Shadow Puppet Storyteller

Time Markers

Commitment to write as a columnist, or blogger, or poet, or other type of author, for me, is less a drive and more a gentle way of being. Thus, I can find comfort in my inability to churn out a day-to-day output. Instead, it comes in fits, and may happen annually, quarterly, manic-ly day and night...but never in a demanded, someone is lashing at my heels to force out the thoughts way -- I do not know what mechanism is actually present at those times I care to move from my own innerspace to output.

As I begin to be concerned about my eyesight, my slowing at the keyboard, and my ability to have other people read, or more importantly, pay for what I have written, it only starts to feel like a race I must take part in now. Yes, I am confronted with my own mortality in playing over these last weeks since daddy died. He passed from the physical into the next phase, like the lovely desolate satellite of our earth does; I was here for only one cycle it seems. I wanted to be that astronaut who not only walked his uncharted surface, but to care for him in that completely solitary assignment when all the best minds launch you there, but can only send you for a short trip and with few companions. I still reconcile myself and try to comfort the shaking, weeping me who discovered him lifeless -- wanting instead to be the brave explorer who not only took in all available data that had been gathered from afar, and resolutely made the trip there to that very moment, but found the Scientific method and every imagined scenario was not going to be satisfied in that voyage.

I dance around the straight forward (as I always have) because my expressing sounds more lovely in its meandering form. Better than, "I thought I would be with him to tend to the transition, and I believed I was staunch and brave to hold even a cold hand, to close his eyes in that time." Even as I write that, trying, to be descriptive and blunt, I see that it still ends with the beating heart of a poet. Am I meant to suffer? How Buddhist a thought.

I can console myself further knowing I stood firm in his having choice and his independence; forcing others at times to give his power back to him, when they were more inclined to question those who should oversee or attempt to control his few remaining pervues. That would not have suited him. I know I prefer the man I knew and could be exasperated at; some degree of sharpness, but his own brazenness, where perhaps, so many had asked that he not be that. I feel my own children did learn the blessing of gratitude at least. That you should show the gratitude even if it does not come in the flavor you'd most like every time. He was a 31 flavors...and if the tiny spoon sample was offered, you felt obligated to choose that flavor, unless you truly had a revulsive reaction to its taste, (but then, it is ice cream after all), so you continue to go back for more opportunities.

Perhaps, even in death of the physical, I still have not run out of those opportunities. As I go through papers and photos, I wonder at both the drive and the laid back way of being, and discover we did have patterns in common. So this relationship is not over, and although my whole being could not do the symbolic ritual cleaning and leading on a new path, perhaps that was not mine to do. And like I often do to myself, I move too far ahead in my planning to savor the actual moment.

I do feel I missed a moment and was instead like a spectator that was asked to move along...and maybe that is where I experienced the hurt the most on that late afternoon two months ago. Being hurried along by the sentinels of the Universe as if I was not ready. How I hate being treated like a child, but delight in remaining one.