Bittersweet
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Eyal and I always knew that it would be difficult building a family from
two different countries. It is just now, however, that we have to really
put that ...
12 years ago
While Walking Past the Cemetery this Morning
"Safely home" reads the gravestone, and I think of people for whom life is merely a dangerous sojourn. Imagine spending your days, your years, decades gritting your teeth, glancing sideways through narrowed eyes, determined to make it "safely home." But then, I suppose, that for those people the journey is always a loop, no matter how short or long, no matter what one endures along the way, one will always wind up "safely home."
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3 comments:
that's just the thing. no matter how safe we play it we shall all wind up 'home'. is it a matter of temperament that for some the journey is, no matter the lenght of its duration, a source of delight, pleasure and terror; while for others it is a matter of drudgery, pain and sorrow.
i think maybe so. i recall the inward life of miss emily dickinson who might just have had the richest inner-life ever lived, yet never leaving amherst. she lived and wrote at the first intensity, and when it was time to die she wrote in a letter, 'i've been called home.'
ED is a great person to bring up. What a seeming contradiction: I think of wisdom coming from experience, yet with her extremely limited life experiences she was deeply wise to the human heart.
To be "called home" has quite a different connotation to me than "safely home" does. It makes me think of a child out playing who must finally come inside, perhaps for supper, or a possibly wayward young person who must finally pay a visit to the parents.
Either way, though, there's a understanding that what comes after life is real and maybe more important or certainly more serious than life. I can see why people would want to believe that, but I just don't.
I think this life is all we get, except in the way that decaying organic matter provides energy to new life and in the sense that the dead continue to exist in the memories of the living.
And speaking of organic matter, providing the nourishment for new plant life, if you take this literally, People who choose the
embalming, toxic caskets and cemetery route are not getting it.
The only way to stay organic and become compost for trees and plants
and bugs would be to choose natural burial. I would have a Peace of Mind knowing that my body
has gone out with the earth, and
will become part of the earth for
all time.
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