Summer when the breeze is cool and the humidity is low is about perfect. Add my Pandora Debussy channel and a few cats sleeping on the couch and what more could a person ask for.


Contentment is hard to come by, so I savor moments like this. Today I learned two things to bring this rare state about. The first came from a feng shui practitioner that I hired to evaluate my home. I figured since my illness coincided with my nearly 8 years in this home that perhaps there are things I can do to remedy my health by way of caring for spaces. Thomas Moore has a great book called Care of the Soul, in which he speaks eloquently about spaces as manifestation of personal or societal disease. To care for spaces does as much to care for an individual or a community as actually treating the physical body.


I learned that my home has lots of issues in the health areas, but they are easily remedied. I will heal my home, as my energy allows. Perhaps I'll notice parallels in my body, we'll see.


As a total aside, Feng Shui also has fu dogs, these crosses between dragons and dogs, both male and female. You place them at your entrance to ward of malicious intent. They look fierce, like amped up super heroes or beasts from God's martial fantasy farm. I will get two fu dogs, mostly because I love to say fu dogs. fu dogs.


The second thing I learned today is that even though I think everything I love is being taken away from me by this illness -- my love of singing, of gardening, of walking places, or seeing friends, or simple pleasures like driving or buying food -- that actually it can't take everything I love away from me....because it can't take me away from me. Debussy and a perfect day make me sentimental, I guess. In any event, I'm still here inside and outside this body, stripped of purpose and pursuits perhaps, and a little worse for the wear, but here in essence.


How we live with ourselves is really what it's all about. I'm learning. Fu dogs!!!