Ripped Open (Ocean Crossing)

Take my hand across the water
You won’t leave no tracks behind
Step all over the moon lit ocean
It’s only in your mind
All these thoughts just rip me open
Who can heal a heart that’s broken?
Like the winds that blow unspoken
Blew my love away

So sings Arlo Guthrie in one of the songs that has become a hymn of my life. When Julie left it was the first part of the song that I posted as a blog because I couldn’t find my own words to write.

Looked into your eyes this morning
You were far away
You knew that I was looking for you
You knew you couldn’t stay

I was in a cab in Washington D.C. with my heart being drug from behind as though tin cans on the back of the car of a newlywed couple’s car.

I was just numb.

Then Skip Eloge called and asked me what was wrong? Where are your words? You always write. So I told him in a numb sort of way. I remember staring at the Washington Monument as I spoke and it was a bright sunny day in D.C. And Arlo’s words kept ringing in my head.

My friend Dedra and I were talking recently and she asked how I kept using lyrics in my conversations. I told her that I think in lyrics. It may as well be a foreign language that I’ve mastered. My dear friend Mitch has also mastered it and he and I can carry on complete conversations with one another just quoting song lyrics.

Anyway, Julie knew she couldn’t stay. I don’t blame her. We’d been through so much. The weight of the world had become oppressive and it crushed us. She went off to survive and I send her the very best of everything.

And I’m still here! Though “here” is a much different place from then. Some things are the same. Goddess is still the most beautiful dog though she stays near me all of the time slamming herself into the sofa or the bed when she wants love. She knows loss too. Though she knows new loves too and gets excited when they arrive.

The house is the same then again it’s not. My Mom had all these dreams about what it should look like and she is a person who has always made dreams come true. So she’s working on it. And it is taking on a different look … a different feel … becoming the right setting for a very different …me.

The friends that I have are the same that I had before though the friendships are far deeper and richer…and fewer. Far fewer! This isn’t a bad thing, I’ve come to learn. Rather than trying to satisfy the masses, I have far more time to invest myself into the few and much more appreciation for what they have invested in me. These are the people who have gotten me through.

So this morning I sit on the beloved back deck with Goddess lying beside me. The choirs of birds are singing. Fran is showering me with love in her thousand shades of green. The newness of the back yard is warm and inviting. I hear the waves of the ocean slap the shore.

On the other side of Fran’s thousand shades of green, hidden from me, are three musicians playing their instruments, remnants of the St. Patrick’s Day celebration in Savannah. A guitar, a violin and a cello sing to me through the trees. Fran has blessed this with purple wisteria shooting from the thousand shades.

And it makes me cry.

So I lean towards the ocean and reach out my hand to the future. Towards this hand that I know is reaching out to me.

I am scared.

But I believe that she’ll take it and we’ll step all over the moon lit ocean. And we’ll make it real. I’m already ripped open though the broken heart is beingl healed.

And there is no need for words.

They’ve all been blown away.