Love Letter to My Life #63: This, too, shall pass
Love Letter to My Life #63: This, too, shall pass
Scary numbers and the pilgrimage of life
This, too, shall pass. A lesson that came to me through my curiosity about the markings on the ring of a manager I worked for and because he was kind enough to explain the story of Solomon’s ring and the philosophy that everything changes, both good things and bad.
I’m glad this lesson came to me at a relatively early point in my life as it has served me well, giving me a tiny dollop of wisdom that has returned to me over and over through the years.
September is something of an anniversary for me … 14 years ago, I began my personal blog following a downward spiral of loss. My second post, available here: “My Cup Is Empty,” marked the bottom of what seemed like an endless cycle.
Now that I’ve moved my writing and art to Substack, my blog is dormant, although there were 22,000+ views this month, which made me realize I need to have a better path from the blog to my new Substack home. A fellow Substack writer mentioned that she had turned her blog into a “billboard,” so this morning I did that also. It now looks like this.
What surprised me as I prowled around my old blog was that among my most popular posts was a series I did celebrating April as Poetry Month. There are over 1200 posts on the blog so I can’t imagine moving them all to Substack but I am going to link to some of them, starting with this favorite where I compare translations:
Life is to be lived. Death is part of it.
All of this reminds me of how grateful I am for my life and the time I’ve had to explore the world and myself in a way I never dreamed of as a child. A generous offer came my way a week or so ago when a new friend offered me a place to stay in Morelia, Mexico, a favorite, beautiful place in the country I love so much. I am anticipating a long revisit next spring.
Pair that with a recent scary number on a medical lab result and I am reminded that this is life and part of life is death. My doctor’s words were guardedly reassuring and I’m taking the scary number as a reminder that death is not a hypothetical. It is life that is real and it is life that deserves to be lived with abandon. These monthly love letters to my life have become a welcome ritual of remembering that.
We live in uncertain times and it’s easy to think that life is scarier and harder now than it was “back then.” That’s probably not true … there have always been plagues and wars and terrorizing marauders. People lived through those times … and people died in those times. We just keep stepping forward, taking the next breath of air.
There are no “them.”
If there is a message for our times, though, it seems to me that it’s about love and community. We act as if the world were divided into “us” and “them” when, in truth, there is no “them.” There is only “us,” neighbors on this one planet that gives us life.
A blog post written five years ago about a favorite movie and titled The pilgrimage of life is seldom like the movies reminds me that I didn’t know where I was going then any more than I do now. However, I am determined to live as fully as possible for as long as possible, knowing that there is an end. It may not be in sight, but I see the glow on the horizon.
Here’s the beginning of that post from five years ago:
In one of my favorite movies, Jeremiah Johnson, the ancient wisdom keeper Bear Claw watches the progress of the beautifully ignorant Jeremiah as he deals with the wilderness in his pilgrimage to become a mountain man. After a long series of trials, Bear Claw gives him the ultimate accolade when he says, “You’ve come far, Pilgrim.”
I like the idea of being a pilgrim, of being on a pilgrimage, although that carries with it the idea of a destination. When I think of my journey, a few-days short of seventy-two years, I marvel at how far I’ve come but still wonder where I’m going.
Here’s a short poll about how you think about death:
Are there any words any more appropriate than Mary Oliver’s:
When it's over, I want to say:
all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was going through my laptop before this current laptop, yesterday, and I was looking for a short story I wanted to revise, and I marveled at some of the past social media platforms no longer in my life. (Or even, no longer existing. The ghost of MySpace lingers on in cyberspace.) Substack doesn't feel like a social platform, more like a place where writing/creative minds meet and see there are others of us, and we were all ready for a better way of interacting in the online world. We've all gone through a global shift together, and come out the other side. Books, writing, reading, art-making. It's all here.
P.S. The short story was found in a cardboard box. Yay for the physical world.
This is a beautiful post. At first look - I loved your art piece. Then I read the post. I relate to so much of it; your artmaking, love of poetry and Mexico. I share these same loves.
What you say about uncertainty is wise; it is the certain who cannot bend or be open to other ways and perspectives. All of life is uncertain, yet it is so easy to get trapped into false certainty when all is going well, then be depressed or bitterly disappointed when our miraculous luck ends - as it always does from one cycle to the next. As you said, it's all only for a time.
My mother never taught me that it was King Solomon; but when I asked her why she always would say "This too shall pass," she told the king story; that he wanted something inscribed in a ring make him feel happy when he was sad and sad when he was happy. That gift stayed with me my whole life; both bitter and sweet. The paradox of duality is that it's the same coin, just different sides - a oneness, too. The 'and, and.'