Sursum Corda

 

From near or far,
Here we are,
Gathered around
the table abundant.

Too long, too long apart;
It’s difficult to remember
The proper way to start.

We join our hands,
We pray for all lands
— for as we have suffered,
others, likewise, have—
And recall those, bright and bold,
Who now the arms of history hold,
Since last we met like this.

The warmth of touch,
Oh, so warm! to share the lively
Pulse of light and life! so much
Missing from living, lately!

Within the candles’ glow,
Within the warmth of home,
This meeting is where we sow
Seeds for Spring in the receptive loam.

Let’s lift up our hearts, Dear Ones!
We lift our cups for the toast,
We lift them up!, reply all tongues,
Gratitude and joy, uppermost—

—Reminded and ever mindful
That all the primary things
Are not things, at all.

Covid Pentacost

Grief walks the streets, masked.
Isolation is summer’s undesired shield
from the hum of bees,
of birdsongs,
of joy.

Help me—oh mama!
I cannot breathe!
Bye-bye!

Injustice walks the streets, armed.
Legal structures and strictures shield
ideologies of subjugation;
they rule with impunity,
sparking outrage.

Help me—oh mama!
I cannot breathe!
Bye-bye!

A virus propelled by breath runs unabated.
Much needed conversation is stifled
—not to mention song,
medicine the spirit
longs to feel.

Help me—oh mama!
I cannot breathe!
Bye-bye!

Gather, all ye in the village squares,
mourn that capture by all such restraints
as leads to the stifling of breath,
sending, untimely, more men of color
to meet Jesus in Paradise.

Help me—oh mama!
I cannot breathe!
Bye-bye!

Fire beetles, light the night,
signal the elusive dove to morning flight,
and when comes here the sun,
rain upon us a fire for righteousness.

Transform these hearts of stone
into the living hearts of compassion;
Make us to speak only justice,
to understand the language of love and no other.

Let not the riotous soul go unheard,
that stands by with help for all humanity;
strengthen us to bring comfort and blessing
to every neighbor, in these times of trial. Selah!

© 2020 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen and songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com

We live in dangerous times. People who should be leaders are fomenting unrest for political gain. Innocent people are caught in the crossfire. Some sworn members of that profession intended to “protect and serve” abuse their power.

I am reminded of Ezekiel, Chapter 7, a description known as “The End Has Come.” At the very end is this line:

“I will deal with them according to their conduct,
and by their own standards will I judge them.”

As bleak as this seems, there is much to hope for. There are good and compassionate and loving people in every place.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said:

“Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”

Love truly is the answer, and the only one.

Meanderings on Motherhood

There was that time, long ago,
(but when I picture the photo in my mind,
I can recall it as if it just happened),
Your voice urged, “Go! There’s dad!”
and these feet (much smaller)
carried this body (tiny then) upright,
for the first time in recorded mystory.

Since then, to now, such a stretch
of rolling and running and walking long trails,
working on words,
how they are formed
on the lips and in the mind,
naps and daydreaming,
watching motes of dust
float through the air,
the sacred holding of ladybugs
in small hands and large,
skipping beside you,
my hand in yours,
later walking on my own.

Of the countless adventures:
The tiny kid on the painter’s ladder,
“But I can do it, mom!
I can go all the way to the top!”
I clearly remember saying,
and when I got there, I looked down,
to realize that up and down are
two wholly different skills,
and your fear-of-heights coaxing
“But it’s time for lunch,
I have your favorite, all ready,”
literally willed my safe descent
from the edge of the rooftop.

Only a superhero can do that,
I hope you know.

Cups of sweet, milky coffee,
in the time-honored tiny tea set,
with fresh from the oven cookies,
punctuated long days of discovery;
who knew that spiders, large enough
for Tiffany the standard poodle to bark at,
could emerge from under an old house,
or that summer swim lessons would
require you to wear your winter coat,
while blue and shivering kids paddled,
as you observed from the stands?

Rescues, both small and great:
the bus-missing preschool finger-paint project,
that found me walking wrong-way home;
the playground knee-roll over broken glass,
requiring a taxi ride to Emergency,
where an old man walked through the plate glass door,
as if to continue a theme of shatteredness;
your calm voice calling to me from up the block
while a stranger tried to lure me with a lie,
through his car window.

Further opening windows of consciousness,
the daily theme, from the portholes
of your piercing brown eyes to my own,
everything an exercise in expansion,
from cultivation of flowers
to the care of small creatures,
from the march against war
to the long bus ride to help
in the marina after the bay oil spill,
for we must save the sea birds.

Over time, these portholes on the world
have upgraded themselves from transoms
to casements and skylights, even bays
clear or color-stained like gems,
to picture and double-opening French windows;
Windows on the world within and without,
these aforesaid windows of consciousness,
this is extraordinary vision,
mapped as the starry heavens,
and the young must first be led
on all the well-trodden paths
before they can forge any path on their own.

The painstaking after-school reading lessons,
for this late bloomer, a first opening
to the greater world beyond our time and place,
leading to the sharing of books and music,
endless school art shows and concerts to endure;
How you and every pet in the house
stood the squawks and squeaks
of an inexperienced bow across the strings,
I’ll never know, even though
every pet in the house slept at the epicenter,
and you sat proudly through every concert,
from violin to voice. 

And I know now,
         I now know,
through my open window,
         what it was all for,
what it meant to you,
         what it means to me,
having relived it all,
         in a different time,
and with a different voice.

And I want you to know that,
         though you are far away,
the little hand of your child
         still reaches through open windows
of consciousness and vision,
         finds your warm hand,
ever-curious mind and open heart,
         and feels your mommally hug.

Love,

         Elisabeth

© 2019 BY Elisabeth T. Eliassen

//
Top photo: Mom has given me little kirigami to throw into a bowl of water, where we watched them open into flowers, circa 1962.
Bottom photo: Me with my twins when they were very young, circa 2000

Incident at the Lincoln Memorial

On Friday, January 19, 2019, there were many people involved in various protest or commemorative marches in the area of the Capital Mall of Washington, D.C., but an apparent confrontation developed between white students from a catholic school in Kentucky, black Hebrew Israelites who had participated in the March for Life and Native American activists, who had participated in the Indigenous Peoples March. Video of this intersection of groups has gone viral, and so many people have commented on it already. I nevertheless also feel compelled to respond.

I, as thousands have, viewed at the original clip (taken by one of the Native American marchers), and the longer video (apparently taken by one of the Hebrew Israelites). This is what I heard and saw, as succinctly as I can put it: One group with a religious affiliation was hurling negative value judgments and pejoratives at a crowd that included mostly white students and Native Americans. The students, for some reason that is not clear, stormed up to the group of Native Americans, invading their personal space and engaged in a staring match. I perceived a clear sense of menace and threat in the actions on either side; the Native Americans were between the Hebrew Israelites and the students. Unrighteous judgment was all around in the video footage. I certainly did not see the best example of nonviolent resistance in this charged atmosphere. Disrespectful behavior was evident.

Then, one of the Native Americans, Nathan Phillips, started to beat his drum and chant. I perceived this to be an attempt to diffuse and de-escalate a challenging situation.

How did I come to make that call? I am a minister in that way; I chant and I sing.  The beauty of the human voice offered in song is one of the greatest healing tools we have readily available to us. The gift that music keeps on giving the world is the creation of innumerable opportunities for unity to occur among people. 

Few are aware of an aspect called “entrainment” or that there is a study called “bio-musicology” that studies this aspect, which is simply defined as a synchronization of organisms by means of rhythmic music. When folks go into a theatre to hear a concert, and they all come out feeling moved or happy in the same way, humming tunes that they heard or singing, that is a simple example of entrainment.

When he started the drumming and chanting, Nathan Phillips was attempting to clear the space and call on the Great Spirit to enter into the discussion. I didn't know what he was chanting, but I knew this was his intent. It is the same thing people do in temples, synagogues and churches, around campfires, in sacred places everywhere - chants, hymns, whatever you want to call them, it is all the same--unifying people around the vibrational energy we all share. My sense of this was affirmed by a woman who commented on the thread of a Facebook friend about this incident. She lives in a community of Native Americans, and she indicated that she knew this was a prayers song.

Perhaps I should add that music first shifts people from where they are to another place or attitude, one where they are potentially prepared for entrainment. Singing/chanting activates both hemispheres of the brain of the singer; the opportunity for a different type of participation and awareness possible from all who are in the vicinity, whether they are singing or not. I've read on this in the past, but I'm not sure I could lay my hands on a definitive article. I do know that music therapy makes use of entrainment to assist in healing of all kinds, and I am sure the Buddhists discuss this from the aspect of meditation, as well as chanting. The ringing of any bell, for example, is the signal to awaken from one way of thinking to another. Do we heed the bell? Do we heed the song? Do we heed the call to change? That is always the question.

The human voice is the body's primary built-in coping tool. We cry out in the darkness so as not to feel alone. Our voices reach out to find others. Rarely do you find children that do not make up songs or hum to themselves when they are alone, quietly playing. This vibration that we generate is a precious tool for our whole lives. Unfortunately, great swathes of our society have been told they can't sing, music programs in schools have been limited or eliminated, and there is so much generated music, the majority of people passively listen and don't participate as much in singing as they used to. If people are listening to music, it is more often through earphones, rather than a shared public occasion. 

Instead of singing, people talk, gabble, gabble, gabble all the time. Much of this gabbling talk is generated by the judgmental portion of the brain; there is a lot of bad vibe being pushed out there, damaging to self and others. This is unfettered left-brain activity. 

Unfortunately, as a society, we do not teach our children that they need to tend carefully the garden of their minds. Without structure, censorship or discipline, our thoughts run rampant on automatic. Because we have not learned how to more carefully manage what goes on inside our brains, we remain vulnerable to not only what other people think about us, but also to advertising and/or political manipulation.

- Jill Bolte Taylor, “My Stroke of Insight” (2008)

Dr. Taylor’s statement rather aptly describes the situation in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and it’s media fallout.

I write about this today because right now the earth is calling us to change. The earth cannot ring a bell. It can only sing a song of sorrow from the depths of the sea and the wind whipped mountaintops. The whole earth is a sacred place and we are supposed to be stewards of it; but instead we are mostly engaged in trying to conquer one another. One woman wrote, in the same Facebook thread on this incident I earlier mentioned, that the need for people to be right at all costs is both exhausting and crippling us. People yell at each other and fling blame. With all the yelling going on, it is no surprise that we can’t hear anything else. Further, seeking to be right is the chasing of a false idol. Righteousness is not something that can be claimed or owned by anyone; it is a honorific bestowed on someone who does good. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about radical love; this type of love is discussed in many holy books, in many traditions around the world. That is what today should be about. In the incident on Friday, Nathan Philips tried to open a door away from a difficult situation by chanting a prayer for healing and unity. (I am trying to find out more about his chant, and if I do, I’ll update this article with that information.) Love is what must overcome the negativity in our world and be the unifying element of our lives. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said in a sermon:

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says ‘Love your enemies,’ he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies– or else? The chain reaction of evil–hate begetting hate, wars producing wars–must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”

- Martin Luther King, Jr.,“Strength to Love” (1963)

I’ll end with a somewhat more cryptic way of looking at it for you all to ponder on as you do service today. This is about unison in music.

Equality is never found in the consonances or intervals, and unison is to the musician what the point is the geometer. A point is the beginning of a line, although it is not itself a line. A line is not composed of points, since a point has no length, width or depth that can be extended or joined to another point. So a unison is only the beginning of a consonance or interval; it is neither consonance nor interval, for like the point, it is incapable of extension.

- Gioseffo Zarlino (1517-1590), singer, composer and music theorist

Love Came as a Child

For them that walk in starkness,
a lucid dream appears;
for them, a retreat from darkness
draws on the horizon and cheers.

Yea, there was a second and a third,
but when was spoke the first word,
that indeed was a concept: Love.
(Sung, as if from somewhere above.)

Then, held safe from all harms
as might lie in the wild,
from Labor to a mother’s arms,
Love came as a child.

Love, appearing as light,
thus cast darkness away
into new realms of night,
visible as shades of grey.

Abundant, how abundant,
and full, oh, so verily sooth:
Love, to all life incumbent,
our charge, our care, our truth.

What the shepherds saw,
what, to worship, sages sought:
loving care should be the flaw
to defy any, all, prizes bought.

The metaphor of the cattle stall,
is both the sermon and reminder:
A peaceable kingdom is here for all,
but only when we are in deed kinder. 

Love, as a child, came down—
Incarnate Love, we cannot shirk;
Life, Love’s cradle and crown
is, in every generation, our work.

© 2018 Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Dear Ones, 

My wish for you, now and always, is that Love be your most abundantly shared and greatest flaw. Imagine the epitaph: “Their one flaw was that they loved too deeply, too much…” May your days be filled with everything that can be shared with love and laughter; even hardship is soon overcome where Love is lively and at work. Many hands move the work forward, onward and upward. Blessings to all!

Final Walk - A Good Friday Meditation

After the dust and palm frond waves,
no steps seem more daunting,
even though each one forward paves,
despite bullies and faithless taunting,
a way, of being and living, that saves.

Servant leadership nixes vaunting
whose lie of pride and wealth behaves
so conspicuously mean and flaunting
— but all who would deny, poor knaves,
might ultimately be left empty and wanting
once redeeming love frees all of us slaves.

Good Friday is a day intended introspection rather than guilt. A newspaper headline about this day might read, “Man Acting Suspiciously Executed in Name of Empire,” and that brings it forward a few thousand years, doesn’t it?

I mean, why kill someone like the man from Nazareth? Why not sentence him to jail? After all, he did advise people that they should give Caesar what was due.

Well, it is all about the meta-message, and that was in part about upending the social strata. But that wasn’t the whole story.

Jesus tried to communicate to people that nothing about their lives was inevitable, unless they allowed it to be so. Oppression at the hands of functionaries of the Empire was the least of the difficulty. Tribalism and taboos; orthodoxy and the inevitable hypocrisy that accompanies that way of being and thinking; the creation and maintenance of ghettos—and by that I don’t just mean the ghettos that are imposed to shut people in (those are very real and devastating), but the ones we willingly create to shut people out. Jesus was trying to let us know that the fastest way to redress societal ills is not to blame, condemn, and fight, but to mitigate, ameliorate and serve.

Said another way, whenever we complain, act out or wait for someone else to solve a problem, we’re not writing ourselves into the solution; further, we are diminishing ourselves. This is not at all to say that organization and protest can be minimized to “complaint” or “acting out.” Jesus and his followers were construed to be rabble-rousers, but when they went into communities, their intent was to serve, and serve they did.

Some tried to say that what Jesus and his followers were doing was illegal, and if there was indeed a real trial, Jesus would have been convicted based on court legalities. In truth, what Jesus suggested is that to do the right thing, we are sometimes forced to act outside human law, especially where it is constructed to ensnare and weaken people in ways that serve no positive societal purpose (a real example: A court demanded a million dollars in bail for the release of a transient accused of arson. What purpose did that serve? There was no one to come forward for the man; the bail might even have been as low as $10K, and this man would have been stuck in jail.) or that are divisive toward the community.

When I reflect on the gospel message, I see that Jesus is saying we cannot use “the system” as an excuse. If “the system” needs fixing, we have to do it ourselves, even if our DIY is a “work around.” The can is kicked forward because the task of dismantling and reassembling the Tower of Babel is too daunting. So, what happens in the meanwhile? Nothing? Status quo? Complacency? All we like sheep, awaiting a new shepherd?

No. The message is clear and irrefutable: There is no easy way out of the thicket of wrongs and the legalese of inequity, but love finds the way. Love can only find the way if we have compassion and if we truly care about and are empowered toward just outcomes. This is such an outcome driven world, and yet so few people invest in the good outcome unless “good outcome” means wealth and status.

Jesus took the final walk trying to awaken us to a desire for the “right outcome.” If we want “right outcomes,” we need to invest self into the equation. Denials and excuses don’t cut it in the Kingdom of Heaven, which is here, inside each of us, and all around us in this life we are living, right now. The charge to “love thy neighbor” is a call to be and do the controversial (loudly or even secretly, if necessary), to buck the system, to do the right thing, the just thing, the very best thing.

Don’t let the dream die. Go in peace, my friends, to love and to serve.

© 2018 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

To Be or Not To Be ... Anthropocentric

Are we for or against ourselves? 

Perhaps the better question is: If we are for us, when will we start acting like it?

If the questions above seem outrageous, out there, or confusing, let me pause for a moment to offer some brief foundation on which to pin these questions.

I was born in 1961, in Berkeley, CA, a city known for radicalism and protest, then and now. My parents took us on marches. We belonged to the Co-Op. We participated in early ecological efforts. (If anyone can now remember the 1971 oil spill on San Francisco Bay, my mother took my sister and me on AC Transit to San Francisco, so we could all help in the rescue of birds and beach cleanup. This was a very low-tech process at the time. I remember lots of hay being spread about, to absorb the oil. While the beaches and bay were eventually cleaned, despite the efforts of hundreds of people, many birds perished.) We had family friends who had opted out and gone “off grid” by retreating to communes. My parents were more on the side of opting in.

Being a child of the television era, I was acutely aware of the news. Among my very earliest memories is of watching the funeral of JFK on our small, black and white Motorola portable TV. Time inched forward through strikes, assassinations, War, famine in India and Ethiopia. I knew that a war had been declared, by our President, on poverty in our nation. I knew that the Peace Corps, Red Cross and other groups were actively working to help people in other nations stricken by illness and famine. I knew there was war against illiteracy. Unrest was all around. Sometimes, I did not feel safe, but I always felt that most people were working to make the world a better place for everyone. That is a little about my background and those events that informed my understanding of the world.

Today, I look back and see that the Progressive ideas, which had their roots in three and more generations before my birth, have largely failed. We can look at the history that has been written since and find a few overarching reasons for these failures: Military Industrial Complex and rampant, unregulated Capitalism. Progressivism and citizen activism have been undermined by those moneyed interests that prefer maintaining hegemony over influence and power to partaking of an equal share in human rights and justice.

War to bolster hegemony and claim on resources has cost more lives and more money than could ever be imagined. Unrelenting capitalism has enslaved entire populaces to create and exchange worthless junk, designed for rapid failure, that quickly becomes refuse, littering our world with toxicity that threatens to endanger the health and safety of all living beings.

What few people seem to realize, here in 2018, is that the world economies are no longer tied to nations, but to corporations that wield enough wealth and power to actively avoid the attempts of any governmental body that would control them. My proof of this lies in the movement toward privatization of the security sector, and to some extent in the numerous recent wars/conflicts that seem to have been unilateral manipulations by certain governments, but which have profited corporations engaged in “rebuilding efforts”.

It is apparent to me that nationalities and governments no longer hold the keys to human destiny, and this is why terror organizations and nefarious cyber disruptors are currently so successful.

It is also apparent to me that no one at the top is interested in civilization or social wellbeing.

What shocking things to say!

If only humans could be accused of being anthropocentric! But, alas, we cannot.

If we were truly anthropocentric, we would realize that anthropocentrism is a state that must be cultivated. The principal flaw of capitalism is that it can only survive when people buy. But if the world is populated by a few haves, the rest being have-nots, ultimately means that that having is an endgame. If the captains of capitalism don’t get to work cultivating larger groups of haves (people who will be capable of buying because they have knowledge, jobs and health, affordable housing, adequate access to food and water), the “free-for-all” marketplace will die, along with great swaths of the world’s population.

After that, all that is left is warlord military might à la Mad Max. And then, you capitalists, watch out!

The solution, to my mind, lies in a benevolent anthropocentrism, one that buys into a central notion that to keep the world going, you need smart, cultured, engaged, and empathetic people of all shapes, sizes, colors, ages, genders and cultural affiliations; caring people. Such people know that the earth and all life must be stewarded, and that this cannot be accomplished by stealing, cheating, lying or bullying, but by cooperation toward a common good for everyone and everything. We need to demilitarize the populace. We need to find the root causes of violence, isolation, depression, misanthropy; we need to weed them out by healing, hybridizing and nurturing wellbeing, by loving. We need to dismantle predatory thinking and practices, and replacing them with innovation that breeds life and purpose. We need to cultivate citizenship and personal responsibility that is manifest in every action built from the bottom up, and (as business consultants never tire in speaking of) resonated in the tone from the top.

Evolution, that is I am talking about, folks. We need to evolve. We desperately need to become something we clearly right now are not. We need to become truly human and anthropocentric in the sense that being good to the world around us is the path toward both meeting all our basic needs and providing spiritual fulfillment.

It is a simple idea, in the words of T.S. Eliot, “costing not less than everything.”

Or, as Voltaire has his eponymous hero ultimately declare, “repondit Candide, ‘Oui, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.’”

All About Making Waves

MYSTERY CYCLE
V. Making Waves

                   for Emily and Ian and their Dad – 20 October 2000

It’s your turn,
a heavenly voice said,
then a tremendous tickle ran out through the clouds,
followed by jiggling rolls escaping into snickers,
and pealing positively gales on gales of giggles
until, finally, there wasn’t anything for it,
and the clouds burst into laughter,
what you call rain.

Drop upon drop,
from small to large, both young and old,
they all fell down akimbo,
tumbling from the sky,
collecting, drunkenly you might say,
in puddles to pools to rivulets to streams,
finally running like great silver ribbons to the sea.

I can’t remember,
One asked an-Other, still giggling the tickle,
I say, what was the joke?
but Any-one would have been too wet to answer,
though really No-one heard clearly enough to say,
and Every-one was wondering what would happen next,
so, if there was a reply, who could say if it was made,
and whether by Which-one,
or not?

But Some-one was able to hold the thought long enough
and, floating up through the lovely bubbles to the surface,
called out to friend Sky for the answer.

A, Darling, did they not tell you long ago?
It’s your turn to have fun!

They gather you all up into their arms,
lulling you with sweetest windsongs
from all the Four Corners of existence,
and when it is your time,
they shake you loose
to join the great throng,
so you can be free.

But what shall we do?
asked the littlest drop.

Moon shimmered a silken answer:
Dearest, anything you do will make me smile,
but why don’t you make me some waves?

So, laughing and shoving all the more,
fumbling and recklessly tumbling,
all heels over heads toward the shores
and to the utter delight of all,
they did.

Reprinted from
“Songs of A Soul Journey” by Elisabeth T. Eliassen © 2002 all rights reserved.

It has been a rainy year, and so, on this anniversary of the birth of my twins, Emily and Ian, I bring you the message that life is wild, wet, wooly, weird and wonderful. Punctuated by hard times, yes; but even so, still the best game in town.

I, who declared at the age of 12 or so that I would never have children, gave birth to twins on this day, 17 years ago -- which is to say that one can make all the bold pronouncements one likes, but the cosmos has other ideas... 

From wombmates to roommates to housemates, they have shared so much with us and each other… 

So, to Emily and Ian, (and to all of you) I say:

Keep jiggling the rolls and giggling the tickles, 

because it’s your turn to have fun;

it's all about making waves!

~ love,

Mom

A Preface To Joining

True enough, a blending,
to some extent, a mending
of some breach, a sending
of renewed hope, extending
from now to beyond pretending
that unity is only an appending,
together a mere attending.

No, this is a mystical kenning
to the purpose life is commending,
never a spectrum of solitary rending,
but a transforming and transcending,
willing to work through good and ill, wending
each way, a striving to build, unbending
the furrows of Eden to flower, suspending
any doubt that union is love ascending.

© 2016 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Introductions, a Memory

Out of an abundance of need,
two women
—one a sister,
the other a friendly stranger—
drew together in an embrace,
propelled by the spontaneity
only a history of sorrow might trace.

In that moment,
one of life’s mysteries
would find full flower
and understanding.

In that moment:

One realized
her sister had spun
a mantle of love and beauty
large enough to cover family,
friends and neighbors,
while inviting many others in
—a sending of
her family’s values out
to grow in the world.

The other very nearly felt
the beating heart
of the lost friend,
and knew the depth
of that rhythm’s origins
in the family,
from which she had poured forth
as lightness and love,
later fully distilled
into a golden girl child,
united now forever with,
inseparable from, her mother
in death.

Two strangers,
in that moment,
may have shared one,
perhaps the same realization,
and tightened their hold
on one another,
with a strange mixture
of tearful elation and deep sorrow:

Fiercely joyous untold love
had been unleashed into
and would live on in the world.

Parting as strangers,
never to meet again,,
each was consoled
in the knowledge that
She and her Girl,
from whatever beyond,
were continuing
to make introductions.

© 2015 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

in memoriam Rachel and Annika