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Life changes in the instant.
Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity. by Joan Didion, “The Year of Magical Thinking.” I am still asking myself– even after almost a year since Sally died–why we never talk about death until it is in front of us. I think some of the truth lies in Joan’s short phrase–uncertainty, fear and perhaps not wanting self-pity. We have no idea when our time is and we are afraid to talk to others about what it looks like when we experience it closely. You can sit with a dying friend the whole day…
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An Olive Tree grows in New Jersey
Have you ever watched something die and then come back to life again? It does often happen in nature when we see. My niece gave me a small, beautiful, olive tree as a gift and it flourished for a while. At some point the moisture and gloomy weather of New Jersey was too much. It died. I never thought it would grow again. After living outside in its beautiful olive pot, I was ready to plant a perennial in the pot. I looked closer. There in the center of the pot between two large round-shaped stones was a small olive bud. It has been outside in the cold and wet…
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Birth, death and rebirth
On January 2, 2021, while talking with my brother and enjoying my coffee and breakfast, I felt a sensation up the left side of my body. My arm and then my leg started making spastic motions. There was no pain, but I had no control of the left side of my body. I tried to walk, but I could only crawl. Some motion in my left eye was evident and my speech was somewhat slurred. Immediately the word “stroke” came to my mind and it gripped me with terror. I rang my doctor and she believed that I had had a stroke. The use of my arm and leg gradually…
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Kindness must watch for me
I find myself unable to edit the blogs I write, so I send them back to the “draft” stage. It is as though I can only write in the immediate moment — the true present. It is also hard to find my true voice. My desperation comes out of anger, not depression. This poem by James Agee has rung true for me for many years, but now during this pandemic, this time of moral unrest and economic injustice, I believe it is particularly meaningful. Here it is both the poetic form and the song composed by Morten Lauridsen. Sure on this shining night Sure on this shining nightOf star made…
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RIP Dapper Dan
I got home the other day from grocery shopping — you know the kind we are used to doing now, mask on and six feet apart. Things went well until I got a call from my neighbor Amanda. “I’ve got very bad news,” she said. My heart froze. I said, “Nothing has happened to Dapper Dan, I hope?” But our beloved neighborhood cat that I gave lodging to had been hit by a car. He was gone. Shock to the psyche: Whatever adrenaline courses through ones’s life system, for me, it was shock rather than grief. I couldn’t fully imagine why and how it had happened. For me, he continued…
