Holidaying for a couple of nights in the Snowy Mountains my Favourite Wife and I are surrounded by trees, wonderful Australian trees, whose leaves hang down. And on our third alpine pilgrimage for the year we are hoping, once again, that it will snow!

Downward-hanging leaves are superb. I relish the sight of towering snow gums with their striking, variegated trunks and verdant leaves – all hanging down. To me it’s deeply satisfying, but to the English colonists this was deeply unsettling; so alienating, in fact, that their earliest artists sometimes painted gum leaves growing upwards from stem and branch. I wonder if it was merely artistic licence; or was it, perhaps, a subconscious reaction to a strange and fearful world? Did they actually see our leaves at all? Sight can be a most unreliable sense! The world we see, or think we see, is not always the true world at all.

A week has now passed since the neurology appointment that indicated some form of motor neurone disease. (How I hate typing that phrase. I still find it difficult to get my fingers, my mouth, or my head around it). It’s exactly a year since exactly the same thing happened in exactly the same doctor’s rooms; and yet in spite of the months of uncertaincy life is richer than ever. I don’t think I am naive about the future, and I can see all too clearly the physical evidence of my predicament. For example B3 (our second power wheelchair and the third incarnation of good old Bugger) was delivered this week, and she’s surely something to feast your eyes on! But it is not what my eyes see that demands my attention; at least not those eyes. With some other ‘inner eye’ I have seen a clarity of being that I find irresistable.

Perhaps we see this world ‘through a glass dimly’ at best; and yet I have a sense that the glass is clearing a little. With so much that ought to anchor me in the visible world, I often glimpse something new beyond the bounds of normal sight: the sheer delight and pristine calmness of simple existence.

I remember another episode that also included a doctor and a diagnosis. Several years ago I went to a GP for some reason or other, and happened to mention that I had a painful knuckle. The doctor gave my right hand the briefest, cursory glance without even turning round in his chair and immediately pronounced it to be arthritis. I was incensed! At barely 40 how could I possibly have arthritis? I protested volubly, but the doctor said he could prove it was arthritis by a simple test: he would squeeze the knuckle in a certain way, and it would hurt like hell. Which he did, and which it also did. He was an Indian man and a Christian, and in a rather brusque way dismissed my self-pitying protestations. “Tell me, did you think you were going to live forever?” he chided with a stern, sideways shake of his head. Miraculously the ‘arthritis’ lasted just a year or two, but in the trifling annoyance I briefly tasted my own mortality and even saw the distant possibility of resurrection! Perhaps that sounds silly, but truly there was a strange joy in that mild pain.

There is, however, one time of day when blindness can obscure the path. The night watch is by far the hardest and ’round 3am I sometimes lose my way. My inner eyes that in the light of day see past the substance of things, in darkness focus instead on the insubstantial terrors of so-called reality.

For three weeks we have been looking at the alpine weather forecast every day, and right now (at 3am!) it still promises snow for tomorrow. We are holding our breath, barely able to contain our excitement about the future. Will it snow in the morning?

Rejoice!