From an Upper Floor

Come To The Table To Share. . . .

Several years ago a loved one said to me you take such giant steps and expect others to follow you and we just cannot!  This was a surprise to me because everyone seemed yards beyond me and I was trying desperately to catch up.

It was with excitement I started to blog.  I would ask the questions I wondered when my hands were elbow deep in suds and  mounds of laundry.  A reader wrote and said I had no difficulty asking who they would take on a journey as Dante took Virgil but she like others never gave thought to these kinds of questions.

Nor roamed the ethers with such equanimity as I seemed to do.  I had and still have difficulty with this concept because I thought that my head is like everyone else’s.  We are taught in school that all men are created equal.  And children do not want to be different.  My head wanted to know things.  I had a need to know.

In my writing I see where people are not born all in the same kindnesses.  For some the ability to love has not been born in them yet.  The ability to see also has not been born which is different than looking.  The ability to discuss things,  to feel,  to conceptualize, the ability to grasp the essence or a nuance, or the ability to relate by bonding, by trust, by hope, by word or handshake, and simply by humanity is outside their frame of reference.

When our rituals and icons seem narrow for the questions burgeoning, it is time to broaden the premise.  Not to toss out the premise,  but  broaden our understanding.  When our God seems too small for the questions forming in us,  it is time to broaden our concepts with larger understanding.

When a favorite sister came out of open heart surgery her first words were man’s god is too small!  He is huge!  No church can hold Him!!!

Will it surprise us that the god of our childhood has a soaring scope that our finite brains will have difficulty envisioning?  Ahhh!  that is a journey that is exciting to begin.

And when we reach an understanding that goes nowhere and we bang our head on the wall with the maxim it is all a mystery,  it is only a way station we reach and another door will open up.  And again we are given light to brighten the way.   Seems like work?  It is.

But be assured that you will be invited to the table to share your journey.

(from a recent journal entry edited only for space)

So there was no one to talk to.  No one who understood the worlds I trespassed nor was welcomed in.  I stayed.  And took cover in what I had to do which left me open mouthed every time I heard something that belly whopped me with I cannot believe they said that!  Cannot believe!

And I never learned to talk on my feet even to this day.  I listen and give the speaker their time and think about what I coulda, shoulda said.  But could not, did not because I do not talk on my feet.  I need to think.  And I can only do one thing at a time.

So I have listened.  There have been a handful of good friends.  Heart friends who said I was a deep thinker.  I did not know what a deep thinker was.  What is a deep thinker?  One who listens  to the silent voice within,  the Comforter within,  the still small voice within,  the thoughts which come from a somewhere else destined for you?  Because no person  wants to talk to you?

And when my thoughts because I think them,  originate with me  I take  to the wall and bang my head there,  I find matched by thoughts from an elsewhere world, I know I have come home to another some place.

I was thinking this morning,  sitting in the dining room and looking out in the yard,  that what if I wrote with my computer what I did in the 2012 journal that there is an  overriding power that undergirds this universe, or universes with the symbol >:____—–:> except there would be curving lines which I cannot do or cannot do with this keyboard but another world took them to be a primitive understanding of a physical world because this is a borning world.

With a small physical brain and said she had something there with this and then put this symbol to work with a higher element of learning,  I would not the teachers said,  recognize the experience as mine  but within the higher learning I could  take comfort that my gleanings would have meaning.

They could take this symbol and say she understood that there was a rumbling thunder that was the beginning that left in its wake what we now know as the heart’s assuagement of a yearning that is the key to understanding somewhat a birth in process of a movement.

What was  thought of as a big bang theory was in reality an assuage of genetic anguish that has kept the earth in turmoil for forever it seemed with no termination.  Giving it a name will eventually terminate it and chasten the ancients’ ancestors’ anguish and continue therefore  a birthing process in movement.  And perhaps the babe in the manger will be allowed to grow to be the adult Christ in our Heart   (Emmanuel. Emmanuel god within )  and evolution will jumpstart itself.

And they will ask again,  give me some of that pipe she is smoking.  I like that mixture.

This is the latest photo of Emma E. that I have and I love it.  I think she has a big surprise that she keeps hidden but I am sure she will let me know soon.  That half smile she has lurking around her eyes gives her away each time.  It is a big secret I think she keeps,  but there is no prying out of her.

I know all about prying locks open before their time.  It is like letting loose a down pillow with all the feathers flying about.  Like Pandora’s box letting loose its secrets before their time.  No use then trying to get the secrets back into the box!

Emma E. holds herself upright much of the time.  She tries standing with support and one of these days she will as her grandfather’s youngest brother did,  climbed out of his crib at barely nine months.  And when I plumped him down after a hundred times shouted at him,  why did you choose me as your mother?

Will Emma E.’s mother shout at her after a hundred times the same thing?  And will she be as surprised as I was with the words coming out of me because I never gave thought to my sons choosing me?  And realized of course I knew that somewhere deep inside of me?

Because I always told them I loved them long before the world ever was!  And I always told my grands that I also loved them long before the world ever was.  I, of course, knew that to be true but I had to hear myself saying those words out loud.

Maybe Emma E. smiles because she already knows that I have loved her long before the world ever was.  And she knows that I will love her forever and forever more.

That has to be a nice thing to know for sure.

My Earth, I take it personally. . .

When I was a homeowner it was said I took it all personally and it was impossible to live like that. To me the world cannot be lived in fully unless it is taken personally.  It is the only way to process information for any meaning to be applied.  It must be personal.  It must be meant for you.  If it is not personal, you are a passer through.  These are my thoughts on this, my world.

Everything in this world is mine.  From the thought in my head to my surroundings.  To my actions, to the weather in the course of days, to my thoughts in the length of my nights.  I am on stage in a morality play, in a thoughtful participation of all life.

I do everything in conjunction with everything else.  I do it because I must, to the best of my ability.  The things are visible, to someone in a somewhere.  To my neighbors who are nowhere in sight.  To the ethers who view and label my actions, to the best of my ability because I can do nothing else.   And what I do will have far reaching effects.

I think what I think because I think it.  My earliest thought was ‘think it through’ and I did.   Embarrassing, uncomfortable all the time, but rewarding in retrospect.  In carrying a thought to conclusion another aspect opened.  And so led me to more thought.

And I learned that all life is thought.  Everything is a thought form and every thought creates a something. With the question arising, what is it we wish to create?  We are a lesson in process.

Arrogant?  I think not.  Because if everyone knew this, we would be working our buns off outdoing each other in caring for our Earth.  Work would be the mode of action.

I saw a pin on a young woman in a store that said, Ask me to do as little as possible!   Inspire confidence?  Shows me she cares or is proud of her work?  Shows me she approaches life in a caring way?  She will leave the world a better place?  Funny pin?  To some, perhaps.

Because I take things personally, and because it is my world, made for me, I have to do what I can.  I wish to leave it with one more person caring.

Just for those who cross my threshold to feel better about themselves.  And given food for thought and to see their eyes light up on the yard and see that love cares for it by who the gardener is.

All birds sing for me.  All life grows for me.  All thoughts are directed at me and I with love embrace all of it.  Because I feel this way, I will work and my eyes will appreciate the greatness of the gift given.  And know the ache in my bones and fatigue is indeed a small price for this caretaker.

You realize of myself I can do nothing.  To ask to be an instrument of peace means that one will be asked to work.  It is my world and it is personal.  I have not been a passer through.  Everything is a lesson and everyone teaches.  I did not know how else to do it.

My world, my commitments, my priorities. Maybe arrogant to think so, but it has been a responsible attitude, done with joy.  If nothing else because then there was no one else to do it.  Now that circumstances alter cases, because I see, it is still mine to do as long as I am able.

artwork by
Claudia Hallissey

They were shadowing a century when they came to visit my in law mother and I had them all over for dinner.  I had married into a U.K. background, the satellite being Scotland.

Seated at a comfort meal, even the aged, ailing  uncle pleaded for a taste of real food of roast beef and mashed potatoes.  He happily ate.

Rrrronnie. . . .Aunt May rolled her r’s as she started with another helping.  What do you think of a mother who capped her daughter in summer because she had dark hair?  Startled , I said, I thought someone had issues not resolved.

I listened carefully to facts from this cousin hoping for light on my not understood difficulties with this  Anglo Saxon Protestant family I could never please.  I researched and found Scotland had been invaded several times in their history by nomads looking for delta land to feed the growing tribes on the move.  Their early history of course revolved about the break from the Romans.

But recently I read an article that new evidence shows that Africa was once green and easy to cross with many waters easy to navigate.  African tribes these hundreds of thousands of years ago left their mainland in droves, swooping countries with devastation in its wake.

We see today the ravages of war across too many places to count.  Generations will find that whatever their much toted pristine origins will be taken aback when the grandchild arrives with features outside their familiar culture.  Like the in law mother who as a child was made to wear a hat in summer by a severely prejudicial grandmother intent on appearances.

And unsuspecting but eager to be loved younger I marrying into an unknown family wondered why I fell short.   They only saw  features from an Eastern European heritage labeled rural and did not know the educated ancestors with a grandmother who spoke seven languages.

In the farm country of my home state settled by Germans where I spent my formative years, a grandfather announced a grandson to his friends with a sidebar of he has black curly hair and brown skin but he’s mine.  Of course he was and I look upon extended family and see unfamiliar features and even  tight, black curls of one of ours (from the Scottish line) and so far no blue eyes but who knows?

The sense of soil exhibited by some family members has made me look closely at investing some fantasy monies if they came to me in household bleach of any kind.  Watching these members scrub a genetic history of hundreds of thousands of years ago of what they consider stain on their pristine hides leaves me with a desire to shout as my Mentor did, ye are brothers!

You are your brothers’ keeper.  You are, we are,  I Am. . . . .