death

“That I did always love”

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It’s been another hot minute (or around 876,582) since I posted a new poem. That’s 20 months if anyone is counting. Most subscribers have likely forgotten that I and this project still exist. There is no judgement at all from this side of the screen. If you’ve followed me for a while, you might remember that I lost my 40-year-old son, Dewitt, in 2023 to suicide, and since then I’ve struggled to write (among other things). Yet here I am, trying again to find my words, popping my head up from under the ocean of waves that sometimes take me down, but have not yet succeeded.

Life goes on. We must also, or things begin to get really isolating, despairing, and ugly for both our remaining loved ones and us. Losing a child is HARD. Going on is HARD. Friends and family can’t fix anything or go on for you. Therapy definitely helps, but grief is a direct result of love, which does not die with death. (It’s also a relentless bitch.)

I’ve recently restarted my practice of Yoga, and my teacher shared some info on the significance of the current Lion’s Gate Portal, which opened August 8th and will remain open until August 12th. It’s known as “a period that many astrologers and spiritual practitioners associate with personal growth, renewed confidence and meaningful new beginnings”1. I spent 8-8 completing some specific rituals and meditations, and setting fresh goals and intentions. I feel like I’ve made some real initial progress. One of them is getting back to my writing.

As the universe would have it, I flipped through a couple of my Carol and Emily Project notebooks this morning, the pages of which have the first line of every one of Emily’s poems at the top, and I stopped on #549. My process is to avoid reading her poem until after I’ve finished mine, and only then do I research and analyze. In doing so, I had to believe that today’s choice was wholly synchronistic. In #549 Emily wrote that love is the point of life and, drawing on her spiritual convictions, she pointed to the immortality of both. My love for my son did not diminish or die when his physical body did. Energy (according to the law of conservation of energy) can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed or transferred from one form to another; therefore, his energy, his spirit, still lives. So here we are.

While Emily’s poem was directed at a beloved anonymous person in her life (perhaps her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson or perhaps another unidentified romantic interest), mine explores the relationship between a flower and a bee as it relates to the bee’s labor of love and survival. The outcome of the bee’s toil and gift of the flower’s nectar is the creation of the ancient, sweet elixir-like material we know as honey, which I see as an apt metaphor for love.

PS Speaking of synchronistic moments, mid-editing, I walked from my office to my kitchen/dining area to get more coffee, stopped to open the plantation shutters to let the light in, as I do every morning, and gasped with surprise when, in front of me on the outside of the screen, was a bee.

I’ll be traveling for a couple of weeks, but I hope to be back here really soon. Stay tuned. <3

Peace, Love and Poetry

1“a period that many astrologers and spiritual practitioners associate with personal growth, renewed confidence and meaningful new beginnings” thegoddesscircle.net

“I Think To Live- May Be A Bliss”

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By all accounts Emily was not born an “unhappy child”, but she did go on to experience significant losses that affected her deeply and contributed to the abundant theme of death in her work. In her poem #646 Emily seems to say that there is a lot more joy out there to be had than she has experienced in her self-chosen cloistered life. She hints in the last stanza that a certain unnamed someone may hold the key to making it all Bliss:

How bountiful the Dream—
What Plenty—it would be—
Had all my Life but been Mistake
Just rectified—in Thee

Emily Dickinson

I have known people who never seem to get a break, never find that golden ticket, and spend their whole lives trying to keep their heads above water, choking and almost drowning again and again along the way. They may experience slivers of happiness here and there, but Bliss is a foreign word to them because they just haven’t had the chance to experience it.

I also know that you can seemingly have it all, or what looks like it all, wrapped up beautifully in gold and still not have a life filled with Bliss. (defined as extreme happiness, utter joy). Life is just not like that, as tragedy and loss strike us all.

As our individual paths converge with others, we’d do well to remember that we have no idea what stories, burdens and losses others carry under the skin of their public self. What we do know is that a kindness, a hand or a smile reaching out to them, without a request or expectation back, is a universally appreciated gift.

This morning I went to have blood drawn for my upcoming physical and witnessed a perfect example of someone trying their best to make everyone smile, to bring a little Bliss to each person’s day. The lab tech’s name was Sandra and she had a kind word and or compliment for every person she dealt with. It took little effort, but you could tell that people appreciated her. They thanked her, laughed with her, or like me, wished her a wonderful day before they left. Then they took that little bit of happiness she shared with them and went their own ways, surely smiling under their masks and hopefully inspired to fulfill the butterfly effect and share it with someone else.

We’ve all experienced how one word, one interaction, can ruin a good day. We can’t individually solve everyone’s problems, but we each have the power to help bring a little bit of joy, bliss, or happiness to other’s days. And sometimes that goes a long way towards helping someone believe that life is truly good, prompting them to share that goodness with someone else, and making our world a kinder, gentler place for us all.

“Unable Are The Loved To Die”

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If we have ever loved a pet or human, we know this to be true. That even after they are gone from this physical realm, they live on in our hearts. If you were to Google quotes about love and life you should be prepared to go down a chasmic rabbit hole, only to emerge weeks later with one great truth- stated a thousand different ways in a myriad of languages, cultures and religions…

“To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.”

Sydney Smith, in Lady Holland’s Memoir (1855), “Of Friendship”

And if ever there was a poignant pregnant line spoken by a character and lived for too short a time by the actor who played him, it is this one.

“Poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

Robin Williams as John Keating in Dead Poets Society

In the first line of her poem, Dickinson likened love to immortality and I have done the same with my poem, while exploring the quality of a life without love, or as in Robin Williams’s case, a life so clouded by depression that one is rendered unable to sustain him/herself. We can survive for a time on all the other things, the scraps, like wealth, recognition, applause, etc., but on the table of life the main dish is love and if we don’t get to partake in and share that, no amount of those other things will ever satiate our souls.

“Why Should We Hurry- Why Indeed?”

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Unless you’re new to Emily Dickinson, you know that Death was never far away in her thoughts and poetry. In #1646 she speaks of being “molested by immortality” and seems to say that we’re being tricked into thinking it will all last, when nothing actually will, because everything ends, so why hurry ourselves to that dark night.

The case against hurrying is not new. The irony is that we’ve been telling ourselves to slow down since the invention of everything humans have designed to help us do more faster. The reality is that we miss so much when we hurry. Most of all we miss the opportunity for genuine connection with others, nature, and our own inner selves. And the ramifications of all of that? Staggering, massive, and negatively consequential. So let’s take a moment whenever we can and focus on living our lives a little slower, because being more mindful can only make things better for all of us.

“In Falling Timbers Buried”

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Some say Emily Dickinson had a morbid fascination with death. Others see the fact that approximately 1/6th of all her poems and letters were about death as something not unusual for one who lived next to a cemetery and during a time when folks died of illnesses at a much younger age than we do today. Her poem #614 speaks of diggers attempting to find a man buried in rubble. Too late, the saving grace is Death, in that he is no longer suffering.

I saw the setting of the first line of #614 as a place where dreams die, aspirations are quashed and we sometimes don’t even understand that we have made ourselves prisoners. I imagined a frolic of mythical forest fairies engaging in a battle with death, attempting to coax it into and ward it off with their fairy ring of mushrooms, a place of legendary doom for non-fairy folk.

In researching fairy rings, I learned quite a bit and will definitely be on the lookout for them in the future. If there’s a full moon and you see me running around one nine times, from east to west (the direction of the sun), it will be in hopes of hearing the fairies dancing and frolicking underground. Please just watch from afar and don’t make me lose count, for legend has it if I run around a tenth time I will meet ill fate and be made to run to the point of exhaustion and death and/or perhaps become invisible.

References

Emily Dickinson and Death – Emily Dickinson Museum

MCNAUGHTON, RUTH FLANDERS. “Emily Dickinson on Death.” Prairie Schooner, vol. 23, no. 2, 1949, pp. 203–214. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40624107. Accessed 22 July 2021.

Do you dare enter a fairy ring? The mythical mushroom portals of the supernatural | Ancient Origins (ancient-origins.net)

Magical Fairy Rings: The Science and Folklore (mushroom-appreciation.com)

the prowling Bee: In falling Timbers buried — (bloggingdickinson.blogspot.com)

Fairy ring – Wikipedia

“The Manner of Its Death”

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I’m back after taking a little break to delve into my other creative projects! I wrote this poem just this morning as memories of my 4 year old daughter skipped through my brain. In her poem, Emily spoke on one her favorite subjects, death. She seemed to be saying that one should be able to choose their manner of death, much as she chose her burial attire and the manner in which she wanted her own death to be recognized.

When she ventured outside her Amherst home, Emily explored as an avid naturalist, and spent much time surveying, cataloguing and appreciating the wide variety of life forms. As a mother of two young children, I sought to get them outside as much as possible and to let them learn from and experience all the wonders of the natural world. On one particular trek through the woods in back of our North Carolina mountain home, my 4 year old daughter came upon a tiny fallen bird, unmoving and sadly dead. This poem is about how she reacted.

The next morning we arrived at the doorway to her Montessori preschool and she presented the Directress with the shoebox containing her discovery. As all good teachers do, during morning circle she used it as a teaching moment, as the littles solemnly passed the box around and they talked about what might have happened to the tiny bird. A simple playground burial followed, with the preschoolers expressing their genuine and heartfelt care for the tiny creature. Life is beautiful and poignant, gentle and harsh. May we all be as bold as preschoolers in expressing that same kind of genuine and heartfelt care for each other.

“Twas Just This Time- Last Year, I Died”

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Of course not literally, but with all the angst I had as a teenager, I spent the majority of my waking hours wondering how we were going to survive the lockdown, quarantine, toilet paper shortage, and general malaise that the Covid-19 virus brought to our lives.

Once again, I was wrong. My husband deserves all the credit for carrying the weight of everything for the first few months until I rose from my funk and started to fully function again. And here we are, over a year later. Many of us are vaccinated and we’re all eager to travel and visit family and hug everyone! There’s so much we’ve all missed. And oh so many who will forever be missing loved ones who died from complications of Covid-19.

The vaccinations have brought us light and hope. Next week, I’m going to get to visit my daughter and grandson for the first time in over 13 months. Believe me, I’m going to hug them for a very long time. We’re so close to managing this. But we’re not there yet. Let’s all be smart. Wear our masks. Get vaccinated. Stay safe.

A Death Obsession

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If you read enough of her work, you’ll soon realize that death is a recurring theme in Emily Dickinson’s poems. Some have found it morbid, but others appreciate the innate curiosity that drew her into philosophizing and speculating about death and an afterlife. Biographers have noted that she grew up living next to a cemetery, which may have started her thinking about the subject. Throughout her life, she was an avid observer of nature and as her poetry reveals, a deep thinker. As a homebody, she certainly had time on her hands to engage in both of those activities.

I don’t write about death a lot, but I will confess to having a preoccupation with True Crime/Murder. I’m a Dateline junkie and have just discovered a great true crime podcast to listen to while I work on the cutting and pasting part of this project. Somehow, I think if Emily were alive now, she’d share my attraction. I haven’t spent a lot of time trying to analyze why I’m drawn to that kind of thing, as opposed to the Hallmark movie genre, but a quick Google of the question tells us that people like me are drawn to the genre because its speaks to the dichotomies of life (good-vs-evil, etc.) and like a haunted house or going to Halloween Horror Nights, we get to experience fear in a safe setting. Makes sense to me.

Emily often wrote about the dichotomies of life and today’s Carol and Emily poem does that too with ecstasy and sorrow, breath and death….

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