#jonathabrooke

I was griping to a friend after a terribly unproductive yesterday and now I see they were right in telling me to relax. We do need to take it easy on ourselves on days like that.  Perhaps all the pushing we do ceases to have value if all you are doing every day is pushing and not taking a  step back to where you have pushed through.  I was angry at myself for not working at all--not working out, not working on my comedy and most of all for not working on getting a new blog up after a hectic day of travel between Anchorage and Reno. So I crashed for five hours and awoke feeling odd, feeling off; but I see now what I was feeling-finally on this trip-was a moment of genuine stillness, but because I am so used to pushing-albeit forward of late-I pushed back against a day of well deserved rest. So rather than try to force a new piece up today I decided to put up an older piece, the piece that really is the foundation of why I write what i write and what exactly inspires me to write when I do.  But I also see now that in doing so I have written myself into a small message today as well... and that is simply that sometimes in the midst of pushing forward, it's okay to take a step back sometimes and enjoy the things that are pushed back at us. That is exactly what I will do as I link the video that inspired me over a decade ago to push myself into these pages and so many years later push them back to you.

And I'm glad this intro message is so short, because what follows is a little longer than usual, but I will honestly tell you oh so worth it, if only to me at least. But if you have some time grab a cup of coffee and enjoy because i also peppered it with a ton of links to other older journal pieces.  As for me, back to pushing forward, but with oh such a big goofy grin... because I like myself again <3 -g

WRITTEN May 21 2002

If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad.      -Sheryl Crow

Those lyrics blasted out of the radio in my Jeep as I drove home from the hospital the night my mother passed away.  It’s been over six years since she ended her eighteen month battle with leukemia -- a battle several doctors gave her no more than three months to lose-- and I still remember the night my mother left this world like an angel.

It was a chilly October night when I told my mother to stop hanging around for me. My mother, Jennie, had weathered eighteen months of hospital stays, blood transfusions (often accompanied by allergic reactions), as well as the brutal fact she was sharing her once vibrant body with an uninvited evil that was methodically destroying it.  Now, as the horrible dance was drawing to a close, my mother lay motionless in her bed in a sterile hospital room filled with devices more concerned with not dying than with living.  The room was several feet down the corridor from the one mom lay in seventeen months earlier while her husband was being buried.  Leukemia doesn’t take a rain check, mom had to miss that too.

Around nine that night, the nurse explained to my brother and I that though mom was unresponsive, she could certainly hear us and that this may be our last chance to speak to her.    I didn’t want my mom to go. I wanted to take all my hate, all my anger, all my rage that I had bottled up inside and use this raw energy to summon my mother back.  Even if I could have done such a thing, it would have been selfish. If there is a beauty in everything, and there most certainly is, it is this selfishness we feel towards the people we love the most.   Mom needed to go.  Mom was still alive, but she was no longer living.                          So I said what I still suppose had to be said. I wish I could remember the exact last words I said to my mother, as much for myself as for this piece,  but I can’t.  I can remember a blinding rage. I can remember the paralysis of my self pity. Most of all  I can remember how each word burned as it choked its way through my throat.  A few hours later, at 12:04 am on October 4th mom was gone; and I was alone. My next recollection is driving alone in my black Jeep down Vineland Highway Route 55 to my now empty childhood home. It was a road that I driven down hundreds of times in my life, yet never had I felt more lost. The emotions of despair, relief, agony, guilt, and anger all combining to make me perfectly numb. Luckily my mother was there for me, as always.  I turned on the radio and Sheryl Crow’s “If It Makes You Happy” played.  Now, you can take it as a sign, as a coincidence, or as a song that simply had come up in the overnight rotation and you would be exactly right.  Things are simply what any of us perceive them to be, no more, no less, but in that car at that moment I know now my mother was speaking to me. Yet despite all the beauty and the simplicity of the message being spoken by one of my favorite singers, I heard nothing.  I couldn’t understood a thing, I could only wail in anger at the infinite sky.

The habit of despair is worse than despair itself             -from Albert Camus’s The Plague I kept up a strong appearance the year and a half that my mother was sick but the daily commute between New Jersey and Delaware was taking its toll.  I look back now and realize that this is when I forgot to be happy—trapped alone for long car rides with only my anger and sadness as it twisted my weak heart and mind. I didn’t see it then, but my mother did.  I still see her beautiful questioning smile as she would look into my confused, frightened eyes pleading for me to remember how easy it was to be happy. She would have told me if she could, but words are useless, only actions lead us to happiness. I see this now because now I see beauty again.  Then I saw only anger. Happiness is like anything else we practice-- a language we speak in word as much as much as action. Like any language, the less we speak it, the more we forget until we understand nothing of it at all. It sits lost in our head waiting for us to reawaken it.  But once we do see it again, as with any language, our understanding of it increases, we better express ourselves, and most importantly, we begin to think in this language. We reawaken this language every moment of everyday simply by listening with our hearts.  It is then we are able see that people speak of joy only when they do what they love.  In these moments we hear this language and-- when it  leads us to act out of love-- we most certainly respond in kind.  And the beauty of it is, no matter how long it takes, happiness will always be there waiting for us the moment we simply choose to see it.

In a twinkling we will all be changed, and I’ll wait for you, and I’ll wait for you…             -Jonatha Brooke's "The Barefoot Ballroom" In the 43 years my mother was a teacher, I never saw her teach in a classroom.  I did see her come home from school every day smiling, singing and dancing.  I saw her get up every morning and make breakfast for my brother, father and myself and smile so brightly that it literally filled the kitchen.  I saw this every morning.  I saw her do the same when she came home from work each day. I felt joy every day but I took it for granted.  I thought it happened everywhere, I assumed it happened everyday. Then my mother got sick.  And everything stopped. Rather then focus on my mother's joy of being alive, of being with her son, instead of seeing her smile when she talked to me, elated to be able to spend another day with her family, with this beautiful world—a God-given gift that in my anger and stupidity I failed to realize— I saw anger. I was used to seeing hate, I was blinded to the beautifully courageous fact that despite machines, doctors and bleak diagnoses,  mom was still finding beauty in every moment she was alive.  I thought she was sad because she was sick.  She wasn’t.  She was sad that her son had forgotten how to smile and that she couldn’t bring me back to something she’d taught me every day, something she was still teaching me.  I look back and am ashamed that I had forgotten everything her smiling, beautiful, passionate heart showed me. Thank God someone helped me remember. Recently I went to see another of my favorite singers, Jonatha Brooke performing solo in an intimate little venue-- stripped of everything but her voice and instruments.  She stood behind a microphone singing in her perfect voice as though it were the only place in the world she could ever be. I sat in amazement as I realized that microphone, that crowd, that moment gave her more life than any machine that will ever be put in a hospital room. I felt the chills of joy as she beat on her guitar less as though playing an instrument and more as though wringing every last life-giving note out of it.  I heard not only each beautiful note and lyric of her angelic voice but saw the urgency in her voice, one that told me how important it was for her to be doing this, how anything else would be death. I watched as her life’s work sustained her, and felt the joy in her soul literally fill that room. And in that moment six plus years of frustration subsided as I realized a simple fact. Each of us need to do only one thing. We need only to do what our hearts will not let us NOT do. This is our passion. This is the language of happiness. This is all around us in every moment of life.  It is in our work, in our hearts, in our friends, and in the beauty that finds us every day if we are simply open to it.  I can’t tell you how to do it. I only know only I am happy right now searching for what I want to say and so happy to be able to come to this page and share my journey with you.  I feel the passion in my hands as I literally beat the words from this keyboard and I need this ache as my eyes well up with anger and joy remembering my mother, remembering the stupid little boy I was.  I cannot NOT do this and I hope that these words will continue to find people each day and fill them with the joy and passion I feel simply being alive and awaken a remembering in you that will remind what we always know but sometimes forget. We need to be happy. We deserve to be happy. There is joy to be found in every moment and we find it as we follow our souls to those things we cannot live without.  Those things that allow joy to pour forth from our hearts as we tap into the beautiful energy that is all life.  Jonatha Brooke showed me that night behind that microphone.  My mother showed me everyday by simply being alive.

It would take a wide net to drag that deep Through all the years, the years I believed you And you’d be hard pressed to face the fact of all the lies And the fears that deceived you

But you say “it doesn’t matter now angel, there’s nothing standing in your way Did I forget to mention how I’m done with you, it’s not my problem anymore”

To be true to be kind to never walk away And it’s true you were blind no matter what I would say to you Is there nothing sacred, to you?

I will turn my back to the wind in your wake To the cold shards of the lives strewn behind you Your record’s scratched but these lines will break Through the drone of time ‘til their meaning will find you

But I say “It doesn’t matter now, Angel, there’s nothing standing in your way Did I forget to mention how I’m done with you, it’s not my problem anymore”