With my feet caressed by sycamore leaves I am taking a moment to thank everyone who follows my blog and to say to those who comment, thank you also. There are times when you comment and try to publish your comment and it mysteriously disappears so please if your comment isn't posted it is not intentional. As for me, I'm a little sporadic at responding to comments. If I respond to one comment and not another it just says something about what is going on in my life at the time. Ordinarily I do not respond to comments. I do well to get an entry posted. As you can see this is turning out to be more of a MOSTLY WEEKLY blog than an ALMOST DAILY blog.
Rebecca over at Dazzling Darkness sent me some wonderful thoughts concerning the ALL ABOUT DYING post. She tends to look at autumn as a hibernation time rather than a dying because the leaves will return in a new form in the spring. She shared a poem with me that she has graciously given me permission to share on this blog. I love the poem and I, too, actually look at this kind of dying as a Happy Dying. Autumn is not a sad season for me.
One day when the air was supple and
full of hope
My life unfurled in a thousand, thousand
Shades of green.
Firmly held,
Tethered by my resilience,
I inhaled each moment.
Moving with currents of air
Or playful breeze
Holding my arms open to the rain
Turning in to survive the storms
Surrounded by murmuring voices
Crescendos in the wind.
I lived the long green-ness
With all the exuberance of
The innocent.
And then, gradually, the nights lengthened
The air cooled
and I plunged deep into myself
Erupting into a golden flame.
Until one day
I was strong enough
To choose to
Fall.
I was witnessed by one who said,
Fall is far too graceless a word
For the jubilant dance
That carries you back
into the ground of your being
Where you will always dream
In a thousand, thousand shades of green.
--Rebecca Johnson
full of hope
My life unfurled in a thousand, thousand
Shades of green.
Firmly held,
Tethered by my resilience,
I inhaled each moment.
Moving with currents of air
Or playful breeze
Holding my arms open to the rain
Turning in to survive the storms
Surrounded by murmuring voices
Crescendos in the wind.
I lived the long green-ness
With all the exuberance of
The innocent.
And then, gradually, the nights lengthened
The air cooled
and I plunged deep into myself
Erupting into a golden flame.
Until one day
I was strong enough
To choose to
Fall.
I was witnessed by one who said,
Fall is far too graceless a word
For the jubilant dance
That carries you back
into the ground of your being
Where you will always dream
In a thousand, thousand shades of green.
--Rebecca Johnson
Let's all try to be part of the jubilant dance
that creation offers us every season--every day.
A truly lovely poem, and it has a lot to teach not only about the seasons of the year but about our lives as well. It really spoke to me about the cycles I go through as I live with severe depression and anxiety disorder, and that in the end it comes down to making the choice to embrace this "dying" side of myself as a part of what makes me who I am. Thank you for sharing it with us.
ReplyDeleteSimply stunning. This poem offers us an opportunity to view death as a necessary part of life, needed as much as we need the day to end, that night may fall, and then begin all over again.
ReplyDeleteMacrina, there is a young blogger who is fighting a deadly cancer at the moment. Her blog is Barefoot and Laughing, http://barefootandlaughing.blogspot.com/
ReplyDelete...