Now

Cold revisited?
I meet you with a warm breath.

Live Wire

HA!
I'm all about it,
Just everything!
Electric limbs,
Out it all comes,
WATCH OUT!

I've been
Radiated
Infused
ZAP!  POW!
Hair falls,
Toes tingle,
Tissues singe and scar;
Apocalyptic atrophy!
Then spring, sprang, sprung,
RELEASE!

Polka dotted pulsing,
Watch me dance,
HA!  Live Wire!
Flip up,
Fly down,
Watch me steroid wild!
Gonna be that way,
Watch out!
ZOW!

 -Julia Livingston

Understood

I've had an illness
That might come back
But it isn't here now and I am.

My X-illness and I were quite a pair;
Very intense relationship,
Violent in fact.
I could have died.

For I don't know how long
I really did not know
What was going on.
It just seemed normal to me.
When I found out,
In the moment when I understood,
I thought I would die.

Instead I live with a restraining order.
I mean, I eat and sleep with a restraining order.
Always on the look out
For a sign, a creeping up;
And off we'll go again
My Illness and I.

-Julia Livingston

Winter Solstice Wedding Ceremony, 2013 - This is a section of text that I will be reading at my dear niece's Soltice Wedding Ceremony

We gather here on this wondrous dark winter's evening to celebrate this marraige at the time of the winter solstice.  A time that for millennia has been a winter's celebration of nature's cycle of renewal.

A time when our days of lengthening darkness become days of lengthening light.  The winter solstice is not a certain moment in time but an immeasurable shifting and turning.  Even now as we are gathered together in this room in the deepest dark of winter, our earth is tilting just a bit more on it's axis as it orbits the sun.  We are moving through overlapping shadows, light and dark, to a new phase.

We hold steady in the knowing that we rest in an imperceptible vast motion that carries us surely and steadily forward.  We live in the hope that we will be brought safely and surely through the dormancy of winter into the quickening of life in spring.  We celebrate in the hope of the coming of the light.

That love can be a renewing process can at times seem like the greatest mystery of all.  The solstice reveals some aspects of that mystery to us.  Love's process of renewal is not a return of the same or a repetition of the same, but a transformative renewal, a freshening, a rebirth.

We often feel its quickening in the darkest moments. It emerges and comes to light when greeted honestly with serious compassion and care in words and actions, with tenderness in fragile moments.  Renewal of love carries forward at times in joyous ease, and at other times, in painful truths and tears.  We hold it in awe.  We rest in its rhythm. We gain strength as we offer ourselves to its call again and again.  We live in longing for its vibrant illumination

-Julia Livingston, December, 2013

April, 2013

My vigilant eye is on this spring.
Death lights flash through thin green thickets.
Sparrow turns, puff ruffles on a breezy limb.
No plans for sure.

Pulse

I want to walk down just the right path,
To stir up and smell just the right pungent leaves.
I want to lie along the creeks edge,
To cover the massive root of the sycamore tree
With my whole body.
I want to live,
To pulse and soak,
To catch the sun in the sparkle of a water pool
And let it all the way in.
I want to find the smooth rock,
The striped mushroom,
The magic golden leaf.


Orchid

Orchids grow in trees
Normally
Sipping the rain
From rivulets in bark.
But potted here with me,
It counts on Sundays,
My memory,
And three ice cubes.

It came to me in April
From the hands of a frightened friend
As I reclined wounded and wombless,
Torn and swollen eyed.
It appeared to me as all living things did then,
Alien and oddly alive in it's full bloom.

It is October now.
I stand at its sunny window,
Brush away its last fallen bloom,
Cut its two bare stalks
And believe what I am told:
A new stem will grow,
It will bloom again.


Three Legs

I've seen her for a year now,
Grazing with the others,
One front leg bent,
She lets it bear no weight.

I saw her in the spring
As I sat broken bodied,
A brand new fawn
Crying to her
As she limped away.
I turned too
And nursed my own pain.

May moved into June,
I saw her again,
Not one but two fawns
Chasing,
Playing
As she grazed on three legs.


Seriously

If someone had taken me seriously,
I would have taken myself seriously.
If someone had taken me seriously,
I would have opened with confidence into everything.

If someone had taken me seriously,
I would have taken myself seriously.
I did not take myself seriously
And have lived inadequate in comparison
To my seriously taken self.


August 5, 2012,  Journal Entry

I realize today that I have turned my body over to treatment,
To doctors, nurses, technicians, chemo drugs, and linear accelerators.
I show up when and where I am told.

I have lost my sense of dignity and strength.
I hardly make anything new happen.
I have lost my sense of self-possession.
I am weary and a nap will not make it better.
I awake each day to loss and more loss.
I am in despair that is beyond consolation.
I am just holding on.


This is a Very Aggressive Cancer

Nothing is mine,
This house I live in,
That car I drive,
The bed I sit upon.
No more my.
This is a very aggressive cancer.


.....Julia Livingston

I'll be reading this piece tomorrow night, April 13, at the "read-around" held in the Quaker Meeting House. It's an evening that celebrates the voices of the women who have been part of Women Writing for a Change this semester.

The Cottage Door

She stood framed in the cottage door a small girl with brown curls holding close a small doll with brown curls, watching as her father tightened the last strap on the car top carrier. The 1953 Buick was fully packed and sank strangely close to the ground. It was time to go.

Her eyes fell to the narrow board that formed the bottom edge of the old wooden screen door. A familiar spur of excitement welled up. She laid her doll on the kitchen counter and took the screen door handle in her hand. She carefully placed her small canvas shoe at just the right angle on the board, rested all her weight on it, leaned into it, and swung open with the door. The door spring screetched and stopped at full swing, then quickly swung closed, bringing her back and ready to swing open again. She remembered her Mother’s warning that it wasn’t good for the door to swing on it but knew she was allowed to do it a few times so she leaned back into the swing. Her older brother caught the door at full swing and she lost her footing and slipped down on to the step. His eyes looked huge behind his thick, black rimmed glasses, “Don’t make Mom come and get you”, he said as he turned and walked towards the car. She saw her mother open the car door and her two older sisters climb into the back seat.

She looked back into the small cottage, now strangely quiet and dim. The refrigerator door stood open. The bucket they used to carry water from the camp well was turned upside down on the kitchen counter. The round wooden pedestal table stood empty and all six chairs were in place around it. She looked across the room and could just make out the pink floral cover on the day bed where her parents always slept. She glanced towards the tiny bedroom. It’s very dark in there she thought. She quickly stepped back outside the cottage door.

Her father stepped in front of her, pulled the inside door closed, and took a key out of his pocket. She heard the click of the lock. He took the screen door firmly in hand and closed it, then moved about the outside of the small cottage checking all the windows. She looked up at the weeping willow tree that stood just outside the cottage door and remembered the story about her father planting it when they first built the cottage. A willow is his favorite tree so it’s my favorite tree too she thought.

He walked past her on his way to the car. She felt a loneliness well up and suddenly remembered her doll lying on the kitchen counter. “Daddy, my doll”. He did not turn around and she watched as he moved to the front of the car and opened the hood. She saw her mother sitting in the car and ran to the open car door. She leaned over the seat and under the steering wheel and stretched both thin arms across the seat to her mother. “Mommy my doll is inside”. “Well, go back in and get it”. “I can’t, it’s locked” she cried. Her mother sighed, rolled down the car window and said, “Howard, she’s left her doll in the cottage”. “You’re such a baby” she heard her brother mumble from the back seat. Her father said nothing, closed the hood and began to walk towards the cottage.

She raced ahead of him, took the screen door in her hand and held it carefully so that it would stay just the right distance from him as he unlocked the door. The door opened and she stepped just inside the dark cottage. Looking up on the counter, she saw the shiny edge of the red cape she had dressed her doll in that morning. My doll has been all alone in the dark she thought as she lifted both arms and tenderly picked up her little doll. “Let’s go”, said her father. She held her doll close, stepped out of the cottage door, and looked to see her mother watching from the car. She ran to the open car door, crawled up on the seat, and carefully nested her doll just between herself and her mother.