If Your Life is a Leaf…

Look at a lush tree or a bush just outside your window. If you focus on a single healthy leaf of that plant for long enough, your mind will follow your eyes across and into it. At first, your gaze will linger at the base of the leaf, where the petiole attaches the leaf to the stem. Traveling slowly upward, toward the leaf’s tip, your eyes are drawn from the petiole to the midrib, from which smaller and smaller veins, or venules, reach out along the leaf’s blades toward the margins. You will see these aspects of the leaf, but devoting your attention to the leaf will do more than acquaint your eyes and brain with the shapes and colors of a tiny component of a much larger plant. By giving your complete attention to the leaf, you will witness the exponential growth of your own understanding of the brevity of life. And you will begin to realize the eternity of effort involved in nurturing soil and seeds to contribute to that brief experience. The leaf can deliver so many messages, simply by enabling your eyes to see it. It conveys to you the reality that the leaf may be shiny or dull; darkest green or brightest neon chartreuse; home to untold thousands of visible, living organisms; or a tiny expanse of color in a desert of transparent air. Later, when you give your undivided attention to the rest of the plant—down through the stem and into twigs, limbs, branches, trunk, and roots—you will experience awe. At a certain unforgettable moment, you will envision the slow, nearly invisible, distribution of water and oxygen and molecular components of life as they slowly travel from the root hairs and roots and the rest of the plant. That moment explains it all. Everything. If only you had looked at that leaf when you were just a baby, you could have avoided millions of mistakes made in the intervening years. But no; mistakes are not accidents born of leaf-blindness.

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The appeal of Asian art, especially Asian art embedded into architectural design, eluded me for the majority of my first 72 years. Somewhere along the way, though, I occasionally encountered pieces of such art and architecture that attracted me. Initially, I thought my attraction to those interesting examples was prompted by their striking contrast to other objects; the clean, clear, simple, straight lines of Scandinavian design. But, sometimes, the similarities were greater than their contrasts. Asian art and architecture both give strong emphasis to symbolism, religious, and philosophical themes, whereas Scandinavian expressions of art and design tend to revel in simplicity. Similar attributes, but expressed near the two ends of visual and emotional spectra, perhaps? If I were able to build a new house, it probably would combine Frank Lloyd Wright influences with Scandinavian and (just a touch of) Asian style.

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Observed from a distance and through the lens of time, the changes in her professional practice have seemed incremental—a lazy stream carrying a slow-moving leaf on a gentle journey. But on closer inspection, and viewed through the magnification of personal involvement, the changes in my oncologist’s work environment represent a river’s rapids and I am a log thrown in to monitor the speed and direction of the current. I do not begrudge the changes, nor the scratches and bruises I receive when treatments seem to scrape my body against the river bank. But I wonder whether adjustments to the frequency and composition of the treatment regimen are having any appreciable effects. Changes in medical support personnel, the addition of satellite location(s), and infusions of different drugs all contribute to a sense of orderly chaos. I cannot tell whether such polished pandemonium is a integral part of the complexity of the treatment plan or whether, instead, the turmoil is evidence of uncertainty about the suitability of the treatment approaches.  Just a momentary doubt, I think, arising from surprising reactions to unknown stimuli.

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Yesterday’s treatment—a single follow-up injection—should have taken just a few minutes. But lab work was required, in advance, to determine whether my hemoglobin level was below average; it was, so I got the injection.  Because my oncologist was out of the office, the injection had to be done in the main office in town, where a swarm of doctors would be available in the event things were to go horribly wrong. Fortunately, they did not go even moderately wrong. All is well…enough…that I will have another full  treatment, one week from yesterday. That day will be Halloween, when I expect the nurses and office staff will be dressed in appropriately ghoulish costumery.

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