Ten after three in the morning: the quiet, dark morning. As we scribble, a brilliant three-quarter moon makes its way down the clear black western sky toward the horizon.
What a thing to see!
It’s sublimely beautiful. Truly: one of the most subtly gorgeous sights I’ve ever seen. Made more so, I’ll say, by knowing this is one of the last times — maybe the last time — I’ll ever see such a thing.
If that’s the last scene I get to see on this earth, well then… Thanks, God. It’s a magnificent gift!
As you may guess, Funny is very, very sick indeed. Beyond “funny,” we might say. The peripheral neuropathy, which never takes pause, is endlessly painful: hands, feet, legs, lips, teeth: everything hurts. Pretty clearly this ailment is never going to heal: we’re coming into the last stage of a life that does not want to step aside and get out of the way. So the darned life is putting up a fight!
Ohhh well. Nothing I can do about it. Except wait until it goes away.
Meanwhile, in these last burning hours and minutes of life, let us enjoy what we have around us.
- Let us relish the beauty that immerses us.
- Let us comprehend the brevity and fragility of that beauty.
- Let us love those who love us.
- Let us pray for the future of our species.
- Let us be grateful for life, for the living, for what has come before us and what will come after us.
- If there is a God — as some of us believe there must be — let us thank that Creator for the beauty of Creation, for its glory and for its horror, for its intimacy and its strangeness, for its past and its future.
Onward. Ever onward!