The Cosmic Hourglass | Catherine Viel

By Catherine Viel, April 21, 2024

(Golden Age of Gaia)

April 20, 2024

No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
~John Donne, No Man Is an Island

I’ve been doing little the past seven weeks but burrow into an insular world of post-surgery recovery. Although I feel solitary, I am still connected, I am still a part of, and retreating into my metaphorical snail’s shell only reflects my perception, not the reality.

What words, thoughts, feelings, do I have to offer? Can I uplift or encourage? Can I express anguish so that other anguished souls feel less alone?

I feel capable of none of that. It’s almost as if surgically removing chunks of bone from the core area of my body has opened a secret portal out of my soul-self, and bits of me have sifted away, sand from the cosmic hourglass of time. 

*****

I don’t feel a need to cure or fix this possible loss of self. In fact, in some ways I’m more self-full, grounded into the present, than I was pre-surgery. Before, I didn’t want to be trapped in the embodiment of my very limited self. Imagining myself in a much more pleasant time and place was preferable to Being Here Now.

I feel steeped in the prosaic, doing chores or errands, becoming accustomed to simply moving, walking, and doing. I no longer need to figure out which movement would hurt the least, or seek with an engineer’s eye the shortest path to any destination.

Shortly after surgery, a nurse friend remarked that my self-identity had been irrevocably changed. I was no longer the person experiencing a level of chronic pain that squeezed my awareness into a corner of gray hopelessness. Now I am the person moving into an altered destiny. 

Who is this person? What is she going to choose to do, now that certain longtime restrictions have been incised away by the surgeon-wizard’s scalpel?

*****

It’s another gray and sunless spring day in Santa Barbara. I tell myself to make my own sunshine, even knowing there’s no substitute for the blessing of light that’s missing.

I can turn on the heat and click on a few lamps so the house is more welcoming, drowning out the indoctrinated energy-saving mantra to use less. And go for a little drive to Santa Barbara, past the rose garden in full bloom, metaphorically thumbing my nose at five-dollar-a-gallon gas. 

The sky has lightened appreciably over the last hour. Perhaps the forecast of partly sunny will be accurate, today.

The forecast of my life feels like it’s in limbo, but whatever it is, I will be profoundly grateful to the strengthening sunshine of feeling more present, willing and able to experience myself existing here and now without the distortion, discomfort, and dis-ease that colored me grimly for so many years.