This month, I continue writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. Today’s prompt asks where we have traveled, even if it is just down the street.
It’s been a while since I’ve had morning coffee over an Ada Limón book, so this morning, that’s where I’m traveling. I’m using Instructions on Not Giving Up as a mentor poem for my poem about traveling today. As they say of travel, “Birds have wings; humans have books.”
Instructions on Traveling the World
more than the elusive green and Seine of Paris, a city
of concrete and stone, more than the Thames rushing by
The Tower, more than the Spree and its bridge of love locks, it’s
the early morning steam rising off the quaint rural ponds
that really gets to me. When darkness clocks out
and the world is still, you can see the wispy white nightgowns –
those sheer ones that seem to float – hanging onto the
threads of the night waters. Flowing, fading, an ethereal mist
takes shape, vanishing into all assurance of another place
and promise of return. Fine, then, I’ll take it, my soul seems
to say, embracing faith that this is how the cycle works
across the globe, transcending Heaven and Earth as I grasp the truth
of it, finally: it’s not about where my body goes, but where my
This month, I continue writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. Today’s prompt asks to tell our stories of love.
Perhaps there is no better day for this prompt than today, the day of the wedding of my college roommate and best friend’s younger daughter, Sarah. Stacey and Keith Jackson and their two daughters are friends who have been there through it all with my family, and ours with theirs. College, graduations, losses of parents, births of children, vacations together, my divorce and relocation to live closer them and then my remarriage (Stacey found the love of my life when my first attempt failed), kids’ weddings, and grandchildren. There’s been more love in this strong friendship than there is in many families. And this is why this day is so special and meaningful.
I left work early yesterday after a tough meeting, feeling drained and not knowing whether there was a single smile left in me. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get through the wedding rehearsal, hoping the headache I was feeling behind my left eye was not another onset of vertigo. I pulled through Chick Fil A and got a real Coca Cola, the one with caffeine, to try to help stave it off, and I did a few eye exercises the way I’ve been taught. I pulled up my GPS to get to Forest Hill Park in Perry, Georgia – – one hour and 18 minutes south. The sun was lowering itself in the sky on my right, and the chill in the crisp fall air with a few leaves beginning to turn tuned my heart back to the right station in my silent car. I wanted it that way after the long meeting. Silence is truly as golden as the sunset, and I needed to do all I could to calm my mind and shift gears back to what truly matters.
I turned the years back through my mind, to the days of helping my own mother, a pastor’s wife, coordinate weddings since I was 7 years old, the year I won second place at the local airport’s 1973 Christmas Flower Show only because she guided my hands and told me where to stick the greenery and each flower. She taught me a little about floral design, she showed me how she met with brides to prepare catered meals, she showed me how to use a hot glue gun and attach Galax leaves to an entire tablecloth when a bride wanted the venue to look like a forest with the huge cake sitting on that table, and she taught me how to be aware when the lights needed dimming or the train needed straightening. Her company, Elegant Thymes, offered the full package of wedding services, right down to the preacher and the church. Mom’s voice speaks and nudges quite presently from Heaven at weddings.
Just a few years ago, it seemed, Stacey and I were making table arrangements and bridesmaids’ bouquets for Sarah’s first wedding, and then using golf tees for attendant placement in my absence as I directed her other daughter Hannah’s wedding rehearsal a few years later from the road on my way to Pascagoula, Mississippi. Since I couldn’t get there in person for that rehearsal, I’d sketched a diagram and suggested using golf tees in the ground to help position the wedding party. It worked, and she pulled it off beautifully as I made my way in time for her to pass the baton to me for the big day. We have always worked as a team that way.
We didn’t have to use golf tees last night. I left work early enough to get there, meet the groom’s side of the family, and have a few minutes to catch up before the rehearsal began. There’s a steeple and an altar in the small park, and a covered bridge that brides cross to walk down the bricked path to the altar. The ladies get dressed in an old train car, while the men go into the old church-turned-wedding-venue and remain in their designated place until time to join two hearts into the forever kind of love everyone hopes to find someday.
Sarah and Brian have found theirs, and it’s as real and palpable, as certain as the sun setting behind the steeple beneath which they will take their vows this evening at 5:30. You see, this couple knows about commitment. Brian has two sons he and Sarah have committed to raising, one with severe Cerebral Palsy. The other, so polite and helpful, is his Best Man. From the time I arrived, I saw Brian making every consideration for his son in his wheelchair and for Sarah, who has a degenerative muscular disease and knows that his arm will be there for her every step of the journey ahead. What you or I might consider a challenge, they embrace joyfully and gratefully as their life —and they have committed to it and will live it together in love.
From this day forward. For better or worse. For richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as they both shall live.
Every wedding director knows there is no right way and no wrong way to “do” a wedding. We tend to start in the middle with placement, then run through the recessional, run through a processional, and then recess a final time to be sure everyone is comfortable. We remind the groomsmen to clasp their hands in front, bridesmaids to hold bouquets just above their waist so the pictures look great. We take note of the sun’s position and the weather report if it’s an outdoor wedding. Stacey calls it “herding cats.” We check with the bride on all decisions, and humorously but seriously remind the groom that the first rule of marriage is learning to listen to the bride, and that it’s all been practice until the wedding, and then it’s officially signed onto paper, so he’d better be ready. We all laugh.
But last night, the groom stepped in with his own request I wasn’t expecting. The walkway to the altar is on the right side of the chairs leading up to the steeple – there is no “middle aisle.” Brian asked to flip tradition and bring the bridesmaids to the right side, groomsmen on the left, to make it easier for his bride to navigate her journey to the altar. My heart melted. Why hadn’t I seen that??
I knew right then: he is THE ONE for our Sarah. Not only is he so completely in love with her that you can see it in his eyes every time he beholds her, but he is also tender in his care of her. He knows what commitment means, and his “I Do” is the forever kind that will carry his family forward through the years, into the togetherness that isn’t afraid to ask to throw out tradition when it comes to what’s best for them. God has winked in the most loving way on our sweet Sarah, on her groom, and on this new young family.
Commitment with tenderness, always self-sacrificing, is the truest kind of love there is, and I will be there with a Kleenex, grateful to be in the shadows of the trees back by the old covered bridge, directing the wedding of my truest-ever friend’s daughter and her new husband, ready to embrace life and love in a deeper way than most of us may ever know.
A Toast
to life
to love
to Sarah and Brian
as they begin
their new life
together
This will be the sun’s position at 5:30 today, Sarah and Brian’s wedding day, as they take their vows at Forest Hill Park in Perry, Georgia.
The flower show trophy from 1973 – my first training experience that prepared me to work by Mom as she coordinated weddings and events
This month, I continue writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. Today, Goldberg asks: tell me about thoughts you have often but that are never manifested. Here is a Shadorma, which takes the 3-5-3-3-7-5 syllable structure in its 6 lines.
My father died June 13 after a long battle with Pulmonary Fibrosis, Colorectal Cancer, and Prostate Cancer. We are nearly four months into life without him, and yet the grief my brother and I have experienced has been an emotional roller coaster of shock, anger, and sadness compounded by the physical tasks of wrapping up his unfinished business and cleaning his house and seven storage rooms.
You read that right. Seven storage rooms.
Mom died ten years ago, and she’d been the glue. Once she was no longer here, his cord came unraveled. He would not allow others – especially his own children – to help him divest himself of his belongings, and he did not know how to handle these things alone – even though he insisted he did and promised time and again that he would.
Oh, how he was stubborn! He bought a car against the advice of the mechanic inspecting it (all because he’d lost the keys to the one he drove). He fired the housekeeper that his doctor strongly urged him to hire and keep after only one visit – reluctantly managing the hiring, but not the keeping.
We struggled to find compassion for Dad when he wouldn’t listen – and frustration lingers as my brother and I have had to bring our own lives to a screeching halt to try to clean up the mess he would not allow us to touch before school started back, which would have allowed a better pace and less racing against the clock to avoid additional monthly storage fees.
I’ll admit: I felt a certain smug satisfaction when a huge limb fell on his new car and knocked the side view mirror off, proving that the repair bills on that make and model would be far more than we knew he wanted to spend after he’d told us sternly that we were just wrong. I delighted in the concierge doctor who did more than suggest that the boxes stacked against the door of the guest room were a fire hazard and that the condition of the home warranted a housekeeper.
We came to places of disbelief, watching him do things no person in their right mind would do. Once we realized he wasn’t in his right mind, we developed what little compassion we could muster.
It was hard to feel compassion for our father, who seemed to be working against us at every turn.
Ephesians 4:32 says be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. How many times has God watched me make mistakes, deliberately and willfully, and then forgiven me with grace and mercy? I needed to extend grace to my earthly father the way my Heavenly Father has so freely offered it to me for 59 years. Even though compassion isn’t listed as one of the nine fruits of the Spirit in Galatians, I’m pretty sure it’s an offshoot fruit, like a secondary or tertiary fruit in the complete rainbow sherbet of spiritual fruits.
Feelings of guilt and regret emerged as we watched our father lying at peace in his Hospice bed, breathing machine as loud and obnoxious as an after-storm generator in a total power loss. I took photos of our hands holding his, so still against the backdrop of the snow white sheets. There was silence without peace, sleep without rest, stillness without calm in all the trademark ways that grief works.
I grappled with my lack of compassion when it mattered – and will carry some of that regret for the rest of my life. I was not as tactful and understanding as I could have been while Dad was still alive. But I take comfort that I held presence in those final weeks, burning sick and bereavement days at work to be with him. I invited his stories of the good old days, recorded them, and took interest in them. I offered words of thankfulness and pride in him, making our peace at the bitter end of a long road.
….still I wonder:
how far down the road
is self-forgiveness
and how does regret
over the absence
of compassion
get resolved?
I’m asking my Spiritual Journey friends for your stories and insights on compassion today. Please share your links to your blogs below. If you do not have a blog, please share your experiences and stories in the comments.
This month, I continue writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. Today’s prompt asks what we have come through. So I wrote a What I’ve Come Through Haiku.
This month, I continue writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. Today’s prompt: Begin the writing with “Nothing at all happened.” Or end it that way. I’ve chosen a Nonet and Reverse Nonet today, where each line 9-1 and 1-9 has that many syllables on it. I’ve also chosen a circular ending so that the same line that begins also ends the poem.
This month, I continue writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. Today’s question asks: Where did your family come from, and when? This question reminds me of the George Ella Lyon poem Where I’m From, and I’ll take that form today. I’m sharing the original by Lyon, and then I’ll follow with my own. You can read more about the roots of the idea here.
Where I’m From
I am from clothespins, from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride. I am from the dirt under the back porch. (Black, glistening, it tasted like beets.) I am from the forsythia bush the Dutch elm whose long-gone limbs I remember as if they were my own.
I’m from fudge and eyeglasses, from Imogene and Alafair. I’m from the know-it-alls and the pass-it-ons, from Perk up! and Pipe down! I’m from He restoreth my soul with a cottonball lamb and ten verses I can say myself.
I’m from Artemus and Billie’s Branch, fried corn and strong coffee. From the finger my grandfather lost to the auger, the eye my father shut to keep his sight.
Under my bed was a dress box spilling old pictures, a sift of lost faces to drift beneath my dreams. I am from those moments– snapped before I budded — leaf-fall from the family tree.
My chosen form is a rambling poem. I love the unexpected turns and the no-pause, no-punctuation stream of consciousness thinking in a rambling poem. Here is one that I wrote in 2024, with a few tweaks. My name, Kimberly, means Royal Fortress Meadow.
Royal Fortress Meadow
I’m from the Royal Fortress Meadow
from Breck shampoo and Johnson’s No More Tears
from wispy locks of amber gold, windblown in the breeze
I’m from chain-woven crowns of wildflowers, dandelions, and daisies
from backlit sunlight exposing truth: there will never be no more tears
from churning butter in an antique churnÂ
I’m from ancestors of the lye soap cooked in the backyard
from the front porch swing and swigging Mason Jars of sweet tea
from wash behind your ears and do a good tick check
from a don’t you slam that screen door one more time! flyswatter granny
who swatted more than flies
I’m from the country church of the cardboard funeral fans
with the off-key piano
I’m from Georgia, Cherokee blood three generation branches up-tree,
still searching for the bloodstained earth of my ancestors
from Silver Queen corn, husks shucked
from shady pecan groves and Vidalia onion fields
from Okefenokee swamplands and railroads
that side of the tree that tallied three pees before flushing
from clotheslines of fresh sheets teeming with sweet dreams
from sleeping under a box window fan in sweltering summer heat
This month, I continue writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. The prompt today is inspired by a question in Brother, I’m Dying asked by one of Edwidge Danticat’s brothers of his father after he tells his children he has a fatal disease. Goldberg asks us to answer that same question, honestly – to do an honest assessment.
I’ve chosen a shape poem today, also called a concrete poem since it takes the form of a tangible object or symbol shape. So here’s a lamp to shed a little truth on the answer to the question today.
This month, I continue writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. Begin the writing with “You Need to Know This” to complete today’s prompt.
Whenever we are anywhere and the Eagles ask that question in Take it to the Limit, we stop and nod. Yes, always.
This month, I continue writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. Today’s prompts asks us to tell everything we know about rutabagas and turnips and other vegetables, fruits, and objects often ignored.
A lot of people ignore mermaids, thinking they aren’t real. Let me tell you something: they are. There are tree spirits that explain the whole situation.
Common Threads 