Category: Altered States

It is interesting to take stock of my life as it again teeters on the brink of oblivion.

Having helped at last launch my youngest, I marvel at the strength and endurance that it took for me to get through single parenting.

In this moment, it seems as if I have none.

“He lied to me…”

“He left me…”

(Title play on phrase, “Another day, another dollar”)

She stood there, hair dripping wet onto her dampened summer dress, arms gently resting on her gravid belly as the rain pounded above her against the stadium bleachers and she sought firmer ground to stand on than in the growing mud puddles.

What was she doing here?

She contemplated.

Pregnancy was supposed to be happier.

My range has narrowed.

The picture of painted pansies had caught my attention, representing that fragile part of myself called “whimsy.”

It’s something that I need to nourish and defend – not something trifling or any longer negotiable.

So when the cashier said that I could not buy it because it had been put out for sale without a price tag and that, therefore, she was not even allowed to hold it for me – of course, I asked to immediately see the manager.

It just made no sense to put it out as a “tease and a taunt” on this day to me.

Luckily, and graciously, the manager saw my point of view, priced it, and allowed me to buy it.

If it isn’t the small injustices that can be fixed, what hope is there for the greater issues that our world is facing?!

Think / Evolve

Love / Justice

A lone, unfrozen Pedialite Pop shifting in an open, otherwise empty box during transport.

(Sensitivity at the tail end of dealing with a home mouse invasion…)

Many people hide away and bury their love, closing it off to where it thins to only the merest underground spring’s trickling.

Others are unaware that it thrums thick in their veins, calling those who quest to find, become nourished by, and to revel in it.

Its interestimg that depending upon which emotions seize the reigns for the day, how life is viewed either positively, neutraly, or negatively.

Born first of three children from three sires, being the eldest and of the only absentee father with siblings’ gap distance of ten and fifteen years, the younger children got the ecperience of an attendant mother, engaged extended families, and a sense of being loved and wanted in their own marriages.

Per usual, the need to survive pushes aside writing and music.

From death to light.

From dark to life.

She loved us, and loved us dearly.

I do not know if we had even half of a chance to succeed with all of the weighted circumstances stacked against our family.

What determines who rises and falls?

“Should” we seek “perfection” to start from, in the hopes of having a good launch – when perfection, itself, is only temporary illusion?

“I don’t know what to do to save my situation.

All I know is to Just Start Working.

Maybe, just like you would have.

Funny, for all of our differences, how perhaps so much we were alike in belief’s core foundations.

Help me.

I need your guidance – like at the graveyard where needed truth was revealed, thus enlightening.

Am I missing something important, here?

Or am I “on the right track” and “doing the right things” toward my own next levels of “greatness.”

I cannot tell and do not trust easily.

I feel disoriented and clumsy

You know why.

You’ve seen what’s happened to me.

Yet, I must shake out this shroud of jaded memories so that it smooths down gently around me.

I must become something more – yet again – than I was before.

Perhaps for you, too, it was never easy.”

“I tried…I tried so hard to hold it all together…

But no one would listen to me – not without you –

And it all slipped away from my grasp, into nothing…”

(Title of dual meanings)

She had earned my love and respect because she had grown.

She’d evolved.

She’d pushed aside her biases, regrets, and grievances, and had looked for essential core values by which to strengthen the family.

She would have never needed to choose sides – or rather, she would have chosen both “sides” and pushed back those who wished to keep us separated.

She would have opened her large, warm home to all of us, kept us all safe and “off of the streets” – and maybe even would have advocated for couples counseling.

The point is, she would have given us all a buffer, a neutral ground, a place to recallibrate and regain bearings after the fall and hits we had all taken.

But she was gone.

Our family had been the last one standing since, with all of the weight of bitter prior generations haunting and pressing upon it to crack and shatter.

And no matter how innovative I was – how determined, how full of love, hope, belief, and far-seeing persevering perspective – it needed the command of our elder’s respect that she’d weilded to help save our fragile marriage.

But she was gone.

And the house along the sea ledge once so full of the triumph of love overcoming all still sat vacant, silent, and weathering away by ensuing neglect –

A testament to the greed and avarice of an inheriting daughter-in-law’s need for revenge upon her father’s memory –

With our matriarch’s memory unable to hold further sway beyond the symbolism provided in loss left holding the ashes of her mortality.

When the structure of a marriage falls, extended family members take sides, forgetting the common purpose once shared that gave us all nourishment to thrive.

They’s call me a fool, but rose-colored brightens and makes the ugly beautiful.

It would be nice to feel like I am making progress, but my attention keeps getting conscripted toward survival priorities.

Renegotiating who I am and want to be in each moment, despite what’s happened in the past.

The experience as if one is always existing within a dream – with a tendency toward nightmares, if I’m being honest.

I see that I have some more clothes, yet… having come through circumstances, it is hatd to think there will be replenishing continuum.

I feel disrupted
Center-spiraling

Unsure of bearings
Extend-contracting

Every thwarted moment; every denied kiss: chance buried by yesterdays; Heaven missed.

Only Through.

“I’m strugglin’ here – but I’m showin’ up!”

It is good to reclaim my skills, but not to have the wound reinjured.

If being gently honest, vulnerable, and inclusive has the result of others reacting by running away, there’s really nothing more that I can do or say.

Fighting for functionality with my phone puts me in a foul mood!

Say it 5 times fast…

There were only so many more shallow feedings that she could endure before her passion’s wrath would break free and force her to consume the world.