Embraced It Will Serve You
Poetry By Charles C. Finn
Dilemma facing the gravely ill:
how balance positive thinking with facing reality?
At what point in the battle against advancing disease
do you pause long enough from perfect faith in healing,
from stedfast visualization of healing,
from earnest prayer for healing,
to address your loved ones with the unambiguous words
they need to hear and you need to speak
just in case the will of the universe for you is not healing.
The Sensitivity Of Silence
If after long inward journeying
you have reached the point from which everything--even
apparent tragedy--
appears holy and is accepted in trust,
go easy on the preaching
particularly to those whose shredded hearts are filled with
aching.
Comfort instead with your presence,.
Project energy and light from your being if you will,
but extend arms that don't deny the crushing,
and, at least for the time if you can, hold in the sensitivity
of your silence
your beliefs about God's inscrutable will.
When He Sees It Bloom.
I learned just today from my mother
that my grandmother so cherished crape mrytle that she'd
order it each year
hoping it would survive Ashland's winter.
Alas it wasn't to be
except in her heart where it never stopped blooming
and in her grandson's yard in Virginia
where from now on when he sees it bloom
he'll hear her sing.
Thanks to Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme
I feel not only stupendous admiration but filial affection
for a star I now call Grandmother
who going on five billion years ago
after accumulating riches over a burning lidetime
died gloriously,
burst into a gala giveaway that seeded the heavens,
birthing nine circling around a central Sun,
the third out no less than our Mother!
How can we fear death
if we remember our Grandmother dying?
Make Flower What's Left
The 50s are the beginning of the downslide.
Denial says not so and it's morbid to think so,
but in all sorts of large and small ways mortality creeps
in around the edges.
But instead of morbid let it be enlivening.
When it starts penetrating your psyche that you won't
live forever
and are in fact past (perhaps way past) the half way point,
to that extent life's preciousness penetrates.
If time is limited, make flower what's left!
Ah, what the 50s are about is determining to make the most
of the sweet precious time that is left.
See death a dark friend, thank old age for help detaching.
You have to hand it to the universe
for creating such an ingenious ebbing and flowing
to keep the game going.
For starters where would we stack the bodies if all were
undying?
And does the fact that our heart-attachents some day will
be taken
reduce our capacity to love them while they're here
or enhance it instead?
How merciful is aging.
For years I've braced against the day, pierced at the
prospect,
when my German Shepherd would be gone,
but now as I watch her decline--
losing first energy, then desire, now even basic functioning--
I find I'm readying not only to see her go
but to assist in the process.
None of this denies the pain and grieving everywhere with
love interweaving
in the ingenious universal dance.
Solution To Dilemma
Dilemma:
Do you dull the pain at the price of dulling the brain
settling for comfort in a haze?
Or do you hang on till the end to the precious clarity
that enables you to think things through
and say to loved ones what needs to be said
at the risk that in your pain
all you can think to say is "please let me die"?
Solution to dilemma:
Don't wait till you hear the knock on the door
to do your thinking and saying.
Death is a tough exam to cram for at the last moment.
Our time together is ending.
You never know, our paths might cross again, which
would be a kind destiny.
But this might be it.
The time in our lives where our spirits have touched is ending.
We have come to know each other and to trust each other
in ways unguessed at the beginning--
a comfort past expressing.
Hand in hand with the sad parting
there is the swelling softness of the bright realization
of how we have grown together.
This bond will not die.
Our living experiences change us.
The solitary presence of us each now
is richer for the combined presence we have grown into.
On the open journey now we carry each other.
Little endears others to us more
than genuine expressions of condolence--
heartfelt with eyes brimming,
embraces sharing the aching,
words that don't even try for not being able.
Sorrow seems an ocean endless
until it finds itself, feels the child of itself,
encircled by a cradling in the arms of mother shore.
Arms of family and friends
encircle the ocean of our grief.
