I am not the first person you loved.
You are not the first person I looked at
with a mouthful of forevers. We
have both known loss like the sharp edge
of a knife. We have both lived with lips
more scar tissue than skin. Our love came
unannounced in the middle of the night.
Our love came when we’d given up
on asking love to come. I think
that has to be part
of its miracle.
This is how we heal.
I will kiss you like forgiveness. You
will hold me like I’m hope. Our arms
will bandage and we will press promises
between us like flowers in a book.
I will write sonnets to the salt of sweat
on your skin. I will write novels to the scar
on your nose. I will write a dictionary
of all the words I have used trying
to describe the way it feels to have finally,
finally found you.
And I will not be afraid
of your scars.
I know sometimes
it’s still hard to let me see you
in all your cracked perfection,
but please know:
whether it’s the days you burn
more brilliant than the sun
or the nights you collapse into my lap
your body broken into a thousand questions,
you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I will love you when you are a still day.
I will love you when you are a hurricane. ॐ
I know that this may come a little late, as it is nearly mid-February, but this is my second year of doing My One Word.
While last year’s word was definitely Allow, my realization of this year’s word proved to be more subtle… but no less profound than Allow had been.
Though, unlike Allow, I didn’t grasp my One Word as quickly this year.
Actually, this year’s word is actually a compound word:
Self-Love
I have come to realize that I have been avoiding working on the concepts associated with Self-Love for a rather long time.
Though, in late January, it became quite clear to me that as much as I thought that I’d done pretty well learning how to Allow myself to feel and to act (rather than react) and to build upon other shadow work I’d done over the last year, there was definitely an aspect of that Allow shadow-work that I’d been avoiding.
And I got the impression from Them that I could not afford to ignore that aspect anymore.
Thus, I discovered that Self-Love was the missing piece.
~~~
Or, as They have often impressed upon me:
No one is going to love you exactly the way that you need to be loved, so you may as well learn to love yourself.
~~~
Tom Hiddleston reads Derek Walcott’s lovely poem, Love after Love:
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
This quote has been sitting in a folder on my computer for at least three or four years now.
I never knew where it was from, except that it was from a poem by American poet, Louise Glück:
“…from the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.”
~~~~
Today, I found the whole poem.
The poem is titled
First Memory
Long ago, I was wounded. I lived to revenge myself against my father, not for what he was– for what I was: from the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.
On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.
And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The grey window
And the ghost of loss
Gets in to you,
May a flock of colours,
Indigo, red, green,
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
In the currach of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.
[Note: “Beannacht” is the Gaelic word for “blessing.” A “currach” is a large boat used on the west coast of Ireland.]
I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear
I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in
I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.
From Selected Poems II: 1976-1986 by Margaret Atwood (1987).
I hemmed and hawed about writing this post, as yesterday was a meaningful date in my personal history.
On the evening of Friday, 19 October 2007, my father died.
I would not find out about until the next day – Saturday – as my mother called me almost 8 hours later, leaving a four-word message on the home answering machine, to inform me that my father had passed.
My husband, my sons, and I had returned from a local skate tournament to see that little flashing light notifying us of an incoming call that we had received earlier that afternoon from an unfamiliar number.
I had been estranged from my parents for several years at that point. To put it bluntly, my mother had ‘disowned’ me in 2005 over something so incredibly petty that I am ashamed to admit now that I honored her wishes for nearly 2 years. And, unfortunately, my father did, too.
But I remember that last conversation that I’d had with my father in early October 2005.
Cancer had returned – malignant melanoma – but my father had insisted that it wasn’t such a big deal.
We danced around the subject of the impending surgery that would require the loss of his right eye, and, in typical form, my father joked about his options upon coming to terms with the reality that he’d probably have to wear an eyepatch.
He insisted that he couldn’t decide if he should tell people that he’d become a pirate, or if he should tell people that he’d given his eye to Odin, for knowledge.
I didn’t know what to say; I was just pleased to be speaking to my father, and I told him that I would be delighted to support him in either choice. In a roundabout way, I was trying to comfort him, but honestly, I would have agreed to support him in any way that I could, even if most of the time my support of him simply required that I cheerfully go along with his jokes.
That was my father. That’s the way that he coped best with adversity – through joking about it.
Though I didn’t want to discuss our own adversity — that elephant in the room — concerning how he missed me, and how he hoped that my mother and I ‘could somehow work things out’ so that he would be ‘allowed to talk to [me] again.’
I was inwardly furious that he felt like he had to sneak around – while my mother was not home – just to talk to me. (Of course, I was too stubborn to look the other way concerning my mother’s obviously toxic and controlling behavior. I was well aware of what a rare occurrence it was that my mother was not at home.)
Despite this, I truly thought that my father and I would speak again.
But we didn’t.
After my father died, my brother told me that the cancer had spread rather fast – but my father was overly proud man and it surprised no one that my father insisted on downplaying the debilitating effects on his quality of life – but as a result, my father refused to allow anyone to contact me concerning this reality.
I’ve no doubt that my father thought that he’d live forever, as long as he could joke about it, but he told my brother that he was even more ashamed to be seen as sickly or frail by anyone, let alone, his daughters.
Please let them remember me the way that I was was what I was told that he had said.
It turned out that my older sister -who was also estranged, also ‘disowned’ by my mother – didn’t even know that he’d died until two months after the funeral. While I am grateful that at least I had been informed in time to actually attend his funeral, I’m ashamed to admit that I was told that she knew but that she just didn’t show.
I regret that I didn’t question that further.
~~~
But, my dysfunctional family aside, I miss my father dearly, even now, even today, eight years later.
So what do I do to honor my father?
I will hold a ‘silent supper’ for him this week, wherein I provide him offerings of his favorite foods. Steak and potatoes. Blueberry pie. Sardines. Figs.
As well, it is likely that I will go to McDonald’s today. I will order – and mindfully consume – a Big Mac and a strawberry milkshake. It was the meal that my father loved, the ‘last meal’ that I was told that my father would often insist that he wanted – and then insist upon eating – even though I’d imagine that his body could scarcely have handled digesting such ‘junk food’ towards the end of his life. (Though that wouldn’t have deterred him, however.)
But I will enjoy it, as he would have wanted to enjoy it. (I mean, what the hell, I can imagine him arguing, I’m dying. I don’t worry about nutrition now. Fuck that. I want McDonald’s.)
As well, I have a playlist of his favorite songs that I will allow myself to listen to, and it is very likely that I will have a good cry over this one:
Perhaps I will read him Philip Levine’s poem, ‘Starlight’
(This is the poet, Philip Levine, reading ‘Starlight’)
~~~
This is a photo-booth photo of my father and I from 1974ish or so.
It is one of my favorite photos that I have of my father.
This is a photo of a self-portrait that my father painted in early 2007.
My gratitude stone is a piece of honey-red carnelian, tumbled smooth.
~~~~
After listening to the first guided meditation, I received not one but two colors to focus on for the first week’s exercise.
First color was an electric yellow green
followed by a second color, which was a pale turquoise blue
I quickly wrote down my impressions of each color:
Electric yellow-green reminds me of happy, sunny things. My first thoughts concerned warmth, happiness and youth.
This color is especially keyed into one of my favorite flavors, and I tasted it immediately upon seeing this color: lime.
I love lime-flavored things, especially that tart-sweet flavor in candies like Skittles and LifeSavers, and I know that I might be the odd one out to say that I absolutely despise when candymakers change their green flavored candies from what was formerly lime-flavored to a dreadful sour apple, or worse, kiwi-flavored candy.
But other than that, this color is a very evocative color for…my tastebuds anyway.
Meanwhile, this pale turquoise blue is related to that green in that I also associate it with a particular flavor – the taste of mint, of menthol.
This shade of blue makes me think particularly of water and sky — cool, peaceful sensations of calm and steadiness — with a subtle undercurrent of sharp intensity.
I think of still calm waters that belie icy depths.
I think of breezes that precede the approach of storms – wind, rain – and change.
~~~
Now, the word:
Allow.
I think of all that I have allowed.
I loved it when:
–I’ve allowed myself to be happy, when I’ve allowed myself to enjoy.
This is difficult work for me.
I need to:
Allow myself to see.
Allow myself to become aware of my own value.
Allow Them to show Their faces to me.
He waits — but I am afraid and I negotiate myself out of allowing Him access out of fear.
~~~
The Oracle Card:
The Raven
This card makes me think of….Odin.
As well, the intuitions that come to me from this card concern path-work, mystery, the process of reaching goals.
I think of autumn when I look at this card, and I notice the mountain in the background with its winding path to the summit. I see the suggestion of a gate at the base of the mountain and a few spiral motifs featured on the stones scattered there.
Spirals can represent energy radiating out (or inward depending on your perspective).
Spirals can also symbolize growth, birth and expansion of consciousness.
~~~
Of course, there is more, but these are the main jumping off points for my journal-keeping this week.
The second guided meditation -for Week 2 – is here.
Ann Bagnall and AnnieB222.com, 2013.
bloodteethandflame 