Because the meds make it hard for Steve to do any attentive reading, I have been reading aloud to him. This is one of the surprising gifts of this cancer desert because there are few things I enjoy more than reading aloud. My early work was as a storyteller and librarian and although I wasn't very good at enforcing fines it never felt like work to read to children.
As a young mother I remember some parenting guru advising my friends and me to put 10 books on the mantel each morning and then read to our children throughout the day from this pile. Then, at the end of what was usually an exhausting day, we could rest in peace knowing that the minds and spirits of our children had been nourished.
I am finding snippets of that same kind of peace on the days that Steve and I have time to read aloud together. Reading in this unhurried, contemplative way each day is a vanguard practice for us. It keeps us in the receiving posture by putting ourselves in the 'way of the gift' (a phrase from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson).
It promises that at some point some word or phrase will strike us particularly and as a matter of course feed our hope. The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called these particularizing phrases 'biddings.' Julian of Norwich, the mystic who wrote our 'All shall be well' prayer called them 'showings.' I usually know when I am having one because I feel something akin to a blush or a shiver or a quickening.
This past week has held some of our most discouraging moments so far. Steve and I have had the big conversations about the bigger things facing us with this cancer. But how to deal with the roller coaster like events of each day is the kicker for me. Steve says that when he feels disoriented, if I start reading to him, in a matter of minutes he will remember who he is and what he loves. It all comes back to him.
What is that, I wonder? It is mysterious, but surely it is tied to the truth that we are spirits more than bodies and fed by ideas as significantly as daily bread. When i grab a pile of books to take to the hospital with us or feel for one under the bed to read from with the nightlight wedge, it seems so random and unguided. But this week, reading George Macdonald's At the Back of the North Wind and Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone, Andrew Nugent's The Slow Release Miracle/ A Spirituality for a Lifetime and Maria Lichtman's Poetry as Prayer: The Life of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Steve and I have been fattened with ideas and somehow readied for another day.