Month: June 2012

We say “hello” to summer this week. Ah, finally!
In the midst of beginnings I realize we also are saying
“good-by” to what has been an unusual springtime.
There is room on any threshold for a pause to
acknowledge the transition.

I have chosen a poem by David Whyte to share today:

“F O R G I V E

I arrived at last, five hours before she died,
through airport and grounding fog at Heathrow
and the crowded irrelevance of King’s Cross.
On the train north toward her I read the paper
with a close, obsessive, intelligence,
knowing I couldn’t face the relevance of the day.
Amid a crowd, we live a strange anonymous maturity,
not knowing how deep inside the body,
or how, with each turned leaf of experience
the word ‘mother’ lies waiting to be read again.
In the paper there was no news of her going,
no witness to the courageous continuation
beneath the mask to breathe until I got there.
I travelled as freely in my health as she
struggled mightily to wait, as if we held together,
so far apart, and each in our struggle
opposing corners of creation.
She would let go of her corner
of our world only when she saw me again
for a last time. Imagine then,
the necessity for rest
before the great sweep
of her unspoken life into mine.”

………..DAVID WHYTE, from his book of poems,
River Flow, 1984-2007

In there not a strength in the simple acceptance of
what’s so? To honor and acknowledge what’s so and
then to heal by walking through the pause, resting
of necessity, as often as needed.

I am a mother. I had a mother who chose not to say
good-by years ago after major surgery. She took one
look at the nursing home across from Norwalk Hospital,
and she thought, ‘no way!’ and she quietly left this world,
just before they served her first dinner,
without saying a word to any of us.
My mother, who loved words, somehow set an example
by her own great sweep of her lifetime’s choice of
how to go.

Always with love,
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette