UNPACKING

UNPACKING©

By Linda Lee Greene, December 31, 2018

It is one of those days when a pale light in the distance informs that dawn has arrived, but the light doesn’t quite break through the cloud cover and icy rain well enough to properly proclaim itself as “dawn.”  I refuse to switch on lamps just yet because I want to experience the quality of this dark light—to feel its gauzy softness. I go so far as to turn the thermostat of my furnace to the OFF position and to open the sliding glass door to my patio to the sound of the rain dancing on its roof. A train clacks by on frigid tracks; an airplane soars in the frozen Ohio sky, and my defrosting heart rises to these spilling words that I hold in my mind until I am released from this nature’s magic to reach for my laptop. I tilt back in my recliner, wrap my legs and fuzzy-slippered feet in a warm afghan, and know that I am a woman content.

In a half-hour or so, I will gather in the palm of my left hand a collection of pills that I will gulp down with my second cup of coffee, medications to aid and/or protect and/or replace my bodily functions. This is the morning routine of my 75 years old self, a woman enthralled with where I have been and where I am going despite the fact that I have begun to solicit recommendations from my girlfriends of my same age as to the best brand of hearing aids. 

All that aside, tugging at my consciousness is the fact that it is taking me days to unpack from my trip to Florida whereby key members of my family and I sat round-the-clock vigils for more than two weeks at the bedside of my dying youngest sibling. The unpacking is taking me so long to accomplish not because there is so much to put away, but because my rooms have been a milky haze that have sheltered but failed to console me since my return. One cannot go through such a thing and not emerge stunned, shocked, ones essence for a time blank with trauma as stark as erased pages in a book. The contours are reappearing now, though, even in this morning’s reluctant light, and their shapes are welcoming me and showing me how to continue to drop back into my everyday life.

Once my enchantment with this murky morning is satisfied, my morning maintenance completed, and my lamps finally ignited, I will finish my unpacking. This is a good day for me to begin to unpack 2018, as well, to go into those dark and musty drawers and closets, and into my heart and mind, and to clear them of outworn and unnecessary, and especially of harmful, things. I have learned well in my many years of life that the Universe adores empty spaces because they are canvasses on which It brings forth new life, new resources, new ideas, new events. I am hungry for such things.

My hope is that by way of this miraculous forum of social media, you, my cyber friends, and I will go on helping one another to grow and prosper and learn and feel through all the days of 2019. Your friendship helps me so much to get through some lonely days and nights, and contributes greatly to my contentment—and I thank you.

Happy New Year to you, one and all!

***

To date, Linda Lee Greene has authored five novels: “Jesus Gandhi Oma Mae Adams” (http://amzn.to/VazHFG); “Guardians and Other Angels” (http://goo.gl/imUwKO); “Rooster Tale” (http://goo.gl/vNq32g); and “Cradle of the Serpent” (http://amzn.to/VazHFG), which was designated as a finalist in the 2018 American Fiction Awards Competition. It was also awarded a 5 Star Review by Readers’ Favorites. Scheduled for release in early 2019, her latest novel titled “A Chance at the Moon” will be available in soft cover and eBook at Amazon.com. An extensive exhibition of Greene’s artwork can be viewed at www.gallery-llgreene.com. 

WE ARE EDDIES IN A POOL

WE ARE EDDIES IN A POOL©

By Linda Lee Greene

One of my sister Susan’s coffee cups warming my left palm, and the thumb and fingers of my right hand encircling its curved handle, I sat and watched the droplets of rain eddy across the surface of the pool in the lanai of her Florida home. Beginning as tiny rings of rain that rippled out in a series of concentric circles, I was reminded that birth and death and the life in between behave in the same manner. Like the lifespan of every human being, each concentric pattern on the water was a whole, a time-capsule of a tiny aspect of the energy of life.

 

                All through Florida’s December rains in this year of 2018 my darling sister Susan kept to her bed suffering the culmination of more than two years of life-robbing illness. Her earthly future was nearing its end, but like the cores of the eddies in her pool, she was still the nucleus of the enormous circle of life she had created in her sixty-three years. There was evidence of it everywhere—in the home, the garden, the artwork, the crafts, the pet grooming business, in every concerned human and animal voice, and in almost countless other illustrations of her heart and mind and spirit. Having scored so many achievements, one would think that there was no more for her to accomplish. A casual glance would suggest that her circle of life was complete—that a person in her weakened state couldn’t possibly do any more anyhow. But no—there was still one more contribution she had to give to life, and her debility was her instrument.

“To live is to suffer!” Nazi concentration camp survivor and psychotherapist Viktor E. Frankl examined this reality to great depth in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning.” He advanced further the premise that if there is a purpose in living at all, there must also be a purpose in suffering and in dying. Woven among Susan’s several successes was an equal number of misses, and the hardships of existence she sometimes encountered manifested now and then in defensive behaviors that were unfortunate and/or unproductive. She was no different than most of humanity in that regard. But over the course of her illness, she did attain to an almost immaculate grandeur. As her body deteriorated, her soul grew sweeter, and her spirit blossomed. My sister showed us how a person can rise to the highest level of courage and strength and even of altruism in the acts of suffering and dying. In effect, she showed us how to die a good death.  

Dostoyevsky said, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my suffering.” My sister’s final deed, that last concentric ring that sealed the circle of her earthly life, was to prove herself worthy of her suffering, a feat that shaped a shining example for all to follow.