#SOL17: Clay

Morning Light on Lake Como (M.A Reilly, Argegno, Italy, July 2017) 

Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door.  - Hesiod

I.

Within--there's a new, strange feeling hard to name.  Alongside each breath, a slim sense of possibility plays. It seems to whispers, All things are possible and I lately answer, Yes. And by answering, I see the woman I have been and am becoming.

It has been so long since I simply have felt like me.

II.

Grief yields. Who knew? It felt so much a part of my blood. Cut me and I bled sorrow. Now the sadness, kindled within my own Pandora's jar, has given way to chancing, to looking down at fear by saying, yes, to life.

Friends, the antidote to grief is verb.

III.

Love as action is stronger than grief--stronger than sorrow.  I'll tell you this:

Once, on a snowy cold February morning, my husband told me a secret. He said, "You attract others to you. That's your gift. Live brilliantly. Don't you dare hide away."

And in the 18 months that have gone by since then, I have hidden and stood among others. Both felt unfamiliar until being among others, known and new began to feel comfortable.

IV.

John O'Donohue in Anam Cara writes,

"When you find the person you love, an act of ancient recognition brings you together. It is as if millions of years before the silence of nature broke, his or her clay and your clay lay side by side" (p. 45).

We are ancient, older than our bodies, unruled by matters of time. I recognize my husband in the march of life that continues.  I see him in the wing of a lone cardinal as it glides from view;  in the way morning light on Lake Como diffuses the color of the Alps, in the absolute chatter of birds an hour before sunrise, in the sound of the subway as it yields to the station, and in the way memory lives each time my foot still seeks his in bed.

V.

Months ago my son told me that his dad formed us. We carry him with us wherever we are. He's in us. And he is, but not in the way I first thought.  Rob would not have sought homage from his son or me, but rather dialogue. And perhaps that is one way to live brilliantly--to live in dialogue with the here and now, with you and those I have yet to meet or know, and to live with the ways our past (re)forms the present.

We are clay, ancient.