SORROWS MUCH KEENER

Well, I’ll be damned if I haven’t managed to stress out and cause a relapse. Perhaps this bout will be more short-lived (although life/lived are a sore subject today). And damned if I didn't wake up at 5:30 again. Sleep beckoned, so I staid in bed. Since returning to yoga, I have begun, again, to focus on my breathing to fall asleep. Breathing practice, like sun salutations, are part of yoga I have never much liked.

This morning Death Don't Have No Mercy (Hot Tuna version) has been in mind. Hot Tuna was one of the loudest bands I ever saw. Then again, I was once sitting upstairs at the Kaiser Auditorium in Oakland listening to the Dead. I looked down and saw that the sound was moving the material of my jeans. And then I wondered what that level of sound was doing to my ear drums. (Stuart was with me and did some nice drawings.)

Update!

Ariel lives to fight another day!

A week later.

Can or is broken-heartedness just a simple thing? Is it complicated or just a basic fact like breathing.

Today, right now, I am, I seem to be, broken-hearted. I am still breathing and moving around, but I really want to lie down and sleep or get lost in some nice long narrative on a screen.

We haven't seen Ariel for a day. I have looked all around the garden and house, but no kitty.

Last week, the vet could not find anything overtly wrong with her. We came up with a treatment plan to make her more comfortable. Ariel's life had another plan.

My mother is taking this very hard.

My mother has been depressed since Anthony Bourdain killed himself. I know his suicide has affected so many of us. My mother cannot shake her sadness over this. I've tried to get her to talk about it a bit, but to no avail.

Just all the loss right now.

Our personal, smaller losses in life, but the bigger loss of our sanity, our integrity, our country. And the trumpeted (no pun intended), televised spectacle, nearly a celebration of depravity batters our souls. Staggering is how it feels. And staggering feels like how I am getting through life at the moment.

This winding down of life is excruciating. These losses take their toll on my mother, who seems more frail, resigned, and distant. Where and how can we comfort one another? What is the lesson? Is there a lesson?

I sit here looking at life and death in the garden outside my window. And the struggles (my hibiscus needs food badly). In my immediate view are the impatiens and penstemon in the newly installed window boxes. The butterfly garden effort must be succeeding as there are yellow and monarch butterflies almost always in view. A red rose crowns a plant in my neighbor's yard, towering over the yellow-painted brick fence. Butterscotch, the kitty that will probably die of a recurrence of cancer is stretched out in the window beside me. A breeze blows through the hot day.

THE BLUE BOWL

Like primitive we buried the cat
with his bowl. Bare-handed
we scraped sand and gravel
back into the hole. It fell with a hiss
and thud on his side,
on this long red fur, the white feathers
that grew between his toes, and his
long, not to aquiline, nose.
We stood and brushed each other off.
There are sorrows much keener than these.
Silent the rest of the day, we worked,
ate, stared, and slept. It stormed
all night; now it clears, and a robin
burbles from a dripping bush
like the neighbor who means well
but always says the wrong thing.

— Jane Kenyon, Collected Poems, Graywolf Press