Greetings readers.  I have spent the past few days to-and-froing from my son in the hospital undergoing a corrective surgery related to pectus carinatum, and full-family summer and researching the pros and cons of PDA (patron- or demand-driven acquisitions).  I am very happy to say that after a nearly 5-hour surgery, in which we allowed “experts” to cut our son’s chest nipple to nipple, lay back the muscle, chip-scrape “excise” the cartilage out of his ribcage, crack his sternum, reshape him and insert a flexible metal bar…he is recovering smashingly, already walking about, playing card-games, and humorously retorting.  This is the first “major” operation, injury, break, accident or otherwise that has occurred to my genetic offspring, and, although I’ve endured much trauma with the injuries and surgeries of my spouse, I was unsure what to anticipate going through in allowing invasive slicings and breakings to my precious son’s body.

Needless to say, it is affective.

At night I slept as if in a dark void.

I felt shamefully unattentive to my other children, lacking energy and focus.

I let deadline stressors and ongoing responsibilities take their places in my tissues and veins, deep recesses of my cortex, and let my eyes drift repeatedly into mid-point aether.

I don’t know.

Something like this went on in my son.

it was pretty foggy in me.

So now we enter “recovery.”  Realignment.  Exercise.  Recall.  Precision.  Strengthening.  Focus.  Effort.  Rest.

and facing the stack of avoidances.

Recall looks like this (for me):

My Medicine(s):

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– regaining presence of mind –

“You could try to express what bliss it was in those days to be alive.  Of course there were bothersome things here or there.  Terrible things, if you looked too closely.  There was the dreadful burden of everything that’s too much alive, all that mingles with air, earth and water in an attempt to destroy you.  There was the malice of men, the voracity of beasts, and the indifference of objects.  There were all the sounds and sights and smells like continual dagger-thrusts in the flesh.  It wasn’t easy to live with all those things; no, no one could have said it was easy.  But all the same it was funny in a way, touching and funny, a splendid adventure complete with emotion, language, consciousness, and perhaps, in some recess of the memory, a kind of nostalgia for silence and peace…Yes, what was happening to you was an unforgettable and unique adventure…”

-J.M.G. Le Clezio, Terra Amata–

HERE’S TO YOU SON