thaw allows the life beneath into the light of day.
“Everyone we meet has wounds upon their heart. Everyone is waiting for someone to scatter the seeds of love amongst their tears and to be patient enough to wait for their beautiful fragrance of dreams to awaken once more.”
When we are born the heavens tell a story.
We don’t know the text, so we fill in the blanks,
to live it out or to create a new path. Without a plot
to foretell the dangers that come our way,
we trip and dance and love and grieve,
as details of a life unfold,
and arguments of free will rise.
We ask ourselves, “to do or not to do” —
a question we face each day, as we
flow through life’s ups and downs,
then wonder if we still end up, after all the fuss,
in the place foretold at our birth,
where we were headed all along.
Just as the river meanders,
with new routes created
by natures unfolding desires,
may it be so—
that we move along,
to exactly where we need to be.
“The world you are forced to inhabit does not match up to the world.”
“I knew at an early age I wanted to act. Acting was always easy for me. I don’t believe in predestination, but I do believe that once you get wherever it is you are going, that is where you were going to be.”
Morgan Freeman
“What I’m saying is . . . remembering feels like time travel, right? Dreaming works the same way. Well, what if that’s all we have in the first place? Thoughts arranged in time. And we’re free—if we can only learn how—to change those thoughts around all we like. So, no predestination. One world. One ever-changing universe. And we can change it!”
Each morning, the news feed stuns me:
images, pain, apprehension—
helplessness in the face of atrocities.
Each morning calls forth:
support, humanitarian aid, food, medical care.
Each morning:
directs me toward the depths of humanity—
that which links us all.
Each morning, I sit in quiet and remember:
go within, anchor in, seek the calm still point,
believe in the sacred seed—within each living thing.
Each morning, I awaken to wonder:
what will be next?
This morning:
I watch the yellow finch,
sip my tea,
sit in my sacred space.
This morning, as the unthinkable looms:
I remember, remember, and remember—
the source, the beauty, and the bounty of this,
our one amazing world.
(reworked poem from March 2022)
“Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“There is peace even in the storm”
Vincent Van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh
“When I’m in turmoil, when I can’t think, when I’m exhausted and afraid and feeling very, very alone, I go for walks.”
Jim Butcher, Storm Front
For Ongoing Resource List: Reading for Heart and Mind
I feel fascinated by endings that arrive with a multitude of announcement styles leaving us witnessing the crack, the break, the dissolution, or one found within a final breath.
An ending might appear as gently as the period that ends this sentence; it is simply complete, leaving no emotion, question, or further thought.
It might come with one or more question marks: Now? Why? When? Are you kidding????
Or maybe an exclamation with excitement, surprise, or one that is severe and feels like an explosion. Yay, I am done!!! We are finished! or, Today, war is declared!
The end might come like a short story with the announcement of an impending death as we move through, with anticipation, to absorb as much as we are able in a short time, to long for more as the end appears, and to feel the shock of loss as we witness the final whisper of a phrase.
An end might be felt as if it is the end of a saga with a list following a colon. One that we know is coming but takes many chapters to bring us fully to the finale which holds a multitude of emotions: exhaustion, relief, memory, tears, laughter, confusion, and finally, hopefully, a feeling of satisfaction in that all was done, all love expressed.
The end might arrive unannounced, found in a phone call giving information, yet hits the target with a larger font in big bold black letters: THIS DOOR WILL BE CLOSING.
If every beginning holds an ending and every ending holds a beginning, maybe an ending is never really an ending but the birthing of a conversation that lives on in memory, story, reliving, reenactment, or the way we take it apart to more fully understand, conclude, savor, or bring forward, as we learn to live or to act in a new and different way.
With these thoughts, I now say, “The end.”
“Life is like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.”
Jim Henson
“The end of THE END is the best place to begin THE END, because if you read THE END from the beginning of the beginning of THE END to the end of the end of THE END, you will arrive at the end.”
Lemon Snicket, The End
“It is always important to know when something has reached its end. Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn’t matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over.”
Paulo Coelho, The Zahir
For Ongoing Reading List: Reading for Heart and Mind
How did I end up compiling a book of my art and poetry at this time in my life?
My summer art and poetry exhibition were well received with many requests from longtime supporters, as well as people I was meeting for the first time, for me to create a book that could be kept in hand to ponder the poetry and the art at leisure. I decided to follow the lead and I began a journey into learning what it takes to self-publish a book, besides, well, writing the book. (More on that wild ride another time.)
I was into a deep research dive when my sister-in-law, Cynthia, was diagnosed with terminal glioblastoma brain cancer and given possibly three months to live. This news numbed my brain while I tried to absorb what this meant for my 61-year-old sister-in-law with new grandbabies to hold and to love, my brother and my nephews who were trying to understand and accept this reality, and all of us who loved and cared for her.
A couple of summers ago at Cynthia and Bill’s cabin, after she and I returned from a robust kayak journey, Cynthia strongly suggested that I write a book about my El Camino experience from 2017. I gave the idea serious thought, but Covid hit, art became my life, and it went on the back burner. Now, it turns out the poetry and art book captured my imagination. As I write and edit, I still see Cynthia at the cabin and hear her speak to me of her vision and her belief in my ability to write. I now draw on that vision to give me momentum.
We all have people in our lives who hold up a mirror for us to better see ourselves. People who have looked upon us and have seen what we have not, or what we have held with uncertainty or even fear. Cynthia, a writer of short stories she hoped to publish, left us after a short two and a half months, but she still reminds me to speak up in support—naming what I see in another’s potential, in a loving and caring way. Is there someone who has influenced you in a way that you did not expect? I would love to hear from you.
The El Camino story is still cooking—gaining steam, making some bubbles.
He came to see me
after the death
and the days then months
attempting to rebuild what was
to be both she and he
for the little one who longed for just one
as the blocks placed one atop another
crash down to the floor
then stacked and restacked
a life that could no longer be
until he forgot himself
could not sit nor play
with the boy he loved
and lost the sleep longed for
to ease the pain felt in a heart
that ached to open to peace
and being in change
that can’t be contained or
reversed only built upon
as he lives into
being carried and opened
then transformed
as he and his son
walk hand in hand
into a new day.
“The song is ended but the melody lingers on.”
Irving Berlin
“No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.”
C. S. Lewis
“You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms too full to embrace the present.”
Jan Gildwell
For Ongoing Resource List: Reading for Heart and Mind
It is said, “It will last a lifetime!”
“How long is that?” I ask.
Is it the 97 years my mother-in-law
expressed her gratitude’s?
Is it the 7 days my daughter graced
us with her existence?
Maybe the 2 weeks a mosquito
became a pest?
Or the 24-hour life of a mayfly?
Existence—not infinity but arbitrary.
A question of quantity or quality?
Between the intake of breath
to our last expiration, we count days, months,
then years; yet truly, they are breaths.
In each moment, we live a lifetime,
not knowing if we gain one more inhalation,
one more moment to love what we see,
who we are, whom we touch, the
sun kissing our skin, or the colors of a fall tree.
We take it all in; we breathe it out.
One breath, one breath, one holy precious breath. In memory of my bonus sister Cynthia and my Aunt Pat, who within these last three weeks, each breathed a final breath, leaving a world and loved ones held close to their hearts.
“the tired sunsets and the tired people – it takes a lifetime to die and no time at all.”
Charles Bukowski
“It’s not that we have little time, but more that we waste a good deal of it.”
Seneca
…Enjoy this precious single breath, for the harvest of our whole lives is that same one breath.”
Omar Khayyám, Quatrains-Ballades
For Ongoing Resource List: Reading for Heart and Mind
Who am I now?
he inquires of the image—
the me that is not me,
without you,
reflecting
lines of loss as identifiable
as a fingerprint.
In unfamiliar land
he explores, tastes,
tries on identities,
see what fits—
foreign to himself,
a shadow of what was.
Visions arise of what could be.
Body, mind, and heart
tired and worn,
he sees the we
now past.
The future is I.
Who am I now?
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. …live in the question.”
Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.”
Stories fill me
Memories shared
Emotions felt
Witnessed
Words assembled
Convey a life
61 years in 15 minutes
A splash of color here
A gray area there
A focal point
Bring it all together
As complex as
A 1,000-piece puzzle
As simple as sitting
In the heart of love.
“Life is a song—sing it. Life is a game—play it. Life is a challenge—meet it. Life is a dream—realize it. Life is a sacrifice—offer it. Life is love—enjoy it.”
Sai Baba
“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments but what is woven into the lives of others.”
Thucydides
“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not a mark of weakness but power. They speak more eloquently than 10,000 tongues. They are messengers of overwhelming grief and unspeakable love.
She advances ever close to her last breath,
and asks, “What is after?”
“After this belly rises as I breathe,
the touch of grandbabies soft skin,
the kiss placed on these lips by my love,
after the thoughts that drift through this mind,
the fear in not knowing,
the joy in seeing my beloved’s face.”
Then, she hears from within,
Look to what was before.
“Before this body descended
from my mother’s warmth,
wailed as I took my first breath,
before this body formed
from a seed fertilized to grow,
before I was a thought or a desire,
before the stars formed?”
You were a part of everything, and nothing.A drop in the ocean of love,
the scent of a flower wafting on a breeze,
all that is after that which was before.
“Now I see,” she whispers.
“I will return from what I have learned,
from this body, from form, from life, in love.
I return to the ocean of love.”
(image from Hubble Telescope)
“In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory.”
J.R.R. Tolklen
“That’s what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays.”
Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet In Heaven
“Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the ocean.”
