Having been pruned...

I remember when, years ago, pregnant with my first child, we invited all of my husband's family to join us at our house in Vermont for Thanksgiving. My mother-in-law was not the best cook in the world, so our intent was to do our best to keep her out of the kitchen, but like many women of a certain age, particularly in her generation, she was more comfortable DO-ing than BE-ing.

In the end, to keep her entertained, we suggested she might prune some of the plants that lay around the house. In those pre-child days I had a prodigious green thumb, so there were plants everywhere, all spiraling out of control in a lush enthusiasm that celebrated my own rather obvious fertility.

Poor plants: little did they -- or I -- know that once the children were born all that creativity would get redirected elsewhere and they would all die slow horrible deaths...

At any rate, they did get a foretaste of that, I suppose, for my mother-in-law trimmed them all within an inch of their lives and then begged again to help in the kitchen, and I remember thinking -- with all the wisdom of my then 37 years -- how sad it was that she couldn't just sit and relax and enjoy having her family around her.

And now, here I am, having been a bit pruned myself, enduring my own period of enforced inactivity while my family swarms around, getting ready for college and departing (the kids) and recovering from various attacks and illnesses (the animals). And, just like my mother-in-law, I have this itch: isn't there something I should be doing?

But instead I am following my brother-in-law's advice and reading the popular bestseller Eat, Pray, Love as I wander back and forth between couch, bed and rocker. It's amazing, like reading my own autobiography in some ways, and profoundly reassuring, especially as I move through the healing process.

I particularly love the part I just finished reading, about the evening she decided to try 2 hours of non-moving meditation just at the hour of the day when the mosquitoes were moving in for the kill. To sit through the bites without swatting, and, most of all, to notice, when it is all over, that eventually even the itching passes, was very reassuring. Soon it will no longer hurt to stand, or cough, and the pain I still feel from my surgery will be just a distant memory.

The challenge, of course, is that good things pass away as well: this flower, so bursting with promise, that Ali bought for me today from the flower stand around the corner, will eventually droop and fade; my girls will have gone back to school, and the next phase of life will begin with its gains and losses, beauties and triumphs, challenges and failures.

And, as Julian of Norwich has said so beautifully, echoed by saints and wise men and women across many faiths and denominations over the centuries, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."