Moving on

Source: Favim 

Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love.

~  Jonathan Safran Foer

Moving on

Source: Favim 

Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love.

~  Jonathan Safran Foer

What is good?

Source: Unknown/Favim

Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that's dynamic and expressive--that's what's good for you if you're at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life--live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

~ Tennessee Williams

What is good?

Source: Unknown/Favim

Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that's dynamic and expressive--that's what's good for you if you're at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life--live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

~ Tennessee Williams

Loss

Source: Unknown/Favim

Such lies have been told about her.
My favorite: ‘when she comes
The blue hand of the sky vanishes.
Hippos storm the sun.
Birds peck furiously at anthills.
Wings wrap tightly against trees.’
But notice how she doesn’t say a word
And sits beside you when
The moments of love have flickered their last.
How she stands beside you when solitude
Has you cornered. Right now she is outside
Rinsing her hair. Later, she’ll use it
To wipe the mirrors of your heart.

~ Abayomi Animashaun

Loss

Source: Unknown/Favim

Such lies have been told about her.
My favorite: ‘when she comes
The blue hand of the sky vanishes.
Hippos storm the sun.
Birds peck furiously at anthills.
Wings wrap tightly against trees.’
But notice how she doesn’t say a word
And sits beside you when
The moments of love have flickered their last.
How she stands beside you when solitude
Has you cornered. Right now she is outside
Rinsing her hair. Later, she’ll use it
To wipe the mirrors of your heart.

~ Abayomi Animashaun

Leeks

Source: OregonLive.com

We planted the seeds in the spring
And up they came innocuous as crabgrass.
The tomatoes soon lorded over them,
And even the jalapenos, sad lumps
Hanging from their limbs like mittens
From children playing in the snow.

They stayed that way all summer,
And before the frosts of November
We pulled them up, declaring failure,
And used them as scallions in salads.
Winter white covered the clay soil,
Like layers of dust in an unused room.

Till spring bullied us into wakefulness:
Thunder and lightning and the gray rain
That heartens depressives with reasons
For misery, then out of the sodden ground,
Tiny blades twisting in the wound
Of the old season. It was shocking:

Nothing worse than discarded hopes
Butting in when you have given up,
Thrusting faith into comfortable loss,
Demanding your heart again because
This time they've made a proper start,
This time they will rise in triumph.

~ Richard Spilman

Leeks

Source: OregonLive.com

We planted the seeds in the spring
And up they came innocuous as crabgrass.
The tomatoes soon lorded over them,
And even the jalapenos, sad lumps
Hanging from their limbs like mittens
From children playing in the snow.

They stayed that way all summer,
And before the frosts of November
We pulled them up, declaring failure,
And used them as scallions in salads.
Winter white covered the clay soil,
Like layers of dust in an unused room.

Till spring bullied us into wakefulness:
Thunder and lightning and the gray rain
That heartens depressives with reasons
For misery, then out of the sodden ground,
Tiny blades twisting in the wound
Of the old season. It was shocking:

Nothing worse than discarded hopes
Butting in when you have given up,
Thrusting faith into comfortable loss,
Demanding your heart again because
This time they've made a proper start,
This time they will rise in triumph.

~ Richard Spilman

From the Silence of Many Trees

Source: Facebook/Favim

Sometimes a tree strikes your face with the memory of loss.
Hickory bark keeps the furrows of the parched fields you left.
The sycamore leaves turning away in the wind are your father’s hands.

From what tree Absalom hanged himself, we never bother to ask.
Of course Jesus blighted the fig that failed to bear its bloodred fruit,
But about the wood that fashioned the true cross, the gospel remains silent.

No matter what changes the earth below them has suffered, geese
Continue their night migrations by checking the alignment of stars.
Our scorched world is only one of a trillion celestial fires,

Although we have never heard that crystalline music Pythagoras sang of.
So we find that grief is a prodigal child, missing at the moment of grief.
The soul should love the snails that gather rusty leaves into themselves.

Did we model the flute on a bolt-struck tree graced by wind?
Or one hollowed by disease? Or on a trunk the woodpecker broke into,
First looking for a meal of sweet termites, then settling for a home?

Why should the tall fir fallen after many years from an escarpment
Care if we hear it? The broken roots shake soil, shake themselves awake,
The sound of someone rising from his knees after long prayer.

~ Temple Cone

From the Silence of Many Trees

Source: Facebook/Favim

Sometimes a tree strikes your face with the memory of loss.
Hickory bark keeps the furrows of the parched fields you left.
The sycamore leaves turning away in the wind are your father’s hands.

From what tree Absalom hanged himself, we never bother to ask.
Of course Jesus blighted the fig that failed to bear its bloodred fruit,
But about the wood that fashioned the true cross, the gospel remains silent.

No matter what changes the earth below them has suffered, geese
Continue their night migrations by checking the alignment of stars.
Our scorched world is only one of a trillion celestial fires,

Although we have never heard that crystalline music Pythagoras sang of.
So we find that grief is a prodigal child, missing at the moment of grief.
The soul should love the snails that gather rusty leaves into themselves.

Did we model the flute on a bolt-struck tree graced by wind?
Or one hollowed by disease? Or on a trunk the woodpecker broke into,
First looking for a meal of sweet termites, then settling for a home?

Why should the tall fir fallen after many years from an escarpment
Care if we hear it? The broken roots shake soil, shake themselves awake,
The sound of someone rising from his knees after long prayer.

~ Temple Cone

Quote on choice

Source: Unknown/Favim.com

In that inevitable, excruciatingly human moment, we are offered a powerful choice. This choice is perhaps one of the most vitally important choices we will ever make, and it determines the course of our lives from that moment forward. 

The choice is this: Will we interpret this loss as so unjust, unfair, and devastating that we feel punished, angry, forever and fatally wounded-- or, as our heart, torn apart, bleeds its anguish of sheer, wordless grief, will we somehow feel this loss as an opportunity to become more tender, more open, more passionately alive, more grateful for what remains?

~Wayne Muller

Quote on choice

Source: Unknown/Favim.com

In that inevitable, excruciatingly human moment, we are offered a powerful choice. This choice is perhaps one of the most vitally important choices we will ever make, and it determines the course of our lives from that moment forward. 

The choice is this: Will we interpret this loss as so unjust, unfair, and devastating that we feel punished, angry, forever and fatally wounded-- or, as our heart, torn apart, bleeds its anguish of sheer, wordless grief, will we somehow feel this loss as an opportunity to become more tender, more open, more passionately alive, more grateful for what remains?

~Wayne Muller