The Cycle of Life
Youth unfolding
in the bright sunlight
blossoming in shade
‘tainted’ by age
becoming fragile
the delicacy of death
From an old Dahlia series, attempting to show the robust beauty of new life as it grows older, finally reaching the unsung beauty of death.
Starburst
“Dear ones, the light of God is moving through me this day… I am in His sea of Light, in that eternal land. Wherever I am, in this life or beyond, I am always roaming in that eternity. I want you to come there also, for you are my brothers an sisters and I cannot bear to see you left in delusion.”
Paramahansa Yogananda
Bee in Dahlia
Click on link below for short article on the ongoing bee disaster…
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/13/honeybee-problem-critical-point
Russell St. in Yellow and Green
Saugurties, NY
Signage and blue predominate in the photograph above, along with activity on the right, but the simple yellow dandelions and green grass and fire plug jumped out at me and demanded a shot.
Resurrection
“From winter’s tomb of lifeless blossoms, thou, O Christ, art resurrected in new buds of roses, marigolds, bluebells, jasmine, and worldful varieties of flowers. Ever-mutating, multicolored flowers of lifetrons growing in the gardens of the astral land are fragrant thrones of thy Presence” ~ Paramahansa Yogananda
Hallelujah! He is risen.
Child Days in Vermont
Long ago, when I was very young, we used to go visit my great grandfather in Vermont. “Pop,” we called him, was a minister. He was a minister at Riverside Church in New York City, just two blocks from where my husband and I have lived for the past 25 years. Pop and Nana, my great grandmother, spent summers in Greensboro, Vermont, right on a lake, facing the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The lake was pristine. So clean you could drink the water. So cold even in summer, you had to wait until afternoon to swim. So cold fires burned in the fireplace in the mornings. I was scared of fire back then and remember crying and Pop took me back to his little office in the woods where he often had a fire going, to give me a lecture about fear. He told me if you were careful and knew what you were doing and had respect for it, fire was safe in the fireplace and I should not be afraid.
Early in the mornings my Dad and Pop and a neighbor would go fishing for perch for breakfast. They would come home with many fish and then would clean the scales into a bucket off the kitchen. Nana would cook them and serve the fish with fluffy eggs, and soft, buttered toast. And there was sweet, home-made marmalade with bits of peel to relish. We would eat out on the sun porch at a long table in the warm, but not hot, bright yellow sun.
Usually I went to Greensboro with my parents but sometimes Pop would drive me up at nighttime. Twelve hours on old back roads, passing through dark, sleeping towns. There were no highways then. I loved Vermont, and Nana and Pop’s house on the lake. I loved walking along the brook that flowed through their backyard. I loved looking at the blood-red poppies in their garden. But I didn’t like the swarms of gnats that hung in the fresh, warm air. Nor the snakes. Neither did Nana. I remember Nana using a garden tool to cut a garter snake in half. This seemed horrific and puzzling at the time, and seems even more grizzly today. I didn’t understand why we had to kill the snakes.
Nana was very strict, an old New England schoolmarm. My pajamas had to be neatly folded under my bed pillow or else they wound up in the “pound”, a big wooden chest, filled with other untidy things. A child had to pay money to get things out of the pound. I had almost no money then so this was a very effective form of punishment. It is true I was given a modest sum of money when we went to the general store in town. With it I would buy colorful fake wax miniature soda bottles. You would bite off the waxy top and drink the sweet liquid inside the pretend soda bottle. I learned a valuable lesson. The liquid was gone in a second– there was a flash of intense pleasure– and then you were left broke, with an unpleasant wad of wax in your mouth.
Town was miles away. The mail boxes were far away but you could walk to them along the driveway. And the nearest neighbors were far away, too. You had to walk along the lake, through the woods, to get to their house. Upon arrival, the grown-ups would have drinks and play cards and talk about this disease you got in the winter when the snow would cover the front door. It was called “cabin fever.” My mother tried to explain to me what kind of sickness it was but I never understood.
The neighbors had a young teenage boy named Andy and I had a crush on him, declaring him my boyfriend. He barely spoke to me but nevertheless when Nana gave me chocolates, I saved them and brought the bag of chocolates through the woods to the neighbors’ house for Andy. The gift went unacknowledged. Even in those days of relative innocence, I had found my first of many love obsessions. It would be several failed relationships and 30 long years spent in pursuit of love before I would find someone I loved. Someone who has loved me back, mental illness and all, in a marriage of almost 25 years. Not that long in the scheme of things.
Pop dying was the first loss I experienced. I remember not understanding death at all, sitting on Nana’s lap and asking where he had gone. She could not answer me. Nana and I corresponded by letter after that until she died many years later.
It was in those days of cool summers that I fell in love with nature and the countryside, although as a city girl, I was scared of the pitch black nights. It would take me 50 years before I would escape the city when my husband and I got a little barn in rural upstate New York.
As I sit recuperating from a recent illness, I ponder the turns my life has taken and wonder what lies ahead, not without fear, but with growing equanimity.
For memoir continuing the above click on:
My Former Life
In my former life I was a bee.
Why else would I keep sticking my nose
into the private, pollinated parts of flowers?
In my former life I was a turtle.
Why else would I hunch my shoulders
into a seeming shell, my back a carapace
to shield me from a sometimes dangerous world?
In my former life I loved thee.
How else could I account for my “knowing” you
from before the first time we met,
for “seeing” the you in your inner depths?
Some would say I risk damnation
for a belief in reincarnation.
Yet this answer satisfies me on so many levels
and requities my thirst, quieting my myriad of questions
that the old belief system did not.
Unpopular in the west,
woven into the fabric of life in the east
in which I clothe myself, sewn by a strong affinity,
a strange familiarity,
attraction mystifies.
Most of us cannot remember
the details of the other lives,
and are left with fractured fragments of the past
glistening like sea glass in our hands, on the seashores of our minds,
trying to piece together a picture
of a previous existence.
Love is timeless and mysterious
and though I dread the inevitable,
the loss of our life together
in this life,
I know we will be together again in the next and the next
ad infinitium
for something as sacrosanct as our love
is eternal.
Welcome to samples of my work in various art forms showcasing “Eye-locks and Other Fearsome Things.” “Eye-locks” is a Bipolar/Asperger’s memoir in narrative form that describes the triumph of love over mental illness.
A Microcosm of the Macrocosm
To see a cathedral in a flower,
to be drunk with its nectar,
under an opalescent sky.
*
“Infinity is our Home. We are just sojourning awhile in the caravanserai of the body.”
~ Paramahansa Yoganada~
(Click http://www.independentauthornetwork.com/ellen-stockdale-wolfe.html for information on, and to purchase my Bipolar/Asperger’s memoir.)
Starbursts
Starlike
explosions of blue
with an
out of season
dusting of snow
a foretaste
of the approach of winter
a sugary confection
one is tempted to ingest
a similar temptation
(I suppose)
as those tempted by coca.
A Wee Life
Oh wee one
how I envy thee
trudging up and down
the raindrop slopes
of rain and nectar
safe within the confines
of radiant yellow
succulent pink
in a self-contained
world of beauty
however short-lived thy life.
Heresay Hear Today
In
sin
u
ation
over
what
Katy
did
or
didn’t
do
to
Dahlia
is
here
say
prattle
of
goss
i
ping
blooms
filled
with
en
vy
Oh Dying Lily
Oh, Lily
in the valley
of despair,
the devil’s lair,
thou seemeth to be shy
with your glossy, glassy tears.
One day we all must die
and we all have fulsome fears
of dying.
It is not
for lack of trying
your life to live;
it is not from sins of lying
or reluctance to give.
You lived your life purely,
always kneeling demurely,
and though your petals turn to crepe
your form still has a humble drape,
still praising He who made you
in your last living days
and inspiring us to follow suit
in your reverent ways.
The Stealth Kiss
Unseen by a background of fellow flowers
he rushed towards her purple petals
to plant the blossom of her bosom
with a kiss
when
blew a breeze
that steathily stole his kiss,
before she ever knew, sending it wafting
above the treetops to the forever fields of lost loves.
It’s All Relative
In the land of the giant Lily
the little ant is King! *
Man thinks himself giant, so important, even grandiose, at times,
when, in relation to the universe,
he is of microscopic stature,
less in size than the tiniest of insects
who live in a veritable macroscosm beneath our feet.
(Adapted from the proverb: ” In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
The Infinity of Spring
Light embraces each flower
encasing it in color
energizing each blade of grass,
an infinity of green,
creating the world we see,
the dream screen
photons of energy
we drink with our eyes,
as our total being,
like the infinity of blossoms,
is caressed by the Light.
Two Lips of Forever Love
He didn’t “get it,
the “loss thing,”
when my aunt died mid-April,
and I lost my second mother.
Didn’t “get it” when I lost my first.
This was not the only time
he was lost in oblivion and
puzzled by my tears.
*
He didn’t see me hurting
from the loss of my lineage,
and his lack of empathy for my grief
as he made me meet and greet
a friend the next day, as if all was normal.
This time I balked, bolder and older,
and he agreed it was time to ponder
and talk with his mentor.
*
When he came home
one night days later,
full of hugs of apology,
and tulips on the kitchen counter,
it was a breakthrough for us both.
It took a few days
but what came out
brought tears upon tears.
*
Not having grown up
with emotional displays
he didn’t “get” the meaning of loss.
With no models of grief
he didn’t know how to feel it himself
nor how to give solace,
not just lip service,
to those who had lost.
*
I cried for him.
How very sad, as a child
he didn’t know the love I knew.
He, a sensitive child,
in an icebox family
fraught with frigid emotion,
and warm, deep affection only
from his great-aunt, Dot.
*
He brought me pink tulips,
flowers of a contrite heart,
and held me close
and kissed me
with lips full of apologies
but I was the one
who felt sorry for him
for the years he knew not love.
*
Twenty-eight years ago
God told me “Love this man,
trust him and have faith in him,
and hold him to your heart.”
Many moons later, I love him light-years
more than the day we met
and in then-unimaginable ways
has our love strove for the stars.
*
He has brought me:
kindness and gentleness,
generosity of spirit,
goodness of heart,
and healing humor.
What I have taught him:
the glories of love
and agony of loss.
*
From the beginning
the seed of love was sown
for better or worse
deeply within the parched,
but fertile soil of my imperfect heart.
And he has cultivated the growth
of a stalwart, staid evergreen,
amid the blooming two-lips of forever love.
The Dance of the Croci
Whirling dervishes
of Croci
spinning colors
of violet and orange and green
soporific breezes
brushing the sunlit
freshness of air
dizzying sway of seeds
dropping from trees
my head reels
drunk with the nectar
of Spring
Fragile Croci
Oh, brave town crier of Spring
bursting forth before all others
in the cold
you age
as I watch
wrinkles in your petals
still beauteous with inner glow
as you close your countenance
against the chill wind
MOONSIDE 
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