It’s been a month since my last post and there is a reason.

The deep dive into pain treatment, as I wrote about in my blog on March 22, has been intense and good and helpful and frustrating all at once. My hope was to learn more about the sources of my chronic pain. In the process, we discovered a rather large kidney stone which stayed stuck in the ureter right at the edge of the kidney. This increased my pain and caused me to pause some of my treatments in order to monitor this new discovery with pain meds and doctor appointments. We also discovered on an x-ray, that my spine is narrowing between the vertebrae and possibly pinching nerves (upcoming MRI will reveal more). So that led to more pain treatments and more waiting for appointments with specialists. And … there’s that word again, waiting.

Waiting demands that nothing else can really be engaged in or entered into while in the process. If you’re waiting for a phone call, your day will be focused on being available, having your phone fully charged, maybe putting off a shower or running an errand so that you can be fully ready for that phone call. Waiting can be an all-encompassing task.

This past week, I wrote another list of all the things, appointments, test results, surgery date etc. that I am waiting for. Once we know more, we will be better able to choose a treatment plan.

However, I don’t want to focus on waiting. I don’t want my life to be defined by waiting. We wait for the world to be immune to covid, wait for restrictions to lift, wait for a sense of normal life to be restored. Waiting will always be part of my/our lives, there could always be something that we are waiting for. So how then, shall we live? Is it about choosing to not know more? knowing less? ignoring facts? quitting the pursuit to make things better? If waiting is part of our lives, then how do we live?

Maybe this ten step plan to gardening will give us some ideas:

1. Choose location for garden

2. Select what you want to grow

3. Prepare the soil

4. Prepare schedule for planting

5. Plant the seeds

6. Add water

7. Keep weeds/critters out

8. Give your plants room to grow

9. Fertilize as needed

10. Reap what you sow. Harvest!

So . . . what if we wrote a ten step plan to nurture LIFE in us?

Or perhaps it is worth thinking about those things we are doing or not doing right now that become so heavy, so weighted down, that we ignore the nurture of life and we start to see decay.

One of my recent challenges is to find new ways to nurture life in my current state of pain management.

Although I have a well established routine of self-care, food, meds, reading, listening, watching movies, journal writing, reading a Psalm a day, sketching the main points, movement and rest throughout my day, there are many hours where I am just laying down because my body needs the heating pad or to sit with a massage device on my back for pain relief. Meds make me drowsy so I will close my eyes and relax. However, as you may well understand for yourself or imagine, boredom can creep in very quickly. The day can become long and if pain keeps me up at night, then there are hours there too where I wish I had more to do. And this is where it is most tempting to focus on waiting, the what if’s and the thens.

This list of gardening tips has become my meditation project. I want to explore where life has been neglected, where it is dry, overcome by weeds, perhaps needing fertilization, or spacing, or experts brought in.

So as the very first start of this project, I’m asking for input!

Do you have any advice or suggestions for me, that I could do to increase life-nurturing things into my day while I wait for more testing and treatments? Feel free to write me back privately, or leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you and the things you’ve learned along the way.

I want to nurture LIFE - while waiting.