“All I wanted was to be a pea/ of being inside the green pod of time”

Title: Lines from Billy Collins’s poem “In the Moment”

Featured image: Birth (Gunpowder Works), 1981), Ana Mendieta

“a pea/ of being inside the green pod of time”

While drowning in the Sturm und Drang of my pre- and post back-surgery wretchedness, I most of all desired a restorative interval of quiet in my soul. I recognized my desire in Billy Collins’s poem “In the Moment,” in the lines about being a pea “in a green pod of time.” As I read the whole poem, though, I see that Collins is, in fact, busting the notion that we humans can actually live in the moment. While outside on a perfect June day, the speaker “wanted nothing more/ than to be in the moment….” But he is distracted by “two black butterflies/ with white and red wing-dots/bob[bing] around my head.” He is in awe of the day’s beauty. Why regret the loss of  his inner focus when his reward is a rare and fleeting moment worthy of becoming a memory? He asks himself which moment to be in. “Not that one, or that one, or that one,/ or any of those that were scuttling by/ seemed perfectly right for me.” In a different poem, “Shoveling Snow with Buddha,” he suggests that Buddha, “tossing the dry snow over a mountain/of his bare, round shoulder,/…has thrown himself into shoveling snow/as if it were the purpose of existence.” While the poet natters on (“This is so much better than a sermon in church”), Buddha remains tranquil “inside his generous pocket of silence.”

“Being” while “doing”: the perfect integration of exalted spiritual ideas and the grind of every day life

Once bitten, twice shy

Doña Quixote’ s reaction to the possibility of more surgery. (Perseus Slaying Medusa, 1875 and 1903, Laurent-Honoré Marqueste)

“You have to get old because of the geometry of spacetime“

Bryan Cox, Physicist, Philosopher of Science

Given that Peter and I are old—not “Golden Agers,” just plain old—we mostly socialize with other old people (other than our family). Inevitably our conversations drift to topics of health. My all-too-often-updated fusion surgery has given our conversations much mileage. When I tell friends about a possible second surgery in my near future, the talk turns to how much worthwhile time a patient gains when she passes 60, 70, 80?  The human brain has no basis to compare its bygone years with those that might still follow. Ironically, the unconceptualizable geometry of space time—the field of knowledge that most of us find utterly incomprehensible—gives us a modus operandi pace Carl Sagan’s “Cosmic Calendar” that mapped 13.8 billion years to a single year Why not map a lifespan onto familiar lengths of time to make it tangible? For example, my 77 years (as of April 30, 2026) on this our Blue Dot has so far accumulated approximately 28,105 days or 4018 weeks. How many extra good weeks can an old person expect after a major surgery? When I look back, the pace at which my life has flitted by reminds of those flip books (1950s) that my siblings and I used to make (you too, probably): a home-made minibook—sewed in the middle with needle and thread—in which you draw, one per page, a sequence of slightly different images that cumulatively tell a seconds-long story when you riffle through them with your thumb.

“A conduit between earth energy and the Aboveworld” 

The fleeting passage of a lifespan was also on my mind when I chose Birth (Gunpowder Work) for this post’s Featured image, an earthwork sculpted by Ana Mendieta. Mandieta’s land art is more than the three-dimensional art object that you see in the photo, more than the figure that was left behind: it includes her process of making it. Except for rare occasions, she creates her earth-body works in private, without a traditional live audience. In a spiritual ritual to “become one with the earth,” she performs her enterprise with the landscape as witness. Her film- and still photography equipment represent the verification of future viewers who will see her printed images or film. To start the sculpture, she outlines her own body in the chosen landscape. Using only natural materials from the immediate area, she sculpts an earthen figure that resembles the ancient Venus of Willendorf. She heaps gunpowder between the anthropomorphized fertility token’s legs, and sets the explosive alight. While the fire burns itself out, the artist focuses on her cameras.  Eventually, smoldering coals and smoke are all that remain. But Mendieta also practices “pack in, pack out.” Using hands and feet and other body parts, she flattens the contours of the figure, drenches the coal with scoops of water and mud until only a blackened scar marks the spot. Erosion will complete the erasure. What remains of her bonding with Mother Earth is the record of a lifespan during which procreative life, birth, death, and decay flicker by at warp speed.

“The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.”

So said Michael Altschuler, serial entrepreneur, sales expert, and keynote speaker. The maxim almost instantaneously became a famous motivational quote. I’m clearly in the minority by raising a cynical response to it: But where then are our pilot selves when the universe hurls Shakespeare’s “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” in our direction?  You just have to look around you: daily headlines illustrate that we Bluedotters experience unpredictable, devastating trials of life. If I am my own pilot, why don’t I just steer clear of the cancer, death of a loved one, or dementia when it looms on the horizon?  If I do really pilot my own life, can I then legitimately take credit for “outrageous fortune” of the other kind: winning-a-lottery or having-a-child-who- is-an-Olympic star? The cosmos seems much more complex than Altschuler’s maxim suggests.

For comfort when bad things happen, I find Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer much more applicable:

God grant me the serenity

To accept the things I cannot change;

Courage to change the things I can;

And wisdom to know the difference.”

My latest serenity buster

On Friday morning May 1^st, a week shy of my back surgery date, I took a bath. When done, I gripped the grip handle screwed onto the side of our bathtub, prepared to get up. But both my legs were lame. I floundered on the slippery bottom. My mind was extremely confused, I felt panicked. Instead of trying to calm myself and think of a plan, I tried again and again to get out. I couln’t even get onto my knees.Using my hands and arms, I gripped the grab bar screwed to the front sofa the tub and attempted to pull my head and torso over the bath’s edge. I slid back to the bottom. I then lifted my right leg over edge of the bath, slipped, slid, fell on my back. My left buttock hit the stepstool. My legs tilted from the highest stepstool step right down to the floor. I palpated my left buttocks. The surgery spot not seem to have a hard landing, the bruise would be on my right buttock. “Outrageous fortune” of the good kind! Also, it seemed I hadn’t hit my head. Nevertheless, I was stunned and confused. I rested on the floor—a few minutes? I could reach my phone, I thought to call Peter. But he was having coffee with friends, a rare break away from me. Where will my help come from? Quoth Doña Quixote, “Wonder Woman, where art thou?”

Trapped on the bathroom floor, I rested for a while, arm-walked to get to top of step stool, arm-wrangled myself on toilet seat, dried body, got hands onto the bathroom counter, got on swivel stool, grabbed door jamb and handle, scooted into bedroom. Sat on swivel stool, said my mantra. Very gradually, life diffused back into my legs. Got my buttocks on the mattress, rolled onto my back, rested until I fell asleep. By the time Peter came home, I’d practiced walking: it wasn’t so much that my legs were wobbly, it was the way the floor tilted up, down, or sideways, like the deck of the boat in Hawaii when I threw up in my hat during the whole duration of our tour of the bay while Peter flirted with a beautiful woman in a bikini.

Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s C’mo’ and Walk With Me, 2019, mixed media: photography, painting, montage. The work was inspired by his mother.

What shall we do with the drunken sailor?

After my legs went lame, Peter and I revisited our old scenario about one of us finding the other on the kitchen floor, not breathing and in a coma. Neither of us wants to be resuscitated without a strong possibility of recovery. We have promised each other that we wouldn’t call 911 without first thinking carefully, i.e., call Newton and/or Marissa to come over and/or talk on the phone. Even before my legs failed me, Dr. Spiker saying I might need more surgery had triggered long-contemplated questions about how much surgery was too much for a septuagenarian who already had number of time-consuming ailments that affected their quality of life. After the bath incident, we raised our kitchen floor Gedanken Eksperiment with our children again. Given my vascular dementia and the lesions already in my brain, we all wondered if I could have had a mini-stroke or Transient Ischemic Attack (TIA). In that case, going to the emergency room, would mean brain imaging scans and psychoneurological testing. My whole being reared up inside when I thought  bout more testing of the kind that I’d found clinical and uncaring and that did not provide any insight about how to live with my affliction.

Shopping for a more acceptable diagnosis

After more internet (! ) research, Marissa, Newton, and Peter independently found that strokes—whether mini or maxi—usually affected just one side of the body, which ruled out a TIA. Our friend Sean who works with disabled veterans as well as my physical therapist concurred that the dual leg failure might have been the result of pinched nerves in my back. A week has now passed after the scary incident, my wobbly walk is still worse than it had been before, but now merely the equivalent of my level of locomotion after one light beer. My head too, has settled down somewhat, but my short-term memory and executive function is notably worse than before. My depression dwells just under my thin geriatric skin. After the family brainstorming, the consensus was  that I should see Dr. Spiker. Peter worked his usual magic and booked my appointment for tomorrow, Monday, May 11.

Artist: Steve Vincent

What is the bush I’ve been beating about?

This post was triggered by the more-surgery specter and intensified by my soul-searching after my legs went lame lame as I worked through these topics by writing. I did not, however, directly address the existential angst behind my thinking, namely my biggest fear: that I will miss the window of opportunity to perform my own self-death. I don’t want to put Peter and/or other family members om legal jeopardy by asking for other than their emotional support. Why does the serenity prayer seem so inadequate for the script of my end-of-life desire? Where have they gone: “The serenity/To accept the things I cannot change;/ Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference?”

It seems that additional physical therapy exercises might be the answer: