Tag Archives: death is part of life

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screen door

For Thursday doors. This is one of the cabins that my family owns at Lake Matinenda. I don’t think anyone has stayed in it since my sister died in 2012. That summer my daughter and I went and tried to clean some. There were too many things that were out where the mice could get them. We bought plastic containers and crated things up. We took all the beer bottles in the boat to the car and 17 miles to town to recycle them. We took loads of mouse nested clothes and shoes to the dump. We took a guitar that belonged to my sister home to my niece.

We were too raw to make decisions, to take the clothes and wash them and give them to a charity. It is time to do that.

A door into memory and how much my daughter helped, with no complaint.

 

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portal cup

If this cup is a portal,Β  where does it take you?

I took the photograph at the Renwick. I asked the guard if I could take photographs. He smiled and said, “We encourage it.” And it’s part of the Smithsonian….free. I could not take my tea inside, and that seems entirely fair….but, free, that is, paid for by the citizens of the United States with our taxes and welcoming people from all over the world to step in and see what is there…..

…..and where does this cup take each of us?

…..and does this fit the Daily Prompt?

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new growth

I’ve been thinking about the A to Z challenge again. I did it last year, with 7 sins and friends. I wrote about an emotion each day…. and I planned to do it this year starting with the 7 virtues. Bet you can’t name as many virtues as sins…. though I don’t think any of the emotions are sins. They are part of us. They are part of the way we respond to the world and survive. We have to learn to pay attention to them and not label any of them as negative or bad. We cannot excise grief or fear or anger from our psyche and remain human. Instead we need to learn to be curious about each emotion….

…..and there has been a shift in my life, three parts all shifting at once, this week. It is very odd to have all three go at once. I may leave the virtues until next year, because this sudden freedom is strange, peculiar, unfamiliar…. I need to expand in it and explore it….

New growth….

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Missing my father

Today is my father’s birthday and I miss him quite a bit, since he died in 2013. This picture was taken in clinic at the opening party. I left a message for another friend, also a singer, who has the same birthday.

Sad but I am happy thinking of him and I am still in the chorus that he helped start, Rainshadow Chorale.

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mother, maiden and crone

When Beth is dying in Little Women, she says that it is like the tide going out….. sometimes I miss my sister so much. I am trying to make sense of the third stage, the stage after mother. With my daughter in college, I am living alone for the first time in 28 years. And I don’t have my sister or my mother or my grandmother to accompany me.

I took the title from one of my sister’s essays: An early promotion to crone. Here: http://e2grundoon.blogspot.com/2007/08/early-promotion-to-crone.html

I want to discuss my sister’s essay with her …. I can’t, except in dreams.

mother, maiden and crone

small child in my heart
baby cuddled warm
safe and loved
small girl dancing
sing run shout

woman seen and heard
woman silenced dressed undressed
woman learning searching writing
woman held and loved
woman gravid bearing carrying
woman feeding raising nurturing

crone quiet watching
white haired dismissed old
unseen unknown ignored
laughing playing dancing
crone alone
sing run shout
dancing

music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiP9WH0zN0Y

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Sending love

Sometimes I wake in the morning, muscles tight and anxious.

This morning I dreamed that I was a teen, going on a trip. I packed my sleeping bag and the new pad. I finally bought a new inflatable pad for camping, last year. I still have my old one, patched and 30 years old and thin. I decided that I am old and stiff enough to have a newer one. I used it for the first time in the tree house. Yoga mat, pad and sleeping bad and I was warm. In the dream that was all I had time to pack: no clothes or books. There was barely room for that. I was worried about the trip and afraid.

When I wake anxious and feeling attacked, I send love. I send love to the people that I am finding most difficult in my life. A family member who with their spouse, have been mean since I was a teen. Not a family member any more: a blood relative, now. I will choose who is family and who is just a blood relative. In the manner of children of alcoholics, this is a terribly slow process. Raised in addiction and enabling, children love their parents anyhow, and it is a slow adult process to learn that love is not addiction, enabling nor enmeshment.

So I send love: may this person be peaceful. May this person be free. May this person be filled with loving kindness. May this person be safe. I send them loving kindness, especially if they are a blood relative who is still cruel. I don’t want them in my life any more and yet I want to forgive them. Forgive but not reconcile, if they are still in the dire pattern. No reconciliation if they continue the behavior.

Sending love.

Sweet Honey in the Rock: In the morning when I rise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAJBZXIzKcY

I took the photograph of my mother in the early 1980s. I borrowed my first real camera and took one roll. I scanned this today and my scanner is not up to the detail, but I like the abstraction. I love this photograph of my mother because it is her thinking and concentrating expression.

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The dead are with me

I am at the lake. There are younger people with me. We go to the graveyard. The earth is soft and loose. There are no markers or stones. We do not need them.

“I can feel the people in the earth.” says one of the younger people.

“Me too!” says another.

“Of course.” I say. I name the people under the earth and introduce them. The young people are amazed. I am surprised that they have never felt the dead. I think the cities and concrete and phones and television and computers: all of these must block the signals. But we never allowed electricity here. The phones don’t work. Candles, aladdin lamps, propane stoves and heat with wood in old cabins. Thin shacks where we hear the wind and water, and tents, lying in the embrace of the earth.

We leave but when we come back, the young start to reach down into the soft earth, arms length. “Did they die young?” one asks. “We want to know more.”

“You must be patient.” I say. “Don’t push the dead.”

Later I return a third time to sit quietly alone with the dead. Dark falls, moonless, overcast, no stars. I stand to return to the cabins and my flashlight dies. I know the paths well, but not the path to the graveyard. I tie up my long skirt and kneel. I feel the ground gently. Yes, I can feel the path. I start to crawl slowly, stopping to feel the packed worn earth. I think of wolves and cougars but none have been here for years. It is not cold enough for exposure. It is just dark and slow. The dead are with me and approve.

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Watercolor

This is for the Daily Post Prompt: retreat.

I have been changing the art in my clinic with the seasons. This is by my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway, and is currently up in the clinic. This is her largest watercolor, of the Olympic Mountains, painted in the last few years of her life.

A retreat into beauty….