Roses are red
Violets are blue
I grew these pink ones
poo poo pa do.
Month: June 2017
Aunt Fran
Kate–you were asking me who Aunt Fran was. Well, here she is:
She is old, she is wise. Sometimes she smells bad and has to be reminded to take a bath. She never flosses so beware her breath.
Aunt Fran keeps me real. I love her and though I’d like to fling myself onto her chest and just hold on for dear life, she is a bit uncomfortable with overt shows of affection.
I know she loves me too.
Be it ever so humble
My daughter Tessa took me to a John Prine concert this last weekend. He sang about love and heartbreak and home.
As I sat and listened and drank a very fine ale, I was struck by the yearning we all seem to have for the “old homestead.” Even if we didn’t have an old homestead, we yearn for home. We tend toward belonging and comfort and safety where everyone knows everyone else and the rules are clear and the future simply promises more of the same.
Around me, sitting on blankets, in camp chairs and slings and just stretching out on the grass were old hippies, young hippies, yuppies, millennials, libertarians, conservatives, guys with long unkempt hair and beards, women with layered skirts and fringed leather vests, biker types, and tykes. All humanity was represented. Except there were no people of color.None that I could see anyway.
So here we are, all these white folks yearning for the “old days”. Black folks don’t yearn for the old days. The old days were not good. Do migrants and refugees yearn for the old days? Maybe, maybe not.
But we all yearn for home.
What is home? I think home, as I mean it, is a soul thing. It is a place where you can rest your soul and your bones. Home is a place where you can stretch out and be at peace.
In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus tells us: “But I desire and I long every day to go home and to look upon the day of my return.”
In the Old Testament, home is being among one’s own. Belonging. I am longing, I am in a state of longing.
We all long for home but it looks very different depending on who you are and where you came from.
There were a lot of tears at this concert. The feelings moved like air, like wind, between blankets, up and down the aisles. We all felt it. At least those who were open to it. A fellow feeling. A connection. A momentary home.
In these nasty times, we all partook.
Are you looking for a bit of home? This is Mrs. Tiggy Winkle. She’s home.
Ancient Greek/ nostos/ homecoming/ nostalgia?
Nostos is homecoming
Algos is Pain
nostalgia is homesickness
A Tough Nut
“Mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind.” Flannery O’Connor
Isn’t that a great quote? I am not so sure, however, this is true any more for a lot of folks. It seems to me that there has been a resurgence of the yearning for mystery. What about the denial of evolution? What about offering virgins to suicide bombers? What about crazy religious and social theorists?
At a time when science gives us compelling information about our world (climate change), it seems that some folks are given compelling evidence that science is suspect, politically driven or promulgated by Satan. This isn’t an either/or dispute.
We are seekers. Whether we seek in a test tube, a Hubble space craft, within the human genome, or reaching out to understand God, we are seekers. We want to understand, we want meaning.
We are surrounded by mystery. Science hopes to crack it open like a nut, revealing the hidden meat. Some folks just want to worship the nut.
I don’t care what you do. I think mystery keeps things interesting. I think the idea of a divine intelligence is intriguing. I’d like the meat and the whole nut.
Check out the walnut above. That seems to me a divine creation. It looks like a brain encased in a shell.
Dominus vobiscum
Joe Biden was being interviewed by Terri Gross on Fresh Air. She asked what it was like to be a devout Catholic in the Senate for so many years. He said he never really thought about it.
He said “I am not a very spiritual person but I find great solace in my faith. Two things struck me in his answer; one, that he doesn’t confuse spirituality with faith, and two, implicit in what he said, that faith is a particularly individual, internal if not eternal experience. To take solace and comfort strikes me as a experience rooted in the particular. Your solace may not be my solace.
It is so hard to wrap my head around this and put it into words. Solace is as unique as a dream. Our experience of the liturgy, the mass, the forms of worship become transmuted in our souls. In a sense then, when the wafer is changed into Christ’s body and the wine into his blood, this is not the only transformation that is taking place. The rituals are the vehicle for the individual to move away from grief and fear and uncertainty.
The rituals are the outward visible sign of an internal journey. They are eternal and unchanged. Comfort indeed.
Rituals say “So it is and so it shall be. Forever and ever. Amen.”
Harvest
Woke up this morning with a wisp of a dream still lingering and a song “Bringing in the sheaves.”
My dream featured my first true boyfriend and love, Ernie. We lived together in New Mexico and then I followed him out to New York so he could go to the New School of Social Research. He actually put me on the path to growth and many happy years in New York.
I laid in bed with my memories and that song. Our memories are our harvest. We gather them gratefully in some years and others, not so much, but we gather them nonetheless.
I guess I would rather gather those sheaves, than rosebuds. I will leave the rosebuds to youth.
Overheard
“You haven’t done a fucking thing, you useless douche-bag”. Overheard remark by my husband as he watched Trump natter on about his accomplishments.
What might have been
I wrote yesterday about grievance. Today I am going to write about grief. I’m so sorry that I am so dark this week but I am struggling with my demons and if I don’t write, I don’t exist.
I was thinking about grief/grievance/grave (as in serious and as in death) and gravity. Each of these words carry weight. in fact, they are all about holding heavy things.
I thought about a wonderful woman who has carried the weight of her mother’s death so unremittingly.
I thought about what folks say about someone who seems to be unable to “get over” grief. It is said they should move on, think of the good times, not “dwell” on it, as if grief were a habitat that one could just walk out of and close the door.
Grief, like grievance carries it’s own timetable. It’s over when it’s over. What I realized, and this is simply about my own resentments, is that I carry grievance as a form of denial. As long as I can keep the grievance alive, it is current.
How interesting is that? The reenactment of grievance as well as grief may be an attempt to keep the person, the situation alive.
I feel so sad as I write this and I have felt so sad the last few days.
I will never own a home again. I will never resurrect the family I had before we lost it all. If there is joy in the fact that we all survived, there is also grief at the fact that it happened at all.
This grievance burns within me like a hot coal. It burns between my breasts into the dark core of me.
It burns and it hurts. Temporally, it is behind me, but not emotionally. It burns. I don’t feel like laughing. I don’t feel like being upbeat, or moving on. I burn.
If I reach into my core to center myself and all I find is a burning piece of coal, isn’t it time for reconciliation and healing? Isn’t it time to put that baby to bed?
Grief, by contrast, doesn’t burn. Grief opens up a hole behind your breastbone, a yaw that cannot right itself. But grief, like grievance can be a comfort, a form of holding on.
To hold on, then is never to move on. And where are we then?
Digging our own graves.
If we can’t get over it, how can we get on with it. “Aye there’s the rub.”
Stay tuned as I struggle with myself. Holy shit, I’m starting to sound like Knausgard.
Grievance
from grever “to burden, oppress, to harm.
“state of being aggrieved,” from Old French grevance “harm, injury, misfortune; trouble, suffering, agony, sorrow,” from grever “to harm, to burden, be harmful to”
Grievance is a state of being aggrieved. Grief is active, grievance is more static.
Resentment—feel again, feel in turn.
That’s the interesting thing about resentment. You can return to it again and again. Like a bruise that is fading but still sore—all you have to do to awaken the pain is to touch it, rub it, re-awaken it.
I am afraid that I hold grievances forever. This is not something that I am fond of in my nature. It is a part of who I am and has been for a long time.
This is the nature of victimhood. Rather than seek to undo the cause of the injury, I keep it close to my vest, holding it for comfort. How did I come to hold pain for comfort? What the hell is that?
This is all snarled up in my brain.
I survived a lot of injury in my life, for what? To just hold on to the fact that I survived. That doesn’t sound the least bit tempting.
I need to do a walkabout.
Hello. Yes, this is Dog 