Past and Very Present

When I went to see Mom yesterday, Dad was very present in the conversation. Maude, our trusty aide, had a 'visitation' after the unveiling at the cemetery, reporting him to say: I need to be buried again....! No doubt stirred up by the attention of all of us at the site, calling him out and rattling his patient wait for my mother to join him.

Mom also saying she'd been missing him....and me, with all my new news kept thinking "man, I'd like to tell Dad! He'd really appreciate this!" The reality that life has of demarcating itself by virtue of births and deaths is a strange thing; we are never really done with the dead, and even those born into the family have been anticipated. So are we ever without the 'unseen' generations? They hover on the edges of our formal reality like shades of times overlapping our own; they influence deeply the thoughts and feelings of the present. They pressure our hearts frame of reference to broaden our view, our dreams, our link to the timeline of history, keeping us from selfish focus. They call us.

Even the record breaking cold is something Dad would have found remarkable. I ran over 5 miles on the treadmill at the gym afterwards; watching the news, the slow-moving repetitions of the gym rats, the blare of music....sorry but give me the wide open space of the roadways- and my solitude....the gym is the avenue of last resort.

The winters up north would drive me into my deepest self. Here, the push comes grudgingly- we should be the respite for the cold! So like everything else in life, adjustment sometimes comes hard....I surrender to the biting winds by coming indoors and satisfying my 'to-do' list.

A PBS show on an artist whose long and happy life was characterized by full-time work, a loving partner, a self-made home.... I know the dream of creating my own enclave, my therapeutic and creative haven is there; I once had it with the Barn, I can build it again. Step by step, something is pulling me towards what I can only describe as my perfect place. And within, the space that warms my heart, despite the record cold, has already warmed the oven of creation; the forces that incubate and push us all towards our Best Dreams.