Happy Valentine’s Day!
I cry red berries
wash them with teardrops
so you can eat them in the morning
with your breakfast
as you listen so intently
to the news on the TV
I want lifetimes
with you…
Without you
I would be
shivering in the snow
in nakedness
berryless
bereft.
Thanksgiving From Within
If you look between the buildings you can see the sky and the trees I watch as the seasons change. There are bare branches in between the buildings there now.
But this afternoon my husband called me in to the other room see the leaves still on the tree outside the den window.
The leaves were ecstatically yellow today as I drank in their beauty from my window seat on a stationery bike.
The yellow leaves filled the room with a wondrous yellow light. Migraines and severe arthritis keep me in. But MUCH can be seen from the inside.
Time flew by as fast as the low lying clouds. I felt a form of ecstasy with Spirit and the world outside. A peace that nature gives and one that has been rare for me in these days of deep strife in the world.
The clouds zipping by and the fresh air from the window and the bright yellow brought me great joy that others racing by in their busy lives below do not see. I am blessed though mostly homebound… blessed with a loving husband and breathtaking beauty in the great beyond. I have much to be grateful for and I wish you all many such blessings and the urge to give thanks.
Mostly I give thanks for a sensitive and sensible husband who has stuck by me through thick and thin and my many moods and suicidal depressions– as a person with a major mental illness. Bipolar Disorder. It has not been easy for him. And he has helped many others in his career as a psychiatric social worker. I was able to help him understand some of his clients, yes, but he gave them the greatest gift of all by sharing with them his sense of humor and treating them as normal human beings.
On our first date, almost 40 years ago, a walk in the park, his sense of humor was what I first noticed about him. He scored the first home run. And then moments later, another, with his compassion. And that was the start of the love story of my life.
Today I send my deepest blessings to him, and, too, I want to wish each of you many blessings of love and nature on this fine, yellow day of Thanksgiving week!
Autumnal Septuagenarian Love
Waking to your touch
electricity in
your massive
healing hands
without a glint
of sexuality…
Waking to your smile
whispers sweetly
to my soul…
like the first time
so long ago
on our first walk
together
when your arm
brushed against mine
and shook our worlds
out of their solitary
orbits and
sent us to the moon!
Your grey fluffy hair
sparkling silver threads
entices every time
I sniff your fragrance
and inhale the heavens
the warmth
of your cheeks
in our fleeting
embrace
I would it
would last forever
like our love!
The smile lines etched
around your sky blues
alter the pulse
the course of my blood
and with each glance
reach for the stars
twinkling inside my head!
The wrinkles in your cheeks
and your furrowed brow
pluck at the strings
inside my bosom
for I know the hard times
and worries that
engraved them on your face!
As day turns to night…
On the doorway
to Orpheus
in pillowed embrace
your big hand
holds mine
and makes me
feel safe and loved
and little
as you drift off
leaving me wishing
for morning
to awaken once
more to you
fears tears
so long to wait
till morning!
We are old
How did this happen?
and we are in love
more than ever
youthful passion gone
replaced by years of fidelity
affection, quarrels, laughing,
teasing, crying
always sharing, caring
yet attraction still stirs
and the years of together
have sewn our souls to one!
Loss is inevitable
and unacceptable
In equal measure
The God I used to find
in nature
I now find in you
And the ecstasis
of gazing at the sky
now rests with the mystery
of you!!
A happiest of birthdays to the love of our many lifetimes together! Hope to continue our journey together to enlightenment!
May the rest of your seventies be healthy and happy and filled with love!
💖Your wife
The Trees of Winter
Every year what budded in autumn, blossoms full blown in winter– my love affair with trees. Trees that were drop-dead gorgeous in their fall colors are now bare, with the exception of evergreens and a few stray deciduous trees that refuse to relinquish their leaves. Now the trees are stripped down to their souls and their souls sing a siren song to the universe.
The tops of trees lift my spirit; brushlike they paint the sky the baby pinks and blues of mornings, and the majestic magentas and violets of day’s end. Each tree has its signature shape against the sky, like a fingerprint or a snowflake, similar yet each unique. Some treetops in their bare state are shaped like a fancy coiffure; others look like wrought iron filigree. On distant mountains, against the snowy ground, some look like stubble on an old man’s unshaven face.
It is the colorful winter sky showing through, and showing off, the bare branches that woo me. The bare curvaceous branches are stark, dark lines against the bright of day and the inky sky of night. These resplendent creatures are living lines that explode. Branches tangle like the lines in a Jackson Pollock painting. Others curve in the sensuous lines of a Brancusi sculpture. Buxom tree trunks stand strong surrounded by their dead blossoms and their burgeoning offspring like a Renaissance Madonna. In truth these trees are not like art at all. Rather art imitates them– their beauty provides the timeless inspiration for artists, writers and poets of all ages and styles.
Trees not only inspire, they themselves are paragons of diversity. One look out of a car window while driving on the Taconic and one can see squat pines alongside towering majestic firs, birches interspersed with maple and oak. And together the different brown and tan barks interspersed with evergreens create not only a mosaic of contrasting colors, but display an example to inspire humans to live together in peaceful unity.
These beneficent beings carry the heavy, dark grey clouds of winter. When it snows the tree trunks become canvases for the abstract patterns of windblown-snow, while the serpentine branches are outlined in white. In ice storms their branches become chandeliers, each enveloped in glassine ice, tinkling in the wind. While in the melancholy of a winter rain, the branches become oiled skins of snakes weeping to the ground below. And finally, in the night sky, the branches hold the stars in their arms, those with leaves holding them in their hands, as they nurse the moon.
All trees, no matter what their species, age or height, stand tall in proud humility, their arms reaching up to the Heavens to our Creator in prayer– soft-spoken beings of peace and tranquility towering over us, while the little creatures race around distractedly below.
Eyes to Eternity
At age 35 I found someone who was more afraid of closeness than I was. I understood him almost from day one. This understanding came out of years of therapy that followed my breakdown at age 28. Before the breakdown, I didn’t know that I was depressed. Before the breakdown, I didn’t know that my failed relationships were due to my fear of closeness. Before the breakdown, I didn’t know I was Bipolar. I learned a lot of things in therapy that helped to change the direction of my life.
And then one day Thomas walked into the library where I had been working for 10 years. He got a job as a library assistant. He was a graduate student and wanted to work part-time. I took the first steps towards asking him out because it was obvious he never would. I had learned a thing or two after a stint at being gay. We bumbled our way into a relationship and, after 4 years, into marriage. We didn’t know that either one of us had Asperger’s Syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder on the Autism Spectrum, until much, much later. We just thought we were very, very shy.
After some 33 years of marriage we are still shy with each other. Our instincts are still to run away from closeness, but now we are able to override the first gut feeling. We have grown together, becoming very, very close. So close that now my biggest fear is of losing Thomas. So close that sometimes we communicate without talking, as if we are on the same radio frequency. In fact talking often confuses things.
We have pushed each other along life’s path. Tom became a clinical social worker and I became a writer and artist. The road has been bumpy in spots. My being Bipolar has been hard for Tom at times. Many times. But there have been many more moments of joy that make it all worthwhile. We both feel the other is the best thing that happened to us, and the journey continues. New lessons are learned. There are still new magical moments and new epiphanies.
It is 3A.M. I lay beside Thomas in bed listening to his breathing as I watch a silent light show outside our bedroom windows. This is not a 3A.M. awakening born of despair as some are. At the moment I feel the Presence and that Presence fills me with love.
The moonlight beckons to me, and I respond by getting up and gazing at the twinkling stars and the hushed light of flickering fireflies. In the quiet stillness of a country night I am stirred by the music of the silence. My ears hum, the sound of the nervous system according to my husband.
The cool air is intoxicating. I go to the den to write and sit in a moonlit cathedral, watching the seemingly random flashing flames of fireflies flying in a frenzy of love. The madness of desire. Well do I know how love possesses one’s spirit and makes one fly through life, manic with emotion.
Yet sometimes, beneath the energy that stirs one’s blood, lies a silent union—a momentary glimpse of eternity in a loved-locked gaze into the eyes of one’s beloved. It is fleeting, at least for me. Gone in a flash, and yet it leaves me wondering just whom I am seeing. The inner voice says that God has touched my soul through Thomas, for the best of human love is merely a sampling of the Divine. Eye contact, so problematic for both my husband and me, is wondrous in this context. For a second, eternity beckons like the moonlight, whispering of another life, another world, something beyond the here and now.
(Click http://www.independentauthornetwork.com/ellen-stockdale-wolfe.html for information on, and to purchase my Bipolar/Asperger’s memoir.)
It’s 4 AM and I Miss You
It’s 4:27… 4:28… 4:29 AM
and I miss you
I hope to God you’ll awaken
and bring me coffee
and tell me something funny and I will laugh
and you will be so pleased to see
someone “get” one of your thousands of spontaneous jokes.
I miss you…
you with the beautifully streaked-with-grey, fuzzy hair
and hundreds of lines, going up, down and sideways
around the corners of your shy blue eyes.
You don’t know I am awake
missing you… your suddenly taking my hand
in yours and holding it on the sofa as
we silently watch our country self-destruct.
I hope to God you’ll awaken and all will be okay
for another day
for it is not promised
for it is not guaranteed
Nothing is.
The wonder that is you
that I found so many years ago
after being alone for so long and through so much.
Unadulterated joy you bring me
as I worry about your every breath
God keep you in his arms
and protect you
for it is 4:38 AM and I am missing you
as you lie in the arms of Morpheus
and I see lights on across the street
Others are awake
as you slumber
Time drags on as I am alone
I cannot wait for you to awaken
to see the twinkle in your eye
and the tousled hair.
I miss you
as I sit here typing and
reading of other’s lives.
It is 4:45 AM
about two more hours
for you lie
in our bed of 33 years.
It is 4:46 AM
and time goes so slowly
as I count the hours
until you awaken.
You with your gentle voice
the pleasant voice
that helped so many
as you listened to their anguish
A healer I always said you were/are.
Almost 5 AM
and I miss you.
If I miss you this much now,
oh, and here come the tears,
what of the day or night
God takes one of us away.
Or could we be so lucky
to go in each other’s arms?
My morbid mind
destroying the present with
fearing the future
It is 4:54 AM
and you have arisen
to make water.
You will stop by to see me
and ask why I am up
and ask me when I will come back to bed.
You are gone again
having returned to
the embrace of sleep
For a second the thrill of you
all tousled and concerned
shot through me.
I will come join you
and look at the lights across the way
and wait if I can’t sleep
for you to awaken
and greet me with another day
as our shared time together
zips by with a vengeance now
my time with you.
5:03… eternity
the pain in my throat and head
throbbing
I should lie down
but it has been so long
since words have come
5:05 AM…5:10 AM
I feel chill
I feel pain
missing you.
5:11 AM
Let me go
lie next to you
and think of the wonder
of your presence
in our marital bed.
5:25 AM…
MOONSIDE 
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