Wednesday, March 6, 2013

On Saying Goodbye


As humans we are a species organized to accept the cycle of life. We assign names to it, we refer to rituals to help us celebrate it. Customs and rituals, both religious and otherwise are practices designed to keep us together, hold families in sync with each other, and to make our worlds a little softer on the edges for all of us.
We cannot know when our last day is, our last hour, our last moment of life. We can only know it if we plan it and even then, it might not exactly happen as we have designed it. More often than not, we live our lives full in the knowledge of that moment, that time which we find ourselves breathing in, but unaware if it is our last moment of breathing out. We push the idea of our own demise right out of our consciousness and travel where we must each day and in each moment of our life, we continue to expand our experiences and if we are lucky, our understanding of them.
Age is not the defining factor, neither is illness, sometimes it just happens, the time when we just find the end of our rope is not long enough to hang onto. That can take place in an instant when something over which we might have no control over, suddenly changes the trajectory of our living into the death experience.
We can do this but once in the physical sense, but many times in a metaphorical sense. We can suddenly find ourselves in a different point of view, whilst looking forward, realize that we have been actually looking at what has been long past.
I don't know if it is actually a fact, that life speeds forward as one ages, I can only say I think it does. If there is a parallel universe to this one, and in it we are still in a part of the past, it might make sense that when the planes of existence sometimes cross that the one we are currently in might speed up to avoid crashing backwards. Maybe we are moving in such a break neck way to our own conclusions to our own story, we are like a writer who knows the begining of the story and the end, but must develop the middle.
We are trying to bring that novel to it's natural conclusion, the one which we find we understand and know and yet, we are not thinking of the end.
We are thinking of the part that we fill up, creating the action, the scenes, the developments, the fleshing out of our character.
Every Thanksgiving we pause and give some thanks, not for the end of the story, but for the action in the middle, the parts behind us and the parts yet to come. We stand either close to the end or in the middle, unknown mostly to us. We don't get to practice the hushed or vibratto good byes, we just live until we run it out, until we get the story done.
I have said good bye to so many people in my life. I have adjusted myself to their loss. I have said even more good byes to dreams, to different pieces of myself that broke off over time. I have evolved as a result of these good byes, all of them actually. I have followed the rituals required, I have mourned, I have buried, I have scattered the ash. 
Yet, I realize I am still here. I am still a part of the middle. I don't understand it, but I am and I will continue to flesh out this character as best I can. In the last years my hands have told the story. I have become someone completely different than I was. I have walked a long path, and reached a place that reminds me of someone I have lost. I examine my hands and think of how, a very short time ago they held so many things, including promise.
I think that they can still grasp a bit of that. I will tell myself to hang on, until there is no more rope. My father would say, "tie a knot (in it) and hang on." Perhaps that is the real trick, to know when to quit trying to climb and just tie a knot and hang on. It is unlikely the knot will undue, and perhaps you will mark time and freeze it for a long while.
I am still here. 
 From my cousin the other day, He had been in remission for just over a year and a half, this is now what he faces again.
...wanted to update everyone on what my cancer doctor told me this past Thursday.....
My numbers that they track my Multiple Myloma have been going up  and my maintenance drug was not working....I started taking my new chemo (12) and steroid(10) pills today - this will be once a week for I think for 12 weeks. ......set up for another stem cell transplant down at Karmanos Hospial in Detroit - maybe March. When they talk now I hear a lot of blah...blah...blah. Just what I wanted more doctor visits.........

Why am I telling you all.....I don't know...... thought this way you don't hear anything second hand.....maybe get an extra prayer or two. (edited)
Copyright 2011 by SheilaTGTG55 

A Muse


muse
She is mostly beautiful, more mysterious,
her heart finds its happiness
in sitting on the shoulder
of an artist
in his dreams.
Unearthly as it seems,
she is 
crafted of silk and gossamer,
feathers coat her wings,
withered against her rosy arms
they are 
dove like white.
He works very silently,
yet he whispers to his muse;
holding her arm against his breast
his thoughts carving their way into words.
He writes.
She thinks of many things of pleasure,
of cool meadows,
green grass,
the freshness of being
the new ideas;
the inspirations of all the times
upon this shoulder she has pressed
her percious drops of limpid sweat.
They are now his,
which he cannot easily wash away. 
Next he furiously works to keep his pace,
the ideas come
and he is satiated with her inspiration.
She finds herself no longer so needed
and focuses on the distant cries she hears.
Her use is only to those who pierce the night
with their laments
to come alive,
to create,
to really live again in their work.
Dedicated to Rosycheeks and Lea Lane 
May your muse visit.
Copyright 2011 by SheilaTGTG55 

The Birth of Venus


A very long time ago, when I was 20, I was wandering the halls of the Uffizi in Florence, Italy. When I came upon Botticelli's Birth of Venus, I was struck with the enormity of the painting and her presence. I had studied art for a couple of years already and loved her. She was just the most beautiful woman who came from a seashell, with red hair, that I had ever seen. I was always fond of water, shells and red hair. I even deepened the red in my own hair once in high school, a few years before we formally met. I think I felt some kind of affinity with her. I knew her spirit then too. 
When we met she was in a gallery lit only by sunlight, at least that is how I remember it. Her massive presence is now housed in her own gallery with other Botticelli  paintings.
Ten years after she and I met, she surfaced in a marble statue in Cancun. I took her home with me. She graced many places and now stands quietly beside the relics of an interest in silver. I don't think she minds. She still is a vision of loveliness.  While my beauty is on the wane, she is ever present in her youthful essence, a goddess.
In all this time, all these many years, she has never stepped out of her shell. I did. 
venus

Copyright 2011 by SheilaTGTG55