I Was Here

For the first time ever, I saw these pennies in the foundation of my parent's yard. I've walked over them thousands of times and my mom just pointed them out to me the other day. They were left by the previous owners and each penny is dated with the year they were born (mom, dad and kids). I've been thinking about my parents house and how much of our families history is there because soon we will have to wrap it all up and move on. The basement is exactly as my dad left it and my brother-in-law is going to have to rip it apart and make it new, as he so skillfully and artfully did in dad's room to give him a better send-off. My dad's legacy is literally written on the walls in the basement. He wanted to leave his mark when he knew he was leaving us. I didn't even know my dad was a writer until he was gone but when we leave our creative mark on this world, there it is... and there it remains for future discovery.

I'm so glad he did. Someday i'll have the heart to read it all but for now, it's enough just knowing it's there. I think my dad was inspired by the legacy that the home owners left before him. Clearly they were also sentimental. They left their kids recorded heights on the walls- the same 4 walls my dad wrote on. When I was a kid we moved so often that I became accustomed to ripping up some corner of the carpet to write "Lindsay was here" and the date, before the moving truck took us away.

My grandma's basement is filled with our entire extended families scribbles and eventually it will all come to pass, too. It will become a part of someone else's history and you can only hope that the next owners have a sentimental heart and want to preserve a piece of your past. People can tear down walls but these pennies are forever. 

Sisters

This picture made me cry when it popped into my feed this morning. I love when a picture so perfectly encapsulates the emotion you are feeling. We spent hours on the phone talking last night, about how we both have such a strong calling on our lives to love and protect the world's children. Universal Mothers. My sister has been protecting me and calming me since day one.

My earliest memories of us are in our shared room where I climbed into her bed night after night and she would tirelessly put me to sleep for hours after my mom thought she had. Tickling my back, telling me stories, making me laugh and sushhhhing my fears. About the war that wasn't even happening. About the war that was only inside my head. She would distract me with stories of my brother "Sendai" who would visit our bedroom window at night on his flying carpet (and would take me away if I was bad). We spoke nonsense into the dark, in a pretend language that only we knew. I watched as she woke up with our baby sister and would drag her crying from her crib and into our bed, effortlessly and instinctively when our mom couldn't hear. When I was afraid of the "ghosts" I saw in our room, she didn't skip a beat. "It's only angels" she said... "you are lucky," she promised.

My first playmate, my pen-pal, my most creative friend and my teacher, writing letters to the characters inside of my head and urging me to "keep writing both silly and beautiful things." Today she is still the first person I want when I am scared and the only person who has ever made me feel normal. The one who fought tooth and nail for our dad, loving him passionately and fiercely in a way that only a daughter could. The one I have to share with our First Nations people because they need her more than me. Even though I weep in fear, selfishly and bitterly when she goes, I know she has no choice. It is already written. "Where you are called, you go," she says. You go and be the hand and heart for people. You go not as your privilege, not as your job and not as separate. You go as a mother and as a wife. You go as a sister.

Time

Verses in Season began not as a blog, but as the title for a collection of poetry I wrote. Last fall I took a poetry course and our first assignment was to write in the style of Kahlil Gibran's classic, 'The Prophet.' I know his work well and I knew it would be a challenge. I wasn't anywhere near comfortable trying to emulate his style. His work is far too superb for us amateurs to compare with! Nonetheless, I was excited and I gave it my best shot.

*****

 

Time is the primordial promise.

Universal oath.

Sun and moon in cosmic union,
painting the sky in definitive tones: fever red and ocean blue; its fragrance is the air.

 

Time passes on the wings of our days and the breaths of our nights.
Pages turned in ancient story,
a map etched in our earthly bodies,
a traveler shrouded in season and skin.

 

Time is the language of the earth.
The morning songbird and nighttime orchestra
summon us to attend time's sacred show.

It is the infant's cry, released from the womb and delivered into the hands of fate—

a journey full of quiet promise, though it beckons with a deafening call 

and its voice is never far from our dreams.

 

Time is the impermanent stone; a treasure to hold,
though it escapes through our memory, like sand through curled palm.

Time rushes like a wave to the shore,

bathing us in ghostly tide and restless storm.
As wind and rain move through ancestral bones,
ashes and mist are left in its wake.

 

For time is the breath of life,
the stillness of death,
and the memory of love.

 

And just as time wears the cloak of today,

By: Lindsay Ronald