the same people, deeper than before

we are old people, we are young people

I didn’t grow up with any kind of formal sense of heaven or hell.  To be honest with you, I don’t even think in those terms today. I sure don’t think of hell, let’s put it that way. Let’s put it this way:  Do I think that people’s spirits live on?  When I say spirits here’s what I mean.  I mean the people I knew and their personality and their history, I think that they live on somehow. I can’t prove this and I don’t want to get into any kind of intellectual discussions about this. I would not hold my ground.

     I sometimes imagine that my mom is still alive, for instance, in this other world. I just call it the Wild Blue Yonder because I don’t know what else to call it.  I think everybody I knew, who died, are there. They have a connection to who they were, their history of who they were when I knew them. They’re also learning and they’ve grown and they’ve transformed. They are who I know them to be and more. I learned a Native American chant from a mentor. She was more like a substitute mother. “We are old people, we are new people; we are the same people deeper than before.”  That’s what I think about everyone I lost recently.  I think they are the same people but deeper than before.

     Every picture of the earth seen from outer space shows this unique blue planet. You know how they say that every star like the sun has its binary twin, a twin sun someplace?  I think the Wild Blue Yonder has twinned the earth.  Our connections to both are what matter.  “We are old people, we are young people, we are the same people, deeper than before.” 

~

     Grief was once something that was endured; couldn’t be cured.  Resilience…somebody help us if shopping is seen as the cure.  Of course everything is different – if you’ve lost someone, lost an ability, lost your country, lost your job, lost your heart or your hope - everything is different.

     A man I know lost his son to an auto accident.  After he had survived two tours in the war in Iraq he thought for sure his son would be safe.  With tears in his eyes, he told me that he had to find his new “normal.”  We don’t know what that means because “normal” is an inner experience.  Is it possible everything is a spectrum that will curl back on itself, like the infinity of the Mobius strip?           

~

     I didn’t grow up with any concepts of heaven or hell.  The closest to that for me was the rainbow; that spectrum of colors I loved from art class, in my Crayola box, later as a wink and a nod on my car, letting people know that needed to know, that they weren’t alone.  Wild Blue is on the far end of the rainbow’s spectrum. 

     In the Jewish tradition, whenever you remember someone it helps their soul live and move on through the different worlds after this world.  The Kabala, if you’ve seen pictures of it, is a map of this journey.  It doesn’t just go in one direction.  It’s showing the soul’s travels. 

     All relationships have their journeys.  Not everyone is perfect or good. Not even those that died.  We move toward connection through a slipstream of time and spectrums of meaning. 

     I never grew up with any kind of sense about heaven or hell.  But there are days, when I feel the pain of my sister’s loss and then the love from my friend that also feels like a sister to me.  Then I know heaven is a sense of connection, a feeling of being loved and heard.  And I listen. 

………………………..

the end of the wild blues, the beginning of something new

the wild blue poem series is comprised of two sections. the first is grief, the second is resilience. this is from the section called “II Resilience”. the entire book is available through Amazon Kindle at:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E2UU19O

the trick of spring

the only wildness I know

     What I want is connection.  I want to swim in the sweet, sensual spring of connection.  How impossible and yet completely delightful and unexpected these feelings.  Suddenly spring is my focus and I’m fully given over to its excesses and tenderness. The trick of spring.  I am undone.

     The deep midnight blue of lobelia is my favorite.  Today, again in the supermarket, apparently my favorite place for sensual pleasures, I was selecting apricots.  Their softness and color seeped into my skin, seemed to flow in my veins.  I felt as if I merged with them.  I don’t know what the Foodtown security people do in cases like this, do you? 

     On a hot day full of sun, if you ask me, I’ll probably tell you that gazanias are my favorite flower.  They’re the sun, the plains, warmest Africa.  But did I ever tell you about lantana?  The smallest flowers. A sweet pain, their indelible imprints in my chest.

     The river of new thoughts are raw and green.

     Yesterday, the next day, flowers. 

     For me, the call of the wild is the longing to have wilderness left unharmed.

     I’m riding the waves.  Though I don’t know how, I know they connect to all landscapes, cool canyons, wild onions, even the prairie dog.  We know the wolves belong in Yellowstone.  They were released there to reenter the cycle.  First we pluck lives out and then place them back into the chain of being.  We knit, we sow.  We don’t really know. We need to save all the parts because we don’t know what all the parts are. We’re not just guardians now, we’re also weavers.

     Our bones, our stones, our baskets of shells and every place a place for feathers.  The wild has come inside.  Have I touched the wild in some way?  The salmon are jumping and flipping orange to the sky gods.  The frogs are gurgling mud and river blood. The loons are loony and jiving on insects and little fishies.  The water is washing silt onto the banks. There is no fragmented, segmented aspect of my being.  The river is not separate from me but a part of it all.  And that is a good thing.  

the wild blue poem series is comprised of two sections. the first is grief, the second is resilience. this is from the section called “II Resilience”. the entire book is available through Amazon Kindle at:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E2UU19O

it is surely time to listen to the song of the earth

for Lena and all our grandmothers  -  it is surely time to listen...

the song of the Earth

     When I was growing up the word ‘pollution’ was something people actually heard. It didn’t put your mind asleep. You had to twist it around your head.  It forced meaning upon you. It’s totally different today. We’re shut down to words like pollution and cancer. Everyone in my family has died from cancer. These are big words meaning big things; entire eco-systems, our bodies’ immune system. 

     Entire regional ecosystems are in danger. It’s not just any longer about how many hectares or acres a tiger needs in order to be a tiger.  It’s not just about the curves in a river a salmon needs in order to be salmon.  (The curves somehow producing more viable offspring within their bellies.)  Finally, in our lifetime, we’re seeing some dams taken down. We wait for the salmon to wiggle waggle up the river again.

     Today, we know that major dams, the largest constructions in the world, can cause seismic activity. We’re talking earthquakes. But the earth’s health is not even just about this sort of thing anymore either. It’s about how we’ve become threatened by our own existence. 

     Every day we hear about new extinctions.

     How do you talk about this enormous loss that all of us are facing?  Those that have little ones. Those that like to think about futures.  Like to think about the summer sun or kitchen gardens feeding families in Kenya.  The movement of people and animals. Rhythms.  Maybe the drumming of the caribou influencing our music.  We don’t really know how any of the subtle or even the strong rhythms transform or change the flow of the blood in our veins. What we do know, we know so well that we’re starting not to hear it. We know that mountains in Switzerland have to be covered to protect them from melting.  We know that bugs that have natural enemies are free to destroy because the cold that would suppress them no longer does. 

     We know that our opposable thumb is unopposable. 

     How do you talk about this and relate this to the loss of someone you love without making it seem like you’ve made too much of a leap and that people aren’t important?  When people rank priorities of life, we’re always at the top of the list. Do people have to be the most important? Of course they are to you. Those that love you; those that give you meaning, and gravity and ground. But what about all those other beings and bodies living on this planet that sustain all that you love? What do you know about that?  How close are you to it?  Is your ear to the ground? 

     Enki, in ancient Sumeria, the place that gave us writing, meant wisdom. Enki literally meant your ear to the ground. Can you hear the smooth turns a salmon makes up a winding river?  While in the belly, salmon eggs learn how to follow the river and to mind their way back to the open ocean.

     Every day another extinction.  Aldo Leopold said an intelligent tinkerer saves all the pieces.  We’re losing the pieces.  Rhythms are changing.  Some of the sounds that make up the song are disappearing.  Some of the movement in the river is stopped by dams and diverted waters. We should celebrate our differences. But we have to distinguish between difference and loss.  We know that the Earth has tremendous capabilities of renewal. Some people call wetland habitats the earth’s lungs.  If given a chance wetlands not only transform toxic wastes but thrive again and become open invitations to ducks flying overhead to rest during their migration.  Every being is a significant part of this world. Every living being, every body of water, every parcel of land. How do we learn how to hear what we’ve put into the background?  We need to start listening again. 

the wild blue poem series is comprised of two sections. the first is grief, the second is resilience. this is from the section called “II Resilience”. the entire book is available through Amazon Kindle at:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E2UU19O