Immovable onto Moving

You look happier
than you have in years.
You look so alive and different,
what is different?
You look especially good lately,
you should know.
You look great,
you are glowing.


All such things have been said to me in the past couple months. How perspectives change. Fully unacknowledged burdens and stresses are lifted--a weight that once felt impossible, so immovable. Didn't realize how my own energies and vitality were being zapped away, how I gave it away--in the name of love, of fear, of tentative loss.


Weight on my shoulders by PandaNyu. Deviant Art.


In grief I've found surprising release and refuge. The pain, anger, and melancholy form an encasement of protection around the shattered bits.

The ground on which I walk is newly fertile, still smoldering, but speaks to numerable possibilities.



"Do you regret any of it, after all this time?"

No, not really. No. I always maintained and still believe it was an honor. To be loved by and to give love to a wonderful human. A beautiful soul. Sure, damage was done to each, but treasures remains. Regret would seem an insult to the many years of life and light that there was.



Now I am all the more learn-ed. Inadvertently wiser and discerning and cautionary, in helpful ways, mostly. Less naive, less prone to personalizing differences. The teacher that is loss and grief. I'm listening, I'm learning. Starting to sense moments of simplistic satisfaction, being all alone. Alone with myself. It's not as scary as I thought it'd be. No, not really.

The difference is, I am freed. From self-imposed and some other-created cages. Out into this liberated, new world--of confusion and curiosity and some kind of destiny. On the open plain, into the even cloudy skies. I want to skydive, I want to dance, I want to explore so many untouched opportunities. All to come. Onward and out. Sweet misery, we're doing it. You're doing it, Peter.

These Zen Questions

With an unsure pace
she slowly proceeds out her room and down the hall.
I grab her hand and guide her towards the back door.
"Which car is yours?" she asks. And again once more.
"It's the silver one," I respond, pointing towards the car.
She opens the passenger door and sits in the seat.
"Where are we going?" she asks with a slight smile.
I repeat the plan, as I have numerous times in the last 2 minutes
"We're going to visit your son, my brother. Do you remember his name?"
She looks at me with a puzzled smile, "You know his name," I say, "it starts with a W"
"William," she says. "That's right," I assure her.
Conversations like these are common place and may seem simple.
But they are everything.
She is my Mom.
Some days she can't recall who we are or our names. She never can quite remember our birthdays, though too true she brought us into this world.
Often I regret the questions I never asked before her memories got buried.
Questions like what it was like to have 3 kids, to have so many untold secrets, to build your life around so many others. I miss and grieve for what I wanted us to have.
But it's not about me most days.
It's about these simple questions.
Guiding her through uncertainty and panic.
I grasp her hand and tell her I love her.
She smiles back at me
and even though she'll forget this all in another moment,
I relish in this opportunity.
She teaches me to be present in that way.
A zen master in her own right.
She only knows now and some of the past.
Some days she seems broken, as I feel broken
but other days she is the smartest person I know.
Teaching me, even now.
To live this life the only way we can-in this moment. In these simple questions.
I turn the key in the ignition and shift the car into reverse.
"Where are we going?" she asks me.
I smile, in this moment.