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Wednesday, September 8, 2010

A new start.....HAPPY NEW YEAR! Sad New Year...love is the answer!.

Happy New Year to my Jewish sisters and brothers celebrating Rosh Hashanah!
Let me join you in assessing my spiritual highs and lows of the year and prepare a clean heart for the year to come....and eat honey apple cake! Yum!

Happy New Year....and Eid to our Muslim friends! Refreshed after Ramadan and hopefully renenergized with a new spirit! Let me join you whilst you eat a lot!

Happy New Year to the Hindus who celebrate their god Ganesh...that elephant head dude...the god of beginnings and science, and art, and creativity! I'll eat with you, too! Probably no meat....

And continuing with the new year theme.....

Both boys got on the iconic yellow school bus with smiles...sort of...that's them in their first day back at the institution! I did not embarrass them with photos and kisses at the bus-stop, but I did make small-talk with everyone present, children and parents alike, which I'm sure they didn't appreciate! Oh well.
Maybe once in this run-up to school I got a twang of remembrance for that back-to-school feeling for the teacher....the organizing the room....the bulletin boards....those tape name-tags with the alphabet on each student's desk... the surreptitious, stolen whiff of the new crayola box ...oh no...wait..that was last year! This year I'm just so happy I'm out of it!!!

On a less frivolous note, R and I woke early for the webcam funeral of Professor Alan Ervine at Glasgow Uni. It was a good celebration. Sad...which is fitting. He was young and had just retired, planning to do missionary work in East Africa. I really didn't know the guy more than to exchange pleasantries, but this last, really tragic month of his blogging has been transforming for me. His honesty, his faith, his anger......he said to his minister the other day, "When I die, I want you to take the service.....and I want you to preach the Gospel!" Well done. It was well done. Onward and upward friends! Keep working until your time's up!
For Alan's family, obviously, I pray. This isn't just a new year...it's a new life that's going to be pretty tough without him.

I know this... Monday, a beautiful day that was a little cooler, marked the 25th anniversary of my mother's death. Strangely, it both feels like yesterday and a lifetime ago.....yet were she to walk into my kitchen just now and make a cup of tea, I probably wouldn't bat an eye...at least at first. Assuming she looked...like normal....not like a zombie or something! That would be freaky. Just kidding.
Every year, on the 6th of September I am stopped in my tracks. This year it was different. Somehow, twenty-five years makes the mourning more...grown....more able to take care of itself. The hole her passing left is still there, the me maybe dances with it rather than is led by it. As I come closer to the age she was when she died, my perspective on how I live changes and that hole helps define me, and obviously makes me question how I spend my time.....which for any of us, is limited. A few months ago, Alan Ervine was planning his future, wasn't he? We need to make the most of what we have whilst we're here.

I wanted somehow to mark the day...I wrote a poem...I'll maybe spend some time today working in the moon garden...it's all a bit hollow this 25th anniversary. Not even a little silver...maybe it's a tarnished silver. I dunno.

The next anniversary coming up this week is that of 9/11.
Regardless of your personal stance on terrorism, politics, the loss of innocent life, your own friends or family lost that day, the memory of that gorgeous, picture-book September day...full of Monarch butterflies and ripening apples... and those towers being hit, and collapsing, changed you...Changed you forever. How you felt on 9/10/01 and how you felt on 9/12/01 were drastically different. This year is super-charged with emotion because of the plan to build a mosque so close to the site.....I hear both sides of this issue constantly, and in both sides I hear fear, but I also hear love.....only I don't hear enough love.
Ouch.
Start with love. Breathe out. Breathe in. Open your heart to God, and make every thing you do be with love.
Put the fear aside.
Yoda said it well, "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to sufferiiiiing." Yoda, a very wise puppet indeed.
Put love first.
...and happy new year!

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