Friday, April 22, 2011

on the other side now...

After a two year (!) gap, here I am with a new post! So much has changed, but here I am, still working with the edges of art and shamanism. Feeling ready to write again after a long pause, and still liking the blog as an outlet, the perfect publishing form... (Thank you Rachel for your inspiration!)

So I pick up the threads, on the other side of the water: back from Ireland, back from nearly 30 years overseas, living again with my parents in the house I grew up in, which I left over forty years ago, at age 17... seventeen, can I believe I was really once so young? So impatient to get away, still needing to learn everything about who I was.

Now I'm grateful for every single thing I've lived in the years since, all the gruelling relationship battles, all the stressful travels and delicious and horrible meals, all the music, all the landscapes, all the inner and outer journeys... bringing so much more consciousness to the fibers I'm made of: yeah, the fibers are conscious! Sinews and bones and synapses... Grateful for all the lakes, seas, rivers, pools I've swum in, all the groups I've played and danced in, every person I've kissed or hugged. All the beds I've slept in, and those I've slept with in them! All the gardens I've planted and tended and left behind... the friends I've laughed with. The cats I've fed and stroked and yelled at and sneezed because of.

Teachers all.

Now my mother is 86, and we laugh and sing together over breakfast. Some times she is accurate and lucid, humorous and wise, sometimes she can't remember what you already just told her six times in the last ten minutes. I love and appreciate her more than I ever have. My father is 89, and is just in the process of deciding he doesn't want any more treatment for his cancer which has already spread, certainly to his lungs and probably to his liver. He doesn't always let me close, but, as he seems to make more peace with his own condition, he opens up in little bits at a time. All I want is for him to let me help him: but have to respect his process even if he needs to reject my help. I try just to be there in the gentlest possible way.

Strangely, for being supposedly "retired" and a totally free agent, I am hugely busy and occupied with my own creative process, spraying in all directions like a hydrant opened up on a hot summer day!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A beautiful post. Finding one's self the caretaker of ailing parents is indeed a double edged sword. While we are saddened by their decline, we are honored to be there to share it with them, to hold them in their moments of weakness, and admire them in their moments of strength. It is a blessing and a curse. But above all, it is a gift...