New acquaintances for me, yet easily engaged and freely sharing more than the usual minutiae generally exchanged on occasions such as these.
A couple married for over 50 years; veterans of wars, depression, parenting, service in the military and careers in medicine; she now battling cancer again, having beaten the odds twice before.
I was envious of their devotion to each other.
I have lived singly for a very long time.
It's difficult to even conceive of the intimacy and depth of that amount of shared history
I don't usually cry after being reminded that a lifetime commitment is possible; some lucky few do have this as their reality. (And by 'lucky', I don't mean to minimize the hard work and effort that goes into maintaining such a long term relationship.)
I rarely waste time thinking of all the "might have beens" and "what ifs".
A poem from The Woman's Book of Uncommon Prayer speaks directly to my feelings tonight.
I'm grateful to the author (whose name I have misplaced) for articulating so clearly my longings tonight.
Spirit:
Kindergarten teaches that race is a fiction,
first grade that gender is a made up thing,
but there are no classes about the differences that are real,
like the differences in how people love and feel.
But out of school the lesson we learn first,
is of the dialects of love.
Calamities abound,
Yet I was tearful all the way home and have continued to feel a deep sense of loss, loneliness and sadness that things in my own life have worked out so differently than I ever would have predicted.
A poem from The Woman's Book of Uncommon Prayer speaks directly to my feelings tonight.
I'm grateful to the author (whose name I have misplaced) for articulating so clearly my longings tonight.
Spirit:
Kindergarten teaches that race is a fiction,
first grade that gender is a made up thing,
but there are no classes about the differences that are real,
like the differences in how people love and feel.
But out of school the lesson we learn first,
is of the dialects of love.
Calamities abound,
we're taught of violent uprootings, cities overrun,
people conquered and dispersed
by Mongol hordes and Hun,
peaceful folk turned into Gypsies.
Jews, Greeks
set searching for a home, a place to roost.
But of one great Diaspora, they never talk,
the scattering of those who shared
the same vernacular of love,
the breakup into twos and threes
and set to wandering, looking for their kind.
Of the splintering of that clan they're silent.
Spirit, send me a lost member of my tribe,
someone who needs my kind of love,
who speaks my dialect of love,
someone who recognizes my gestures as a familiar idiom.
Spirit, send me a member of my tribe,
who wants to be loved as I can love them,
who needs to be loved as I can love them.
people conquered and dispersed
by Mongol hordes and Hun,
peaceful folk turned into Gypsies.
Jews, Greeks
set searching for a home, a place to roost.
But of one great Diaspora, they never talk,
the scattering of those who shared
the same vernacular of love,
the breakup into twos and threes
and set to wandering, looking for their kind.
Of the splintering of that clan they're silent.
Spirit, send me a lost member of my tribe,
someone who needs my kind of love,
who speaks my dialect of love,
someone who recognizes my gestures as a familiar idiom.
Spirit, send me a member of my tribe,
who wants to be loved as I can love them,
who needs to be loved as I can love them.
No comments:
Post a Comment