I just came inside from a few minutes on the hammock. My new Chi-Po, Little Mo, and I had just made our migration around the yard, and I'd hooked his leash onto the hammock chain, realizing that I'd need to buy a longer, light weight rope for this purpose. As I lay there with Mo stretched out to his full sixteen inches underneath me, with Rita-dog curled up on her bed in the garage, with Laila-cat out hunting, and with Louie-cat ... somewhere, I don't know where-- I tried to empty my mind for a space of time. Like Martha I've been busy with many things--most of them unimportant things or else important things over which I have no control. The sunlight shone through the oak branches. In autumn the leaves turn differently here than in Minnesota. Here the heat gets them. The dryness gets them. They curl and crinkle and turn bronze. In Minnesota the chill brought color even while the leaves still lived. They not only caught the sunlight, they let it through, tinting it.
The hammock was still, and I realized: I'm thinking. I'm comparing different times of my life. Is it because this new time feels so unknown? Am I prepared for this, or am I intent upon recovering past time? I pull my attention in from the oak leaves. You are living in metaphors, I tell myself. The leaves. The dogs. Minnesota. Oregon. Can you live in your own being? Can you be still? And even that is metaphor because right away it brings Eliot's poetry to mind -- "We must be still and still moving, into another intensity/ For a further union, a deeper communion,/ Through the cold dark and the empty desolation, ... In my end is my beginning."
During the first six months of grieving, I moved fast. Too fast. So much to do. Plans to make. Trips to take. Visitors to enjoy. Learning to do. A lawn to mow. And now the house to prepare for winter. It doesn't seem like much, compared to past involvements, and maybe that is what fooled me into thinking that even with things to do, I wasn't doing enough. I wasn't moving fast enough. The family reunion and my niece's wedding both put me on an emotional high that fostered the illusion that I must have completed the really hard time. But the hard time is the being alone and still. Winter is coming and that feels just right.
Liz told me yesterday that her chemo-recovery therapist said she must slow down. She had no idea she was moving too fast. She wasn't getting everything done, so how could she be moving too fast? But the feedback monitors told the tale---yes, Liz was moving too fast. Slow down. We'll never get enough done, I guess. None of us will. That doesn't need to be a depressing thought. It can be a freeing thought.
Both dogs sleep a lot. They become alert, though, in an instant, when the moment calls them to action. There aren't a whole lot of things to do. There is now. THIS thing. This song to sing. This room to clean. This sentence to write.
Why be busy about many things when only one thing is necessary? This moment. This stillness. This sentence. This communion.
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Comments: 11
Your article is Featured in the Triple Name Club.
When I lost my wife Joyce almost thirty years ago now, I too had questions about 'how to use my time'. It simply 'happens'. The learning and reorientation simply occurs at its own pace. We learn how to accomodate to the 'newness' and slowly learn how to remember without the earlyier griefs. . And slowly the minutes and hours and days became filled with things to do :old 'things and thoughts and usual actions' participate with new 'things and thoughts and new opportunities for action'. I cherished some new actions and discsarded some old ones. I learned how to use my precious TIME differently as I learned to reorient my heart and my mind.
Your powerful, loving, creative mind and heart will show you ways. You will transform hurts to new insights and new intellectual and personal relationships. Life will become different but cherished memories will develop into new directions that will add to your (alreadty present) capacities and give you -- via paths to the Divine -- both Peace and embellished ways to SEE and EXPERIENCE God's WILL.
Dick
Somewhere along those "moments" over the past year I have grieved and in that grieving and growing, I have learned to live with my loss.
It seems that you are learning to live with your loss. You don't have to like it, but you are learning your way around it. Keep living those moments, one breath at a time, and you too will be past your painful grieving and onto other, even better, "moments."
Sending you many blessings of peace, joy and life to you~
Namaste,
Lisa
Here in West Virginia I look out the window and see leaves falling. The weather is not yet cool. In fact it's unpleasantly warm and humid. Yet the leaves come down. Some of them green. Which causes me to wonder. Why green? Is it some sort of metaphor for dying out of sequence. Dying before your time.
Still it is a season for dying. For leaves to turn yellow and blood red or grizzled brown and litter the ground. And for me to exercise my leaf vac and build up my compost pile. I believe in resurrection. I believe in compost. This is the stuff that promotes life and growth. We must celebrate those dying leaves. They are giving their lives that we might live. They will rise again from the soil with which I mix them or their clean black remains after two three years of resting and rotting.
Man. My metaphors keep twisting. Ping ponging back and forth between life and death. But that, alas is the way it is. And I celebrate it. And participate. It is a participation in creation and redemption. Divine recycling.
Yes it's time to winterize the house and get on with life. The sun will rise tomorrow. Spring will come with freshness and beauty. I say with who? TS Elliot, All I know is this this thing: If present when grace dances, I must dance.
Happy dancing.
Cheers.
Jim
Warmly from Moscow - S.