• Bluelight
    Shrine




    A memorial
    to Bluelighters
    who have passed away

RIP ektamine

I get chills when you talk about your son Herby
The immense love definitely reaches through this medium to the next, some how...
 
I always find myself reading this thread and thinking about my mom. I try not to be as wreckless as i used to be but the thought of my moms grieve if something was to happen makes me sad. My heart hurts for you jan but yet the stregnth you have shown since then is nothing short of heroic. Your an inspiration to me! I hope this message finds you healthy and in good spirits. I also hope you are able to find a measure of peace eventually.
Plur. Drew
 
^and that makes me happy, Drew. (((<3)))



Watched the sun come up down on the dock. I thought about how two years ago I brought some of your ashes here, poured them in the shape of a rabbit into the water and watched them disappear. By now you are everywhere. The Tualatin took you into the Willamette which handed you to the mighty Columbia which set you out to sea. Perhaps you went north on the Alaska currents towards the Bering Straits or perhaps you took the California current down to the North Equatorial current and then headed straight for Samoa. You were so happy on this lazy little river. My mind plays all the old reels: stuffing your arms into those little plastic floaties, melon and sandwiches on the dock, the smell of hot wood and sunscreen, splash wars and canoe rides, the rope swing, herons and the sound of your voice calling me, "Mom! Watch this!" , "Mom, come in! It's not cold!", "Mom, try to take my picture when I let go of the rope swing.". How many times I watched you jump off the steep, muddy bank, swinging higher and higher up to that instant of letting go.



 
Caleb couldn't have been blessed by a better mother Jan. He was one lucky guy to experience what you gave him. And I'm sure you received the same back from him. Those memories never die <3.

Someone once told me that souls travel together into whatever it is beyond this. I like to believe that.
 
“Tree” by Jane Hirshfield

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books -

Already the branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
Click to expand...

Whenever I read this poem now, I think of you. I think of this choice. It is after all a choice that we all make in small ways every day--to subscribe fully or partially or not at all to the mundane or to subscribe fully, partially or not at all to "immensity", to the bigger picture.

For years I have nested and loved it. Creating a home for our family was something I loved on every level. You looked out the window from that home and you saw more than the street. You seemed to see the wind that no one else was seeing as early as I can remember. Who can say what is a bad choice or a good one? I often accused you of making bad choices. Maybe they were and maybe they weren't. I have been humbled enough to see my own choices and yours as simply what we thought was best at the time. Perhaps we were making choices based on the reference point of the soup pots or perhaps the redwood tree--they can't be good for both at the same time--or maybe they can, but they would certainly appear differently.

Lately, immensity has been calling me. I'm sure that your voice is part of that. Here is a picture of your Great-Great-Grandma Talberg when she had no home herself and packed that little suitcase every few months to stay with one or the other of her children so as not to overburden any of them for too long. She was not that much older than I am now, though her hard life makes her look much older. I think of what it must have been like for her to give up a home of her own. In her case, it was poverty that forced her hand. My hand is being nudged by something larger. I am not giving up my home, just lessening its pull on me by leaving for a while.



I want to stand in the unfamiliar by myself. I want the loneliness and the acuity of feeling that comes with that. I want to sit and listen to the wind that knows neither borders nor language nor culture. I know that you yearned for that, too. I have been packing and unpacking my pack trying to hone everything for 4 months down into 50 litres of space. There are clothes and toiletries and rain-gear and a first-aid kit; there are art supplies and writing supplies and a camera. And there is the little pouch that contains some of the ashes left when you left your body and left this world and joined the immensity that was always your second home.

I don't know what I will do with these ashes yet. I will know when I get there. I know why I am taking them, though. I am taking them to embrace you, to honor your desires to travel in this world that you barely got to see; but I am also taking them to let them go. I love you so much Caleb, as much in your absence as in your presence.<3
 
I've been off Bluelight for awhile, Jan, but your words here reminded me of a poem that I wanted to share with you. I don't think the following is about embracing pain; I think it is about embracing life with ALL that means, including loss. When you go, wherever you go, love goes with you because that love IS you....

The Meeting Missed, Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

If I am not to meet you again in this life then I want to feel that I have missed the meeting, don’t let me forget, let me feel the pain of it in my dreams and while awake.

As the time passes in the black dust of the body, and I get fat with money, I want to feel that I have gotten nothing out of it all – don’t let me forget, I want to feel the slivers of pain in my dreams and while awake.

When I walk up the steps, exhausted and tense after a long trip, or when I climb into some lonely bed, I want to feel that the long trip is still ahead of me – don’t let me forget, I want to feel the pain in my legs both while asleep and while awake.

When my house is all cleaned, and drinks are set here and there, and I hear people laughing, I want to feel that I haven’t invited you to my house – don’t let me forget, I want to feel the pain of that grief both while asleep and while awake.
 
^Yes and how eloquently stated. The desire to feel everything, not to numb or deny pain, neither to self-punish nor refuse to allow joy, is the full experience of grief. Really it is the full experience of life.
 
Caleb, in 3 days I leave the city for the rainforest and I will be taking some of your ashes with me. Jane sént me this prose poem about a woman taking her belovéd's ashes out into a lake and leaving them there. It comes close for me. I know that these are ashes and that you have long since joined all there is but I will copy it here for you anyway--well, for myself really--or for the bond of love we shared as mother and son that is still so strong within me.

"When he left, and when he was finally gone, when he thought that he was nothing on this earth, though there was no "he" and no "thought" and he believed that he would join the vast armies of the dead that he had heard about, but nothing flew up from his breast and nothing raised up from him. then the woman held him in a wooden box, and he heard her say that it was heavy, so heavy, that it was mostly crushed bone among the black ashes. her hands were strong,They were always busy and he had always admired them, but they were both beyond that now. She shook him gently from the box at some point. It was what they had known as "morning". She shook him into a paper sack and put a smooth stone from the beach into it. Their minds had been alike in some ways. There was a good weight to the stone. He knew it. they had picked it out together. It was the size of her heart. Then she carried him. She walked the path out through the woods to the pond. When they reached the shore, she stepped into the water, which was like the night sky, black and shining, and she walked out to where the water was near her shoulders, and her breath blew and shuddered. Then she let him go. It was everything they had hoped for in those times when they had hoped. He went down. He settled.He might have lain immured in the sack for weeks. It was a surprise. he loved the cold water and he loved it more as it ate of the sack until it no longer was, as he no longer was, and without a way to tell it clearly, he slowly became the pond, spreading with the slowest, quietest eddies.So slow. he could not say where he had been, or what. But when the ice came, he was the ice and at the same time he saw up through its grey ceiling, and he saw more grey. Snow came then, a dusty white, like clouds, and then it thickened and he was everywhere under a black quilt, moving , as nothing moved. When the summer sun came he was in the fish and the fish were in him. When the lillies rose, white and impure, he was in their throats and they made a broken kind of singing. when the stars drifted over, the frogs roared. Then there was a kind of laughter. This is all a way of speaking when there truly is no speaking. he didn't know where the others were, but it would be wrong to think that anything was the same, that there were desires or feelings, or even "others". After a while everything and nothing were just sounds the living made., he barely knew them. If there were speech he would say just one thing: Your realm above the glassed eye of this silent water is just a dream.This other place, this forever, this forgetting--this, always, was the only world." ((Frank X. Gaspar)

You are everywhere and it is I who is still inside the dream. It is important to me to lay your ashes in the rivers and the rainforest and the desert. It is for me. I am studying so hard to try to get all the verb tenses right in Spanish. This one is easy. Tú ya regresó. Yo estoy todavía regresando.
 
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Have a safe trip Jan! I really hope you find whatever you are looking for!
 
Last week I was in the amazonian rainforest in Ecuador. Every day I went out with a small group of travelers and our guide, Eduardo, who taught us about the local plants, the Quichua uses for bark and leaves and vines, as well as about the animals and birds, fish and reptiles. I don think there is anyplace on earth that blurs the line between life and death like a tropical rainforest. Everywhere is decay and in that decay new life springs up in a matter of hours. I asked Eduardo if he would accompany me into the jungle, just the two of us, so that I could spread some of Calebś ashes and he said of course. That night he proposed that we go by canoe to a place that he thought would be good. There was a half-moon and a jet-black sky full of stars. The moonlight cast dim shadows over the bow of the canoe in front of me and the only sounds were the insects and frogs and Eduardoś paddle dipping into the black water. We paddled in silence for awhile and then he brought the canoe to shore and tied it up and we walked into the jungle. I thought that maybe he was taking me to an especially old tree or a spot that held special significance for the indigenous people but instead we came upon another lagoon with a canoe exactly like the one he had tied up.

It will be impossible to describe the overwhelming beauty of this place but I have to try. Above was the clear night sky, full of stars and and the bright waxing moon and all around the lagoon and in the trees that grew from their own little islands out in the water, fireflies twinkled in the foliage. But the most amazing thing by far was the lacy ring of phosphorescence that glowed at the edge of the lagoon. He told me that this was a place that the fireflies came to lay their eggs and that the larva were phosphorescent, too. The black sky of stars was perfectly mirrored in the black water and it really looked like the stars were sifting through the trees and falling to earth. He paddled around for quite a while, occasionally sweeping his torch over the surface of the water looking for alligators. He said the lagoon had two kinds of caimans ranging from 6 meters to 2 meters long. Three times the flashlight found the red eyes but as we tried to paddle closer they always went underwater. We circled the small lagoon like this for what felt like an eternity outside of time. Still the only sounds were the insects and frogs and the gentle dipping and pull of Eduardoś paddle in the inky water and occasionally the call of an owl--so different from the ones at home.

After a while, when I had been silently talking to you, Caleb, I asked Eduardo if we could just drift. We floated without speaking held between two worlds on the thin membrane of the water--above us the whole sparkling universe, beneath us alligators and piranha, anacondas and giant turtles. I felt so strongly that you were all of it--from the stars above us to the huge creatures beneath us, you were there, you were all of it. We floated in the the canoe that seemed to be changing shape as we drifted in and out of moon shadows. I poured your ashes into my hands and held them above the water. I spoke your name and prayed that the beauty of this place call out to you, that you would hold this place and this place would hold you and then I let your ashes drop into the water. The amazing thing was that they did not sink; for the longest time they hung like a shifting cloud just below the surface of the dark water. Finally I looked up at the sky and when I looked back they were gone. Eduardo sensed that it was time to go and so he paddled in silence back to the shore and we retied the canoe and traced our steps back to the canoe that would take us back to Yarina. I did not shed one tear. There was no sadness in this. It felt dreamlike and even now I cannot believe what i saw. There will be other places and yet I cannot believe that any will ever compare to the powerful magic of that place. This is what I came for: to know not where, but what, you are. I am carrying that knowledge now.
 
and that is beautiful <3

a mother and childs naturalistic bond is not one that can simply be shown in depth, photographs, words, nor expressed to others (no matter how greatly you are dying to share it). its just felt and is deep inside of you. im so happy you found the experience out of this self sacrificing and preserving journey you were hoping to and that you were able to connect with your son once again. it sounds wonderful, spiritually cleansing, and well worth it, and above all else as calebs proud mother; you deserve it.

light and love sweet herbi. be safe on your travels from herein. <3

...kytnism...:|
 
For almost four months now I have been wandering. Lifted out of my life, gratefully, and set back into my body in a foreign land, a foreign language, hoping to create the space and unstructured time to do some things that I did not get to do before you left. I had wanted to sit with your body longer. I had wanted to wash your body, say goodbye in that ancient way, give you all my best wishes for your journey, wait with you while you left. Everything happened too fast. Police time. Coroner's time. Cultural time. Too fast, all of it, and your father and I in a fog, unable to resist. I could not reverse time, go back, but I thought if I could just sit still in my mind, I could take the remorse out of that part of the loss at least.

So I took myself away. I gave myself months where I knew no one and no one knew me. I gave myself no schedule, no expectations, nothing at all to hang onto, floating free. Foreign signs, foreign meanings, foreign food, foreign news, foreign humor, foreign innuendo, foreign geography, foreign climate. I went as high as I could get and let the clouds that walk around the Andes lift me up and carry me along. I learned to talk to them. I talked to rocks. I talked to rivers and I talked to birds. Always, I talked to you. Sometimes I felt you there, but leaving. Sometimes I felt you there in a new way.Sometimes I felt you were really and truly gone. Always I have felt your absence in my life and I still do, the presence of it, the weight. The shape of that absence changes, like everything does.There is nothing like keeping company with clouds and rivers and wind to unlearn the old vocabulary of death.

I walked for hours; I walked where they told me I should walk and where they said I should not.I smiled at people and they smiled back. I hiked up and up and when I got to the top of the highest ridge I could see from where I had started, there was another ridge and another higher still. On the equator you can do this for a long time without snow. I was usually lost, but it never mattered. Once I lost my reading glasses in a river while I was bent over looking for stones. I could not read the trail map that I used to get into the woods, nor could I read the few small signs. I had gotten so used to walking and wandering and not knowing that I never got scared, just kept at it until I was out of the forest and in a town. When I got to the town, women were sitting out in front of their houses and the sun was going down. There was such beauty in their relaxing, in their greetings and questions. You cannot be lost when you are wandering. I thought about how this applied to your life, what you must have seen when you took that drastic turn, where you ended up, how you were transformed.

Some days I woke up into a sadness so profound that I could only walk out into the world and keep walking, hours and hours, until all the life around me pulled me into some kind of rough embrace. Other days, I would wake and feel that great sky of solitude I floated in, the peace of it, the room I had to write to you or just to think about you, about me, about what is and is not and what is outside of that concept. Always there are the clouds here. You can be in them, under them, over them. The most amazing thing is to be over one layer and under another, and the two of them moving in different directions. I have never thought of clouds as beings. Now I do.

It is almost time to go home. I am trying to get accustomed to that thought. My concept of home has changed. I feel at home wandering. I did get to sit with you, but it wasn't enough. Perhaps it could never be enough.
 
Jan, I don't know you and we've never really met. I want to say thank you for helping me, both directly and indirectly with coping with things in my life more than any doctor or "real life" friend has. I hope someday I can develop the strength to turn my pain into something as productive and positive and beautiful as you have. I hope you understand how important you are to so many people here.

The picture of your Great grandmother reminded me of the comfort I sometimes find in looking at those old photos of my own ancestors. The pain and sadness and joy they felt was just as real and it all passed and life went on and joy and pain reincarnated ad infinitum. It's scary but also comforting and helps me put things in perspective during times when I want to scream at the walls that fall in towards me and rip apart space and just fall away. Living is scary and it's so much more than I can understand. We'll fade away too, maybe tomorrow or maybe 60 years from now. in the meantime the choice is to wander gently upon the earth or to desperately hold onto place and collect {pain, misery, money, possessions, ego}/
 
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herbavore said:
For almost four months now I have been wandering. Lifted out of my life, gratefully, and set back into my body in a foreign land, a foreign language, hoping to create the space and unstructured time to do some things that I did not get to do before you left. I had wanted to sit with your body longer. I had wanted to wash your body, say goodbye in that ancient way, give you all my best wishes for your journey, wait with you while you left. Everything happened too fast. Police time. Coroner's time. Cultural time. Too fast, all of it, and your father and I in a fog, unable to resist. I could not reverse time, go back, but I thought if I could just sit still in my mind, I could take the remorse out of that part of the loss at least.

So I took myself away. I gave myself months where I knew no one and no one knew me. I gave myself no schedule, no expectations, nothing at all to hang onto, floating free. Foreign signs, foreign meanings, foreign food, foreign news, foreign humor, foreign innuendo, foreign geography, foreign climate. I went as high as I could get and let the clouds that walk around the Andes lift me up and carry me along. I learned to talk to them. I talked to rocks. I talked to rivers and I talked to birds. Always, I talked to you. Sometimes I felt you there, but leaving. Sometimes I felt you there in a new way.Sometimes I felt you were really and truly gone. Always I have felt your absence in my life and I still do, the presence of it, the weight. The shape of that absence changes, like everything does.There is nothing like keeping company with clouds and rivers and wind to unlearn the old vocabulary of death.

I walked for hours; I walked where they told me I should walk and where they said I should not.I smiled at people and they smiled back. I hiked up and up and when I got to the top of the highest ridge I could see from where I had started, there was another ridge and another higher still. On the equator you can do this for a long time without snow. I was usually lost, but it never mattered. Once I lost my reading glasses in a river while I was bent over looking for stones. I could not read the trail map that I used to get into the woods, nor could I read the few small signs. I had gotten so used to walking and wandering and not knowing that I never got scared, just kept at it until I was out of the forest and in a town. When I got to the town, women were sitting out in front of their houses and the sun was going down. There was such beauty in their relaxing, in their greetings and questions. You cannot be lost when you are wandering. I thought about how this applied to your life, what you must have seen when you took that drastic turn, where you ended up, how you were transformed.

Some days I woke up into a sadness so profound that I could only walk out into the world and keep walking, hours and hours, until all the life around me pulled me into some kind of rough embrace. Other days, I would wake and feel that great sky of solitude I floated in, the peace of it, the room I had to write to you or just to think about you, about me, about what is and is not and what is outside of that concept. Always there are the clouds here. You can be in them, under them, over them. The most amazing thing is to be over one layer and under another, and the two of them moving in different directions. I have never thought of clouds as beings. Now I do.

It is almost time to go home. I am trying to get accustomed to that thought. My concept of home has changed. I feel at home wandering. I did get to sit with you, but it wasn't enough. Perhaps it could never be enough.
Click to expand...

Much love <3

I'm wishing you and your family the best. You are simply an amazing person <3
 
Transcendence said:
Jan, I don't know you and we've never really met. I want to say thank you for helping me, both directly and indirectly with coping with things in my life more than any doctor or "real life" friend has. I hope someday I can develop the strength to turn my pain into something as productive and positive and beautiful as you have. I hope you understand how important you are to so many people here.

The picture of your Great grandmother reminded me of the comfort I sometimes find in looking at those old photos of my own ancestors. The pain and sadness and joy they felt was just as real and it all passed and life went on and joy and pain reincarnated ad infinitum. It's scary but also comforting and helps me put things in perspective during times when I want to scream at the walls that fall in towards me and rip apart space and just fall away. Living is scary and it's so much more than I can understand. We'll fade away too, maybe tomorrow or maybe 60 years from now. in the meantime the choice is to wander gently upon the earth or to desperately hold onto place and collect {pain, misery, money, possessions, ego}/
Click to expand...

You have helped me, too, though you probably don't know it. Listening to the way another parent experiences the death of their child, the going forward with their own lives, whethert for themselves or their family or simply because they do not know how to die themselves, affects me profoundly because each different experience, whether I have experienced it exactly or not, speaks to me. The experience of picking up your son's ashes put words to the baffling, surreal experience of that for me. Your struggle to find your way is my struggle to find mine as is the struggle of Where_wolf's mother and all the other mothers and fathers who have found Bluelight through their sons or daughters.

I love what you say about the choice. Losing a son or a daughter makes everything else seem irrelevant, weightless, meaningless. There is a complete re-set and the trappings of accumulation are the first to go. I am down here in Perú watching the frenzy of christmas amp up around me--the same false promises of happiness and love if you just give the right present, or receive it; the same ridiculous excess that is being pushed on people who have no way of actually buying into it but will suffer for trying as they will suffer for feeling that they have not succeeded., I am in a desert where trash never disappears, just gets layered into the sand and soil, caught on the rocks and formed into drifts wherever there is something to bank against. this is the same desert that held ancient cultures long before the Incas even existed and yesterday I saw the perfectly mummified body of a priestess with her tattooed skin on her arms covered with stars, birds and the sun and I have seen all the amazing things that have survived, the pottery, the textiles, the adornments and geogliphs and ruins. It is in our blood, in our DNA I think to want to hold on, to want to preserve and it is our legacy to leave behind the detritus of our culture and time.

It is hard to compare the incredible ceramic art of the containers of thousands of years ago with the plastic water bottles gathering like locusts on the earth but there you have it. The old hierarchies and the new are not so different--always some of us are deemed important and most of us expendable.Only to each other do we matter at all. Our sons, for us, mattered more than anything, the birthright of every child born is to matter more than anything.

As I sit watching the ridiculous ads on the blaring TV in the mercado this morning, the ads where long-legged beauties in tight dresses emerge from giant gift boxes holding wrapped gifts in their hands, and everyone around them explodes into an orgy of love and happiness simply by touching the mythical white box with the big red bow, as I take in all the falseness of that swallowing up culture after culture, I am thankful that I gave my son all I had to give: he mattered more than anything to me. I know that your son mattered more than anything to you. Hold onto that. No matter how badly you feel about mistakes you made as a parent, things you wish you had done differently, words you wish you had said or could take back, the truth that your child mattered more than anything is the only truth you need.

To wander gently on the earth is a lovely way to live. It takes so little really. Maybe such loss makes it easier to step outside all that need and wanting. I wish you expansive, swollen moments of peace amidst the inevitable moments of pain.

herby

And to CH and jj, and all those here that hold me in their great big kind hearts, thank you and I hope you know that I hold you in mine as well.
 
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