$90,000 Rolex

$90,000 Rolex

m326933-0001This morning I dreamed we gave Cameron
a $90,000 Rolex
with a broken watch band
that we’d found somewhere
and counted as our lottery win,
our ticket forward.

Yet we handed it over to Cameron
so he could marry his girl
and have his own future.

I don’t think the dream’s about dollars, though.
It could be about time.
About the 90,000 hours he’s missed of his own
this-time-around life.

Or the 90,000 beats of my heart,
within not one of which he’s been absent.

Or the 90,000 bits of bone and ash
still waiting to be scattered.

Or the exponential expanse of time
he’s now experiencing.
All the time,
not just in the world,
but in the Universe
to live in love and freedom.

Or the energy of nine, which is endings
and the magnified energy of zero,
which is eternity,
infinity,
and the real truth of his passing.

There was a day I would have handed over $90,000
or 9 times $90,000
to buy his happiness.

But happiness is an inside job,
not to be bought, but created
day by day,
heartbeat by heartbeat,
tick by tick of this $90,000 Rolex we call life.

He taught me that
through the grief of his leaving.

 

in memory of
Cameron David Perkins
4/2/1978 ~ 5/3/2004

To Weep For the World

To Weep For the World, digital collage by Claire Perkins aka ArtfulAlchemist on Polyvore.

There are days when my heart weeps for the world, and today is one of them.

It began with my thoughts about 9/11 this morning, remembering the feelings of that day. The grey skies and drizzling rain, while welcome, added to my somber mood. A misunderstood post on Facebook left me feeling defensive as I tried to explain my position on moving forward from this shared loss with more understanding and less fear. It’s far too easy to sound cavalier and dismissive when posting brief social media sound bites, and I know I can come across as hopelessly naïve and idealistic.

I feel the pain of those who lost loved ones on that day. And I feel the pain of those who perpetrated the attack. And I feel the pain of all the mothers who have lost their children in one way or another, as expressed in this video clip.

Not having suffered a personal loss of a loved one that day, my grief wells up around man’s inhumanity to man, that day and in all the days prior and since. If, one day, we could all see that there is no “us and them”, but only us, events like those of 9/11 would never happen to begin with. If we connected to each other heart to heart, in the spirit of Namaste, one divine spark to another, what a different world this could be.

On my more Pollyanna days, I believe we can get there – to that place of understanding and living our Oneness. On my darker days I fear we’ll never get there – that instead we will continue, little by little, to destroy ourselves, each other, and this planet.

Yesterday, I lit a candle to the memory of a friend’s son lost to suicide. Today I learned a colleague just lost her son to an overdose. Later this afternoon I heard a first-hand account of atrocities witnessed and experienced in a childhood hell the likes of which most of us in this country cannot even imagine. My heart feels too small to hold all this grief.

And I wonder what kind of systemic pain festers beneath the surface of this planet that can drive people to these desperate and depraved acts. But more than that, I wonder how we can heal it.