Opening Up

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

The first photo is of a late blooming, non climbing! clematis, and the second of a hellebore which virtually blooms through the spring snow: the omiga, then the alpha, the end, and then the beginning.  How do you make the end of one thing be the beginning of another?  How do you remake your life in some small or large way?  My husband died.  This eliminated part of my life and opened up the necessity and opportunity to rethink it.

Sometimes I will quote others:/And she shows you where to look/Among the garbage and the flowers/There are heroes in the seaweed/There are children in the morning/They are leaning out for love/And they will lean that way forever/While Suzanne holds the mirror/And you want to travel with her/And you want to travel blind/And you know that you can trust her /For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind.

This, of course, is part of Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne. I use it to let you know that in some way I want to be Suzanne.  But you don’t want to travel blind.  I don’t want you to.  I hope that my experience informs yours, not that it should be yours!  What has worked here and now to give my life meaning?  I will welcome comments, and also your own incidents and stories.   I may ask to include them in my blog. If you reply, and ask me to, I will send an email reminder just after i post each blog.

“This is my voice.  There are many like it, but this one is mine,” says Shawn Koyzan on his spoken Word CD, Long Story Short.  And yours.  No advertising.  Just you and me discovering the joy of life.

Today I’ll only tell one short incident when someone changed my mood, my attitude.  Two very significant ones will come later.

I had woken up depressed.  Discouraging, since I thought I had overcome depression.  Then a friend, for good reason mind you, cancelled a lunch date.  I watched as my computer shut down voluntarily.  The television after weeks of various efforts was still showing only pink and green.  The pink and green problem had to be dealt with, and I was not up to trying just one more thing that might work.  Or might not.  Negative feelings rose up and blocked all possibility of accomplishment.  Not until late in the afternoon did the phone even ring.  “May I speak to Sam or Marilyn Medén?”

“Where did you get the number?” I asked.  She gave an it was on her list response.  I told her that my husband had been dead for over two years.  Her attitude changed.  I could feel it over the phone.  She did not sound as if she were speaking prearranged lines, but as if she really cared.  I had to assure her that it was okay now.  We laughed!  It felt good.  And that’s all it took to change my mood of the day to positive.  I wonder if she realized the effect she had.  I sure did.

The next blog will be about something I did to change the confrontational mood of a man annoyed with me.

After that Being Ira: How I benefited from offering a young man a place to pitch his tent in my rather isolated backyard.

We will be living our stories together.

Marilyn