The Winter Cold

I have somehow managed to live most of this lifetime in places where the winter temperatures range from minus 20 or 30 F to plus 20 or 30 F. But no, today, I'm not referring to that sort of cold. I'm referring to catching "a cold." The flu. What my English friends, the last time I was there, called, "lurgy" (a wonderfully apt word). Don't you hate it when one day, you are fine, and then you wake up the next morning sick as a dog? February and March seem to be the perfect time for this.

Mind you, for weeks, I have been hearing that this was "going around." I've heard complaints from friends that they had "gotten it" from the lady ahead of them in line at the post office, or the guy sitting behind them at the movie theatre. (Person A sneezes, and Person B gets sick, kind of thing.) And I suppose in my own way, I was subconsciously waiting for it to hit me.

But one of the advantages of our current climate of blame is that you see the absurdity of it, the ultimate powerlessness of it as a way of operating in the world, even in the health sphere. Long ago, I started to understand that, yeah, this is a world chock-a-block full of health "threats," but I need to take responsibility for my own health, and believe in my body's ability to right things that have gotten out of whack. This has been an outrageously stressful six months on the world scene, and while I have tried hard to limit the barrage of news, the fact is, I want to know what we are dealing with. I need to know what we are dealing with so that I can serve the world in a meaningful way. My body is working overtime to transform enormous amounts of toxic world and national anger, and if I've gotten "sick," it is just my system trying to restore balance and give me an excuse for rest. I used to work so hard to fight getting sick, and to fight back when I did, but these days, I just thank my body for its wisdom, and let it do what it needs to do to recover. Releasing all the fighting and blaming, at least in my own little personal corner of the world, is the best I can do today.

On an entirely different note, I heard the most extraordinarily well sung Choral Evensong service Wednesday on BBC 3's broadcast live from The Queen's College, Oxford. What a choir! (Yes, mixed men and women.) Crisp singing, great diction, great tuning, lovely musicality and just one of the most glorious services I've ever "been" to. Music by Scott, Clucas, Howells, Noble, Bruckner, and more. I highly recommend it (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08dr2n4). The Psalm was one of the longest on record and had to be divided up among five chants, so newbies might get a little bored, but not me. I continue to thrill at the ever higher levels of beauty and excellence in this genre of music.