You provoke
I provoke
Push and pull
Until someone breaks
Who’s at the helm
Who’s fighting whom
Is it your ancestor or mine
Vying for survival
Where does our love go
When our history floods through
Stream of Consciousness
Family
Legacy
I feel you there
All the hearts of those before me
Your dreams are in mine
Or are my dreams echoes
Of what you imagined for yourselves
I want to be what you could not be
Do what you could not
Live more fully
More freely
Give those who’ll follow me
Dreams less encrusted
With the pain of the past
Create a new narrative
Of True Love and Joy
Give the future a love that will last
Traveling On
I hear you
My constant companions
Some whispering, some insistent
All desperate to be heard
Reaching from behind to steer me
Safely through the world
A world you did not survive
I hear you
I do
But I must find my own way
Must live new mistakes
And leave this world
Having lived new ways of being in it
I hear you
I do
And I say
Thank you
And I say
Goodbye
Soul Echoes
Who’s there, yearning, in pain
In the dark of my past
I look behind and see
The silhouettes of the many
From whose dreams I was born
I feel their unrealized needs
In the needs of my present
What they have not let go of
Holds me now, outside of my life
I see you, I say
I’m sorry, I say
This is yours, I say
I lay their burdens at their feet
Look them deeply in their eyes
Thank you for dreaming my life
I’ve got it from here
Cherished Objects
Happy holidays to all!
I am with my family in Texas, enjoying us all being together, laughing, talking, playing games.
My sister-in-love inherited all of my Mom’s many cherished collected holiday things.
My two favorites: my Mom’s manzanite tree that she decorated for every holiday, and a Santa that always sat under our tree at Christmas.
To you and yours, wishing you a wonderful day.
Family Friend
This guy’s seen many, many holidays…he was under my Mom’s trees when she was a little girl. Then he was under our trees in my childhood. Now he lives at my brother and sister-in-love’s.
I still love seeing him each year.
It really is the little things.
#familyholidaytraditions #santa
Inheritance
I hear their screams of silent disapproval
Feel their arms, clutching me, holding me back
“Don’t go out there. You’ll die. It’s not safe for us.”
My belly’s a stone
Ingested before I was born
I’ve tried to throw it up
Doesn’t budge, it’s mine now
I carry it with me
This inheritance
This heavy key to the past
This memorial to those before me
This museum housing their lives’ dreams and losses
Maybe it’s not something to pass
Like a kidney stone
Or to be removed like a cancerous growth
Perhaps I need only to lovingly lay it down
At the feet of those whose dreams I am now living
Perhaps their burdens are not mine to carry
But mine just to remember, and know
As I move forward into my own life’s dreams and losses
To be remembered, one day, and known
By those who come behind me
A Stitch in Time
When my mother was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2001 and was going in for surgery to have it removed, I immediately knew I wanted to fly down to be with her.
But I was 6 months newly sober, so it was daunting to fly across the country, leaving behind my support system. But more frightening than that was the fear that my mother would die while on the table, or that they would find more cancer than they could treat.
It was a challenging time.
I knew that I would be experiencing many emotions as I navigated her illness and surgery, and I really wanted to deal with them in healthy ways, not fall back into old coping behaviors.
Someone suggested to me that I take up knitting as something to occupy my hands and eat up some of the extra energy (aka anxiety) that I would be experiencing.
Thankfully, I took their advice, bought some knitting supplies and took them down with me. And as I waited for her to come through the surgery, I began to knit.
My mom had been the one to teach me how to knit in the first place, so it felt really right to sit and knit, waiting for those awful hours to hear how the surgery went. Anyone who has gone through it knows how difficult that waiting can be.
I only remembered one stitch, but that was enough. I had no pattern, so I just started knitting a row about the width of a muffler and took it from there.
Thankfully, my mother came through the surgery very well. I moved back into her hospital room, and the knitting came with me. In fact, it would continue to be my sober companion for the rest of her hospital stay and afterwards as she recovered at home, because I ended up staying longer than I had planned.
My mother had her surgery on September 10, 2001. We were both sleeping in her hospital room that next morning, when a friend of hers called my mother and told her to put on the news. We watched together as my adopted home city was terrorized.
In shock, I immediately did two things: I went to a meeting and then I went to donate blood.
Then, I went back to the hospital, where knitting became a lifeline again as my world was rocked from its axis a second time.
I was so desperate to get back to NYC, but could not leave until they allowed flights again. I knitted with fervor through those days following 9-11, as I helped my parents take my mom back home and settled her in.
And then finally, I was able to return home to NYC, and my knitting accompanied me on the plane and through the weeks as our city began to heal.
Eventually, I stopped knitting…though from time to time I will pick it up again when the proverbial sh*t hits the fan or I feel that I need it as a way to stay calm under duress. I guess that is just the nature of my relationship to it. I am grateful it is there for me when I need it.
I still have that piece of knitting from that time when my world was rocked to its core. It is a very, very long muffler-type knitted piece that is a bit misshapen and not at all suited for anything. But it stands as a reminder to me that there is always a way to show up and consciously move through even the hardest of times. That I can survive anything, be of service and even be creative even as my world is falling apart.
Good Fences
For as long as I recall, I’ve carried within me the following line:
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall
I can’t usually remember what poem it is from. I probably read it in high school English.
But it has stayed with me all of these years intact, the way wonderful writing can. It visits me at times, like an echoed wisdom from an ancestor since passed.
I think it stuck with me because even in high school, I sensed the existence of walls inside me.
I didn’t know it consciously. But often the Frost quote would float through my mind paraphrased as “There is something in me that doesn’t love a wall.”
Looking back, the Freudian slip was prophetic.
Those walls were walls that I’d built to protect me, but they’d also held me prisoner, because I did not know then that they were of my own making, and therefore my own to remove.
Years later, through much personal healing and growth, I’ve come to terms with my inner walls, and I find I am both of the people in Frost’s poem.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.
Like the narrator, I, too, find that my walls want to come down.
Though I’ve come to accept them as a part of me to love and find compassion for, they also feel like something that wants to be dislodged, or that needs to disintegrate, feeling like foreign matter in the organic soul forest I inhabit within.
And like the neighbor, some ancient part of me feels them to be necessary. It’s as if there’s an ancestral heritage in place that pulls me to them, at odds with the part within that wants them down.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
I thank those parts within for their concern, and the peoples from which I came who needed walls to survive.
I thank them for their love and care.
I respectfully let them know that today, I choose a different way.
I feel their support at my back as I step out into the Great Adventure.
I lovingly dismantle each wall, and face the leafy, lush green of the world within and without, with my face towards the sun, unafraid of the shadows.
I wonder if Robert Frost was speaking of the walls within, too.
I like to think so. It makes me feel we are connected, like good neighbors can be.
Mending Wall
BY ROBERT FROST
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.”
I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Kinship
Through marriage, I now have a large Irish family.
This is a continually astonishing gift. I come from a comparatively small family which, as I wrote about in my former post “On Weddings,” has become even smaller over the thirteen years I have been with my boyfriend-turned-husband through a series of losses. It is now just my oldest brother and his wife and two kids, my three aunts, an uncle, four cousins and their spouses, four cousins once removed (my cousin’s kids,) and a few of my father’s cousins, and their kids-that-are-sort-of-like-cousins.
My Irish family is comprised of 8 siblings-in-law: 6 sisters-in-law and 2 brothers-in-law. I always wished for a sister. Now I have 6! Actually, I have even more than that, because the two brothers have wives, so that’s 8 Irish sisters-in-law (in addition to the incredible woman married to my brother.)
These women, my husband’s sisters and sisters-in-law, welcomed me into the family with such love and warmth. As did his brothers. And their 23 children! Yes, that’s right. There are 23 nieces and nephews. Add to that the children those nieces and nephews are now having. I think at this writing there are 17 grandnieces and nephews, and…wait for it…2 great-grandnieces! (We go over at least once a year for weddings!)
And that is just the immediate family. My husband and his siblings all have cousins who have spouses and they have children, and those children have children.)
I love my Irish family. I come from the midwest, from people who were of Protestant stock. My people are stoic, hold-your-cards-to-your-chest people. We get together in small batches of time. There is love, of course. But it’s, well, a bit more subdued. There’s not a lot of hugging. Storytelling and laughter, yes. Just in short spurts.
My Irish family? These people truly love being together. They gather for epic periods of time!
And any time they gather, it is certain that there will be the “sing-song” and “a bit of craic.” (Craic is a term for news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation, by the way. Pronounced like “crack.”)
This entails each person taking attention to perform a song, or play an instrument (there’s alway one around it seems, spoons if nothing else.) Or recite a poem, in what they call recitations.
This reverence for the spoken or sung word goes way back in the Irish culture. It is truly important and meaningful part of their life. And the love of song! The stories told through song are passed from generation to generation. It seems a rite of passage for one of the “young ones” to start singing or reciting a “piece” that then becomes known as their “party piece.”
At first, these sessions (and they truly are sessions — they often last 10 or so hours, literally into the early morning) were totally overwhelming to me. In so many good ways. I was literally mesmerized by the love and the effusiveness. The laughter! My face and sides would ache.
Of course, I was asked to join in from my first trip there. You would think that as a singer and performer that it would come naturally to just jump in. But I was hesitant at first. What they do is different than get up and sing a song. They sing songs well known to the Irish people, and to their family in particular, and people join in and sing along with each others’ songs. And there is some drinking going on, too, which adds to the joviality of it all. They are usually singing a cappella, or without instrumentation. I mainly know American pop songs and show tunes and am used to singing crafted arrangements with piano accompaniment! I wasn’t sure how to fit what I do in with what I was seeing and experiencing.
When I finally did give in and join in, I was well-received for what I had to offer, and so now I have my own party pieces to do. I also think ahead for songs to do that everyone may know so they can join in. (It feels OK to sing one song that only I know – more of a performance – but it feels weird to me to do more than that.) It is more fun to have everyone singing along. I have taught a round to the group that they love to do (as loudly as possible!)
I have had to develop new muscles for the trips to Ireland for the weddings that bring us back each year. Not only stamina for the epic hours spent together into the wee hours of the morning, which can be additionally challenging while adjusting to the time change. But for the sheer volume of human interaction that occurs.
Being a mostly introvert person, I do love people, but I also need refill-the-well time. I love going deep in conversation; not so much the small talk. I have found my own way while over there. Fortunately, I can just sit and listen a lot. I can take little power naps if need be. No one judges. Being “the American” buys me some wiggle room: I am given some leeway.
But mainly, I just love every moment. I bask in the love and the music. I do my party piece and enjoy their appreciation of what I have to offer.
I am blessed with this extended Irish family. It has been the gift that keeps on giving, this marriage to my husband. I am surrounded by love that helps keep me from getting too blue over the key family members who are no longer here.
And I get to study with true masters the art of storytelling through song and spoken word. It just doesn’t get better than that!
Inspired by The Daily Post Daily Word Post: recite
Beyond the Skinny Branches 