The Raven

The Raven

Tuesday, April 5, 2011


I had a bad night last night. I don’t know why I write, I just feel compelled to write what I see in my head, yet I suppose it is a form of therapy, since I am very shy, and have a hard time describing my thoughts and ideas aloud before people
I polished off a 1/2 pint of whiskey alone in my room. Tears heavy with heartache. I soaked my pillow so much that if it were filled with feathers, they would never fly again. My mind falls victim to my pillow harboring ominous ideas that wait in shadows to become nightmares.
When I drink to excess I have vivid dreams and the next day I cannot separate reality from my dreams. What people do in my dreams I think really happened.( a kinda funny one, I woke up one morning thinking the Leaning Tower of Pisa fell!) The shows on TV enter my mind as I lie half awake between dreams and slipping away into another. Lat night in my dream my brother was acting schizophrenic and speaking vulgarly to me and today while driving I had to really try to think if that really happened. I know now, it didn't. My sleep is fitful. I sometimes yell out, waking people in other rooms, and also my dog, who runs to my door to see if I'm ok.
At first, when I start drinking my head euphorically spins- mind is suspended in a fragrant warm pool of water- that bitter, burning, sweetness of bipolar ecstasy… a warm rush, spinning euphorically in your own mind, then, restless anger, desire to rebel and be heard and understood, then defeat and overwhelming sadness, yet still feeling, I am grateful for- a passionate feeling.
When I drink in bars, I often get into confrontations and wake the next day with the soft skin around my wrists bruised from pounding my fists on the bar. More than once I have been rescued by family members from these places, only to have me climb out my window, or leave their couch and wander out into the woods, lie in the grass, pretending to stir the stars with a stick I found. I am not easy to take. I have physically fought with my father and got thrown into the car because I wouldn't leave willingly with my parents. I have been bitten by a dog, blood running down my leg, my nose almost broken from falling and I didn't even know it. I was still screaming and arguing about something I cannot remember now.
I went this past week without a drink and felt great. Yesterday, alas, I let myself drink. I didn't even want to. I just told myself I need something to drown my thoughts, or numb me from them for a little. Yet, when I got to the bottom of the bottle, they were there waiting, more intense and painful than before. They followed me into my dreams, made my head pound, and my stomach acidic and nauseous. I writhed in bed all night.
As the birds were summoning the glowing, grey morning light, from the rain soaked tree, looking like spilled ink, I stared up out the window above, my aching head on my pillow. I turned again and tried to sleep. I felt a sick heaving wave in the ocean of my stomach. As I drift slightly, I heard a sound from a bird I had never heard before and I felt it was a message from some other greater Spirit around me letting me know it'll be ok now; it is a new day, a different one and in the grand scheme of things, my life is just a little moment, though it is intolerably painful sometimes, there is nothing God will let happen that you cannot handle with what you have been equipped with inside. I have the ability to bring peace to my body by meditating on God and asking for help. Even though my life is a fleeting moment in the Grand Universe, it is not lost from God. Today is a new day to start over, to start healing.

This time of year is so enchanting!
When the clutch of Winter loosens, and the haughty howls of the cold are soothed by nurturing Spring. Trembling rain drops, like delicate pearls adorn the tree branches full burgeoning buds.
Soon, my yard will look like Heaven spilled a milk pail of tiny purple and blue flowers- turning my yard into an ocean of fairy flowers and the sighs of wild honeysuckle will float on the breeze with the butterflies as I doze in the grass.
I want to work WITH Nature. Surely we can energize and sustain our planet with the more benevolent elements of the Earth- a celestial sphere that delicately exists on the Great Cosmic tree, like the trembling rain pearls. Let us harness the energies of sunlight, water and air- not Uranium. Reuse our waste to fuel machines and vehicles.
I think then the Earth Mother may be happier with us, kinder to us. I feel she is sick and we need to help her get well! We need to come together and help each other and our Earth!

Sunday, April 3, 2011

There Was Time Now


How I love old books! Torn, stained unraveling books! My best friend recently gave me an old book from 1926, called Wisp:A Girl of Dublin by Katharine Adams. It was from a library in Charleston, West Virginia. The other night I discovered the library card sleeve and inside an original check out card; the most current return date was March 17, 1931! And here I hold it in my hands in March 2011! A little thing, but I find it haunting.
All throughout the book as I turn the pages, learning more and more about the characters, I find smudges and fingerprints- these people are all probably dead and buried now, but they live on through these now ghostly fingerprints; my thumb landed almost directly on top of a rouge colored thumb print as I turned a page. I get distracted from the story and wonder what the person who held this book in their hands 80 years ago was doing as they read. Was it for school they had to read it? What did they think of it?
There is a small scrap of paper that was probably once white; age has stained the paper and impressed its shadow on the pages. Some nights, I notice when I go to save my place for the night, I fold the top corners at the same places the readers before me have. There are sloppy little side notes and thread peeking out from the pages just before the title page. It is alive with the words of the author, but also with the marks of the people who brought it into their lives briefly. The book and its pages don't erase time or memory; a book gains more character- spirit as it is stained by Time. Books build layers of remnants that become part of the story for every new reader to discover. Not only can you learn from and be entertained by the words of these old volumes, you can FEEL and smell the history as your finger tips grace grains of time.
I don't ever want print to go away!

TimeEnoughAtLast.jpg Time Enough At Last