I suppose this is leading to a toughening of my soul.
The faces and places through which I have been sifting aren’t mine. I’ve perceived a least portion of the meaning below the lines on his face and to the tilt of her chin. Obituaries are the finial polish to our public image, and it damn well better shine or leave it to one line: born; died.
My maternal great grandmother typed Continue reading
I find no peace today.
I would follow my feet through the wet grasses and walk in wind among the stone remains of the dead; there is no peace there either. They cry from abandonment. They speak of the hauntings of war. Some are buried far from home and family, caught unaware by death. A mother embraces her child no longer though they are side by side in death on the same day and buried in the same ground.
I find cemeteries poignant. Like the streams that feed the rivers to the ocean of humanity and inhumanity, I follow the steadfast families anchored in generations and those filled with wanderlust in single or in company. Likely my blood is from among the ones beneath my feet who travel no more.
No peace today.
©2012 Sandra Davidson
My time is running out «. Fantastic post from a new-to-me writer. She touches on a topic that drives me, has driven me my whole life.
Her post elicited my (edited) response below.
I have been too aware of time’s passage since about the age of three, before the hands on the clock meant anything. I tried to wear a watch and gave it up before junior high school. With the addition of microwaves in homes, I grew impatient with myself for watching the seconds count down. My home has no clocks; it needs none. There are time keepers on my computer, cell phone, microwave, oven. My husband has the alarm clock for moments when it is necessary.
It is an urgency. For me it is a questioning of myself. Am I giving more than I’m taking, in all sense of the word—resources, ideas, perspectives, understanding, love, compassion.
Writing is frightening. It should be. With everything we write, we open ourselves to a little more transparency. I’m terrified of being known in this way but I cannot stop the flow. I have only the choice of whether my words appear or hide away someplace. More are hidden than revealed, I confess.
©2012 Sandra Davidson
A day much like today:
Most days the intemperate blow and gust of air through the hundred-foot firs becomes me standing by the river’s edge of my imagination, listening to the changing depth and breadth, the dredge of watery momentum through a stone-littered river bottom.
Someplace in the River Wind lives a great fish, tail rattling in the wind chimes. Without form it drags and tugs at the corners of the house and mouths the windows.
Rare days, I am beside an ocean in storm, a heavy, irregular tide sucking at my ears and spitting them out in false feeding, threatening to bow me, demanding I submit to its waves.
This moment, will I step out onto time-worn rock, into the richness built upon loamy layers of the recent pasts? Or will it be shifting sands, once parched now drenched by eternal tide?
It isn’t a choice; I join the elements in birth, death and resurrection.
©2010 by Sandra Davidson
