Perspective: beneath the clouds

Beloved why?
I am glad for your love
and warmth
and connection
and my cat’s
and my adult children
friends
family
patients
work
and why? Beloved

A high Adverse Childhood Experience Score
Two alcoholic parents
One sick with tuberculosis through pregnancy
Letters from the hospital to her mother
After birth
Never mention me
As if I do not exist

She told a story that she dreamed
she gave birth to kittens
played with them
and gave them away

Not a dream of joyously welcoming her new baby
Me.
Yet I didn’t hate her or my father
My damaged parents
My damaged sister
Who followed their path, not mine
There was nothing I could do
Only three years old when she was born
Try to shield and mother her
As best I could

Why Beloved
I have tried so hard to grow
to love
to forgive
and yet I have no human lover

My cat jumps on my notebook
And interrupts this writing
She is happier to welcome me home
Than any man I’ve ever dated

My daughter’s boyfriend picks her up
at the airport and has made her dinner

If I am a failure at love with a partner
Or too smart or damaged or difficult
To love
For humans
At least my children have both found love
And if I were to choose me or them
Yes, I’d choose them

Is that why, Beloved?
Sacrifice to heal the next generation?
It is worth it.

And yet, that small child part of me
That even as a toddler thought the adults were unpredictable, dangerous, mean when drunk as they laughed.
She is angry at them, Beloved
She is angry at you, Beloved
Or at people
Or at the universe
She still believes in every cell, in her bone marrow, in the vast universe in her mind

that she too could be, should be

loved.

There’s a boat here somewhere

Two of the ferries, that cross Puget Sound from Port Townsend to Whidby Island, are in this photograph from January. But it’s the sky that distracts. The ferries and the dock look small in the sound and the sky.

I do miss the Salish Sea!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: boat.

mountain effect

Mount Tahoma, Mount Rainier, the mountain effect on the clouds. The sunrise last week revealed a cone shaped cloud above the mountain. The interaction between the earth and the sky is so beautiful…. and from this distance the mountain is small against the sky.

view

For the Daily Prompt: churn.

This is not a churn. It’s a cat. This is Princess Mittens. Oh, I miss her, but she is gone. I was looking for a photograph of students with a churn. I have one, but I found this instead. It is from my old phone photos and I don’t think that I took it: my son, I suspect.

Churning the internet…. “butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth”.

Perspective

This is taken at night from the beach, camera at full zoom. The mountain is Mount Tahoma, also known as Mount Rainier. The object that looks like a gibbet for hanging people is at the end of a dock. It is a small crane.  The perspective makes them look like they are the same size, doesn’t it? But one is very close and the mountain is very much further away.

We have to be careful not to misinterpret what we see when we don’t have enough information or when we are given misinformation. Truth is complicated and there are people who will lie for power and advantage and their own agenda. Consider the source, use more than one source, consider if what you are seeing has been edited, exaggerated, placed out of context or if it’s really just a lie.

For the Daily Post challenge: Conventional Wisdom.

Music: I can’t keep quiet.