What do I care?

What do I care, in the dreams and the langour of spring,

That my songs do not show me at all? 

For they are a fragrance, and I am a flint and a fire,

I am an answer, they are only a call.

But what do I care, for love will be over so soon,

Let my heart have its say and my mind stand idly by,

For my mind is proud and strong enough to be silent,

It is my heart that makes my songs, not I. 

~ Sara Teasdale (1884 - 1933) 

I found this poem in winter, near the beach of my childhood, and dreamed of spring. And with it, the promise of fairer weather and better days. But now that spring has arrived, I find myself weathering a different kind of storm. I'm staring into a vast, churning void, heaving with absence and silence and unsaid things. It is a torment and an anguish to hold so much unresolved for so long, and in the midst of it I feel profoundly unseen, unheard, even unknown. It is as if I have become tangled in someone else's version of a story, and it is unwieldy, intractable, unyielding to all my efforts to shape it into something kinder, more generous, more benevolent. And there's a wailing sound coming from my mouth, a keening that's been made by the pain sustained in the story, so there's this awful noise coming out of me and there are people who think this is what I am, that this role that's been forced upon me is who I am. No. It is not. But the story has been so overwhelming and so relentless on so many levels and for so many reasons, and in all of that loss and hope and longing and grief and striving and brutality, there must be a voice. Let my heart have its say. All of that suffering cannot be visited upon a single person without choking out some form of expression in response. The wind cannot sing through the clefts and curves of the sand dunes without scouring them into new shapes, but neither can the beach be dragged away from its moorings without the ocean roaring its terrible songs. But those howls are the voice of pain, and I am not my pain. I am undone in pain, but I am not destroyed by it. My mind is proud and strong enough to be silent. Even at my lowest ebb, I have had the presence of mind to guard and defend some place of sanctuary within myself, so that I have the wherewithal to do what needs to be done. To declare painful truth in the face of the vicious onslaught. To chant the wracking lamentations of that other story without being consumed by them. But it is gruelling work, it is exhausting, and I am worn down. So now that the spring I dreamed of has arrived, bringing kinder weather but uncertain relief, I take comfort in these words, written nearly a hundred years ago, which remind me of my strength, my ability and my worth: I am a flint and a fire, / I am an answer, they are only a call.

Perhaps

 

Perhaps you haven’t put enough effort into understanding how angry I am, and how angry I am at you, and why I am so angry. 

 

I ache. 

First

First, we sing for our hearts.

Black

falling deeper

getting closer

 to the furthest part

of darkness

The edge of my heart just fades to

black.

deepest secret

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart 

                                                                       ~ E.E. Cummings 

Tonight

sun lights up

the daytime

you

light up my life

the hand

that calls you forward

is the hand

that leaves me

behind

hold me

hold me

tonight

Precious

Today is full with sunshine and light.

I hold these precious, fragile moments in my heart.

always

always

the expanse

The point of marriage – – –

                                                       is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

nourishment

i nourish myself ––– 

it does not wait

     
it is     

     fleeting  

    temporal   

      shifting

    momentary  

   dreamlike   

    uncertain  

  mysterious   

   tentative   

  fragile      

      

     it is     

   precious    

       &       

it does not wait

it does not wait

On this night, again

All is healed

all is health.

High summer holds the earth.

Hearts all whole. 

Instead

So, instead of those words, I write these - - - 

care

solicitude

regard

concern

gentleness

esteem

respect

love
consideration

goodness

support
affection

kindness
safety

trust

Six

On this anniversary, I have a profound sense of the distance I've travelled over the last six years.

Then, I was stumbling around weakly, without understanding which fractured part of me had gone missing. Now, I feel whole, not sheared in half. Regardless of my lost breast, my lost memory, my fatigue, I feel whole. It's as if the intact part of my spirit needed to battle it out with the most broken parts of my life, to reclaim my essential strength and energy. In the cataclysm that ensued, in the long, slow healing that followed, I was remade. Incrementally, my own truest Self was restored. 

Now, I feel whole. 
I am whole. 
I am awake. 
I am alive.

Antidote

It's not all bad news.

There's a simple, but potent, antidote: empathy.

And there's that word again: connection.

Ridiculously happy

I am ridiculously happy today.

No particular reason, but my heart is soaring and my spirit is singing.

I’ve had a smirk on my face all day long. It started this morning, after a meeting with my boss who gave my project the go ahead. I had to excuse myself and go and smile hard in the toilet for a few minutes, because the degree of my smiliness was out of proportion with the result of what was actually a fairly mundane encounter.

It continued after a powwow with my new supervisor. For some reason he couldn’t sort out the lighting in the meeting room, so I was grinning about the hilariousness of the “mood lighting” encounter.

After another meeting this afternoon, more smiles. Left work early, sunshine still blazing all around me. The bus was late, commuters all around me were getting tense. My happiness bubble was intact. And so it went on.

And then I remembered something. On the bus this morning, I was listening to my ipod, when something unusual shuffled itself in to my aural space. I was nearing the end of my journey, so I didn’t listen for long, but I did shut my eyes and let the sounds swirl around me and soak in completely.

It was The Gyuto Monks of Tibet ~ The Jewel in the Lotus ~ A Guided Meditation for Healing the Heart.

I think it worked.