On, In and Around Mondays: Let Me Place You in Autumn

What do you do, when the rain is falling? I asked. For Autumn has come, and with it the rains.

What do you do when the rain is falling?

Maybe just this. You take the time to set it down. In words, or images. In an afternoon spent walking, pulling someone close. Or just watching a loved-one move in her own space, outside of you, beyond...


Pound Ridge, Autumn

There are so many years
between us,
like these fields
now stand between us; you never stop
moving South, touching
tops of bronzed grass bending
to the weight of September.
I hold quite still, note
that you don't look back.
And I don't want
to look forward.



Pound Ridge in Autumn photos, by L.L. Barkat. This post is also offered as part of One Shot Wednesday.

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On, In and Around Mondays (which partly means you can post any day and still add a link) is an invitation to write from where you are. Tell us what is on, in, around (over, under, near, by...) you. Feel free to write any which way... compose a tight poem or just ramble for a few paragraphs. But we should feel a sense of place.

Would you like to try? Write something 'in place' and add your link below. If you could kindly link back here when you post, it will create a central meeting place. :)

Lament

This morning I was reading Louis Masson's The Play of Light. It spoke to me, even in my deep lament over Charity’s new journey with cancer.

Says Masson, “In our life…perhaps the days just after a loss are the most difficult to bear. It is time to question whether chance or providence brings lives together. One of my father’s cherished beliefs was that special people would appear in our lives when we were in need.” (p.74)

I turned this in my mind. Who has been brought to whom? Have I (have we) appeared for Charity in her need, or has she appeared for us in ours?

As the morning drifted onward, and I daydreamed while doing my daily exercise, I continued to mull this over. These thoughts took me to the attic to retrieve Michael Card’s A Sacred Sorrow, where I read, "none of us need to be taught how to lament. What we need to hear is that we can lament."

To this end, Card shared a quote from Job… "I will not speak with restraint. I will give voice to the anguish of my soul. I will complain in the bitterness of my soul" (7:11). "I insist on arguing with God." (pp.53-54)

I realize that while Charity's journey is intensely her own, it is also ours. We will lament together. And in this way, perhaps providence has both brought us to her, and her to us. To worship through the language of lament, to give voice to anguish and sorrow.


Watercolor by Charity Singleton. Used by permission (again).

If you post something to share your lament and your love with Charity (a song, a cry, a poem, a prayer, a psalm, a piece of art, whatever), please let me know, so I can link to your post in what could truly be called link love...a way to join together in support and sorrow.

LOVE LINKS:

Charity's Hard Times
Ted's Pray for Charity
Carl's A Lament Most Proper
Christianne's I'm Sad for My Friend
Tina's The Blogging Community
Christine's For Charity
Craver's For a Friend
Jenn's Still Sovereign
A Musing Mom's Retreat
Llama Momma's Words for a Friend
Stacy's Too Hard for Words
Charity's Greeting Cards, Hot Flashes, and the Search for a New Metaphor. Transitions. Countdown to Chemo.
LL's A Prayer
Charity's Update from Chemo 1
LL's Charity for Charity
Craver's Keepin' On
Nancy's Indy
Charity's Practical matters. Radiating with a New Metaphor.
Carl's Take 10 For Charity
Eclexia's Radiating with the Glory of God
Charity's Good Days and Bad Days
LL's Charity Among the Thorns (updates, for prayer)
Nancy's prayer for Charity
Shlomo's A Borrowed Prayer for a Friend
LL's Twice Given
Charity's Series of Events. Things are Getting a Little Hairy. Getting the Treatment. Entering the Season of Expectation.
Nancy's For Bob and Charity
Charity's The Presumption of Heat Pumps
Erin's It's About Something More... Or Perhaps Something Less
Charity's A Good Day. A Head Full of Hair in Glory. Good News. Bottomed Out. Back to Normal. Common to Man.
L.L.'s Prelude to a Prayer
Charity's Ancestral Visits
L.L.'s Postlude to a Prayer
Charity's Another Round. Sneak Peak. Surviving as a Community Event.
L.L.'s new Charity for Charity
Charity's A New Normal. Pressing Forward. A Renewed Mind. Charity's One Year Ago Today.

Shaping Our Pain

I remember reading Freud, ages ago. And he seemed to be saying that humans live by the principle of pain avoidance. To some extent, he was right.

Yet it is ultimately unrealistic to live our lives according to this principle. Pain, unavoidable pain, is sometimes our surprising companion. We cannot escape it.

This past week, I began a journey through such inescapable pain. As did so many of my friends, my church community, who knew and loved the dear brother-father-husband-scientist-elder who passed away.

Around the middle of the week, one of these grieving friends shared a song with me. And I had, without knowing it, shared my poem with her. At the end of the week, another friend told me how she had taken the funeral flowers (with the widow's blessing) and saved the ones that were still fresh, to rearrange them in new designs. She wept and wept as she rearranged them. And so her tears and flowers bedecked our refreshment tables on Sunday. Each of us had begun to touch and mold our pain, through our own particular gifts and loves.

In The Burning Word, Judith Kunst notes that the Jews have long relied on words to shape and reshape their pain. Discussing the book of Lamentations she says, "This painful kneading of words and grief binds the poet to his despair, and at the same time it pushes him through it, toward hope..." (p.55)

I realize that I shape and reshape my pain through writing. In this way, I do not avoid my pain but am bound to it while also experiencing a sense of pushing through it. As I told my friend who shared the song, "I write and the mending begins."

(On a totally different note... today marks one year since Seedlings was born.)

Lilies photo, by L.L. Barkat.

Seedlings Invitation: If you write a post related to this post and Link It Back Here, let me know and I'll link to yours.

Instructions

What to do when a best friend's husband dies
on the eve of your little girl's birthday...

Hang up the phone, lean into the counter
in a kind of conscious faint. Moan.
Moan, a deep cry that comes from a place
you didn't know existed, tremble
and feel the ice cold sensation that begins
rising and falling within you like
Northern Lights
shimmering up and down
a midnight sky.

Take out the black-handled
Henckels and a yellow onion
and chop the pearly flesh into perfect
little squares. Mince the summer
garlic. Scrape it all into a cast iron
pan. Add dried oregano, because you can't
think about harvesting right now... the fresh
oregano just outside the kitchen door.

Turn to the sink and begin. One glass,
one dish at a time. Watch the suds play
at the edges of cobalt blue, fall onto
stainless steel, slide down the drain. Moan
again. A labored moan rising to a muted wail
(you dare not wake the children).

Curse the maker
of lawn mowers. Beg the man
to come back and this time decide
upon a nap instead of the simple exercise
of back and forth on green, where he has
fallen. Did fall. Ask God to turn back time,
if only for this one whose heart has failed
him. Let it not be so, that he has
fallen.

Turn off the pewter faucet,
the blue flame. Put wilted onions
and herbs in the bottom of a crock pot,
where they will have to wait until tomorrow.
Flick off the recessed lighting.
Go up red oak stairs. Sleep,
a dreamless sleep.

In the morning, sing happy birthday
to your eight-year-old. Kiss her on the
cheek and forehead. Hold her to your
heart. Give her the black-handled scissors
so she may go out into the green.

The birthday sauce will be needing basil, fresh.

And she will go out skipping,
snip it for you at the tender neck.
Put it in your hand with soft, round
fingers. Toss her head, and smile.


Poem and Dying Hosta photo, by L.L. Barkat.

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