What day is it, anyway?
It feels sort of strange to completely drop out of life and sleep for 2 1/2 days.
Turns out it was just the medicine I needed.
Hearing about friends who had a terrible cough for weeks on end, I tried using a mask in certain public spaces and crossed my fingers, trying not to over-do on life, and hoping the virus would pass me by.
It finally caught up with me.
After conducting a workshop on the labyrinth for a half a dozen women on Saturday morning, I was strong and well until I wasn’t. The respiratory virus caught up with me in full after everyone was gone. I cleaned up from the event, drove home, and literally fell into bed.
My body seems to believe that sleep is my first and best medicine. Knowing the power of the homeopathic coldcalm, I’d already been placing them under my tongue while driving home. Before falling into bed I made my go-to flu tea (lemon, garlic, ginger, and honey) in an oversized mug.
Provisions in place, my dog and I laid down for a long winter’s nap.
While my family was having a party.
You read that correctly. My family was celebrating all the wonderful things that were not sickness (a wonderful thing for the ones who are not sick and for the ones who did not have to work).
Among the wonders of spending time with some seriously great humans I get to call my own (which I slept through), we welcomed our 16th grandchild (Baby Jackson!), had our son visiting from West Virginia, AND we had our regular ChristmasNewYearsBirthdays, too!
Let there be egg rolls!
When two of my offspring came over to check on me, I was down for the count. They told me that I even left the hatch back on the car open. Yikes!
Waking at 11:00pm and feeling starved, I found three homemade egg rolls with my name on them in the fridge. If you can’t get to the party, pray that a tiny bit of the party comes to you!
Life!
The ups and downs, the surprises and disappointments, the whole wonderful messy thing (LIFE!) makes me so grateful to be alive.
We lost the person we were to spend the rest of our life with;
We are figuring out how to keep going every day;
Society gave us a new name: the widowed;
And — we are still alive.
The land of the living is a mixed bag.
There is loss and sadness, joy and excitement, and countless things in between.
We take a chance at life and love and we’re still alive, figuring it out.
The “nickname” for sleep in ancient times was “little death”
While my family was full of life today, in the ways only they can be, my time in sleep brought me back to the real world with significant progress on beating whatever virus grabbed a hold of me.
I felt sad when consciousness reminded me what I was missing. But I knew where I needed to be.
Continued healing remedies, and wise choices about sleep, might just get me through this one without the weeks and months of coughing I’ve heard others speak about. Who knows?!?
Just for today, I’m okay with the way things came down exactly as they did.
