Soapbox

At a recent funeral service it  crossed my mind to wonder what people might say about me one day at my funeral. Sometimes I feel like I haven’t accomplished much. But I realized that when my time comes, if they say "She loved people and she told them so", I will have done alright.
I mean, really- what else counts?

When I woke up this morning there was a mourning dove
Right outside my window, singing about love.
Oh fly away, you mourning dove for now at last I see
How each and every love I’ve known makes up a part of me.

All we are in this short life is all the love we feel;
The giving and the taking is the only thing that’s real.
And that’s the simple reason why I’ve got to let you know
Something that I should have said a hundred years ago:

All we are in this world is love
All we are, when we come to the end of our days
Is the people who love us, and the ones that we’ve loved:
All that matters is that we love~ all we are in this world is love.

We can’t all climb great mountains or sail across the sea,
I will never change the world or write a symphony.
But it is love that built the mountains and it’s love that filled the sea
And its love that makes me who I am: mine for you, and yours for me.

So hush-a-bye you mourning dove, please fly away and find
All the special people that I’ve got on my mind
Don’t care if I said it yesterday or half a lifetime has gone by
I’ve got to say it one more time and here’s the reason why:

All I am in this world is love.
I’m a patchwork of people who fill up my heart
I’m the people who love me and those that I love:
All I’ll leave when I go is love~ all we are in this world is love.

With a look or a touch I can let you know
Whether we’ve shared a lifetime, or just an hour or so.
For love is the part of me, it’s the part of you that never lets go!

All we are in this world is love
All we are, when we come to the end of our days
Is the people who love us, and the ones that we’ve loved:
All that matters is that we ;ove.
All we take from this world, allwe bring to this world,
All we are in this world… is love.

Good evening friends.
Our top Haiku for tonight
You can read below:

Fifty billion more
For an endless, ugly war-
Will it never end?

Man who cried “Iraq!”
says “nukeular Holocaust”
Please, no one listen.
***
Two bitter years gone
ruined houses rot and die,
levees still don’t work.
***
Geneva just quaint
Constitution obsolete~
Gonzales moves on.

Rotten apple out
to make room for someone who’s
more incompetent?
***
Dark and still below
cold, heavy earth above
Silent lies their tomb.
***
Pay no attention
to millions with no health care:
Michael Vick hates dogs.
***
Lindsay Lohan drunk
Senator in bathroom stall-
Put silly news here.
***
To sum it all up:
Bush hears only his own voice
Nothing’s new tonight.

That is all for now.
Sleep well and try to survive
until a new day.
News brought to you by
Exxon, maker of Valdez.
We toast the planet!

So I’m sitting on Grandfather mountain listening to all these celtic and pseudo-celtic singers, and I started thinking, "I could write a song like that." It seemed a pretty simple recipe, sort of like chocolate chip cookies. Instead of flour, butter and eggs, just mention hearbreak and wandering the hills, mix in a little longing, and there you go.
Bon appetite!

I knew from the first you belonged in my heart,
You were part of me then, even though
I was so young, with the heart of a child
And so much of love I did not know,
And so much of life I could not know.

But you came and you left like the wind in the trees,
Your wild heart I could touch but not hold
You bid me farewell one sweet autumn morn
When the year turned the mountain to gold
And the sun turned my tears to gold.

So many years, so many miles ago,
So many young dreams not fulfilled.
Where does love go as the years roll on by?
It lives in the heart, even still
And you’re here in my heart, even still.

As I wander the hills, all the trees speak your name
And the wind, it recalls me your face
Though t’was lost from my sight half a lifetime ago
I think of you now, in this place
and I wish you were here, in this place.

Now I watch the moon rise and I wonder, my dear,
Does it shine on you now just the same?
Do you wish you had come back to try one more time?
Do you hear my soft voice in the rain?
Does the summer storm whisper my name?

Oh the heart remains young with the passing of time,
Of dreams it surrenders but few
And my heart can’t forget what you meant to me once
And my love, it still longs for you,
Yes my heart does remember you.

I was sitting around one evening, thinking about the law of thermodynamics (because who doesn’t, from time to time?) and it occurred to me that the first law sort of applies to human dynamics, too. And this little song kind of wrote itself.

When we were only children
Playing grown-up games
I opened up my heart
And there I wrote your name…
I wrote your name.

We were tied together
So many years ago:
A slender thread much stronger
Than I could ever know…
I did not know.

Deny it, or transform it,
Ignore it if you will
The years reshape the meaning
But love exists there still…
Exists there still.

Like the force that drives the universe,
Love does not go away.
Though life will change the melody
The song will always play.

I can’t begin to tell you
What I hope to find-
There’s just a bit of your heart
That’s written, still, in mine…
You’re still in mine.

A message in a bottle,
Cast into the sea
Of time and chance and longing
To bring you back to me…
Come back to me.

It’s the force that binds the universe:
It does not go away.
Though life may change the melody
The song will always play.

You can’t create it or destroy it
For love is here to stay
Though fate rewrote our melody,
Love’s song will always play.

30 didn’t phase me, 40 was no big deal…
50, I guess, is going to be a bitch.

I really don’t want to go back
To those cyclonic days of my youth
Full of young dreams and lovely friends
But also young demons and fears,
Confusion and pain.

I was such a child then- looking back
I see so much sadness that I caused myself
Over things I thought I would die without
And the wounds, large and small, that I agonized over,
Watching them bleed,
When I should have seen how little they mattered.
How I struggled with things
That should have been simple.

But suddenly
That past seems so very far away that I feel panicked-
like a child who realizes she has strayed too far
to ever find her way back home.

It makes no sense.
I could not go back to the past the day I left it.
Why am I sad that I can not return
From 30 years beyond?
Loves lost were lost a lifetime ago
And love gained has outweighed them a thousand fold.

But I feel suddenly irrelevant, incidental:
Like nothing I do will really matter now.
I am blessed to have done so many things I wanted to do-
Graduation, marriage,
Children born, and loved, and taught
And now sent on their way
Towards that brilliance of young adulthood
Which I can still remember like it was mere weeks ago-
and yet, at the same time
It seems nothing more than a movie I once watched
Of someone else’s life.
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