The Week Thus Far, Part One: Beware of Maya

Part One: What Made Me Serene Thus Far This Week

One doesn't necessarily connect "serene" with "A 12-year old in the house" often, but given the only time I saw Luke in the last week was last Monday night, the day of my hysterectomy, while I was in the hospital, his presence, albeit noisy and rambunctious, was music to my ears and a sight for very weary eyes. The busybody was aflutter all evening re-setting up all of his electronic gear that had been at Dad's for the last week, re-arranging things in his room and explaining to me the plot of a book he plans to write about anarchist rebels who overtake a corrupt yet supposedly utopian city and save two hapless business people from being gassed in a mock-concentration camp, a story he thought up while sitting on the can the other night. (Trust me. If you're a writer, roughly half of your most brilliant ideas will happen while you're idly hanging out in the john.) God, I love that kid to pieces.

I was admittedly none too pleased when I told him to go to bed by 11, which is still an ungodly hour for him to be up, and I got up to go the bathroom (to pee, not to think) and found him still up playing games at 11:30pm. Being tired this morning was his own tough shit, but with the assistance of Grandma, we got him up and out the door on time and as far as I know, he functioned fine all day, like he always does on 7 hours of sleep.

Hurriedly this morning, he had me go through last week's school papers and sign what needed to be signed, and I came upon his religion class "activity" of Q&A and True/False about Hinduism and Buddhism. How astonishingly progressive of the Lutheran school to even ACKNOWLEDGE that there are other religions, much less teach the children about them. He knows the difference between dharma and karma. He knows you have to follow the Buddha's Eight-fold path to learn the Four Noble Truths. I particularly liked his answer to the following query:

"Give an example from the Upanishads to describe how a person unites with Brahman." Luke answered, "Like a lump of salt thrown into water--it's part of the water." So simple yet actually quite philosophical and dead ass right on. He's read parts of the Upanishads before the Bhagavad Gita? Well, ok. Either that, or the continuous loop of George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" finally transfixed into his brain. He came into class already knowing who Brahman, Vishnu and Krishna were and what they meant. No wonder he planted an OM sticker on his XBox and somewhere else in his room last night. Dude's enlightened. No, he's not converting to Hinduism or Buddhism, but at least now he appreciates them more and understands why his mom might be likewise enlightened while still accepting Christ as the Savior. And all this, during Holy Week? Has the world gone crackers? When I was his age at that school, it was all about the Garden of Gethsemane, that fuckass Judas Iscariot, cocks crowing in denial and the Last Supper and all that other important stuff all week before Good Friday.

This morning, Luke left his 2 giant stuffed walruses, Walle and Wilson, on my bed to keep me company today, which I thought was sweet, even if they took up half the bed. (I have since put the walruses to bed on Luke's bed, for I was feeling a little cramped in here. He gave me an actual kiss on the cheek and a hug when he left, and I'll have him back tomorrow after school for a couple of days.

I rested today, as I don't have much energy or strength back yet, still have a bad cold, and am sore, though I'm toughing it out on Advil. Keeping hydrated, as well as I can with recurrent GI trouble again, which could be because of my antibiotic, though you-know-what is commonplace in my daily life. At least now I'm on iron supplements for my anemia, which help me feel less totally fucking freezing all the time, given I have 17% body fat and am down to 115 lbs.

In my boredom of convalescing, I made a Beatles mix for a friend, narrowing down my absolute favorite Beatles and solo songs into one mix. Seriously, only my absolute favorites! The only problem is that it's 106 songs long, taking up 5.8 hours and will never fit on even like 5 single CD's. So I put them on a flash drive of mp3's and printed out a track listing that'll hopefully help him. Surely he can figure out how to upload them to his computer or his iPod. He grew up on the Beatles, so I'm sure he's familiar with all the songs, though maybe not much of the solo material, but I think overall, he'll appreciate the mix. I thought about separating the songs into early Beatles/late Beatles/solo material, but it's all thrown together haphazardly and I actually like the way it turned out. It's more eclectic that way.

I came across a song today that I honestly hadn't heard in several years, Dido's "Thank You." It reminded me of this friend. If I had to pick a day that was the best day we spent together, it'd have to be 07/07/2011. We saw the Lips that night, got to catch up with and hold Steven, and I've never seen someone so elated over a bizarre, wonderful rock show extravaganza in my life. We were both high on life and I never wanted the evening to end.

My morning and afternoon were restful, though I didn't sleep. I finally got to take all the bandages off of my abdominal incisions and they're healing normally, though slowly, though I'm bruised and still sore and have no energy, partially thanks to my bad cold and partly the surgery. It took a lot out of me to go to the gynecologist's today and I felt wiped out afterwards. Tatus was right that it takes really skinny people longer to recover from operations than it does the heavier folks. He was also right about something else, something that went terribly wrong last week, which will be explained in Part Two of this blog.

Until I finish writing THAT, soak in George Harrison's "Beware of Darkness," live from the Concert for Bangladesh, 1971. In it, he says "Beware of maya." Maya is, in Sanskrit, the veil of illusion that prevents human beings from perceiving the Divine. It separates you from God by virtue of man's ignorance. Conversely, vidya maya counteracts maya and grants you the wisdom that eventually allows man to become liberated, thus joining with God in unison.

Stay tuned...