Well, somewhat moving since the large, mixed-breed dog, Bonnie, part lab part pit bull, jumped up in enthusiastic greeting (so should all such greetings be) and forced me to move back wherein my right foot hit a rocky step immediately behind me and down I went. It took two people, one on each side to help me up, at which point I discovered my ankle to be extremely painful, swollen and quite sprained. Since, almost two weeks later, the ankle is still painfully swollen and very red, I went to the doctor. The redness concerned him. It could be a blood clot, he said, or cellulitis, a skin infection, or simply a bad sprain.
At the hospital here, I received a test for the blood clot possibility; I am clot free, I am happy to announce, though the test itself was worth the price of admission. It involved a young woman moving or pushing a camera down the vein in my right leg from groin to ankle. It was a non invasive test. For the possible skin infection I am taking an antibiotic for seven days. For the swelling and sprain I am wearing a compression sock and am told to eat no salt and to sit with my leg and ankle elevated. Once again the body announces its primacy in the matter of movements, both vertical and horizontal. One ignores it at one's peril, for without it one is going nowhere except into the ground.
Today, I confess, I moved mostly horizontally, finishing book number 19, The Burning Room, in the Harry Bosch series, by Michael Connelly. With my leg and ankle elevated, as it is not so elevated now. Thus I end the record of the journey toward Jerusalem on this day, Saturday, April 23, 2016, 4 a.m. Of course I have just understood that both movements, vertical and horizontal, are possible together. One can, after all, walk to the restaurant for lunch while saying one's prayers and admiring the deep pink springtime azaleas that grow in gardens along the way. "O give thanks to the Lord for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever." You will have discerned by now that the movement toward Jerusalem is almost entirely vertical, except, perhaps, when I am reading Daniel Silva.
Sunday morning. April 24. I found another handbook for the journey, so to speak, that also explains how one might relate to the natural world while moving toward Jerusalem. The book is a collection of essays by Michael Casey, The Undivided Heart: The Western Monastic Approach to Contemplation. I may have mentioned Michael Casey before, for I find his writings extremely insightful and useful. The essay I was reading today in the book is called "Cardiomimesis." Cardiomimesis, he writes, "is the activity by which other objects mediate the self to the self. They reflect or echo back to the person the movements of the heart. A person becomes aware of an aspect of the truth of his being by recognizing himself reflected in the world around him. Finding the heart is a matter of perceiving its mirror-image in the objects of experience." Casey had said earlier in the essay that "To find God, it is necessary to find one's heart." When he is talking about the heart in this sense he is of course talking about desire.
In my wife's garden the azaleas are at their full maturity and the beauty is so rich I find it hard to move away from them. If the picture I added today appears, you can get a sense of the richness of the color and the beauty of the flowers. There are not only the delightful deep pink in the garden, but also lavender, a gorgeous bush of white flowers where each flower has just a light brushing of green; there are also yellow azaleas that seem lit by an inner light they are so intense and of course there are several bushes of orange. Having read Casey's essay today and thinking much about the journey and the relation of horizontal and vertical movements (ha, I may have to give that up soon), I was standing before the beauty manifested in the azaleas, wondering about the mirror image aspect. What a person might call the beauty without and the beauty within, I thought I was beginning to understand. What does it mean that the flowers in some sense reflect the self? I have the feeling that I am back at the beginning of the journey, for while I was standing still before the bush I was also aware of a movement within too. I was suddenly aware that I always wanted that beauty to be a part of myself; in other words the immediate thoughts tend toward finding (movement) the source of that beauty. The flowers thus also point to a reality beyond themselves where beauty is eternal. So, the bushes are in the garden, the flowers are beautiful; the beauty is arresting, taken in by my attention to it; realizing that the beauty is truly fleeting, I become aware of the way in which that ephemeral beauty awakens a sense of the eternal. Sometimes I almost make sense.
Well, another encounter with the objects in the world led me to see Simon as a rather giant pollinator. Swollen ankle, painful leg, I nevertheless walked the dog down the country trail. Simon, in his quest to find edible grass, had wandered through a large area of dandelions whose flowers had gone to seed and his whole back was covered with the white seeds, which of course kept falling off as he dashed through the grass. Now, it occurs to me that in some sense what is true for the azalea as mirror image is also true of the dandelions and especially true of my lovely goofy little dog. Out there, in there, what that experience means remains to be discovered.
The last thing Casey says in his essay Cardiomimesis is that "To find the heart is the only means of finding God. We find God only because he has made all things to serve as signposts. This is cardiomimeis."
Time to clean the kitchen and go to bed as thus the journey continues. I'll proof what I have written later to find what changes the speller has made in my words. A while ago I found that "white" had ignorantly become "what," which made no sense in the sentence about the azaleas. What?