Life

Life is still much the same, as in the same as it would be without cancer.

I’m still doing all of the things I love. I still have to do the things I don’t want to do. I’m doing some things that I wasn’t thinking about doing a year and two months ago, like writing a will and getting a joint title for my car so it can be sold easily. But mostly, it’s relatively normal.

Right now I’m feeling pretty well most of the time. I’ve had some stuff to deal with here and there, but overall, I’m feeling better than I have in a long time.

I still hate cooking. I’m pretty sure in Heaven we’ll be on some sort of a barter system instead of a currency system, so I’m looking forward to trading my artistic skills for some of your cooking skills when we’re there...

I’m still enjoying a lot of good music, songs like THIS and THIS.

I’m still messing up big time with many, many things. Heaven’s going to be nice, with not messing up anymore...

I’m still being thrilled on a fairly regular basis by my students. This week it was a second grade boy. I’ve been trying very hard to be patient with him but felt like I had exhausted my options for engaging him in a positive way. He told me recently that he’d rather copy definitions from an art textbook that do any artwork. What do you do with that??? Last week we started a project on insects and suddenly this guy was drawing beautifully, intensely engaged in his work, coming up with clever solutions for sharing a paper with a classmate, and just being delightful in general. His blue beetle is awesome too. When I saw him smiling later in the hallway, he said, “You liked that beetle I drew, didn’t you!?!”

I’m designing a new tattoo. Actually, my students designed it and I’m just sort of arranging the elements they drew. I’m using various flowers and butterflies my students have drawn for me over the years and combining them to make a garden that will go around my arm. It’ll look like a child’s garden. I’m pretty sure I’ll get to keep my tattoos on my resurrected body. I’m hoping that when Jesus comes for me He’ll transform the few bits and pieces of shading that aren’t perfect. He said He makes all things new, right?

The bottom line, which is a phrase I might be using way too much recently, is that life is still very much normal. It’s just that along with the normal there is a strong sense of the profound. There is a sense that I would describe as an awareness of the greater reality in which I’m living. There is also sense that this is what I’m supposed to be doing now but that there will be a time, possibly soon, possibly in six or eight months or a year, when things will change forever.

Right now, I need to go clean my house and trim my dog’s nails.