Bedrock

"It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand."
- Madeleine L'Engle

I once worked with a woman in California - F., a beautiful woman with thick long brown hair like a rope, a young woman, perhaps 25 at the time, on whom I had a tremendous crush - who had relapsing-remitting MS. About six months earlier, before I met her, she had had a flare up; it had put her in the hospital; she had gone temporarily blind. When the flare-up subsided, her sight returned, her motor function. You'd never guess it had happened at all if she didn't tell you. One day she said (I'm paraphrasing, this way a very ling time ago) that in a strange way she was grateful for that flare-up because she knew, however bad it got, that the very bottom of her was made of bedrock. That was her exact word, bedrock, and I've remembered it all these years. We were eating Indian food - I was having a vegetable korma - and she said being blind, in the hospital was the worst she could imagine - she was an academic and had just recently completed her dissertation and was looking forward to a life of reading and writing - but the whole time she was lying there practically paralyzed she just knew she was going to be okay somehow. Maybe not the okay she wanted - whole of body, full of sight - but some sort of okay. MS couldn't crush her because it had crashed through everything but then it hit her bedrock and could go no further. That much, at least, would hold.

It's a mixed blessing to find your bedrock, more bad than good really, because, as powerful as it is to know that the core of you is stronger than you guessed, it means the whirlwind has stripped away everything else, and those other things are wonderful things we want and need and love, and you've been stripped down to this bare harsh rock. But it's there. And it holds. And that's something. At the end of the day, it's something.

There are some people out there today who are getting pretty close to their bedrock. I wish you some shelter from the storm, some good hardy prairie grass to hold tight your topsoil, but when the dark times come push your hand deep through the rich black earth. Feel that? Bedrock. Unbreakable bedrock. That much, at least, will hold.