Wide Open Wednesday

Welcome to "Wide Open Wednesday"! Although I am sure my blog will blossom into a daily one, for now I have committed to Wednesdays. I started my blog with a poem that has been a catalyst for change in my life. I found it about two months after my father's death in March of 2010. I was in the middle of an abyss of grief that nearly swallowed me whole. My father was my "person" my whole life through. I woke up each morning after he died asking, "How does someone go on without their person?" I began to question everything and nearly everyone (including God), OUT LOUD. I marched myself into grief therapy, choosing to open up to a complete (but competent stranger) and began excavating many lost pieces of myself. Turning my tears to ink on a blank journal page was immensely cathartic and healing. This is an extension of that process, as I attempt to open just a bit wider...

I realize now looking back to March of 2010, I asked my dying father (who was connected to intrusive; alarming machines that kept him alive, but disconnected from me in a way that made my heart ache) many of the very same questions that I would begin asking myself over the eighteen months that followed his death. One afternoon I was gifted a priceless hour alone with my heavily sedated father. This was rare because family and hospital staff were typically always present. At first, I sat silently alongside his hospital bed wondering if my father was satisfied with his life which was drawing to an end? I pondered regrets he might have, things I knew he loved and longed to do; what he might want to tell us if he could? I wondered if he knew this was "it" and if his life had been enough? I continued in this vein until I could no longer hold in all of my questions. I began in a timid voice (which quickly became choking, childlike sobs) to ask my father the questions out loud. Although he wasn't able to answer me in the ways I had grown accustom to and found so very comforting over the forty seven years I had been his daughter, there was great relief in asking him anyway. I know he heard me because not only did I somehow hear and feel his answers, I saw them in the tears that trickled slowly down his sunken cheeks.

  My father gave me a parting gift that afternoon: a testimony of living on purpose and living what you love. This kind of living requires that we find what and who we love, (love them fiercely) giving it all we've got, and then we pass it on. My father did this very simply in his life. Despite how simple and unassuming he was, my father's life was a light. If our lives (or lights) were colors, Daddy was a blue flame (cool, true, calm) and I am red (passionate, fiery and sometimes angry). Both colors are beautiful in there own right, but distinctly different. It is my intention to pass that light to those who follow. I hope that those who come after me lives will be richer, fuller, wider and deeper because I was willing to live wide open, asking myself the questions out loud; risking to live what I truly love. My life is certainly deeper and steadier today because of my father's gentle, peaceful blue light. That light had the ability to pierce through the darkness of my mother's boundless depression I experienced growing up as a child and beyond.  His gentleness cast light on a divorce I didn't choose and feared. And most importantly, my father illuminated a belief in me- that I could do and become anything I wanted to.  I'd like to think he passed his light to me that afternoon and that my dramatic, passionate red flame melded with his cool, calming, blue flare - creating a rich purple torch to pass on to our posterity. I count this as my inheritance.

Some of the questions I have asked myself out loud after my father's death:

1. What is the unlived life that is calling me?
2. Who stands beside me supporting me?
3. Who will come after me, thanking me for who I've been and what I've done?
4. How do I make my life too small for myself?
5. Is this an act of faith or is it an act of fear?

And so I end where I began. Dawna Markova's poem has inspired me to live differently than I have ever lived before. So many of the questions I now ask myself out loud are unanswerable for the moment, but have inspired rousing conversations with myself. Not unlike that last conversation with my father, the answers don't always come to me in ways I expect; yet sometimes are exactly what I need, when I need it. As I no longer live in a clenched state of being, (trusting in this process) I am happier and more willing to ask the hard questions that allow my life to open me.

What questions do you ask yourself today?

~ Julia

"Wide Open"

I will not die an  unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.

- Dawna Markova