Last night a friend taught me this prayer: “Make me see what I need to see, God, so that I can do what I need to do.“

This morning while I am sitting outside for my quiet time, I remember my friend and her prayer. And then my eyes fall upon a dragon, right in front of me and staring straight at me.

We have a 2-foot-high whimsical metal dragon in our garden. He falls over easily and has spent these many weeks lying on his side, but now someone (must’ve been my husband Frank) has stood him up again.  Our dragon is standing upright and staring directly at me with its little rabbit ears straight up, holding its solar-powered ball of light.

“Is this what I need to see today?” I wonder, and as certain as the rising sun in the East is flooding the scene with light, the answer comes.  “Yes! Focus on the fun today, and the light.”

And how I need that message.

I am trying out a strong medication to (hopefully) control my essential tremor. (When my tremors got to the point where I couldn’t type without making multiple errors, I said “Enough!”)

The medicine makes me groggy and sometimes, like today, foggy-minded.

I hate feeling like this. It scares me. It makes me afraid that I won’t be able to function, to have a good quality of life.

Then all those other little fears, holding hands, come before me, doing their little gray dance, waving, trying to capture my attention. Fears about the cure being worse than the disease. Fears about losing myself in this change. More and more fears, dancing more and more wildly to get my attention, and then bringing in their showpiece attention-grabber… that grey ghost that, like cataracts, becomes familiar to us as we age… that fear of What Is To Come.

But today I remind myself that fears are not facts and, actually, most of them will probably never happen. Then, as I look at the little dragon, I remind myself (in a foggy-minded way) that today is the third day after an increase in the medication and the third day is always the hardest.  Last time on the fourth day I felt great. We shall see.

So here I sit, groggy and having a hard time focusing. Scared.

I can choose to dwell on my grogginess. And fear.  To splinter my days, my attention, to waste away the hours watching the little grey ones dance.

Or I can choose to see the light.  And the beauty, all around me.

I can focus on the light I need to see. On the amazingly unbelievably beautiful moments that insert themselves into my day. Like how I look up and see, towering above the dragon, my neighbor’s giant Bradford pear tree, every branch filled with white blossoms unfurling against the blue sky.

Or, in the yard East of me, incandescent in the light of the rising sun, a magnolia in bloom, a white torch glowing as if lit from within, brimming with light for a few seconds only, for those lucky enough to see.

As all this crosses my mind in a flash, a single Canadian goose races across the sky, honking loudly as to say, “Wake up, wake up!  See the light!  See how beautiful the world is this morning!”

I watch it fly across the sky. I say, “Yes.”

And feel joy.