Beautiful Belle

~for my daughter BJC on her 34^th birthday

Beautiful Belle of red blood and divine light

Battling strangulation in the womb

As the tangled intentions of nature and spirit grew

To emerge from darkness, life unbound —

Screaming your first exhale on a Friday afternoon.

Beautiful Belle of sea foam and fire

Entering through a door of complexity and tangled intentions –

Newborn child to a child of sixteen, the warlike forces

Of class and culture and mystery and possibility

Dancing in the air of your birth, at the foot of your crib.

Beautiful Belle of soft pulse and warm breath

Vibrant child of bruises and cuts and fearless

Determination to run toward the waiting world

Dragging your brother by the hand, always seeking

Another adventure of happy mischief and bubbling laughter.

Beautiful Belle of purple quartz and diamond hardness

Rebelling at every teaching, refusing every lesson,

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.”
― Martha Graham

I missed her. She was a faint memory, a fragment hiding inside my spirit and heart. A ghost-whisper of feeling, presence, image, essence. . .

That me was a kind and gentle person with a quirky sense of humor, a bright sparkly  laugh, that saw people as multi-colored skeins of yarn, unique and beautiful in their various hues. She was the type of gal that understood everyone, including herself, as imperfect individuals fighting their own daily battles to survive, grow, and become. And she recognized that those battles gave people a variegated quality of individuality that made…

“Perhaps some day I’ll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.” —Sylvia Plath

The words hurt.

Or, maybe…

The venom of the disease is horrific. It will destroy me if I allow it to.

Or, maybe…

The truth in the words hurts. The reality that I wish was different … but isn’t.

Or, maybe…

The words hurt because they match the actions that (I interpret to) mean I am irrelevant in this relationship. The person I love either too sick or otherwise unable to love me back or show me kindness that is normal between two people who care about one another.

And I keep trying and wanting a “different” answer, keep trying to “force a solution” that lets me find some small happiness in this relationship. But all relationships are partnerships of some sort…

It is the ongoing, daily living of a spiritual life that has meaning. Our progress may range from dull to spectacular, but we must accept both. Each and every day should be linked together, strung into a long line of prayer beads.

In life, you don’t know how many beads you’ve counted already, and you don’t know how many are yet to come. All that matters is fingering the one that comes to you now and taking the spiritual significance of that moment to heart.

~365 Tao Daily Meditations, p. 226, Deng Ming-Dao.

A daily ritual when I was a child, weather permitting, was me and grandma taking a walk. We lived in the country with over twenty acres of land, cut with numerous footpaths and trails in various states of upkeep, backed up to the house.

Grandma was a weathered sage. She knew the hills and valleys and old…

mu jo   constantly changing (meaning Impermanence) in Zen

“Who am I?” ~ Repetitive life-long question in my journal entries

We all fall down. A comment I say often to my partner during different struggles in his life. A comment that my children have heard me say a million times in their lives. A whisper in my mind to myself during difficult times.

This was my personal mantra that meant:

We all fall down, but then we stand back up. We all make mistakes and are less than we wish to be, BUT we can find our way through it and grow and become better. We can become anything we want to be. The key is not to quit, not to give up hope. God will help you, you will figure it out,  and it will all turn out for the best.

That mantra had served me well through…