I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert … Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
–Percy Bysshe Shelley
I want to escape this haunted place, walk away, never look back, forget, and wander among green trees, feeling their breath on my face. I want the blessing of the rain on my skin, to plunge my hands into rich soil, lie open to birdsong and the sun’s touch.
I want to be free.
Yet, again and again, I find myself crouching in front of that shattered visage, tracing the frown, the wrinkled lip, the sneer of cold command, unable to leave it or look away. I remember, and weep, and try to understand how something so mighty, so powerful, can fall and break apart, become nothing more than a colossal wreck in a desert in an antique land, unvisited, unremarked, nothing but time’s debris.
I was born in the shadow of those stone legs. I watched the sculptors at work, perfecting, shaping. I learned to worship Ozymandias, to make myself small before him, to endure his stony displeasure and indifference.
I did not know his name for a long time, not until I read this poem in high school. He was called Money. He was called Status. He was called Power. He was king of kings – that I never doubted. He required unceasing sacrifice; though I sacrificed everything I had, the sneer and wrinkled lip looked down upon me in infinite contempt. I looked upon his works and saw destruction and anguish. I saw lies and shattered lives and I despaired.
By Wei Gao on Unsplash
I left. I crawled away under the weight of my own inadequacy and unworthiness, across the lone and level sands, feeling his stone gaze upon me. I left, and one day I got to my feet and walked, and then I remembered how to dance, and swim, and the world opened up for me, showing me friendship, healing and joy.
Then, across the years, across the miles, Ozymandias fell, and the ground of my being has shuddered and convulsed with the impact ever since.
Understand, when he fell it all fell. Secrets lay revealed. Lies tumbled naked in the desert sun. Ozymandias, so carefully sculpted by generations before me, disintegrated. I understood then what I was taught to call Money was really named Fear. Status was in fact Shame. The wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command were not love, were never love. The king of kings lay forgotten, impotent, slowly wearing away to sand.
“Look on my works … and despair.”
It’s all gone, the gods of my childhood, the king of kings, the money, the status, the false power.
All gone.
Except for me. I am not gone.
In Maine, I eat and sleep. I journal and write. I walk to work, talk to people, laugh, teach. I sweat on the elliptical and exercise in the pools. I pay bills, make plans, file papers. I buy groceries and cat food. I do laundry and clean. I work in the garden. I’m distracted and absentminded, prone to sleeplessness and unexpected fits of tears welling from some deep unaware place. Or, on the other hand, maybe that place is all I’m truly aware of right now.
I talk and text and email to staff at the memory care center in Colorado where my mother resides, to her hospice team, to people at the agency we’ve now hired by request to provide extra caregiving. I hear about dementia, combative behavior, falls, sabotaged bed alarms, incontinence, sleeplessness, anxiety, medication adjustment. I am called to calm Mom down as though that was ever possible, as though she trusts me or ever took any comfort from me.
And part of me kneels in the desert, watching the family money (a mere pittance, judged by today’s standards rather than those of 100 years ago) and pride, that towering edifice more important than love, more important than health and happiness, more important than anything, sink into the desert like water. Is the desert powerful enough to cleanse it? Shattered Ozymandias still frowns, wrinkles his lip, sneers his cold command, but his works have disappeared even as he himself wears away.
Do I grieve or rejoice? I try to understand. I try to feel something more than despair at the waste of lives, at the dearth of love.
One thing I know: I will not stay here, beside Ozymandias. It’s a cursed place, a dark place. I will leave it to the circling vultures, the sun, the wind, and the silence. I will leave it to Time to wear away the sneer, the frown, the wrinkled lip, the trunkless legs. I left once, and I will leave again. I know this desert is a small place and the world is wide. I know who I am now. I know what love is, and that I’m capable of it. I am no longer alone.
I would have saved my family if I could have, but my gifts have no monetary value. What I have to give, what I am, cannot be bought or sold. I do not accrue a good rate of interest. I was not judged a sound investment. I did not increase my family’s status. Ozymandias, king of kings, was incapable of seeing or knowing me, being far too dazzled with his mighty works, dissolving now into sand while I myself, still vital and alive, pause to find absolution and mourn, groping for a way forward, watching it all decay.
Questions:
What idols have fallen in your life?
What family secrets have you discovered?
Do you find comfort in the eventual fall of what once seemed all-powerful, or does it frighten you?
How have you challenged your family’s definition and expectations of you?
Leave a comment below!
To read my fiction, serially published free every week, go here:
As I lingered on the threshold between waking and sleep this morning, thinking about loss, the subject of my last post; thinking about my distressing inability to publish my usual essay on Substack last week, and thinking about the ways in which I’m reshaping my beliefs about my family and therefore myself, I recognized the chaos part of the dance.
Photo by Leon Liu on Unsplash
To dance in chaos involves letting everything go except the beat. Chaos is about strength, not beauty. It’s about grounding and staying grounded even as the music flings us through space.
Chaos is the part where you dance till you drool.
The edge of chaos is fertile, regenerative, thick with possibility. It’s also powerfully disorganized and unpredictable. It’s exhausting, overwhelming. Too much is happening too fast. When dancing chaos, we give ourselves entirely to the music and follow it through the tumult however we can. As Margaret Shepherd said, “Sometimes your only available transportation is a leap of faith.” Add music to that idea and you have the chaos part of the dance. The car has broken down. The planes are grounded. The train has derailed. The illusion we’re in control has shattered. Our routines and schedules fall apart around us. Our internal and external worlds begin to reshape in ways we can’t understand.
I’ve been troubled in the last couple of weeks by the violence of my rebellion against doing anything except work and play in the garden. I don’t want to write. I don’t want to think or reason. I don’t care about the damn housework. Beltane, May 1st, came and went without my usual ritual and practices. I don’t want to be brave, strong, organized, compassionate, tolerant, empathetic, or responsible.
I can’t remember a time in my life when I’ve shut down like this. I/m unable to guilt or lash myself into being “productive.” I feel ashamed and scared. I don’t recognize myself.
It occurs to me this is my Beltane ritual this year. After all, Beltane is about fertility. Physical fertility, the cyclical fertility of the growing season, creative fertility. My ritual this year is being in the garden. There, with my knees in the dirt, the smell and feel of the soil, the texture of new weeds and old leaves and matted grass (we didn’t have a mower last year), I am peaceful. I know where I am. I am, literally, grounded. I don’t have my phone. Nobody needs anything from me. I bend, kneel, stoop, dig, rake and shovel compost mindlessly. I dream vaguely about new garden beds, rewilding with native shrubs and trees. Black flies come for their drop of blood. The sun shines down on me.
Right now I need to be in the garden. I don’t understand it entirely, but perhaps there’s no need to. What I do know is something in me refuses to engage with anything else. As the lilies and iris emerge, as the tulips bloom and the daffodils fade, as the lilacs bud and the magnolia blossoms fall and cover the ground, I mulch and prune and feel seismic forces beyond my control reshape me internally.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
So much of what I’ve learned and believed about my family and my place in it has crumbled into dust. Old family myths have exploded with fragments of evidence from Mom’s life, unearthed in the process of selling her estate. I didn’t entirely believe in some of those myths, but they were stable. They provided a family background I was familiar with. I built an identity from the identities family members who came before me created. If I am not the despised one, the broken one, the one who doesn’t belong, the cuckoo in the nest, who am I? Has all that been yet another family myth? Has any of it ever been about who I really am or my personal value, or have I been nothing but a faceless, nameless piece in a dysfunctional family pattern?
I long for freedom. Is this the beginning of freedom?
My recent inability to force myself to take care of business, to be responsible, consistent, and productive, is terrifying. I’ve always pushed myself through any resistance or fatigue. I’ve always known I must justify my existence with constant production, pleasing, and caregiving.
Am I free of that now? If I don’t have to justify my existence because that belief is a lie based on family mythology that’s at least part lies, is that freedom? Am I brave enough to take my freedom, walk away from all the burdens (too heavy for me, but I’ve carried them anyway), and simply choose what makes me happy? I have stood at this crossroad before.
Two weeks ago I wrote about loss. Now I’m watching glimmers of new beginnings, nebulous glints of what might come into the disturbed ground of my being. I pick up trash and find rich soil beneath it. I dig up dandelions and burdocks and discover little patches of old garden. The sun touches me without asking for anything in return. I rake away last year’s debris and mix it with compost to build new garden beds. This morning, the crab apple is in bloom. The tight buds on the white lilac by the porch door gather perfume.
Meanwhile, back in Colorado, strangers live in my mother’s house. Hospice tells me Mom can no longer ambulate independently, even with her walker. A call in the middle of last night reported yet another fall, as she doesn’t realize (or won’t admit) her own weakness. Appraisal revealed my wealthy and powerful grandmother’s gold, pearls, and gemstones were mostly costume, not real. A ladylike façade. A denial of her impoverished roots. A glimpse of shame and fear that rival my own, though I never knew they were there.
Photo by Doug Maloney on Unsplash
It’s Mother’s Day weekend. A friend asked me yesterday how I felt about that, and I had no words.
What is real? What can I bear? The dirt on my knees, under my fingernails. The spectacularly itchy, burning welts of black fly bites. The egg shells, banana peels, and soggy segments of lemon in the compost pile. The lovely cupped double tulips I planted last fall, white, pink and purple. The thumb-sized bumble bee tumbling ecstatically among the pink blossoms of the crabapple. My own breath, heartbeat, sweat. The sun on my skin.
Gardens are made and remade. They die and are reborn. They go wild and survive until rediscovered. They adjust, adapt, take advantage of the edge of chaos according to their own wisdom and purpose.
For now, I’m in the garden, dancing with chaos, nurturing new life, hanging on.
Questions:
What is your experience of Mother’s Day?
In the times during which you struggle to manage your life, are you fearful or do you allow yourself to follow your needs?
Do you find chaos joyful and exhilarating or frightening?
What opportunities have you had to reframe your family?
Leave a comment below!
To read my fiction, serially published free every week, go here:
I have returned from ten days in Colorado during which my brother and I prepared for and hosted a living estate sale. Together, we emptied, polished and cleaned my mother’s house. Thankfully, she herself was oblivious, as she is in memory care with a hospice team supporting her.
Photo by Michal Balog on Unsplash
We were successful in our goals, which were to spend time with Mom, hold the sale, and ready the house for renters, who are moving in as I write this.
It doesn’t feel like success, though. Since I arrived back home to Maine, I’ve been groping for what it does feel like, but I couldn’t come up with a clear answer until this morning.
It feels like loss. It feels like a hundred small losses.
Until I came to Maine, Mom and I lived in a small town at the foot of the Spanish Peaks in Southern Colorado. The town lies in a green (sometimes) valley nestled below the Trinchera Mountain Range and the peaks, and something about its geography brings harsh, dry winds that scour the landscape for days, filling the dry air with bits of dry landscape. The wind is relentless, without mercy, inescapable.
It was windy for the first several days we were there, and I feel as though I have been staked in the teeth of that wind, like a plastic bag caught on a barbed wire fence, whipped and shredded into ribbons.
I hadn’t realized before that cleaning out an old person’s house is never about just that person. Mom, as the oldest remaining family member, kept papers and pictures regarding known and unknown ancestors, fragments of hidden family stories. She had her mother’s antique armoire, filled with crystal stemware, silver, and china with gold accents. Cupboards and drawers housed ornaments, cut-glass dishes, and jewelry that belonged to my maternal grandmother. Cross stitch, embroidery, and needlepoint done by that same grandmother and my younger self hung on walls throughout the house. She held onto papers and records from my adopted father, deceased for many years. Mom still had his good parka and a pair of his almost unworn boots in her coat closet.
We recycled and shredded pounds of paper, filled and tied countless bags of trash. I packed boxes and baskets and plastic storage containers with bathroom products, cleaning products, dishes, silver, kitchen stuff. I put inexpensive jewelry on a tarnished silver tray for the sale. We used up all the old newspaper for wrapping and I put out an SOS for more, which speedily arrived. I packed boxes to ship home to myself of the few mementos I wanted and took them to the post office, one by one.
All these bits and pieces of lives, of family. A collection of nail clippers and tweezers, from rusty and stiff to new. Hundreds of greeting cards for every occasion. Old letters, report cards, school papers. Boxes and albums full of photos.
Photo by Laura Fuhrman on Unsplash
In the laundry room, I sorted through products for cleaning, polishing, waxing, staining. I found three open bottles of lemon oil for wood, sticky and congealed. I discarded old sponges, rags, scrub brushes and a broken Swiffer.
I moved Mom into that house. I painted the front and garage doors. I painted the trim around the new windows. I painted the walls in the sun room and hallway.
I felt engulfed by the past, a past I prefer not to dwell on, a past I would like to let rest in peace.
But the wind caught me, pinned me against the thorns and spines of the high desert, and had its way with me.
Is home the place that glues us together? Perhaps. Perhaps that’s why I feel unglued, fragmented, as though I have left pieces of myself in my wake for the last couple of weeks. I inadvertently left a book I was reading on a bench while waiting to meet my brother at Denver International Airport the night I arrived. It was a good book, too. Part of me still sits on that uncomfortable bench, reading, watching reunions, waiting out the slow minutes until the tall form of my brother rises into view on the escalator.
We found pieces of ourselves in that house, my brother and I. I wondered if I looked as lined and shadowed as he did. I wondered if I looked as frayed and torn as I felt. My mother’s fleshless face, fragile skin, and bewildered eyes clawed at my heart.
Part of me is on each of the two planes that carried me across the country, wedged in among strangers, my bag between my feet, my backpack between my knees, while I read and dozed and tried not to think about how uncomfortable I was, tucking my elbows in tightly so as not to intrude upon my neighbors.
Part of me sits at various disheveled, grubby, airport café tables, anonymous, utilitarian, with the hard-used look of all airport eating establishments where the high-priced food tastes of weary miles.
I cried in the shower at Mom’s house, letting the water wash my tears, my hair, my skin cells down the drain and into the wastewater system of my old town.
I found pieces of myself in the faces of my friends, in an outdoor hot tub at dawn with a dear one, in a dance with some of my old dance group, all the more poignant because of the absence of others. I filled my eyes with the majestic Spanish Peaks, looming over the valley. They anchored my life for years.
I found pieces of myself, too, on the dusty interstate highway I traveled hundreds of times during my years in that place. The pronghorn antelope, the giant wind turbines, the miles of yucca, cholla cactus and tumbleweed. The familiar place names and exits. Surely some part of me will eternally drive north and then south along those miles, some ghost, some echo.
Part of me is still standing in the 6:00 a.m. hour-long line for TSA at Denver International, shuffling forward a few feet at a time, surrounded by hundreds of other people, early-morning faces creased, crumpled, yawning, and resigned. Mothers with children. Families. Couples. Young people. Old people. Businesspeople.
By David Edkins on Unsplash
I deliberately left a book on the bus that brought me from Boston Logan Airport to Augusta, Maine. I was finished with it and I didn’t want to carry it any more. Perhaps it will be a happy find for some other traveler who will sit where I did, taking their own journey, and their hands will turn the pages I touched, their eyes travel down the printed lines.
I said hello, and then I said good-bye again, not knowing if it was a final good-bye. Hello and good-bye to the memory of the good man who was my adopted father. Hello and good-bye to my mother’s parents and their parents and theirs. Hello and good-bye to my brother. Hello and good-bye to my oldest son, now living in Denver. Hello and good-bye to my friends, to Mom’s friends, to the dusty dirt roads, to the two houses I lived in during my years in that town, to my memories, to the community, the places I shopped, the places I ate, the places I danced and worked and told stories and hiked.
Hello and good-bye to Mom and the caregivers I met and conferenced with.
So many good-byes. Too many good-byes.
And then hello. Hello to my partner. Hello to the initially disbelieving cats, who still zoom around in excitement and welcome days later. Hello to my comfortable bed, my serene room, my kitchen, my giant-sized tea mug, my laptop, my little bathroom, my electric toothbrush.
Yesterday I went out to sit on the porch and read. It was beautiful in the sun; the garden full of exuberant new life. I put my book down and weeded, discovered bulbs coming up, and planted peony roots. Those hours were the first feeling of coming home to myself.
I’ve come home to the simple rhythm of swimming, to the warm, humid, familiar routine of my job in a rehab pool facility. I’ve come home to the keyboard and the page.
I went to the store this morning. I had a list. I drifted up and down the aisles, putting a few things in the cart. I set a book I was finished with on the donation table. It was as though I walked through the little mom-and-pop store in my old place in Colorado and the Safeway in a nearby larger town at the same time. I felt confused. I walked in a dream. I forgot where things were. I couldn’t focus. I left with a small bag of groceries I didn’t feel like I really needed or could use. I came home, made a cup of chai, and used up the milk. I knew I needed more and remembered while I was shopping, but I didn’t buy any …
Too soon to shop. Too soon. I’m not all here yet. The pieces I left behind are still caught in the wind of my passing. I feel as threadbare as Mom’s memory. I wonder if all those pieces will find me again or if the wind has carried them away forever. Do I want all the pieces? Did they slough away because I no longer need them? I can’t tell. I don’t know.
Two things are clear to me. The first is something I read and wrote about somewhere on this blog. The greatest thing we can do to honor those who came before us is to live our lives fully. Grieving fully does not mean living in grief forever. Living fully means living now, not in the past. Living now cannot be accomplished with clutching hands and a clenched heart. Now is not then, nor is it a future that never arrives. Now is now: the sleeping cats, the creamy pink flowers on the magnolia outside the window, the sound of the birds at the feeders, sunlight on the neighbor’s house.
The second is that none of us can live in two places. I transplanted myself to Maine years ago, and have no regrets. My roots are watered here. I belong here. It’s my place now. We need each other. For this day, I will choose to believe all the pieces of myself I need will find me again, will gradually come home to me. The rest I will simply let go, as I’ve let so many things go during the last days and years.
Questions:
Have you ever been responsible for sorting through a loved one’s possessions and wrapping up their life? What was the hardest part for you?
What’s the best support you’ve received during a process like this?
How have you supported others who have needed to manage a loved one’s estate?
Have you ever felt so emotionally exhausted you couldn’t function? What helped?
Leave a comment below!
To read my fiction, serially published free every week, go here:
I went for a walk today in the cold sun. The dirt road led me up and up; my feet slipped on treacherous patches of ice lurking invisibly under a thin layer of earth and sand. Water ran in the ditch alongside the road under winter skin, thin and glassy in the sun and opaque and layered in the shade.
The bones of the trees show clearly during this thin and aging time of year. We’ve had heavy wind in the last few days, and new, jagged wounds show where trunks and boughs snapped and splintered.
Winter Solstice is a strange time of year. Spending time among the bony, sleeping trees under the pale light of the low sun is such a contrast to the frenetic human activity accompanying the holiday season. The fields and forests sleep, letting the long dark hours and cold do what they will.
Nature has always been my best teacher, leading the way to faith, trust and renewal — the endless natural cycles of life and death. Even from my small, ant-like perspective, I find comfort in the ebb and flow of life.
I’m in need of comfort. Our woods are beginning to fall silent. Our bird feeders are full, but we see very few songbirds now, and when they do appear, they’re in small groups or single, rather than in flocks. Many insects are vanishing, which means the avian insectivore populations are diminishing fast. It seems to me we’re losing so many kinds of life — so many lives — as well as other things like trust, respect, dignity and integrity.
But I know loss is just another word for gain. The dark is another kind of light. Good-bye is another kind of hello. All we know now is loss; our inability to imagine what might come into the empty spaces of our loss does not mean nothing will.
It’s easy to forget about light in the darkness.
Yet I welcome the longest night of the year with my whole heart. Something in me loves the deep, cold darkness, unlit by flame or star. The darkness is like a womb, and in that womb lies a glowing seed containing rebirth, transformation, and the new cycle.
As I celebrate Yule, I sit in the darkest place I can find and open myself to it. I call up the shadows in my heart and mind and embrace them without fear or resentment. My eyes are blind, but inside me something old and primal listens and watches, waiting for guidance or wisdom, waiting for the light to return.
This time of year I do the ancient women’s work of sorting one thing from another. How do we discern the difference between natural cycles of darkness and light and the frozen, unending darkness our choices and behavior can lead us into? What habits of thought and action keep us groping, blind and despairing, without a star to light our way?
What offering can we make to the dark? What can we let go of? What is ready for recycling and transformation? What do we need to do in order to greet the dawn of the new cycle less burdened?
Photo by David Monje on Unsplash
When I have rocked in the cradle of darkness long enough with these questions, I light a candle and tell the small flame of all my gratitudes, great and small. Each one is like a prayer of thanks, a guiding star in the dark night.
The candle flame is a spark of life cupped tenderly in the hands of the dark. What might grow out of it? What new paths might we tread; what terrain might we explore? What new intentions have rooted in our hearts? What can we call into birth and being within ourselves? What undiscovered guides and friends wait in the year ahead? How can we keep the flame of our courage, love, and strength alive?
What is waiting to be born in the next cycle?
A winter blessing on you, my friends. May your Yule be dark and the following dawn be bright.
For each of us There is a desert to travel A star to discover And a being within ourselves to bring to life. –From an Iranian Christmas Card
Autumn’s smoke and flame are with us again in central Maine. The land’s lush summer garments fray and fade, withering into dusty, brittle rags of leaf, flower and stem.
More than a dozen apple trees grow on our 26 acres, everything from small, hard green apples too sour for anything but cider to large, sweet, white-fleshed beauties, fragrant and delicious.
The first frost or two brings my favorite eating apples to the peak of perfection, and last weekend we knew it was time to harvest if we wanted any of the fruit. A friend, with three children in tow, participated in a nature walk at a nearby lake and came to sit in the sun with a picnic lunch and pick apples.
A crisp, sunny autumn day, three eager children and apple picking. I can’t think of a more perfect way to spend a gorgeous day.
Unsplash
Apple picking, as anyone knows who’s done it, is about so much more than selecting the most perfectly waxed, polished, shaped and colored specimens from a grocery store pyramid and putting them in a cart.
Apple picking is about muddy shoes and knees and floppy hats. It’s the smell of tick and mosquito spray, rotting fruit and browning ferns; the texture of twig, bark, raspberry cane, moss, and the waist-high brittle, dry aster blossoms.
Apple picking is a lesson in sharing. Many creatures enjoy autumn’s bounty. Birds peck at the fruit. The deer take bites out of windfalls. Worms leave telltale dark tunnels. Wasps burrow head first into the flesh, ecstatic and writhing.
We don’t know how old any of our trees are, but their gnarled and disheveled condition suggests they’re quite old. Many have hollow trunks and a great deal of dead wood. The one we picked from is lying almost on its side, half uprooted, the base and uncovered root ball couched in moss. Crawling under the tree, carefully avoiding wasps, nettles, poison ivy and other hazards, one finds a damp, low-ceilinged shelter, roofed by the tree’s branches and floored in muddy ground. This particular tree grows over a spring; doubtless the reason why it fell in the first place. The deer have lain in this sheltered place. Their scat is everywhere, and I see their prints in the mud and the smooth hollows where they’ve lain together on the ground.
Apples thump softly around me as the children enthusiastically wield the apple picker, an old mop handle on which is attached a cloth bag suspended from toothy jaws that pull high apples off their branches. The ripe fruit falls easily with a nudge.
Apple picking is wonderful therapy for those of us recovering from perfectionism. Each piece of fruit is uniquely shaped and blotched with color, ranging from pale green to pink. Some are patched with brown, rough areas. Some are speckled with green spots. Windfalls bruise and split, an invitation to insect plunder. Heavy with juice, sitting comfortably in the palm of one’s hand, each is a lovely, individual thing rather than a clone lined up with other clones in neat rows for display.
As the children pass the apple picker around and bag the fruit, we adults talk casually of apple pie, applesauce, apple butter and drying. I remember the ache in my right hand from processing pounds of apples when I lived in Colorado and had children to feed. In the fall, my food dehydrator was on for days, four trays stacked with plums, apples and pears I picked from trees and used for homemade granola, trail mix, fruit leather and hot cereal.
Photo by Autumn Mott on Unsplash
For days I have been watching golden leaves loosen and fall. Fall, for me, is always a meditation on loss and surrender. On my hands and knees under the tree, retrieving windfalls, the smell of damp earth, rotting fruit and drying leaves and bracken in my nostrils, the sound of the children murmuring and laughing and my friend and partner talking, I feel a pang of grief about what I have lost. My own small boys, firm-bodied, grubby, loving, hilarious, maddening and mischievous; the big-hearted, foolish yellow lab who helped me raise them, seem for a moment to be there, with me.
Then, just as quickly, they’re gone, vanished back into the past, and I feel slightly ashamed of my nostalgia and wipe away a tear before anyone sees. After all, I know children grow up and faithful, foolish dogs can’t live forever. My grief is followed then by a pang of gratitude for what has been, what is this day, and possibilities and adventures in the future.
Fall is a time to think about harvest, both the harvest that keeps our hands, tools and dehydrators busy and the harvest of our hearts and minds. The leaves that made the summer green are falling now, in a final glorious display. The nights lengthen, temperatures and humidity drop, and soon we’ll bring the outdoor furniture cushions and houseplants in from the front porch for the winter.
I do not count the blessings of my personal harvest. I feel them. The wordless embrace of friends. The weight of a child in my lap. Laughter. The exchange of support, affection, information, and a really good book. Deep sleep. A healthy, active body. The muscular rhythm of walking, swimming, dancing and exercise. A small group of children learning to swim, blowing bubbles, coughing, grinning, giggling, splashing and spluttering, like so many wriggling otters, joyful and triumphant as they master floating, kicking, and rhythmic breathing. The opportunity to be of service, to make a contribution to others, to share resource.
I’m equally grateful for what has been lost, though my gratitude mingles with grief. Every autumn, the trees guide me in the work of letting go, of surrender, of faith and trust in the natural cycle of life and season. This year, I’ve released objects, clothing, financial commitments, noise, clutter, destructive patterns of behavior, and, painfully, some illusions.
Without all this stuff, the true shape of myself and my life begins to emerge, and I’m less apologetic and more confident. A deep well of creativity bubbles in the center of my experience, cool and clear and clean, moss and stone and the scent of water.
Well Water
While the horses strain at the harrow in a darkening field, I pour red wine over lentils in an iron kettle. The full moon rising beyond the farm graveyard is as round as a well, and the cold autumn wind has the taste of distant water.
