28 June 2014

Have been away...

for a long, long time...

Feel I'm beginning to surface after being deluged by problems, heartaches, and various issues.

To start me on my way again, Life threw this at me this morning:

“You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them.”
~Michael Jordan

It is the "You have to expect things of yourself" that has caught me....caught in the maelstrom of life, I think all that thrashing around took the juice out of me and out of my life.

Going to get it back!

16 June 2014

I don't know why...

I am suddenly assailed by all kinds of doubts and regrets.

Chief of these is my inability to put into words my feelings about the loss of my mother. As I've mentioned before, since I didn't see my beloved Dad (he was also an extremely important presence in the life of my DD) interred, to me he is still around....but Mom was different - I saw her suffer - a lot of it because of her stubbornness - but suffer she did, and badly...

I was comforted by these words:

A mother, after all, is your entry into the world. She is the shell in which you divide and become a life. Waking up in a world without her is like waking up in a world without sky: unimaginable.

A mother is beyond any notion of a beginning. That’s what makes her a mother: you cannot start the story.

When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. 

Grief requires acquainting yourself with the world again and again; each “first” causes a break that must be reset… And so you always feel suspense, a queer dread—you never know what occasion will break the loss freshly open.

It’s not a question of getting over it or healing. No; it’s a question of learning to live with this transformation. For the loss is transformative.....it's like a tree growing around an obstruction.

Taken from 'In The Long Goodbye' - Meghan O'Rourke's magnificent memoir of grieving her mother's death. In this book, she crafts a masterwork of remembrance and reflection.

It is in the presence of death...

especially of those we love - that we come face to face with our own mortality...

05 June 2014

Laws are something you merely obey...

Values are something you feel.
~ Edward Slingerland

This really clarifies things for me. Not the laws part - of course laws are to be obeyed, or if you know the laws well, they can be broken, or well, they can be broken anyway...

But what Slingerland says about values made me sit up straight. There are many ways in which 'values' are explained...I seem to get stuck every now and again in one or the other of these explanations. This one spells it out loud and clear - it is what we feel - so if we don't feel good, obviously that is not for us, and if we do feel good, then, wow, it can work for us....The key words are how you - the person - feels.