Moosje M Goosen

In March 2017, after four years of illness, I underwent surgery for a life-saving bilateral lung transplant. Even though the transplant required waiting, it was impossible for me to anticipate it rationally. Suzanne Weenink happened to be visiting me in hospital when my doctor announced that there was a donor match. Suzanne was the first to hear and share this extraordinary news with me. Around midnight that day I was rolled into the operation room. I woke up the next day around 5pm, breathing through different lungs.

My donor lungs have given me renewed health, and the awareness that we share a deep connectivity, with the people we know and those we don’t know, with the living and the dead.

Before my lung transplant, being ill and having deserted “the army of the upright,” in the words of Virginia Woolf, I was forced to live a life of the Mind, a life of reading, writing, thinking – but with an ailing body.

For Daily Practice I have composed a text from my writing of this period, to give room and occasion to this extraordinary period in my life, and to invite visitors to enter this state of mind.

In collaboration with Suzanne Weenink and Nienke Terpsma (meditation cushions).

Moosje M Goosen, March 2020