Mixed Lives

There are certain lives that should not mix. This is not to say mistakes can or can’t happen but when events come to pass, reality is that which we take with us. In the human field this is our drama, or trauma or release or our final resting place. Like Greek memories never written down. I’ll get into these later. What I realize now, after leaving this place, my American space, is that no memory supersedes another and that what I wanted from my friends has been nothing more than a confirmation that I (that ever present I) have purpose and that this purpose is right and good. Most thinkers will see this as a romantic notion and it is. After one year in Kosovo I no longer desire this confirmation rather it (the ever present it) is there like a long sunset or sunrise. Perhaps this is confirmed by the daily interactions with the others, even made up of them, but depending on one’s relationship to god or objectivity is not for one’s own conscious field to determine. “It” is determined by action and inaction within a purpose, until that purpose has been played out to an ultimate living end for better. The details of this thought, as it is formed, are likely the most important message (why else write it down?) though the details will come from walking in the light, then for a good long while in darkness though hopefully not forever. Forever being determined when death arrives. I’ve spent a lot of years in darkness.

A week ago I visited Buttercup’s family on the day after her body was laid into the earth. I was greeted by the cries of an infant, born to her older brother and new wife a month prior. The house was, oddly, a place of joy. The place from which Buttercup came is governed by the soft and reassuring presence of her large and open family, one that is strong enough to mourn and share in her memory with presence. The living with the dead. My presence was surprisingly welcome or it came like this for the grace with which Buttercup had made her exit. “She didn’t want to die” her father explained, even as her breath grew short and labored. I told him about the package she was to send and that it never arrived. “What a woman”, I said to him, to know and leave her memory in such a way. Her package arrived I think in the form of courage and grace. What I had demanded of her was impossible. What she had asked of me was equally impossible. In hindsight, it was her ability to never let go of the will to live that set all petty conflict aside. The package was and remains forgiveness and the will to remain clear – Here is where you now live. Here is what you are. And here is where you must decide. It is here, now, for certain. The candy over coating of will that the story takes is just another present-ness of form. It’s like that.

Driving, on the way back to the States, in the radiant evening spring light reflected from the still waters of Huron, I stopped at Buttercup’s grave to listen for a response. What I found was a mound of dry earth and a black cross near the top of a graded slope near the church where we had Christmas those years back. I sat with the dry earth and the cross and the memory of my lover and her body beneath and mourned her death, at first with my mind, then my heart and then with my hands on that ground warmed by the sun. I collected the remains of small butterflies that had landed on the mound and drove the rest of the way peacefully in the good company of angels.

On return to NJ I didn’t see my Flora, for not willing to pressure my soul into any more loss. Instead I arrived at the kennel, saw the new life as the rain fell and made my exit. This slip, as I saw it, was nothing but a dive into limits of spirit; at least the spirit that is called to hold steady in the beating heart of a living body. This living body.

Dear lord, keep me the least of yours and with it the grace to explore the least in this world. For now, for always. Amen.