From an Upper Floor

Not quite 50 when I wrote the following one Saturday night in a September journal entry.

The window is open where I sit and it is black outdoors.   The dampness is coming in and I am almost transported to my youth and it is once again life on The Farm.   The crickets are making their own kind of noise, certainly peculiar to crickets but the night itself has its own kind of sound.   Does stillness have its own sound and can you hear it?  The muffle of the daylight brings on the darkness and it pulsates with its own vitality.   I wish I had the words to tell it.  It is almost as if I can flow right through the screen and become a part of the night and disappear into it.  With not even a ripple to disturb the night.   The poem said it long ago that somewhere the night has a thousand songs waiting to be sung.   But never enough time.   Never enough time.

Is there a point in life where if you lived just one day longer,  you would find a difference in your perspective and it would convince you that your entire life had been lived with the incorrect premises?  I wonder. . . . .And what would that do to you?   Would that one day more convince you that it was not necessary to repeat another life or make you more determined to come back to earth and try again?   And who has the time in physical life to take on the enormous task of searching for the gods?  Can you squeeze it in between the work life and home life and million details of just plain living that boggle the mind?   Or will you find it at 11 o’clock on Sunday morning?  The search is all encompassing and consuming for those of that persuasion.  It amazes me that there are those who give it no thought at all.  Can you live a life without searching for some meaning, any meaning?  Or is it enough simply to get through it?  I wonder what sort of contracts are written before birth to enable one to move through earth life with no complications.   Some ground rules must be laid and if  so, by whom.   Except no doubt by the people involved.

(As the mother of 3  I innately knew and told them as often as I could and always on birthdays that I am glad they chose me as their mother because I chose them.  And it was a ready answer for the often adolescent retort which invariably stated. . . .I didn’t ask to be born!     Ahhhhh but you did!)

Photo by Joshua Hallissey
click on photo to magnify

My friends thought I was obsessed with connecting the dots.   This is the process by which I see an event and see its consequences while the event incubates.  I have a lifetime behind me where I was a veritable Sherlock.   They were unable to see the connections between people or events even when pointed out.

I find the most disconcerting phrase being ‘live in the moment.’  Everything is in the  moment.   Whether it is love, (STD’s or who will take care of the baby disregarded) or a war being declared.  These things are real but their roots are not in the moment but in the many yesterdays.   The moment has no meaning without a yesterday.   If we have no yesterday,  today is sterile, impotent,  without meaning.   It is  a well thought out and lived in yesterday that gives this moment its meaning.   Why do I press this?   If our yesterday was not filled with events that were thought filled,  that were fulfilled,  then yesterday will make this moment null and void.  And those who see dots and make connections are sometimes quick to take advantage of those who do not.

Socrates was filled with advice about putting meaning into our days.   He said that the unexamined life is not worth living.   It is only by remembering the past and chasing our memories that we begin to know who we are and from where we come.  It is only by understanding the past that the present,  the now,  will not have to repeat the past.

Oftentimes and too often it seems,  when it comes to our Earth’s resources,  we mortgage our children’s futures.   We must sit and think about the past,  not only ours but our ancestors.   We must take time to reflect on our behavior and how we contribute to our problems as well as the Earth’s.  What can we do to make the present more commendable?   We make our present richer when we glean from the past those lessons and times that are good memories.   And we learn from the bitter failures what we do not wish to repeat.   Let us thoughtfully include them.   The present moment only has meaning because of what we bring to it.   And if we find our Now empty,  it is best we look within.   We take who we are into tomorrow and find we have within us basis for a future with meaning because we root our present.

We are the gold that shows.

Double click on the photo.   This plaque was a gift from my sister who read The Last Bird Sings and surprised me with this gift.   She read the first manuscript and this impressed her thinking.  It has much meaning for me.

May I ask you a question?   He was sitting at the window and looking out as if he could will the sun to come out so he could play outdoors.   Why you ask?   Because I want you to know that if you don’t want to answer,  you can say no to me.   But you always answer my question and never say no,  he said.   I woun’t say no to you,  he said.   I maybe not know the answer but I woun’t say no.   I tried to frame my question simply.

I wonder, I said, if you can remember what it was like before you came here to live.   I waited.   He continued looking at me and I thought past me and then asked,  which time before?   I drew breath and then said the one you remember best.   And he smiled at me and said the one where we were together before?   Where was that I asked.   He said, you know,  you know.   That’s why I choosed you this time.   We were bestest friends and I knowed how much you could help because we were bestest friends.

Where was that I asked again.   He said in that cold place where we had to hold hands so our fingers could be warm.   Who was there with us I asked and he searched my face.   He was reading me I thought and then wondered why.  He said it was a hard time and this time would be better.   Why was it a hard time I asked and he said because our bodies were broked and sick.   This time he said we are not broke so we can go outside and play.   We were too old and broked last time and the cold hurt when we breathhhhddd.   How do you remember that I asked and why do you remember.

Because here I can breathhhedddd and it don’ hurt.   My throat burn in that place when things ‘ploded  ’cause they fighted all the time.  You ‘member he said, you ‘member.   And he became silent and his eyes clouded.   And he said,  we say to each other,  never  ‘gain,   never  ‘gain.  I pulled him to me and hugged him and said never again.   We will try to stay where it doesn’t hurt to breathe.   And I wished I could promise there would always be a place where it didn’t hurt to breathe,  but I could not make that promise.   For this time only,  I could hug him and keep him where the air did not burn his throat.  But how long before all places would be safe?

Until life in all forms vowed not to inflict such terror in worlds where to draw breath just to live would hurt,  we would continue to work.  That is a promise.

From a journal entry September 25, 2000. . . . .”I meant to come down and write this story last week when it happened but again I did not.   Whether I am becoming lazy or whether just tired,  I don’t know.   But when I was unloading the car of groceries in front of the house,  a car came by with a young woman in it.   She pulled up in front of the house next door and parked.   She got out of the car and approached me with a slip of paper.   She was looking for a street address which she had written on it.   I told her this was the seven hundred block and she would do well to go down the next block to the East.  She was a little thing,  probably in her thirties or so and she said in broken English that she had come to a garage sale a few days ago and when she got home she realized that she did not pay the woman enough for whatever she bought.

I said well,  that is awfully good of you to come back with your money and I know the woman would appreciate this act of honesty.   No,  no,  she said,  my God sees me.   My God sees me.   And  that is why she was coming back.  I said,  thank you,  thank you.   For I had fueled my body with resentment to get my errands done and had forgotten momentarily what I was all about.   I was grateful to be reminded that when I am at a loss for a good reason to do things,  the one reason should be reason enough.   My God sees me.

I brought the groceries into the house and was coming out to put the car away.   I saw a car slow down in front of me and the window slid down.    It was the young woman from before and she said thank you to me again for she had found the woman and returned the money.   No,  I said,  thank you.  She smiled and waved herself away.    I think about her and can see that face with her scarf binding her hair and the smile crumpling a dignified demeanor.   And I am grateful again for being reminded that even with feelings not seen by the outside world,  my God sees me.   Anything that corrodes my Spirit needs to be worked on immediately.”

(And today with so much flooding our circuitry,  it is easy to forget the basic lessons.   I am grateful for the written word.)