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Between trapezes

Two and a half years
Between trapezes

Letting go is hard
Enough
But then to hang
Wait for the next
On Faith
When you can’t see your way
After a while you aren’t
Flying through the air
But falling

Falling
And screaming inside

Free fall
For hours
Days weeks years

In the company of angels
Letting go
Calls the angels
I dream of angels
Falling in a black void

And after a while
You don’t want to fall anymore
And you understand
Those who end it
It takes great strength
To hold on to the idea
That it will end.

Two and a half years
And suddenly my hands are solid
Not falling
Swinging

Joy wells up
My mind is freed
From the hard work
Of falling and screaming
And I am swinging in the air
Safe

Color is back
Sensation
Sound
Music
Taste
Food melts in my mouth

Who would not be manic?

previously published on everything2.com in 2010, written in mid-2000s.

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Dark sky with stars

Yesterday I had my “Armour suit”  massage at 4:00.

Sometimes during the massage I space out and go elsewhere. I don’t know if it is falling asleep. My practitioner knows when I am gone, because he is telling me to roll my leg to the left against resistance and I will just stop in the middle. I usually see pictures and tell him what I saw.

Yesterday I saw a dream that I had years ago.

I dreamed that I was looking through a window and the sky was black, with stars.  The stars started to fall. The stars were all angels, all falling, slowly, down. I wanted to ask the angels, “Why do you have to fall?” but I was frightened. I was terrified. Because all of the angels were falling: every one. Slipping slowly down the sky.

Then I saw their faces. They were not afraid or angry or resisting. They all had expressions of acceptance and peace.

In the dream then there was no window between me and the angels. I was in the dark too and falling slowly. I did not resist. I knew I needed to let myself fall, like the angels. We all must let go and fall. I was crying even as I accepted it.

I wonder why the angels were made to fall. I think they fall for us, to show us acceptance and love.

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Demon Chainers

And you thought the hard work was over
Finding your demons
Facing them
Adopting them
Comforting them
Learning to love the parts that no one loved
That you hid as a child
Mothering your own unloved self
Fathering the parts he couldn’t love
And to surface knowing that you are a child of God
And lovable
Only to be attacked
With a concerted effort
To return you to what you were before

Don’t be frightened enough to give up
You are right
You are still a child of God
Lovable
In your wholeness
Talents and faults

Those who attack
Feel their demons
Clamoring at them
Clawing
When you learned to love your demons
Theirs want to be loved too
So badly
But their keepers are frightened
They are pressing their demons back into the depths
Desperate
Attack you for you have made them feel their sorrows
All unaware

Seek those who have also
Dealt with their demons
And they will welcome you
You are not crazy
To feel the euphoria
Of surfacing
But do not get carried away
And be kind to the demon chainers
Remember where you were before.

8/16/05

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Trust in the dark

Writing201’s prompt today is trust. This article in the NY Times about how there is no right way to grieve moves me: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/10/getting-grief-right/?_r=0

Trust in the dark

Oh Beloved
   Help me to trust in the dark
      Help me to take each step
         Down into grief
            As needed
Oh Beloved
   Help me walk in the caverns of despair
      Each step slow
         As if I walk through molasses
            The air is thickened
               My chest hurts
Oh Beloved
   Help me to trust you
      That just as I descend into grief
         That just as I move through despair
            That the steps will someday lead up again
               That I will rise and spring will come
Oh Beloved
   Help me to thank you
      For tears and joy
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Angel Witness

Sometimes
Even as you make
The same mistake
Cross the threshold
Open the door
Lift the glass

You feel the presence
Of angels
Drawn by the seriousness
Of your decision

Present
Not to pull you away
From the cup
The drug
The wrong man
The dire pattern
You feel their intensity
The presence
As if outer space
Has clung to their wings
Or motes from heaven
Alien
The weight of their gaze
And their interest

Sometimes
Even as you make
The same mistake
It’s not the same
To sense an angel
Witness

previously published on an obscure writing site

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Family rebels

On my father’s side, his father’s branch are English. Most families would boast of the illustrious ancestors, but mine boast about the black sheep. I am related to the last man to be publicly hanged for poaching in Sherwood Forest. My father’s father’s sister’s child, who is my age, went to Nottingham to check this legend and said that it appears to be true. I do not know his name. After his hanging, there were still hangings but they were not public. You couldn’t gather up your children and a picnic and go to see the punishment and gruesome death.

My father’s mother’s side are the Scots. My greatgrandfather is in the 1901 census in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in his late teens, with his father, a French stepmother and many half siblings. He played saxophone in John Phillip Sousa’s band and toured the world. Links in the Sousa website lead to a book with my greatgrandfather in the index. I have a very newsy letter that he wrote to me in the early 1970s.

My mother’s grandparents were Congregationalist Ministers, at least the males. The women were ministers’ wives. They were in Iowa and one was part of the Iowa Band, a group of twelve ministers from Andover that went to the wild frontier to spread the gospel: the frontier was Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska. They started Iowa College that later became Grinnell. I have lots of relatives that went to Grinnell, including a first cousin. My mother’s mother’s father went off to Turkey with his family to help start Anatolia College, that moved to Greece at the start of World War I.

morris temple and cornelia

The photographs are Cornelia Temple and Morris Temple “about 1860”. They were in my mother’s father’s lineage, and my middle name is Temple.