Prolifically Raw: Accidental Ending

Sunday, June 03, 2007

Accidental Ending

The smell of death is somewhere around the back of my house. There is nothing like that familiar sweet decay of soft flesh. I thought it was spoiled food yesterday but this morning, at 5 a.m., as I water my roses, I know. That is death.

I don't attend to that smell though. I finish the job of watering first, my mind awash in the ending that has arrived for me and a beloved. Hit after hit has been coming this week, in the wake of letting him go and this morning, yet another hit, yet another revelation, yet another stunning insight. Each hit takes him down from the heights I raised him and he becomes just another man who must walk among us on planet earth. Isn't it funny how we are our worst when it�s time to let go. Or was the worst crime in the idolization? Or, was it the self diminishment? Or was it in the abandonment of my intellectual knowing: what comes up, must come down? My questions turn around the familiar path, taking me back to my origins: Do daughters of emotionally unavailable fathers ever stop idolizing (or demonizing) men? And this is just half of the equation. Then there is the question of sons, who love mothers who are not truly emotionally well either. There is so much wounding in our origins, of every sort, no wonder it�s so hard for many of us to stay in the process of relating.

There is a bark from the pale blue of dawn and a flock of geese cuts a path east.

Mary Oliver wrote: You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting � over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

I wonder, as I so often do at times like these: what is my place in the family?

The roses are in their fullest bloom, while death reeks from somewhere unseen (as of yet) and I am in attendance of both life and death, beauty and decay, past and present. That�s all there is, in this moment.

I put the hose down, turn off the water and go into the heart of the stench. A small opossum died in the bottom of my yard debris can. He must have fallen in and then, couldn�t crawl out. There is a metaphor in this death, this accidental ending, but I don�t linger. The smell is overwhelming and there is work to do.