Lit

Today I lit a candle and let its small light lift a prayer from my soul to His.

There's a dream in me that won't die. Regardless of what I do, or what happens or doesn't (as the case may be); the dream persists.

It tugs me to wake when I want to sleep and to think when I crave silence.

It makes my breath short and trapped with a bursting imagination and no magic to make it live.

This dream has been, as long as the sun has shone from the heavenlies.

I don't know if my candle will avail much bar comfort me with its fragile, little light.

Dear God

Please, please, please, pretty please with sugar on top or honey if you'd prefer, can we be financially sound so I can write full time?

Could things finally pan out with my writing so that I could be spending this evening planning future books and not only English language lessons?

We would be eternally indebted to you (as we already are) and I would write and write until the tips of my fingers fell off.

In your name,
Amen.

The silver cord snaps

It seems as I get older I am more inclined to dislike and truly resent death. Of course this may seem a perfectly good waste of one's energy when little is as certain as death, but it doesn't wash my mouth of the bitter bile that it leaves.

A friend of mine, Pauline O' Briain passed away recently and I found out when my phone beeped with a new email breaking the dreadful news. It's hard to describe what you feel when someone you last saw with breath in them, a wide, eye-creasing smile and glittery eyes full of life no longer has one. There are few words that can capture the way your insides have suddenly been left hanging suspended in the air- how everything about you stops as you try and reconcile that earth, and all of us has lost another soul's light.

Even as I write this I feel outraged with death. I feel maddened by its blood thirst and disregard for this most holy of gifts that God has given- so much so, am shaking and crying.

I watched two films this week that probably helped solidify this in me. Remember Me and Everything is illuminated. Both of the closing scenes in these films have gone beyond haunting me and left a sad yearning.

It isn't just the fact that moment of death is still uncharted territory until our silver cord snaps or that we go there alone but it's all those we leave behind. We leave them to reminicise, cry, lose sleep, have recurring dreams, wish and miss and hopefully, heal and carry on.

I've been worried I'm losing my God perspective on all of this. He experienced death, firsthand, on both sides of the fence and he is alive to tell the tale (so to speak). He also spent much of His human life comforting us with what would come next and somewhere in all of the riddles and rhymes, hinted He would be there to meet us.

There are those that argue that this life is it - that one day we'll be merely dust. But even despite my fury with death I refuse to believe it has the final say. Perhaps I am being a silly beatnik, but there is too much in this life of ours, too much for it to simply end in nothing.

And so that is where my hope will be - that the one who wept on his knees for his dead friend, just moments before He raised him, understands this grief that lies in me. Understands those who still remember their dead.