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Showing posts from September, 2016

Nearly there

 "Yell into the belly of the Earth", she told me, "she will listen and ease your aching sorrows". I yelled until I was hoarse. I was twenty-one. Burdens fell from careworn shoulders and we were sisters ever more.  The other day a friend entrusted me with a Kabbalistic myth. In the telling, 144 souls were created at the dawn of time. Those 144 souls eventually splintered into the multitudinous fragments of sentient life on planet Earth. Now I look out upon the mosaic of life and believe that my kindred spirits are my clearest reflections of the original soul from which we sprang.   Now she travels the final steps along the sharp, stony terrain of cancer, I walk with her, my heart aching.  I see ahead a field, beautiful and inviting, with tall grass, clear skies, shade trees and a small bubbling creek nearby. There are ample places to rest.  She is tired.  I say, softly, lean on me, we're nearly there. This grief has settled in and it's not what

Only love, only love

Words. Insufficient, awkward, clumsy tools with which to communicate.  They have all but dried up.  Each one spilling forth is incomplete and one-sided, ill-suited to its task.  Drawing water from an infinite well, they cough wet sand on the surface of things, unable to match wholeness with anything other than division. Ah yes, but these are what we have. My beloved heart-sister, one of the greatest loves of my life, is leaving form and I, with deep tenderness, am breaking open, admitting that I know nothing and yet am so generously known as everything. She freely shared her love with me, year after year, until my own well was discovered to have been full all along. The heart never grows tired of loving, no matter the cost.  It pours love like an inexhaustible river filling the parched places so long tended by words alone. Now, I have no words to offer at this parting.  Each one spills out, empty and inadequate. The heart simply breaks and love spills out, flooding life, every