Wandering into the past

As I said last night, I have threatened poetry. I have tales in my life that friend Kathy has never heard. Whether over margaritas or out in nature, stories will be told and poems will be read.

I could not find the binder with all the poems of that era but the poems are all on the computer so I just spent about 40 minutes printing them all.

Most cannot be shared here. They are private, they include acrostics that spell out names, and some are still too intimate.

Sixty may well be the new forty {skeptical look}, but sixty is still sixty and I have already gone past that number. I have come to the season in life where one begins to review more, hoping to integrate the shards of one's years, to distill some wisdom from the journey, to make sense of one's life.

I have crossed cyberpaths on Facebook with people I have not seen or chatted with in ten, twenty, or forty-five years. This can be challenging. I was so busy keeping multiple masks on and trying to keep various facets of my life from colliding together that I have almost no memories of high school. Some, but compared to my classmates, virtually none. And not many more from college. A classmate reminded me a while ago of an episode in my freshman year that I do recall but had not thought of more than once in the intervening decades.

This Saturday I am not merely taking an opportunity but creating one to revisit the tumultuous transition after the love of my life and I took separate paths. [May I say at this point how grateful I am for my therapist and Paxil and people who loved and upheld us both?] Life was a true roller coaster - typical in those circumstances but we all must take our own ride.

So, in the medium of poetry and the presence of a dear friend, I shall revisit that ride.

Poetry, by the way, was how I managed to feel my feelings and survive. I was churning out something like two poems a week, a large percentage of them acrostics. I love the challenge of acrostics. You may read some of my poems (and hymns) from that period here.

Each night, immediately after the Lord's Prayer, I pray for the one I hold dearest (still) and for the one I briefly risked loving - the two who are the center of all those poems.

Don't you imagine the discussion and insights that emerge from this nostalgic visit come Saturday will prove fascinating? The content will not show up here but my musings thereafter may.

May we all find healing and integration of memories as we journey toward wholeness.

These fragments have I shored against my ruin
--T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

--the BB