Another way

An interesting day.

Walking was a little more... possible, today. I still need my walker, but simply doing the walking was a little more doable. I had to walk a long way from one end of a rather large parking lot to the other (thank you, Super Bowl, for filling the shopping center with people desperate to get ready for The Big Game/Party, the only open parking spot was as far away as possible from where I wanted to go), but somehow walking all that way wasn't nearly as nasty as I had expected it might be. It wasn't as debilitating as such things usually are. Was it just a neurologically good day? A positive side-effect of the magnesium my herbalist is asking me to take? Don't know, don't care. Enjoyed not being floored by having to walk and stand. A wonderful change.

And then, after the happy journey home and enjoying lunch, it was time to do the taxes. In the process, I noticed how much I spent last year on getting treated for M.S.

Oh my...

Sigh. Well, my fellow travelers on the M.S. Highway, you know how that song goes. Enough about that.

Anyway, to ease the pain of dealing with numbers and receipts, I dug through the CD cabinet for some "spirit raising music" for the annual journey down the Tax Tunnel. I was happy to come upon a recording by Virgil Fox: still my all-time favorite organist.

Just hearing the first track, I nearly burst into tears. Virgil completely changed my life; when I was an organist, I did everything I could to follow in his sequin-spangled footsteps. He might as well have channeled Archimedes, saying "Give me a pedalboard to trod upon, and I can move the earth." And he did.

And whenever I played the organ, I tried to move the earth too. And often did.

I like to think that when I really rocked the house, when as Milton said, I "let the bass of Heaven's great organ blow," I would have made Virgil proud.

I think I wept not at "what I could no longer do;" I really don't think it was mourning for losing control of the instrument I loved for all my life, but can no longer play--that has hit me before, I know what that feels like. It was... ... ... hearing the voice of a world I used to live in. Not one that was "denied me," but one that I don't live in much--if at all--any more.

And I miss that world. I really miss the organ, my comfortable entryway into that world. When I played the organ, I was there. "There" with a very large capital T. But I think I really miss that world, and its voice, more than I miss the mechanical, physical instrument.

And being in that musical/energetic/spiritual world has nothing to do with M.S. or the limitations my oddly behaving nervous system bring to my interactions with the physical world. Even though playing the organ was the way I made that world manifest, and the way I myself became one with that world.

There is another way. There has to be another way. And more so--there has to be a way that's only possible with my neurological "accessories."

I feel like that recording--like Virgil himself--has placed the challenge before me.

There is another way: Find it.