#158 / 2010 Winter: Panama City

DECEMBER 1

#158

To Dana:

Today we will learn Joe’s fate. I have struggled for one week with the knowledge that Joe is not going to grow old with me. I have bellowed like a bull, screamed like a banshee, and now I have made my peace.

I have disintegrated at some sort of molecular level. My soul split apart and all the atoms in me disgorged, flew out into the universe, returned, and rearranged themselves somehow. I am someone else now. It reminds me of that old movie “The Fly,” where the man was put inside a cabinet and transported away. All his atoms were disassembled and reassembled in another location. It worked just fine until a fly accidently got in the cabinet with him.

The weather has turned. I walked the beach yesterday as the dark clouds accumulated along the horizon, building and looming, coming toward me. What I realize is I can’t go into this situation torn asunder, empty and hopeless.

So all alone on the beach with the usually placid Gulf now restless and loaming, I sang, “It is well with  my soul.” At the top of my lungs I sang this refrain over and over. And everytime I said it I felt better.

The clouds darkened even more and I felt the first drops of rain, so I turned around past my only companion on the beach, a man in a big sand racking machine, and walked the empty beach back to wZ’s house.

I can only accept; it’s not my fight. I can support and I will to the marrow of my bones. I think of that little book wZ gave me called, “At the Feet of the Master.” 

It’s theme is to surrender to the master plan of someone much greater than ourselves. I must.