"When the body is rendered useless..."

From The Sound Of A Wild Snail Eating, as featured on NPR's Weekend Edition. The quote is too long for Twitter or Facebook, but so lovely I just had to post it somewhere. So relate to the mind running "like a bloodhound" or being "flooded with storms of thought, unspeakable sadness, and intolerable loss" as well as the way time is both painstakingly slow and instantaneous at the same time. The discussion at NPR also reminded me of my desire for a terrarium. Some connection to the forest that I miss so much.

When the body is rendered useless, the mind still runs like a bloodhound along well-worn trails of neurons, tracking the echoing questions: the confused family of whys, whats, and whens and their impossibly distant kin how. The search is exhaustive; the answers, elusive. Sometimes my mind went blank and listless; at other times it was flooded with storms of thought, unspeakable sadness, and intolerable loss.

Given the ease with which health infuses life with meaning and purpose, it is shocking how swiftly illness steals away those certainties. It was all I could do to get through each moment, and each moment felt like an endless hour, yet days slipped silently past. Time unused and only endured still vanishes, as if time itself is starving, and each day is swallowed whole, leaving no crumbs, no memory, no trace at all.