For A.

My best friend, I love you.

I sense that my posting angered you and I would never willingly do that to you. I had some horrible news last night about my health condition. After 3 hours sleep I woke up to realize it wasn’t true. It was a goad to get me to look at where I was going. Or at least, I am praying that that is the case.

There are no normal mirrors here so I do not see what I look like ever and it was a shocker to catch site of my face on the laptop camera. You…are one of the more beautiful women I have known and I am most likely safely assuming that that remains the case today even though we are older.

Right now I am listening to bucolic birdsong and thinking of the song by Cat Stevens, Morning Has Broken, which is actually an old hymn from the 1940’s, I discovered. It upsets me to know that some people’s lives are like this all their lives long, it also inspires me. Yet, I feel like I have so little time left to turn things to the good.

If only I could talk to you. I don’t know what to do about this commission that I was clearly given in my thoughts a year ago to “Act the soul of…” As far as the concentration camps, the reason for it was easily seen and done, I remember watching footage in US History in High School, that stuff was IN me, and I needed to find its outlet. Because of that it seems that there would be a reason for the rest of it but I have little other personal connection to Asian culture and risk offending in a serious way by even broaching this subject. I have had a few other Asian contacts but not any other Japanese and I do understand that there is a difference. I had a close connection with a woman from Taiwan in Florida. She was like a second mother to Ian. She was a smart woman, like the “good woman” in Ecclesiastes (?) (Proverbs?).

So, I hope you are well and that you are still teaching. My New Year’s resolution last year was to “be of few words” and that (ironically) burgeoned into the most fantastic changes; this year it is to trust. It is taking me to new places in my soul and some of them are the unpleasant places that a person DOES need to go to and here I am with this project that was initiated a year and a half ago wondering about the wisdom of it and I will just have to walk in faith as to how to proceed with it. Or not.