Tag Archives: healing

Stairway to Heaven

Posted on by Standard 7
Stair hike at Mount Glennon Park: Photo by Noelle

Stair hike at Mount Glennon Park: Photo by Noelle

Sorry couldn’t resist the title.

I’d been climbing the stair to the cliff path. The light broke the ridge and poured down the stair. Amazing moment, made more so by the fact I almost didn’t take the evening hike. I’ve been focusing on living more in the now, lately. Taking advantage of what is available in my life. Filling my mind with more nature and less obsessing about the minutiae of daily living. Something about a mountain trail makes me more aware of my good fortune and breaks my egos need to look for what’s missing.

Still, it had been a long day, and I could find a million reasons to veg out at home. This moment was a perfect reward for having stepped out the front door. A little bit of spirit in the mountain weeds.

Suitcase

Posted on by Standard 6
Free Bing Photos

Free Bing Photos

I opened up the suitcase I packed carefully before I left. On the road it had been tossed about and now irritation, which I’d packed next to fear was sticking out the side. That’s always how it happens. You think you’ve got it all together and then life tosses you around, and the next thing you know, melancholy is covered with eczema ointment, whose cap has come undone. Every journey requires a little clean up if it’s a good one. Anxiety has mixed in with anticipation and it’ll take a wet towel to get it all back in order. I’ll confess, I’m like most people. I like happy folded perfectly on top. That way, when I open up, it’s the first thing everybody sees. Sometimes, though, you open with exacerbation or dumb shock and your scrambling to get the wrinkles out and cover that glaring stain of shame. I tuck irritation back in, closer to disappointment than fear, but whatever. I’m not planning on wearing it anywhere if I can help it.

We come into life with a full kit bag. It has the entire emotional scale packed neatly within it. We can pull out any and all of it whenever we choose. We are never free of it, because that suitcase is our free will. It’s just part of the road gear. It’s what we all take with us when we step out onto Earth’s mantle. We meet a lot of people, see different things and experience a traveling circus of life, but no one else decides what we’ll put on. That is our choice. Someone can be holding a black tie hate party, but I get to decide if I’ll show up in my flower child, wild ass, love suit. You feel comfortable in that hat of indignation? That’s cool, no judgment, but I hope you don’t mind if I throw on this baseball cap with foolishness written all over it.

I take out my makeup bag filled with curiosity, intrigue and imagination and leave it in the hotel bathroom. I change into hopeful and dab a little wonderment on my neck and head out to dinner. No telling what I’ll run into, but I’ve packed a full case. I’m ready for any eventuality. Besides, what’s the worse that can happen? I have to pull on blissed out. I always look good in that.

Lonely Haiku

Posted on by Standard 10
Free Bing Photos: 100 images of solitude

Free Bing Photos: 100 images of solitude

The piece below was written by my Insight Timer friend, Roy Mason in New York. I had been working on a poem related to loneliness that just wasn’t coming together. I sent it to Roy and he flipped it, most lovelingly, on its head and produced this beautiful layered haiku. Far better than my original piece. It is an honor to post it here.

Lonely Haiku

Magazines read twice,
Fridge food contains emptiness;
My heart: comfortless.

Mind wheels are spinning,
Sleep is sought but elusive.
The hours go on…

I ask: who am I?
The deafening loneliness!
Waiting for the light.

Outcast and apart,
I hear the chimes of the clock;
Then tick tock, tick tock.

I, disconsolate,
Endless pacing with worry.
Five O’clock: birds sing.

Beautiful Cocoon

Posted on by Standard 2
Free Bing Photos: From lovelifedrawing.com

Free Bing Photos: From lovelifedrawing.com

Before the beetles find me
Or the fire licks my bones
I will forsake this body
That has so lovingly carried me
Long upon roads
Of hot days and cool nights
Deepening forests
And fine ground sands

For in the end it is but a
Beautiful cocoon
And comes a point when this spirit
Must break free
To fly

The Caress

Posted on by Standard 2
Free Bing photos

Free Bing photos

Leaving work it started to rain. I turned, intending to go back in and take the causeway to the parking garage. Save myself a drenching, I thought. As I turned, I felt the coolness of the air that was ushering in the rain caress my cheek. Just a second, really. It lingered upon my face, before my hand touched the door handle and I stopped to turn back into it. Fresh and full of that summer rain, which now dropped in big, slow drops upon my head.

Surely, I’ll get wet walking to the car, I told myself. Hair will be a mess and you’ll ruin this leather bag, said the always cautious, always organized part of my brain. Still, I couldn’t resist the feeling. A curious intimacy of being touched by the weather, for it was a caress, of that I’m sure. A delicious taunting of a lover to come back to bed. The wind was begging me to stay. So I left the door closed and walked out into that summer rain and let myself fall in love.

Eking it Out

Posted on by Standard 10
Sierra Nevada Mountains: Photo by Noelle

Sierra Nevada Mountains: Photo by Noelle

It’s curious how we go about eking out a life. Not the financial part, but the creative life. The part of us expressed, even privately, that makes it all seem interesting. Aspects of us that transcend rush hour commutes, deadlines and scrubbing the kitchen floor. We plant bits of ourselves in between jobs, school plays, and the church pot luck. Oasises of fertile land amidst the rocky terrain of daily existence. Music, photography, haiku crafting, a curious penchant for coin collecting or beading seem small when looked at in the scope of our whole life. Yet, those small pieces are what feed everything about us. Our engagement with them gives us the sense we’ve climbed off the conveyor belt and left widget-land, if but for awhile. A few moments with a favored album or doodling with your child are as water to arid land. A creative nitrate for the mind that enlivens the dullest spirit and grows a beautiful life.

Dying Grace: Photo Poem 45

Posted on by Standard 16
Last years art, waiting on new spring: Photo by Noelle

Last years art, waiting on new spring: Photo by Noelle

For my fortieth birthday my colleagues at work gave me a party with black balloons and a wheelchair. I’m normally a person with a sense of humor, but I had watched this parade with colleagues before me. I work with mostly women. We have a habit of telling each other stories of how our time is past as we age. The best years behind us. We’re used up and lost our sex appeal. Men don’t do this to us and they don’t do it to each other. We do it to ourselves. I smiled and thanked everyone, but I knew in that moment, that I would live differently. That I would not see aging as a cross to bear, but an immense opportunity.

I look at this leaf dead, fragile, used up and am filled with its beauty and grace. Even dead, passed its season and it’s still showing the world what it can do. What it has to give. Aging isn’t about years, it’s about perspective. It’s seeing beauty where no one else would think to look. That isn’t weakness, that’s power. In that power is the possibility to transform. To embrace death when it comes and know you are about to pull out your best work yet.

Little Gem: Covered in Shit

Posted on by Standard 4
Free Bing Photos

Free Bing Photos

This is re-posted from Jeff Foster’s Quotes page on Facebook. Simply beautiful.

“I remember, early one morning several years ago, while working as a home carer, I found myself washing faeces off a man’s giant, swollen testicles. He was dying of cancer which had spread throughout his testicles and prostate, and in the night he had defecated himself and rolled all around in the mess. We laughed a lot together and we chatted about football and the latest news stories as I cleaned him up. He could barely move, he was so sore and swollen everywhere. He was myself in disguise.

He had a few weeks to live, but he was so alive, so in the here-and-now, without a trace of self-pity. There was no loss of dignity there – there was just what was happening in the moment. He had somehow found a way to deeply accept his circumstances, even though his life had not turned out the way he had dreamed when he was younger and he had time to dream. It took over two hours to get him ready for his day, to hoist him out of his dirty bed, to get him toileted and dressed and into his favourite chair. He didn’t live for long after that. But I will always remember him.

Even when covered in our own shit and without a tomorrow, we are nothing less than divine.”

~ Jeff Foster