I am thinking of two people today. One is a wonderful widow woman I spoke with online about eight years ago named Anjolie. She was happily married and her husband slipped and fell in the shower and was dead in two days. She's living with his family in Scotland now. Another is a friend on Twitter named @siren_sweet who's battling cancer and not expecting to live much longer, she has two teenaged children she's leaving behind along with family and friends.
Death could arrive at anybody's door at any hour and I am thinking of the great tenderness and care I showed Angie and Siren when in conversation with either one.
It occurred to me that we should always be conscious of how fragile life is and of how much gratitude we should always show anybody we love or care about or meet in a day.
They could be gone tomorrow morning.
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Thoughts on dying and love
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
We are Love
We are Love.
Beyond questions of time or place,
Beyond the past, present or future, we are Love...
Amongst the stars, or floating
Together in a little boat
On the warmest trade winds
Across the sea together, we are Love.
Clifton Goodwin
Autumn Twenty Twelve
Monday, December 3, 2012
One lifetime, a poem for @siren_sweet
One lifetime
A heavy velvet curtain hangs
Across the last day of our lives
Hiding the unseen beyond
Never to be known or shared
We leave this forlorn vale of tears
In sadness, taking nothing with us
The pain of being gone is left
Unfairly to our too young children
And growing up is hard enough
Without your mother by your side
There can be no easy answers
To give a child whose mother's gone
The only comfort is to know
Your love lives always in their hearts
There's nothing else to say or do
But wonder when our own time comes
What we'll find beyond the curtains
Dark and heavy hanging down
Over this life's final day
Clifton Goodwin
Autumn Twenty Twelve
Sunday, December 2, 2012
Night, A Poem for @Cheyarafim
Clifton Goodwin
Autumn Twenty Twelve
Review: Ordinary Substance by Zayra Yves
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Review: A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
How do you review a melancholy book of essays by a gifted, world-weary writer like Rebecca Solnit? By impressions...
In "A Field Guide To Getting Lost" Rebecca Solnit has given us a wide ranging series of essays that begin by getting lost and end up in far flung realms of introverted ruminations ranging from the mundane to the brilliant. Four chapters are titled The Blue of Distance, "the color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go." This longing is a major theme of the book, the longing of Spanish Conquistadors looking for gold in the New World, of whom she writes "no one will ever be as lost as those conquistadors ever again". She tells many little stories of loss and finding in this Field Guide, of her grandmother, having lost her mind in mental hospitals after the wrenching horrors of war and being a refugee from the Pale, appearing from a hospital to give her a lipsticked kiss that made her mother scream in terror, thinking she saw blood; of making a film in an abandoned hospital called "The Cure For Living" inspired by a dream of Joy Division; of her dazzling meteoric girlfriend Marine who was in a punk rock band and shared countless adventures with her in California before succumbing to the numbing allure of deadly street drugs... but what ties these essays together is the constant authorial voice, intense and focused even when examining the most rambling subjects, sharing nostalgic whispers from a time and space shared with so many of our generation, the lost suburbs of the '70s or the nostalgia of finding and reading essays like this in The Atlantic or Harpers or The Nation; and finding so many other treasures of history to share and personal stories to relate. Solnit has given us all a wonderful book to lose ourselves in, or find our inner introvert in.