HAUNTED BY THE HOLY GHOST

"Let the statues crumble. You have always been the place."

I dedicate this poem to my 2 daughters,

 

THE TYPE
by
Sarah Kay

If you grow up the type of woman men want to look at,
You can let them look at you.
But do not mistake eyes for hands or windows of mirrors.
Let them see what a woman looks like;
They may never have seen one before

If you grow up the type of woman men want to touch,
You can let them touch you.
Sometimes it not you they are reaching for;
Sometimes it is a bottle, a door, a sandwhich, a Pulitzer, another woman;
But there hands found you first.

Do not mistake yourself for a guardian or a muse or a promise or a victim or a snack.
You are a woman;
Skin and bones, veins and nerves, hair and sweat.
You are not made of metaphors, not apologies, not excuses.

If you grow up the type of woman men want to hold,
You can let them hold you.
All day they practice keeping their bodies upright.
Even after all this evolving
It still feels unatural;
Still strains the muscles, holds firm the arms and spine.
Only some men want to know what if feels like
To curl themselves into a question mark 
Around you;
Admit they do not have the answers they thought they would.
But some men will want to hold you
Like THE ANSWER.

You are not THE ANSWER.
You are not the problem.
You’re not the poem, the punchline or the riddle or the joke.

Woman,
If you grow up the type of woman men want to love
You can let them love you.
Being loved is not the same thing as loving.
When you fall in love,
It is discovering the ocean;
After years of puddle-jumping,
It is realizing you have hands,
It is reaching for the tightrope,
When the crowds have all gone home.

Do not spend time wondering 
If you are the type of women men will hurt.
If he leaves you with a ‘car-alarm’ heart,
You learn to sing along.
It is hard to stop loving the ocean,
Even after it has left you gasping, salty.
So forgive yourself for the decisions you’ve made,
The ones you still call mistakes when you tuck them in at night.

And know this,
Know you are the type of women who is searching for a place to call yours.
Let the statues crumble. You have always been the place.
You are a woman who can build it yourself.
You were born to build.

 

Love Me, Love My Dog

My Service dog, my right hand (or my left-I don't know the difference), my right foot to my two left feet...Asher.

via holyhauntings.typepad.com

via holyhauntings.typepad.com

Intimate Absence

There are legitimate experiences of absence within this ever-present world of God's grace,
but they are forms and modes of love.
Such were the experiences of the prophets of the Old Covenant, of the Son of God on the cross and in the darkness of his descent into hell;
Such are the experiences of all those who, in their several vocations, follow the Son.
These are the redemptive paths of love as it traces the foot-steps of sinners
in order to catch up with them and bring them home.

~ Hans Urs von Balthasar

 

 

photo: Untitled / Wintertales by nikaa

Czeslaw Milosz On Prayer

 

       You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.

All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge

And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,

Above landscapes the color of ripe gold

Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.

That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal

Where everything is just the opposite and the word 'is'

Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.

Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,

Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh

And knows that if there is no other shore

We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.

 

Art by Noell S. Oszvald

I'll Try To Make More Mistakes...I Won't Try To Be So Perfect

INSTANTS

If I could live again my life,

In the next - I'll try,

- to make more mistakes,

I won't try to be so perfect,

I'll be more relaxed,

I'll be more full - than I am now,

In fact, I'll take fewer things seriously,

I'll be less hygenic,

I'll take more risks,

I'll take more trips,

I'll watch more sunsets,

I'll climb more mountains,

I'll swim more rivers,

I'll go to more places - I've never been,

I'll eat more ice creams and less (lime) beans,

I'll have more real problems - and less imaginary

ones,

I was one of those people who live

prudent and prolific lives -

each minute of his life,

Offcourse that I had moments of joy - but,

if I could go back I'll try to have only good moments,

If you don't know - thats what life is made of,

Don't lose the now!

I was one of those who never goes anywhere

without a thermometer,

without a hot-water bottle,

and without an umberella and without a parachute,

If I could live again - I will travel light,

If I could live again - I'll try to work bare feet

at the beginning of spring till

the end of autumn,

I'll ride more carts,

I'll watch more sunrises and play with more children,

If I have the life to live - but now I am 85,

- and I know that I am dying ...

Jorge Luis Borges

 

Photo: By Isabella (me!)

Taken in Helsinki, Finland

Original and edited-All Rights Reserved

A Repost...of something that seems to resonate at the moment

 

 

now, what was I doing?

I can't think in straight lines...

I can't  walk in a straight line; The part of my brain that tells my body where it is in space is malfunctioning.  I frequently bump into things, trip over my own feet, and standing still, have been known to just ...tip over.  (I lean against walls much of the time).

And no matter where I go, if there is a whole row of empty seats,  and I know that I will have to ask people to move if I need to get out,  I will never choose the seat on the end.  It's less rude to ask people to let you go past them than it is to ask them to pick you up off the floor when you miss the seat and end up sprawled in the aisle.  Chairs without arms are just too easy to fall off or or miss by an inch or two, especially if it is someplace where you have to get up and down a lot, like church.

It is soooooo easy…to, just, FALL.

Boy is that a loaded statement

 

BUT I AM FALLING;

IT IS NOT JUST A “SENSATION”

 

fall out of time, space, thought, 

off the edge, 

A little here, a little there

Ending up unnoticeable to anyone but myself that up is higher than it was yesterday…

This could be a problem if it keeps up….Gravity being what it is and all.

 

Why am always falling?

No.

Why am I always landing on the edge of something increasing odds I will continue my decent ?

Curious

I NEVER SEEM TO CLOSE TO HITTING BOTTOM

THAT is every bit as disconcerting as the fact that falling is my current vocation

Gravity, and other forces hold our bodes together and help keeps our feet planted in one place

I seem to have lost gravity or rather it seems to have lost me.

I tell my husband when I stand up I am never sure if  “something” is about to  “drop”

It is a horrible sensation feeling like you can fall at any moment. But it gets worse.

It is beyond horrible to feel as if body parts (visible and invisible) could just become de-tatched and fall by the wayside

...it's a feeling I have all the time...no matter what I am doing.

Thinking, writing, trying to play music (I am taking organ lessons for physical/music therapy to help my balance, coordination, memory..

.music with movement kills lots of birds, but I don't seem to be aiming very well, or hitting any of them; they all end up flying away, 

chirping as if they are laughing at me.

Sitting on the bench (that has no back of sides) is like jumping out of a plane...fortunately, I have known my organ teacher for many years,

 and I would trust her to to wrap my parachute if I were jumping out of a plane, and I wouldn't have any fear about landing safely.

The thoughts in my head and the words that come out of my mouth, bear little resemblance to each other

 On many days trying to have a conversation, balance listening, processing what I hear, respond appropriately (all the while trying to not to fall off a chair, drop or spill something,  is like trying do do the Olympic decathlon events all at once.

Sitting in a group of people who are casually conversing reminds me of how it used to feel in grade school when we would play volley ball....please don't hit me the ball...

And I have to think so hard to do every day things,
Let alone things that actually required thought,
My brain hurts, aches sometimes just like my joints do on a cold day.

I said extremely silly things when I tried to have sensible conversations so
I avoided them. I had a persistent headache and mental exhaustion. I
found myself saying "left, right, left" as I was walking along.
I squinted if I had to concentrate.

I had to leave notes for myself all over and then still don't know what they mean...
I had so many alarms set that I never knew what was beeping and why, so I just quit.

Besides, I can have an alarm tell me exactly what to do when and then get distracted and end up forgetting what I was supposed to do, or end up losing so much time (still not sure where it goes) that I feel time is always chasing me.

On particularly bad days, if I have to do something I'd say it out loud (softly, if people are around-yes, I know I talk to myself) until I had done it or by the time I'd start out to do it, it would be gone within 10 seconds

Leaving the house in my car...I am going to....wherever my destination happens to be.  I now have a GPS system there have been times it was just more helpful to program where I was going so it would tell me when to a turn was coming up--it was less taxing on my brain than repeating (I am going to turn at the next street, I am going to turn, I am going to turn....and then miss the turn anyway.

Or...and btw, I don't drive on days like this anymore...red light-stop, red light-stop, red light -stop,.......

Most of the time I chose not to drive, unless I absolutely have to, and then only if it is short distances and it is somewhere I have driven to many times.

During bad spells, I need more rest/ quiet/very low noise, light, movement/ kind of like isolation therapy...I worry people think I am avoiding them and when I want to be around them, they won't be there

Though it seems counter-intuitive, one of the most restful things is reading a lot.
I read things in sections, never all the way through...and I also find it helpful to completely change subjects frequently.  I may read a few chapters of a book, then read an article from a journal, study a chapter from the bible, read through some of my daughter's and their friend's facebook, blogs, and harass them with a comment or two or three.

I may not remember much of what I read, or just bits and pieces that choose to float around in my brain.
Sometimes they will connect to something that comes up weeks latter, but don't ask me where I read it...or if I read it...I could have daydreamed it, or just thought about it, wrote a bit about it and then deleted it, but it all floats around in the same space and like rubber ducks in a tub of water, keep bobbing up and down, in and out of my line of vision or thought.
I never know which one is going to float into view just at the right time, connecting with something someone has said, and many times nobody gets the "connection" anyway.
that makes me smile.

Reading.....So access to large amount/types of reading material is the best thing about the computer.
I know my family jokes about not being able to rest if someone in cyberspace is wrong about something...that I am out to make sure everyone is straight on something...but even if I did used to do some of that, to compose a coherent paragraph in answer to someone spouting something just begging to be set straight...it takes too many brain cells to compose the 2 or 3 paragraphs needed, and some days I CAN'T  even write that, at least well enough to satisfy my standards...so I have learned to let most things go (IN SPITE OF  WHAT MY FAMILY CLAIMS).

And all they need to do is recall the last conversation when I tried to explain something to them to know that this is not a my toolbox of skills, even on good days.

....unless all the planets a aligned just right, and there is no full moon, and the next day is not Friday.  There are moments when the fog clears, but no way to predict them, or how long they will last. The last time I was able to write a email to a friend that actually contained some understandable content, I copied and sent it to about 10 other people, knowing they had been waiting forever to hear from me, but I couldn't put two words together.
So what if my emails get passed around like an annual Christmas letter...it beats people thinking I don't care enough to communicate with them, or that I moved away, or maybe worse.

what's left...Reading... the computer spares me from places I used to love to go, but avoid now as if my life depended on it; places  Borders and Barnes and Noble.
For me, are now just nice places to have coffee.

Shopping...stores, or anyplace that has more than 3 things to choose from is like entering  Dante's inferno.
The sign on the front door may as well read ABANDON ALL HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE. 

I am finally past the stage of thinking THIS time will be different...but until I finally admitted this...it was like the movie "Groundhog Day" that looped and looped, except that someone stole the happy ending....and I still get that same feeling walking into a store.

Grocery stores, bookstores, any store;  choosing a book, magazine, detergent, a flavor of yogurt, a box of Kleenex,  a birthday card, soap, shampoo; I could feel by brain start to solidify.
And the ninth circle-choosing a gift for someone I love (that I do desperately want to give a gift to)...it's like I am failing the simplest test of basic friendship...it always ends with wandering aimlessly, my brain feeling like concrete,  and leaving empty handed and  in a daze.

Not only is it wasted time and energy, once I get home it takes hours of isolation and quiet for my brain to reboot before I can attempt something like a conversation, answering the phone, or anything else requiring brain cells.  I must say that is one of the few times, pushing past the fatigue and doing a brainless task that has a visible reward is helpful...my kid's think I am going on an OCD cleaning binge, but something in the physical work and a visible accomplishment helps me feel that I am not a total vegetable.  If it wasn't for dead brain syndrome days, I don't think anything in my house would ever get cleaned or organized.

 (I don't do alphabetical order, or number order anymore.  I just arrange things by size, color, or whatever configuration makes sense and hope I remember the ad hoc file system I just came up with.
If not, at least it is usually color coordinated and has most of the elements of a good art-rhythm, repetition, texture and proportion

----------

it is called neuropsychiatric systemic lupus/ that slipped in when everyone was preoccupied with the rheumatoid arthritis and joints swelling, and being in too much pain to get out of bed.
Now I can get out of bed, but I am never sure what to do after that.

It's still called that, and I went into remission for awhile, but I have had a relapse and the hilarious part is that my body has all the same symptoms, but no biological markers...and my doc says it's just another version of the damned Fibromyalgia (Words he says-but words I hear-it's all in your head).  I know it's REAL, but  there is no real medicine this time to give me a hand.

 

So I am stuck in this foggy purgatory for....don't know.....God's given me other helps this time around, but too many words to explain.

It comes and goes.  Some days I feel or seem normal.  I look
normal...which makes it difficult to try to explain myself, especially
since one of the biggest losses is in my ability to write, to use words
and language.

 It is also complicated by dyslexia, some ADD, and the general disarray that has always wreaked havoc on trying to keep life a little bit predictable...and then we had two daughters, both artists, and my husband just gave up and joined in the chaotic frey.

 

That's why it's been so quiet around here.
I had a bad flare last Christmas, but it seemed to lift in the spring, so I quit with all the neuro testing, the therapy plans...probably not a good idea in hindsight.

-------------------------

And here are the words I have been avoiding, as if not writing it will make it somehow not true.

Just before Thanksgiving, my brother, my big brother, died, unexpectedly.

and there is no part of that loss or pain that gets lost in that space where everything else goes.
I know every detail, every contour, everything that was there, and now it isn't.

 

what's left?

Same as always

That One True Thing, the One who was, is, and every shall be

 

 

 

 

 

I AM NOT by Czeslaw Milosz

 I Am Not

 

I am not, and I do not want to be, a possessor of the truth.

Wandering on the outskirts of heresy is about right for me.

In order to avoid what people call ‘the serenity of faith,’

Which is, after all, merely self-satisfaction.

 

My Polish compatriots have always liked the language of ritual

And disliked theology.

Perhaps I was like a monk in a mid-forest monastery

Who, seeing from his window a river in flood,

Wrote a treatise in Latin, a language entirely incomprehensible

To peasants in their sheepskin coats.

 

How ridiculous to deliberate on the aesthetics of Baudelaire

Amidst the crooked fences of a little town

Where hens rummage in the middle of a dusty street.

I used to turn for help to the Holy Mary,

But I had difficulty recognizing her

In the deity elevated into the gilding of altars.

WORDS FROM THE WASTELAND-I am telling what I know...

“What gets you is the knowledge, and it sometimes can fall on you in a clap, 

that the dead are gone absolutely from this world. 

 

As has been said around here over and over again, you are not going to 

see them here anymore, ever. 

Whatever was done or said before is done or said for good. 

Any questions you think of that you ought to’ve asked while you had a chance 

are never going to be answered. 

The dead know, and you don’t. 

 

And yet their absence puts them with you in a way they never were before. 

You even maybe know them better than you did before. 

They stay with you, and in a way you go with them. 

They don’t live on in your heart, but your heart knows them. 

 

As your heart gets bigger on the inside, the world gets bigger on the outside. 

If the dead had been alive only in this world, you would forget them,

looks like, as soon as they die. 

But you remember them, 

because they always were living in the other, bigger world while 

they lived in this little one, and this one and the other one are the same. 

 

You can’t see this with your eyes looking straight ahead. 

It’s with your side vision, so to speak, that you see it. 

The longer I live, and the better acquainted I am among the dead, 

the better I see it. 

 

I am telling what I know. 

It’s our separatedness and our grief that break the world in two.” 

 

 

“...There wasn’t a body to be spoken over and buried to bring people together, 

and to give Tom’s life a proper conclusion in Port William. 

 

 Berry, Wendell - 

A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William

 

-----------------------------

Words from the Wasteland 

(actually Little Gidding, but our words reflect everywhere we have have ever been)

10 years ago I could have read these words and thought them quite beautiful and poignant and admired the simplicity of his prose conveying a most complex, but common human experience.  

My experience of death and loss was not, what would you call it, ripe, yet.

Sure I could write about it, but the words were just cover for rage, confusion, and nowhere near anything like knowledge.

I was stuck in those early stages of kubler-ross’ death and dying…pretending to be on the other side of “acceptance”.

 

Today, I think I can honestly say I am finally there.

It’s the “It’s our separateness and our grief that break the world in two.” that’s the clincher.

 

That’s a place you can’t pass over and not know you are in it…mostly because it turns everything you knew for certain to chaff.

 

“But you remember them, 

because they always were living in the other, bigger world while 

they lived in this little one, and this one and the other one are the same.”

 

Then all those “childish things” that you put away, because you had pronounced yourself no longer a child, MOCK THE HELL OUT OF YOU and you must recover that childlike humility, because that is what you still are…no matter how many candles are on the cake.

 

Then, in that humility you  remember the rest of the story…”For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

 

No matter what we see in that glass or mirror-(ἔσοπτρον really doesn’t translate well-but if you ever were in a museum and looked in what they called a “mirror” ages ago-it’s doesn’t resemble anything like the “modern” one of the same name), it is still dark, distorted, and imperfect and always will be this side of life.

 

The old theological canard of the “now and not yet of the kingdom of god” has bitten you in the back-parts, again.

Berry’s simple words define a complex reality of concentric places of being…..

 

“But you remember them, 

because they always were living in the other, bigger world while 

they lived in this little one, and this one and the other one are the same.”

 

And even though you are always at home, ‘hidden in Christ’, doesn’t mean you can’t get lost…and I was, and I am, and may always be.

Then I hang on to the words of another wise writer-

 

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring 

will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. 

 

T. S. Eliot

Little Gidding V,

Four Quartets.