The J Stands For Jacob Marley, I Guess

We don’t get hurricanes this far inland. Technically. However, Nashville is far enough south that we get edges of hurricanes.

Since Monday evening I have been lurching around my house in a fair amount of pain.* I’m not sleeping a whole lot, and since one of the ways to manage nerve pain (see the footnote because I moved an excessively whiney paragraph down there) is to walk, I spend a lot of time pacing around the kitchen/living room/dining room area.

A few years ago when my husband worked in Bermuda I went with him for a short trip and bought an anklet ringed with tiny bells. It sounds sometimes like music and other times like rain falling gently on a tin roof. Very pretty, very soothing. One of my favourite adornments. Since Monday I’ve been wearing it all the time.

Quinn went blind over the weekend, you see. He sees nothing apart from light and shadow. Since it happened so suddenly–over the course of three days–the panic in his face is wholly justifiable. But whenever he hears the Bermuda anklet he smiles. That sound means Mommy and it means he knows where Mommy is in the room. So to keep him at peace, oriented in his new shapeless world, I jingle when I walk.

So that means at night I feel like I’m haunting my own house. Pacing and jingling and jingling and pacing.

What kind of blog entry is this? I don’t know, really. Between playing strung-out haint and watching my old dog get suddenly very much older I’m stuck in a place where I’m thinking a lot about love and loss and pain that moves past the body and into the heart.

A few days ago in the comments of another blog I was told that if I couldn’t worship in a certain setting that it was my fault. I was standing between God and myself.

I spend hours with nothing between God and me. Hours in the dark of night clinging to God when there is nothing else. God and I are great.

Music ministers who don’t like criticism and I, however, are not so much great. Is it any wonder that people feel distant from Church? I get that different people have different worship styles. I know that one person’s flower arranging is as worshipful as the other person’s solo, as worshipful as the meals cooked by a third person for the homeless. I know that some raise hands and others write poetry. I’m not going to tell anyone that they aren’t good enough at talking to God if they don’t do it my way.

I’d just like the same respect.

Watching my two dogs interact now that Quinn is blind is a good lesson. Gob taps Quinn on the nose to announce his presence whenever he enters a room. When they go into the yard, Gob acts as a seeing eye dog to guide Quinn around during the initial moments of disorientation. He doesn’t say “you can’t see so you aren’t good enough to play with.” He says “I’ll play differently, in a way you understand.” I learn a lot from my kids, you know?

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* It’s kind of difficult to explain the pain that weather causes an arthritic like me, especially since my arthritic is systemic. (A lot of ics there….) The joint pain is something like having your hands and feet smashed between the grinding stones of a grist mill. The nerve pain, on the other hand… You know how your foot falls asleep sometimes? Once you get the blood flowing back into it again the numbness goes away and there’s that ten seconds or so right before it goes Normal it is so sore to the touch that bumping it brings tears to your eyes.

I live in those ten seconds. All day every day. That’s how hurricanes eat my mind.

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