Sometimes you need a miracle and not just inspiration, and I guess the world can cut the music right out of your throat, and then it takes a miracle to put it back in. Life can be like a cancer, too, not just give you cancer. Some things are just too hard to deal with and can’t be written about. Sometimes you are praying so hard, you can’t write; it’s like that expression, “just hang on!” which has a picture of a cat hanging on to a branch for dear life. You never really understand that until it happens to you. But, if you open your mouth to speak, you could let go of that meal, and it might be your last opportunity to get a meal, so you would die, or at least that is the inference; maybe you feel like that is the reality.

This past year and a half has been one of the most difficult in my life for a number of reasons, and I thought I had become a little wiser, that life could not throw me new curve balls, that I was smarter. I was taking care of my grandmother and healing from the loss of my mother. A lot of people can relate to that, and it did not go gently with me, or with my family. I heard an expression recently, “When life is giving you hell, put your head down and go on.” But what if this meant that you lost your child, even one of them, or that you had to deal with death and loss of true love? Well, no matter how bad things get, they could always get worse, right? So, no it wasn’t that bad, for me, and it took the death of a friend’s child to teach me this. He committed suicide, so I did not really have to learn that, and that is the first and foremost thing I am feeling blessed about not having to endure. The harbinger of death, banshee, angel of death was near me and I felt his shadow, but it did not touch me, this time. I must take some succor from that-we all must. It took an innocent soul, a person whom I loved, though, and this made me think really hard about how not to hurt the ones I love and how to make moments matter more, and to do and say the right things, and to not be afraid to say what I feel or think, not to waste one precious moment.

In a way, one feels guilty about that. How do you commiserate with someone when there is no one around to commiserate the loss with? Well, we also lost my grandma, finally, as you know, and these memories of all these people kept surfacing and making me think hard about life, and events which threatened everything which we have worked for, which my daughter and we all have worked for. http://www.ballet-dance.com/200403/articles/bellingtheslayer-1.html But all of life is really about love or death.

So, I just kept meeting the slayer, and without knowing the outcome, sometimes blindly kept on, holding my head down. The problem with keeping your head down,is that if you do not have a sixth sense, you might not always see what’s coming, or in certain cases, even what is going on right around you. Sometimes we refuse to see what is happening around us because we are too selfish. We fail to connect with other people, seeing the world from our own damaged perspective, and this can be disastrous, too, compounding our problems, and even resulting in our not being there for those around us, those who depend on us, even when they need us most. We might even emancipate ourselves from them, and in denial, we think they do not really need us or they are doing fine, while we roll around in our own self pity, or corrosive needs. This is not what happened to me exactly, but then something miraculous happened, out of the blue, and everything went right again, and I suddenly saw that it could, and someone else had control. This happened for another person, not for me, and in the strangest way, because it happened to her, and the miracle spread, and helped me. God, or some unseen hand, must have had a plan, or perhaps, like the spectre, even my own self-destruction, could not touch the life of another so innocent and believing. Sometimes someone else’s faith is so strong, it brings you home.

Sometimes it is their love for you which you see, and their willingness to stand by everything you do, no matter how it brings them down or hurts them, which finally awakens you to the facts or reality of your own selfishness. If God can perform miracles, then you finally find yourself praying for one to help you, whether you believe in God or not, I think, and that miracle can be for yourself or someone else you love, but it’s magic in that one miracle can touch so many other lives and that (selfishly) you benefit from it too. Their fortitude saved the day. You were fighting, you thought, but sometimes you go in the wrong direction and you are just running in place when you think you are changing the thing which needs to be changed, and then you realize yo are not. This is best explained in another old adage which goes, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference” (and it’s attribution has become somewhat controversial). It is now (since 1950) in the form of a commercial prayer, but the gist of it is the same through the ages, so I cannot believe that I am alone in my resurrection of it, or need to think about it, or consider it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serenity_Prayer

So, within this past year, I have been going through a spiritual awakening, I guess, and as a result I have lost sleep, my voice, and my guide, but certain things have happened which have caused me to reexamine the past, and due to the experience, a seeming miracle came through, and I felt great relief that this happened, for I can see no other possibility or name to call it. Sometimes the sheer determination and strength of other people around you, and their love, must teach you to let yourself fall into their arms and to not be ashamed of it. Sometimes you can let things happen, not have control or responsibility for failing, and not fail, because some power comes and sweeps up you or those you love, and carries them up and away, in one form or the other. It can be like this in life and in death. Sometimes you must just hold on, there is nothing else you can do. You just have to have faith.