21. Darth Nadir Meets The Force.

My view today is of blue sky and palm trees, and I’m listening to bees buzzing in the orange tree behind me, fragrant with blossoms, the high-speed wings of a hummingbird fanning the air near me as she races a three-dimensional figure 8 pattern above my head with an occasional hovering pit-stop. A couple of doves noisily chase each other from one address to another in some kind of avian argument as to which neighborhood has the best schools, hospitals, and shopping centers, escrow for a nest being imminent according to Mrs. Dove's latest visit to the Lady Bird doctor, and a 2 foot long gecko has climbed halfway up the fence just a few yards away. The gecko is a bronze colored metal sculpture Juli and I picked up in the Dominican back in February, but everything else is real, so wonderfully, beautifully, God-I-worship-you real.

So peaceful on this Palm Sunday to be outside, nadir nearing the end as my body regenerates the blood cells killed off by the chemo session a week ago Friday. "It's Easter" you say, not Palm Sunday and you would be incompletely correct. Because Eastern Orthodox Christian churches go off the old calendar of the east, and Western Christian churches go off the calendars of the west, occasionally the celebration of Christ's resurrection comes on back to back Sundays. This year, today is Easter in the west, and next Sunday is Easter (or as they say "Pascha") in the east.  That makes today Palm Sunday, and because I can finally be outside a little, and I am beginning to regain energy, it is almost emotional to look up into the palm trees today, knowing I can celebrate the Resurrection next Sunday, and I haven't truly lost this most special of all celebrations to Christians around the globe.

This chemo cycle has been much better than the last one so far. I have yet to experience the nausea we so feared, and the sore throat experienced last time has been minimized while the rhymes with anticipation but without all the fun has been non-existent due to better preparation. Fatigue then has been the most notorious side-effect, although my fingertips have begun to get sore and being aware that my fingernails may die and fall off has caused a little wariness that it is perhaps beginning. My lips continue to feel like they are coming out of a novocain injection from a visit to the dentist, and the inside of my mouth feels as though I burned it recently with a mouthful of too-hot coffee.

But right now I’m relaxing outside with the temperature a perfect 78 degrees, reading a First Edition classic from 1930. It’s called “Barrel of Clams” and it’s about a young single female writer who has taken up residence at her father’s cabin on a small coastal river island. She can’t make any money writing so she learns to dig and sell clams. Funny, the last book I read was John Grisham’s Camino Island, and it too was about a young single female writer who took up residence at her grandmother’s coastal cottage, and she also cannot sell books. Instead of digging clams for a living, she helps break up a First Edition Manuscript theft ring. A podcast I heard recently suggested that everyone of us should write an autobiography, even if unpublished, for the sake of posterity. My newfound interest in my remaining term of life along with my inability to dig clams or solve crime has caused me to consider this.

Maybe I’ll start a blog.

And along the way, I get to feel intensely the beauty all around me, the palm trees, and the day from history the branches of those trees will always remind me of. The darkness of nadir reminding me of the tomb that held Jesus, knowing that a few short days of endurance will see light creeping in around a stone as it is loosened and rolled away. And the beautiful resurrection of Jesus, Easter, giving us all hope, because we will all die, and we do not know when that will be. Today in the West, and next Sunday in the East, we celebrate the building of a bridge between us and God, the bridge fashioned from the rough beams of a cross by a Carpenter, who died building the bridge, yet defeating death on the third day he lights the bridge  for eternity, offering to walk each of us across who are willing to follow.