Here, midway through an unusually cold March, we have suddenly had a glorious spring day. Tanja celebrated by taking a walk around the Nob Hill neighborhood with her PT. She reports that a young girl stopped and stared at her as she went by. Tanja attributes this to the c-collar she is wearing but it seems more likely the girl simply picked up on that thing that Tanja radiates, all the time really, but pretty powerfully these days.

“I woke up in the middle of the night last night,” she said. “And my hands were tingling a lot. Or maybe I notice it more because my arms are tingling less. It made it hard to get to sleep, so I made up a little mantra. Do you want to hear it? Do you think it’s silly to have a mantra?”

“I no longer think anything is silly. Or if it’s silly I don’t mind. Tell me.”

“I just spoke to my hands and I said ‘Humming with healing energy, flowing with healing calm.’ And do you know what happened?”

“What?”

“I fell asleep.”

Tanja held a fork today and made the motion of lifting it to her mouth.

“If you put a piece of food on there, it might be too much for me,” she said. “But tomorrow!”

In the evening, Wren and I brought her green curry from her favorite Thai place. On a whim, we’d ordered dumplings but when we opened the box it was less like potstickers and more like triangles of aggressively deep-fried won ton.

Tanja took a bite.

“Not for me,” she said. “Life is too short.”

We put that aside and mixed white rice and green curry in a Legacy coffee cup–it smelled delicious and Tanja ate forkful after forkful, closing her eyes with each bite and savoring the flavor.

Now, the last thing we want to do is offend anyone. But these days, with everything so terrifically heightened, it is easy to imagine sitting at a campsite in lower Gallilee and listening to this beloved person declaim about fried won tons or tingling hands or anything at all and just seizing on every crumb.

“Never shall we fry the won ton, for life is too short. Instead let us make a meal of the curry and the tofu!”

“If the fork is too heavy today, let us wait instead for the morrow.”

“May you hum with healing energy, my brother!”

“And may you, my sister, flow with healing calm.”

It has been fun to put songs at the end of these posts. And today seemed to cry out for “Spring Will Be A Little Late This Year,” because we are very much waiting for Tanja to get home before it can begin. But that song is far too sad for how the day really feels. It feels much more like this: