Monday, April 14, 2014

P&P - pained and perturbed, parables and pardes

Our daughter and son-in-law bought us a magnolia tree a few years ago for our anniversary.  And oddly, even though this was not planned, it buds and almost blooms every year about the time of that special date.

We were worried when we planted it, as so many trees and bushes and plants have died in the severe clay soil we live on top of here in Cinnamon Lake. We think we were the reason Buff's nursery went out of business - they guaranteed their trees to live, and even though we took every precaution, there are admittedly only a select few trees that like clay soil.

They faithfully replaced the dead trees they had suggested for clay soil, until their doors closed.

I remember pulling one dead tree out when it was obvious it wasn't going to make it, and the roots were in a four foot wide swirling motion - they could not break out of the bowl we had made for it with good dirt into the cement-stiff clay.

We've spent a small fortune hauling in dirt to cover over the clay, and it works for a while, but eventually the blue-clay wins season after season.  I've developed a handful of perennials that like - or at least can withstand - the boggy wet clay in the spring, that turns into the cement-hard-dry clay in the summer.

We've worked around it.

So it's quite miraculous, today, I'm sitting here on my front porch, watching the Magnolia bloom.

It survived and seems happy to be here.  

It's a pleasure I thought might be denied me a short time ago.  A pleasure I wasn't sure I would have the ability to monitor throughout its life.

So, I'm sitting on my front porch on a warm, rainy, cloudy, gray day full of spring-time promise, surrounded by a Shalom that settles on me from time to time, and taking pleasure in watching my magnolia bloom out.

***

Honestly, where does the time go.  I think I was home a whole five days the month of March, and this month is not holding too many more "home-body" days.

I've had appointments.  And appointments.  And a few more coming up this week.  And the next.

Obviously, I was a bit more stricken with radiation than I ever thought.  I was the star pupil in radiation, the one that kept feeling better and better the five-plus weeks I was *radiating*, while all the other women were stepping down each week into the pit of fiery radiation burns.

I escaped those, so I thought I would escape the other radiation damage they warn you about as well.

I've never been more wrong in my life.  Week number 6 after week number 5 finishing radiation, I woke up with a chest that felt like it had been kicked in by a mule.

I called my radiation oncologist, and she laughed and murmured "we wondered when it would catch up to you, Karen".

I had felt so much better getting out of chemo, each week in radiation seemed like a step up to me. Since I take replacement thyroid meds I didn't have to deal with the effects of the radiation hitting the thyroid and wreaking havoc like all the other women were forced to deal with - it's the one time in my life I was thankful for a dead thyroid gland.  Radiated, scared and out of control thyroid tissue is not a good mate to walk through anything with.

If there was a frying and crackling going on in my soft tissue and cartilage in my rib cage during radiation, I never noticed it until it was frightfully non-ignorable.

Costochondritis is the term they use for BBQed ribs.

And unbeknownst to me, succumbing to a virus or two, or three can prompt an angry flare up.  Honestly, they probably told me this, I just didn't remember it.

So things like the following nicely composed table make it worse:

          • Sitting at a computer
          • Long drives in a vehicle- try to not "hunch" over the steering wheel
          • Weather-  rainy/humid weather makes a lot of people worse
          • Sneezing/coughing
          • Lifting heavy objects from the floor, or above your head
          • Repetitive motions such a vacuuming, mopping
          • Stress
          • Caffeine
That's a nice list, but what caught my notice was when I coughed or sneezed - which was a lot while tarrying in virus-land for three months after Christmas and the annual communal sharing of germs our family does so well and generously.  When I coughed or sneezed or breathed deeply, I was pretty sure my rib cage was cracking into bits and pieces.

I held a pillow to my chest to ward off the sharp pain.  It took great self-control to not hunch over and hold my ribs when out in public and caught unawares by a deep sneeze......

Deciding how to live with the above list was too much for my brain.  I have to drive an hour and forty minutes to get to my awesome physical therapist.  Then drive home, "hunched over a steering wheel", mostly undoing all of her awesome work.

No more sitting in front of a computer, and just for the record - rainy humid weather was what I have been praying for after the long, long freezing cold winter, slow traffic and slick roads.

And the final blow - no lifting *anything* - "remember a gallon of milk weighs 8 pounds, Karen"........

It all seems to conspire to land one in a state of frustrating despair and depression.

It seems like I am set back much further than I thought possible.

Pain can put one into slavery faster than anything known to humans.  I gave in, stopped life again, *rested* it, heated it, physical-therapied it, and stayed away from germs again to not anger it with more viruses or infections.

The inflamed area is no longer basketball size, now it's a more manageable feeling of being hit by a baseball in the ribs.

***

I want to be done with all of this.

More than being done, I want my brain to think again, and work again, and decipher life again, like it used to.

While talking to my Physical Therapist one day, I told her that one doctor had told me I 'couldn't force my brain to come back', and that trying might make it worse.

She paused a moment, and said "I don't agree with that".

I love her.

I told my daughter what my PT had said, and she said, "yeah, I think the same way".

She had a tumor removed from her brain, so she talks from experience.  Any time you mess around with the receptors and neurons and pathways of the brain, it changes you.

Any time you damage your brain either by opening it up and cutting into it or chemically poisoning it and damaging or destroying nerve endings and pathways, it changes you.

She knows more than most what it is to fight back through an intense jungle trail of brain-recovery while maintaining two active children and a household.

I've watched her and it's downright admirable.

So I also listen closely to what she says about it, and note how she has attempted "repair".

She gave me a book and told me that it was a good book and that I should read a chapter a day.

I laughed.  I can barely sit through most medical articles that are six paragraphs long.  And if I muddle through them, I mostly don't retain them or remember the bullet points.

She looked at me and said "it helps".

She said "a chapter a day".  I bartered - I said "maybe a page a day".

She looked at me and put the book in my hand.

I have read a chapter a week.  Because I have to go back and re-read what I have read because I don't remember why some things are happening in the book.

And I'm just finishing the prologue and chapter one here folks.

But she keeps asking me how I like the book, and I have to tell her - because she won't let me off the hook like everyone else - what is happening in the book.

I horribly butcher the few sentences I do say about it, but she says the book gets better.

A couple of months ago, my "book-club" friend wanted me to read a book she was reading, so Scott quickly jumped on that, paid Amazon twenty dollars and downloaded it for me.

I surprised myself and kept reading into chapter two over a few weeks time - all because the book made me angry.  It seemed like it was deceptively trying to disprove God, and the little innuendos made me angry, and forced me to look up and listen to some Bible and some Rabbis and their teachings on why I believe what I believe again.

It all surprised me.  As I was telling my PT this, she said, "oh, if you attach an emotion to reading, it helps you".

Hmm.....

We all need to bounce off of others, don't we?

***

Another blogger I read, probably the only other blog I somewhat read regularly, posted thoughts about dealing with people after you have been through chemo.  She stated how it was somewhat difficult to maintain connections and as if that wasn't difficult enough, just forget about planning how to keep connections strong.

She hit a tender nerve in me.

Every time I am in a room with a group of people I am overwhelmed.  I always forget how much multi-tasking conversation requires.

I was diagnosed with the inability to multi-task, and I am a believer in that diagnosis after a few kitchen disasters.  Pulling a simple meal together requires a lot of multi-tasking that you don't even notice - it becomes innate over the years.

I can't do that now.  Simple meals are not simple, nor should they be advertised as such.  A simple meal means putting the oven on 400 degrees, unwrapping a frozen pizza, and baking it.

Just don't forget to set the timer.

Or hurriedly use a dishtowel to pull out the over-baked thing, swishing the dishtowel against the oven burner, creating a little fire.

It's just the multi-tasking little things, folks.

But, even more difficult, is a human to human to human conversation - like a small group or such conversation. I am always like three sentences behind.

I used to be a mental conversationalist gymnast and need to wait for others to catch up to me most times.  I used to be able to read conversation cues, remember data that was imperatively important to any given conversation, what was sensitive, what had crushed them in life - I used to have all that rolling in my brain while conversing.  

Not anymore.  I don't remember the difficulty of conversations until I am knee deep in them. I desperately try to grasp the multi-tasking thread in my brain while looking at a person and spilling words out of my mouth, but the need of mental gymnastics eludes me.

I like talking to my grandchildren best.  My husband and kids are ultra patient.  And a friend that is a keen listener and patient with the short circuits still plaguing my brain.

If I am going to have to repair this, as it seems recovery of that brain part is elusive, then layering the learning to multi-task in conversations might well start chatting with children.

***

I am loving word pictures.  It seems if I can connect a picture to what I am learning, or relearning that it is a tremendous help.

Again, I am working on memorizing lists.  I have the exits on 315 in Columbus memorized to Kennair.  It's a picture in my mind that looks like text 'B'HNALK' - don't ask, for some reason it makes sense to me.  I have the exits on the northwest corner of 270 memorized until Rt 40.

Because a few sentences in a book riled me up a little, and I could not remember how to refute them, I have again memorized some Hebrew styles of teaching.

One list I have memorized is P&P - Parables and Pardes.

(Not to be confused with my state of mind, Pained and Perturbed.)

You might be surprised to learn that most, if not all of Jesus' parables were not new stories to his listeners.  In fact, the prodigal son parable was told by several different Rabbis before the time of Jesus, with different endings.

What would have caught the ear of the listener in the time of Jesus was not a new story being told, but the listener would pay keen attention to how this Rabbi would use this story to teach his students his "yoke" - what he believed to be true about the Bible and God.

The other part of the P&P is Pardes - which translated means 'orchard'.  It's also used as an acronym - and remember Hebrew does not use vowels so only the letters correspond PRDS.

  • Peshat (פְּשָׁט) — "plain" ("simple") or the direct meaning.[1]
  • Remez (רֶמֶז) — "hints" or the deep (allegoric: hidden or symbolic) meaning beyond just the literal sense.
  • Derash (דְּרַשׁ) — from Hebrew darash: "inquire" ("seek") — the comparative (midrashic) meaning, as given through similar occurrences.
  • Sod (סוֹד) (pronounced with a long O as in 'bone') — "secret" ("mystery") or the esoteric/mystical meaning, as given through inspiration or revelation.

Some have given serious study to the teachings of Jesus, and say that not only did he use parables to teach, but PRDS as well.

I have been musing over the R and the D part of the acronym.  When someone accuses Jesus of never coming out and just saying plainly that he was the son of God, they don't know the Rabbis method of teaching.  If you use Remez, he plainly states many times that he is the son of God.  But because we don't know that he is throwing you back to the Scripture - mainly because we don't know our Scripture - he says over and over and over again that he is the son of God.

That's why they wanted to stone him.

I mean say a little thing like "for I am humble of heart" and the hearers get openly violent tendencies kind of doesn't make sense to us.  Unless you understand that they knew their stuff and knew that the Messiah would be "a Moses" - "the most humble man ever to live on the earth".

Jesus openly compared himself to Moses, and by saying that they all knew that he was stating that he was Messiah.

That kind of goes over my head even when I am seeking it out.

The 'midrash' part is even more fascinating.  For instance, in the book I was tempestuously turning pages on, accused the Bible - Matthew to be exact - of lying.  Because as Matthew states:

21 And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. 22 But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there, and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee. 23 And he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene.

Which is all fine and good - except as the author of the book pointed out - it doesn't say that ANYWHERE in the Old Testament.  Not anywhere.

And I was frustrated  because I knew the author was correct in that statement, but I couldn't remember why it all worked out.  So I had to look into it.

It's because of the 'D' - or the use of Midrash.

Nazarene / Nazareth comes from the same root word as 'branch'.  If you were an American living at that time, and someone said "He's from Nazareth", I would say, "oh that's nice - my cousin grew up there".

If you were a Jew living at that time, and someone said "He's from Nazareth" - your antennae would immediately go up because you would think "branchtown", he's claiming to be from branchtown -- you would think Isaiah - 'the branch (shoot) of Jesse'.

That's why Matthew stated that living in Nazareth fulfilled the words of the prophets, and no one argued it.  It would have been nice if he would have taken the time to explain it to all of the distant gentiles that would read that text one day, but he didn't, because obviously he felt comfortable enough to write that and know that everyone would "get it".

Like I get it when someone says "my bologna has a first name" and they don't finish the song - I know they mean O-s-c-a-r M-a-y-e-r bologna, because of a 1973 commercial song that still sticks in my brain.  (Some things are firmly planted in those brain cells that really don't need to be, hmm??)

Two thousand years from now, they might scratch their heads over the connection in my brain between bologna and Oscar Mayer.

So I am working on memorizing my lists, and am spending time especially on the Pardes.  The whole mind picture is beautiful to me - that the idea of learning and knowing the Scripture is likened to an orchard.

And unless you were an early 1800s pioneer stepping into the Ohio wilderness and happened upon an apple orchard planted by Johnny Appleseed, most orchards have to be planted, diligently watered, tended, pruned, harvested and also, enjoyed.

There's nothing more beautiful than an orchard in bloom.  The sweet smell from the petals that will develop into fruit is intoxicating.  There's nothing better than sitting beneath a fruit tree and eating the fruit that is fully ripened.

So, I turn that visual picture over and over in my brain while I work on memorizing it all, and love the picture of the orchard.  Of the need to work it, but also the need for its sustenance to my body.

And the beauty that is a well-tended orchard.

So I sit on my front porch and immensely enjoy a small flowering tree in my front yard that I have planted and pruned and tended, and I know those blooms are going to be frozen off tomorrow and all that hard work will result in possibly seeing only the first starts of the pink blooms today, but that's ok.

Today, I'm going to sit here and enjoy it.

It's all a parable and Pardes after all.