“And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line…Happiness is the longing for repetition.” – Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being.

If you look at this photo, you will see Maria lost in thought, dazed by an illness, starting at her fish Frida. Maria got sick last night – it looks like food poisoning – and was weaker and paler than I  have yet seen her. She didn’t even protest when I went out to take care of the animals and the dogs.

That’s a first. Seeing her across that space, an image in the glass, I felt a deep and rich sorrow that was almost overwhelming to me. It is easier to hate than to love, isn’t it? Doesn’t illness call up compassion in a powerful way?

There was a feeling of melancholy in our usually cheerful farmhouse, sickness can bring us to that.

Maria was awfully sick today, she couldn’t eat a thing, the color was drained from her face, she could hardly get up.

She spent the day resting, reading, sleeping. She finally took some food at dinner, and I fed her ginger tea all day and generally ignored the advice of friends who suggested various exotic recipes involving rice, oatmeal or herbs. They don’t know Maria, she is a Willa Cather girl, she toughs it out without medicine, doctors, or home remedies.

I feel especially emotional and vulnerable when someone I love is sick and I am helpless to do anything about it, other than to watch and boil water. Sometimes I think that love is the longing for the half of ourselves we lost or never had.

It is fashionable these days to be cynical and cruel and angry, but I honestly thing there is nothing harder or sometimes sadder than compassion, and nothing cheaper than hatred.

My own pain and occasional sickness is nothing to the pain and sadness I feel when with someone or for someone, that pain, wrote Milan Kundera in “The Unbearable Lightness Of Being,” is “intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”

Cruelty and anger are of the self, they are the most narcissistic and self-centered of emotions. And the cheapest.  Compassion asks us to feel the pain, sickness and suffering of others and thus becomes a heavy burden that can pull down the strongest soul.

Plato wrote in his Symposium that human beings were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half or ourselves we have lost.

Watching Maria, this vibrant and intensely energetic and creative person, I felt weak and  vulnerable.

Watching her through this looking-glass, I realized that I want nothing that I don’t already have, for the first time in my life. I think it is true that a person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person. There is no perfect life, only life.

Tomorrow, a big storm coming, it will last all day Wednesday and well in the night and next morning.

I am the Hunter-Gatherer here. Even when she is not sick, Maria would never notice an onrushing storm, or care a whig about it. If necessary, she would eat dry cereal for a few days or munch on so thawed out bread with cheese, which is all she ate when I first met her.

I rushed out today and stocked up – two frozen pizzas from the Round House, cafe, milk, a chocolate fudge brownie for Maria, some anti-creosote powder for the wood stoves, some fresh fruit and vegetables, some freshly sliced American cheese and a bag of wheat pretzels for me.I also got two new books, the new book of essays by Sadie Smith, “Feel Free,” for Maria, and the new non-fiction book about immigrants for me by Dave Eggers  – “The Monk Of Mokta,” will sit with me by the fire when the snow is shoveled and the animals fed, and the toes and fingers need to thaw.

In our cozy farmhouse in a raging storm, I will be dreaming of compassion, sipping hot chocolate, eating our gourmet pizza,  taking photos of the snow, blogging, and giving thanks for it, all, especially for love.

Love is the sister of compassion, and compassion is the mother of feelings.

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.” – Milan Kundera.