Doctor's Visit

I never did meditate today but I had a moment of truth, actually two, worth noting.

The first was while I was in a doctor’s office with Grace, listening to an ENT (ear, nose and throat specialist) talk about her physicality. I was looking at Grace and a question I had written the night before, in connection with a project I am working on, popped into my head: Do you feel you are changing your lineage? Grace has inherited many physical traits from my side of the family and we were in that office to discuss her tonsils, which are, to borrow from the doctor’s polite phrasing, “quite generous.”

The reason we were seeing this ENT was because her dentist, her pediatrician and a speech therapist had all recommended we have her tonsils looked at. All were concerned because of their size and because last spring I told them all that she snored, slept with her mouth open, had circles under her eyes and seemed a little low on energy. She also had a tooth that wouldn’t let go, even though the adult replacement had already come in. It was sticking out like a shark’s tooth, at a 90 degree angle.

But over the summer that tooth fell out. It finally let go all on its own and all the other issues seemed to be resolving themselves one by one. The snoring stopped, she stopped breathing through her mouth, the circles had dissipated and her energy was good. As the doctor spoke, assessing Grace as the picture of health, I looked at her wondering if she was simply growing out of things, or if any of those shifts might have something to do with me, and all my changes.

The summer was the beginning of a period of deep healing for me, and ever since I have enjoyed excellent health and so has the entire family. (Okay, I was sick for a couple of days in early fall, but it was nothing more than a cold.) As I have become more and more disciplined with my spiritual practice I have never felt better physically. My kids seem healthier too and are getting along with each other better. In fact we are all getting along beautifully. We laugh a lot more than we used to. I was thinking about how my own personal healing was healing the whole family, particularly Grace, who is a lot like me. And as I looked at her sitting there, beautiful and radiant, I was looking beyond her, seeing my sister who had to have her tonsils removed at age twelve and was always suffering from colds and hay fever. I thought about my mother, my grandmother, aunts and cousins, all long gone but many of whom were creative women who put family first and never got around to really expressing themselves. Grace comes from a long line of women who were artists and teachers, full of life but not belief in themselves, and many of whom died fairly young.

On the way home we stopped for gas. As it was pumping and Grace was sitting inside the car I felt full of love. I was thinking about the lineage and the idea or the image of changing it. I let my heart open and started to look at everything around me with love. The other people filling their tanks, the oil stained cement, even the smell became beautiful. The scene at the gas station is normally a place that I don’t think of anything except getting through it. But as I stood there, fully in the moment, loving everything around me, a pigeon walked right in front of me. It was completely white. A beautiful white dove, just like the bird that flew back to Noah with a piece of green in its beak. A symbol of peace, and love.