Guides Part 2 - Trust

Two days ago I got a doozy of a flu; it started innocently enough - I felt tired. Then came the familiar sore throat, stuffy everything, aches, pains - welcome to the plague. As you may guess I am a horrible patient; I just want the whole "being sick" experience to be over fast. I dumped every medication I could get a hold of into my body: Nyquil in all its varieties, oscillococcinum, yin chao, herbal cough syrup, claritin, and the cherry on top, some antibiotics I conned a doctor into prescribing last month for a sore tooth I was convinced could turn into a sinus infection.

I've spent the past two days wandering around our small house in a snot nosed, coughing stupor. We'll need to go out today to get more tissues; I've gone through them all. And then there is the issue of the migraine headache medicine I've been carrying around in my purse for two years now - I do feel a throb on the right side of my head. I wonder - would that interact oddly with the smuggled antibiotics?

My daughter got disgusted with me - she was sick last week without all this fuss - she went to school with it. I have no intention of going to school with this mess in my head. Isn't that how all these germs spread in the first place?

Around midnight the whole mental nightmare lifted. I was thinking about guides - my inner guide in particular, and I felt a comforting presence in my room. I wonder if the presence isn't around all of us all the time - presence of being - I'll call it, and we make so much mental racket we just don't notice it.

I was lying there in my incensed Woody Allen like state of worry. I'd shifted from the head cold to other stuff: worries about myself and what I am doing, worries about my daughter, worries about pain in general.

I remembered this nun I taught with during the Rodney King riots in the nineties - how we were worried then about rioters coming into the school, hurting the kids somehow - and how she showed me this life sized sculpture of a hand - God's hand was the idea. There was a person in the palm of that hand, and she told me to relax, to remember that no matter what, God holds us in the palm of his hand. That was a revelatory moment for me because even if you don't believe in God, the image was still that of the universe, larger being, cradling us. No matter what happens or doesn't happen. No matter how shitty we feel.

This morning I'm remembering that solid hand below me, as I sip my tea, shuffle around the house, let myself heal. That hand that is the source of all things is of infinite comfort. It reminds us to not fall prey to temporal sorrows. It reminds us to not fall victim to anything false or toxic. We sit in the very hand of God.