On a day when the sky is the blue you want it to be & the air is fresher than new lilacs. In a late morning when anyone passionate about life would be rolling on the greening earth & shouting praises to a kind sun.

   Amid a spring so precious it ignites reflections on how many are left I come inside to write you about what matters most: how you spend your life caring for the ones that cannot go outside. The ones Disease holds hostage in hospitals.

   These are the fellow humans who seek your radical loving care.

   One of these, Anne Boyer, wrote a life changing article for The New Yorker (excerpt at left, April 15th edition). I read one paragraph & could not stop.

   It is more than an article about cancer. Ms. Boyer devotes her prodigious eloquence to describing illness universal. How the incessant florescence of its liminal state burns our eyes. How that netherworld is laced with longing. The familiar ground we knew in the mirror has been earthquaked into rubble we do not recognize.

   The severity of her disease means the severing of her breasts. Her plight evokes the stories of newly legless soldiers whose nerves feel limbs their eyes cannot see. Like them, Ms. Boyer is left with prosthetics.   

   This is a story of illness both chronic & acute. A tale embedded in the bodies of so many of the people in crisis for whom you care each day. The people we call patients.

   I read Anne's story amid health's arrogance & felt the pull of darker days I've spent on the other side of Wellbeing's fragile wall. Radical Loving Care's hymnal holds two songs. One thrills with notes of celebration. The other is limned with lyrics of longing.

   You know both songs by heart. 

-Erie Chapman