All selections from: Shambhala Pocket Classics
"The Pocket Rumi"
Edited by Kabir Helminski; copyright 2001
Enjoy!!
Donna
A New Rule
It is the rule with drunkards to fall upon each other,
to quarrel, become violent, and make a scene.
The lover is even worse than a drunkard.
I will tell you what love is: to enter a mine of gold.
And what is that gold?
The lover is a king above all kings,
unafraid of death,
not at all interested in a golden crown.
The dervish has a pearl concealed
under his patched cloak.
Why should he go begging door to door?
Last night that moon came along,
drunk dropping clothes in the street.
“Get up,” I told my heart,
“Give the soul a glass of wine.
The moment has come
to join the nightingale in the garden,
to taste sugar with the soul-parrot.”
I have fallen with my heart shattered—
where else but on your path, and I
broke your bowl, drunk, my idol, so drunk
don’t let me be harmed, take my hand.
A new rule, a new law has been born:
break all the glasses and draw near to the glassblower.
The War Inside
Rest your cheek, for a moment,
on this drunken cheek.
Let me forget the war and cruelty inside myself.
I hold these silver coins in my hand;
give me your wine of golden light.
You have opened the seven doors of heaven;
now lay your hand generously on my tightened heart.
All I have to offer is this illusion, my self.
Give it a nickname at least that is real.
Only you can restore what you have broken;
help my broken head.
I’m not asking for some sweet pistachio candy,
but your everlasting love.
Fifty times I’ve said,
“Heart, stop hunting and step into this net.”
Search the Darkness
Sit with your friends; don’t go back to sleep.
Don’t sink like a fish to the bottom of the sea.
Surge like an ocean,
don’t scatter yourself like a storm.
Life’s waters flow from darkness.
Search the darkness, don’t run from it.
Night travelers are full of light, and you are, too;
don’t leave this companionship.
Be a wakeful candle in a golden dish,
don’t slip into the dirt like quicksilver.
The moon appears for night travelers,
be watchful when the moon is full.
Be Love’s Willing Slave
Come and be Love’s willing slave,
for Love’s slavery will save you.
Forsake the slavery of this world
and take up Love’s sweet service.
The free, the world enslaves,
but to slaves Love grants freedom.
I crave release from this world
like a bird from it’s egg;
free me from this shell that clings.
As from the grave, grant me new life.
O Love, O quail in the free fields of spring,
wildly sing songs of joy.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Coming Home
Spring of ’09 has felt like a season of “Coming Home”.
After a winter of preparing for my third move in as many years, March and April were consumed with moving, and bringing final closure to my and my childrens' lives in a house that had become too big for us, and in the end, more of a burden than a home. Along with the excitement of the move, April also is the month when kid number last (four) made her college choice. Also in this transitory month, New York State finally figured out that they needed to issue me a license in Marriage and Family Therapy, and did!
In May, my older two kids came home to their new home away from home for Memorial Day weekend. While home, my daughter attended one of her high school classmates in her wedding, making for a weekend of lots of reminiscing and noticing the passage of time. Then, the last weekend of May I participated in a small “retreat” of sorts with some of my MFT “family” from Syracuse University. After all the craziness of preparations for and then moving during the winter and early spring, the events of May felt warm, comfortable, and were a welcome shift from the tedium of trying to get myself re-organized in my new space. It really did feel like it was my time for “coming home”. Home to my new space where the kids and I could be home together. Home with my professional family, who I don’t get to see that often. Home with myself as I move forward.
And now it is June. Youngest had her senior ball, and is preparing for her high school graduation, and then college. I had a birthday, complete with lots of old fashioned phone calls from family and closest friends contacting me with their well wishes. And, I have gifted myself on this birthday by re-furnishing, and re-creating my bedroom space. It seemed to be the appropriate offering at this important juncture. Many pieces of my life that have been a source of struggle and heaviness now seem to be falling into place.
It would be easy to decide that all those heavy struggles that have worked their way to happy resolution, and with such synchronicity, should now create for me the life that I have been waiting for. However, I know all too well that there are many more sources of struggle and heaviness yet to find me. Despite turning the page in my calendar, I am quite certain that I have many more years of sorting out the “stuff” of my life, and weaving my way through confusing paths, before I can rest easy in the bliss of pure enlightened wisdom! And, that is a good thing. I may not have quite attained bliss, yet there is a juiciness that life offers as I have found myself swimming through the mud, and then finding a place to emerge. Hopefully the next pond will have thinner mud, and will not be quite so wide!
Donna
After a winter of preparing for my third move in as many years, March and April were consumed with moving, and bringing final closure to my and my childrens' lives in a house that had become too big for us, and in the end, more of a burden than a home. Along with the excitement of the move, April also is the month when kid number last (four) made her college choice. Also in this transitory month, New York State finally figured out that they needed to issue me a license in Marriage and Family Therapy, and did!
In May, my older two kids came home to their new home away from home for Memorial Day weekend. While home, my daughter attended one of her high school classmates in her wedding, making for a weekend of lots of reminiscing and noticing the passage of time. Then, the last weekend of May I participated in a small “retreat” of sorts with some of my MFT “family” from Syracuse University. After all the craziness of preparations for and then moving during the winter and early spring, the events of May felt warm, comfortable, and were a welcome shift from the tedium of trying to get myself re-organized in my new space. It really did feel like it was my time for “coming home”. Home to my new space where the kids and I could be home together. Home with my professional family, who I don’t get to see that often. Home with myself as I move forward.
And now it is June. Youngest had her senior ball, and is preparing for her high school graduation, and then college. I had a birthday, complete with lots of old fashioned phone calls from family and closest friends contacting me with their well wishes. And, I have gifted myself on this birthday by re-furnishing, and re-creating my bedroom space. It seemed to be the appropriate offering at this important juncture. Many pieces of my life that have been a source of struggle and heaviness now seem to be falling into place.
It would be easy to decide that all those heavy struggles that have worked their way to happy resolution, and with such synchronicity, should now create for me the life that I have been waiting for. However, I know all too well that there are many more sources of struggle and heaviness yet to find me. Despite turning the page in my calendar, I am quite certain that I have many more years of sorting out the “stuff” of my life, and weaving my way through confusing paths, before I can rest easy in the bliss of pure enlightened wisdom! And, that is a good thing. I may not have quite attained bliss, yet there is a juiciness that life offers as I have found myself swimming through the mud, and then finding a place to emerge. Hopefully the next pond will have thinner mud, and will not be quite so wide!
Donna
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Why Therapy?
There’s nothing quite like a family members capacity to challenge your basic belief system to the core. In a recent Sunday phone conversation with a very dear family member, our chatter about family edged into an emotional realm regarding our kids. Sensing that I was getting into uncomfortable territory for him, I offered one of my favorite truisms: No one, absolutely no one, gets through childhood unscathed. We both laughed, a knowing laugh. I took the thought to the next logical step and offered that, after all that confused childhood hurting, most adults then proceed to spend the rest of their lives sorting out the hurts and looking for some manner of healing. In his classically expected response to me, his reply was: ‘Or maybe you just move forward and get on with your life’, followed by a statement about how he and I are probably never going to come to an understanding on this one. I did not proceed to spend phone time trying to enlighten him. But I did find myself stirred up by the exchange, enough so that I decided to dash an email off to him a little later, offering a very concise couple of sentences about why healing those childhood hurts is not optional, but a responsibility. Knowing full well that my condensed thinking about, “why therapy” will likely either be lost on him, disregarded, or both, I decided it might be worthwhile to offer it more broadly here:
“Having a level of self-awareness (which very much includes understanding and courageously taking the time and effort to heal the woundedness of our childhood) is a basic human responsibility as a citizen of the world. It is the refusal to take a look at our own imperfections, faults, and yes, even hurts, that creates the kinds of unskillful behaviours that lead to domestic violence, and on a larger scale, wars between nations and peoples.
This is both my personal and professional experience.”
Well, maybe I tried to pack too much into a couple of sentences. In essence, if we cannot love ourselves well enough to understand and do our own healing, all too often it becomes too easy to shift into a super-rational mode that excuses hurtful and punishing behaviours towards others (to say nothing of the consequent hurt and punishment we will also offer ourselves). It might not always escalate to the point of physical violence, but all too often does include some level of abusive behaviour.
This is not to say that every living being needs to participate in talk therapy at some point in their adult life. Though, that is likely not far from the truth. What I believe it does mean is, that everyone has healing to sort through. And, whatever mode might be employed for figuring out, understanding, and forgiving whatever it was that created all of those hurts, that healing is essential for living a conscious life with a capacity for clear thinking. The more conscious a life we each can create for ourselves, the more likely we are to have content, satisfying, loving relationships. The more likely we are also to avoid harmful and unskillful behaviours with the people around us, whether those people be our most intimate partners and family members, co-workers, friends, or someone who merely happens to be somehow randomly placed in our path.
Donna
“Having a level of self-awareness (which very much includes understanding and courageously taking the time and effort to heal the woundedness of our childhood) is a basic human responsibility as a citizen of the world. It is the refusal to take a look at our own imperfections, faults, and yes, even hurts, that creates the kinds of unskillful behaviours that lead to domestic violence, and on a larger scale, wars between nations and peoples.
This is both my personal and professional experience.”
Well, maybe I tried to pack too much into a couple of sentences. In essence, if we cannot love ourselves well enough to understand and do our own healing, all too often it becomes too easy to shift into a super-rational mode that excuses hurtful and punishing behaviours towards others (to say nothing of the consequent hurt and punishment we will also offer ourselves). It might not always escalate to the point of physical violence, but all too often does include some level of abusive behaviour.
This is not to say that every living being needs to participate in talk therapy at some point in their adult life. Though, that is likely not far from the truth. What I believe it does mean is, that everyone has healing to sort through. And, whatever mode might be employed for figuring out, understanding, and forgiving whatever it was that created all of those hurts, that healing is essential for living a conscious life with a capacity for clear thinking. The more conscious a life we each can create for ourselves, the more likely we are to have content, satisfying, loving relationships. The more likely we are also to avoid harmful and unskillful behaviours with the people around us, whether those people be our most intimate partners and family members, co-workers, friends, or someone who merely happens to be somehow randomly placed in our path.
Donna
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Grief
As war rages in and on Gaza, I find myself both desperately reading about what is happening, and at the same time so disturbed by the news and the images, that I can not bear to read or watch.
The husband of one of my Palestinian cousins that lives in the Middle East died last Saturday; of liver cancer. Yes, even Palestinians die of things other than war inflicted wounds. My image of this man, comes from a very tender recollection of an occasion when I had a chance to share a meal with him and with the family in Amman. His contribution to that meal was his own home made special dessert that is very traditional in Nablus, the city in the West Bank where his family is from. He rolled up his sleeves, dug in and produced a wonderful dessert for all of us to share.
Rula is just about exactly my age, and like me she also has 4 children. Our eldest children were born the same year, and our youngest were born within days of each other. Rula traveled by herself with her very young children when she was pregnant with her fourth child, so she could deliver him here, in the US. At the time, her brother was living in Texas. On her way back to Amman from Dallas, she stopped in Syracuse. She and her 4 children, ages less than 2 months to about 8 years stayed with me and my 4 children, same ages, for a very brief, but very sweet visit. That was the fall of 1991. I have not spent that much time with my Palestinian family, but that visit with Rula and her children was very special. She is an intelligent, loving mother, who wants all the same things for herself, and her family that the rest of us do, no matter where we are born or where we live. I did not know her husband well, but I do know and feel connected with Rula. And, what I know about them is, that theirs was one of those rare relationships of lasting love, enduring and growing over the years of their marriage. I did not hear how long Sami had been sick for, but I am quite certain the juxtaposition of his last breath occurring during the current carnage that is happening in Gaza is more than mere coincidence. The event of his death touched me in a way that almost felt disproportionate for my relationship with him. Yet, I understand it offers me the opportunity to shed the tears that so desperately need to be shed, and that are sometimes hard to find for the bloodshed that we see pictures of, but keep our distance from. Every time a member of my more distant Palestinian family dies, it is another reminder of the ongoing, never ending bloodshed in the name of ignorance, hatred, and cowardice. Another Palestinian who was not able to see a vision of peace or hope before the end of their life. Another marker in the timeline of useless ongoing bloodshed and war. Grief deeply felt for one. I cannot imagine the magnitude of the grief of so many. The human heart weeps, is helpless, knows not what to do, and answers its grief so unskillfully. Will we ever learn??
Donna
The husband of one of my Palestinian cousins that lives in the Middle East died last Saturday; of liver cancer. Yes, even Palestinians die of things other than war inflicted wounds. My image of this man, comes from a very tender recollection of an occasion when I had a chance to share a meal with him and with the family in Amman. His contribution to that meal was his own home made special dessert that is very traditional in Nablus, the city in the West Bank where his family is from. He rolled up his sleeves, dug in and produced a wonderful dessert for all of us to share.
Rula is just about exactly my age, and like me she also has 4 children. Our eldest children were born the same year, and our youngest were born within days of each other. Rula traveled by herself with her very young children when she was pregnant with her fourth child, so she could deliver him here, in the US. At the time, her brother was living in Texas. On her way back to Amman from Dallas, she stopped in Syracuse. She and her 4 children, ages less than 2 months to about 8 years stayed with me and my 4 children, same ages, for a very brief, but very sweet visit. That was the fall of 1991. I have not spent that much time with my Palestinian family, but that visit with Rula and her children was very special. She is an intelligent, loving mother, who wants all the same things for herself, and her family that the rest of us do, no matter where we are born or where we live. I did not know her husband well, but I do know and feel connected with Rula. And, what I know about them is, that theirs was one of those rare relationships of lasting love, enduring and growing over the years of their marriage. I did not hear how long Sami had been sick for, but I am quite certain the juxtaposition of his last breath occurring during the current carnage that is happening in Gaza is more than mere coincidence. The event of his death touched me in a way that almost felt disproportionate for my relationship with him. Yet, I understand it offers me the opportunity to shed the tears that so desperately need to be shed, and that are sometimes hard to find for the bloodshed that we see pictures of, but keep our distance from. Every time a member of my more distant Palestinian family dies, it is another reminder of the ongoing, never ending bloodshed in the name of ignorance, hatred, and cowardice. Another Palestinian who was not able to see a vision of peace or hope before the end of their life. Another marker in the timeline of useless ongoing bloodshed and war. Grief deeply felt for one. I cannot imagine the magnitude of the grief of so many. The human heart weeps, is helpless, knows not what to do, and answers its grief so unskillfully. Will we ever learn??
Donna
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Love Death and the purpose of Life
I found this on the web site of my friend and yoga teacher extraordinaire, Tom Gillette. www.innerhappiness.com He has many interesting and inspiring information bytes tucked away to find in various places on his web page.... It is worth the look, and definitely worth the effort to make it to his class if you are anywhere near Providence, RI!! Donna
Love, Death and the purpose of Life
When you love, give it everything you've got
And when you have reached your limit - give it more.
And forget the pain of it,
because as you face your death
it is only the love you have given
and received that will count.
And all the rest -
the accomplishments, the struggles, the fights - will be forgotten in your reflections.
If you have loved well
then it will have been worth it.
The joy of it will last through the end;
but if you have not, death will always come too soon.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Stopping the Pain
A friend who is going through separation, and probably divorce also, spoke of the confusion of feelings that has come up, and continues to come up in his process of transitioning his relationship with his wife. “I didn’t know what to do, or what I wanted. All I knew is that I wanted the pain to stop.” I found this to be an extremely eloquent statement, a very clear expression of that unclear feeling, all too commonly unearthed when life offers an unavoidable, and unchosen major jolt. It is really what my clients hire me to help them to do: “Stop the pain. Please just help me stop the pain!!”
We are very good at getting ourselves into pain: get up every morning, do our lives, make a few mistakes along the way and BAM! PAIN! Now what?? No one told us life would be this difficult when we were sweet innocent young children. Well, maybe even that is a fantasy. Most small children get to witness their fair share of struggling adults around them. In that respect maybe it is an unspoken truth that we all know somewhere deep inside; yes we too are destined for struggle and Pain.
Wouldn’t it be nice if as a holiday gift to ourselves we could find ways, at least a little bit, and maybe even just for a short space of time to, “stop the pain”? It really should not be that hard. Pain is all about our wounded hearts. We wound ourselves, and allow the people around us to wound us also. First step in undoing our pain is to take personal responsibility for all the things that we know we can take responsibility for. Our adult ability, prerogative, and privilege to make choices is very powerful and very freeing.
So what do the Holiday’s and Healing have in common? Plain and simple, they are both occasions for pure loving. The first place to offer that love, and sometimes the hardest, is to our selves, to our own hearts. The wise advice I offered my friend is simply this: Healing and loving are two sides of the same coin. To offer yourself healing, allow yourself to be and feel loved, truly loved. So often people skip themselves and move directly to all the people around them for whom they feel responsibility. Altruism looks good on the surface, but it really is only altruistic if the person making the offering is strong enough to be able to make an offering. As anyone who has ever traveled on an airplane knows, if you don’t have oxygen, you will not be able to offer oxygen to your traveling child or other loved companion. Likewise, if your heart has been abandoned, it will not have the strength and capacity to love well.
This holiday season make an offering of love to yourself. Spend some time thinking about what will nourish you, inspire you, make your heart sing, and find a way to allow yourself that gift. Think of it as an offering, not just to you, but to all the people around you that you love the most. Imagine a world where all the people in it were content, nourished, and felt loved. Then do what you can to make yourself one of those people.
May you feel and be love, this holiday season and always.
Peace,
Donna
We are very good at getting ourselves into pain: get up every morning, do our lives, make a few mistakes along the way and BAM! PAIN! Now what?? No one told us life would be this difficult when we were sweet innocent young children. Well, maybe even that is a fantasy. Most small children get to witness their fair share of struggling adults around them. In that respect maybe it is an unspoken truth that we all know somewhere deep inside; yes we too are destined for struggle and Pain.
Wouldn’t it be nice if as a holiday gift to ourselves we could find ways, at least a little bit, and maybe even just for a short space of time to, “stop the pain”? It really should not be that hard. Pain is all about our wounded hearts. We wound ourselves, and allow the people around us to wound us also. First step in undoing our pain is to take personal responsibility for all the things that we know we can take responsibility for. Our adult ability, prerogative, and privilege to make choices is very powerful and very freeing.
So what do the Holiday’s and Healing have in common? Plain and simple, they are both occasions for pure loving. The first place to offer that love, and sometimes the hardest, is to our selves, to our own hearts. The wise advice I offered my friend is simply this: Healing and loving are two sides of the same coin. To offer yourself healing, allow yourself to be and feel loved, truly loved. So often people skip themselves and move directly to all the people around them for whom they feel responsibility. Altruism looks good on the surface, but it really is only altruistic if the person making the offering is strong enough to be able to make an offering. As anyone who has ever traveled on an airplane knows, if you don’t have oxygen, you will not be able to offer oxygen to your traveling child or other loved companion. Likewise, if your heart has been abandoned, it will not have the strength and capacity to love well.
This holiday season make an offering of love to yourself. Spend some time thinking about what will nourish you, inspire you, make your heart sing, and find a way to allow yourself that gift. Think of it as an offering, not just to you, but to all the people around you that you love the most. Imagine a world where all the people in it were content, nourished, and felt loved. Then do what you can to make yourself one of those people.
May you feel and be love, this holiday season and always.
Peace,
Donna
Monday, October 6, 2008
A Day to Reminisce
The juxtaposition of life’s events can create a complex stir of thoughts and emotions. It seems that my life is offering up a potpourri of events and feelings, and I have yet to figure out what the mix is supposed to be creating and offering for me. As I write this, I realize that at almost any point in the last several years, I could probably begin an essay with these couple of sentences.
Took a big exam a few days ago that, should I pass, will legitimize some of my big energy expenditures of the last nearly eight years. Traveled the first half of this past weekend following my exam, with a mission to deliver a cello to a violinmaker. Not sure these events have much to do with each other, but both mark endings and beginnings, and so in some abstruse way they seem appropriately connected.
The cello offered two of my children an opportunity for some portion of their musical education which, to my disappointment, neither of them have been keen on continuing. As fate would allow, however, their full size cello is a beautiful instrument with some value. This is an important piece that I am realizing now also: Musical instruments don’t generally depreciate in value like most other material possessions! And, as I have a potential serious buyer for this beautiful cello, it turns out that before it can be sold, it will need a repair or two from the violinmaker who sold it to me, who is now in Boston, giving rise to the need and opportunity for this trip from Central New York to Boston, as well as my extended imaginative travels.
Which is also the exam connection. All that wild pre-exam imagining that so effectively puts an end to any level of efficiency of day-to-day living!! What is being offered up as I expose my anxious self to 200 multiple-choice questions? Every time one takes a BIG exam it is the culmination of years of preparation that seem to be at stake. How could I possibly put on the table the better half of the last decade of my life in a mere four hours???
OK, back to my actual trip: After depositing the cello with the violinmaker, I got back in my car, turned around and headed west right away, but decided that on this beautiful early autumn day, I would take the scenic route back. I took myself home traveling across northern Massachusetts via Rt. 2. As I got close to Walden Pond, it seemed that both my head and my car at the same moment decided that I should pay a visit. I spent five important years of my earliest “mommy-ing” in the greater Boston area, and Walden Pond was one of our old haunts from those days. It has been nearly 20 years since we had last been there. The recollections that it brought up were of my 2 older children, both in their mid 20’s now, who were between the ages of two and five or six when I discovered and visited Walden Pond with them. Those visits then were very different from this visit. I actually walked around the entire lake this time! With toddling kids, that simple hour-long walk would not have been a pretty sight. My current visit also is well past the heat of summer. We always came on warm summer days, with sand pails and shovels, beach towels, bathing suits, and sunscreen. We splashed some in the water, but swimming was less important than playing in the sand. Here I was now however, by myself, in the same place where I had come to play with my young children so many years ago. At first it did not feel like all those many years, and yet there is undeniable history that has spanned those years. As those memories flowed, all of a sudden the time was more poignantly felt. The pail and shovel, sandcastle-making-kids today are both working their first serious real jobs. Their next younger sibling, too young to get into sandcastle creations before we left Boston is now a junior in college. Baby of the family, not yet even a twinkle in my eye when we left Mass., is now looking forward to college next year. I am feeling my years and the nurturance of all those intense mommy-ing days. Every time I come back to one of these places near and around our old stomping grounds, I sink into the recollection of that time when life was both complicated and simple, busy, hectic, scheduled, but with no difficult questions about what needs to be done next. Diapers and dinner, walks to the park and naps, grocery shopping, art classes, their first piano lessons, and pre-school.
In the interim 20 or so years the family structure has changed, there have been a number of graduations, including my own from graduate school. And, lots of complexity as well as routine, keeping our lives both mundane and storied. Stopping along the way to take in Walden Pond, and the gorgeous colors along the winding road and hills of Rt. 2 offered tender opportunity to slow down for a day, ponder the intersection of my and my children’s past with current time and space. Opportunity to reflect on how I got to be standing and walking this space where I mixed my own early adult years with my children’s impressionable years of sucking everything in. As I now ponder my sentimentality at this juncture, I recognize the tear in my eye and throat as another coming of age. I, like so many others, granted myself wisdom as I stepped into parenting full steam ahead. One of life’s many lessons, that we don’t really “get”, until an opportunity to step back and away offers itself. Tears of my own youthful innocence, offering the best I could to my children. Forgiving my parents for the best they could offer me, which of course is never adequate. Moving forward, I continue my job of my own re-parenting, and guiding my children when and if invited, as they now enter the stage of their lives not so far from where I was 20 years ago.
I make no predictions for anything at all. There is no knowing or predicting. There is only the offering of love, and being present to what is.
Donna
Took a big exam a few days ago that, should I pass, will legitimize some of my big energy expenditures of the last nearly eight years. Traveled the first half of this past weekend following my exam, with a mission to deliver a cello to a violinmaker. Not sure these events have much to do with each other, but both mark endings and beginnings, and so in some abstruse way they seem appropriately connected.
The cello offered two of my children an opportunity for some portion of their musical education which, to my disappointment, neither of them have been keen on continuing. As fate would allow, however, their full size cello is a beautiful instrument with some value. This is an important piece that I am realizing now also: Musical instruments don’t generally depreciate in value like most other material possessions! And, as I have a potential serious buyer for this beautiful cello, it turns out that before it can be sold, it will need a repair or two from the violinmaker who sold it to me, who is now in Boston, giving rise to the need and opportunity for this trip from Central New York to Boston, as well as my extended imaginative travels.
Which is also the exam connection. All that wild pre-exam imagining that so effectively puts an end to any level of efficiency of day-to-day living!! What is being offered up as I expose my anxious self to 200 multiple-choice questions? Every time one takes a BIG exam it is the culmination of years of preparation that seem to be at stake. How could I possibly put on the table the better half of the last decade of my life in a mere four hours???
OK, back to my actual trip: After depositing the cello with the violinmaker, I got back in my car, turned around and headed west right away, but decided that on this beautiful early autumn day, I would take the scenic route back. I took myself home traveling across northern Massachusetts via Rt. 2. As I got close to Walden Pond, it seemed that both my head and my car at the same moment decided that I should pay a visit. I spent five important years of my earliest “mommy-ing” in the greater Boston area, and Walden Pond was one of our old haunts from those days. It has been nearly 20 years since we had last been there. The recollections that it brought up were of my 2 older children, both in their mid 20’s now, who were between the ages of two and five or six when I discovered and visited Walden Pond with them. Those visits then were very different from this visit. I actually walked around the entire lake this time! With toddling kids, that simple hour-long walk would not have been a pretty sight. My current visit also is well past the heat of summer. We always came on warm summer days, with sand pails and shovels, beach towels, bathing suits, and sunscreen. We splashed some in the water, but swimming was less important than playing in the sand. Here I was now however, by myself, in the same place where I had come to play with my young children so many years ago. At first it did not feel like all those many years, and yet there is undeniable history that has spanned those years. As those memories flowed, all of a sudden the time was more poignantly felt. The pail and shovel, sandcastle-making-kids today are both working their first serious real jobs. Their next younger sibling, too young to get into sandcastle creations before we left Boston is now a junior in college. Baby of the family, not yet even a twinkle in my eye when we left Mass., is now looking forward to college next year. I am feeling my years and the nurturance of all those intense mommy-ing days. Every time I come back to one of these places near and around our old stomping grounds, I sink into the recollection of that time when life was both complicated and simple, busy, hectic, scheduled, but with no difficult questions about what needs to be done next. Diapers and dinner, walks to the park and naps, grocery shopping, art classes, their first piano lessons, and pre-school.
In the interim 20 or so years the family structure has changed, there have been a number of graduations, including my own from graduate school. And, lots of complexity as well as routine, keeping our lives both mundane and storied. Stopping along the way to take in Walden Pond, and the gorgeous colors along the winding road and hills of Rt. 2 offered tender opportunity to slow down for a day, ponder the intersection of my and my children’s past with current time and space. Opportunity to reflect on how I got to be standing and walking this space where I mixed my own early adult years with my children’s impressionable years of sucking everything in. As I now ponder my sentimentality at this juncture, I recognize the tear in my eye and throat as another coming of age. I, like so many others, granted myself wisdom as I stepped into parenting full steam ahead. One of life’s many lessons, that we don’t really “get”, until an opportunity to step back and away offers itself. Tears of my own youthful innocence, offering the best I could to my children. Forgiving my parents for the best they could offer me, which of course is never adequate. Moving forward, I continue my job of my own re-parenting, and guiding my children when and if invited, as they now enter the stage of their lives not so far from where I was 20 years ago.
I make no predictions for anything at all. There is no knowing or predicting. There is only the offering of love, and being present to what is.
Donna
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