let it spill

Thoughts from the week…………………………

First, a poem leaps out at me as I resume the habit of reading poetry daily:

My Cup by Robert Friend

They tell me I am going to die.

Why don’t I seem to care?

My cup is full. Let it spill.

Brave, bold words which strike hard at the me who has no idea how to navigate these older decades, which seem to suck so many into bitterness and despair. What was it Odysseus had to navigate? The whirlpool Charybdis….some days I row too close to the whirlpool, too far away from the sun.

I am also feeling as if I have nothing new left to say in this blog, so I look back to old blogs to recycle and come across this (slightly reworked this version) from July of 2009. It seems a hint toward finding the blessing implied in Robert Friend’s poem, and so I share it…..

“Neil Young sings:

I want to live

I want to give

I’ve been a miner for a heart of gold……

and I’m getting old.

I thought about my searches for a heart of gold. What that meant to me was finding someone who would love me without ever hurting me. It was about me being loved, not so much about my loving.

And then I was reading Byron Katie, and very stark sentences leaped off the page: ultimately there is only you; you are your own suffering; you are your own happiness. And I thought about what had flitted through my mind as I hummed along with Neil Young: I’m the heart of gold.

It is the quality of my loving, which includes loving myself. And I’m growing old.”

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silly

Silly quarrel this weekend.  Hurtful things said. How imperfect human love is, crushed by depression, thrown off track by random moods, despairing before the imagined unknown, changed into a monster by addiction, swayed by suspicious suggestion. How imperfect we are with our little internal dramas, half of which never occur, but we do like playing the movie of ourselves over and over. So I sat on my front porch and cried. And then I gathered myself up and went on, and later my loved one said, I’m sorry, and that was all it took for my heart to let go the tight bands that had fastened around it. How silly this matter of life is. What puny creatures we humans are. Petty and self-absorbed. And lovely, too, all of it–and us–imperfectly  lovely.

What’s your imperfect life?

PS….For fun, I made each link a poem from Writers’ Almanac.

journal entry 11/14/00

What tears were cried Sunday. I cried missed God tears. I was with a Holy Man, and he told a Sufi story. Tell me, the man in the story asked of the Master, how to find God. The Master took the man to the ocean, walked in with him, held him under water until he was fighting, crazy to be up in the air. Are you insane? shouted the man when the Master let him go. Why did you do that?

When you desire God the way you desired your next breath of air, you’ll find him, replied the Master.

Well, ain’t that a kick in the pants. When I heard that I went outside and cried for the girl who once sought God but turned away because he/she/it seemed all bound up in hellfire and damnation and original sin and nailed to a cross–no thanks–only when her husband went crazy, God saved her, and now she knows she has to find her path with this God, that this has to come before job, children, men, only she’s afraid to go full blast…..too many born again Christians in her memory….oh bless me, thank you, Jesus….gag me with a spoon….only she does need, does seek, so I cried Sunday because I was with this Holy Man who never lost God even when he was in the pits of suicide, of complete despair, and I’m so far from Mecca…so far…………..