When I moved to New York almost ten years ago, a great friend and I sat underneath a cherry blossom tree (that friend is my neighbor these days). Under the influence of pink we exchanged ideas, laughter, painful memories and hope for a better future. I am not a fan of the color pink, but I must say once you are near it, something magical always happens.
I was just thinking abut the miracles of cherry blossoms when I heard a poem by Kevin Kling titled Tickled Pink. I think the poem says it all.
At times in our pink innocence, we lie fallow, composting waiting to grow. And other times we rush headlong like so many of our ancestors. But rush headlong or lie fallow, it doesn't matter.
One day you'll round a corner, your path is shifted. In a blink, something is missing. It's stolen, misplaced, it's gone. Your heart, a memory, a limb, a promise...... a person. Your innocence is gone, and now your journey has changed. Your path, as though channeled through a spectrum, is refracted and has left you pointed in a new direction. Some won't approve. Some will want the other you. And some will cry that you've left it all. But what has happened, has happened, and cannot be undone.
We pay for our laughter. We pay to weep. Knowledge is not cheap. To survive we must return to our senses, touch, taste, smell, sight, sound. We must let our spirit guide us, our spirit that lives in breath. With each breath we inhale, we exhale. We inspire, we expire. Every breath has a possibility of a laugh, a cry, a story, a song. Every conversation is an exchange of spirit, the words flowing bitter or sweet over the tongue. Every scar is a monument to a battle survived.
Now when you're born into loss, you grow from it. But when you experience loss later in life, you grow toward it. A slow move to an embrace, an embrace that leaves you holding tight the beauty wrapped in the grotesque, an embrace that becomes a dance, a new dance, a dance of pink.
