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dwelling in the past
I think I said that grief is passive. It creeps over you in those famous waves, you know, whereas mourning is an active process of remembering, reliving the good and the bad, and defanging it in a way. Until you have examined all those memories, they don’t lose their power to undo you. ~ Joan Didion It comes in…
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Act Two, After death of a spouse, Art, Awesome Women, Death and dying, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Love, Marriage, Memoir, Music, Rites of passage, saying goodbye, Scaffolding, Seamus Heaney
scaffolding an imperfect marriage
Laurie Anderson tells this story about the day she married her best friend, Lou Reed: “It was spring in 2008 when I was walking down a road in California feeling sorry for myself and talking on my cell with Lou. “There are so many things I’ve never done that I wanted to do,” I said. “Like what?” “You know, I…
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“let your soul and spirit fly”
“Each of us, as we pass through life, leaves traces of the passage. Sometimes the signs are as slight as a bent leaf, a twisted twig, or a seed dispersed. Sometimes, we leave behind the husks of former selves or castaway restraints. While following these trails, we grow ever more aware of our lives in connection-to our foremothers, to the elemental…
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Language of Cancer, Leontia Flynn, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Rituals, Seamus Heaney, Themes of childhood
the lovely uselessness of poetry
For World Poetry Day 2015. The freedom and the lovely uselessness of poetry is its whole point. ~ Leontia Flynn My parents were raised in rural County Derry, Heaney country, where they learned to be thrifty and resourceful, and also – when all else failed – to believe in the mystical powers of “folk healers,” those individuals uniquely gifted with…
