The lotus blossom rises from murky waters, unstained, receding once again each evening, then rising in bloom every day, a symbol of strength, rebirth and the resilient spirit.
These last few months I have been recovering from surgery, learning to walk again, and regaining my self-confidence. If you have never done this, watch a young child learn to walk. I love watching the development of infants and toddlers. Watch them as they learn, you’ll see the absolute joy in discovering their sense of balance, and control and even the occasional fall, the pushing themselves up to standing triumphantly unscathed, reminding me of the lotus.
For adults it is difficult, challenging, and frightening. A fall at this stage can mean injury, and beginning the journey to learn all over again. But, with all that is happening in the world, I relearn to walk, and regain my sense of myself. I am finally back again trying to remember the lessons I learn along the way, and here are some of my thoughts.
Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
by
Delores Lowe Friedman
Fraught with frenzied thoughts
Time runs away from me,
Cloaking my moments in his pockets, shading them from my eyes, secreting them , perhaps forever.
Through the wide-angle, death, the unspeakable crowds every image, the pictures that we cannot unsee, unhear, linger in our hearts.
So, we take them with us and paint them into the composition of our days.
Through the telescopic end, a brief moment of beauty and peace with beloved friends, subsumed.
How can it be at this same time, when so much hurt crowds ’round, squeezing it away? Yet here they sit, side by side., brushing up against each other.
Dichotomies, always the constant truth of life. We must know both, each informing the other, giving it color and texture, and the sweet salty tastes, like the flavors of love.
Sublime sidled up with the profane, curled up together like lovers. Engaged in the illicit.
So, the friend who depicts her cancer treatment, sharing its beginning, publicly sharing a photo of the moment it begins, and we have so many words and none come together, the moment too sweepingly sorrowful.
And yet another friend, screams softly for surcease as he contemplates loneliness, a wife gone, a home brimming with memories imagined in only two suitcases too small to stuff them all, and pushed into the two tiny closets in assisted living? Is that what they call it?
My gaze turned inward, my heart, scarred tissue, years of loving and then losing,
No wisdom Just whimsy waiting to wonder.
Is there a lens that erases pain, whisks it away, transforms years into wisps of time, filaments of fluff of a dandelion? Can we just blow?
Yesterday I had brunch with a new friend. We connected over my writing and her knowledge and skill was appreciated as I finished my novel. Her view of my writing revealed understandings of embedded themes she saw, and her insights brought a heft to the book that I had not seen before. I had been more involved in the people and places that I had created.
We chatted and chatted catching up on so many things and when it was time to part, my car did not show. So we stood in the sun, me wilting from the heat and aches unattended, my head swimming a bit, and she lent me an arm, as we navigated Broadway crowds, traffic and calling for a ride to replace my no-show car service.
We vented and bellyached a bit about my circumstance, but there was always the offered arm. Just the occasional, “if they had called and said they would be late, we could have lingered over our meal and be chatting “, time flying, laughing or lamenting the times in which we live.
So when I was finally at home , reflections on friendship filled my mind. There are times when I have felt, my friends who have passed on are with me still. Their thoughts, images of them seared in my mind. And their losses are with me long after they went away.
Interestingly, my melancholy is always mingled with peace of mind.There is a contentment that comes from having had good friends. So here were some thoughts from last year that came to me as one friend left.
Fast Friends
Fast friends, float away like the leaves on a fall tree,
Lined, and windblown, you lie at our feet,
Bearing the reds, and the golds, the passion of a life fully lived and wizened,
A testament to the true treasures, to us, you have given.
And we gather them up, lest they are blown away,
Keeping them alive in our minds till spring’s bright sun’s rays.
So all that is left now, are our sad good byes,
Our love expressed in gentle soft sighs.
Wishing for more than the whispers those loving sounds say,
For in our hearts, our love is loud, and lingering, and for all of our days.
Now new friends , those people who enter our lives and we find that they are immediate touchstones for those feelings and states of mind that are our essences. This had not happened in a while, focussed as I was on the loss of my best friend and love. Let this thought steep. And maybe ideas of new friends will waft up, fill the air, and speak to my senses.
Last year in April, I posted a jotting on Face Book that had been living and growing in my mind the entire year since my husband, best friend, and my muse passed away. It was titled Grief is Layered. Some asked for a copy it, and I shared it. One friend and reader told me it made her smile. I will post it here (below), and then the thoughts mulling in my mind these last few weeks.
The Lotus rises from the muck and mud, unsoiled and beautiful.
Those who know grief intimately will tell you that the stages, they speak of in articles and books, don’t go to the soul of it. Those writings speak of psychology and describe grief’s surface. But when you know it bone deep, it is something complex in its design, a silken tissue thin, and heavy drape of pain, both at once. The gauze, you see through each day, as you are trying to catch up with life moving in all its myriad directions. Glad for it because it takes you where you might not have been and wouldn’t have thought to go. Rediscovering the sound of a baby’s laugh, a door held open, a welcomed smile from a stranger, the voice of a friend. The weighted drape separates you from the world, shielding you from those who cannot and should not know. That weighted curtain can cloak you from their eyes, muffle your cries, and sop your tears, permitting a growing peace to soothe your soul.
So here is Grief is Layered and then the aftermath, Love’s Tears, the thoughts I am having today. You can feel free to share. Perhaps it will speak to the heart of someone who knows this, or remind that somehow they can find the essence of the ones they loved and lost, renewed and reborn in their memories. And maybe, just maybe, allow themselves the gifts of friends who tug them along, and take them out to play some days when their souls can, and who leave them to grieve when they must.
Grief is Layered
Poesy
by
Delores Lowe Friedman
Grief is layered.
It is cluttered with memories that transport you places, years away.
Feeling the flush of new love, a renaissance of warm wonder,
Followed by the first fear, the raw chill of loss.
Fall has always felt full of endings, pregnant with golden teardrops of falling leaves, dying and collecting at our feet.
So, it is the passing of time, we accept because we must,
But passing love, we press on our breasts, holding fast to pieces that ease the pain, bits so bittersweet, linger like languid licks or lashes lining our backs, reminding us of what, at once, was and is no more. Can you imagine a joy so intense that its blade sears as it is pulled from your soul?
Like handfuls of seawater, escaping our fingers, flowing away from us through our clenched fists, holding fast to the ways love felt.
Full as a pounding wave breaking into bits, and gentle as a pulse of your love’s sleeping heartbeat.
Profound paradoxes crashing about in my mind, trying to piece together the sad happiness of loving you a half a century.
My lonely tears collect themselves in my chest until they break free and squirt from my eyes leaving behind the salty symbol that sadness etches my soul.
Now they secrete themselves again, as I stumble along with the rest of the world, trying to keep up as they merrily roll along.
Until it comes again, that pathetic spark which reminds us of a better time.
Buried there in my mind, a playful time presents. A touch, a taste, an instant revisits, and you are there again.
Grief is layered with these full, rich times of joyous love, that picks you up and spins you about and dizzies you, till like the golden leaf dancing in in the wind, l am lost in you.
Here is the Aftermath, Love’s Tears. A peek into the lives of two writers.
Weeks of death and destruction of human life were all that my soul could take. I went back to the times in my life that held promise, not pain. Memories came flooding in for me. The kinds of things I recalled were those junctures in my life when I learned something novel. I think of beginnings often.
The beginnings, the setting out in a new place in time and space, can make one tremble at its offering. Sometimes what is offered to us seems too huge in scope, or too complex to conceptualize. Or sometimes, just sometimes, you find a path into it and discover it inside the beauty of its complexity. Newness has that capacity to shake us and make us take notice.
Years ago, my husband and I moved to a new place in upstate New York. He was a professor, so he professed (smile), and I wrote. We had been there for about nine months when one day he came home from campus and said to me, “Come out with me, you’ve got to see this!” It was misty out, from a spring rain. “Where are we going ?” “You’ll see,” he answered. Then he drove down one road to another, and another and finally said, “Look at this!” It was an area near the Erie Canal, we were on one side of the narrow ribbon of water.
A scene out of a painting. Pastel pinks and lavenders, pale greens and yellows draping the space before me. Springtime had always been the season of wonder for me. Here it was presented to me, as my very own living painting.
So that is what I am thinking today as spring is almost ending. I must take these ideations and begin something anew. My posts in this space, will reflect thoughts about writing, and where they are taking me.
Reaching back can propel you forward. It can revive your strength and focus your intention. Recollections of your beginnings, your setting out, hold your hopes and your dreams. And as you linger there, like a long walk on a quiet beach, you may find sea glass, pounded smooth by the salt and water, holding the reflections of a lifetime. Renew your soul, and it can become reborn in the promise that you discover. Memories, the windows into your tomorrows.
You may have noticed that I haven’t posted in months. I have been hard at work editing my second novel. I had to stop to get ready for this event. I am happy to announce that the Brooklyn Book Festival will be holding a Virtual Fest with a Virtual Market Place. It is an unfortunate consequence of COVID is that we cannot congregate in large gatherings. A great consequence is that, by virtue of technology, the Brooklyn Book Festival will go on. We can present our our books in a Virtual Market Place.
I would like to WELCOME Brooklyn Book Festival Attendees and offer them an Autographed Copy of Wildflowers at a discounted price.
Something quite wonderful happened yesterday. I was at a birthday party and sat opposite a neighbor I didn’t know. We began talking about school and he shared that he was a truant in high school, though he was in one of the best high schools in the city and scored well on his regents. One neighbor said he would never be truant, and I agreed. Also, I said, in college I was the VP of the black students club, Club Toussaint L’Ouverture in the 60s at Hunter College. We were successful in getting a course in Black history, even though students were threatened with expulsion for protests. I said, I was most nervous that my mother would kill me if I was expelled. That course quickly grew into a department once I was in graduate school. Then he shared this! He was a student at Hunter years later in 2000 and took a required course in the Black and Puerto Rican Studies department, and read books by James Baldwin and Richard Wright and others. He said, “I know that if it wasn’t required I would never have been exposed to these writers.” It was quite wonderful to feel that something I had a hand in beginning had a positive effect on this stranger, and others.
The back drop of Wildflowers is the 60’s and Kirkus called it “A solid historical novel with engaging characters.”
The end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019 has been fraught with illness for me and mine. This last few months have been filled with ups and downs. I haven’t written here because of illness in my family and a terrible upper respiratory infection that I suffered for the past six weeks. But while all that was happening, a wonderful thing also happened. At the end of 2018 Wildflowers was chosen as an Indie Book Worth Discovering by Kirkus Reviews and was highlighted in the January issue.
This honor meant a great deal to me, and I am glad I finally can share it with you. Wildflowers is one of 23 books that was selected for this honor for 2018.
On Tuesday, September 25, I met with my first Book Club–the Bay Ridge Book Club. What a wonderful evening! I was nervous for days before. A retired professor, I haven’t given a presentation in years. I have been caring for my husband and at home writing. And none of my presentations had anything to do with my novel. So, this was new. My son and friends all said, just go, be yourself and have fun! It was so much fun.
I began the evening by talking about how I began as a writer. Then we had a free-wheeling discussion of Wildflowers. It doesn’t get better than hearing a room full of women, ages from fifty to eighty, tell you that they loved your characters, and related to the incidences in their lives. One, a retired teacher, read the book twice. They were retired teachers, social workers, business women, a variety of career backgrounds. Yet, they talked about how the circumstances of their lives, were so similar to the things that happened to my characters as college students, and as women, so much so that they felt that there was a universality in the story. They related to my characters thoughts and feelings, and connected with them. One expressed it this way, “I know these women. I hung out in the same kinds of places. I did these things.” One mentioned that the protests that the main character was a part of, reminded her of her own participation in protests in grad school. Another said that she found herself thinking back on her own friendships reevaluating them as the character in the book had. They then mused that they could see the characters and the story Wildflowersdone as a film or extended series.
That was Tuesday , and then today Friday, September 28, I see this review on Amazon.
5 out of 5 stars
Wildflowers is a great book to curl up with
ByLinda C. Pierce on September 27, 2018
Format: Kindle Edition
Right from the start, when Camille…one of the main characters of the novel…mentioned her preoccupation with reading the “Obituary” column in the New York Times, I was intrigued. Sure enough, at some point in her perusing, Camille came upon the obituary of Jewel, a dear friend from days gone by. Apparently, Jewel had passed away at age 64…alone in her apartment, with no visitors in months. Now, I was really curious to find out more.
And so the story of three best friends …Camille, Saundra, and Jewel…unwinds. Each of these “wildflowers” opens up to the reader, petal by petal, in individual chapters. Each narrative is compelling, unique, and memorable. And the individual narratives intertwine resulting in a story you will not easily forget.
The action initially takes place in NYC on Hancock Street in Brooklyn where three little Black girls…Camille, Saundra, and Jewel…first meet and play together. We get caught up in their lives and see how childhood experiences have profoundly informed the women that they have become.
If you are looking for a good book to curl up with, Wildflowers is it. And, I would be remiss if I did not mention that the novel is beautifully written. In the expert hands of author, Delores Lowe Friedman, the figurative language and imagery are skillfully rendered as the plot keeps you engaged and captive.
I highly recommend that you add this novel to your list of books to read. You will be glad you did.
We assume that our closest friends will be around forever. Sometimes we let years pass without checking in, confident that our paths will cross eventually and that the connection we once had will still be there. However, life doesn’t always work like that.After learning of the death of her…
