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Tag Archives: friend

Praise Be For When We Allow

13 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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creatures, evolving, friend, holy, humanity, hurricane, katydid, listen, nature, son, waterfall

I think my understanding of the concept “holy” evolved somewhere between my first communion and touching the wriggling minnow caught in my net at summer camp. The idea of holy immigrated from an echoey church that smelled of incense and psalms and kneel-dimpled pews to seeing the midnight milky way that night I talked to my bestie on the cordless phone in the middle of the lawn. Holy and me came to have an understanding: It would always be secret, it would always be available, and it promised to make me feel (something) and I would know it when I seen it.

Holy was no longer frankincense escaping its decanter like jinn from a lamp, no more a captive in a flying-buttress box. Holy became ancient fallen trees brought to their knees by hurricane Gloria. A waterfall you cannot see unless you hike five miles in. Bowls cut into rocks for sweet, clean drinking.  The white flash of space between midnight and dawn in an Arizona bowl. My son’s smile while he slept on my couch. My friend’s dying. Rescuing box turtles as they crossed trafficky asphalt in pursuit of their home.  Curtains of fireflies rising from hot summer grass, signaling secrets on four- and sometimes eight-horsepower wings. A stranger paying for her formula at the checkout counter because she ran out of Wic. Listening to a stranger’s broken heart because it’s all he needed.

I’m not sure you believe in the word holy, except for maybe that one time you saw the moon on the walkway.   I think you do what you do and holy never crosses your mind.  But I believe you felt it in your fingers when you plucked the katydid from the parking lot and put her in the grass. Holy is in you.  Poetry is in you.  I weep because I see it and you doubt, you refuse to believe.  Holy is available to us all, every day, all the time, no sacrament required. We just have to keep our eyes open, allow ourselves to see.

Our Queen in Saffron Passes On

26 Tuesday Jun 2018

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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death, dog, friend, gratitude, grief, life, Saffron Queen, sunset

20160904_190005

Voy a fingir que eres tú en una playa de Puerto Rico, aunque solo fue tomada no hace mucho, aquí mismo. Puerto Rico, tu amor. Fotografiando el atardecer. Tu perro te está molestanda. Tu nuevo viaje comienza hoy. Adiós mi amiga, nuestra Reina Azafrán.

The Queen Wears Saffron

04 Wednesday Apr 2018

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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ask, death, dogsong, friend, healing, help, listen, love, peace, Saffron

“They left me. The dogs. The afternoon!”  I cobbled together what she meant. I heard the panic in her voice, but that didn’t stop me from brushing my teeth and buying her a Slushie before I pulled into her empty driveway.

I entered the house, de-pursed and -jacketed myself onto her sofa. I took note of the state of her home. It wasn’t until I reached the second stairway that the dogs decided to make a fuss, but the herd did not murder me as she always fears. The dachshunds are a noisy lot but they know I’m not afraid of their “yeah just you try it” eyes and ivory teeth. They flop over and let me love them like the pussies they are.

She needed someone to take the dogs outside for their afternoon walks because everyone left her. I did my best in shifts and had some success as they relieved their bowels and barked at the breeze inside a plastic white fence. She asked me to stay and of course I did, willing to stay until midnight.

I brought the queen a blue Slurpie because I know it’s what she likes. I walked her dogs because it’s what she needed.  I listened to the queen whose house has been on fire since I’ve known her, Judge Judy playing in the background.

The queen sipped and nipped at food which I found encouraging, her dogs circling her wagon, allowing me on her bed. I complimented the lady on her bedroom curtains not because I felt I had to but because it was sincere.  It seemed to make her happy. I understand now why she says her bedroom is cold: the north wall is one big window that faces the Chesapeake Bay, and it’s hard to keep out the north/northeast wind from your eyelashes this way. The view is beautiful, if only one is okay sleeping under a pile of covers.

The queen was strong enough to ask for help in getting her dogs outside to relieve themselves, yet she wouldn’t allow anyone to delve into why her body is wasting away. I find it hard to ask and receive help, and her cold fingers remind me that I am a fool. She apologized for the current state of her home where she served everyone homemade meals and tried to save everyone from themselves because it was her job. I held her cold hand and noted the “watch it, punk” look in Izzy’s eyes: I told them both, “No worries.”  I left them resting in a nest of clean saffron sheets and a gray throw.

We all let each other down when we do not talk, when we do not speak the real. When we do not truly listen to each other.  My prayer for today is wrapped in saffron and dandelion, tiny pollens stuck to my fingers and nose, that we stop and we listen, and we grant ourselves peace.

Branches, Crossing

26 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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acceptance, death, friend, life, love, Mary Oliver, patience, strength, wild and precious life

20180324_132119.jpgSome might say we make our appointment with Death on the day we are born. There are few promises we are given in life and death is one. So is life and temptation and choice. Dance, song, rain. Drought, snow, and wind that changes direction three times in the space of a day.

We come from imperfect, fragile seeds that force our way up, out, from the dark and into the cold light. We are imperfect, fragile humans told we must go “that way,” and we go with hands that are empty or hands that carry unnecessary burdens. Success is a word with little meaning, like failure. What matters is Life. What will we do with this one wild and precious life* we are given, that we don’t even know exists? What will we do with what remains of this one wild and precious life when we know we are at its end?

My friend is in transition and she knows but doesn’t know. She reclines, weak and full of effit on a broken branch, afraid it will fall, certain she did not cause its withering, fighting all of us and our outreached hands, begging her to come in, come back in, you will fall, please come in, but she knows best. We are watching the branch breaking beneath her. She pushed us away and we turned away and now we are watching her wither at the end of a branch that needn’t be.

My friend’s greatest treasures are her memories of her childhood family and of taking care of her children. We never talk at length about this life, today, or the future. In her best days and today at her withering branch, she’s only ever wanted to talk about her children, how she took care of them and knows what their favored foods are. I have listened to her heart breaking, and the hardest part for me is that she will not allow me to suggest she could try and make a change. It’s hard for me to watch a woman consign herself to misery and pain, who refuses to believe that she can be Herself and let go of everything else.

My friend’s body has been dying for a long time and she refused to respond to herself or anyone else’s push to seek wellness. I listen to a woman whose brain has so little function she can’t speak coherently, and I refuse to give up on her. She has no one else who will be patient with her.  I watched her branch wither, I stand on it and I struggle today to not fall to my death with her.  I will give what I can to her and her family, but my greatest wish is that she believed enough in herself to stay alive.

*Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day” 

Heal The Woman-wounds, Help The World

02 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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daughter, friend, healing, mother, sister, Why I Marched, woman

We were talking about everything under the sun as friends do when we haven’t talked in a while.  Her conservative views come across casually, and I appreciate her voice:  it helps keep me balanced. I was surprised when she said she thought of joining the Women’s March on Washington back in January, but in the end, she decided against it. She couldn’t see herself marching with a bunch of women who are showing solidarity one day then stabbing her in the back the next.  I hurt so much for her when she said that because I know where it came from.

Her mother threw my friend out of the house when she was a mid-teen. Her mother had been divorced for some time, and her religious views bordered on delusions and aberrant behavior.  My friend figured out how to survive, bouncing from house to house, only wanting to finish high school and move on with her life.  She had no rock, no foundation to stand steady on, only the one she made for herself.  She graduated high school. Went to college, earned her degree, got a job. She’s worked shit jobs just to make ends barely meet, lacking health insurance that she needed and dealt with things few of us ever encounter. She walked and hiked and cross-country skied taking photos, had good times with friends along the way.  She figured out how to survive and remain creative. Her life is better now by her own hand, and I’m so relieved that she has some relief.  She worked for everything she has instead of lying down and blaming the world. She never cried herself “victim” of a bad childhood, the economy, or sucky boyfriends. I am proud of her, and I wish more women could use her story as a lantern, a way to keep going.

But for all that, my friend is still woman-wounded. The first wound hasn’t healed. It’s hard to trust womankind when your first woman emotionally abuses you and throws you away.  She and I have stories in common of women who put up roadblocks or planted landmines on the job. Yeah, men do it too, and it all seems to come down to survival of the fittest.  I’ll not help you succeed (by answering a simple question) because your success will drown my own. Women have exchanged clans for cubicles, and it has to stop.  I’d like to see women help each other instead of grabbing for some dusty, low-hanging, genetic fruit, hoping to poison the other.

Perhaps you’ve heard the saying that “nurses eat their young?”  We worked with a woman who changed careers from a desk job to pediatric nursing, and oh, we have no doubt she’s going to bully everything in her path. It is her nature.  Some say bullying new nurses girds them for the oncoming stress of the job, but I ask, is cruelty the only way to teach competence and confidence?  Is bullying your child the best way to raise her, just as bullying a classmate will make her more socially viable? Do we secretly hope if they off themselves, we won’t have to carry their sorry asses anymore?  Is the risk of self-pride, self-sustenance, and the clan so great that a woman can’t stand up for another?  Are we certain that kindness and compassion will raise a society of black holes that destroy with no hope of a return?

How about all those times we used subtle words and gestures to hold a woman down, things like he’s not good enough for you (but he is for me), or that job’s out of your league (but not for me). How many times did we choose not to celebrate a woman’s success either in person or social media because it somehow dampens our own light? Are we that fragile?  Apparently so. Where are the stories of women who find ways to shed their fragile shields, allow themselves to receive a kind word without fear of retribution, allow themselves to give to another without fear of the knife?

Madeleine Albright suggests there is a special place in hell for women who do not help each other.  I don’t believe in hell, specifically, but I see the ashy pit that remains of our behavior. Ancestral knives in the back are hard to shake off, a broken trust that reverberates through centuries.  And here is my friend taking care of her ailing mother today.

Roy Walked In My Dreams

14 Saturday Jan 2017

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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blessings, Butch, chickenhawk, dream, friend, Roy

Oh Roy…you were in my dream last night.  Why?  How? How long has it been since I heard your soothing baritone?  Seen the trenches of your forehead, your dark, bushy brows, rolled my eyes at your deadpan humor?  Too long, and too long.

I heard you in my dream, Roy, saw you just as I left you, a quiet smile and gentle heart.  How is it we trained in the martial arts?

Roy, you were wearing a light blue t-shirt and what looked like silky Adidas track pants.  We greeted each other in a parking lot surrounded by buildings, maybe dorms or dwellings of some sort.  You were smiling.  You were speaking, making those subtle hand gestures, telling your tale. I never spoke, and though I cannot make out what each word was, it had the same rhythm and cadence of a man who was telling a good story, one that had a funny (or wry) punchline at the end. Other people came to meet up with us, but I don’t recognize them.

All I know is that when I woke this morning I was in awe of how real it felt, then feeling so blessed and happy to hear your voice again. How can this happen?  Why did you come to me? Was this just some random electrical confabulation my neurons assembled while my body was down for recharging?  How could those neurons make me remember every detail of you, as if we were both really there, and more importantly, why?  What do I do with the memory of you, who left us long ago?

I recall me and Butch discussing dreams, and for a man with all his faculties he made me wonder (happily) when he suggested that maybe dreams were real. Alternate realities. It was something I needed to hear in that time of my life. Here was a man I loved and respected, his feet firmly on the ground, but he suggested to us that dreams could be real?  Whatever the means of your revelation to me I feel blessed to see you, Roy, and hear you, truly hear you, like you were standing by my shoulder like we used to.  I’m not sure what to do with you, but I suppose it will come in time.  For now I will feel sad that we can’t conjure who we want, when we want, in our dreams. For now I will be grateful for another moment with you and keep all my dream channels open for any who will come.

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