Ringed Round by Green

“If I could strip a sunflower bare to its bare soul,
I would rebuild it:
Green inside of green, ringed round by green.
There’d be nothing but new flowers anymore.
Absolute Christmas.”
Donald Revell’s poem of never-ending green, the “furnace of” an emerald eye, is titled “Death.”
I had always thought of black as the color of death, and of green as occupying the opposite end of the metaphor spectrum: the ephemeral lime green of incipient spring flower petals before alchemy renders them in magenta; crocus leaves’ broad, flat matte green, thirstily reaching through fall debris in search of stormy April skies; winter’s verdant evergreen perfume.  Jim’s color.  My own mint green eyes, encircled in teal-tinged steel blue, gifted me by my father before the furnace took him, too.
Green eyes open, studying the horizon, crying in the rain, not heavy-lidded in pain or closed in death.
In Revell’s poem, green eyes are not windows to one person’s soul, but the soul itself–a collective being of its own, holding the dead and the living, children never born to murdered children who did not grow old enough to bring them into this world.
Here closed eyes offer infinite sight.
One flower’s dismantling makes perpetual flowering possible.
Death is life and rebirth.
Black is green.
Green is never gone.

A Wishbone Sunset and a Journey Home

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July 16th, 2016.

At the appointed late afternoon hour,  one of our daughters was a wedding guest several hours away. She was in the same chapel where, at a service of remembrance four winters ago, the sun had suddenly streamed through a frigid cloud cover to the last strains of the first verse from Beethoven’s Hymn to Joy:

“. . . .Hearts unfold like flowers before you, opening to the sun above. . . .Melt the clouds of sin and sadness, drive the storms of doubt away; Giver of immortal gladness, fill us with the light of day.”

July 16th is my wedding anniversary. Somehow, already it was my sixth one alone.

Does the journey of marriage continue after death parts those who took its vows?

Weeks ago I watched the end of my father’s life of more than sixty years with my mother, including just short of 59 years of marriage.  I wonder whether she too will come to tap–or, as I have, sometimes fitfully and fruitlessly beat my fists against–the boundary at which their paths unwillingly diverged, and how she will see the new space between them.

One can only share a journey so far…or at the veil’s threshold does the form of the relationship and of each of its innermost parts simply change, becoming not so much disordered as reconfigured?

My husband’s size 13 work shoes’ thunks on the sixteen stairs that curved upstairs in our house have become transfigured into “footprints like a butterfly’s.”

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The ever-present camera he used to carry, elegant and specially adapted to his patient photographic skills, has transmuted into a small and simple point-and-shoot one I cannot be without.

It is curious–one of my father’s favorite and most loaded words–that as traditional time moves forward, my mind carries me almost ceaselessly back . . . to my older brother clicking his heels at our wedding, to my husband plucking a plump leech from our youngest child’s toe at a first visit to his favorite lake, to the glimpse of a summer stand on the side of the road that looks just like the place we picked strawberries with visiting friends from California when our children were babies.

Now I have gathered in my arms, as if holding a child, black boxes holding my husband’s and my father’s ashes.  I had told my mother what the box would look like and what its weight would be.

It is as if everything, part and particle, has been rearranged in time and shape and space itself. And while there is conservation of matter, love remains capable of infinite expansion.

“When the sun hangs low in the west
and the light in my chest won’t be kept
held at bay any longer
When the jealousy fades away
and it’s ashes and dust for cash and lust
and it’s just hallelujah
And love in the thoughts,
love in the words,
love in the songs they sing in the church….”

Not infrequently, I thought I heard myself voicing Jim’s thoughts, in the measured tone he would have used, while speaking to my father as he was in hospice care at home.

And I thought of the single most ridiculous and selfish thing I said to Jim during his illness, when I wept in the deep winter of his hospice care and said he would never be alone, but I would be alone forever.

What I meant was that we–our children and I–would never leave his side, and I could not face being being without him, of not having him at my side, for the rest of my life.  I still can’t. I still and always will miss his physical presence more than words can say–the same measure by which we love the children born of our marriage–but I also believe what I read to the close friends and family who gathered after my theoretical physicist father died, about why you’d want a physicist to speak at your funeral:

 

to “remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. . . .  [and] tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives. And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that…scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly.”

 

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July 16th.  The day my father had walked his only daughter down the isle of Memorial Church and I married my husband.  This was the first time both were gone. My husband’s ashes were mixed with the sea on Father’s Day; my father died three years later on Father’s Day.

“When my body won’t hold me anymore
and it finally lets me free,
where will I go?
Will the tradewinds take me south
through Georgia grain, a tropical rain
or snow from the heavens?
Will I join with the ocean blue
or run in to a Savior true
and shake hands laughing?
And walk through the night, straight to the light
holding the love I’ve known in my life….”

But I was not alone. Grateful for the indulgence and the company, I followed an impulse to go with a friend towards a spot I’d never seen before, where an outdoor chapel’s pews face the sea. Over the course of nearly an hour, we watched layered clouds brighten and sharpen into a wishbone suspended over the sun as it dropped under a purple band at the horizon.

What did I wish for as a child when I held a wishbone in my Drumphian fingers? What do I dare to wish for now?

The wishbone had to be broken, snapped clean through, to make its fulfillment possible.

 

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A few people then wandered near us and quickly left, remarking that they’d “just missed” sunset.

We waited.

The noseeums began biting.

We waited some more.

The visitors who had flashed by in search of the precise moment of sunset weren’t quite right.

They hadn’t missed it. Once we had waited long enough, it gloriously reassembled.

 

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Black and White: Part 5

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Since being invited to take a foray into black and white, I’ve happened upon scenes which translate well–metaphorically–into the absence of color.

There has been no unifying theme, but it occurs to me that three were taken looking down at the earth beneath my feet.  Two–one of a tentative spring bird, and this shot of billowing pure white beyond black steel twisted into a colony of perpetually flying birds–aimed up at the heavens.  Only one, though sunlit, was taken indoors.

The five pictures were taken in three different states.  None was taken at my own eye level. Although two were taken downtown in heavily populated cities, not a human is in sight.

I don’t want to read too much into this, and today marks an anniversary prone to plummet me into not necessarily productive solitary musings, but I sometimes wonder why my vantage point so effectively seals me off, even in a city of millions.

“And out on the street, there are so many possibilities to not be alone. . . .”  And yet I am.

It can be empty out there, even when the streets are filled.

The Empty Nest

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Abandoned Robins’ Nest

Loneliness is an interesting feeling.

Interesting, you ask?  How neutral.  How unilluminating.  How non-judgmental.

How unlike me.

My feelings about loneliness have been pretty darn negative.  I’ve written about unwanted solitude as a vacuum, an inescapable shadowed partner to despair.  I’ve bemoaned the loneliest number.  I’ve even referred to closing the door of one’s home, remaining alone inside, as a step towards death.

And of course a person can neither experience nor dispense compassion without at least one human being on the other end.  It’s a tandem event.

But is loneliness always steeped in black?

Overwhelmingly, I take my best photographs when wandering by myself–as the sun rises, as rainbow skies edge into black, as mist rises from the sea’s surface and swallows evidence of humans going about their daily business. I have never even glimpsed another human being at the spectacular lonely spot where I most frequently take such pictures.

Solitary at Sundown
Solitary at Sundown

In the wee hours of most mornings, including this one, being by myself–during all seasons, in outside places I never would have ventured were my spouse still at home with me as we both began a day–makes me notice things I would not have experienced but for having been left behind, alone, by death.

Within these spaces, solitude’s silences are punctuated by noises which are nearly impossible to hear amidst even the smallest of maddening crowds: the startling click of a falling acorn, signifying summer’s softly edging into fall; the scurrying and rustling of chipmunks; a bird’s lilting two-note call.  I hear the ocean.  I hear the wind.  I even hear ice splintering.

When I am by myself, pictures and thoughts come to me and begin transforming themselves into words (and into blog posts).

Jim tends to visit me when I am alone . . . or have a minimum of corporeal company.

Generally I indulge in my artistic impulses only when I am alone.  I find that art is neither for the faint-hearted nor amenable to group input.

Let’s consider the Dreaded Empty Nest.  Mine will be empty very soon. I will be alone, but for my canine companions.

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The Maddening Crowd

Yes, I know; you’re probably thinking, “This nest isn’t empty.”

This is the time of year when children clear out in droves from the houses in which they were reared, heading for school or beyond.  Many of their parents, my friends, begin thinking of themselves as “empty nesters,” in a negative way.

This makes me cringe just a little bit.  (I am at least consistent in overreacting: I recoil when people proclaim themselves “single parents” despite sharing custody of the children in question.  I don’t care how much you hate your ex-spouse or how dreadful an influence that person is on your children; you aren’t a “single parent” when more than one living person takes on some portion of the burdens and wonders of parenthood.   If your ex happens to be a malignant narcissist or otherwise does your children more harm than good, I’m sorry for all of you . . . but you’re still not a single parent.)

A child with more than one involved parent does not have a single parent.

And a house with a spouse is not an empty nest.

But if you do find yourself alone, both in a truly empty nest and wandering in the world outside it; it still isn’t all bad.

Sure, sometimes you have to stretch to find gold in those hills: when it’s just you, for example, you’re far more likely to recognize the contents of your laundry hamper.  And I certainly never fail to put gas in the tank, or pick up more milk when I’m the one to use it up (not mentioning any names here, kids).

I realize I’ve finessed the line between loneliness and solitude, which for me has to do with volition.  I’m alone by death, not by any kind of choice.

But here’s my mildly shameful secret: even when I wasn’t so shockingly alone as a parent, there were times I wanted to be by myself.  The persistent demands of a job and marriage and four children under the age of five could be a wee bit taxing on my supply of patience and energy.

And now that I’ve been forced into a large measure of solitude, I find that neither being alone nor even the darkness itself is always filled to the brim with sorrow.

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