Swimming to Shore

I lay on my bed for many hours yesterday. Flat on my back, staring at the ceiling when I wasn't playing Solitaire on my phone or carrying on on Facebook. I felt beyond drained. Spent. All used up. I felt filled with sorrow and sadness and loss and loneliness later that night. I thought about my friends who spend days and weeks and months in hospitals with their children. I remembered the many days I spent in hospitals during the early years of Sophie's life and don't remember how I did it. My body bears the memory in muscle and sinew, brain synapse. I think of Sophie's brain and kindling, the cascade of spark. I think of doctors in earnest boxes and those that believe so earnestly in them. Again, sorrow and sadness and loss and loneliness. I don't believe in the divine but am grateful for the divine comedy. Every thought spins another and the other is a gentle admonition that it's not that bad. There's perspective. There's Aleppo. There's my cousin in Mississippi who lost her beloved teenaged stepdaughter in a car accident on Tuesday morning. There's the very fact that I can lie on a bed for five hours staring at the ceiling, let sorrow and sadness and loss and loneliness wash over me, the bed a boat bobbing.











Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature this morning, and I am glad. I'm glad because his poetry and song has shaped my adult life. Even as my mind doesn't understand, my body -- muscle and sinew, bone, mouth, tongue -- does, and I am alive. I got up and out of the boat and swam to shore.



Though you might hear laughing, spinning, swinging madly through the sun
It's not aimed at anyone
It's just escaping on the run
And but for the sky there are no fences facing
And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time
It's just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn't pay it any mind
It's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing


Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about today until tomorrow