You begin to count on them and then to remind you not to take then for granted they become elusive. Taunting little false dawns, strange sounds, sensitive bladder, dry cough. Eventually they get here. Well at least that’s what happened today. Guess there are no guarantees though. Except for this,
If there is a morning soon there will be coffee.
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At some point I realised
There is a place
One can go with pain
That is not oppositional
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So not only can you give life
You can bleed without dying
amazing
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Don’t forget
Spiders want to live too
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You Might Look To Remember Me
Walking the maple groves
When spring causes swift the sap to rise
The crisp hard frost early in the morning
When the hunting’s best
An old chair strategically placed in the living room.
Remote nearby
Joy and tears of my children and their children
Steadfast loyalty of my loving wife
Wherever & whenever comrades old and new should gather
The dogs barking at some random things.
Yet able to restrain themselves enough to wait patiently for their dinner.
Roll of waves playing guitar with the sunlight.
Old fishing boats at the end of a working day.
Sure, these and so many places you might look
Even occasionally catch a glimpse
Though through the years more and more elusive these might be.
On todays menu ~ Spring, Horseshoe Crab, Body/brain Memory According to Horses, This Mornings Repetition and of course COFFEE!
Empty bird feeder
Dappled sunlight
Budding trees
I get to notice
Spring
Again
~
Horseshoe Crabs
I think about horseshoe crabs, when child, discovering them.
My friend telling me they were dangerous because the ridge along their sone and tail would cut your foot. And they were poisonous too!
Notwithstanding I forum them fascinating. Would have called them alien but I didn’t have that word you. Extra-terrestrial creatures you know.
Later I heard that they were a creature that had silver blood and were used to discover way to treat leprosy. There were definitely a colour of unseen worlds. Upside down there was bits of orange a more familiar thing. sometimes we’d find small little ones not as intimidating as the adults which were about a foot or so wide. Besides all the little one we ever found were dead. Bleach whitish by the sun, shells thinner than a potato chip.
Any way I don’t know how much of what I believed as a kid is true. Don’t want to know enough of my childhood has been disproven. So I’m keeping this for my childhood and my friends as if that would keep us walking along the big giant oceans sharing stories and the adventure of comradery.
The Body/Brain memory according to horses.
Has its own memory. Things a brain might rather not know. The body remembers and will act automatic to prevent, or at least try to prevent a reoccurrence of such things.
I remember getting busted up by a horse. First time thrown, first time in hospital, first broken bone, first collapsed lung a long list of things. All firsts that I wished were nevers.
So after I was discharged from hospital I realised I need a cane, There was no medical reason, But I found whenever I was walking around in public and people got to close I’d flinch and it’d hurt. They weren’t really too close but according to the body’s memory they certainly were, So I carried a wooden cane. Not to menace folk but people generally give a wider berth to a person with a cane.
The brain too has its own memories. Maybe sometimes it decides the best way to manipulate what’s happened is to go full throttle out there. To prove to itself and the body too that though a thing happened once doesn’t always mean it will happen again’ Kind of rushing away from what the body remembers and mind does not wish to acknowledge. Apart of something that wants to prove something to its/my self?
So anyway that’s the reason I got back on the horse so to speak. Never rode that other one again. A difference between courage and stupid?
And so that was enough for firsts although my second time in hospital was from being kicked by a horse. That was the first time I lost a spleen and at least I know that can never happen again.
“Your spleen looks like smithereens’.” said the surgeon. Needed to be quoted somewhere don’t you think? They wanted to cut my chaps off. That of course did not happen. But that’s another story.
One of my favourite things to ride out alone early
No plans for when we’d come back.
The joy of it
Me and this wonderful creature
As if we could really never come back.
The sense of truly anything could happen.
I knew we’d head down to the river
A small pool there she liked to splash
I was thinking up the goat trails
Then into the peaks.
She had great balance and true to her breed
Feet like steel.
How would the valley look this morning?
Where would we find ourselves by afternoon?
These questions opened our hearts.
Hearts of gratitude. Pulsing life as something to be unknown
Embraced Rejoiced Savoured.
Thank You.
Cold diamonds
Prisming
Early sun
The longer I live the more I know I don’t know.
Like Dylan said – I was so much older then I’m younger than that now,
The certainty of youth seems to give way to the wisdom of not knowing and not for the most part giving af.
All I can do is cultivate kindness to everyone else that don’t know anything either. Although some folks get really spun out about it. If you spend generations insisting on things being a certain way well good luck to anyone who shows its different. I am grateful for the evidence of revolution. Makes these hardships a bit easier. How can you look a seasons ageing empires come and go and come up with a belief in a never changing anything.
On the other had as a great master once reminded his students upon his departure “Don’t Know. Don’t need. Don’t want.”
I’m sorry I never told you. But that night I came home terrified you really saved my life. I lay in bed your cool hands on my for head on my arms. Talking softly all I could say was that someone must have slipped something in my beer. When actually what it was, was I had bought these little white pills after being told they were mild like Valium. Turned out they were white lightening acid. And so, I spent a few hours trying to figure out what was happening alone in the woods coming up with answers like I was dead or I was god or if I didn’t want to be dead I had to become god. Usual seventies acid stuff which at the time even with my experience I couldn’t tell .well any way. I didn’t need to do any of those things, I just had to make it back to you and then it all came clear and you were my mother and I was your kid and I slept for most of a day and it was ok.
Sorry too that we never really talked about your sickness. Maybe I didn’t want to know? Or I was too afraid to know that I would be loosing you. Loosing my mommy. I was feeling I couldn’t do anything any way. Well, what could I do? Today’s answers are not the ones I had back then.
Helpless when all I could do was hold you – and didn’t even do that much,
Today’s answer – one of them, I hold you now and always in my heart. I see you in my beautiful son and daughter, for that always I am grateful.
Thank you for saving my life and for giving it to us all.
Not even big as a handful. The only type easy enough to peel. Flavourful enough to be worth the peeling. That first piece of peel, Always pinch it between my fingers so I can inhale the stronger scent of citrus oils. Did you know if you hold a lighted match close to the peel while you squeeze the little jets of oils will do split second bursts into flames. Each flame sounding a little bit like a whistling fire work. Tiny streaks blue flames for tiny moments whistling themselves out. Don’t remember who taught me that. It was one of those boyhood things that everyone in the neighbourhood seemed to know. Like how to make a sling shot using a coat hanger and some inner tubbing. Which yards you could cut through to sneak up to the reservoir. How to whistle, how to tie a slip knot, how to light a match, how to sneak cigarettes from your parents, how to fix a bicycle chain, friends showing things to friends.
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Today the rain
Sails across the sky
Sounds against the house
Even the dog keeps patient
Let’s me finish my little orange and a cuppa tea
Before setting up we’ll walk.
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Let them be unto themselves
Secret never to be told
A futile fantasy
Reveals nothing
But the fact
No one can be truly known
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What can you do when you don’t know where the trauma
Shaking you around all knee jerk and random
Comes from?
Where do you go when you don’t know where to go?
No places but for slow simmer heart aches occasionally boiling over.
