Dendrochronology

Furrows burrow
knit brow to brow:
rings round heartwood.

Chance and choices
interwoven to now.
Where next?

---

Last night before bed, I was reading Atul Gawande's article, The Checklist, in the latest New Yorker. I woke in the night dreaming of bagging severed body parts and large shards of glass. Not that he ever mentions anything of the sort, though he does write about intensive care units, of trauma and surgery and life support: "over a normal lifetime nearly all of us will come to know the glassed bay of an I.C.U. from the inside." This afternoon, I worked on an outline for some educational modules on postoperative pain management. The writers I work with write every day about cancer, heart disease, mental illness -- all the things that can go wrong. All the things that modern medicine can put back together again, sometimes. We are so complex, so ingenious, and so mortal.

Comments

[marja-leena]

Nice poem and knitting - is it yours, the knitting I mean? Such lovely yarns these days... Not a nice dream but I can see where that's coming from.

[Leslee]

Thanks, Marja-Leena. Yes, that's my scarf, my first knitting project. It is beautiful yarn; all I have to do it knit back and forth et voila! I bought some just like it in blue.

[mark]

Yes -- that's it: the complexity and mortality...sometimes it is striking just how fragile life is, while we worry about minutia

[Lucy]

Sometimes being flesh and blood is frightening and awful. Sometimes it's great.
Beautiful knitting.

[leslee]

Mark: Very true.

Lucy: Yes, both. And thank you - it's beautiful yarn. I just do the repetitive motion thing.

[Kat]

Beautiful knitting. I've tried knitting but I am better with knots. :-) I hope not to know glassed bay of an I.C.U. When my time comes I hope it's quick and in my sleep, in my own bed, in spring, while watching and hearing chickadees!

[joanna]

Just checking in to say "hi!" Lovely knitting!

[leslee]

Kat: Thanks. And if only we could choose.

Hi, Joanna! Thanks - hoping to finish it soon and put it around my neck. Very cold here now. Especially in this apartment.

[Dick]

'How fragile we are'. I'm horrified at how acutely conscious I have become of the vulnerability of my complex, ingenious & mortal constitution as I move all-too-rapidly through middle age.

[Leslee]

Dick: Yes, that Sting song keeps going through my head. It really hits you at middle age, I think. Maybe it hits sooner if you or loved ones have medical issues.