“There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.” ~ Harold Pinter

Lion at Nelson's Column, Trafalgar Square, London
Somewhere in a box there is a picture of me on one of these lions.

                   

“And in the heart, born single as a kiss,
Broods the sad other—learner, yearner, dier—
That knows, uncomforted, its one desire
Was not for this.” ~ Rhina P. Espaillat, from “Falling”

Saturday early evening. Partly cloudy and warmer, high 80’s. Thunderstorms predicted for tonight and tomorrow.

Very tired today. Spent about eight hours yesterday roaming around with Alexis, trying to find her comfortable shorts and sandals. Bought a couple of skirts for myself to wear to her showers. Also bought the invitations and decorations for her shower. So it was a very productive but tiring day. I made the mistake of drinking too much caffeine while we were out, and I definitely felt the difference in my body.

Double Decker Bus at Piccadilly Square, London

Both Eamonn and Brett came to me today separately to say that they missed Corey. I’m missing him as well. Maybe there is something in the air. I would hate to think how it would feel if he were really going to be gone for 90 days. There was a specific reason why I never dated anyone in the Navy as I knew that I would not be good on long deployments, six months at a time. That has to really wear on a relationship.

Anyway, the house is empty at the moment. Brett went out with Em, and Eamonn went to some cookout with his friends. Just the dogs and me, and Tillie is content now as I took her out to play before sitting down to write; otherwise she wouldn’t leave me alone.

“There either is or is not, that’s the way things are. The colour of the day. The way it felt to be a child. The saltwater on your sunburnt legs. Sometimes the water is yellow, sometimes it’s red. But what colour it may be in memory, depends on the day. I’m not going to tell you the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.” ~ Charles Dickens, from Great Expectations

So I’ve been thinking about memories, specifically my earliest memories, real memories, not the imagined memories from hearing people talk about events in your childhood. Of course I have the general, vague memories: going to Ravenscourt Park with my dad and our poodle, Sooty. Walking through Ravenscourt Park with my mom to the tube station. Going to the shops with my mom in Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith, and to Mr. Higgin’s shop on Goldhawk Road. But my first true memories come from about the age of four:

• We are living in London in the first house. We live on the second floor. I have not begun school, so I am at home with my mother. There is a large window in the kitchen, and it is covered with steam as she is cooking. I draw what I think are words and letters on the window. I ask my mother what I have written, and she says, “home.”
• Same house: It is Christmas Eve. My mother has put up a fake silver tree. I have begged to stay up late. There are footsteps outside the door. My mother tells me that it’s Santa and that he won’t come in if I’m still awake. I crawl under the heavy front door that has glass as its top half, and run to my bedroom.
• We have moved to our apartment off Goldhawk Road. I fall off the living room couch and sprain my arm. That night I develop a fever and have nightmares about rolling hills of different colors and a giant striding the hills. I have this nightmare frequently when I’m sick.

  

  Stamford Court, Goldhawk Road, London W6
  We lived on the right side, first floor in the corner; our windows faced the parking lot

• A little older. We are living in London. I go to spend a week with my parents’ friends who live outside the city. I realize later that I have been sent away so that my parents can sort out yet another indiscretion of my father’s. While staying with these people a local boy is stung by a wasp. This is a very significant event, but I am not sure why.
• Same age, same visit: The friends and neighbors take several of the children to a neighborhood pool. I do not have a bathing suit. At first I want to swim in my dress. They convince me to swim in my underwear. I am unashamed in that way that only the most innocent of children can be.
• Still 5. My mother’s brother Danny dies, and she is very upset. She tells me not to tell anyone, so I tell my friends who live in the apartment two floors above us.
• Five or six. I am participating in a Dances of Asia program along with some Phillipine Embassy children. There are older girls and boys, and I am left alone with the older boys in a room. One of the boys finds a girdle and holds it up. All of the boys laugh. I run from the room and promptly tell on them.
• Still in London, five or six. I am auditioning for the school chorus in front of the headmistriss of flora Gardens School. I do not use my usual singing voice but yell all of the words very loudly because I want her to hear me. She smiles and tells me that not everything need be loud. I am not given a place in the chorus.

“Memory is the library of the mind.” ~ Francis Fauvel-Gourand

More childhood memories:

• I must be about five or six as I am in school. My mother puts the front part of my hair up in a rubber band, but she does not take it down every day. I cry from the pain when she finally removes the rubber band that has become tangled in my hair.
• Same age: my mother and I travel back to the U.S. for her friend’s funeral. I learn the significance of this much later. While we are in the U.S> it is Halloween. My mother buys me a plastic mask to wear. It scares me, but I say nothing because I want to go out with the other children.

  

  A Typical London Taxi
  Riding in one of these was a treat as we usually took the tube or a bus.

• About six. Summer. We travel to France on the ferry that crosses the English Channel. Then we drive through France, and Spain. We arrive in Morocco where good friends of my parents live in a metal Quonset hut on a military base.
• In Morocco, I eat watermelon for the first time that I remember.  An Am-ah in long black robes takes me to the market. I ride on the back of a motorcycle and see camels.
• Same trip: We drive somewhere in the country, and I need to use the bathroom. There is a hut by the side of the road. Inside are two holes with smooth stones on either side of the openings. I refuse to go to the bathroom.
• In Spain, we stay at a hotel called the White Horse. There is a strip of paper across the toilet, and I decide that I will use this bathroom.

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.” ~ Cormac McCarthy, from All the Pretty Horses

I’m older now, but we’re still in London:

• I’m in the hospital to have my tonsils removed. The nurse comes to give me a shot, and I throw a tantrum. Orderlies hold me down.
• After the operation they put me in an oxygen tent. I pull the sheet over my head because it is cooler beneath the covers. My mother walks in and sees the sheet over my head and screams.
• One day while walking to school, my friends and I see a purse behind the bushes that line the side of the hospital fence, a huge black metal fence that runs the length of the street. This may be the nurses home. We wonder how a purse got behind the bushes. Years later I remember this and think that the purse must have belonged to a nurse who was attacked. I create an entire story in my head about this unknown woman.

  

  Ravenscourt Park
  We walked through the park to get to school. There used to be lots of arched recesses.

• One day while walking home from school I fall on the road right outside the entrance to the park. A piece of gravel embeds itself on my left palm. I still have a very tiny spot on that palm where the gravel was.
• We are in school having a maths lesson. The teacher writes a problem on the blackboard and asks the smartest boy in class how many numbers he can work with at one time. He says all of them. She says no, that we can only work with two numbers at a time, do one thing at a time. I spend the rest of my life trying to prove her wrong.
• My mother cuts off all of my hair so that it will be in the same style s a singer she likes. I hate it short and feel like I look like a boy.

“The words with which a child’s heart is poisoned, through malice or through ignorance, remain branded in his memory, and sooner or later, they burn his soul.” ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

These memories are mine, perhaps not recalled perfectly, but as close to real as I have stored them. For example, I know that I saw the guards at Buckingham palace on several occasions, but I do not actually remember this. Most of these things I have not told my mother, so she has not recounted them at the dinner table in that embarrassing way that she does, like the things that I did as a baby. I never told her about the girdle incidence, or the black purse behind the bushes. She does not know that I was afraid of the mask with the thin strap of elastic that got caught in my hair. I never told anyone about my dreams of colored rolling hills and giants.

Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, London

Nor does my mother realize that I remember the Indian woman in the sari who came to our apartment door right after I got back from spending the week in the country, that my mother closed the door and began screaming at my father. I remember that, just as I remember being taken from the room.

Why does it matter where these memories come from? I don’t know, I only know that it matters to me. These are my truths, and they have not come to me from someone else’s filter. There is one thing that I can tell you for certain: I was a happy child most of the time until I went away for that trip in the country. After that, I did not trust that my parents would not send me away again. After that, I was unsure of everything.

All images feature places or things in London that remain firmly ensconced in my memory. I cannot tell you how exciting it was to find pictures of some of these places on the Internet.

More later. Peace.

Music by Josh Ritter, “Change of Time”

                   

The solitude of an apricot

Away from leaf touch, from twig.
Away from the markings and evidence
of others. Beyond the shale night
filling with rain. Beyond the sleepy
origin of sadness. Back, back into
the ingrown room. The place where
everything loved is placed, assembled
for memory. The delicate hold
and tender rearrangement of what is missing,
like certain words, a color reflected off
water a few years back. Apricots and
what burns. It has obtained what it is.
Sweet with a stone. Sweet with the
concession of a few statements,
a few lives it will touch without bruising.

~ Carl Adamshick

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“Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.” ~ Albert Camus

Hadrian’s Wall (from northumbria-byways.com)

                   

“I have walked much to the sea, not knowing what I seek.” ~ Loren Eiseley, “The Inner Galaxy,” from The Unexpected Universe

Friday early evening. Partly cloudy and mild, low 60’s.

Hadrian's Wall, Northumbria, by Diego's sideburns (FCC)

Still not feeling great. I suppose that I’ll have to go back to the doctor next week. I keep putting it off in the hopes that this blasted cough will finally subside, but instead, it seems to be getting worse again. So tired of coughing and coughing.

It looks as if Corey is on track to leave sometime soon after the New Year. I have very mixed feelings about all of this, as I’ve said, but in the past few days, the reality has really begun to settle into the forefront of my consciousness, and I’m not liking the reality. There’s nothing to be done, of course. This is the way that it has to be, at least for the next three months.

He’s both excited and apprehensive—I’m not sure which feeling is dominant, probably a vacillation between the two.

His current boss gave him a stellar recommendation, saying that he was the hardest worker that he had and that he wished that he had a whole crew of Coreys. High praise indeed.

Anyway, he’s gotten out his big suitcase, and has begun the search for his flannel lined work pants and such. So there’s no more denying that it’s happening, no matter how much I try to move it to the background.

“You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.” ~ Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Last night I had a very strange dream in which I was going to some kind of holiday party with my friend Jammi, who lives in Texas. I had this really beautiful outfit and access to antique jewelry and accessories, but the outfit was quite tiresome to put on as it had closures in odd places and a long scarf, and each time I went out of the room, Jammi would change into another dress. It was most strange. And then the person who was lending me the jewelry said, “Don’t forget the choice of weapons.” Someone opened a cabinet, and there were things like small daggers and such, and they gave me a ring that had an antidote in case someone drugged my drink.

Hadrian's Wall by Stuandsam (FCC)

How very strange.

In the middle of all of this, my mother reminded me that I owed her $86 (where did this number come from?), and she wanted payment before I left the house. To pay her I gave her a necklace that still bore the original price tag ($80), and a pair of earrings. She seemed satisfied. The necklace was turquoise and very unattractive . . .

There was a lot more to the dream, but those are the weirdest parts. There was another dream that involved some of our German relatives, a glass of half-finished milk, and mixed nuts. Make of that what you will.

“God, give us a long winter
and quiet music, and patient mouths,
and a little pride—before
our age ends.
Give us astonishment
and a flame, high, bright.” ~ Adam Zagajewski, from “A Flame”

I have a feeling that I’ve used this particular Zagajewski quote before, but that’s okay. It’s beautiful enough to be worth repeating.

I’m not entirely certain what it is about winter that I love. I mean, perhaps it’s the idea of winter that appeals to me. I love snow, the emptiness of a snowy path that has yet to bear footprints, human or otherwise. I love the starkness of the trees. But since I have never lived in a really cold region, one that is frigid and icy and has unmelted snow for extended periods, I’m not certain that I would like it so much if it were my reality.

Hadrian's Wall (bbc.co.uk gallery)

Does that make sense?

I mean, I love azure seas, so clear that what lies beneath is visible. I love white sand. But I don’t think that I’d like to live in very hot weather all year long. The heat would probably be much better for my bone pain, but I really don’t like to be hot. I like heat if I’m in the water. Then I can bear it. But I can remember being in heat that was so unbearable that it was hard to breathe. Perhaps it’s a memory from when I was in the Philippines. I don’t know.

Corey has no desire to live in a very cold climate, and I understand that because he spent a big chunk of time on a Coast Guard ice breaker in the Great Lakes—definitely cold, but I think that I do want to live in such a climate, that I do harbor this desire, and I will probably not be able to rid myself of this longing until I have experienced it. Just as I say that I would love to live in Ireland, but people tell me that it’s rainy more often than not . . . again, I don’t know. I only know what my dreams and desires are made of, what seems to me to be the perfect environs.

I know that when I was in my 20’s, and a friend of mine moved across country to live in Washington state, I was appalled. I mean, who would leave living by the ocean to live in a place that is misty and rainy? But now? Now the idea of living in Oregon or Washington state does not seem in the least farfetched.

“I carry from my mother’s womb
A fanatic heart.” ~ William Butler Yeats, from “Remorse For Intemperate Speech”

Last night/this morning around 4 a.m. I caught the end of Tom and Viv on one of the movie channels. It’s a movie about T. S. Eliot and his long-suffering wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot. The marriage was not a happy one, and for the last decade of her life, Viv was committed to Northumberland House mental hospital. The movie stars Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson, and I’ve wanted to see it forever, but never think about it, so of course, it’s not scheduled to repeat anytime soon.

Hadrian's Wall at Sycamore Gap (featured in 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves) by stevemonty (FCC)

The problem with finding out too much about the personal lives of writers that I love is that it’s hard to think of them in the same way after learning too much. I mean, Eliot was really horrible to Viv, but I love Eliot’s poems, as witnessed by my frequent use of quotes from his work, and I believe that he’s probably one of the first true poetic influences on my writing style, or rather, poetic style. Eliot uses a lot of internal rhyme with his vowel sounds, and is partial to alliteration, as am I.

And then of course, there’s my love affair with Yeats. After seeing a picture of him years ago, it only cemented my love for his work.

Don’t call me shallow. I loved his words before his face. In fact, Yeats penned my all-time favorite lines from a poem (from “When You Are Old”):

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

When I first read those lines in college, I longed to find someone who would love the pilgrim soul in me and the sorrows of my changing face . . . Years later, I did.

“What is the water in a lake? A blank page. The ripples are its wrinkles. And every one is a wound.” ~ Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions II, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop

Anyway, not really sure what took me off on that poetic tangent, probably indicative of the way that my mind if flitting from subject to subject without  any long pauses for any one thing in particular to take hold.

Hadrian's Wall: Housestead Fort Looking East (smithsonian.com)

Today’s post features images of Hadrian’s Wall. As a passing fancy, I thought that I would see how many different perspectives I could find of this ancient edifice.

For those of you who may not know, Hadrian’s Wall was built between 122 and 128 AD and remains one of the finest example of ancient Roman architecture in Britain. Built of stone and sod by Roman troops under the orders of Emperor Hadrian, the wall was approximately 15-feet high and 8 to 10-feet wide, and it extends approximately 73 miles (80 Roman miles) across open country. Forts were built at seven-mile intervals, and milecastles, or guard posts, were built at one-mile intervals. Two turrets were placed between pair of milecastles. A ditch fronted the wall, and in the three locations in which the wall crossed rivers, bridges were built.

Hadrian’s Wall was built to help keep the Picts of the north (Scotland) out. It stretches from the North Sea to the Irish Sea (from the Tyne to the Solway). The wall remained the northernmost boundary of the Roman Empire until the Romans abandoned Britain in the early 5th century (around 410 AD).

Hadrian's Wall from illuminatinghadrianswall.com

The Wall is now a World Heritage Site. You may have seen it featured in the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (above), and a representation of the wall with garrisons in King Arthur, starring Clive Owen.

For your edification. As I said, I’m all over the place today.

More later. Peace.

Music by Sia, “I’m In Here”

                   

Fork with Two Tines Pushed Together

It’s fast and cool as running water, the way we forget

the names of friends with whom we talked and talked

the long drives up and down the coast.

I say I love and I love and I love. However, the window

will not close. However, the hawk searches

for its nest after a storm. However, the discarded

nail longs to hide its nakedness inside the tire.

Somewhere in Cleveland or Tempe, a pillow

still smells like M_____’s hair.

In a bus station, a child is staring

at L____’s rabbit tattoo. I’ve bartered everything

to keep from doing my soul’s paperwork.

Here is a partial list of artifacts:

mirror, belt, half-finished 1040 form (married, filing jointly), mateless walkie-talkie, two blonde eyelashes, set of acrylic paints with all the red and yellow used up, buck knife, dog collar, camping tent (sleeps two), slivers of cut-up credit cards, ashtray in the shape of a naked woman, pen with teeth marks, bottom half of two-piece bathing suit, pill bottles containing unfinished courses of antibiotics, bank statements with the account number blacked out, maps of London, maps of Dubuque, sweatshirts with the mascots of colleges I didn’t attend, flash cards for Spanish verbs (querer, perder, olvidar), Canadian pocket change, fork with two tines pushed together.

Forgetfulness means to be full

of forgetting, like a glass

overflowing with cool water, though I’d always

thought of it as the empty pocket

where the hand finds

nothing: no keys, no ticket, no change.

One night, riding the train home from the city,

will I see a familiar face across from me? How many times

will I ask Is it you? before I realize

it’s my own reflection in the window?

~ Nick Lantz

“How mysterious this life was, how deep and muddy its waters ran, yet how clear and noble what emerged from them.” ~ Herman Hesse, from Narcissus and Goldmund

Antennae Galaxies (NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team)*

                   

“The things that existed were so immense and so desolate. She continued to be conscious of these vast masses of substance for a long stretch of time, the clock still ticking in the midst of the universal silence.” ~ Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

Friday afternoon. Beautiful blue skies and cool. Autumn temperatures.

Pain scale: Head 6, back 8.

So I had my first migraine since the Botox shots, and I have to say that if this is the results, then it’s well worth having someone stick a needle in my face. I took a Relpax when it hit, and within a few hours, I was already feeling better. About six hours later, I was a bit weak, but no more migraine. It’s been so long since once onset med did the trick that I just didn’t even know how to react.

Tadpole Galaxy (Arp188): Tidal Tail (NASA)

The headache I’m currently dealing with isn’t a migraine, more of a stress/sinus combo, so I’m trying to take just ibuprofen for these types to see if that will do the trick. It would be wonderful to be able to give up at least one pain medication. Just have to wait and see.

As for the back pain, well, nothing new there. Omnipresent, just manageable on some days, and then on days such as today, almost debilitating, as in turning over in bed is painful. As in trying to do one of those wake-up body stretches, arms above the head kind of thing is impossible. Consequently, I was unable do drive the kids to school this morning, and Corey had to do it. I know that sometimes he thinks that I just don’t want to get out of bed, but as I had been awake since 7, that wasn’t the case this morning.

I dreamed of candles within rocks, natural candles formed by pouring the wax into the hollows of rocks, and a quilt. I was making a quilt for my mother, and somehow I knew how to do this even though I do not sew, and I was looking for the perfect centerpiece for the quilt, something with eyelets, but the fabric store was closing. And somehow I had to include grosgrain ribbon on the quilt. It was an assignment for some class, and I wasn’t in the least disturbed by the incongruity of it all.

“In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” ~ Cormac McCarthy

I have realized why some parts of Europe like Ireland and Wales seem to call to me: It is the commingling of the ancient with the now, being able to live in a country that is thousands of years old, that has structures that have weathered centuries, sometimes millenia, to live near these, to feel the history even as life progresses ever onwards into the future. That is what I want because that is what I feel inside—that I am a mix of the old and the new, the ancient and the present. I have always felt that I was this way. I have no explanation for it.

Messier Galaxy (M81) Hubble and Spitzer Composite Image (NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA Harvard-Smithsonian)

Corey and I watched Valhalla Rising, a movie with little dialogue and a lot of mist. I alit on this movie in the middle of the night mostly because it starred Mads Mikkelsen, who played Tristram in King Arthur, which is enough for me but not quite enough for this movie. It is set at some point in the Dark Ages of Europe, and the plot, what little plot there was, involves a warrior who had been held captive but gains his freedom only to go on a journey into a hellish unknown. I only mention this for two reasons: Don’t watch it unless you need a soporific; conversely, watch if you are interested in a lot of landscape.

The weather is harsh, the mountains forbidding, and the conditions, unforgiving. But I still found something hauntingly beautiful about the landscape, the wide open unpopulated spaces. The movie is not an action film, but I think that it’s supposed to be some kind of extended metaphor for about what awaits us in the unknown.

The movie’s title references Norse mythology, Valhalla being that great hall for the chosen dead. Odin, who rules Valhalla, chooses those warriors who will come to him after death. And perhaps the visions that One-eye (Mikkelsen’s character) has reference the Medieval literature, most of which includes visions of Valhalla, blood, and battle. Or perhaps I’m overthinking, which I have been known to do.

“Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It’s the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you see both their beauty and their death . . . Does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance? Maybe that’s what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying.” ~ Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog (tran. A. Anderson)

So today is 11/11/11. I’ve never paid much attention to these significant dates. I mean, I didn’t notice when it was 10/10/10 or 9/9/9, etc. But something about the 11 sequence is intriguing. Eleven has always been one of those numbers for me, like 3 and 7. Prime numbers. I don’t mean to imply that I’m deeply into numerology or anything like that, but there is a certain elegance in numbers, one that has always eluded my right-brained thinking.

Rose of Galaxies (Arp273) (NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team)

I’ve never had a deep affinity for math, except for geometry, which I love to this day, but the idea of trying to determine the next number in the sequence of pi does not fascinate me; just as I’m certain that people interested in calculating pi are not necessarily interested in words in the same way that I am. Nevertheless, I respect numbers, am intrigued by sequences, find the complexity of it all rather mysterious.

Take the Fibonacci sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.), which intrigued me before Dan Brown employed it. I wrote a post about the Golden Mean a couple of years ago. What I find most fascinating about the Fibonacci sequence is its appearance in nature: the perfect blending of science and art, the means and the method. Am I rambling? Probably.

I suppose it boils down to this: The mysterious, the truly mysterious has an explanation on one level, but remains mysterious on the other level. Consider the sunflower . . . Fibonacci. An aloe plant . . . Fibonacci. An artichoke . . . Fibonacci. Larger? Spiral galaxies.

Yes, the mind is zooming today, from one thing to another, no apparent connections. The only link is the mystery.

“Suddenly I began to find a strange meaning in old fairy-tales. Woods, rivers, mountains, became living beings. Mysterious life filled the night. With new interests and new expectations I began to dream again of distant travels” ~ P. D. Ouspensky

Actually, these things of which I am speaking are not so unrelated. Consider, I made the mistake of assigning Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to a class of freshmen. Ah, the follies of youth. I was a graduate student at Virginia Tech at the time. Now, of course, I realize that very few 18-year-olds know anything of the darkness that can lie at the heart, know little to nothing of the journeys we make into the unknown with little to guide us besides some vague idea of a mission.

Messier Galaxy (M101) Composite Hubble Image (NASA and ESA)

Consider the artichoke heart: My friend Mari once wrote of how her father would steal the heart of the artichokes from his daughters, saying to them that they would not like the heart, when of course, the heart is the tastiest part. When eating a fresh artichoke, something I did not do until I was 18, we peel away the leaves, each one subsequently smaller than the previous, and we arrive at this heart, covered with a protective layer of fibers.

To get to the heart, we reveal a natural Fibonacci sequence, but how many of us are aware of that? And then the heart, it is covered, and if this is our first time, we know nothing of its substance, so we can be convinced that we won’t like it.

And One-eye, knowing nothing of the journey he makes with the Christian Vikings, arrives in a New World that is completely foreign to him, and at the heart of his journey is only more darkness. And Marlow, who journeys into the unknown of Africa, finds at the end a darkness that is almost unfathomable.

“Ishmael gave himself to the writing of it, and as he did so he understood this, too: that accident ruled every corner of the universe except the chambers of the human heart.” ~ David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars

Coiled Galaxy (NGC 1097) Spitzer (NASA JPL-Caltech)

We all make our own journeys near and far, figuratively and literally, and some of us arrive at something that is unknown yet sweet and delectable nonetheless, and some of us arrive only to find that we have not found that for which we thought we were searching, that we have found instead something quite different, something dark and forbidding.

And then some of us, never make the journey at all, remaining stagnant at the first 1 of the sequence, unable to build upon what came before, either from fear or ignorance, or a combination of both, and because of this, we are never able to finish the quilts that represent out lives even though we thought that we knew how.

Our personal histories guide us, but they do not necessarily define us. The smoke from the bridges that we have burned can leave us with the most bitter of tastes. But fire also cleanses and renews. And I am reminded of my favorite line from Michael Ondaatje: “The heart is an organ of fire.”

More later. Peace.

*All images are from the NASA Galleries found here.

Music by Brooke Waggoner (just discovered her), “Come Love, See My Hands”

                   

Usk

So we’ve moved out of the years.
I am finally back upstream
and, but for their holiday grins
on every bookcase, the boys
were never born, it was a dream.
Here is where my past begins

in a garret beside a bridge,
woken by birds pecking moss
from the dark. The river’s clear.
It will not turn to sludge
till it reaches you and the mess
of streets I hated, endured

only because you were there.
My windows are full of leaves.
There are mountains in my skylight.
Perhaps you would like it here.
It is the same river—it moves,
perhaps, towards the same light.

 ~ Paul Henry