OM-1/25/2015 Time Does Not Heal All Wounds

Aleathia says:

 I wasn't going to blog today because I didn't feel like I had anything to share but the cloud of sadness that has been hovering over me for the last week.  The anniversary of my mother's death is in a few days.  I have been trying to hold strong and not be a blubbering baby, but I must admit that at night, when I am alone, I sit here and cry silently.  I have unanswered questions that will never find relief.  I have a string of regrets sewn together with the tendrils of  the ephemeral why.  There was so much more we had to say to each other now that I had found love and happiness; now that I knew, in essence, who I really was supposed to be.  That was taken away from me.  Some days are better than others.  I'm a sentimental git so the weepy, heartbreaking days are hard to let go of.

Through all of this Michael quietly waits for me to be ok.  Sometimes he hugs me while I'm crying and washing the dishes.  He doesn't have to say anything, because I know what he will say.  I know he understands this pain as we have both lost our mothers at a young age.  Men deal with things differently.  He got angry and drank.  I have been sullen and distant.  Neither of them cure what ails us.  Time doesn't heal the wounds, I have found, but I think somewhere it gives you perspective.  He is almost 4 years out from losing his mom and he only made the turn around last year.  I know there is hope for me yet.  Stay busy.  Don't bury it.  But most of all, keep loving.

I was reading "All The King's Men" this morning and there is a passage I would like to share.  In a round about way it was why I turned the computer on today.  It was a passage about how love changes a person.  After reading it I knew that I had to share it because without love, without how Michael makes me feel about the world, I would not be able to stand up in the face of everything that happens in a day.  I am strong, but he makes me stronger.  For that, I am forever grateful.

"So maybe she was up in the room trying to discover what her new self was, for when you get in love you are made all over again. The person who loves you has picked you out of the great masses of uncreated clay which is humanity to make something out of, and the poor lumpish clay which is you wants to find out what it has been made into.  But at the same time, you, in the act of loving somebody, become real, cease to be a part of the continuum of the uncreated clay and get the breath of life in you and rise up.So you create yourself by creating another person, who, however, has also created you, picked up the you-chunk of clay out of the mass.  So there are two you's, the one you yourself create by loving and the one the beloved creates by loving you. The farther those two you's are apart the more the world grinds and grudges on its axis.  But if you loved and were loved perfectly then there wouldn't be any difference between the two you's or any distance between them. They would coincide perfectly, there would be a perfect focus, as when a stereoscope gets the twin images on the card into perfect alignment."  --Robert Penn Warren

Thank you Michael for finding me; for allowing the life I always dreamed I would have.  You are a fine man and an incredible human being.  I love you.

Lit Bits-1/14/2015 Robert Penn Warren

Aleathia says:

I am working hard at being able to read more books this year.  Last year was the pits and I aim to make time for reading again....even if it is only for 20 minutes.  Presently I am about one third of the way through Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men".  This was a Pulitzer Prize winning book for him and thus on my list of books to read in my lifetime.

I find these episodes of forced reading interesting.  I would have never picked up this book on my own as it does not fall into the usual type of book I gravitate towards.  Having said that, it is a lovely surprise.  Warren has a masterful vocabulary (I have to hit the dictionary at least every few pages) and is spot on with his narrative that is engaging and detailed but not so much that it is burdensome.  I will admit that the dialogue is harder for me as it is set in the 1930's deep south.  Reading in dialect has never been one of my favorite things because I have to hear it in my head in order for it to compute.  Combine this with very small print and you have a slower moving book than I would have liked.  It is slow moving because of me, not because of the content.

In the wee hours last night, when I couldn't sleep and the house was quiet, I sat in my sewing/reading room layered with blankets in negative weather and read this book.  I came across this quote and it made reading the book worth it:

"They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people."--Robert Penn Warren

I had to stop and read these lines over and over again.  There is so much unwanted truth in these sentences.  We want to think that we are the same person no matter who we are around, but in our heart of hearts we know it isn't true.  I am a different version of myself with my child than I am with my lover.  I am a different version of myself depending on which nurses I work with.  I am different at parties than I am at home.  The people in my life and in my environment change me.  We all want to be accepted in the company we keep even if we pretend we don't care.  It is human nature to want to belong to something greater than yourself.  Why do you think religion has such a strong hold in the world?

I look forward to finishing this book and adding it to my list of Pulitzer's read.  The book is about a man in politics from the view of another man who works closely with him.  It is the unraveling of a life.  It is relationships that fall away and leave the narrator as an island.  At least it is so far.  Pick up the book and see for yourself.