The Times In Which We Live

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?