Illness is essentially a lonely pursuit. When healthy, life seems full of opportunity, and you are the vanquisher of evil and of regrets and of things of all sorts! ¡Adelante! When you become ill or fall down or are beset by anything that kicks the pins out from under you, all of a sudden you are the vanquished, the one beset by evil and regrets and things of all sorts.

So I fell, a very stupid little fall, and Lucas the dog came to lick me so he could make me better (he is a firm believer that dog kisses cure all…) but when I tried to get up my right foot was excruciatingly painful. I hasten to add that I have been dealing with the winter flu, colds, who knows, but I was getting better and feeling more and more like the strong samurai warrior ready to uphold honor and bring about justice…

I had to go to Court in Fremont today and I was late, because it took me a good 20 minutes to walk, dragging my right foot, to the front entrance, and then to drag myself to the courthouse. I was in so much pain by the time I was sitting on one of the chairs that I was fighting off tears… and feeling immensely lonely, but in the parking lot a young man offered to drive me to the front (I couldn’t lift my right foot to make the jump into his truck…) and in the courthouse one of the guards helped me with checking in, and in the courtroom another young man rushed to give me his seat and help me sit down, and the court clerk was kindness personified… So I remembered all the people I work with who on top of being ill or unable to walk properly or in a wheelchair are also homeless… and I realized that this is a way of learning true compassion, which etymologically means, to suffer with… I continue to suffer with and seek to alleviate the suffering of my brothers and sisters, wherever and whenever, and to paraphrase Tom Robbins, even samurai female warriors get the blues…