bitter

She’s still bitter. I don’t blame her, but life is both sorrow and joy. There is nothing we get to keep forever, not even our lives. I ran across Wordworth‘s words the other day, and I wanted to email them to her….

What though the radiance which was once so bright/Be now forever taken from my sight,/Though nothing can bring back the hour /Of splendor in the grass, or glory in the flower;/We will grieve not, rather find/Strength in what remains behind….

But I didn’t. Nor did I watch the aching long-ago movie with those words as its theme. As a young woman, when I saw the movie, I didn’t understand it. But now I do. Hold tight to what you love while you have it, grieve it when it’s gone, but move on…and on…and on…..because that’s what life does.

Have you let go yet? Tell me how you did it….

Advertisement

green

Another Christmas done. They’ve arced through a continuum of joyous for so many years that I thought such joy would always be mine to a lost wandering through the internal debris of the blast of divorce, hurt to children, loss of a first, dear, unexpected love affair. The landscape was bleak, desolate, incinerated, nothing green, only smoke, small fires, charred and ruined trees, writhing memory, hissing doubt. I thought I would never heal. It was unbearable this time of year. And yet… I’ve slowly created a Christmas I can bear, a Christmas which brings me small joys. I am content, grateful, humbled to have them. I celebrate friendship at lunches and Ann’s wonderful brunch. I go to a play or festive event. I watch my grandchildren at their music pageant. I buy too many gifts. I decorate, for me, not on the scale of my once-upon-a-time life, but on a scale which pleases the girl who thought she’d have what she wanted forever, that there was nothing that could overwhelm her. I cook and serve a homemade dinner, adding fine folks to family so that the ruin of all I once had isn’t the ghost of Christmas past sitting silent and pale and mocking at my dining table. There’s a saying from the Talmud: every blade of grass has an angel bending over it, whispering, grow…grow. Heal is what my angel whispered. Not possible, I thought. Surely when one’s psychic legs are cut out from under you, you never walk again, you always feel the ache of what is no longer there. First I lay weeping. Then I crawled. One day I stood and stumbled forward into my life. Green has reappeared in my once desolate forest, widened, reaches skyward again. I almost dare to hope, to expect, in the wild way I once did. Almost….but not quite.