Some of you may have noticed I never posted the second show

I did set it up… 

That morning a strange kind of cramping came along for the gallery set up and by mid afternoon it was making me a bit light headed. Cramping is not new to me, having had reconstructive bowel surgery when I was twenty, cramps are just part of what my body sometimes does. 

It will pass . . .

It did not.

Brad kept saying, let’s stop and come back in the morning, let’s get you home to rest…  and I kept on working, responding, let’s finish this n o w . . .

We left the gallery and drove straight to emergency to sit and wait as my pain became so intolerable they took me inside.

After a CT scan they were able to see a blockage in my bowels. A team was called and I was in the OR within the hour.

What a frightening time and as I sit here writing about it, I feel it is a story I am telling, not a reality, that that could not, after so much else, have happened.

But it did.

The show came to life but I never saw it. Brad was superman for several days taking care of me and driving down the river to the gallery to the opening day and each day to help things run smoothly.

Friends who knew gave us gifts of time to watch the gallery and Gisele was here visiting family in Halifax, coming down for what she thought was an annual visit, she jumped in to nurse, assist at the gallery and share evenings with Bradley making sure he was taking care of himself.

The show was just a short set of days and it was finished and taken down all while they worked with me in the hospital trying to help my body restart and be able to take nourishment again…

Life has dealt me one more sequence of health crisis and recovery,

And my body pulled through it again.

I simply surrendered.

And I know that my wee body is astoundingly remarkable and not ready to stop living.

Middle of the night July 18th

It’s quiet now inside me and the tears slide down my face as I open my heart and look at what I have learned, and I ask myself, what that is. . .

During my years of therapy I was asked what it was I wanted. All the darkness of my childhood, the shame of what my father and mother felt was right to do to their children, the endless processing, so that I could???  Find peace? Maybe even some joy? what did I want? 

My answer was freedom.

And I found an even deeper sense of it one week ago tonight when my body collapsed again. Everything was mine. I touched the air. I touched the sky. I held the magic that I searched for my whole life and I knew it was mine and I had always had it, even now. 

Middle of the night I had asked for a needle to calm and blunt the pain, I was struggling. It didn’t knock me out. It knocked me in inside my heart inside a place where I can look. A quiet place where I talk to myself.

So the needle is now making me wobbly and my voice is getting weak. My heart is slowing, but I think I’ve been able to say, with the help of this funny little rectangle that has a microphone, what it is that I’m asking, bargaining for or wanting next.

I can feel myself fading into the mattress on the bed. For once not bathed in sweat. I’m gonna close my eyes, climb on the back of my swan and go for a ride 

and if you would like, come with me…