Adrift
Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a
duet of
wonder and grief.
The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as
delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat.
The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look
for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next
stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can
take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift,
feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and
everything is beautiful.
(Mark Nepo)
My friend Marlene sent me this poem and it so describes my head and heart for the past year and nearly an half. I am only now pausing and listening to myself, observing what I choose to do without comment from the part of me that likes to criticize.
In my email to Marlene, I wrote:
I have been struggling being alone, struggling with all the work it takes to run a household, keep myself alive. As well as my usual chores, I now have to shop, cook, figure out how things work - so many things that I would just call “Rob” and he would solve the issue. I never realised that he did so much...
I have been researching aging, trying to find the good part about aging. I turned to Simone de Beauvoir and her book “Old Age”. How depressing. I want sunshine. I want to understand why Ann Truitt said that it was the best time in her life. I thought of Helen Luke who said something like “to die a good death, you have to live a good life.”... At every time in my life that I have been uncertain where to turn, a book has fallen into my lap. I am still waiting...
I have led such an interesting life. I think now of times with grouchy old Rob and I am astonished and delighted at his words, his actions. And yet he was often a difficult man. And yet I trusted him to be there for me. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Where do I go from here? I intend to go somewhere.
I intend to go somewhere!
In the meanwhile, I am readying my house for my children and their families who arrive at the end of October when we will celebrate Rob and scatter his ashes.