01.28.2003 - 1:04 p.m.

One of my favorite poems ever:

The Wind

This is the end of me, but you live on.
The wind, crying and complaining,
rocks the house and the forest,
not each pine tree separately,
but all the trees together
with the whole boundless distance,
like the hulls of sailing-ships
riding at anchor in a bay.
It shakes them not out of mischief,
and not in nameless fury,
but to find for you, out of its grief,
the words of a lullaby.

-Boris Pasternak

I often bless people when they leave my life, or when their roles in it change significantly. It�s never more than a sentence or two and never out loud, just in my head. Kind of like a prayer, I suppose, but without the sense that I know who I�m praying to. Really, I suppose it is more of a dedication, especially the kind you would find in a self-help or chicken-soup book, but I call it a blessing anyway since I don�t have anything to dedicate:

For Laura, that you may find friends strong enough to support your most painful decisions.

For Dave, that you may someday understand how you are both less and so much more than you believe.

For Tony, that someone may bring you to trust your own hope.

I have unspoken blessings for several people I haven�t lost yet, too. (Tony, for instance. I don�t seem to have lost him as badly as I�d thought.) I think I do it mostly for myself, to absolve myself from failures beyond my control, and to remind myself to free others from my old expectations. I do it partly to express to myself the things I would never say to a person, because if you are going to hold on to regrets at all, you should only keep the ones you can cherish. And the part of me that is still my mother�s daughter believes it is worth doing anyway, just in case there is anyone up there, listening.

We could all of us use a good lullaby.

-stonebridge

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