The Mayo Clinic and a Pan Flute and the Candlewood Inn

Zumbro River downtown Rochester MN

Sometimes there’s numbness.
Not unlike your son’s limbs. Who leans on a sun-bleached
maple wood cane as we slow-walk through the clinic’s
achingly cavernous lobby,
pass by a baby grand and a man
wearing a head scarf playing Come Fly With Me
which changes to Amazing Grace which changes to
Fly Me To The Moon.

Sometimes there’s fear.
Like God’s a lightning flash and you’re high-summer chaparral.
Or helplessness.
Like you’re a wandering drunk and God’s an unexploded mine.
Or anguish.
Where if you remember to eat — it’s ashes
with tears and you feel like that wilderness owl,
or those biblical blades of withering grass.

Sometimes there’s nothing, I mean, not
nothing, there’s your true love, there’s family, there’s
memories, meals with friends, Merlot on a patio
overlooking a well-kept golf course and your pretty decent life,
which you have no right to be ungrateful for — yet,
seems all you do is spin plates
in the rotunda of your mind, and wait
for grimness or light.

Then, sometimes, you’re listening to some Spotify playlist
and hear a pan flute, and you’re not even a fan of pan flute,
but there are these notes, I don’t know,
so immaculate and immediate as to bead your skin,
so free, like those black terns
that followed the tractor and harrows,
cut sharp pieces from air that fell whistling —
next thing you’re sinking and soaring,
you’re root-bound and buoyant, you’re
plant and bird all at once —
do you think maybe that’s a little shaft of afterlife?
come to say go easy on yourself,
tell you you’re not alone,
come to say it’ll be okay,
come to unveil
The Holy,
right where you’re standing,
in a hotel kitchenette,
slicing carrots for your son’s supper.

24 Comments

  1. May you, your wife and son be well and happy, free from enmity, disease, and grief
    And my happiness be your guard allways??

  2. May you, your wife and son be well and happy, free from enmity, disease, and grief
    And my happiness be your guard allways??

  3. Continuiung to ponder and pray..

    “.so free, like those black terns
    that followed the tractor and harrows,”
    Brings back memories of a different time

  4. It is so hard, the loving so deeply and wanting wholeness for those we love. And yet, would we have it any other way? Blessings Stephen and Teryl.

  5. Beautiful! And so carefully and tactfully done, so that we are all called to think of our own memories of glory and pain. In my own brief brush with mortality, I was carried through by poetry and by yet another rereading of Nora Gallagher’s Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic.

  6. ‘root-bound and buoyant, you’re
    plant and bird all at once —
    do you think maybe that’s a little shaft of afterlife?’

    … good god, man. you take my breath away.

    my heart aches for what teryl is going through.
    best wishes for healing love and light, L

  7. Somehow, through a glimpse of the struggle
    and the briefest of
    sorrow,

    you offer up a bit of warm syrup
    to accompany
    a morning
    of waffles

    Thank you Stephen, for beautiful things.
    Love and kindness
    to surround you xx

  8. “unveil the Holy”
    – serendipitous, unpredictable, you never know when it can show up, and it takes discernment to recognize when it does – slicing carrots for a son!!

  9. I saved this until I had time because I knew I wanted to savor it. I’m so glad I did. I wish I could grant your wishes, but here in reality I am so grateful for the beauty and healing you make with spit and mud. I need some of that these days and these best things are always contagious.

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