Touching Life

I have been deeply touched by life this week. I couldn’t tell you what has happened exactly, except maybe, to name an array of things not one necessarily connected to the other but each forming part of the whole.

My days have been filled with a strange kind of feeling I don’t remember feeling before. Trying to describe it is like trying to find which leaf on the ground came from which tree. The closest I can come to it is that it’s a combination of openness and expectation.

All of this has left me feeling somewhat vulnerable like standing under an ultraviolet light where things which have always been there but I couldn’t see are revealed. It's a heightened sense of awareness like the kind you get when you rub a balloon on your arm and it makes the hair stand on end and all of a sudden every hair on your arm and your skin beneath it takes on a whole new awareness. That’s what I'm feeling in my body and my whole being.

Experiencing these new feelings can be a little unnerving like walking a tight rope between panic and euphoria. This is what’s happened from the inside. From the outside, in my physical world several things have happened. There was a shooting on the street half a block from where I live. We got questioned by a special investigation team as to what we might have seen or heard. This wasn’t the first gunshot we’ve heard but it’s the first I hear where someone is down on the ground.

The next day the Remax hot air balloon made a crash landing a few feet from my house. New developments and work opportunities have popped up here and there making me question and look at what is important to me. I’ve been feeling nostalgic missing old friends up North that were/are important to me and wishing I could just pick up and go visit for a day or so.

New people have come into my life and have touched me in ways that have opened my heart deeper than I thought possible. I’ve had the opportunity to get a glimpse of the beauty of their soul through their pain and I am challenged to help them access their inner power so they can shine their light. One thing has led to another adding to my sense of being deeply touched by life this week and of letting life touch me.

I visited with Mom yesterday. In a strange sort of odd kind of way, I feel closer to her now than I ever have in all my growing up days. And that too perhaps is part of the super sensitiveness of standing under an ultraviolet light that I’ve been writing about here today. There’s something that happens inside a person when given the chance to give what they never had.

My mother never showed her true self except for the little bits that slipped out when the pot got too full and she couldn’t make the lid close tight enough. She never could express love or show that she cared. Never could touch or be touched or allow herself to feel or show that she felt. But things are different now that she can’t pretend, deny or run away.

I bring her wheel chair right next to me and I lean on her table top tray so I am inches away. It’s the only way I can hear her words. Words that come out in a low monotone voice, disconnected thoughts grabbed out of the clouds that pass through her mind. “I put a pail in the stove. I don’t know if Helen is back. He wants to do like the others. The children prayed at noon. Pass the vacuum in here. She’s gone home. There’s a broken window. I’ll help get the diapers ready. Dad is working in the shed.” I respond to the little bits that I can.

She raises her hand with arthritic fingers and touches my forehead then lets her hand fall and finds delight in lightly touching and playing in the thick crop of hair on my arm. I bring her to the dining room put the bib around her neck and help to feed her, a task she can sometimes manage on her own on but not today. When done I get a warm face cloth and wipe the tears that fall from her light sensitive eyes and the traces of food left on her face before handing her a “sippy-cup” filled with coffee.

It’s strange being closer then ever to a mother who has never been so far away. Another part of touching life or life touching me in a very special way.