Skin (...a recent, rough excerpt)

(....excerpt taken from a longer work in progress, called Skin...)

I waited in my room listening to Pink Floyd all afternoon.  It was     almost night when Alex’s dad called.   I knew it was him, I could feel it.  I snuck out of my room and sat at the top of the stairs and tried to listen. Mom was the one who stayed on the phone even though dad was home.  I could hear dad watching the History channel in the den.  I wished he’d turn it down.

I strained to hear the conversation and went down a couple of steps and sat on the floor.

“She is just fifteen and I don’t want….” I heard part of her sentence and pieced together several more fragments,

“I need to make sure….”

“….you will be there?”

Half sentences in between silence.

“If I send my daughter….I need to know…”

I walked all the way down the stairs holding my breath and stood quiet by the trophy case.

“Well, you have my number in case you need to call…..okay…….okay…….bye.”

I waited for a minute, walked back up the stairs and then stomped down so mom could hear me coming.

“Was that him?”

Mom’s eyebrows lifted and furrowed down.

“Well….”

“He was really hard to understand.”

“I told you he…”

“You told me he was Hungarian….he also stutters.”

“Oh…I forgot.”

Mom collapsed her head into her hands,

“I just don’t know if I am making the right decision,”

“You are,” I said.

Mom continued,

“I don’t ever know if I am making the right decision with you kids….”

“Mom!”  I raised my voice so she would stop.

She looked at me through parted fingers,

“Mom….everything is fine,” I said “everything is going to be fine.”

“I just don’t want….anything bad to happen.”

I felt my body slump into the ground at her comment.  I huffed and sat down hard bench in the entry way facing her.

“Nothing bad is going to happen to me,” I said in monotone.

“How do you know?” She raised her voice at me, “you are just a child.”

“……and, I am your mother….”’

I sat inbetween mom’s worry and dad’s History Channel sounds.  I felt like putting my hands over my ears. 

“What bad things could happen, mom?”

“You could get pregnant Allison!”

Her eyes shook back and forth at me.

“Mom!” I shouted at her.

“You have to know all women in our family get pregnant easily.”

I jumped up, turned around in a circle and threw my hands up.

“Did you talk to his dad about that?!”

She didn’t say anything,

“Mom!”

“I just don’t want you to make the mistake my family did.”

Mom turned her back to me and walked away.  She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and turned her face to look at me.

“Well you can go aren’t you happy?”

She walked up the staircase.  I got up and followed her,

“Mom, I am not going to get pregnant.”

She didn’t turn around.

Allison Distler

The Stigma of Depression

.
Robin Williams stunned the world when he committed suicide on August 11, 2014. I was deeply saddened but not stunned. I've always thought he had the saddest eyes. I believe there were many reasons why his death touched so many people: Millions of us can relate to depression. Unlike many celebrities, he didn't die from a drug overdose. He had recently been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and was on medication that had a side effect of suicide.

When you think about how physical his comedy was and how lightning fast his mind worked, he must have felt his career and way of life were over. We cannot know what goes on in another person's mind, nor is it any of our business. The laughter he gave to all of us and his kind spirit to all he met will be sorely missed. After his death there was a lot of information and misinformation on every form of media you can name. I'm disheartened that so many people believe that fame and fortune will guarantee happiness. This prompted be to write the following post on Facebook.

I don't usually post much of a personal nature on FB, but I feel strongly about the topic of depression, so part of my writing today is going to include my thoughts on depression, an illness with the stigma of shame attached to it. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer 11 years ago, I felt a lot of things, shame was never one of them. I didn't hide it. I had support. I got well. Depression is a whole different game. We often try to hide our depression or deny that we suffer from it. The tricky part of depression is that sometimes you don't even know why you're depressed. This starts a lot of self-talk. "What's wrong with you? You don't have anything to be depressed about. Get up off the couch you ungrateful piece of shit." When I had breast cancer, not one person said to me, "Stop having cancer." But I have heard people say, "Stop being so depressed." Not helpful.I was never so depressed that I felt suicidal, but I have wondered how I could keep going. Many people think it's weak to ask for help. Asking for help is just the opposite of weakness. It's one of the strongest things you'll ever do for yourself. I think that sometimes, people are so worn down from fighting depression, that they feel they have run out of options. My two cents.

Laughter and smiles hide a lot. Take care of yourselves. Put your own oxygen mask on first. 

Rebekah for the Poplar Grove Muse. 

Like

When I Wrote My First Poem

                                               (September 2013)

I probably didn’t write it

I probably sang it as I skipped to the creek

As I jumped from rock to rock

As I returned home up the hill shaded by buckeye trees

And smelling of wild roses

Or maybe it was when I climbed from tier to tier

In our old tobacco barn

Playing pretend games

And finding something new and exciting

In every spider webby corner

Every slant of sunlight dancing with dust motes

I still write poems like this

Not writing them, I mean

I sing them

Sometimes rhyming

Sometimes loose and free and flowing

More like the creek in our valley

Than the woodpeckers’ steady rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat

On the hollow beech

And I sing in the car and in my kitchen

And in the garden when I’m picking green beans

Trouble is, I rarely remember these poems, these songs

For longer than a minute

And I lament that I don’t carry pad and pen in my pocket

Or recorder in my car

How many profundities have found no ears

But mine to inspire?

How many beautiful noticings have blessed my heart alone?

I regret for a moment or two my lack of memory

But then I forget what I’m regretting

As a swallowtail butterfly catches my eye and carries it

Far beyond my soul searching exercise

Or my old cat begs to have his ears scratched

And can anyone give full attention to a purring cat

Without losing track of most everything else?

And maybe it’s okay that I don’t remember

That first poem I wrote

Or the one I sang this morning as I lay in the early morning stillness

And listened to my husband’s soft breathing

Maybe what I get from it is enough—I am being

Myself, in the moment, spontaneous

I am (as Mary Oliver put it

In her poem she remembered to write down)

“Married to amazement”

And what a fine state of marital bliss it is!                 

Glenda for the Poplar Grove Muse

Rock My World

Stone is the face of patience.       

Mary Oliver 

Even rocks have stories to tell,

deep old stories of time passing through eons, 

slow and fast moving water 

shape the stones over millennia. 

I have such a stone, ancient, from a creek bed in the Colorado Rockies. 

It fills my whole hand with its weightiness. 

Hefty. It feels hefty.

The color of dusky charcoal with white threadlike veins running around it,

tracing the paths of its life, telling the earth's story. But my stone has another story; the story of how it came into my life in the summer of 1982 during a family vacation through the west. 

My husband, our ten-year-old son and I had climbed an easy sloping mountain where we sat, all three of us, hushed by the beauty of it all, the vastness from on high. The only sound, the flapping of a bird's wings. We sat in awed silence for a while, we three, with our own thoughts before we made our way back down the mountain. Our son, always fearless, made it down way ahead of us. It seemed like we all were craving continued silence as we went our separate ways to explore the creek bed, remaining within sight of each other, but feeling no need to talk. 

The creek was lively, yet easy to navigate. As I waded the shallow waters, the rock caught my eye. It was sitting there alone, glistening, serene, tempting. I moved to pick it up, but hesitated for a second, not wanting to disturb it in its ancient bed. In the silence it seemed to call me; a connection on a cellular level that has stayed with us for 32 years.  

She's a good traveler. (I think of her as female.) There is always room for her in my suitcase. She went to Scotland with me where I picked up a couple of traveling companions, two pieces of green marble from Iona. On a tour of the Isle of Coll, we saw formations of gneiss, some of  the oldest rock on earth. I think she felt at home there. 

I look at her every day. I hold her every day. She  has been a silent witness to my journey. She's seen every emotion it's possible for a human to have. Sometimes I look to her for answers. She never has any. What she does have when I hold her in my hand is solidity. She takes me right back to that ancient silence, which gives me the space to be calm and focused. It's her never-ending gift to me. One that I never take for granted. 

The few steady influences in my life are very precious to me. She has been a most steadfast presence. She doesn't judge. She abides. 

Rebekah for the Poplar Grove Muse

Puzzling

Puzzling

Today, I put the last piece in a jigsaw puzzle that has waited over eight years to be completed. The puzzle has set on various shelves in various closets over the years. Occasionally, my eyes would come to it as I searched for other things but they never lingered on the puzzle box.  It made me too sad.  The day finally came though, when I decided I would take it down from its shelf and put it together.

As I worked it I thought of my daughter, the puzzle had been a birthday gift from her.  Ten days before my birthday eight years ago the driver of a semi ran a red light and hit her car broadside. She passed away two weeks later.

She was almost twenty-nine when she died. Married to her high school sweetheart and a new mother to my ten-month-old granddaughter.  She taught first grade and always said the only thing she wanted to be more than a teacher was a mom. 

After her death, my son-in-law gave me the wrapped package. He explained why she had decided on a puzzle that year.  He said she had noticed that her dad and I liked to work puzzles together and it made her happy to see us enjoying each other’s company.  

It was a thoughtful gift, but that was her way. Being thoughtful. On her birthday she would always bring me flowers and thank me for giving birth to her.  She had been thoughtful and kind and had grown into such a beautiful woman.  

She would have been thirty-seven last April.  As the puzzle took shape before me I wondered about what she would have been like at that age.  What joys, what sorrows, what experiences would have shaped her thirty-seven-year-old self?   I think all parents that have lost a child must wonder about this and count the years. We are always left with the what ifs..., the I wonders....

I also wonder about those of us she left. Who would we be if she hadn't died? 

Our grief was so profound that it changed us on a molecular level. We are different beings now. We were turned and made to travel down a rock-strewn path that took us to an alternate universe.  We eventually found our way in this altered place but like beams through a prism our lights were shattered and our colors are a different hue now.

The world moved on and the years have passed and I found I could look at the puzzle.  I found I could hold it and remember all of the beautiful things about my daughter.  Perhaps, I also hoped for a cathartic healing, some purging of the sorrow, some definitive answer to “what if,” by finally working the puzzle.

Sadly, grief doesn't work that way.  In the end, the puzzle was just a puzzle. A last gift, from my beautiful, thoughtful, loving daughter who is gone and who I miss every day.

Diana, for the Poplar Grove Muse

Reflections on Nourishment

After a 24 hour Nourishment Retreat

Her true pleasure lies beyond rage…beyond sadness…beyond the things she can never change.   It requires that she feel her anger, weep her tears, accept what was, what is, let go, and forgive it all.  

This is a continuance of life work.  Important, necessary, sometimes very difficult.  May it be also joyful work.   

Her true pleasure lies in the feel of the air on her skin, nourishing water to drink, to float in, solid ground to walk upon. It travels on paths through the trees, stands on a lake shore, looks down from dizzying heights.   It requires a new kind of bread, fresh veggies, fruit and the newfound delight in food that nourishes and satisfies…it requires indulgence when the body, mind and spirit want to indulge, in dark chocolate and wine.  It requires loving touch,  a re-strengthening of the parts of her that have grown weak. 

Revisit the core.  Re-adjust daily priorities.  Reclaim parts lost, but not forever-so.

Her true pleasure is not to have to work too hard at this, but work on slight adjustments and create the space to embrace and live these pleasures.  These are small movements, really.  More and more doable as the demands from others lessen and as she learns to listen to her yes, her no and to sweet words she whispers to herself: "You do not have to be in charge",  "You can rest now", "I love you just the way you are."

Her true pleasure is in the exchange with other beings who seek pleasure and depth, the wisdom of their bodies and souls;  these are allies for the journey who, in embracing the changes in themselves, whether intentionally or unintentionally, change the atmosphere around them.

I take her true pleasure with me, this weekend.  I leave behind remnants of “can’t do that”…and enter another bend on my own spiral, seeing possibility, knowing something deep inside of me is capable of ever more generosity to myself and that this can only be good for me and for the people around me.

24 Hours on Kelley's Hill.  Thanks to Kelly and Allison and all the circles of women in my life who find nourishment in words shared and conscious community.  

BLR July 14, 2014

Why We Go

Today our weekly Sunday hike had its share of figurative hills to climb and poison (ivy) to avoid. These obstacles are so very much with us each week, no matter the season. They resemble for us what the seasons of parenthood have looked like. Sometimes we climb, step over, stumble, stand strong. We are often on unsteady feet until the phase or obstacle finds its way into our normalcy or we forget it was something in our way. 

Today we knew feet that refused proper shoes would get itchy and tired, bellies would ache though they'd just been fed. We probably knew we'd rush like we do so often when we set ourselves up for being somewhere "on time," and we knew that among all the things that can make a couple mile hike feel more like ten, there would be more gifts than challenges. 

This is why we go each week. Why it is on our must do list. 

Out Here is where we give our thanks, learn to listen together, to step so lightly in case something small may be under foot. 

Here we look with intention. 

It is where kindness towards others and ourselves is modeled, requested, remembered. 

Here is where the much that is alive on earth and sky is noticed. It reminds us to do so at home. To find joy (screaming, LOOK! joy) in a cardinal, a worm, the moon.

 Here, we are out and yet so very much a part of the whole. We meander, we wander, we have direction. 

Here we are kept on our path when the other moments of our week mean to weaken our spirits. We hold on to these moments, speak of them often, go back to them so we can be filled back up when we are feeling a little low.

 We are each seeking 

treasures: to touch, to keep, to witness, to quiet, to bring togetherness.

We find what we seek.

This is why we go. 

~KGS