Hello World

LET THINGS GO

This blog is long overdue. In my chaotic, colourful sometimes mellow world, at long and laboured last, here I am and feeling somewhat liberated. Today, on the eve of my “Cerebral Angiogram”I’m finding time to kill. I used to have no time to KILL. a few months ago I was either going to the gym, playing tennis, reading a book from my book club (www.readersdelight.ning.com), writing poetry (whether by myself or with my mentor Sally), watching some obscure independent or foreign film, struggling through the latest (and sometimes difficult) level of a video games, balancing my never-balancing budget, on the phone arguing with my Lawyer or some other seemingly significant task.

Today, I’m blogging …just writing it all down for better or for worse. When I had my stroke back in August, I wasn’t as terrified as I should have been. I learned the lessons that I needed to learn and i have slowed myself down a little ( ok..a lot) but I am no longer missing the flowers on the roadside that I should have stopped to admire. I am happy to still be here.

I’m doing this procedure tomorrow so I can get off the medication that supposedly is preventing me from having another stroke. This medicine (Coumadin) was originally designed as rat poisoning. Leave in to me to see the poetry in all of this- as the Smashing Pumpkins so aptly put it…”despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage”. There’s a poem looming here.

I’ve decided that with every blog entry (as few as I foresee these to be) I will try to publish one of my poems so here goes. Each poem that I have written represents either something going on in my life, or the world at large. They represent pain, love and beauty, hope and despair. They sometimes transcend space and time. They imitate and celebrate life’s beauty and its richness..as well as its pain and explore its meaning or mysteries thereof.

I wrote this over 2 years ago and it is one of my more straight forward poems. It was written right after I cut my dreadlocks off. For those who wondered why I cut my dreads off, the reason’s are buried here…just a little bit deeper than my roots:

Deeper than these roots

This episode runs deeper,

Grows darker,

Is more boundless

Than the edge of the universe,

And the center of these ruins

Light years passed,

Between this rock,

And that ocean

What was there is now here

high tide has come

Will this free me from bondage?

A jailhouse,

And safe haven

I embraced for eons

This mood runs more eerie

Oh what furor!

And what satire!

What role have I played?

Supporting actors missed the cue

I am no longer comfortable

In this God-forsaken skin

Where happiness and balance

Evaporate like ghosts of me

This flowing crown a symbol

Used and marked for deletion

Will this loose me from the wreckage?

In this purgatory

Have I found a way to tip the scale?

This is deeper than my roots.

So there you have it. Trimming my locks was a sort of re-invention and it worked somewhat. There are lessons to be learnt here. I am still the same person that I was with the hair, but, the physical change represented a paradigm shift. I felt and looked like a new person and my attitude towards many things changed. A look in the mirror always reminded me that I needed to be different now and I was in many many ways. So you know what…it worked. I kept my hair in a bag for about a year. That meant that there were things that i needed to let go of but couldn’t quite release. A year later, when I had completed my mini-metamorphosis, I threw it out with that days garbage and never looked back.

My only regret is that I could have fetched a couple hundred dollars on ebay, or I could have donated my hair to chemo victims. This is a simple sorrow but now I know better. I’ve learn that in everything you do, think of a way that you can benefit others. Even a simple act of throwing something ( anything) out that no longer benefits you could make someone else happy (I sometimes think of the little bald headed girl that could be running around with my flowing locks on her head) Of course, as with all things, I had to let it go.

Life becomes so much easier when we learn to “LET THINGS GO“