Solstice

The tip of a turn
and off we go
on a new way
to who knows where.

I stand and look
I feel the ground
I fall again
and turn.

To what has been
searing sadness at the loss
Innocence lost
Again and again.

A shadow cast
My dark form
Turns
And finds a way.

Stumbling, sliding, flowing
To the bright
That tempts me
Over and over.

I cannot stay still
I wish I could
But all is turning
Phase to new phase.

I take my breath
And go.

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