There are those who believe you must find your credibility before people will want to read what you write and what we want you to understand is that when you tune in to who you really are that's where your true credibility comes from----and that's attractive to anyone who's a vibrational match to it. In other words anyone who finds you not credible, wouldn't understand what you've written anyway.
- Abraham
It's been over two weeks since my last post. I wonder to myself why I haven't felt moved to write ( my inner censor not withstanding). A few minutes ago a special friend sent me this quote. As I read the words in the quote, I find my courage emerging from the shadows.
Now it's okay to share with you what I've been grappling with of late to understand. In my middle-aged years I sense the passage of life more deeply. Themes of loss seem to dominate at times. In the space of several weeks, my cousin died unexpectedly; my best friend's sister was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died within weeks; another friend's mother died over the weekend, fanning the flames of grief over my own mother's death 18 months ago. I still miss my Mom every day.
Living several states away from friends and family, we can't make it to all the weddings and funerals. I feel torn about that. I call my 83 yr old Dad up on Father's Day, wishing I could be with him. He no longer has an endless number of Fathers Days ahead of him.
I experience an identity crisis of sorts. I ask myself why I live where I live. Am I creating enough of a positive impact to justify living here in South Carolina? Am I allowed to live my life the way I see fit? Will our adult daughters ever live close to us again? Will I ever move off the topic of middle-age?
Amidst these loss-related issues, my husband and I laugh and relax with good friends over the weekend; my business partner and I enjoy a recent, tremendous business success; and I move through my day without getting needlessly stuck. It just goes to show you that life goes on side by side with the angst.
Raising the above questions brings both discomfort, and relief. Unlike the game show, Jeopardy, answers usually don't first show up without a question to pair up with. Now that I've tossed these questions out to the great Universe, I can wait. The answers I need will find me in time, or lead to better questions!
A friend approaching sixty said to me once that she woke up with the sense that every experience was suddenly her mirror. She could not escape anything about herself in the constant reflections. No matter which way she turned, it came back to her with a rush of realizations; her losses, triumphs, ambiguities, regrets and insights all mixed up together, all part of the same "funhouse" that she couldn't quite (didn't want to?) get away from.
When there's no exit to awareness, I suspect what we learn to do is surrender to a newly emerging center, something "beyond us yet ourselves," as the poet would say, a center woven from a multitude of very disparate threads. The topic of middle-age, of things pulled apart and rewoven, is not something we can just put aside because now more than ever we experience in real time each of those threads, each thread's unraveled or discovered truth, its colors and textures, its knots and remaining loose ends. And maybe, just maybe, we see some part of the larger patterns in the cloth.
Wallace Stevens in his poem, Of Mere Being, says, "You know then that it is not the reason/That makes us happy or unhappy." A phrase pointing to a mystery: we only need to understand that understanding itself isn't going to be the final answer.
Of Mere Being
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
~Wallace Stevens, 1954~
Posted by: Dan | June 25, 2009 at 02:04 AM
Dan - you have the beautiful gift of being able to pick up the "threads" of my meanderings and hand them back to me in a fabric of both clarity and reassurance. Thank you for stopping by to share both your friendship and your wisdom.
Posted by: Deb Call | June 25, 2009 at 03:54 PM