Happy Merry

a writing prompt and its unfolding alignment with today!

ANTIDOTES TO FEAR OF DEATH (the prompt)

Rebecca Elson (1960-1999)

Sometimes as an antidote 
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark 
Till they are all, all inside me, 
Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself 
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars 
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything 
Already there
But unconstrained by form.

And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth 
Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis, 
Thinking: whatever left these husks 
Flew off on bright wings.

Assignment: The Light of All the Not Yet Stars

The Light of All the Not Yet Stars (the aligning unfoldment on 3/15/22)

This is a timely poem. I received another Caring Bridge blog notification an hour ago. A childhood and lifetime religious acquaintance came down with rare cancer. I read hearing her fear, the minute-by-minute horror freak show of what a cancer debut in one’s life feels like.

I wrote a Caring Bridge blog when I was diagnosed with CLL (Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia) in January of 2010. One of the best things about cancer is the circle of love that others want to put around you. You find out who your real friends are. My friend Bonni - always busy teaching little ones - I only get to talk to her twice a year, during summer and winter holidays. Yet, when I contracted cancer, she called me weekly. Her childlike optimism and unconditional love gave me much strength. When she came down with a worse cancer, I tried to give it back to her. Her amazing connection with Spirit helped her through. Cancer is a club one doesn’t want to join, but whose membership brings unsuspecting gifts along with undesired challenges.

I have another friend who tomorrow will get the results from his bone marrow biopsy. I know about those moments of wondering how many more days on the earth one will get to have. I know about the cancer of fear that starts to eat one up when the diagnosis is unloaded on one’s periphery. I also know that I’ve lived 12 years, 2 months, and 5 days longer than that diagnosis. 1225. Christmas. This is my own mystical arithmetic. I believe that my cancer was a gift. It woke me up. If I didn’t have cancer then I would have kept complaining about the same old sh*t instead of facing facts and attempting to choose realistic alternatives that change the same old outcomes.

When I first read this prompt poem an hour ago and noticed that she died early, at 39, I decided to do some research on her. I read the Wikipedia page. Coming from scientific ancestors, she soared to the top of the field. She had a Ph.D. She came up with new theories. Knowing how I see arithmetic at 62 I know you won’t ask me to retain and provide the details of her scientific honor roll. Only that you should know she knows about stars. She didn’t write about stars and relate them to peppery cheese without having true inspiration and a deep melancholic but authentic understanding of our connection to the stars.

I read that it was her Italian artist husband with a fellow female poet friend who brought her poetry out posthumously. I tried to find out about him. His artist’s page didn’t have English on it or a picture of the artist. But Facebook sure did. Wow. What a looker. Yet, knowing the haunted remembering of our loved ones already gone and moving forward in spite, I could see in him his developed new life 21 years after losing her.

12/25/22

Happy Merry to anyone reading this. My mystical arithmetic is evolving. I went through a portal on my 63rd birthday. My brother died on 6/3/93. On my birthday this month, I met a man who wants to buy my 1998 car. On the day I turned 63 I discover his birthday is 6/3, 1958. I’ve read license plates since high school. I never feel alone because the loved ones I’ve already lost, are not really gone. The hugs are, but not the hello’s, not we see you’s, not we love you’s, not we’ve got you.

I was directed to this 3/15 piece because I have it synthesized very small on a side of my medicine cabinet that has a mirror, perfect and up close to examine a skin irritation by the lower right side of my mouth. I see 1225 Christmas… on 1225 Christmas. Now, what made me look long enough to recognize what that blip was I was inspired to put up almost nine months ago. And that I would see it now? This is how the mystical arithmetics is expanding. I ask a question about when something happened in my life and by the end of the week, quite by accident I go to that page in the diary. Huh? How is this happening?

Annie Ernaux, a French writer, got the Nobel Prize for Literature on 10/6. My birth moment is 1:06. I saw that connection. No idea what it means, YET. Studying her work I’m seeing similarities, as I also did with Phyllis Theroux whom I noted in 1984. Looking back at PT’s page to see all that she has accomplished since I first noticed her. I don’t know what all this means, but these are breadcrumbs. I’m hot on the trail, and hungry.

License plates are expanding to literature and those who write it. Jane Roberts (Seth) brings through THE AFTER DEATH JOURNAL OF AN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER, THE WORLD VIEW OF WILLIAM JAMES. She brings it through the back door versus the front door.

In the DK London chapter of Penguin Random House, I’m now immersed in a lovely library book, WRITERS THEIR LIVES AND WORKS. Charlotte and Emily Brontë, starting on page 93 (again notice my brother died in 1993), “The children also spent time on the moors that rose behind Haworth’s back door. It is this wild and rugged landscape that dominates Emily’s only novel, WUTHERING HEIGHTS.”

Soon I will tell the story of a cat. Her name is Happy. The day Happy shows up so do the books from the library on Saul Bellow. I ordered them after seeing the American Masters presentation about his life and output this past week.

Then a neighbor delivers me a New York Times article on Haruki Murakami, a Japanese novelist, who quotes Saul Bellow as saying, “I am not an ornithologist. I am a bird.” Also in the WRITERS book from the library on page 172 is an article on Natsume Sōseki, an earlier Japanese novelist who “wrote a story called I AM A CAT, which, using the device of a cat as narrator, gives an outsider’s wry look at the strange world of humans in modern society.”

This is a long enough post. Not all lives are long enough, but learning continues if one is open.

This is a dance I’m learning as I go.

It’s a holy day. Enjoy yours!