The Green Fuse (Dylan Thomas)

I don't get many hits on my blog on the weekends. I understand, you are out there enjoying the summer. No worries. But I continue to write on the weekends because NPR (National Public Radio) changes their line-up on the weekend. No news in the morning, no regular stuff. Just entertainment. Drives me crazy, so here I am. Continuing to provide regularity to you in the morning...

It is late night, simply because I woke just the other side of midnight again. The unicorn meat eating cats are up and insane, and chide me for lack of window opening, but it's too hot and muggy outside to be opening any windows of freedom today. The dog worries about the light that shines in his eyes, again. But it doesn't stop him from closing them and pretending to sleep. Horrible nightmares in the night, but I put that down to the brownies I had before bedtime. Not too many, you understand, but just enough to make a statement.


But now, the Perseid meteor shower is at it's peak. It has been cloudy here, but cleared overnight. I can see the stars, as I walk Max out. I look for the shooting stars, but they just sit there, unmoving. One of the things about the Old House was the lack of light. Dad would rouse us at all hours, call us out on the deck to look at the star field of the Milky Way.

For the past several years, I have considered myself beyond the need for romance. You know, a mate, a friend-lover. Not the "friends with benefits" arrangement, but a Love. I had a Love once, and it was beautiful. But it was over 20 years ago, and I thought I had moved past 'all that.'

But love, many emotions move round me now, as the Change approaches. Despite my medications, or maybe because of them, I have been able to feel each emotion as it comes, and experience it as an entity. Perhaps I feel that I am in a safer place now. The daily stressors still swirl around me, and sometimes I fetal on the bed, and suck my thumb, and sometimes I want to run through the woods, naked.

Perhaps I am recovered from a hurt from a past partner. The last one I had was mentally ill, but in denial about it. It ended cruelly, because of his lack of communication skills, and the deepening of my borderline personality disorder. That relationship was not love, but something like. And it was a disaster. That's when I decided that I did not need to look for Love anymore. I had Love when I was young, and that was my measure of it.

I thought that I was my disorders. And my disorders and disease do not need love. They simply are. But I am not my illnesses or disabilities. I am a human with some brain disorders. I need Love. It is a relief to realize that I do not have to resign myself to eternal aloneness.

I need solitude, but there is a difference between the blessings of solitude and the circumstance of being alone. Alone has more of the factors of alienation to it, and should not be practiced by humans, herd creatures that we are. In every instance I have seen, those who truly live alone are destroyed.

All of this I learned around a fire on a starry night, not long ago. I was freed from the illusion that I was different from other women, by going through this Change. I know all of you who have been through this will laugh at this post. Yes, I have discovered I need Love.

I don't think that this place in time is right for a great Love. But now it looms in the distant future, this hope called love.

And with that thought comes this one. Maybe I accept myself enough now, to realize I am more than a hodgepodge of disorders, and a disease. One of the very things I advocate in this blog: we are not our disorders. I am not a borderline, bipolar alcoholic. I have borderline, bipolar disorders and have the disease of alcoholism.

Sometimes I am blinded by the internal struggle that is dealing with life on life's terms. Radical Acceptance is a part of dialectic behavioral therapy that I have been dealing with lately. It is the ideal that I must accept the circumstances of my life.

All that has happened and all that happens now. The loss of a friend, the passing of another, the loss of a service animal, or a home. The birth of a child, the need for sobriety, the entrance and leaving of loved ones. The choices and decisions we have made in our lifetime; sometimes unbearable and terrible to think about, sometimes something to congratulate ourselves on.

Radical Acceptance is the notion that living with all our decisions is what we need to be healthy. If I choose to deny a choice or a circumstance, I know what will happen. I become destabilized, sometimes manic, or I drink or cut.

Throwing my mind and emotions wide open to acceptance feels like jumping into Lake Michigan, in December. It means throwing the self into the acceptance of all the implications that making a decision brings about. My darlings, this is so much more difficult than can be said by me, here. My acceptance fuels my poetry and this blog. It drives me to wander in the dark, and to rescue cats. I chooses the colors I wear, and the food I eat.

Dylan Thomas said it best: "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/Drives my green age..."

So we'll part here, standing among the violets' leaves that grow long after the flower has disappeared. It is a terrible and awe filled truth that the violets have been, and will be next year. I may not. Each day is not guaranteed. The sun may blast and the cold winds come, and I may disappear, or you may.

I won't leave you with the trite sound byte that, "Each day is a gift" or "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may." But with the soul clearing thought of acceptance. One day, perhaps today, everything will pass. The ancient earth turns while the daisies bloom.

One day, I will be gone, and the forest and the field will change. Smallishly, and subtly, but change it will. And each of you, my darlings, when you leave, your forest and field will change as well. I see each of you amid the field.

The sun is not near the horizon for me. Perhaps it is for you. I am used to the night sounds now, and the rustles that move in the dark, beyond the door. Every thing has a silhouette, here in the City's light. The sky is grey and bends over us, carefully. The ground is solid, and damp, and the flowers bloom, even at night, pink, red, yellow, and blue. We shuffle the leaves at the edge of the path, everything is dewed and scented with water. Scents come from the earth, and the grasses, and the forest in the near distance.

Something new lies on the path each day. I want the unchanging field of the past. There were more Queen Anne's Lace there, and less chicory, the commonest of flowers. There were more daffodils, and buttercups, and less clover. There was more a rolling in grass and less a mowing of it.

But the unyielding truth about acceptance is that today is always a day to roll in the grass. It's just that now, I know I will get muddy. Green stains will dye my shirt, and my knees. I will have to, myself, clean my knees at the stream's edge and bind the cuts I have. I will endure a leaf's worth of time to cross the stream, and rest on the bank.