Thank You for the Rainbows: Remembrance (And Instructions. HA!)

The recent passing of a member of my church family -- the giggling, gossiping, generous and already-sorely-missed Katie, who never once flinched when I told her I was gay and then presented me with a Book of Common Prayer that had a cover made of rainbow-colored yarn and the observation that, "You know, whoever made this probably didn't have this in mind, but take it, it suits you." -- has me up late thinking about death.

Morbid, I know. And yet.

Actually, I've been up a lot lately thinking about death: my regular, generally unfounded forays into panic have, over the past several months, coalesced into a huge, seething ball of death anxiety. I even have a CD by an artist called Pocket Vinyl called Death Anxiety, which actually helps with the death anxiety because the guy who wrote it has his own huge, seething ball of the stuff. I don't know what to do about the death anxiety, but I have many an idea of what I do and do not want to be done with my body after I am indeed dead. Yes, I will be writing it down. Yes, I will be consulting an attorney and making a living will to go along with my unpleasant-to-think-about-but-definitely-necessary Mental Health Advanced Directive -- and finding out if some of these things I want are even possible. But the Internet is forever and it helps me to ping things off other people, so here it is: The Grand List of Dos and Donts for Dead Tif.

1. I DO NOT WANT TO BE EMBALMED. It is not, in fact, the law here. I looked it up. You can place me in a sealed casket or stick me in your walk-in freezer. I don't care. JUST DON'T LET THEM EMBALM ME. I have come to realize that it isn't death that bothers me as much as it is the thought of what modern mortuary science does to your body after you're dead. I mean, I'll be dead, so ostensibly I won't care, but please, please, PLEASE, for the love of all things holy, don't let anyone lay me out on a cold metal slab and replace my blood with chemicals. It's macabre. I can't deal with it. Which brings me to a second and then a third point:

2. I hope that when I die, whenever that is, there is someone who loves me enough to perform for me the burial rites the way they were done before all the impersonal expanses of glinting metal came to dominate our medical culture. Someone who loves me enough to wash me by hand and then wrap me in a shroud. Even if I'm going to be cremated and planted in a biodegradable urn and then become a tree, because I saw you can do that now, and I really, really like the idea. I would prefer to be consigned to the flames with dignity. (Side note: screw white; make that damn shroud so purple it hurts.)

3. If I do end up with the regular casket-and-burial deal, no one gets to come gawk at my corpse. I suppose I could skip this item because I'm not being embalmed so after 24 hours you wouldn't be able to look at me because I'd already be sealed up in a box or keeping your venison company in the deep-freeze, but seriously. Corpse-gawking? That's macabre, too. The only persons who get to see my dead body are the folks who do my laying out.

4. Concerning attire: Everyone is to wear something obviously purple. No half-assing it. No, "But my underwear are purple!" That will not do. You MUST. WEAR. PURPLE. I insist. I will know.

5. Concerning music: do not let anyone pipe in sappy acoustic versions of my favorite songs. There will be a list included with my will -- play those songs. And turn those fuckers up. Enjoy them. Sappy acoustic versions of my jams will cause a disturbance in the universal flow of which I will then be a part, and I will come back to haunt the deejay mercilessly for an undisclosed period of time.

6. If I should happen to expire of some disability-related malady, there is to be no inspiration porn at my service. If I inspired you in some way you're allowed to talk about that, but one teary, "And now she's free to run forever..." and the part of the universal flow that is Tif might have to smack you upside the head.

7. Much as I love my Episcopal church family and enjoy being Christopagan (That's a real term! It's so exciting! It has nothing to do with Columbus!) in their company, I do not want an Episcopal burial service. I don't want much of a Christian service at all, though my favorite hymn is "Come Thou Fount (Of Every Blessing), and you're welcome to belt that out as many times as you please. I've been researching pagan funeral rites, and they are BEAUTIFUL. That's what I want. ("May there be peace in the North...") I'll include a set of instructions with my will and tweak it so that it can be done even if I don't know four pagans for the Four Elements when I die. (All of my pagan friends are contemporaries, so unless I die next week -- which I don't want to do and don't plan on doing, so don't worry your pretty little minds over that -- I might be screwed if I only set up for four.) If the thought of a non-Christian or Pagan service bothers you, I'm sorry you feel that way and I still love you, but don't come to my funeral. Say goodbye some other way of your own choosing.

It might sound like a lot of work, and maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. Having never had to care for the dead in this manner, I do not know. But if you, reading this, are alive when I am not and see me laid to rest, wear purple. Blast my favorite songs. Sing "Come Thou Fount". And if for reasons of my not being pumped full of preservatives there is no time for a chapel service, have a memorial service. Hell, just throw a party in somebody's basement. If you remember me, I'll be there. Energy never dies -- I'll be part of the earth, part of the wind, part of the rain, an Ash tree, maybe, but I'll be there. My being will simply (profoundly!) have been swept into the rhythms of the natural world, to help other life have its chance to live.

And that's pretty cool.

You are missed, Miss Katie. Thank you for the rainbows.

A Bridge Over Untroubled Water: Sunset on Lake Pontchartrain, and other beauteous things

It's 2 a.m. and I'm still awake, because apparently I'm in one of those special cycles wherein anything that makes me a functional human being -- like sleep -- gets kicked to the curb. My brain is breaking up with me. Everything I own is in the box to the left.

Anyway, since I can't sleep, I figured I might as well wax poetic about the sunset on Lake Pontchartrain. We went down South, see, to finalize Pip's adoption (by "we" I mean Mama, Dad, Pip, and of course myself) and by some sheer miracle of timing, we happened to hit the bridge over the lake just as the sun started to go down.

The bridge over Lake Pontchartrain is over 20 miles long, and the lake itself is some 630 square miles. Drive a few miles out, and it's like being in a Buick LaCrosse in the middle of the ocean: everywhere you look, nothing but water stretching away to the horizon. Looking at it, I finally understood how the early explorers thought the world was flat. The water just goes on and on forever.

The colors of that sunset on the surface of the lake! The light! The purple and orange and velvety blue sky so close I felt like I could reach up through the roof of the car and touch the it, and come away with a masterpiece of wet paint on my hands. The huge red eye of the sun hanging suspended over the surface, looking for all the world like it was about to drop quietly into the water and disappear... oh. Oh. I can't even describe it right. I can't do it justice, how it made me feel: excited and awed and deeply moved, bouncing in my seat like a small child, but silent, with my nose against the window. I've never seen anything like it before. I may never see anything like it again. It was... breathtaking.

I'd ride all the way to Louisiana just to see it again. It's worth a trip in itself.

We didn't get to see much in our whirlwind tour of the South: we were in New Orleans for a court appearance, and then we swung by my Mama's folks out in Georgia, and then we had to head home so working lives could resume on schedule. I wanted to drag my feet and look at everything, but alas, there was no time. It's nice, though, how just the experience of sharing rooms in little hotels with the 3 people one loves most and catching breakfast together in random diners before driving on is it's own little piece of everything. Sitting on a hotel bed eating a shrimp po'boy late at night while the palmetto bugs scream is a memory I will always keep. So is the childlike glee with which I encountered Spanish moss, palm trees, and pine cones bigger around than a baseball. (I brought one home with me.)

And then, of course, there was the adoption finalization in itself: not a legal hurdle or a fight to keep Paul, as some people have thought, but a proceeding to terminate the rights of his birth parents and so officially recognize Paul as adopted for life by my Mama and Dad, and to legally change his name. It was quick and painless. The only tears shed were tears of happiness. I was in the courtroom while the judge read the decree, and I cried at the beauty of the whole thing: the fact of Paul being born, and being real and alive and miraculous, and of coming home to us so we can love and nurture him and help him as he grows; at those words, "adopted for life." Tears slipped down my face. My Mama cried. So did Dad, though he'll likely deny it if you ask him. Something about it was so incredibly moving. Something about it felt, to me, like so many pieces to an eternal puzzle dropped neatly into place, right where they were supposed to go. It felt... right. Pip has felt right since the moment I laid eyes on him, and this was just a confirmation of that rightness. I was glad I got to be there for it. So very glad.

And now I'm so very tired. We'll see if Tiffany.Writes. Down. actually helped. Tiffany wrote down. G'night.

Back in the Saddle: Tif Blogs Again!

It has been nearly a year since I, Caged Bird, have posted ANYTHING. I need to get back in the habit. I've thought about it on and off, but the longer I waited the more I had to say, and the more I had to say the less I wanted to say it. It fed itself: the endless loop of Not-Wanting.

Blogging is nice, though. Therapeutic. I know at least one person reads what I post, so it's my way of pinging out signals more... wordy than what would normally be put in a Facebook status (Though I tend to be wordy there, too.) It's weird to say that this is a more personal method, given that it's on the Internet and despite my privacy settings, any hacker with 2 brain cells to put together could read everything I type, but it feels more personal. Hello. I am conversing with you from across the table.

It would be impossible -- even if I wanted to tackle it, which I don't -- to apprise you of everything that has happened in the past almost-year, but it has flown. My brother, alias Pip, will be a year old in a few months. He's 99th percentile on everything having anything to do with the growth chart: height, weight, head circumference. It's like having a 2 year old with one tooth in his head. My job now is to nanny him each day while my Mom and Dad work, which is an arrangement that makes me ridiculously happy. It's hard work, but for once in my life I am perfectly content with something. This child lights my life. I was feeling more than a little aimless before he came along: disabled and apparently unemployable, very little structure to my days, groping around for reasons to get out of bed. I majored in Social Work because I wanted to do something with my life that matters, but 70-some job applications and only a handful of interviews -- and 0 offers for employment -- later, I felt like wasn't mattering to anyone. Barely to myself, even. I was more depressed than I was letting on.

And then, Pip. BANG! Everything opened up. It has been such a privilege to watch him grow and develop almost daily for the past 10 months. He makes me so happy, with his frizzy little 'fro and his big brown eyes and that mega-watt smile.  He's old enough now to instigate games of peek-a-boo, to indicate that he wants to be tickled, to open his arms and come at me full tilt like a barreling train. It's been 10 months, and sometimes I still hold him and cry at the sheer miracle of him. He's my favorite person.

Everything else in life is pretty much the same, although it's also completely different because he's here. It was a natural absorption, a perfect fit, our Pip into the pattern of our lives. He belongs with us. We belong with him. It's that simple, and that amazing.

I turned 30 in December. Jude-cat will be 9 toward the end of July. I bought my first piece of brand-new furniture at the end of last year. It barely fits in my tiny apartment, but it's my couch with 2 reclining ends, and I'm proud of it. People on poverty-level incomes buying their own couches is equal to the upper middle class acquiring McMansions. I have acquired a reclining McMansion. Go me.

I'm currently waiting on and going through a battery of tests to figure out why my ankles won't stop swelling, which just screams "Heart trouble!" and has me feeling even more neurotic than usual, but other than that, life has a pleasant routine: I spend the days with Pip, and in the evenings I either go for a latte, with book, or stow away outside under a tree, also with book. I want to read 120 this year. I'm trying to fit more mindful appreciation of the present moment into my everyday life, and it really has opened up my whole world. Before mindfulness, I was just this anxious creature all boxed up inside myself in a little cell of not-noticing. It occurred to me, earlier this Spring when I stopped to listen to the birds sing, that I'd never purposely stopped to listen to the birds sing. This seems sad to me now. The world takes on a magical new depth when you set out to appreciate life on purpose, and not just get through it. The mundane can become fascinating -- I spent a long time, just the other day, marveling at the way a robin hops. Maybe it sounds silly, but you really should try it: just a few minutes here and there to stop and tune in to your life, your experience, your surroundings, can make so much difference in the way you see things -- or, like in my case, can even determine whether you ever see them or not. Or hear them.

Now that I sound like a New Age guru (I do yoga now too; cover your face and lament), I'll sign off for the time being. But expect to keep hearing (seeing?) from me. I have remembered why I keep a blog: because I like it.

A Family Story

Once upon a time, there were two truly amazing people living in a tiny town in Pennsylvania. One day, they took in a broken girl and decided to help her put herself back together again. They didn't have to; no one expected it of them. Very few people even knew it was happening. That's what made it so amazing: they didn't have to do it, but they did it anyway.

For awhile, it was rough. The broken girl was really very broken, and loving her wasn't always easy. There were fights. There were hospital waiting rooms in the middle of the night. There was a time when the broken girl, who had by then become a woman but who felt very small and dark inside all the same, pushed against constancy and love with everything she had, looking for a way to break it, searching for an escape route, convinced these two amazing people couldn't possibly care about her, someone else's castoff child. Other people had claimed to love her before. They had lied.

But this time there was no need to run. There was no need to escape. The girl pushed and struggled, and the man and woman held on. The harder she fought, the harder they held. And then, finally, the girl realized something phenomenal: They weren't going anywhere. She began to settle. She stopped fighting and let family be redefined for her, let people love her, let there be Christmases together,  and birthday dinners, and nights on back roads looking up at the stars, and all the little things that make up what it means to be a family.

And then came something even more amazing.

For years and years, the girl had been too broken to ever call another woman Mom. Dad she could manage, somehow, and she had a dad again, a great dad, the best dad there was: he taught her how to hunt for ghosts and how to throw darts and hatchets and change a fuse, and all about Star Wars and superheroes, but mostly he let her be somebody's little girl again, even though she wasn't little anymore.

But the part in the girl's heart that said "Mom" stayed empty, because she was too afraid to fill it. But time kept going by, as it will, and one day she wasn't as afraid anymore. And then she was a little less afraid, and a little less afraid, until finally she gathered up all her courage and said to the woman:

"Can I call you Mom?"

And the amazing woman said yes. Even though it made her feel old.

And then -- and pay attention, now, because this is where it gets really, really good -- the amazing man and the amazing woman decided to do something even more amazing than all the amazing stuff they had already done, and they adopted a baby boy.

When the once-broken girl (who was now just as mostly whole as most other people are, because everybody has cracks and scars, you know) first learned that there was going to be a baby someday, she was really excited -- and also kind of scared. A tiny part of her thought, if there's something that'll make them not want you anymore, it's a baby. (She felt horrible about feeling like this, but the fear was there anyway.) But it turned out to be nothing to worry about, because the great thing about a family is that it can grow and grow and never need to cut off any parts or pieces so that other pieces fit. The excitement drowned the fear. The girl told the fear to shut its stupid, ugly mouth and started planning a baby shower -- months and months in advance, before there was even a woman out there in the world with a heart big enough to give away her baby so that it could have a life with the amazing man and woman who had also taken in, once upon a time, the broken girl.

And then the day came, and he was born. Paul. And when the once-broken girl saw a picture of Paul, her heart grew and grew and grew until she thought it might burst. She was so happy for the amazing man and woman, who had waited so very long for their very own baby and finally had him -- Paul, perfect, beautiful Paul -- that she cried and smiled and smiled and cried and laughed with joy and couldn't stop crying and smiling and laughing and being so happy for someone else that she didn't know what to do with it, so she smiled and laughed and cried some more!

The amazing man and the amazing woman don't know how incredible they are. That's the thing about amazing people: they think they're ordinary. But there's a girl in the world who knows better, and now she has a brother who will know too, because over and over again she will tell him the story. She will take him on her knee and say, "Listen, little brother. Listen. Once upon a time, there were two truly amazing people living in a tiny town in Pennsylvania. And then there was me. And now there's you. Because the great thing about a family is that it can grow and grow, and never need to cut off any parts or pieces so that other pieces fit."

The End.

Untitled Poem about Faith (Or Lack Thereof)

No matter how long ago it was,
               No matter how many      years

                              months

                              days

                              hours

                              minutes

                              seconds separate

Me from that last scream,
               No matter how many personal theologies I try and    reject

                              and retry

                              and re-reject

No matter how many churches I duck into and then out of    again

                              and again

                              and then again

Driven away by the smell of the air,
               Driven away by the press of the walls,
Driven away by the wide open spaces,
               Driven away by the hymns     (even as I love them)
Driven ever away from the many homes of a God who abandoned me

                              to darkness

                              mercilessness

                              and the shadow of death

No matter my resentments, my fear, my insecurities, my anger, my sorrow,
my pain, my pain, my bitter, bloody pain and self-pity and self-loathing         and again my fear

               No matter that                 no matter any of it

               I can never stop looking for,
               crying for,
               praying for        Everlasting Arms to lean on

Though I am certain their embrace        Will crush me.

Christmas Un-Caroling?

Sometimes I am rudely and abruptly reminded that no matter how much time may pass, the reality of a violent childhood will be with me forever.

John Michael Montgomery's hit song "The Little Girl" was released in August of 2000. I turned fifteen that December. I was still a little girl myself, and it would be several more months before I would look at my mother through a scrim of tears and blood and tell her not to come back to my room again unless she wanted me to kill her. Most of the little girl in me was gone or hidden away by then under the iron will I'd need to survive the rest of my time in Hell, but when TLG started climbing the charts, I was still a baby who thought Jesus was going to come whisk me away from my suffering.

Every time I heard that song, it broke off a piece of me. It broke me because it made me hope, and hope was a dangerous thing then. Hope meant disappointment. In the final stretch of years and months between the first time I heard that song and my one bid for freedom that didn't have my death drawn into the plans -- because so many of them did; there are so many ways to end a life, and I thought of them all -- I would learn that the only way to keep going was to turn hope off, to accept that every day was going to continue to be the same as the day before, and that I had to put my shoulder into the work of surviving and keep pushing forward till I dropped in place. But before that lesson made itself known, hope twisted and squirmed and gnashed inside me, and it hurt. Hope hurt in a way I cannot describe, like a feast set for a starving child who has no mouth with which to eat. I needed what I could not have. I was set in a race against time, violence, and the limits of the human spirit, and I was steadily losing ground. "The Little Girl" reminded me of that. It made me know, deep down, that I knew I was dying: there comes a point at which a person's will can no longer serve to keep her fully human, and an intrinsic part of a person will perish when pushed to that point. If I didn't die at the hands of my mother or at the hands of myself, or escape, and soon, I'd become a walking ghost, lose all desire to, or concept of, how to relate to others beyond the necessities of self-preservation.

It might sound drastic, and it is, but it's real. It's even recognized by the medical and mental health spheres as a type of attachment disorder. Of course, I didn't know that then. I just knew, could sense, that if I didn't get out I'd die, one way or another. That in some important way, even if I was still physically present, I would cease to be. 

There are fates worse than death.

I managed to escape the harshest of these, but I carry scars with me wherever I go. It's not a ploy for pity, saying that: it's a fact. We all carry scars, some deeper than others, some deep enough to affect everything that we are and everything that we do. I said earlier that sometimes I am rudely and unexpectedly reminded of this, but actually I need no reminders: I carry my past with me in the present, as a current of thoughts and memories and emotions that are right on the edge of my conscious mind every second of every day. If it sounds exhausting, that's because it is. It's exhausting and limiting; it throws up roadblocks you don't expect. I fell head over heels in love once, and I was so scared of it I pushed it away and watched it burn. I don't date anymore, because I'm too afraid of it happening again. I'm 29.

The past in the present can bring about good things, too, like my unquenchable passion for social justice and my entrenched belief that people are entitled to be loved and cared for because of the same reason that they're entitled to breathe: they exist, and therefore they matter. They are human, and they live and breathe and feel; they are real and they matter. Because of my own suffering, I am uniquely attuned to the suffering of others. I am a person who will drop everything and run to help alleviate it, and I probably wouldn't be that person if I hadn't suffered.

There are times, though, when I wish I didn't have to be reminded of the length and breadth of my own particular suffering. When I don't expect to be. I went to the coffee shop tonight to hear Christmas carols, and instead I heard a song that was probably only put into the set because it had Jesus in it, and 'tis the season for Christians everywhere to make sure everything has Jesus in it. (Did that sound bitter? It did, didn't it? Oh well. Truth is truth.) As soon as the artist announced it, I knew I couldn't listen. I will endure a lot in the name of awareness -- for instance, if the same song had been played at a vigil for child abuse awareness/prevention, I'd have stayed in the building if not in my seat. But given the season, and the memories it brings up anyhow, and the pain associated with that particular song -- plus the fact that I was a little pissed off because I thought I was supposed to be listening to carols, and not country songs about Daddy drinking and Mommy shooting up in the bathroom -- I followed my instincts, preserved myself, and got the hell out of the coffee shop just in time: right before the part that would have either made me crumple into tears or scream like I was being boiled alive in a kettle of hot oil, which is kind of how that song feels to me.

... and how do you wrap up a post like this one? I suppose by saying I needed to write this, to get it out of my head, and now that I have I feel better. Usually I keep writings like this to myself, but I'm putting this out there because people need to know that the consequences of childhood violence are real, and that they are ugly, in the hopes that maybe some tiny something about that knowledge will help another child, or at least another survivor.

Calling all angels: walk me through this one; don't leave me alone.

Also, I hope to God I NEVER HEAR THAT SONG AGAIN. Next time, I WILL scream.

This is Anxiety

And it wasn't meant to be a poem. I just gave it line breaks so the un-panicked brain could follow it. This really is anxiety.

Things weigh on me. They press and press and press until I'm flat.

 It's anxiety like carving the heart out of a pumpkin and then cutting it a smile.

The room is too big, the walls soar away when I reach for them;
I get dizzy and my hands hum.
Or the room is too small and it can't hold me,
 my pacing, my flapping fingers flicking the nervous off like soapsuds.
My throat clogs up. I want to claw at my chest;
there's a space that hurts and I want to clutch it, a child's hand clapped over a bee sting.
 It's a cannonball, it's I would gnaw away my fingers if I thought it would help,
it's how many blue pills do I have left and I swallow them dry and sit motionless till they work,
because oh god, oh god, if I move I will die.
It's I wish I still smoked because nicotine would save me,
 it's I'll down the whiskey and the wine and the one bottle of beer in the crisper -- why is it in the crisper; for god's sake it isn't lettuce-- all at once just to blunt the edge of this hell;
 help me, someone help me, I think I'm drowning on dry land.

Baa, Baa, Black Sheep

I, Tiffany Allen-Bernard, have come to a horrific realization: I have prejudices.

Yes, yes, everyone does. They taught me this in Social Work school. They even taught me how to pick up on a few of my own, maybe things that were flying by under the radar screen of my conscious mind. But it would take someone deaf, dumb and blind with no nose and no hands, someone completely insensate, to miss my latest mass judgement: I don't like Christians.

I suppose it would be more apt to say that I don't like Christianity, but Christians practice Christianity, and since I don't care for the religion, its adherents and all its trappings have seriously started to get on my nerves.

Perhaps it would be prudent to stop here and attempt to evaluate, in writing, precisely why I don't like Christianity, and precisely when I stopped calling myself a Christian. Answer: I don't really know. I know that my upbringing has a lot to do with it -- I'd rather gnaw off my own hand than ever set foot in the church I grew up in ever again, and that is NOT an exaggeration. Give me a choice between one of my hands and South Liberty Church of Christ, and I'll start chewing right now.

But my upbringing can't have everything to do with it, because I've been to some wonderful Christian churches with some wonderful Christian people in the ensuing years: New Bethel, Saint Paul's, Common Place. And without the people in these places, I'd probably be homeless and naked and sleeping in a box -- so why do I bite the hand that has, quite literally, fed me? I've come up with a few reasons:

1.) I am an abuse survivor, and I'm still pissed. 

Aside from the fact that when I was a child God was a weapon and Hell was an ever-present threat, God never saved me. I begged and begged; I pleaded and wept. I used to lie in bed and pray to be given wings so that I could fly away. Then I prayed to be allowed to die. Then I prayed for my mother to die. But you know what? Nobody came to my rescue. I suffered. I bled. I lost every shred of humanity I'd ever had along about the time I had to eat spilled food off the floor like a dog. Jesus loves the little children, my ass. That's what my anger says, and I've never been able to cool it. To be completely honest, if I were sitting on the front porch having tea with God, I'd throw it in his face and demand an explanation! Over the years I have tried to rake the ashes over those coals with rationalization after rationalization: God cries when I cry; I went through what I went through so I could help other survivors, blah, blah, blah. None of it stands up under scrutiny. If God cried when I cry, God would still be crying. The nightmares and the constant threat of debilitating depression and the old abuse injuries -- the loose jaw, the crushed knee -- would be giving him a lot of trouble, too. And as for helping other survivors? If you ask me, if God was as merciful as they say, there wouldn't be any other survivors, because a merciful God would never allow children to be subjected to the never-ending horror of abuse in the first place.

So that's reason number one: I'm angry at God, and try as I might, I cannot let go of that anger. I'm like the Hulk: I want to SMASH. Everything.

2.) I'm too smart for my own good.

It's true. I've often maintained that my life would be a whole lot easier if I were as stupid with everything else as I am with math. But I seem to have made up for the fact that simple addition challenges me by being a whiz kid at pretty much anything else. I think in overtime. I analyze, compare, deduce, intuit, learn, re-learn, and think, think, think. Sometimes I even think about the nature of thinking! And then I worry about thinking too much, and I think about the worrying about the thinking! I can't make it stop. I'm driven by some sort of insatiable internal appetite to learn everything. I used to read the encyclopedia for fun. Right now I'm committing the Germanic Pantheon to memory because I want to. And you know what all this thinking does? It makes me critical of people who don't do as much thinking. In spite of all my thinking, I appear to have equated Christian with probably dumb. And here's the deal: I KNOW THAT'S UNFAIR. I know so many Christians who are so smart they'd put me to shame, but I've lumped all Christians together as a bunch of mindless sheep who don't know or care to know the origins of their faith, so long as they can palm it off on other people. 

3. I'm jealous.

There's that jealousy again. If it showed on the outside, I'd be as green as Elphaba. In spite of the fact that I'm blazing mad at God, in spite of the fact that I'm critical of Christian evangelists to the nth degree, I've always secretly desired the kind of faith I see in the Christians around me. It makes them happy; I can see it on their faces. It reassures them. But I can't obtain that kind of faith, and my attempts have only frightened me and made me miserable. Every time I set foot in a Christian church, I want to turn heel and run away sobbing. I feel fundamentally different, fundamentally deficient in a way I can't name. Like God doesn't want me. Like I am the chaff dirtying up the wheat.

So I guess it isn't about Christians or Christianity, really. It's about me. I am doing what I despise in others: judging something I don't understand.

It's like this: lately I've been delving into witchcraft again. Being a learned individual, I know the origins of witchcraft; I know what it is and what it isn't. I know that witches ("wise ones," as it translates) don't go around possessing people and worshiping Satan and eating babies as a midnight snack. I know that magick is simply a more elaborate, more intentional form of prayer: prayer with a ritual attached to help focus the energy, the intention, the need. Are there "bad" witches, people who use the Craft to twist and manipulate and cause harm to others? Yes. But there are Christians and Hindus and Muslims and atheists who use their beliefs for the same reasons. And just as it would be unfair for someone to judge me and run away screaming in terror or threaten to burn me alive if I said to them, "I'm a witch," it's unfair of me to curl my lip at someone who says, "I'm a Christian."

And so, having realized that I harbor an extreme prejudice against Christianity, I am trying to change it. I haven't gotten very far yet, considering that this stomach-flopping epiphany just occurred to me this evening. Evaluating it, I have realized that I've been judging Christians for being Christians even while trying to be one myself. How much sense does that make?!

Good grief, I'm tired now. I guess too much revelation in one night can wear a woman out. I do want to say this before I sign off, though:

To my Christian friends: I'm still your friend if you're still mine. I'm sorry that I've most likely lumped you into an unfavorable category based solely on your faith, and I will try my hardest to do better. Judgement is not for me to mete out. Walk with me, and let's be a community of people who hold each other up!  

Crazy Cat Lady

I once dated a woman I met on the psych ward. (In hindsight, this was a bad idea.) Then I dated her again. (Don't look at me like that.) There followed, after breakup number two, a period of dry years. (In more sense than one.) 

Then I fell swimmingly, dizzyingly, head-over-heels-over-head-over-heels in capital-L Love with this amazing girl, only to have it set off a host of abandonment issues that not only broke us up, but created a rift between us so wide we can't scream across it and won't ever try.

2 years after that, I crawled into bed with someone I never should have slept with, ever in a million years. And that has been the extent of my love life, save the boyfriend I had for about 3 months during my senior year of high school and a date sprinkled here and there like stray confetti.

Why am I telling you this? Because.

I'm at "that age" -- you know, the one where 99.9% of the women around me are pregnant and I'm buying more toys for the cat. Before that, I was at the age where 99.9% of the women around me were getting married, and I was sharing powdered donuts with my pet ferret. But I didn't mind the marrying as much as I mind the babies.

And I mind the babies because I'm jealous.

It's true. It's horribly, awfully true. It's also true that I never wanted children before I hit, oh, about 25, and that I never believed in such a thing as childbearing as a biological imperative up to that point. And maybe for some women it isn't. Good for them. Because all I really know is that my brain has been screaming for a baby for the past three years, and I can't shut it up.

It sounds vaguely ridiculous: me, a mother? Me? Forfeiting sleep and changing diapers and bandaging ouchies and chasing a little person everywhere? Ha! Saying the words, "I want a baby" out loud makes me feel kind of stupid, really. 

The first thing my folks say is, "Oh, but you're so young!" but even they're adopting again -- an infant this time, not a teenager who shows up at the door hungry, like a stray cat. They're getting a baby. My little sister has babies. My little cousins have babies. My friends have babies. I have a cat.

Also, I have no prospects for babies. Not even some nice girl to consider settling down and adopting with. Not even a fourth of the financial security I'd need to go it on my own, sans welfare. Also, I have a lease that prohibits the adopting of more cats! I CAN'T EVEN GET ANOTHER CAT!

I'm going insane. Wacky. Cuckoo. Fruit crackers. I've just begun to come to grips with the reality that perhaps I was meant to be single -- damn those abandonment issues -- and now I'm looking down the barrel at coming to grips with not having the opportunity to be a parent. Not even a single parent, because I am eternally impoverished.

I know, I know: I'm so young. Chronologically. My body is much, much older than 28. I can't shake the feeling that I don't have as long to do these kinds of major life things as other people do. Maybe that's just trauma speaking -- I know by now that survivors of chronic childhood abuse such as myself often exhibit a foreshortened sense of the future. Somehow we expect to die young. (And given the lasting toll of chronic stress on the body and brain, maybe we're onto something.) But then I have this disability too, and … sigh. I don't know. I just know that I feel like I have to hurry. Which doesn't help the general sense I've had lately that life is passing me by and I can't do anything but watch it go.  Which is where half of my stress comes from in the first place: hurry up; fit it in; there it goes. It's a vicious cycle.

Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Always the auntie, never the mother.

(How do I be happy with now? How do I find the patience? Some serenity, some 'Que sera, sera?' Someone? Anyone? I know I need to slow down, stop taking life in huge gulps of anxiety. I just don't know how.)

Sigh.

I could use my mommy right about now.

So. Many. Frustrations.

Older childless friends? Older childless gay friends? Older, childless, gay, disabled friends? Um ... halp? 

Penned

Lately I've been suffering from a sense of pervasive, um, ick: I just don't feel like doing anything. I wake up. I eat. I go back to sleep. Repeat ad nauseam. It's like ever since I came home from Bradford Woods, and from seeing my sister and niece and nephew, everything is so boring. I have a renewed sense of being trapped. Caged. Stifled. Curtailed. Penned up and pent up.

BW didn't fit for me for a lot of reasons -- chief among them hunger, exhaustion, and being surrounded by people about 10 years younger than I am: I discovered, at BW, that there is a huge difference in outlook and maturity between 19 and 28 -- but I did do a lot of new things. A lot of different things. I slept on a beach. I relived my adolescence by invading Stake n' Shake at midnight on a Saturday to inhale French fries smothered in cheese sauce. I learned about Down Syndrome via the total-immersion method. I heard a member of an American Indian tribe give a prayer in a language I never even knew existed.

At my sister's place, I watched a Monty Python movie adapted into an opera and performed live at the London Philharmonic. I tried kung-pao for the first time. My 3 year old niece told me she loved me and melted my heart into a puddle. For 3 weeks, there was something new, something different, every day, and I ate it up: even before I left I'd been feeling caged in a town that's not big enough to hold me anymore, with no job and no money to move to where I might more easily get one: someplace with more lights, more people, and (dear holy God) a bus system. Think of the novelty: me, going where I want when I want instead of practically begging to be taken to Wal-Mart so I can get out of Lock Haven for 10 minutes every 3 or so months. And it's not that I don't love this town; it's that I can't readily leave it. I'm plunked down in this one valley between the mountains and the Susquehanna, and I know I can't go anywhere else unless someone takes me. It's maddening. It drives me to apathy: Why get up when there's nothing new to do? What's the point?

I've had to start being strict with myself again. Anti-blob rules: 1. You must go outside for at least 30 minutes every day, even if it's raining or hailing or cold enough to freeze your tits or hot enough to melt your face off. 2. You must engage in at least one meaningful exchange with another human being. 3. You cannot wear the same thing 3 days in a row. Do the damn laundry .... and other things along the same vein. Otherwise I'm afraid I'll let my chronic depression slip in through a crack in my defenses and lay me out flat.

So I've been out photo roaming with my new camera. I forced myself to go to a free concert on the riverfront and found that once I was there, I actually enjoyed myself (DO NOT ISOLATE; DO NOT ISOLATE!) Day after tomorrow, I have a coffee-and-books date with a friend. I've joined a group of lovely fellow gamer geeks who are going to start meeting at LHU to play Dungeons and Dragons. I've started foraging, with the intent of learning to make my own herbal remedies and sachets and soaps. (You should see the amount of stuff I canned in olive oil, steeped in whiskey, bundled, froze, pressed and/or tied up to dry today alone, and today was the first day!) I'm devouring books at roughly a thousand pages per millisecond, on all kinds of subjects I know nothing about, just because I get a thrill from learning: the human genome, Nature vs. Nurture (and why it's a false dichotomy), how the brain creates the mind,  early Christianity, early, early, early Christianity, Gnosticism, Jewish and Christian mysticism, saints, deities, pantheons, and on and on and on. (For instance, I'm reading my way through Plato's, The Trial and Death of Socrates, and have come to the conclusion that good old Socrates was quite full of himself.)

I'm trying to be happy. I'm wrestling with my inner naysayer to find inner peace. I keep asking myself why I'm such a malcontent, why I always need more! new! different! to be truly in my element, but I haven't figured it out yet. I remind myself of my great-aunt Carolyn, who was such a wanderer that she built a new house and moved roughly every 2 years just to have something different to look at(!) Here? Same 4 walls, every single day.

You know, sometimes I think I'll never really settle. I can see myself walking around with my feathers ruffled thinking peevish, penned-up thoughts till I'm old and gray. I really don't want that to be who I am ... but what if it is?

A Sorry Little Tale

Once upon a time, there was a mother and daughter who hadn't spoken two words to each other in several years, on account of several heinous and often bloody injustices perpetrated on the mother's part and a state of grief, anger and confusion on the daughter's part -- which, it bears saying, came to a head after she came out of the closet and received from the mother an extensive list of Christian scripture purportedly outlining why persons of the homosexual persuasion are doomed to an eternity in Hell. And so, to preserve what was left of her sanity, the daughter cut ties with the mother and went on with her life.

She was reasonably pleased with this arrangement until word got out that the mother had cancer. When she received this news, the daughter felt horribly guilty and wrong and bad. She cried for weeks. Finally, unable to bear the uncertainty any longer, she called the mother and asked after her health. All of her questions were met with noncommittal "ums" or changes of subject. Thinking that the mother was uncomfortable facing her own mortality, the daughter made do with these clueless clues to her mothers well-being. Mother and daughter set up a semi-regular communication of emails, and the daughter only asked after the cancer when her mother hinted at surgeries and procedures. "Did they get it all?" she'd ask, but the mother would ignore the question.

Having come to realize that she still loved her mother in spite of all the nasty, evil, rotten things that had been done to her, the daughter worried and fretted. She cried a lot. She suffered debilitating anxiety attacks that left her shaking and unable to catch her breath. She sent her mother a gift of loose leaf green tea and a special pot to brew it in, with a nice card that had a letter inside saying she hoped the tea would bring the mother comfort. When she went close to where her mother lived to have a visit with some other members of her family, she called and set up a lunch date with the mother. The two of them sat across from each other at a small booth for over an hour, and the daughter listened to her mother detail how much she loved small children without vomiting into her french fries or clawing out the mother's tongue, though she's always been 10,000 kinds of pissed off that her mother could find it in her heart to love other peoples' little girls, but not her own.

The daughter debated asking after the mother's health -- because how can you wriggle out of a question like, "So how's your cancer?" when you're face to face? -- but decided against it on the grounds of not tearing down the shaky bridge of peace they seemed to have built between them. But she needed answers, so the next day the daughter went to visit her grandmother and asked her about it.

And that's when she learned her mother had never actually had cancer.

What she had was a serious vehicle accident, and the ensuing MRIs showed a series of tumors that proved to be benign and were ultimately removed with zero fuss, and not even so much as a round of cautionary chemotherapy. (She also has a rod in her spine from the accident, but as far as the daughter is concerned at this point, it serves her damn right and she ought to have a few more rods, and maybe some missing limbs, and a caved-in face and a plate in her skull.)

The daughter is not as angry as she knows she should be. She can manage occasional anger -- see above -- but it's mostly for show. She wears the anger when she needs to hide the fact that she doesn't feel anything else in regards to this situation, except maybe a fatalistic sense of resignation. Her mother is evil, always has been, and always will be. Such is life. What makes the daughter most angry isn't that her mother lied by omission and failed to tell her the cancer scare was false, or even that she got her hopes up again and thought maybe the two of them could forge some kind of relationship out of the vast pile of shit between them. What makes the daughter most angry is that now SHE looks bad. SHE looks like a fool for all the guilt and the tears and the times her friends had to comfort her, and she has to tell them her mother is a filthy liar who's happiest when she's making other people look like filthy liars. And for this, the daughter is sorry. She's sorry her mother is a conniving, controlling bitch who hurts other people by proxy as often as she can, and she's sorry she inadvertently told a huge lie when she damn well should have known better, and she's sorry she loves a sociopath because she's too weak to help it.

She's sorry.

END

33 Things I've Learned in 3 Weeks

1. If you go five minutes without hearing a peep from your 17 month old nephew, chances are good that his sister has locked him in the bathroom.

2. Ketchup and blood look terrifyingly similar when matted in a small child's hair. Also, even after you wash the child's hair, the child will still smell like ketchup for a period of several hours.

3. You can apparently feel guilty enough to pull over for a cop who wasn't even coming after you.

4. THE BOOK OF MORMON ON BROADWAY SOUNDTRACK.

5. "Let us protect your asse(t)s."

6. Some people were just born mean. Sad, but true.

7. Don't feel bad if you don't recognize your cousin after 10 years. Your cousin doesn't recognize you, either.

8. Amish people might get smashing drunk and pass out driving their buggies. Their horses will then get tired and pull into the nearest garage.

9. I like rhubarb pie.

10. There's nothing in the world like hearing a 3 year old tell you she loves you for the first time -- even if you're suffering through "Yo Gabba Gabba" when she says it.

11. It is possible to be so tired that you ask where your own crutch is, even as you're leaning on it.

12. Conversations like this may take place as you are leaving a room:
              
              "How does she do the stairs?"
               "Not very good, but better than you."

13. If you are accustomed to sleeping on a twin bed, you will sleep on a twin bed even if you're actually sleeping on a queen-sized bed.

14. I can walk more than I thought. A lot more. It isn't pleasant or preferable, but it can be done.

15. 2 toilets in the same building will overflow on the same night if at all possible, most likely at 3 a.m. when you're hungry and functioning on 10 minutes of sleep.

16. It is possible to function on 10 minutes of sleep for an extended period of time, provided you aren't asked to remember your own name.

17. Spiders are amazing, because spiders eat mosquitoes and mosquitoes are an Old Testament plague God forgot to mention and/or get rid of.

18. Down Syndrome has a spectrum, just like autism.

19. If you have a camper that is cognitively around 3 years of age AND struggles with social appropriateness, you may receive a full frontal boob grab within the first 5 minutes of meeting her. This same camper might also enjoy grabbing your butt, and holding you in a headlock while patting you and crooning, "Baby … soft …." You will be able to tolerate a surprising amount of this, after the initial shock wears off.

20. I can tolerate 2 roommates in a 9x9 space for approximately 2 weeks before I start frothing at the mouth. This is much, much longer than I expected.

21. I can wipe someone's butt without gagging. I can also give someone else Preparation H, because, well, someone has to do it.

22. Generally speaking, there are 2 speeds associated with Down Syndrome: running, and not moving at all. Very little exists between these extremes.

23. It can take a camper a solid hour to eat one small container of yogurt, even with coaxing and constant cheerleading. This can be surprisingly tiring for the cheerleader.

24. CARD PARTY! (I had a camper who thought 52 Pick Up was the greatest game in the world. We called it Card Party.)

25. Cognitive delay can mean your 15 year old camper still likes to eat crayons and color on people with markers. She may even have a color preference, which can mean that after 2 days there will be no purple crayons in the entire cabin, and several other campers may be mysteriously speckled with unnaturally orange freckles. It is also possible for an entire crayon to be consumed in the 5 seconds it takes you to urge someone else to eat her yogurt.

26. It is almost impossible not to laugh when 2 campers get in a fight over which one is going to marry Justin Bieiber, and the loser ends up crying facedown on the floor in the middle of Music Time. And yet you can still get down on the floor beside your camper with a straight face and treat the entire matter as seriously as a heart transplant.   

27. It may appear that your camper is having a seizure, but she might just be indulging a habit of staring directly at the sun. You will learn to tell the difference fairly quickly -- after about the first 2 panic attacks.

28. The ASL signs for "stop," "more," "hungry," "thirsty," "angry," and "please".

29. Pick your battles. If your camper really wants to wear her panties backwards, fine. At least they're on.

30. The difference between Scottish and Irish accents, and the proper pronunciation of Sorcha. (SIR-ka.)

31. PJ Fashion Shows!

32. The beautiful sound of a Chinese instrument called the zither in the hands of a skilled musician.

33. It is possible to love a place and its people, and still be sad and exhausted. Knowing your limits does not mean you are weak, or that you love the place and its people any less.

30in30, DAY 30!!!!! "In the Time of the Zoloft, my Spirits Were Wired"

In the Time of the Zoloft, My Spirits Were Wired.

My plan for the summer is to land a helicopter on the lawn every morning at 7,

to flatten a crop circle into the grass I'll never mow and cause a nationwide conspiracy.

The experts from all over will congregate on the porch,

and I'll sneak out the back door with my pet ferret in a pouch on my chest

and buy us those little packs of powdered donuts to share,

and I won't care a wit about government involvement in the politics of my grass,

except maybe to laugh while licking sugar from my fingers.

T.A.B. 4-30-13

30in30, Day 29: "Local Color"

Local Color

There's a certain intimacy in the backsides of knees
No one notices, save for me and others like me
-- or am I like them? Who is who, and where, and when
Did it happen to you? And what was it, anyway?
Go ahead, friend, and have more coffee.
The bathroom here's a palace.

The sidewalks on Main
are made of brick;
fair warning.
You'll jar your kidneys
Up through your nose.

Some people have pretty ankles.
It's a thing you'll see come summer,
and everyone in sandals --
and there's something personal about
That, too. Like, thinking, I can almost see
Why long skirts are considered modest.
Care to share a cookie?
They'll carry it to us.

Oh, I meant to tell you about the library elevator --
hope you don't have any
Claustrophobic tendencies;
the things a moving cubbyhole.
Sometimes it makes this noise …
but never mind.
Just pull your feet back.
You'll be fine.

Have someone push you
Up on the dike sometime --
There's this slope down to the city beach;
it's fabulous.
Watch your stopping at the bottom, though.
Too far to the left
Means a face full of sand.

The bike shop will replace your tires,
if you take the new ones in.
You need air in the tubes,
there's a garage on the avenue
That'll fill 'em.
Just stick your head in the door and holler.

I think we see more violets than other people.
We are closer to the ground.
Today I counted 1,000 in 2 blocks,
and tulips, too. Yellow.

T.A.B. 4-29-13

30in30, Day 28: Mind's Eye

I will bathe in coconut
milk in the halfhearted
glow of a rainy
day through the skylight.
There will be the petals of a dozen orange
lilies f  l   o  a   t  i   n  g    in the water.
My legs will appear

long

and

finely

toned.

My hair will ^float around me.

I will feel queenly.

Just _lonely enough to savor the minutes ticking
slowly by on the clock in the hallway,
which I will traverse while still dRiPPiNg tiny
afterthoughts of white on the gleaming wood,
orange petals still stuck to my thighs.

And then I will dress in a purple caftan,
BILLow      ing like the wind against curtains,
and go and stand in the
garden under the trellis with the white roses.
I will pick one to tuck behind my ear.
I will untangle my wet hair with my
fingers while the rain blows a fine mist across my face.

Think of the picture it will make. 

T.A.B. 4-28-13

30in30, Day 27: Emotion Eats

 And temptation is everywhere.

 I could afford 3 of it with the Abe in my pocket right now.

Golden arches, red pigtails,

or powdery confections from the pink-and-orange?

(I could get 4 of those.)

What do you do with hunger,

after it slips its leash and doubles back to bite your heels?

It's not my body that's hungry, anymore.

It's the complicated circuitry that is my brain,

running on memories and a kind of sadness that circles with its hackles up,

looking for a break in the wiring.

(If my mouth is full of hamburger,
there's no room for the ashes I'll become when it finds one.)

T.A.B 4-27-13

30in30, Day 26: "Hugging the Beech"

She palms salt, licking the sea from her hand.
The day spreads out golden over the hills,
but her head aches and she pulls the blinds against it.
The curtain billows in the April wind.
She lies on the floor,
breathing the scent of trees turning green.
She brings her arms up and hugs one to her body;
inhale to open, exhale to close the embrace.
The man in white taught her this.
She imagines the smooth bole of a beech alive beneath her fingers.
Soon she'll return to the woods,
and press her face against such a one,
and greet it as an old friend.
It was there when she was but ten,
her first night in the cabin bearing its name,
in sea green shorts and a braid that would swing when she walked,
the end just brushing her waistband.
She read Ben Hur to a blind girl in the next bunk. 
Then Sam with the red hair like fire loaned her a book by Roald Dahl.
She learned a little ditty 'bout Jack and Diane,
and that Noah built the ark but forgot the unicorn.
She learned the world from the back of a horse,
and the wet delight of making a piñata like a giant sun,
only to burst it later with a big stick and pounce on the candy raining down.
She ate chunks of cool, sweet watermelon by the pool,
her feet in the water and bleach in her hair,
the air scented with chlorine.
Giggling, she learned to kiss with borrowed lipstick and a piece of paper.
She let a counselor teach her the Catholic rosary,
holding it up in the orange glow of the overhead light so she could see Mary etched on the center bead. They played a game of wolf packs,
and she threw her head back and howled in delighted undulations.

The memories make her wild with joy.
She hugs the big tree and laughs into its trunk.

T.A.B. 4-26-13

30in30, Day 25: "Recall"

Recall

Mint gum mothballs motor oil Mop n Glo,
Vanilla Fields. Pine sap.
Body shops? Salted wounds,
hollow gut. Wood smoke?
Slightly sick.

Car horns cracking whips wind chimes,
wire hangers clanging. Old trucks idling,
particularly in wintertime.
Sun on snow? Blind with fear,
but early set? Sadness, tears.

Closets hide secrets;
darkness veils danger.
Do not turn on the box fan,
it steals away my ears.
Cover the clock;
the red numbers count up in blood.

Oh, oh God, absentee father,
come pay a visit, give me a present;
a one way ticket straight out of my mind. 

T.A.B. 4/25/13

30in30, Day 24: "Run"

Run

She has legs like 2 pylons, legs like marble sculptures,
mus-cu-la-ture rolling along finely tuned under her skin,
legs that should act as pistons, propelling her on-
ward and upward, all sprinting and dancing,
and jumping and plies, all climbing and conquering.

But.

This woman wasn't made to strut.
Or skate. No leaping, no racing,
no finish line in sight with her bear-
ing down the home stretch,
triumphant.

Spastic,

they call it.

Diplegic. Hypertonic.

What looks strong is actually weak,
and what looks weak …

well …

This woman was made merely to watch soccer,
admire from a distance how it looks like a dance.
This woman was made to sit outside the rink,
taking pictures of the skaters.
This woman was made to feel like an addendum,
a useless limb, an inconvenience to her friends,
who all sit at high tables and strand her with the grandfathers,
closer to the floor.

Silently, she chants:

Remain in the present.
Do not resent others.
Stop pitying yourself.

This woman was made to read a lot,
in lieu of other, more active pursuits.

This woman can quote Jamaica Kincaid,
Thomas Milton, Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde,
Walt Whitman; this woman knows verse,
from Chaucer to Angelou, and back again;
she can debate about the na-
ture of original sin,
and discuss the inevitable death of the Sun --

But really,

all this woman wants to do?

is run.

T.A.B. 4-24-13

30in30, Day 23: "Passing the Murder Garden"

Passing the Murder Garden

All those wands of delphinium

Waving red in the wind,

Those poppies like bloodied kisses,

Tulips an army of girls

All dressed in red blouses;

Those pansies angry, eyeing me,

The Queen of Heart's roses

Gone wild on the vine,

Crocus in beds of flame

Eating up the ground;

Asia lilies sparking hot --

This garden's a raging inferno,

I thought.

So violent.

And then I saw the violets

Down among the coleus,

Cooling the edges of its leaves to green;

The bluebells curling daintily over,

And the bonnets in their shades of blue scattered through

Like rain that fell to tame the fire;

And there was beauty in it,

And then I stopped to savor.

T.A.B. 4-23-13