Warrior Hearts

image from emoda.com

She was born
with a gentle nature
and a tenacious spirit,
which would
come in handy
down the road.

She and her mother
were born
of the Celtic mist,
the turbulent tide
and the
hope of the
morning star.
They came,
blood and bone,
from a long line
of Irish crones.

Stoicism
was bred
in their marrow.
This, too,
would prove
helpful.

They shared
hearts full of dreams,
lives of disappointment
and, fortunately,
a wicked cackle.

When she was
fourteen,
the worst thing
that can happen
to a girl-child
happened.

There followed
bad and
painful times,
and despair.
Somehow,
she hung on.

With the force
of her will,
her mother
kept her
tethered
to the planet,
and
would not
let go.

When she was
barely seventeen,
she had a girl-child,
one more elfin
Celtic woman-
in-the-making.
And for this child
she turned her life
towards hope.

More pain
would follow,
for more pain
always follows.

Like her mother's,
her marriage
was oppressive.
Like her mother,
her spirit 
rose from
that oppression
and cast
those bindings
definitively 
Off.

Oh, how
her spirit rose!
Like the sunrise
over a peaceful 
inlet mountain,
fiery red
and glowing,
so bright it hurt
one's eyes,
did it arise.

But life
as a single mother
is no picnic.
She had watched
her mother
do it.
She had lived it
as a child.
Now here
it was again,
all pain and struggle
and trying
so hard to
keep on
keeping on.

Times of despair,
of hopelessness,
the too-much-ness
of every single thing,
trying to find
a storybook ending,
finding instead
the Rocky Horror Show
of Real Life.

And then
this girl
got on
the healing path.

Courageously,
she went to
the scariest place:
within.
She peeled away
the layers
of muck and shame,
as her forebears
once dug
in the earth
to find the
potatoes
that kept
their souls alive
through
years
of famine.

In that deep earth,
she found treasures
that had lain
buried within
for decades,
gone all unnoticed.

She strung them out,
in wonder,
all pretty and twinkling
and feeling
just right
in the hand:
her heart's jewels,
her own worth,
the worth that was
always there,
belatedly discovered.

After so much pain,
it takes forty years,
give or take,
to finally believe.

Now she believes.

She has claimed
her voice
and uses it
to state her truths
respectfully.

She takes no shit
from any single body.
This is her time now.

She has arisen,
and, baby,
you better
keep your
sunglasses on,
that's just
how bright
things are
about
to get!

Instead of the
scarcity
in her
fridge
and wallet,
she chooses
to see
the abundance
of the All That Is.

She is grateful
to be alive
and on the planet.

She stopped
dreaming
of those misleading
fairy tales
and started living
her very own
Reality TV Show For One,
and what a show!

Her life is
far from easy,
but her
radiance
is dazzling.

Her mother
has watched
all this
with pride,
her daughter's
warrior heart
coming into
the light of day
and claiming
its passage.

This fellow warrior
was walking
in her footsteps,
following markers
she had herself
laid down
to point
the way.

They exchange nods
of deep respect
and recognition.
They are both
Warrior Women
on the path.

Now the girl
flings
a long scarf
round her neck
jauntily,
and pulls her
combat boots on.
She is heading
out the door,
looking for
the day's
fine adventure.

Her beauty
turns heads
wherever she goes.
But what stays
with you
is her kindness,
her respectful manner,
her compassionate heart
for the most broken
among us,
her seeing of
the downtrodden,
the bypassed,
and their worth
as human beings.
It is her
inner light
-that she has
always had-
that truly
shines.

SANCTUARY BY THE SEA

[On the topic of the think tank prompt : Sanctuary at Poets United, this is an edited excerpt from the book I wrote about the twenty-year journey my very gifted son and I made after he was stricken with schizophrenia at seventeen. The night the first phone call came in, I went to the ocean. It has always been my sanctuary, the place where cares were subdued by the sound of the waves, where I gained strength to carry on. I have not yet submitted this manuscript; it needs a solid editing. But here is a bit of it.]

The night my son collapsed with schizophrenia, I went to the shore. My heart was aching; the familiar, resigned stoicism with which I had endured so many crises was creeping over me again. I was bracing myself for certain heartbreak, clinging with all my strength to the comfort I found in the sound of the ocean rolling in, wave on endless wave, upon the sand.

Pacing up and down the water's edge, nervous and shaking, I thought of my gentle, happy-natured son as he had been when he was little. Jeff was my third child, always laughing. His disposition had always been sunny.....In our house of four noisy children, he was my gentle, sensitive one, the one I felt was most like me.

Jeff was an Old Soul, one who lived gently and kindly on the planet. He seemed to have brought wisdom with him from wherever he was before he came to me. Now that laughing, tender little boy was a lean, fragile six-footer, seventeen years old and in the psych ward.

Apparently he had run out of my mother's house, where he was staying for the summer, racing through the darkened, night-time city streets to the hospital, where he had checked himself in.

My sister called me from Vancouver. I had to come...... Hospital staff said he was psychotic, suicidal. They needed me to sign the consent forms; they could not begin treatment until I came...........

On the way, I stopped at the shore, preparing for what came next, pacing up and down with an aching heart, nervous and shaking, trying to gather strength to see my son through whatever lay ahead.

"At least I have this," I told myself. "They cant take this away from me, no matter what happens." It had taken me twenty years to get here to Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Living here had been my dream for half my life, and it appeared that, once again, the cost of my choosing would be high, for me and my children. But this time I had the ocean's roar in my ears to give me solace.

..........That Jeff, with his big blue eyes and ready smile, his kind and gentle heart, should be suffering this was unfair and terribly painful. But I felt myself strengthening to meet him on this unfamiliar ground. My life had taught me to withstand. I would be there for him. I would see him through, and I would take my comfort in the beauty of the shore. I would replenish my stores of peace, the peace I had sought for so many years and struggled so hard to win, by letting the sursurration of the waves wash through me, through my ears, my brain, my skin, my being, until I was as calm as the lull between waves, as strong and silent as the smooth stones scattered along the ocean's shore, as patient as the sand dollar that spins its house from the sand and grit around it and carries it within.

I would take my peaceful presence to my son, to the city, to his bedside, and I would sit with him, be there with him, as he made his painful journey. I set my mind firmly in the direction of hope. He would get through this. We would get through this - together.

Somehow I knew that being there beside the sea would give me the strength to get through the days ahead...........My spirit had been hungering for ocean and nature. Now even more did I need it, to withstand the distress of being alive, the anguish of a mother whose child was in pain.

I balanced the guilt [ of having moved there] with rationalization. If I had stayed in Kelowna in a job I hated, Jeff's breakdown still may have occured. Then I would not have had the comfort of being in the place I loved to sustain and nourish me. But what would sustain Jeff, in his lonely misery? The guilt was something I would have to work on. After a lifetime of putting my childrens' needs first, it was a bitter blow that in the same moment I had made this one choice for myself, my child had been struck down.

I knew as I turned my back and walked down the trail towards the car, that no matter what happened, I could not give this place up. I needed it too much, had waited for it too long, to ever leave.