Well Mom, it will be two years today I first posted to this blog, and thus was born The Temenos Journal.

It was eight days after Tim’s death, and there I was all alone, staring out the window at an autumnal world. There was the lake, still in its calm cedar ringed glory, surrounded by things that would soon become a distant memory, I ventured out onto the blogger sphere.

I suppose at the time I really had no more designs than to record the journey I had just taken. To transcribe onto the screen those words that had streamed out of me, on those lonely, sad mornings of our journey through Tim’s cancer. I figured I would sketch in the bits that I’d been unable to write about at the time, and that would be that.

But that’s not what happened.

Blogging for me became like therapy, or metaphoric compost, as it drew up out of me all the disused, discarded, and denied tales that had saturated my past decade or more.

from the poem IN DAYS SPENT | Lost In Helium Spheres
I found myself cascading off mountains,
plummeting down towards anger,
uplifting my eyes to guilt,
surrendering to helpless stagnation.

Looking into the eyes of maniacal loss.
A sweeping denial;
dulled vision.
Possible continuation swaying in the breeze.
Doors of life and death seen as if a mirage.
Attainable wisdom – in shadows of regret.

Today I look back at my two years of grief, and I can stroll through all the photos I took of our four-square years, and I can miss him without sagging inside and out – well, usually.

In the early days, with those first birth pangs, as Tim’s death loomed on a horizon I could not see, I fiddled with the idea of naming this blog Wilde Childe… but a brief google search on the term cured me of that. And then, at some undocumented moment, Temenos reared its head and thus began post after post from that old journal I’d scribbled out my anxiety, anger and grief.

But then, something happened, and I found I was rather weary of this mere transcription of a life – and thus was born the real Temenos.

Today perhaps is a day for looking forward though, instead of back. Inside me Mom is this deep-seated desire to create, to write, to design, to mold my visions, and somehow reach out through the many forms expression can take. To make a coin or two from that, well, what a happy bonus… but I’ve come to recognize the importance of just waking up every day, and tap, tap, tapping away whatever thoughts, griefs or anxieties that may have need of expression. It soothes and smooth’s out the jagged edges of the everyday.

Grief and I are not strangers, as I’ve danced before with the dark days that follow a dying. Leaving behind the tatters, like a trail of breadcrumbs, I follow the trail back. From Tim, to Shoe, than you. Onward back through the death of my marriage, and to the first powerful shock that accompanied the days after Grandma’s death. With each I have grieved alittle more, and shed more of those deaths of old, like skin. With each I am strengthened a little more, a little tougher, yet more Willow am I then Oak.

From within, a fount of tales has simmered inside me for a long time. I’ve denied it, I’ve shoved it into the closet, I’ve turned my back on it for fear of failure, yet in the end I have found myself compelled.

Thus I am today dredging from that Lake of dreams a lot more than I bargained for.

The strangest part of my first encounter with Tim, was that somehow that first night he told me his family was from County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. Yes, indeed Tim and I shared a common ancestry, of a sort. He grew up on a farm, and had been around cattle his whole childhood. I could clearly see the farmboy hidden underneath the layers of coke and citification. I could see underneath that thin veneer of confidence and convictions, to the young man who was lost when there was no more farm to farm.

And that touched me. I admit I wasn’t seeing clearly at the time, or else I perhaps would have noticed more his lies and administrative interest in my bank account and credit. If, oh if, I’d been paying more attention all those antiques and mementos would not have been lost in my neglected storage… but I was, and I did, and there is nothing I can do about it now.

Therefore I walk away, I dredge the lake of lies, I ply the memories, and with each step it takes me farther away from those days of grief and sadness.  I suppose now, from a distance, I can more clearly see them laid to rest… or atleast they will be in time.

So Mom, just one more of these anniversaries to go, for in five days it will be that All Hallows Eve.

This month, as the leaves turn colour, and each eventually is released from its branch, there still exists a hope of what is yet to come. I have learned that death is but an ending, not THE end.

And so…

May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face.
And rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the hollow of His hand.
~ from Irish Blessings

Love Paula