The first day, I responded as a higher dimensional being. I contacted other Light Workers to be sure the souls of the children startled out of their bodies so suddenly, had found their way into the Light, not left wandering  in confusion and fear. I sent love in protective wave after protective wave to those left in such profound sorrow.  I sent love and compassion to a soul so tortured that killing children seemed his best option.

The second day, I responded as a three dimensional mother, curled on my side in bed, contracted in such grief and sadness that only deep, desperate sleep could contain it.

There is a scene in the African Queen, when Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn have gone as far as they can go in the reedy waters of the river they are following. At one point, Charlie Alnut is literally dragging the boat behind him. He struggles along in muddy water up to his chest, leaches covering him, sun baking his head. At last, he can go no farther. The boat is stuck: the reeds too close.  Rosie helps haul his exhausted body back on board. She helps him tear the horrid leaches off his skin. They decide they have done all they can do. They give up. They lie down together on deck to await death.

The camera pans up. 

From above the mast of their small craft, the viewer sees what they cannot:  twenty feet away is open water. While our heroes sleep, rain falls, lifting their boat free. When they awake, they are redeemed. Their boat has drifted into open water. They rise, rejoice, and they resume their travels. They are energized; amazed.  They are giddy with the relief of their renewed hope. Their faces shine.

From my own reaction to twenty-eight deaths that awful day in December, I can feel so deeply the difference between the hopelessness of the view of our limited human experience and the solace of a higher perspective. We are bereft. We struggle to understand. We grieve deeply and forever the losses we suffer. There is no way to tear off the leeches of our sorrow. We are devastated. It is beyond our ability to imagine living a moment longer. 

We pan up. We lift our consciousness. For a moment, pried out of the limited suffering of three dimensions, we may see this from the mast of our own scuttled ship.

For reasons we cannot fully fathom, these souls left this world together. Their passing has drawn us closer in compassion and love. Their leaving has galvanized us in our commitment to comfort one another. Our lives turn in our resolve to change our society.  Together, we celebrate the Light they shared among us for so brief a time. They leave us breathless with love.  They shine.

So today is 12 October 2012. Here is a paragraph from an e-mail I sent this morning to a friend who teaches on the college level:

Today is his birthday. He would have been forty---what? Forty-five.  .

He was just twenty-one when he died. Coming home too late, too fast, too drunk, leaning his motorcycle into a curve that sent him sprawling, his helmet flung twenty feet from where they found his body. 

This isn’t about the hours that stretched into days in the icu waiting room. It is not about a man who never regained consciousness, words of love slipping from his ears, un-heard.

This is about remembering a young man,who loved hiking. Once, when chided by his girlfriend about the risks involved in peeing off a cliff, he mentioned off-handedly that he was an organ donor. This is about his generous parents, who, in spite of their deep and sudden grief, allowed his wish to be fulfilled. This is about the family who prayed for a miracle, but got seven; only they were for seven other people, not their own beloved Ed. 

Mostly this is about how, twenty-four years after his organs were rushed to various parts of the state, the portrait I painted of him still hangs six feet two and a half-inches up on my wall.  This is about how, in the scheme of eternity, the comfort comes in knowing that the heart I could not bear to stop beating, didn’t.

“Thank God for Ryan White”

The TV droned in the background, a nuisance to me, but not my home, so there we were. One of the men was talking about getting a new dresser for his room, when a commercial about pharmaceutical companies suggested a tangent. He told us that his medications cost seven hundred dollars a month. “Thank God for Ryan White!” He spoke his blessing sincerely, this middle-aged man with AIDS. He shook his head.

Thank God for Ryan White. I remember Ryan White, his life, the injustices that fear fanned into outrageous proportions. At the time I was not a yet a mother myself, but it is his mother I always hold in my heart when I hear his name now. How hellish was her life then? Heart-sick and afraid for her child, the uncertainly of AIDS was hard enough to shoulder. She and her family were burdened further with the public outcry against her son, a ragged, angry clamor born of ignorance, intolerance and fear, fear, FEAR.

In 1990, The Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act was signed into law just months after Ryan White died. Reauthorized in 1996, 2000 and 2006, this legislation provides billions of dollars of assistance for people living with HIV/AIDS.

So now, in 2012, folks are still thanking God for Ryan White. Would somebody please let his mother know?

26 May 2012


Grandpa Joseph Nicholas Angelo served in The Great War (...WW I....they called it The War to End All Wars......ah well....)

..anyway, he was a private who lived to tell us grandchildren carefully edited stories about his time in France. He lived happily enough until just almost his 93rd birthday.

He never missed a parade and always held his hat over his heart until the flags had passed.

We the People, enjoy your potato salad (and jelly beans, as the case may be). Remember someone who did not come back, or someone who came back and left friends behind. I'm taking my son, Josef Angelo, to put a flag on his great-grandfather's grave.

25 May 2012

The flags appeared overnight.


It was 1992


and


I had just moved onto Elm Street.


No signs, no explanation, just


flag after flag.


Eventually


I found myself


at a Memorial Day parade.


It is my understanding


that the flags


line the parade route.


How appropriate,


that rather than just


commemorate


where we have been,


they are


the banners


that tell us


where we will go,


together.

That is the title of the image that you see on my home page and business cards.  There is a story to tell about that work. I'll write it up and post it soon, but not today.

If you know a Bogdan story, I would love to hear it. 

This is the twenty-fifth time the lilacs have bloomed since I brought them to his wake.

15 April 2012

Still getting the hang of this cyber stuff. The e-mail fail post was from earlier this month, but just figured out today how it got to be put in a different place...having found out earlier this week that it needed to be moved...and today I managed to re-do my ABOUT page, and added an ART page that no-one can actually access yet because while I could CREATE the page, I didn't know how to create one of those nifty boxes that you can click on and actually GET to the page.....which is just as well because once there, the Tabor House  birdhouse images I had wanted to put there in the FIRST place, were not co-operating.....so I am just going to unplug, sit on the front porch and watch it get dark.  At least that is something I have always been able to do completely on my own and web-free.  Adios.

7 April 2012

So I sent a happy little "Tell me what you think." e-mail out to my favorite cronies to invite them to view my new site. I forgot to include the link--which ended up being a very good thing. Some of their responses were what you might expect, the gentle nudge-nudg-wink-wink reminder that I had, in fact, just had a very public senior moment....yet others told me what they thought.  Hilarious!  I am going to have to send e-mails like that a LOT more often.

Oh, while we are on the subject of e-mails.  I particularly enjoy my weekday notes from the cosmos. Check out tut.com and sign up. It will change the way you think.