I shall not cease from exploration

7 years ago I began this blog. I first started writing pieces while living in Brooklyn. I worked with a web designer who taught me how to put everything together. During this time, Gregory, my son, moved to his own apartment in Brooklyn. Soon both Sally and I retired. She moved to Cincinnati. I moved to Asbury Park. It was both exciting and sad. But once Sally and I moved, we talked everyday. It was our way of keeping the connection and the friendship.

My intention for writing was to find a story with emotional resonance for me and write about it. Then I would marry this short piece with a complimentary photograph. Memories of my mother, my father, and both grandmothers were shaped into blogs. Grief, animals and dreams also were created into short pieces. Virginia Woolf was a beloved character. Rosie, the donkey appeared and my darling cats Tabitha, Little Bea, Jazz and Dapper Dan had cameo roles. Spirituality and empathy were my guides,

From the beginning of the blogs, Sally was both reader and editor. It wasn’t from the pen of a lawyer that she edited, but rather the pen of a friend with a sense of humor. Her voice encouraged me along the way to always keep writing. Sally loved reading and writing. We met in a course on T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” taught by the Priest at St. Luke-in-the-Fields Church. These words echo in my heart as I continue to live as fully as I can. Eliot writes in Little Giddings : “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.”

Today, May 4 is Sally’s 79th birthday. She loved this hymn Jerusalem by C.H.H. Parry. Blake’s text is certainly unusual, but it never kept our church in the country–St. Peter’s Episcopal– from singing it with gusto and love. Though Sally’s ancestry was mostly German, there was enough English in her (her mother’s family was Harrower) to bring tears to her eyes. She is now part of “the Church triumphant” as she called it, but I still celebrate her life on earth.

Someday, I hope to be better able to see beyond my grief into a time with new possibilities. Now this is where I live, and grace will take her place beside me.