rebirth

Significant women in my life, those I came to know well, were at birth delivered/attended by some difficulty similar to my own. Revealed by mom, whether in anger or in response to my curiosity, I cannot now remember. But the birth was difficult for her: fifty-eight hours of dry labor alone.

For me, this birthing process, leaving one mode of life for another, is reminiscent of those times I wish I'd never been born. Difficult, principally for encountering my vanities, the much and many articles of things annotating passages from indifference to self care, if not love of self.

For the second night in a row I have awoken beset with a frenzy to capture quotes made by women I’d never heard of and cannot, obviously, know. But then I have an unusual and unreasonable fondness and reverence for women generally. By which I have, after a long time, begun to know the difference is not merely physical, but profoundly psychological in their attitudes towards life itself  Great stamina, long term strength, devotion and dedication to the on going of all life.

Of the men I’ve known well, but never so well as women, they were without exception reverent to a woman as equals. Refusing to inhabit a half-world wherein women are secondary, victims or slaves.

Significantly, as part of my daily methodology, I weave, back-and-forth between writing and collecting quotes. In the process I discovered Pam had sent me an email, once more, lifting my head above the despondency of sorting through my vanities. What I had hoped to leave at the time of my death to others. Who in their turn would merely dispose of things I must considered to carry forward or abandon meticulously. There is very little that I identify with in terms of articles or furnishings. Yet buried beneath piles of neglect are things of actual value; the remains of what I failed to destroy or abandon in the past.

130621 MDT 06:05

Wringing my peace is dawn this longest day of the year. Fears that I seldom addressed, possibly the last? Hopefully! The love I know and anticipate is beset with concern that I will, as I was in childhood, be a ‘bad person’. Annie, my companion, a cat, is one of many pets beginning in infancy, to accompany me through life. Their lives truncated by accident, disease and disappearance . . . or disappeared from my keeping, as first was later discovered in the keeping and companionship of my mothers uncle John. Mozart lived twenty years and prior to my discovery I never knew where my crib mate went.

Of the women I have loved, desiring companionship with, unreasonably, both are fond, no, more like, love animals unreasonably; at that, all animals. Mother, however was not one. Since as a child she brought home stray kittens and her mother drowned them in front of my mother; poverty being a stern teacher. That said, whenever a cat or dog escaped from her keeping it was always my fault for which I was beaten both physically and emotionally savagely. In retrospect I have begun to conclude all lives given into our care and concern have their own agenda, fate and destiny over which it is not totally incumbent upon us to die bereaved at their loss. Then too there is the simple realization that the animals did flee the ‘home’ mother provided them being in essence house pets. As with pets so with me until now the last fears wrung from me. Stasis has caused me anguish beyond my endurance daily in process progressing towards the inevitable move. An unknowable, until now, expectation of grief beyond endurance should Annie run away, be accidentally killed or terrified beyond my ability to reassure her that she will be well in our new home and family; Pam has two dogs, both of whom have lived with cats before.

Animals seem to have an instinct for what we are personally, benign or fearful. In fact many characteristics I might once attribute to myself as intuition have apparently evolved into and ability to assess potential friends leading me to trust both M & P emphatically.

In recent converse with M I said; “It’s all your fault, you did after all suggest I volunteer for hospice service!” In significant ways they are clones. Lending me an organic sense of our relationships as divinely given and ineluctable/ineludible [archaic]/inescapable/unavoidable. A fate and destiny towards I go. Albeit, until recently, haltingly. Giving away possessions possessing me appropriately to others who will make good use of them. Annie, however, is entirely another matter for she is a friend since our joining one another five years ago.

Startled to realize that time frame roughly describes the current tenure of my friendship with M . . . a love that will extend beyond the distance between us and/or life. Convicting me that we are, all one family in life, stemming from Mozart, both the cat and composer, who slept with me in my crib through my long lonely life. Until now that is.

Did I just say “long lonely life”? Yes. Until recent time I have considered myself poison, a bad person, unwilling to be completely real to anyone including myself. What began with M will go on, a process of becoming a whole person. Better and better—day by day.

130620 MDT 03:00 birth

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved