenly and couldn’t catch my breath.

I decided to go to the Wetlands.  Surely, I thought, it didn’t take energy just to drive.  I turned on the heated seats in the car to relax the nagging pain building in my hips and back and drove on.

I pulled into the Wetlands a few minutes later and that was when I realized I should have just headed home.

Like I said in yesterday’s blog post, sometimes it takes me a little bit longer than most people to figure out the obvious.

They say you know you have the flu by how fast it comes on.  Yes, I hadn’t felt well the day before, but I had been well enough to walk this morning and then an hour later just talking to someone on the phone, just sitting upright in the car was more than I could handle.

The road through the Wetlands is one way.  Once you start, you’re committed.  There’s no turning around.  Fortunately, it’s not a long road.  I could have probably gone through it faster this morning, but I was not leaving without pictures.  I didn’t care how I felt.

The weather this morning seemed to reflect my mood, though sometimes I think the weather directly impacts my mood.  I am one of many Floridians who always seem to go a little crazy when we haven’t seen the sun for a few days—or a few hours.

It was cloudy this morning and gray when I pulled into the Wetlands, but then the sun did that magic trick where it seems to be hiding one second, and then the next thing you know it’s knocked on the cloudy window and shattered the glass with streams of Godlight breaking through.

As I drove through the Wetlands, the sky alternated between cloudy and sunny.  The birds that stood in shade seemed to hunch over and fluff their feathers and look as gloomy as the skies, but the birds that stood in sunlight seemed to come alive, lifting their heads and relishing how the sunlight danced across their feathers.

“Make sure you get my good side,” these birds seem to say to me.

I left the Wetlands and raced home.  I say “raced” but I took a detour to check on the White Pelicans around the corner from me.  I didn’t stop to take pictures.  I was rapidly running out of energy to drive. 

But I slowed and I smiled.

There were dozens of White Pelicans in the retention pond and dozens more in the sky overhead.

Now those are some serious sky decorations, I thought.

I like my skies best filled with sun and blue, dotted here and there with pelicans or ospreys or hawks. 

Back home, I dragged my weary body up the stairs, physically spent, but soul nourished by the best of spiritual medicine.