A poem from Rumi:
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don't go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep. ~ A BOOK of LIFE and DEATH and Life sparrow JAN RICHARDSON "I've been thinking about memory the past few weeks. It began with a quote that came my way from Oliver Sacks: We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust's jars of preserves in larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection. Evidently that landed somewhere in my subconscious, because sometime during the following week, during my prayer time in the front studio one night, the quote came to the surface. It got me pondering in a new way what it is that remembering does and how it's part of my journey in grieving." "Specifically, I've been thinking about memory as a creative act, that perhaps in the disassembling and the reassembling Sacks talks about, memory is generative. It's not just pondering and piecing together what happened in the past but also creating something for the future." "I find myself with the sense that in remembering you, your story, our life together, something new is being created, something that has a tangible element to it--that it has structure, that it is a shelter, a new home between the worlds (page 151)." |