Yet More Advice-to-Self
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Category Archives: Grief
A Couple More Things I Tell Myself
…since I seem to be in the mode of self-improvement. Or, more likely, just talking to myself as usual…
Here I am. Now.
Honey Badger is not alone. Dead people don’t care, either. Even if they’re going to be reincarnated, they couldn’t possibly care less, I assume, about what anybody thought of them in life. The past is a lock.
What matters, if anything does, to the dead as much as to the living is what’s yet possible (if that includes reincarnation). The only way to get to the future, furthermore, is to be present in the present. All of the yesterdays that ever were can only be altered—at least without a time machine, which, of course, must be built in the present or future since there isn’t one yet, other than the hard to find Vernean one or the wonderful TARDIS of course—by improving the outcomes of those yesterdays in the present and future. Funny how that all works.
But what it tells me is that while I can (I very much hope) learn from the past, there’s no benefit in dwelling on it. And I don’t even think there’s much to be gained from living exclusively for the future. I’m not guaranteed one, after all. I could be caught unawares by a fatal disease, slip on a blot of mud and fall off a cliff, or be eaten by aliens tomorrow. And I can’t be sitting around knitting my brow and fretting over whether anyone will express admiration and gratitude for the wonderfulness of me after that happens.
I’d like to be way too busy until tomorrow, or whenever that cutoff time arrives, to expend any real energy conjuring up what grand eulogies I’ll get and what perfect art will be applied to my tomb, when I’ll be much too dead to care. Not to mention that whether I’m cremated [post-mortem, thankyouverymuch!] as I intend or it’s because there’s nothing left of me but my socks and hat after the aliens ingest me, there won’t be any need for a tomb. In any case, joy and contentment should be usurping all of the space that any such thoughts would aim to occupy. I prefer to think that I’m living out my eulogy, and lest it be of any interest to anyone but me, the most fitting one I can imagine would be that I was too busy living to sit around for a funerary portrait.
I know that I am loved. That is the best of all possible epitaphs I could possibly desire. And it’s a cheering enough thought to keep me occupied for as long as I get to be in the Here and Now. I guess my job is to pass it along to those in my immediate vicinity, my small orbit, so that they might be able to make the same claim.
All Things in Due Season
Boon Companions
When shadow steals across my eyes, when chill sits in my soul, when cries
Of hopelessness and bitter cold would turn me hard, regretful, old,
I turn my memory to when I cradled happiness, and then
Remember that what shaped me so was love, the kind I came to know
From those great luminaries whose wisdom it was to seek and choose,
From the remotest needful place, pursuit of happiness and grace,
Who told in kindly, teaching voice that peace and joy are bought by choice,
That when the frozen dark descends, we’ll find our light
among our friends.
Hope Lives in Unexpected Places
To the Astonishment of Angels
Where in the wilderness of life an adumbration points the way
From our benighted place, our strife and sorrows, to the sun of day,
A banner flares out on the breath of some great strength to give reprieve
To wearied lung and heart, from death to lift us to where we believe
Once more that goodness lies within, that kindness is courageous love,
That generosity’s akin to calling stars down from above
And handing them to needy souls to light their way to higher ground,
And that small songs pierce blazing holes in prison walls with their mere sound—
Here in the bitter night and cold, when such a beacon lights a spark
To guide us forward, as of old, let us rise up and leave the dark
And carry all our fellows, too, to those bright, grand palatial places
Where in the wilderness the true angelic joy renews its graces.
Leave It that Way
How irksome that constant tension between the urge to grow, move and change and the undoubtedly more natural desire for stasis! Isn’t good-enough good enough? Can’t the ol’ universe cut me a break a little more often? I like it when I get something done, especially something I’ve really wanted or needed to finish, and most especially when it turns out well. But I can’t say I’m crazy about the long slog from here to there. Most of the time it’s just work. Drudgery. Laborious, effortful, tiresome and irritating, endless to-do lists of work.
That, as you know, is the unwarranted whingeing of a privileged, well padded and wilfully late-sleeping creature. I am the human equivalent of a Slow Loris, desiring fervently that the world would slow down to my own pace and let me seem to catch up with it—that is, if anyone as lacking in will and momentum as I am could be called fervent. But like the Loris, I am masking with my ever-so-slow progress through life a fair quantity of deliberation, because I do indeed have wishes and plans. They tend to be so vague and changeable that it’s useful to move at the slowest possible pace in order that my ideas will catch up with my motion before I need to act or make any significant alterations in my trajectory.
That’s how a person with seemingly no ambition or energy or intention of doing anything whatsoever that is not forced upon me can have, in quiet reserve, a fair treasury of plots and plans, ideas and inspirations all waiting for the right moment when I decide to take them up in the public view. Like seeds and bulbs, these unfold into leaf and then, as leaves, transform from season to season. Like artworks, they begin as the meeting of a barely formed thought with a pencil mark or two and gradually evolve into drawings that in their turn can change to other kinds of drawings or paintings or parts of collages. That’s how a little book that took about a decade to get from the slightest inkling at its inception to publication can have in its wake another ten books or so that will seem to spring fully formed from the printing press in relatively short shrift because they too were being built and tended, ever so stealthily and quietly and ever so slowly, all the while I’ve been creeping and plodding along.
It may not look like anything’s happening yet, but don’t worry; unless I’ve stopped breathing, I’m still moving imperceptibly and you can safely leave it that way for now.
One Stormy Day…
Bleak indigo and velvet was the sky
That hung above that cold portentous noon
More chilling than the goddess of the moon
If she had bowed her sorrows down to die—
My own, I could not grief so sharp withhold
But wept as though the torrent ought to drown
Me in the rivers of her velvet gown
And leave me breathless on the stones and cold—
But blue is not my cloak, or yet my skin
As much as dark the tenor of the day
And when the storm had lastly passed away
I felt the night might swallow up my sin—
Now sorrow’s misery that spoke you grief
Forgiven falls in sunset’s sweet relief.
Crestfallen
I, like the mighty John Fall-staff, may fall, the butt of others’ laugh,
If I heed not the warning signs, and slip in traps, believe the lines
Yarned by slick liars, kind and not, that tie me in knots I’ve dumbly wrought
Myself; if I would puff and preen, I’ll skid and splat upon the green
In front of wiser fools in stocks, caught up in the snares of my own locks.
Like old Sir John, I’ll meet my doom
If I think me the smartest in the room.
We Wait for Change…
…when we should be agents of change. We wish for rescue when we should be out seeking ways to aid others. We huddle fearfully in the late summer, already conscious that the autumn ahead will lead inevitably to winter’s dormancy or killing frost, when what we could be doing is plotting the way to make use of the transition to position ourselves to take fuller advantage of the ripening and plenitude ahead.
We are, after all, only human. But the exemplary people of generations past have proved, and those of our own time are still showing, that as long as we exist to worry about them the ages and seasons, the events and goings-on do indeed go on, cycle and change, and that if we choose to do so—if we determine to do so and act on it—we can make the changes better and the growth so much the more meaningful and joyful. If we wait for change, it will happen, all right, but it will happen however and whenever the universe or others in it decide. Ours is the calling to engage in the world, no matter how intimidating it is, and move toward what we desire. It may seem like plowing on foot through chin-deep snow, but trusting that there’s a thaw ahead and behind it, renewal, we can stay the course.
At the other end of it is potential that surpasses even our fondest, wildest imaginings, if we dare to move instead of lying waiting.
It’s interesting to me that I wrote the foregoing portions of this post a few weeks ago and set it aside for this very date, not knowing that it would follow immediately on the heels of my publishing my first book, something I’ve longed to do for years but never had the nerve until now. Funny how we sometimes put things in motion without even realizing what we’ve done; it’s a saving grace of our race, I think. O happy day, when we stumble into our dreams because we kept seeking them despite all sense!
Knock Down the Fortress
Battlements Better Breached
In the windows, down the rooftops, through the stonework of her walls,
All the shadows gone at midday, softly as an echo falls,
Whispered secrets came to haunt her, spoken like a jailer’s dream
Though the sun would flame and flourish and the loneliness extreme
Drove her near the brink of madness, still she boarded up her heart;
All the same, away with sadness! Every ending is the start
Of a different adventure—little did our lady know
That her fortress wouldn’t save her, with its brave protective show,
But when breached and doors thrown open, halls filled up with ringing song,
She’d be rescued by companions she’d been fearful of so long.
Hospitality and kindness, love and great companion friends
Altogether bring salvation: joy is where this story ends.
Art-Colored Glasses 