On any given day, I have a lot of words in my mind of all sorts.
On any given day, I take in a lot of words from external sources.
On any given day, I output a lot of words, more or less…in various ways, for better or worse.
During the past year or more, I seem to be taking more note of the full moon and various related things that seem to come my way during this time. While I’ve long been aware of both serious and humorous thoughts about full moon cycles and have long considered my own spiritual, emotional and creative flow cycles, only in more recent times over the past months and year or so, have I given more intentional thought to this…or even in some ways, decided to ride that wave in a new way, so-to-speak.
Truly, last month, during July’s full moon, I had some pretty powerful spiritual experiences, rooted both in Jesus and my own internal world and psyche. Actually, I did not realize it was somewheres around the full moon specifically until the next day, as I contemplated what just happened there...?
These past several days including last night, I had this sort of anticipation of sorts, and was intentional to increase my prayer times with Jesus in my special place outdoors, both during the day but especially, in the dark of nighttime. It’s been an interesting string of days and inward and outward experiences.
Last night, at one point I felt inclined to add some poetry I’ve written during the past seven years or so into a journal, hand-written, than I began in March 1985 and have mainly only used on occasion for poems written during college and shortly afterward, and some thoughts around the time my mother passed in 2001.
But there were four specific expressions, one written in 2016, two in 2021 and one in the early part of 2022 that I felt were significant enough to add into this little book of mine, for whatever it means or is worth. I really don’t hand-write these types of things much these days, but I type lots and lots.
I was not surprised to witness my impatience with the hand-written process, and reflected somewhat at the slight evolution of my own penmanship from college days and shortly thereafter, where I seemed to be making some attempt at neatness and perfection, to my own hand around 2001…to my impatient hand last night.
I am nearly sixty now and I have done beautiful calligraphy for well over 30 years. Certainly, I could have taken the intentional time to “draw” lettering – which is what I consider calligraphy to be. The letters themselves are formed as art.
The increasing arthritis in my right hand, definitely genetic from my dad’s side and a thing that produces fear and dread in me, somewhat…and a more careful selection these days of what I feel is worth stressing my bones, tendons and whatever this all involves…cartilage, I suppose…seems to be happening.
So I can’t say I was particularly neat last night, but, I stayed more or less on the lines. It is legible to me, and I didn’t overthink crossing over a few words that I formed so wrongly I couldn’t heavily trace over and correct.
I later read aloud some of my poems from the past and present, speaking into the silence, I suppose.
That, along with other things I observed in and about me…made me pause also to consider the full moon effect.
Whatever that is…
As I came to the part I wrote in 2001, surrounding an interaction I had with my mother about eight weeks prior to her death, that happened in a patient community visitation room in the Delaware State Hospital, as my dementia-ridden mother was slouched in a wheelchair and I came and sat with her and attempted communication, I re-read the way I had actually taken note of the encounter, in real time.
While I did incorporate parts of this encounter into my short story called The Mirror, written in 2005, I don’t recall referring to this journal for what was actually spoken, in some specifics.
Like most words spoken by and with others, we take away different parts…we may retain a part the next day…a month later, the same or perhaps more or less parts…and ten years later…it may wax, wane or somewhat vary like the ebbs and flows of the natural universe God has created for us here…
I suppose in terms of Scripture texts that reflects somewhat, the exegetic versus the eisegetic process of things.
Being human, I’m okay in a variety of ways of going in and out of various spiritual texts and experiences, to a degree, utilizing both approaches to some degree, in some back-and-forth tango of sorts… For me, it is essential to the personalization of things and process of hearing God speak to me.
Of course, starting with the actual text, understanding its context/genre/intention and more, is always the primal place to begin. Someone once said to me, you cannot handle metaphor well without first clearly understanding the literal. I suppose this idea applies, to some extent.
Likewise, most human communication involves some mixture of what is actually said versus what is actually heard, as well as how it is recalled. Add to that, discerning what is actually meant within the communication itself, directly or indirectly.
However, it was more than interesting to refresh myself on what I actually noted at that time of this September 2001 conversation with my mother. That conversation, along with two other specific ones around that time…remains in my mind as one of three significant last conversations I had with her.
The other two recalled conversations from 2001 involved being at her bedside in what felt like the basement dungeon of the Delaware State Hospital…that is where the elderly patients live out their last days…quite a recollection I carry with me of the vibe of that basement prison of sorts, housing the mentally ill in their last days on earth.
I was flushed with a momentary wave of emotion as I typed that just now.
That conversation involved interspersed dialogue with my mother that, as I recall, started about piano playing in the here-and-now but roamed in her mind to what seemed as though she were re-living a certain moment in time, one that triggered actually recollections of this event as I believe I was watching from my bedroom window outside, my father likely having warned me to go inside and stay.
My mother was saying, “Rodney fought that racoon for hours with a shovel.” A reference I vaguely recall to there being a rabid racoon outside during the daytime in our backyard, either inside or around the kennel which he kept his English setter hunting dogs. I have vague images in my mind of seeing my father with a shovel, and him killing it, in the end of the encounter. It fascinated me at the time how the neural pathways in our brains work, and how this recollection was floating through her mind at that moment and touched upon some joint memory.
It reminds me of the profoundly sad and poetic lines penned in the song Bookends, by Simon and Garfunkel:
“Time it was, and what a time it was, it wasA time of innocence, A time of confidences
Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph
Preserve your memories; They’re all that’s left you“
Last night, as I read aloud a poem I wrote in 1985, I found myself speaking aloud something else, through tears, at the one line with the way I had ended that expression, acknowledging the massive pains, immense consequences, and disappointments that this thing did not prove true. Yet on some other emotional and spiritual plain, it was entirely true and timeless, and for that reason, produced a momentary weeping of grief, from which I only reeled a moment and then recovered, to the truth of my present day, in every way.
I think now of the verse, “Weeping may last for a night…but joy comes in the morning…”
The other, third conversation I recalled with my mother in November 2001, took place at an actual nursing home near Greenbank Road in Wilmington, Delaware, which I somehow managed to find an opening for her, to remove her from dying at the State Hospital. That just seemed so undignified to me. Surely, her human life before my eyes had (and is, still, in many ways) one of immense complication and incomprehension – and our actual relationship cable of producing a gamut of thoughts and emotions at various times – yet, I recognized the immense sadness of her life, and it just seemed like the least I could do for her…having not been able over the years to make any other real, material difference, seemingly.
In that nursing home room, slouched again in a wheelchair in a community visitation room I wheeled her into, at the direction of a nurse, due the time/schedule of that part of the patient’s day…she expressed thirst. I requested a cup of water, which had a bended straw. I recall my thoughts and emotions as I patiently held that cup for her to drink from…she couldn’t seem to get enough water, and she commented that “no one would hold the cup long enough for her to drink.”
Now, as I type that out, flooded once again with emotion. Such deep and profound spiritual meat in that statement; I couple it also with the poem Gunga Din, by Rudyard Kipling, for various reasons. “Catch a swig in hell from Gunga Din…”
It was super significant to me, as was the other notations I made about three weeks prior in this little journal in 2001. These are currently, super significant to me on so many personal, spiritual and practical levels right now.
I am grateful that among the plethora of experiential things happening in and around me right now, grounded in my faith in Christ and understanding first of His recorded specific words to us, alongside the specifically recorded other ancient words – stories and various accounts and expressions by people of faith that have somehow come to be known as canonized Scripture – that somehow I was led late last night into this journal.
I had been meaning to add these four poetical expressions sometime…and last night I sensed “what about now”…and just went with that sensing…
This morning, my FB memory feed reminded me of other words I took in and expressed back out seven years ago today, which I also found timely, meaningful and significant.
Many things right now seem to difficult and these words are no less timely to me…
It feels like the same raging tempests, more or less, that prompted me on some level to take in those words that day are still raging…simply having morphed into new inter-related storm fronts…
Yet, here I am…already waning in my own strength this day to keep swimming (I am switching to a Nemo thing, I believe, thought I’ve not really watched that, ha ha…I’ve seen the memes…) in what feels like the middle of the Atlantic Ocean! I suppose that means I am actually out of the metaphorical boat, too…
Do I do art/orders/pick produce/clerical/promotional/bills/shipping/cooking/baking/canning…?
I simply don’t know.
It seems to not matter at this point what task I pick or where I start…for everything I do there is only the 100 others I can’t seem to manage, quickly enough…that all seem important either in terms of actual need or in terms of desire.
I think of Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus…what is the one thing needful in this moment?
I really don’t know.
But, as I was eating three scrambled eggs and three slices of cheese, while organizing more dirty dishes, while grating zuchinni, thinking about making big batches of breads and freezing them, maybe making that peach pie I really wanted to make just once this summer, thinking about taking food scraps out to chickens, or possibly picking okra and other stuff…or…or…other needful business tasks and creative work…I found myself going back upstairs for this past hour or so and expressing this…in real time…
It just seemed to be the next thing I sensed Jesus was telling me to do…somehow…but…how can we know anything for certain?
Ha. For all I know, I’m being supervised by a CAT!
I’M BEING SUPERVISED BY A CAT – AND HE’S FORCING ME TO THINK DYSTOPIAN THOUGHTS!
MARLEY. He seems to be an ongoing source of amusement here in my solitude.
All good gifts come down from the Father above…and now…I think upon how my friend Erin and I discovered little baby lost kitten Marley in my garden in Alabama around July 4 of 2019…oh the story behind that, and especially, the selecting of his name.
Truly, this kitty provides endless amounts of visual and other comfort and strangely, follows me around like a dog…only, he sits just staring at me, patiently, curiously…like a cat…!!!
I suppose “Marley” is telling me to wrap this up…splash some cold water on my face (I’m a bit tired today, was up a bit late…of course…) and find the next thing I am supposed to do.
Before I collapse into bed tonight, and then, sleep, and start it all again tomorrow.
Thank You For Reading
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