decompressing

What a ridiculous couple of weeks! That cliche that when it rains it pours? Yes. Normally I don't use this blog like a journal, but I was looking back over my last few posts, and realized that I have been really skimming the surface lately. (Here's Liam's soccer team, aren't they cute. Here are the boys riding their bikes to school, don't they look cold...)

Anyway, there's a lot going on under the surface around here.

Our dear friend - who is really more like family - discovered a black spot on her lung last week that turns out to be cancerous. The same cancer she had beaten only months before. We are confident that it's all going to be fine, but this is a battle we were hoping she would not have to fight again. (She's starting radiation this week.)

Right on the heels of that news, my dad called to tell us that he has to have abdominal surgery to remove some masses in his large intestine. His surgery was scheduled during a three-day trip to Seattle for my company retreat last week. I met Joel and the kids and Rohanna in Portland on Friday to visit Dad in the hospital and help him transition back home. He's doing great now, and his pathology came back with the great news that the masses are benign. (I didn't take a photo of him in his hospital gown, but here's one of him from last winter. That's his senior picture.)

While we were in Portland, Rohanna and I decided to visit Buzzy, our step-grandmother. She is our mom's stepmom. Our grandfather passed away in 1995, and Buzz recently moved from their beautiful house in Cannon Beach to an assisted living facility in Seaside. There is really nothing good to say about assisted living facilities. Or Seaside. It was a hard visit. (And why do they crank the heat up so high in those places?) But she loved Lucy, and in the end we're glad we went.

Oh wait - did I mention that our downstairs flooded last week? Yep, the washing machine overflowed (for three hours). We had to remove the carpet and we've been living with industrial dehumidifiers for the past week in an attempt to save our drywall. Ugh.

But this week is calming down. I do feel like I keep looking over my shoulder for the other shoe to drop, but it feels like "normal" is in our future. Life is a series of peaks and valleys I've learned. Today I'm looking up at the nearest peak, knowing that there's a lovely view at the summit.

I leave you with an excerpt from the Tao Te Ching which a coworker sent me last week, which I am working on believing:

Be completely empty.

Be perfectly serene.

The ten thousand things arise together;

in their arising is their return.

Now they flower,

and flowering

sink homeward,

returning to the root.

The return to the root

is peace.

Peace: to accept what must be,

to know what endures.

In that knowledge is wisdom.

Without it, ruin, disorder.

To know what

endures is to be openhearted,

magnanimous,

regal,

blessed,

following the Tao,

the way that endures forever.