I see the pelicans, Michael, and feel their energy pulling you forward on your journey to find them. I wonder if they are calling you to enjoy your time to find them. Wow, a 15 mile bike ride, not once but twice. Perhaps that is your purpose now, to enjoy what is before you, the ride, the creek, the friend to pray with. The story. Your words are so powerful! Thank you for sharing.
Love to you on your journey. Sending positive outcomes for your MRI.
Betsy

Holding you and your team in prayer today, sending love and light. We are all interconnected. There is no other way of being.

We are with you today Michael! Maybe Barbara McAfee can make a song out of the loud MRI sound to transform it.
Blessings, Michael.

I read every one of your posts, but this one contained enlightenment for me around closeness and clinginess. I'll be pondering it a long time. Thank you, Michael.

Thanks for naming all of this. I'm well acquainted with grasping and yearning as well, and try to remember that we always hold more with an open hand than a closed one. Sending love, release, openness, healing and of course hopes for good MRI results today.

Ahh, Michael:
"...our desire for closeness, even as we grasp for it, can be an essential part of our transformation and healing, if we combine the desire with ongoing practices of releasing."
YES!!
WHAT we do is important, but
HOW we do it is also important.
There are RULES but there are also important NUANCES.
A cautious and nuanced balancing, in one's second-by-second life, of paradoxically opposing forces.
I couldn't have said this before reading your post.
You exemplify it beautifully.
You identify you iron claw, grasping for a flock of angels (pelicans), for a win in the game of MRI,
and for deep connection, laden with meaning.
And then you turn and affirm. Not the claw, but the reaching out, the drawing toward, the impulse toward the connection that points at oneness.
Thank you,

I'm praying for you and for favorable MRI results!!

Watching Minnehaha Creek roll over rocks and around bends I return to this poem.


Passage
by John Brehm

In all the woods that day I was
the only living thing
fretful, exhausted, or unsure.
Giant fir and spruce and cedar trees
that had stood their ground
three hundred years
stretched in sunlight calmly
unimpressed by whatever
it was that held me
hunched and tense above the stream,
biting my nails, calculating all
my impossibilities.
Nor did the water pause
to reflect or enter into
my considerations.
It found its way
over and around a crowd
of rocks in easy flourishes,
in laughing evasions and
shifts in direction.
Nothing could slow it down for long.
It even made a little song
out of all the things
that got in its way,
a music against the hard edges
of whatever might interrupt its going.

Thank you for this amazing post and update. You’ve expressed what matters most in life. I’m so thankful you put it into words that are so beautifully expressed. As a cancer patient, I too feel like I’m grasping for those intimate relationships. That’s what is remembered after we leave this earth. I continue to pray for you, Michael and that you’ll be blessed by the relationships that you value most. And for a good report after your MRI. ❤️

Holding you in the light through the MRI. Please feel affirmed in your sense of purpose as you share your wisdom and your faith and your vulnerabilities with your community. This wisdom you document each day builds something very strong and important for your community and those beyond your community that you don't even know that will live on solid and vibrant beyond your life here. Nonetheless we pray and grasp with you for extending and deepening this life you live among us now. Blessings be.