The Water Of Life

It had rained, and it would likely rain some more. But, at least for the moment, there was blue sky in the north, so I headed out with my camera.



The recent rains had fueled the lush, green juggernaut of spring. I plunged into woods surrounding Beaver Brook, overwhelmed by green. Droplets splattered around me, shaken from leaves by the wind. I could almost hear things pushing up out of the earth, spreading, drinking, blooming.



Water coursed through channels,



pooled in holes,



hung from blades.



Overhead and underfoot and all around me green clasped and unclasped green, clasped and unclasped me.



I was in danger of becoming greenblind; I longed for Photoshop's desaturate --



So I fled. I fled across the dog park, past cavorting poodles and terriers and retrievers, past their owners, chatting in casual little groups. I veered off into the woods and crossed the small red bridge over Beaver Brook. I noticed green knives thrusting up out of the shallows.



One short path and a small hill lay between me and sanctuary: the tracks.



The final wasteland home of last season's weeds.



Amidst the battered hillside stand of Dutch rush, a few had kept their regal heads.



Some even seemed to sing.

and singing, praise the mercy/that prolongs thy days.



But most were brittle, bleached and bent.



Here, even the new growth seemed worn and world-weary.



A few old weeds enjoyed a fleeting, final luster,



and some even seem to rise like genies into brilliant light,



but, in the end, Yeats was right. This green spring

is no country for old men.

Or women, for that matter, I thought as a bruise-colored cloudbank gathered over the tracks and began to rumble thunder. Even new green seemed old, old, old. I too was clearly green: jaded. Was there nothing new under the sun ?



Thunder again. I turned and headed back. It had rained, and it was fixing to rain some more. The wind rose a little. I shivered in the cool breeze and tried to shake off the oily trackside melancholy I'd sought out. I'd just been confirmed, after all, not 24 hours prior. And that reached back through the decades to my baptism, that greenest of immersions, that watery death, which makes all that follows perpetually new. I thought of all the amazing things my camera and I had seen, and would see, the pure grace, the pure delight, the pure gift of being alive.



What happens when you sprinkle a little water on a thick-skinned, involuted gall ?

A miracle !

Signs

First there was that burning bush right outside my office window.



Then, Tuesday night, in the midst of a quiet rainshower, there was a blinding flash of lightning right outside my bedroom window. A nearly simultaneous thunderclap rocked the house.



On Wednesday night, in a torrential, windblown rain, practically a whirlwind, I arrived at the church for midweek Eucharist. The church was dark, the door was locked. The big, plastic Meditative Eucharist sign flapped and snapped in the wind like an unlashed sail.

A block east, the big, new, stolid Trinity Congregational sign -- white buttressed plastic with a perpetually scrolling electronic message -- squatted, motionless and unflappable, on the wet Trinitarian lawn. The church had recently left the progressive UCC and struck out on its own transdenominational, Biblically inerrant path. I crept past in the rain, my shoulders hunched against stray Trinitarian lightning.



Yesterday, as I drove to work in yet another rainstorm, the radio announcer predicted more rain. Floods.



As Saturday's confirmation nears, I can't help reading these things as signs. But signs of what ? A burnt out bush, a thunderbolt, an empty church, an impending flood --



-- something about sin, about solitude, about power and purification ? I am walking on thin ice. Over an unfathomable abyss. I pray for it to break.



Last night, DK tells me, I shouted out in my sleep. Something like

Look out !



Could it have been Amen ! ?

Horse Altitudes

I was sitting with the consultant across the hall from my office in the nurses break room. She was giving me my final lesson in using our new voice activated dictation software, a program named Dragon that has a desktop icon featuring a dog, and a headset emblazoned with a parrot. Despite (or maybe because of) its mixed zoological metaphor, I had to confess a growing fondness for the software: it is capable of both astounding accuracy, and hilariously surreal mistakes (vide infra.) I probably enjoy the hilarious mistakes more than I do the astounding accuracy, but that's another story. As we sat there reviewing text macros and vocabulary training, suddenly the fire alarm went off.

Don't worry about that, I said cheerfully to the consultant, It's usually nothing. I proceeded to yammer on about the alarm -- three bells pitched a step apart sounding at three different tempi -- until we both became aware of some frenzied activity outside the door.

It's a fire ! Right outside your office ! exclaimed Nurse Sally. The office manager sprinted past with a fire extinguisher. I dashed into my office to rescue my backpack, pulled aside the slatted blind and saw a wall of white smoke.

By the time I got outside, the fire was out. By all accounts it had been a swift, spectacular blaze, going from a few flames flickering in the mulch to a small pine tree fully engulfed in flames within a matter of minutes. I stared at the blackened, smoldering tree skeleton. My tree ! I'd enjoyed that tree and the little now-singed bush beside it. In winter, I liked watching snow pile up on its branches. And now this ! I felt a bit ill.



Then I got pissed. Damned smokers, I thought. I'd been complaining for years about how the hospital entrance's "No Smoking Within 25 Feet of Building" sign simply moved smokers a distance down the sidewalk to the yellow newspaper vending box just outside my office window. Less than ten feet away, I might add, from the building. All day I watch people stand there smoking -- some with IV poles, hospital gowns and hospital bracelets -- and drinking coffee, tossing butts into the mulch and leaving their Dunkin' Donuts empties on the newspaper box. Afternoons, if any door or window is open, the stench of tobacco smoke pours into the clinic. And I get pissed, and rant, but can't help thinking that the smoker's probably got some dying loved one in the ICU and who am I to add to their woes by getting on their case. So I simply fire off another self-righteous email to the office manager lamenting the non-enforement of the smoking policy and let it go at that.



But now there had been a casualty. A tree was dead. Bushes were singed.



My office window was cracked.

There were victims, VICTIMS !!!



I got on my high horse. It whinnied and snorted, up for a good fight. Is there any atmosphere more envigorating than what's found in the horse altitudes ?



Then it came. The revelation. I dismounted and stared, wide-eyed, at the dead tree. There had been a burning bush right outside my office window !

A burning bush ! I turned to the person beside me, an ER nurse.

It was a burning bush ! I exclaimed. Like in the Bible ! God spoke to Moses from a burning bush ! First my dictation software is a fire-breathing dragon and then my laptop takes to surreal and gnomic utterances, and now there's a freakin' burning bush right outside my office window ! Well, there was one, and I missed it, and now it's just a burnt-out bush, maybe like Graham Greene's burnt-out case, but what does it all mean ? My God !!!

She peered at me, and, with wide eyes and a frozen little smile, slowly backed away.

O praise Him

All creatures of my God and King.

Two Views Of Chlamydia

What I said: a reportable illness.

What the machine wrote: a very portable illness.

I would say we both are correct.

I will, of course, prescribe stem cell lung cream.

Rhus Blues

Today, thanks to my voice-activated dictation program, I have become the first doctor on the planet to prescribe "stem cell lung cream."

This, after spending long minutes trying and failing to teach the program to recognize the word "vine."

Fine. I snorted, using a word it clearly knew. Have it your way, stupid machine. P-L-A-N-T. Ha !

That's when it came up with stem cell lung cream.

Can I go home now ?