Easy Wind and Downy Flake

"Time does not heal old wounds...you simply get used to them"

Someone posted this in a non LJ community I belong to and I loved the quote so much I told her I was stealing it. I think this is true. Grief is that sometimes barren plain you pass through as you journey from loss to acceptance.

This quote also reminds me of a phrase I *loath* "I/You need closure." I always feel that closure is code for 'getting over it' and some things one cannot get over. Some wounds are tiny and can heal without a scar, others leave their mark on your flesh for the rest of your life. The very word 'closure' conjures up the image for me of putting something in big dark closet never to be spoken of in public again.

If I close myself off to the things I've grieved in my life, I cut myself off from something that has powerfully shaped the landscape of me. I think once the doors to certain rooms are open, they can't be shut.
It's not about closure for me, it's about integration.

But how do I embrace my grief as a "cancer surviving divorcee who has had a miscarriage and survived a thousand other little disasters"? By feeling it and acknowledging it. The things I have grieved don't interrupt the joy of my life they inform it and make it more nuanced.

A little piece of all my griefs are a part of who I am and shape how I perceive and respond to the world.

My mind has forged a link between this Leonard Cohen poem and my feelings about kissing. I suspect it's because for me, this poem captures the inner monologue that swirls through the a lover's mind during a final kiss.

Or maybe not.


This is one of his poems; I don't know if he ever set it to music. Every time I read it a Celtic/modal tune plays in my head. Maybe I'll write it down one day or even record it.

Or maybe not.

This piece always makes me think of the sea in autumn; brine and woodsmoke in my nose. At the same time it reminds me of an Irish landscape, like something from Ryan's Daughter. This poem haunts me because in it I see the faces of some of the men I left and some of the men who left me.


TRAVEL by Leonard Cohen

Loving you, flesh to flesh, I often thought
Of traveling penniless to some mud throne
Where a master might instruct me how to plot
My life away from pain, to love alone
In the bruiseless embrace of stone and lake.

Lost in the fields of your hair I was never lost
Enough to lose a way I had to take;
Breathless beside your body I could not exhaust
The will that forbid me contract, vow,
Or promise, and often while you slept
I looked in awe beyond your beauty.

Now I know why many men have stopped and wept
Halfway between the loves they leave and seek,
And wondered if travel leads them anywhere -
Horizons keep the soft line of your cheek,
The windy sky's a locket for your hair.