Letter to Kathryn

Kathryn,

I'm so impressed by your new set of drawings. You've made tremendous progress. There is a quality of observation that you didn't possess one year ago. Whatever you're doing continue to do it.

It's been a challenging week for me. On Tuesday the Dr. looked at my fingers and for the first time mentioned the possibility of having to amputate the middle finger at the knuckle. The skin on the pad is quite black, and it's hard to tell if regrowth is occurring underneath. If that skin does not regenerate, the next alternative would be to attempt a kind of skin graft where they cut a flap from an adjoining finger and try to get it to grow. This would apparently disable the finger that the flap is from, so simply lopping off the top of the middle finger may be the most sensible thing to do.

So my ability to embrace acceptance is being challenged. When bad things happen nowadays I instantly begin to look for the lesson contained within. I'm concluding that the lesson in this accident is about taking care of myself. Most of my adult life I've been inconsistent about caring for my body. In the last few years, living on my own the disregard for my well-being in regard to eating well and being careful around power tools has been clear. At the same time my connection to higher power has grown tremendously. And what has struck me this week is that my body is an important part of this spiritual mechanism; it's an integral part of the creative work I do; it's what carries my speech; it's the part that people interact with. In other words, I'm coming to appreciate the belief some religions have that one's body is like a temple, there is a sacredness about it that one should recognize and treat accordingly.

I'd be curious to hear any reaction you might be having to this concept. With all this spiritual change in my life I often wonder if my children think I'm getting weird. I know for certain that the 25-year-old me would have been cynical hearing and reading the words I spout nowadays.

One thing that's kind of neat is using dictation software to write. That's how I'm creating this e-mail. It's about 95% accurate. Which reminds me, I posted a link on Facebook to a wonderful TED talk  http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_diamandis_abundance_is_our_future.html, a very optimistic view of the near future, a future of abundance, much of it coming from technological advancements that will allow humankind to put forth the best and the brightest people and ideas.

I love you Kate.

dad