Heart Happy (cathy_edgett) wrote,
Heart Happy
cathy_edgett

Return

I was at a Sensory Awareness conference, and went from there to the memorial for a friend's mother at Tor House, the home built by Robinson Jeffers in Carmel.  My friend's mother had been a docent there, and this was a tea to honor her.  A bagpiper played from the top of the tower, and strolled around the grounds playing his pipes.  In the 1920's, my grandmother lived in San Francisco.  She and her friends would take the train to Carmel and sleep on the beach.  Those were different times, and yet one can stand at Tor House and feel the ocean and the footsteps of those who've passed. After visiting the church my grandmother attended all those years ago,  I was walking around Carmel before the ceremony when I saw a friend who lives in the East Bay.  She, too, was in Carmel, so a visit we'd been planning to orchestrate happened as easily as that, and we enjoyed a beautiful lunch together.

Robinson Jeffers was strong.  He had been a wrestler and knew how to balance rocks so he could bring even a 400 pound rock up from the beach to form his home and Hawk tower.  I am with that strength this morning, that balance, and the power and strength of his character and poetry as I adjust to life back home.   This return feels slow.  I believe I am carrying the weight of years.  My grandmother died when I was 13, and the missing of her still is strong.

From a book by Lou Andreas-Salome called You Alone Are Real To Me: Remembering Rainer Maria Rilke:

Mourning is not as singular a state of emotional preoccupation as is commonly thought: it is, more precisely, an incessant discourse with the departed one, on order to draw him nearer. For death entails not merely a disappearance but rather a transformation into a new realm of visibility.  Something is not just taken away but is gained, in a way never before experienced. In the moment when the flowing lines of a figure's constant change and effect become paralyzed for us, we are imbued for the first time with its essence: something which is never captured or fully realized in the normal course of lived existence.



If you are interested in information on Tor House, check out:

http://torhouse.org
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