These tears : stream of consciousness

I wrote this piece as stream of consciousness following the visit my by nephew back in August.   It didn’t make it out of drafts, sadly (until today).

These tears We could not shed together Are shed in the privacy of my home

Alone

My soul breaks open The bank bursts

As I think of the darkness that descended when rupture saw you fall to the ground Your older son found you And now he lives 12,000 miles from home

We miss him And our souls ache Knowing how hard it is for all of us

This disconnection

And yet later I know

Our connection is never absent really Its just that the Now has taken us all in different directions

Jasper you wake from your slumber To see me crying (but you are animal and not human so you turn away)  makes me sadder Then with these later tears comes the realisation of the deeper impact of my sister’s stroke and the painful aftermath, that flung everyone wide apart

For me I see how I have found it almost impossible to hold anyone close The fire of my anger which was undistilled grief and pain was the force field keeping others out The fire I had inside carried a deeper symptom of how much fear I had about ever being close to any one again  Lately I am feeling it as embedded vibrational charge as I make the attempt to connect again

And so I erect my lines of defence In sad stories I tell about how no one could ever really love me or understand In the fear my body feels but my mind denies In the distance I keep up by avoiding  I saw it so clearly yesterday How I moved in the opposite direction away from connection like the planet Uranus, my ruling planet that revolves backward.

The tears that fall now speak to the terrible lonely complexity of my plight.  To be close is dangerous, to be far apart can cause a chill to cover my soul

Back in bed my mother looks for rest After a fleeting visit that awakened who knows what ghosts she faces the sad fact of her immortality and of all her desire caused to pass

Old anger flares before compassion floods me with the water of a deeper knowing compassion that undoes the flames

Stream of consciousness I just let it flow – Making sense – helping me to see things and to feel things I never could before

I long for loving arms to hold me as I grieve just as my nephew surrounded my shoulder at the grave where we viewed the barren space with two small plaques bearing the names of sister and grandmother

In another grave on the other side of the cemetery my father lies So far from anyone So far So far Oh Dad I cry I wish we could talk So many things I cannot know You are not here now I can only speak to in silence  I pray that you hear me but even then it doesn’t really matter what is most important is that I write the words.

As I navigate the inner and outer worlds, I am weaving this complex tapestry of loss and love and really wondering if there is any life outside this painful history or is this just the final reckoning?  I am not sure I know how to live outside of it while also knowing somedays I do, at least for a short while

Grey clouds descended just after you flew out  I face my fear and call my sister and we talk for a long time I say to her that I feel the sky is crying After days of sun When you left It went Aint No Sushine When You’re Gone Frost on the Soul Damp covers everything

And yet in this heart too, a fire is awake

Or at least there is fire food here to light when I reach out for connection with others and with my soul

I am reminded of how much lies hidden in the subtext of what we say What falls in the spaces between words

All we lost all we suffer all we ache and long for things we lost or never really found, laying tired and spent behind a passing river which flows past regardless to another destination while we weep or just open our arms to the sky and let go

Then another images comes : Mercury divine messenger with his winged sandals appears in the left field of my vision I see him moving between the worlds conscious/unconscious, above/below, inward/outward as I am reminded to keep a close watch on my soul and allow what ever realisations or reckonings to emerge and flow.

And then I notice how my tears have dried and how later the sun has appeared

There are blue sky spaces emerging reminding me that everything changes and comes into and out of view and also how precious a moment of presence awake within  the vibrant moment is and if lost like a dropped stich can be picked up again with just a subtle shift of time and view.