Don’t get old!

I have been meaning to write to you. 

There’s so much to share. 

I don’t even know where to begin. 

Where are you now?

I picture you on your boat, the rolling seas mocking your exuberance.

My patients often admonish me, “don’t get old!“ as if I can stop time taking space across my face. 

You know what I have seen? 

The old, they count backwards: “where they’ve been, what they’ve done.”. 

They often live life in reverse “how once upon a time, they did or saw, or wished or hoped”. 

The old, they have just a past that lingers and whispers ever so often. 

There is no remedy unless one rides bareback across the dew of mornings.

I miss you still. 

I await the moment you’ll be near when I could rest on your shoulder to share such tales. 

Until next time, my summertime!

What’s lost!

I don’t know about anyone else and their journey. I can only speak on mine and my solo journey. Some days I wish I could do so in its totality but 1: no one really cares 2: what will it accomplish?

My daughter’s friend father committed suicide. She is saddened to bring the news to me. She must share. That is her way of dealing. That is our way is it not? Whether it is to friends or loved companions, we must let it out.

Life between the lines is my lifeline. It is the screams I let out into the world, one that is empty that no one has to listen to or attend to or roll their eyes at. Maybe they do but do we hear the abyss or the echoes of a release?

What I lost, I must give myself. Friends who can’t be with you when you are down, who only seek to share happiness, their joy or yours, If you can’t come to someone with your pain, your questions, your uncertainties, your angst, are they really your friends?

The chance to share all that you are and what you are going through with someone willing to take all of you on, that is the gift you can’t ever give yourself!

Sharing takes two.

Wail onto the night!

When do you give up on a dream?

Do you hold on, keep on trying,

until the day you die?

Every breath is another lie.

Try and try, 

everything is well-nigh.

I wake then lay.

Erect, the pole yea high.

Beyond me, stretch stretch up to the sky.

Yearning and earning. Wanting and waiting

When do you give up on a dream?

Do you wait and wait, work and wait until you die?

PS: I miss you still! J225

Spent!

When youth is grown

It’s through the days of youth that’s grown you realize how time’s spent. You live and breathe in their embrace to love, provide and protect. Hour by hour, day by day, their existence consumes you. You wake to the light in their eyes, swim in their yearnings and lay down in their sighs.

You waylay, set aside your desires, bequeathing what’s now theirs and no more yours.

And then one day, when their youthfulness is spent. When the smiles are gone and they’ve moved on, you look in the mirror and sense your youth is gone too.

You are no more the young woman with dreams, the one who easily smiled, jovial, hopeful and wanted.

You’re the shell of what used to be holding a woman who had to become what they needed and who, you felt compelled you ought to be. Love buried you. Ensconced is a woman who had to be who can’t be no more. For she is not whom they want or wanted. 

With your youth spent, who do you wish to be? Who can you be? Who should you be? 

The balancing act

Everyone needs someone sometimes. 

It may need be today, this moment or tomorrow. It may not be this one or that one or another. It will be one, anyone, someone.

Feeling used differs from useful in that the one being used has a need the other isn’t meeting. Feeling useful underlines reciprocity, not in the act but in mutual need that’s fulfilled at the same time, most times.

Being needed becomes a burden when you’re running on empty. When you’re filled, fueled in all ways necessary, being needed will elicit a sense of gratitude, can give you purpose as well. 

Relationships that last have one thing in common: mutual fulfillment. It is a giving and a taking. The giver has isn’t emptied by the taking for he has enough to give, not be left bereft. The taker has nothing left and is replenished, reenergized by the other. Mutual fulfillment creates balance. Balance brings on continuity.

We sometimes think our needs supersedes that of another or that the other is selfish for focusing only on their needs. What we should consider isn’t how one’s needs take precedence, more so that we can’t effectively create balance within the relationship, with that person, whether friend or blood.

Relationships are fluid, that’s why it matters to have balance.  Too much giving and you feel used. Too much taking and you start taking the other for granted. 

Even in moments of gratitude, we are really saying my needs are met by… It’s a giving and a taking that brings balance. 

A life of gratitude is a result of a balanced life.