Stones For My Sister's Birthday

 Today would be my sister's 75th birthday. This morning I woke to find a beautiful tribute to her from a dear friend. Still half asleep, I felt flooded with gratitude for all life has held during my own almost 84 years, my beautiful sister Elizabeth (Betsy/Liz), and for such a friend who would wake me on this shining day with remembrance. And, let's say it!, for email that makes such instant communication possible. 

I miss Liz every day. Our personalities were different, and we counted on each other for that. Just the other day I wanted to call her. I needed her voice--that calming, steady, no-nonsense voice. I remember that we talked a lot after I moved from Minnesota to live along the Pacific Coast. It was my first understanding of how drastically environment can affect perception of both world and self. Liz saw it right away. "You aren't a Minnesotan anymore."  But the new people I met in California in the East Bay knew I wasn't one of them either. "You're from--where?--Wisconsin? Minnesota?" Liz and I, on the phone, would laugh. If I became anxious, her voice would calm me down. "Just like Mom," she'd say. If she worried over what was right, I'd offer her permission to follow her dreams and trust her heart.

Each of us made up for what was sometimes missing in the other. It's a good way to live--trusting the gift of our differences. Believing in each other's truth and wisdom. She liked to walk along the Pacific Coast with me, finding stones. In memory I love to watch us there. She is silent and off a bit down the beach alone, bending here and there. She could find such stones, the very best. She loved jade. I see her lift her hand with one and wave to me through the wind. She had a way about her. She had such a way.

Recently I wrote a poem that soon will find its way into another book called OBSERVANCES.  It reminds me of Liz, though I didn't write it for her. I give it to her now. This day. I remember how her daughter, Krista, brought the stones Liz saved through the years to my sister'/her mother's burial. We each held one of Liz's stones and with deep gratitude for her being in our life we laid s stone on top of her coffin.

  Here is my poem, in memory of Elizabeth on her birthday.

You joined the pilgrimage along the narrow road

Of all who burn and dig to find the most desired.

I felt you take my hand, yours trembling and stained

With earth and blood, you had dug bare-handed

for the precious stone. "It might not be below."

You felt it then, the humbling that happens to the soul. 

All the years of gathering the words the stones

The bones of being, the essence of yourself, the world

The heart of you. You scraped your fingers

On the basalt of their origin, the cliffs of them

The sharpness under mud while forever the stones drift

They break, they gather rust, they shatter under time

They turn to diamonds or to dust. The stone you sought

Is already part of you.

 

1972