Life has changed quite a bit recently. This may be a temporary situation dependent on whether I will be able to have an ileostomy, or it may be permanent. But I spend much more time in bed than I used to, and I seldom leave the house. This is partly fatigue and partly fear of having ‘an accident’ when I’m out. My dear hubby brings me breakfast in bed – I’ve resisted this for weeks but finally given in, and it’s a real pleasure. Then I get up and have a bath around 11.00. I’m up for a few hours pottering around the house, then go back to bed for the afternoon, when I generally sleep like a log. I finally haul myself awake for the evening, when I frequently fall asleep in front of the telly! But last Friday afternoon I did venture out to have a cup of tea with my mindfulness teacher who had been on a 4-week silent retreat nearby and was just passing through the village. I was the first person she had talked to since the retreat! I felt really responsible and as if I should be asking profound questions or making profound statements, but I couldn’t think of much to say and just behaved normally in the end.
Later, my teacher sent me a very helpful email in which she suggested that I might benefit from visualising my depressed thoughts and feelings as clouds crossing a blue sky, the sky being my awareness. The clouds are continually dissolving and reforming, and eventually disappear from sight as I let them go. This is a visualisation that I use a lot in my meditation practice anyway, so it was good to be reminded of it. There is a meadow in the Severn Valley, some distance from here, that I often transport myself to. I imagine myself sitting on the river bank. Sometimes I use the clouds in the sky as my image, and sometimes my thoughts float by on the current.
So I was thinking about sky and looking out of the window as I lay in bed this afternoon. The sky has been particularly beautiful in the last few days – lots of clouds, but lots of sun too, so that the clouds seem rimmed with light. The view from here is beautiful too. I snuggle down in the bed so that I can’t actually see the allotments, the football pitch or the bowling green. We face south, towards the Kerry Ridgeway. This is one of the famous ridgeways along which, in the old days, Welsh farmers took their livestock to the lowland markets of England. It’s only 15 miles long, but it never dips below 1000 ft and the views are amazing in all directions. We are down in the valley and looking up at it. It’s currently dusted delicately with snow which makes it even prettier. Not so long ago, I could have walked (and did) the whole path in a day, or it’s an easy cycle route there and back, but now my world has shrunk and I can only look at it. But it’s just as beautiful from here as from up there. It’s just my perspective that’s shifted.
In the middle ground at the centre of my vision is a group of silver birch. When the sun comes up in the morning, these trees glow pink in the most remarkable way. Right now, in the afternoon, they form a fine black tracery of twigs against the pastureland behind, and the sky. To the right is a row of Lombardy poplars that the council cuts down about every 5 years, but which swiftly grow again. When they are stumps, we can see through deeper into Wales. Right now they are at their tallest, and in summer can cut off the view in that direction completely – not that it matters, for there is so much else to occupy the vision. To the left of the birches and farther away, are horse chestnut, sycamore and douglas fir, and farther still two magnificent oaks, home sometimes to little owls, if we are lucky.
So I have plenty to look at, to do and to think about, and on my good days I’m not unhappy. And pain is easier to deal with in bed. That was one reason for having breakfast in bed – my shoulder pain always seemed to be very bad at breakfast time because I was doing a lot of moving about. Now I just sit like a queen in the bed while poor hubby slaves up and down the stairs answering my every whim. No, it’s not really like that – one slice of toast and half a cup of coffee is all I want, really! Just as long as I can go on looking at that lovely sky….
