Coots

Good Morning Sweet Son,

This morning at Dorothy's I woke up happy- read for a long time about the history of the exploration of the Devil's river and I felt a deep urge to kayak. For the first time since you left  I felt a desire for something. I could almost imagine life again, maybe bigger and more bold, like my grief for you is making me want to jump off a cliff (figuratively speaking) and fly. Am I too old to live large? Is this a flash-in-the-pan kind of feeling  like has happened to me before?

I went outside with our dogs and binocs  to watch the dawn on the lake, and I sat at the water's edge and coots were about....they were 200 yards away in the cat tail rushes, feeding and moving about on the glass-still water. A singular coot began to move toward where I sat in a very deliberate way, straight at me.


 I mean, straight at me at a rapid clip, making a wake, if you can imagine it.

 He moved to within 40 feet of me and hesitated, came closer, then waited as a friend joined him, and they both came in to within 20 feet. Even with our two dogs pacing the bank, these wild birds just keep coming closer. Coots do not do this, they are NOT ducks, begging for a cracker. I raised my arms to the heavens, opened my heart and welcomed the notion that it was, again, YOU.

I have been told you are always around me. Sometimes I feel you-as I did the moment the coot came towards me. I smiled, hesitated and then welcomed the moment and it felt good. I have been told that these thing will happen-they are NOT accident, in fact they are "anything but" accident. My heart welcomes and embraces them but my mind resists. I have also been told you are excited  to communicate with me in this way. Well, ok.

Now, logically I think there must be science and some logic involved. So you are now "luminous awareness and bliss", pure love, pure energy devoid of any human negatives. You can move here and there-not confined to our laws of physics. God, how beautiful that must feel to someone who yearned for freedom from limits as much as you did? I am wondering about my many Ian occurrences..spectacular sunsets and sunrises? Animals that move close to me? electric  anomalies? Wind bursts?

If you move freely, maybe you can influence an animal's behavior in subtle ways. Buzzards already kettling  could be "shooed" closer to where I ran the other morning, like a feather you can blow and make it float a bit higher? That coot had no reason to approach me at all-none-did you murmur into his little bird brain and make him more curious of me? Could you still his fear of my dogs and urge him closer? Can you push a cloud?

Does your love for me remain?

Does it act as a force of energy that you can wield?

Does my love draw you in when I get quiet and listen or feel you?

Is this what remains as a our only bridge?


I can never touch you as my grief keeps telling me, day by day, minute by minute, second buy second. It obscures my journey to understand and keep my mind open to the bridge that you and I can still have. I feel this morning that I am trying to learn to suspend my longing for you...the bitter and constant MISSING YOU so that I can touch you in this new way.

Thank you for trying to pull me into this new world of loving without physically touching. I am not very good at it yet., but I am going to try, Ian.

You know, since the moment I first became your Momma, you have been a special challenge. You demanded more patience, more energy, more understanding, more open-mindedness than I had ever needed before. You and I had kinship and I was your champion and and touch-stone. I feel bad for many things, but NOT for loving you so damned much, because maybe our fierce love for each other was the the training for the time that is now before us.

Love,
Momma

Twilight

Good Morning Bright One,

Thank you for the lovely sunsets lately (I almost said SONSETS, haha); yesterday's popcorn cloud sunrise, the random doe with a red collar, kettling turkey vultures, and daily serenading of our red shouldered hawks that have taken post around the house.Thank you for sending Mariana sunsets too, and for teasing Eugene with random windshield wiper salutes and electronic door tricks. Thank you most especially for our sweet Michaela, the best gift you ever gave me.




Thank you for speaking through my wind chimes and for the squirrel posing on the head of my gargoyle.

Tiny, random moments when I feel you, baby. It is not enough (are you surprised). I want more and I am going to keep asking for more, but thank you anyway.

I read a little in my bible this morning for the first time since you left, and stumbled across one of my favorite verse from Psalms 34:18:

"When someone is hurting or brokenhearted, the Eternal moves in and revives her of her pain."

This, then reminded me of another favorite line I need to track down:

"Heart-shattered lives ready for love don't for one moment escape God's attention."

I found that one in a tiny devotional given to me after the divorce when you were 5 years old. Seed planted, it made me reach to God, take you guys to church, and latch onto God, like a baby at the breast. Jan Booth says you were a little scholar in sunday school (who knew?) and that you loved to sing hymns and color maps of the Holy land. You were her favorite, and she gave you a pocket cross that I recently found in a tiny raku goblet made by your Aunt Jeanne that I kept my Holy oil in so that I could anoint you in your sleep. The yarn of these connections keep winding through my mind like colored ribbons. Yes, colored ribbons indeed, that daily lead me out of the darkness of each long day.






What's up with God? His voice has softened below even a whisper, to a tiny, almost inaudible hum. I wonder why God doesn't speak louder during dark times? Why does He become so still? He is like that coldest moment, just before dawn; you know it, right? Just a vague sense of light, easily mistakable as the moon. Everything has stopped and is in the last moments of deepest sleep- bugs, birds, deer, rabbits, humans and even the wind do not move. You can hear your own heart beating and your breath. So cold, and still, but not lifeless.

Death is not what I feel then. I feel that hush just before an inhale when the lungs are empty and I have to really want to bring some air into them again....but not just yet. There is a pause. God is quiet too in the winding down of the moment. Everything appears at "FULL STOP" and only memory and hope tells me that there is still life.

It is where I am now, in the twilight waiting for God to make me inhale again, for the sun to rise, and the world and all creatures in it to open up crusty eyes and look for breakfast.

I don't know much anymore. My faith and understandings of life have been shaken and rattled so fiercely that don't know up from down.I am only sure of this and I cannot even tell you why.





































God is not mean.

God is love, or something very near it.

Maybe God is fueled by love?

So in my current chilly twilight I do sense a soft love of some sort still there-I feel it in the love I have for Chris, Kenzie and Hudson, my darling little man. He is just about to start smiling and cooing...proof enough that life is not ending. Oh Lord, thank you. I feel it in Mariana's tears, worried texts from Jenny Pearson and Marion, the post card you send me at sunset that send me charging out of my house and into my neighbor's yard for a look, and the memories of our love.


You and I loved each other well.No one who loved as well as you could be anywhere but bathed in love. I believe you are. If we have a collective unconscious; if everything we have seen and felt and experienced becomes a tapestry that cloaks us and prepares us for days ahead, then I think you here in full color. 

Love,

Your Momma