Stealing Sunshine...

Image taken from www.mombasainfo.com

One of my favorite blogs to visit is: http://mycastleinspain.blogspot.com/

I kid you not, this woman delights my heart! She is amazing...creative, thoughtful and bright. I've never met her, but I'm always excited to see what new things she has created, or new places she has visited. I admire her style and she lives with gusto--in color--in joy. I'm sure she is just like the rest of us and has her blue moments, her sadnesses and her disappointments...but she inspires me to create more...to live more...and to do so in fulness and not in mediocrity.

I strongly recommend her blog if you are looking for something different and new...something unique and exciting...but I digress through my commendations...

My point...and there was a point...LOL...was to share a poem, that I read on her blog a little while back. It is in French with an English translation. This comes from her site...but I had to share it on mine as well, because for me...it captures summertime and the joy that burbles through the clouds and the music that fills the air if we will but take a moment to stop--and to listen--to feel.

I love this poem in French...I love it in English.
It captures summer evenings--the smell of charcoal, fire, wood and meat...grass and water. Sunshine ebbing as eventide comes on and the way our noses follow the delightful scents of someone else's dinner...or if you are lucky...your own!

Les viandes grillent en plein vent, les sauces se composent
et la fumee remonte les chemins a vif et rejoint qui marchait.
A lors le Songeur aux joues sales
se tire d'un vieux songe tout raye de violences, de ruses et d'eclats,
et orne de suers, vers l'odeur de la viande
il descend
comme un femme qui traine: ses toiles, tout son ligne
et ses cheveux defaits

Meats broil in the open air, sauces are brewing
and the smoke goes up the raw paths and overtakes someone walking.
Then the Dreamer with dirty cheeks
comes slowly out of
an old dream all streaked with violences, wiles and splendour,
and jeweled in sweat, toward the odour of meat
he descends
like a woman trailing: her linen, all her clothes, and her hanging hair.

(Translation by Louise Varese-she made such a super job of capturing and translating the exact tone of Saint-John perse, the English translation is as enjoyable as the original text)

3 Horses...

Image: tmdag.com/blog/?cat=23

My mother almost died on Friday night.

It was a sobering event.

Our family went up Ogden Canyon to go camping this last Friday night, for the weekend. My beloved and I were going to go but ended up not joining them as we were caught in a bad rainstorm and by the time it stopped, it was getting too late and too dark to go and to find our way up the mountain, so we stayed home.

My mother had to work Saturday morning, so she was just going to go up for a campfire dinner and some company and then come back down to her home to sleep so she could go in to work.

After going to bed, and sleeping for a time, we received a phone call. It was about 1:30 a.m. It was my mother telling me that she had been in an accident and that she was in the Emergency Room and could we come and get her. "Of course" I said, "What happened?" and she said "I hit three horses."....I paused...thinking that perhaps in the accident she had become disoriented and she really meant, 3 deer or 3 elk...but 3 horses?...so I said "3 Horses??" and she laughed a little and said "Yes. I will tell you about it when you get here." I spoke with the nurse who told me that she was doing just fine and that there was no need to panic or to rush.

We got up, got dressed and headed to the hospital.

Upon arrival, we found her in her room, on a hospital bed, hooked up to monitors and in a neck brace. I didn't see any broken skin or head wounds, which I was happy about, but she looked dazed and shocky. There were no casts or transfusions. They were waiting for the x-rays of her back and neck to come back to confirm that there were no fractures.

I asked her what happened and she told us that she had been driving down the canyon without incident. Not going very fast, watching for deer. It was about 11:30 p.m. or so when she suddenly saw 3 horses galloping straight towards her and then into her car. She said it was like time stood still and she realized several things at once...she saw them and how beautiful they were...their manes blowing out behind them...realizing in that same moment that "this was going to be a hit"...she braced herself as all at once they converged on her car...coming across the front end, across the hood and into the windshield, crushing it and up on to the roof of the car. She said she felt the sun visor touch her forehead and then it was over.

Fortunately for her, there were two ambulances coming down the canyon behind her. One a regular paramedic and the other a fire truck paramedic. Both stopping to give aide. The park rangers came and a Sheriff showed up. The horses were milling about the site of the accident...two of them, and the third had wandered off. A neighbor man came out to see what all of the noise was about and asked what happened. One of the paramedics, who had seen the accident happen, told him that there were three horses that had run straight into my mother's car. The old man said that those horses were always getting out of the paddock and running around.

Then they took her down the canyon and to the hospital and after a couple of hours she called us and there we were.

For my part, I couldn't believe that she had survived the accident. One horse will kill you, or cripple you or leave you in a coma, let alone what three could do. Coming through the windshield and crushing the roof...I didn't understand how she wasn't cut up or left with broken bones...but aside from being a bit bruised, sore and battered...she was just fine.

It was not my mother's time to go...and I am grateful to God for watching over her and keeping her free from harm...I am grateful that she is still here with us and that we have not been left behind as orphans. It was a sobering event...but one that has left me full of joy and gratitude...and this is a good thing.

Pain Marbled With Eternity...

I came across this poem that I wrote a couple of years back. I like it. It captures the darker side of my sad feelings, while also tipping my hat at my belief in eternity. It picks up on the melancholy that I will occasionally indulge in if the mood is right. I also think that pain and sorrow are the other side of the joy/happiness coin which we all experience and so my feelings are very human, very real.

I also think it captures that time is a mortal concept. That our life in this sphere--in this time--is very temporal, before it transitions into something new and different. That our probation here is limited, and then when it is over, by whatever means it may end, that we indeed move on to something else--and those that are left behind are left changed, but still moving forward and that we will be joined again in the next realm of our existence.

In contemplating beginnings and endings, how can the universe be so enormous and amazing, space so continuous, that we are an accident...or merely a blip in the eternities? Of course this is not my thought, because to me it is not rational and being merely a blip or an accident is a very human thought, one that is constrained by time and the science that we know of to this point. I also think it exhibits a limitation in thought capacity and existence.

As human beings, to think that we know everything there is to know is pure arrogance. In that way, we really are blips, though not insignificant ones. Juvenile--child like. Thinking back through the centuries, there was a time where the world was flat...or at least it was thought to be so...by scientists and scholars, by travelers and navigators. They were dead serious in their belief and in their proof. It was the limit of their knowledge at the time. We would scoff at it now. I mean, it is ridiculous to think the world is flat, when it is obviously round. But who will scoff at our science, our theories and our philosophies 100, 300, 500, 1000 years from now? Do we truly *know* so much?

I think that we have been before, are now and will be again. I am not a reincarnationist, because I do not think we come back here or that we come back as new people or creatures. I think it is an interesting concept, an interesting philosophy, however in my mind, we have already been here, in this time, in this season, in this era and that ends. I think we move on to our next place, our next task, our next place to learn, to grow, to love.

At any rate, just some miscellaneous musings on humans and the eternities.

Usually I make some note on what prompted the writing. Unfortunately, in this case I did not do so. It would be apropos, and has the sound of, reflections on my father who passed on into starlight and eternity some time ago. So I will consider it that and leave it as it is.

It is a deep sadness--dark with bolts of light
Pain marbled with eternity.

Nothing can change what is gone.
It is done. Over.

Not to be met with again until another time-
Another place-
Another dimension-
Away from this place and this time.

So for now, memories and feelings steeped in the sadness that is loss--
Shimmered in the melancholic joy of times past.

11-27-07