once again, the map is not the territory

     I was reeling from the loss myself but called my niece to give her some kind of comfort.  To tell her what the road ahead was life.  I mean what the road is like. Well, it’s like no other road you’ve been on.  It’s very real and it’s not real at all. It changes all the time. 

     I didn’t grow up with any kind of formal sense of heaven or hell.  But sometimes I feel as if my mother is off somewhere in the Wild Blue Yonder.  Then, the other day, a friend told me, she said, “Ask me about blue”.  OK. I didn’t realize that grief, being sad, feeling blue, all the same.  But the Wild Blue Yonder doesn’t really feel like a sad place to me.  It’s just another place.  It’s a place where my mother and the others I have lost live on in some way.

     There are days when you think you’ve gone past the grief and you’re in the land of resilience, when suddenly you feel a bolt of pain, a deep sense of loss.  Oh yeah, those days happen. The path from grief to resilience doubles back on itself. It’s not a straight shot. Sometimes I imagine my mother is in the Wild Blue Yonder and I feel really good about that.  Sometimes that just seems so far away.       

     I imagine a key or map legend that shows the distance in scale, imagine opening your thumb and index finger to show the scale. It’s this wide, as far apart as your fingers can go and you got it right.  The scale is that wide.  That’s the “I don’t know” scale.  Everything is a spectrum.  If you were to map the distance between here and the Wild Blue Yonder, remembering that the map is not the territory, the scale would be in increments of “I don’t know.”   I don’t know the road from grief to resilience.  I just know I’m on it.

the wild blue poem series, from the first section on grief. the entire book is available through Amazon Kindle at:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E2UU19O