Mystery solved.

My doctor is sending me to an interior decorator. Unless when I heard room-atologist I should have heard rheumatologist. I'll find out June 7 at 7 am (what kind of specialist sees patients at 7 am!?!)

In the mean time, I close out the school year with my students. I sent them a goodbye letter. In it, I quoted things from a book by Ken Gire--Windows of the Soul--that is my most current source of soul-stirring reading. Some of these are his words, others are his own favorite quotes. Either way, these things domino-fall nicely against my own soul so I'll keep them here in my literary scrapbook:

"A glass window stands before us. We raise our eyes and see the glass; we note its quality, and observe its defects; we speculate on its composition. Or we look straight through it on the great prospect of land and sea and sky beyond."
Benjamin Warfield in "Some Thoughts on Predestination"

"Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries."
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Aurora Leigh"
(I wonder: would I have understood this poem even 3 years ago? Back then, my well-shod feet were unstained by fallen berries; while my stained fingers grasped and came back empty. My soul cried out at the unfairness of blackberries suddenly out of season. You withered the bush, God. What an amazing risk You took. Then what a great pay-off when my eyes did indeed see heaven crammed into that fruitless bush.)

"Art is at once surface and symbol."
Oscar Wilde, preface to "The Picture of Dorian Gray"
(This, I think, is one of the most challenging things I try to convey to young people who study the arts under my tutelage. I take it very seriously.)

"The soul, though at all times hidden, is at all times revealed, expressing itself through everything we say and do. Through the ordinary brushstrokes of our everyday life, a portrait of our soul is being painted."
Ken Gire himself in the source book used here
(For teachers, this is a given. For others, maybe not so obvious.)

"There is more to you than you know." (Gandalf to Bilbo Baggins)
J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Hobbit"

And bookends to finish.
At one end, C.S. Lewis:
"The book or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing...They are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited."

At the other end, Abraham Heschel:
"He who is satisfied has never truly craved." Related to this quote Gire says, "...True food from heaven...The more we taste, the more we long for another taste. And another. Until at last the hunger grows so intense it transforms not only our lesser longings but our very lives themselves."

To me, this last is the lost heart of evangelism; one I strive to revive in my own little life at least. It reminds me of the quote you showed me, my love, from Blue Like Jazz:
"...I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself...I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened."

And now before I really start to ramble off on a tangent...a last quote appears, reminding me to wind this down, playing even now in the background.

"That's it, Buster, you just lost your brain privileges!"
as said by Plankton on SpongeBob Squarepants.