Stream of Life
[English translation of Praan (song in third movie below)]
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.
I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.
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I can't think of better words than these to describe how I've come to be feeling these past days/months. I've struggled with the word "god" and what it means to me and when I read these words above, I begin to understand. I started this journal as a way to document the fun this family is having with this amazing piece of land, and how it will change over time. And again, I find myself struggling with words to explain the deep impact it's experiences have given me. I count my blessings every day for this little slice of heaven, and for my parent's who made it possible for us to be here and learn from it. My dream is to take this gift and allow it to change other people's lives as it has mine. This land is healing. period. And how can you not want to share that? Fortunately our whole family shares this vision, and now we are in the exploration and dreaming phase of this journey.
Even though I haven't been writing on our experiences, I have been documenting them with photos. We closed on the land in December, just before Christmas. I was just about to have my second round of chemo take two, and was losing hair by the minute. We had 6 weeks to explore this wonderful gift before we were sucked into the intensity of my treatment of high-dose chemotherapy, stem cell transplant and recovery that took us away from the land for over 2 months.
I feel like my experience during this battle has mirrored the seasons, and it has been really something else to see our changes, mine and the land. Winter was a time of death--killing my cancer, leaving me hollow, quiet, and still. Winter on the land was brown, quiet and cold, yet it was also the time that we could see so far--with no leaves on the trees, the vistas were expansive. We returned to the land in Spring, where the buds were just beginning to pop out of the dormant limbs. I was also feeling the rustling of life returning to me. We've now been coming up here every weekend since that time and have seen such lovely changes in the land. Flowers blooming, birds flying, green bursting. Each weekend we arrive, it is just full of even more life, and that is how I am feeling.
So here are three movies I made of the photos I've taken since December. I was hoping to keep the slideshow updated, but I just haven't figured out how to do that yet. I missed two visits...one from Mary Beth and Dan, and one from Rin and Dawn. They visited my first two weekends back and I was still pretty sick and uninterested in taking photos. So they will just have to visit again!! The Cook family is visiting in 3 short weeks, and we can't wait!
This post has taken hours and hours to create (due to my learning of techno things and also copyright issues....) Anyway, a song that I really was hoping to have for the second movie was End of The Line by the Traveling Wilburies. So I put it here, copyright laws obeyed, for your listening pleasure.
