Beloved Something

"And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth."

--Raymond Carver

As this difficult (for me) summer slowly deepens towards autumn, I try to re-assess the gifts within the great physical challenges I faced in May and June, which have increased my knowledge of my own mortality. My long illness has taken a huge toll on my body, though I am getting stronger day by day; still, I am left with the deep realization that I will not be here forever. Yet this knowledge, however difficult for me, is also jewel I can learn to carry with appreciation and respect, like a treasure found in the ashes of a wildfire.

Whether my final day on earth comes tomorrow or fifty years from now, I understand, a little more now, the grace of impermanence. I try to hold with conscious knowledge that opening my eyes to the world every morning is a gift and a new opportunity to choose my behavior and to deepen my desire to walk a path of compassion and goodness, not just proclaim that I do. In fact, I hope to proclaim not at all, just do.

When I was a child, my mother would take me to my grandmother's grave, to tend it and put flowers there (she loved best the dyed carnations, blue ones and also green). On my grandmother's gravestone is the phrase, "Beloved Mother."

I have thought of that phrase often as I continue to weave into life again. I realize that no one would probably want on their headstone, "He Had a Lot of Money" or "She Owned a BMW," or "She Had an Organized Closet," etc. In fact, anyone passing by a such an inscription would probably feel a little badly that this was the phrase that summed up a person's life!

But the phrase "Beloved Mother,"--or sister, friend, teacher--the idea of being beloved to someone, would be the most wonderful thing I could earn as my last message to the world, to anyone who passed by my final resting-place. So this year, and I hope for all the many years I have left, I will work on increasing my 'beloved-ness", and hope that I can also help increase others' sense of beloved-ness, too.