Journey of the Heart

Grief is consuming, it takes us on rides of wishes and longing and memory... Then, in an instant it can throw us to our knees through the force of our loss. Magnetic  by Mariann Martland She looked to the sky, longing for him to whisk her up with the winds that blew through her heavy hair. She could feel the freedom of the breeze, swirling around her like an inviting dance, asking her to join, to become the movement. She wept as she remembered her body, pulling her back down to the earth as though magnetic to the weight of her grief. Mariann Martlan   is a writer, a seeker, a lover, a friend. She is a woman finding her voice in a very real world where she cannot help but dream. She wholeheartedly believes in the universe, love, connection and strength of human spirit, even when she is overwhelmed or confused by life; there is usually at least one moment in each day whe...

I’m missing her: my cousin. She's been gone since 1987, and still I miss her... As I walked tonight in my neighborhood, on a summer day, like those I remember playing with my cousin, catching lightning bugs, I felt a wave of loneliness.   In the later evening, I held the vase and felt the spirit of her living on through a creation by her. It might as well be an urn. But it's comforting to have even after all these years.  The Vase I hold the vase you made, cream colored with daisies and butterflies, indentions you carved into wet clay. I cup it gingerly, possibly the last thing you created, before giving it away. Killed in 1987,  my best friend, cousin, only one year younger than me, I walk through life missing you, searching for my best female friend, yet always feeling left alone. We wore one another’s shoes, switching one for the other, wearing mismatch, feeling completed by the exchange, knowing no matter wher...

  Sometimes all I have slips through my fingers… And I pray and kneel to whisper my heart so maybe I can stand when the earth keeps shifting and all I can hold onto is a sliver of faith. Loss etches itself into the chambers of my heart. Patience is my staff and hope is my food.  Every day is a challenge I don’t think I can face and yet I rise, and do the next right thing, as they say in certain circles. The next right thing might be a poem, a movie, a late night with the moon or lots of coffee. Some days the next right thing only serves that moment and the only light it holds is being for that moment the best I have.  I am giving this now my all and hope somehow to make it to the other side, though I have no idea what that looks like. Artwork by George Christakis Truth Lands in My Hands Sometimes all I know rests in prayer: Help the love I know to grow. Help me plant the seeds to sow. Help my heart to beat the loss to lig...

I was moved by a couple of folk to write this poem, as well as my own sense of loss… Grief and I are close friends. When I stop crying I know that is when I need to worry. Lately life threw me a curve ball but all will work out, as it always does. I hold faith close to my heart and believe in prayer.   So I offer this up, because we all know what heartbreak is like and getting up again is the hard part when we want to hide and let go of all. ~Art by by Johann Heinrich Füssli~ How Many Ways Can a Heart Break? Loss wears an odd face. It is my newest friend Whose toddler died While he was 180 miles away. It is watching the man I love Make love to another woman, Night after night. It is loving a baby I didn’t have But was so close it should’ve Been mine. It is having love tease you into believing This one man will hold your heart Until he breaks it. It is having every man you ever tried To love leave you alone, again,...

Grief to me is personal and yet poetry gives me a way to share it… By sharing with you through the transcendent medium of poetic lyric and image -where meaning meets me where I least expect-, the deeply personal gives me more me! This piece was written a few years ago and yet it holds now on the edge of the evening. Sadness is always close to me.  One of my teachers told me my beauty rests in how I hold my sadness because it is so much a part of me. And yet even more so today, years later, I find what holds me is the grace I find within the poem: the way I can graze what aches in my heart and yet find its release in my hands, as if each prayer held a bird learning to flap its wings and as my hands open, take flight. Grief   Like a cricket’s legs, sadness Waxes on the wings On my back few can see As they are rays Of light holding shadows As if shade from a tree Where I find quiet, a reprieve From the s...

 I find that the muse often strikes when much of the world is asleep… As this poem came through to me at 4:00 a.m. following the memorial service of a 21 year-old member of our dance community. He fell while hiking alone, and his mom was both torn and bereft and reaching for connection with him from beyond.  While I did not intend it to be so, the poem came through to me in the style of Rumi and the other Persian mystics: fittingly as he was of Moroccan heritage.   The languaging for G*d is purposefully open-ended so as to be inclusive; however the phrases used to describe Him/Her are a translation from the Hebrew in my mind. Song of Grief
 
 Let yourself be as a hollow reed so the wind-breath of the Blessed One can blow through you
 and play you the sounds of your grief:
 your moan
 your sigh
 your keening cry.

 Do not close down or block 
the Breath of life 
from finding in you opening.

 Gently, gently
 let you...