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
