Mistress Morning

And morning comes and touches me with her soft fingers. Not too long, too early. Another day is given to consume what she offers. She waits for me then is gone. Before I was ready to take her, to take what she had for me, I remembered who I was; who I was the day before. And before I could turn back from this reckoning she was gone. And I am left clothed in who I am reminded to be. Those soft fingers, touch of hair and welcoming promise may return, I imagine. And I might again wake and find morning there beside me. Will I remember not to remember and take her, make her mine, be taken and wear her sweet promise about me?

The flower thing

The little flower in the desert has neither enough moisture to quench thirst nor enough substance to nourish hunger and yet it nourishes cavernous voids in the soul without being consumed in the process…

The “Signs of Life” thing

Some explanation might be in order:

I thought carefully about what I should call this blog. Signs of Life is a well worn personal brand but it is still relevant. The name originated as an initiative I er.. initiated to explore signposts of hope with a group I was managing – disgruntled and shaken by big time corporate acquisitions and the possibility of us all being redistributed. I took it on more personally when I left my corporate quarters and began exploring parts of me that had largely been lying dormant most of my life. This, my second life in so many ways. Same home and family very different head space, different associations – completely.

Life is rich and certainly wierder than those who let me into it would have had me believe. I think we could do a lot worse than, each day, do something that changes the rhythm of our heart and makes us catch our breath whatever that might be: sex, fear, prayer, exercise, beauty whatever. Its a sign of life. You may try this at home…

If I were to die

There’s a good start! Of course I’m going to die. Anyone reading this who is not already dead will die. But as I think of this I realise that one of the things I will leave behind is a shelf full of (very) personal journals full of… well largely moaning, lamenting and other forms of pain induced utterance. Anyone reading these would have to wonder how I ever lasted as long as I did without opening a vein. And that I probably should have been taken out of my misery long ago. The fact is this is not the whole story. I have been known to smile occasionally, laugh, party, be nice and a whole lot of things other than being miserable. So while the little clusters of pain stroked pages continue to grow I will record some of the rest of life here.

This raises an interesting question. If I or anyone else were to die today, lets say at around 6:30 this evening, what would be the “things” left behind. I am of the age where parents tend to die. Both Pam and I have been though the process to a geater or lesser degree of sifting through our passed on fathers’ “things”. Things like letters, photo albums and diaries are windows into their lives and their relationships. They help us to grieve and to celebrate our legacy. Neither of us have given much thought to trawling through any hard drives or blogs, for that matter, to find our fathers’ things. We would be unlikely to miss much as they still lived pretty much on paper. My things? Completely different story. You pass by my hard drive and you are likely to miss a huge repository of correspondence images, history, me. I imagine the same would apply to many others.

Does this change the way we leave a legacy, a history? As one who no longer has living parents I can say with authority that a personal history is an important thing. Its an important life process to browse and acknowledge one’s ancestry whatever shame, pride, misery or delight it might bring. As the windows on our lives become more virtual, more wordlwidely visible they also become more volatile. What does this mean in terms of our capacity to leave our history as compost for the future we spawned to root itself in?