When at first you set out

When at first you set out, your feet do not know where the road will go, or how.

The head thinks it knows, but it may not.

(After all, in the thick of winter, the leaves were supposed to have loosened, to have fallen. What then of such insubstantial strength, such golden light?)

Who can explain our brittlest survivals? Or the beauty of ice, in a broken space?
It befalls us: inessential, necessary, ordinary--as uncomfortable as prayer. 
What is the meaning of life?
Why are only some days full of light? 

For those of us already living, what matters in a new year is to perdure, to endure--there is no experience without an undergoing,  without perseverance, without suffering.

Lightening struck, we stagger, try to be like that tree that groaning, still stands.
Noble beyond reckoning. Beautiful in every cracked and shattered limb.

All hope is here: not in what is absolutely new, but in what there is to learn from those who carry on, blind as we all are, but abiding, open-hearted.

Pinched (ex voto to Frida)

 

Upon
being told her
right leg would have to be
amputated, Frida Kahlo
sat up

shouted,
"feet, why do I
need you? If I paint wings, 
I can fly." Thus, every loss lifts
her up.

Not so,
you. Heartsick, your
humerus fractured, you
rage against the night, suffer her
wild love. 

Notes
An ex voto is a devotion, an offering to a saint or local god, given in gratitude for healing or deliverance from adversity, or because a sufferer seeks grace.  (Ex voto is a shorted version of the Latin phrase, ex voto suscepto, "meaning "from the vow made.") Some ex votos consist of tiny stamped tin charms in the form of an arm or a leg or a heart--indicating the body part or attribute to be or that has been healed.  Other offerings might include small paintings with an illustration of the affliction, and a legend explaining what has  happened. In Mexico, such ex votos are often painted on small crudely cut out rectangles of tin. Frida Kahlo both collected and painted works that drew upon this vernacular tradition.  Here, Frida is the saint to whom I make this offering for a friend in agony.  Can she help? I am not sure...

Cinquains, again.

Photos were taken in Mexico. Of course. And this entry blogged from a laundromat in Canoe Cove, on Vancouver Island.