down but not out yet

What is my problem!!
The sun is out, my seedlings are thriving, I’m taking my 60 milligrams of happy pill every day, we have hospice available (including a social worker for moral support), and my mom is still sleeping a lot.
I should be feeling a whole lot better than I do. I shouldn’t be feeling this “stuck.” I should have more energy.
Maybe I have spring fever. Maybe it’s the just-past full moon. Maybe the loss is greater than I thought.

Elevator
Jim Culleny
Be still in a field of
slowly falling snow
and renounce focus
Peer into the distance
to where the hare
hunkers under a log
and the coy dog
waits for it to move
Let a billion dropping flakes
inundate your vision
unselfconsciously
and find yourself rising,
taking the forest with you,
taking it all,
riding the snow-snuffed
woods into a gray sky,
levitating at the pace
of cool, languid
precipitation,
rising gently weightless
with pine and spruce
and the white-clad carcasses
of busted oak and ash
and every crystal-buried
stalk of undergrowth,
—the graygreen scales of lichen,
the silent future of mushrooms
underneath awaiting
the blessed touch
of damp and sun,
take with you the lights
of a distant house
and the wisps that unwind
from its chimney
like tendrils of love
of a blazing heart,
find yourself rising
unfettered as a hawk on a thermal
a dandelion tuft on a whistled breath
a balloon let loose from the grip of a child
ride upward,
easy,
weightless as a well-lived
soul


The above from one of Jim Culleny’s daily poetry emails.

2 thoughts on “down but not out yet

  1. give yourself a break
    make it a few
    you have been full time care giver for a very long time now, you have just lost someone who shared your life with for many years, and i think the moon is waxing ~ so much is building inside as well…
    the energy will come

  2. give yourself time to finish all the stages.

    i think one of the stages they left out is when we think to ourselves “i should be over this by now…” that happens to all of us. it’ll probably happen to you 15 or even 20 years from now.

    take care – r.

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