Telling the Truth

connecting the dots of my life

Tag: Life and Death

February 19, 2018

Am I ready?

Hesitating
My fingers languish
On the keys

Life
Flashes before me
Inviting my company

My heart
Skips a beat
Am I ready?

Dear Friends,

This past week was wonderful. Going through old files and notebooks told me more about my past than I’d remembered. And I didn’t get through everything yet.

Thankfully, my home office is about half transformed! I focused on files and piles, not books and drawers. Breaking my jaw nearly two years ago brought ‘normal’ life to a sudden halt. And the piles began getting larger and larger….

Hidden in all the files and piles, I found several gems. Things I hadn’t read for years. I even read one piece out loud to myself. It was the Sunday morning ‘sermon’ I gave at our last Renich family reunion in 2012. I wrote it so young children in the room would know exactly what I was talking about.

That was the first time I’d ever talked to my extended family about my troubled relationship with my parents. The room was full of family members from at least four generations. I was a trembling wreck after I finished and sat down. I hadn’t yet begun blogging. I just knew I it was time to do this.

Now I’m at another milestone—still blogging, and with the end of my life approaching more visibly than before. ‘The last chapter’ sounds ominous. However, I see an opportunity to write about things I’ve not written about before. Some new, some old. None of it easy.

During the past week I wrote a haiku on most days. I don’t plan to stop that discipline, or writing poetry. I want to let my heart speak to other hearts. I believe that’s what drove Jesus of Nazareth, though some of his words were difficult to hear.

What I practiced giving up for Lent last year is still relevant. This year I’m thinking about it in terms of my writing voice and my desire to let my heart speak to other hearts. I’m using the same litany as my guide:

I let go my desire for security and survival.
I let go my desire for esteem and affection.
I let go my desire for power and control.
I let go my desire to change the situation.

Quoted by Cynthia Bourgeault in Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, p. 147 (Cowley Publications 2004)

As always, thanks for listening.
Elouise♥

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 19 February 2018
Image found at twing.com – Living Words

11 Comments
February 6, 2018

Loving the last chapter


Loving the last chapter
Short or long it’s upon me
An uneasy wedding of
For better and for worse

Heavy world-weariness
Creeps in when not looking
Though my heart insists
There’s still love to live

Not yesterday’s love
But today’s and tomorrow’s
My mind leaps up and
Out of bed each morning

Though my body won’t
Go there my heart races
Ahead into undreamed dreams
As unwritten words pile up

A strange sensation this
Knowing but not knowing where
Or how the rest of my life
Will play in this shrinking world

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 6 February 2018
Image found at shitijbagga.net

7 Comments
January 23, 2018

feeling unnerved

a foot bridge beckons
park lights pierce dark midnight
the way ahead fades

***

Feeling unnerved tonight
wandering through my mind
not sure where I am
or what to do next

Life happens quickly
though it feels like slow motion
so little time to listen to myself
much less to You

It’s almost midnight now
and I’m still not sure where I am
or where I’m going

Would You be offended if I
just follow in Your footsteps
wide awake or stumbling
wondering Where and Why?

Many thanks to my blogging friend John for the photo at the top. It was taken in Caulfield Park at about midnight after a sweltering hot day in Melbourne, Australia. The ambiguity of the photo grabbed my attention, and John kindly agreed to let me use it for a poem not yet written.

John has followed my blog almost since its birth. You can check out the post about his midnight walk right here:

https://paolsoren.wordpress.com/2018/01/20/night-time-in-the-park/.

John’s posts are Australian to the core, full of entertaining, thought-provoking, irreverent, hilarious and enlightening insights. All dished up in his native tongue. I’ve told him at least a million times I wish I’d had him as a teacher. Somewhere along the line he got the gene. Now he’s retired, wandering around here and there with his camera, or pulling out old photos about the way things were when he too was very young.

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 23 January 2018
Photo taken by John (paolsoren) in Caulfield Park, Melbourne, Australia, January 2018

10 Comments
January 22, 2018

setting sun

setting sun
kisses cold western sky
clouds blush

The magic lasted only seconds, and this photo captures but a reminder of what my eyes saw. And still I’m drawn to it. A magnificent flame-out at the end of the day.

I wonder, are we not meant to flame out in the last years or moments of our lives? I picture the human spirit about to set off into another world. Sometimes in dire circumstances, yet always still a living human being. Never without beauty even though our eyes may not know how to see it.

Do I know how to see beauty when the photo or the reflection isn’t beautiful by my standards? We seem to have become a race obsessed with beauty. Searching for it, measuring it, trashing it and moving on quickly if we don’t find it in the moment.

I’ve often felt disappointed about what I see in the mirror of my life. Not all of it, but significant chunks of it. These  days I’m beginning to see it differently. I see the reflection of a woman making her way slowly, yet surely, from one revelation about herself to another. The kind that often come at the end of the day. Beautiful to behold.

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 22 January 2018
Photo taken by me with my IPad, 21 January 2018

13 Comments
January 19, 2018

chilled to the bone

chilled to the bone
night’s deep silence descends
winter drifts through cracks

***

Disconnected from feelings
Numb and disbelieving
I want to write
So many unknowns
So much at stake
So little time left
Will I or Won’t I?
Sooner or Later?
Is Never still an option?

This week brought unwelcome news in a couple of areas. No catastrophic accidents. Just the knowledge of things I didn’t want to hear. About a friend and about my health.

Yesterday we drove through Valley Forge National Historic Park. Outdoor temperatures were subfreezing. Snow was on the ground, covering a thin layer of frozen sleet. We saw one brave soul walking his beautiful dog along one of the paths that circle and cut through Valley Forge. Everyone else was in heated four-wheel vehicles driving through the Park.

I didn’t write the haiku above after that drive. But it captures some of the angst and foreboding perhaps encoded in the few remaining buildings and cabins still standing here and there throughout the Park. Remnants of a winter nightmare followed by springtime diseases that took more lives than winter took.

They thought they would be going home to their families and friends.

foot paths meander
through fields of wartime sorrow —
home to the fallen

I want to find my way home. Don’t you? Life is filled with breathtaking beauty. The kind that makes leaving it breathtakingly painful. Right now I’m being invited to play life in a different key. And my cold fingers are stumbling around a bit, learning to be at home in what doesn’t always feel like home.

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 19 January 2018
Photo of cabins at Valley Forge found at history.org

5 Comments
January 9, 2018

hovering

hovering
betwixt and between
slow drip to nowhere

This morning small icicles were dripping outside my bathroom window. Destined to be gone by the end of this sunny day.

I wrote the haiku thinking about icicles. Yet the truth goes deeper. It reflects how I feel about our national preoccupation with the Washington DC ‘Reality Show.’ Guaranteed to make multiple appearances on popular late-night commentary shows dedicated not to commentary or thoughtful analysis, but to making one side or the other a laughing matter.

On top of which we now have a newly released tell-all book, guaranteed to bring gasps of horror and indignation, not thoughtful analysis.

And what of our future, our cohesion as a nation? Are we caught up in a slow drip to nowhere? Mesmerized by the theatrics of reality-show performances supported by friend and foe alike? Laughing our way to nowhere?

It’s good to ask questions. But not if the answer that most pleases us is a lame joke that takes the edge off our responsibility to be actively informed citizens. The future of our nation and our planet deserve out best efforts. Especially when it feels like the tide is against us.

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 9 January 2018
Photo found at beachfrontbroll.com

3 Comments
December 30, 2017

without fanfare

without fanfare
snow blankets a multitude
of the fallen

A silent mercy falling from heaven. It asks no questions, requires no filled-in forms, no fees to pay or bribes expected. Just a quiet laying to rest of the fallen.

This morning I woke up to the beginning of a short, ice-cold soft snowfall. Our worlds carry so much grief on the surface and beneath the ground. Public and private. Self-inflicted and other-inflicted. The names of fallen ‘great’ men and ‘great’ women tick past our eyes in tribute to those we’ve lost.

Yet the greatest losses are small, personal, unrecorded and unacknowledged. I imagine a gentle snowfall blanketing your sorrow and mine. Letting our losses be just as they are. Invisible and not forgotten. Blanketing the overflowing wisdom and sorrow of little children, women and men everywhere.

This isn’t about romanticized loss. It’s about acknowledging the staggering number of irreplaceable lives and dreams now laid to rest in their particular beauty, agony and grandeur. Just a little lower than the angels. Each and every one.

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 30 December 2017
Photo taken by me with my iPad, from our bedroom window 30 December 2017

6 Comments
December 27, 2017

ripe seed pods

ripe seed pods hang clumped
soak in early winter sun —
shadows creep

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 27 December 2017
Photo by DAFraser, Longwood Gardens, December 2017

2 Comments
December 19, 2017

mountain of sorrow

mountain of sorrow
strewn with graves of the slaughtered
cannot forget

I wrote this after watching a special report last night on the PBS News Hour. It included video of hastily dug stone-marked graves for men and boys slaughtered on Sinjar Mountain during genocidal war against Yazidis in Sinjar District, Iraq.

It caught my attention because it happened in the last several years, just ‘yesterday,’ right before our eyes. Genocide is an attempt by some human beings to disappear other human beings from the face of the earth. Uncounted numbers of men, boys, women and girls were found unworthy of belonging to the human race. Their crime: being Yazidis.

Advent has its dark side. A Jewish baby born to a young unmarried Jewish woman will one day be judged by his own people and others, and declared unworthy to belong to the human race.

His crime? Speaking the truth about people who populated his world. Sometimes it was unwelcome truth, delivered in unconventional ways. He didn’t hold back or grease the hands and reputations of religious leaders, politicians, or everyday human beings like you and like I.

Nor did he hold back in showing us how to live, speak, and die for truth. Especially when other human beings are being disappeared.

This challenges me. I don’t want to be among the disappeared. Nor do I want to collude in the disappearance of others. What does this mean for me, looking ahead?

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 19 December 2017
Photo found at thestar.com

18 Comments
December 5, 2017

autumn elegy

spent oak leaves
spiral to the ground
dancing a sad song

Today was dismal and gray. Rain coming tonight, followed by a fierce cold front moving in later this week.

It took a while for this haiku to take shape. The sight of brown oak leaves spiraling down from their high branches did it. If an elegy were a dance, that’s what I saw as they spun slowly to the ground now littered with them.

I felt torn. The ache of falling leaves is inevitable. Yet it’s also beautiful and, in this case, graceful.

I want to be a graceful oak leaf, pirouetting to the ground—having spent all I have to become and live faithfully as the child of God I am. Not without defects, but content. Using the voice my Creator placed in me not to be silenced or hoarded, but to be heard.

This time of my life is filled with aching beauty everywhere—including yours and my own. Thanks for stopping by.

Elouise♥

© Elouise Renich Fraser, 5 December 2017
Photo by Joel Sartore found at fineartamerica.com

7 Comments