I M Perfect lady

Tag: Poems

  • Gate to love

    Fear… this incredibly small word is extremely powerful and it has led my life and all its decisions.

    I am not sure I can articulate the difference of living life from a position of love compared to fear.

    Unless you see your fear driven life, you may not even know how much of your life has been absconded by fear.

    I looked up the word absconded, for it isn’t my usual word, but it felt right to express my sentiments, but I wanted to make sure I was using it properly.

    Do you know its meaning?

    It means – “To depart in a sudden and secret manner.”

    It fits perfectly. Fear absconed with my life.

    Here is what I know for sure, is that if you are left untreated after abuse, you will live from that day foreward, not as love, but fear.

    Fear replaces love. A young girl living in love, becomes a young girl living in fear.

    How to explain this. I go into a situation with my father filled with love for him and I come out filled with fear. I go to my mother in love and with fear of my father, and she doesn’t do anything, I then leave in fear her….

    My love, or those who love me are absconed and replaced with fear.

    Dr. Maya Angelou has a quote about the endurance of a child suffering is born out of the lack of alternatives.

    I didn’t have a loving place to go, so I had to live as fear.

    This fear mode of living is hard to describe, but it leaves you with the knowing that the world is not a safe place to be, that at any time terror will jump in front of you, that those you love will do something fearful…and you have to prepare and plan to dodge these bullets.

    My whole view of life was geared toward protecting and a very defensive way of living.

    I was on guard. A Fear Filled guard.

    The small pint of love that lived within me was toward objects and things, items that had no power of hurting me.

    But live living creatures, yikes, at anytime a friendly face could turn and bite you…and many did.

    The most sad and tragic part in being a fear filled maniac, is that my children were mothered from this position.

    Instead of teaching them the wonderful loving kind beautiful amazing things, my mantra was what was out to get you.

    Understandably we all know how I was raised to become this way, and gratefully with a lot of fearlessness, I have been able to learn how to love and not fear AND to fear those who rightly needed to be feared and not loved.

    What an amazing ride.

    There is a a poem that Kim Rosen speaks of in this months Oprah magazine, called Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

    “Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things,
    feel the future disolve in a moment
    like salt in a weakened broth.
    What you held in your hand,
    what you counted on and carefully saved,
    all this must go so you know
    how desolate the landscape can be
    between regions of kindness.
    How you ride and ride
    thinking the bus will never stop,
    the passengers eating maize and chicken
    will stare out the window forever.

    Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
    you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
    lies dead by the side of the road.
    You must see how this could be you,
    how he too was someone
    who journeyed through the night with plans
    and the simple breath that kept him alive.

    Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
    You must wak up with sorrow.
    You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.

    Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
    only kindness that ties your shoes
    and sends you out into your day to mail letters and purchase bread,
    only kindness that raises its head
    from the crowd to the world to say
    it is I you have been looking for,
    and then goes with you everywhere
    like a shadow or friend.
    Naomi Shihab Nye

    What I know for sure, is that without the years and decades of sorrow, I would not recognize kindness.

    Kindness, again such a simple word, but it is the gate to love.

  • Using Words.

    I went to my first night of the Writers on Location series held in the little white church on Finlandia’s campus.

    The topic this week was singer/songwriters. Eric Koskinen and Mike LaBeau entertained us and shared their experience about putting words and music together.

    How music is used to back up a word, how it can change the meaning of the word by how the music flows behind it, swirls around it and carries it away.

    They spoke of the Business of song writing, how you write for a hit record, for a catchy tune, to be the one that makes the money, and how sunshiny bright tunes sell better than the dark renderings of pain and sorrow.

    Seeing how there is a market for ‘lightness’ and how the more poignant journeys of the soul are of lesser value in the market place seemed sad to me.

    I came away knowing it would not be fun to write for an audience or for a buck, to have to force words of a certain flavor forward.

    They did sing their songs and you could hear their hearts and souls wind around the words and music, perhaps not a best seller, but songs with feelings and longings, words sharing with us who they are.

    Most singers today do not write their own songs, they are actually acting out what someone else has wrote; someone in a room with a few other folks, playing on instruments and tossing around words to frame up a song. The singer than gets the song and uses their voice, but the words are not from their soul, but a collaboration, bits and pieces strung together to make a story to be sung.

    Listening to all the different writers, authors, storytellers, songwriters, singers I see that we all use whatever avenue we are comfortable with to share our journeys. That we each have an outlet for expression, an Art form that we happen upon that is our vessel to express what is in our souls.

    Words are words and how we arrange them in ways that leave a trail for others to follow what we feel is the magic to writing.

    Perhaps it is getting in touch with feelings, digging down deep into the caverns of our soul’s journey, and then using the words to deliver their message by laying them out in a poem or a song, in a book or a blog that connects us together.

    It is the longing to be heard, to be understood, to know that we are not alone, that we are not the only ones who have suffered, known sorrow, lived through confusion and angst, to be carried away by overwhelming pain or bursting with joy or engulfed in love that leaves you breathless.

    Connecting souls on this journey called life, using words.

  • Love Sorrow, By Mary Oliver

    Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
    take care of what has been
    given. Brush her hair, help her
    into her little coat, hold her hand,
    especially when crossing the street. For, think,

    what if you should lose her? Then you would be
    sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
    would be yours. Take care, touch
    her forhead that she feel herself not so

    utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
    altogether forget the world before the lesson.
    Have patience in abundance. And do not
    ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment

    by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
    abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
    sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
    And amazing things can happen. And you may see,

    as the two of you go
    walking together in the morning light, how
    little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
    she begins to grow.
    Mary Oliver

    I love how she writes about sorrow as being a child, a part of you to love
    and care for, instead of trying to shove it away, or change it somehow, rather bring it along gently and with patience and understanding.

    I believe each of our emotions would be better treated this way.
    To walk along with each allowing them to express themselves as need be.
    Until they grow into wisdom of lifes experience.

    Thanks Mary Oliver for expressing sorrow in these words.