This rose will never die....

Striking Steuben glass rose heart.



My Lady D'Arbanville
Why do you sleep so still?
I'll wake you tomorrow
And you will be my fill
Yes you will be my fill

This 1970 hit has been considered one of the best love songs of the last decades of the XXth century. Its author, the young English musician and songwriter, Cat Stevens, wrote it in the pangs of pain caused by a short separation from his sweetheart.

The story behind it, from the Wikipaedia, tells about Cat Stevens falling in love with "a very young American woman who was pursuing a modeling career, by her own account about 14 years old at the time, named Patti D'Arbanville. The two began dating over a period of more than a year. D'Arbanville stayed with him whenever she was in London, but often found her career taking her to Paris, and New York City. Unfortunately, after over a year with her, Stevens was willing to invest more in a serious relationship than his young, ambitious girlfriend. It was on such a foray to New York that she heard his song about her on the airwaves. Her reaction was one of sadness. She said, "I just have to be by myself for a while to do what I want to do. It's good to be alone sometimes. Look, Steven wrote that song [Lady D'Arbanville by Cat Stevens] when I left for New York. I left for a month, it wasn't the end of the world was it? But he wrote this whole song about 'Lady D'Arbanville, why do you sleep so still.' It's about me dead. So while I was in New York, for him it was like I was lying in a coffin... he wrote that because he missed me, because he was down... It's a sad song." D'Arbanville continues,"I cried when I heard it, because that's when I knew it was over for good." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_D'Arbanville]

If you wish to hear the actual song by Cat Stevens, with "a guitar that gently weeps" along with him: http://youtu.be/vjfI3uSN8DQ

But thus said, it sets the reflection about the eternal plight of impossible love affairs. He had the crush on a lady who was not able to understand his intensity and the whole affair ended in a predictable manner. Those stories are the stuff movies, novels, poems and such are made of. Is sad and painful when that happens in real life but there is a silver lining over them because if the person is able to let go, something new and most of the time much better will come his/her way. Many times the best thing that happens to such relationships is when the crush crashes... some things are not meant to have a long life at all, and there is a wise reason behind, even if the pain of a broken dream itches a long time after it has happened.

My Lady D'Arbanville
Why does it grieve me so?
But your heart seems so silent
Why do you breathe so low?
Why do you breathe so low?
[....]

What is much worse is when a relation happens only to slowly sour year after year to the point of the together alone-ness. Aging, growing, health and sickness are facts of life and many healthy couples go through them as a team, sowing blessings even from the roughest of rides. But those that end in the living dead state of the together alone-ness seem to be unable to flow and roll with whatever live dishes to them.

....your heart seems so silent
Why do you breathe so low?

It could be a violent process or a slow eroding one. Maybe five or seven years went by with ups and downs soothed by a mutual attitude of respect and love. One day one of them stops pulling his/her weight. Sometimes it comes with a shocking announcement, sometimes is just an eloquent attitude of expecting the other to do all....refusing to address any emotional issue. The severed member of the couple has no doubt that things have changed and not exactly to continue growing together.

They grow apart when a hidden sickness of the soul develops. Autistic traits in all degrees of severity went undiagnosed in adults now in their sixties or older... and that does not spare them from that "different" mental wiring that makes them emotionally cold and distant when not irrationally aggressive. It might be the dry drunk syndrome, when the imbibing of alcohol is controlled but the 12 Steps aiming to transform the self centered, highly insecure, obsessive-compulsive personality into a strong spiritual caring, service-oriented person were never embraced as a life path.

Individuals raised in extremely repressed societies, non assumed homosexuality can also grow as a wedge between the couple. More often than not the receiving end of an inexplicable hatred will suffer it in silence, wondering what was the sin that merited such a continuous punishment. If just the other one admitted what is going on inside...but blaming the other for everything that happens solves nothing, yet is easier.

All the array of narcissistic and controlling personalities destroy relationships inside out, to the point that a hollow shell is all what is left standing. Seeking some "attention" is perceived as the most "irrational" demand an individual can place as part of a couple, seen from this sick perspective. Is not much fun to be around an individual that can only identify the emotions that go from strongly upset to anger into rage. A fairly normal individual might wait until there is a short time to share with the spouse to be as unavailable and unpleasant as possible, returning to "normality" as soon as the work shift starts. All the above might be desguised with the "perfect" excuses: always turning it against the neglected spouse i.e. blamed for being so "expensive" to maintain. Listening to the other side will be unthinklably outrageous. There is only one point of view: mine or the highway. Causing pain is cheap. And having a captive whipping post is the cheapest way of all.

Unfortunately a separation many times is easier said than done. Age, the strict religious observance, the fear of loneliness, financial reasons and a wide spectrum of unfortunate situations may get together to deter a merciful end to the nightmare. If the couple lives in opposite sides of the house, maybe even in different houses, with incompatible schedules and activities that never bring them close, avoiding the normality of getting together, never sharing meaningful conversations and abundant quality time together the covenant of the marriage is broken. Living the life of single yet married individual is not the reason most people get married. Those with the misfortune to be involved in one of these together alone relations regard the trampled dreams of a young love as nothing compared with the pain of living, day in and day out, isolated with a cold and hostile marble statue.

My Lady D'Arbanville
You look so cold tonight
Your lips feel like winter
Your skin has turned to white
Your skin has turned to white
[....]

Unresolved issues does not get solved by avoiding to discuss and address them in a positive way. The dark list is long and varied, but gives the unmistakable feeling of the dead end of a severe winter.

No wonder the drainage of defending a sane psyche from a living dead results many times in the premature death of the sensitive side of the couple. Sadly some have even taken their lives when they find there is no exit. Were the icy spouse to die first, the grieving process of the sensitive survivor -if any, just sad for all the good times wasted- is mixed with a sense of liberation. Many have accepted reluctantly to have wished more than once the hostile spouse were dead and gone. At least to feel the hope of a second chance in love.

Of all pains there is no one more cruel and bordering in the unbearable than the one inflicted by someone we linked our life to, by our own free will, looking forward to grow in love and understanding and to be for each other a safe haven, just to find down the road all soured up beyond further repair.

I loved you my Lady
Though in your grave you lie
I'll always be with you
This rose will never die
This rose will never die
[....]

This was a subject my father and I discussed more than once and none of us found an adequate closing. As Christians we never felt to come close to a satisfying explanation for these ugly situations. We both knew first hand about it and recognized that despite the emotional distance -many times actual physical distance-the coldness, the lack of intimacy, the absence of nurturing communication and the painful process of falling apart, deep in the grieving heart of the hurt sensitive spouse was still a silent glowing ember for the loved one now lost.

We understood what Cat Stevens was talking about when he wrote to his Lady D'Arbanville: this rose will never die

No bridge over troubled waters

M. Cole. The Carry-troubled waters. 2011. Acrylic on canvas.11"x14"

Usually the narrative of a painting in the West goes as a written page, from left to right... At the left the past, at the right the future... action tends to go forward.

In The Carry-troubled waters, the river rapids stormed the left of the picture, starting in a higher right ground....Believing that no image is such by chance when painting in a complete channeled way, I pondered what it was showing about my world at this point.

No stagnant waters of resentment, no idle pond of complacent memories but a turmoiled mass of water running....The stormy waters of future rushing in, forcing change, washing out the past. A brutal redemption. Rocks were my first subject in this new period, then a peaceful mass of water seen from far up high, then thundering surf and the gentle trickling of a waterfall... then breaking surf on a sandy shore and this carry have displaced the subject to water in motion....life seems to have started to warm up motors.

The resentment and wounds of the past will mess up a lot more than the present and cancel more than the future when a person becomes obsessed with all the wrong -real or imaginary-that has received, when the yet-to-come is regarded with fear. Sometimes it takes a gully washer storming into an infected and paralyzed soul, to wash away the past, dissolving it into a present turmoiled enough to open a space to cure and open space for some fresh future.

As I started writing this lines an actual mass of water ended a world as a lot of souls knew it ....the Tsunami that followed the brutal earthquake in Japan on March 11. No one living in this sublunar world can boast that the life they have is safeguarded against change. Sometimes blessings come in ways we pray God not to suffer them, yet His perfect plan is there for those who survived as for those who did not.

On the aftermath of the deluge, the rainbow was a visual symbol that there was a promise that Humanity would never be destroyed. Annihilation was out of the program, but so was the utopia of Arcadia.

Good has a way of filtering in the cracks and fissures of apparent evil. Light is trapped by gross matter. It takes a disaster to test the mettle of the human soul. I remember how many young people were shaken out their comfortable nihilism by the earthquake that destroyed a good section of Mexico City in 1985. The national crisis became a wake up call and many lives were born again to service and life. I was one of them.

Japan will rise again. Thousands are doing their very best in the face of what happened showing that takes a split second decision to shift from being part of the problem to be part of the solution. Since then, deep into May, the world has kept being shaken as it had since the first day after Creation. And the choice is simple: either you go full of fear and divide or you set to join efforts to rebuild. One attitude "as far as the East is from the West" as the phrase of the Psalm in the song by Casting Crowns. The world has no use for those in the first group. But desperately need all into the second one.

Where there is no bridge over troubled waters, those, the indispensable, are becoming one.

Against the Wind 1980

M. Cole. Malpais. 2010. Acrylic on canvas. 8"x10"

Dad and I shared a lot of times the mistery of how a song could trigger memories. Of course the songs that made us dream were years light apart, his of the forties and fifties, mostly soulful French songs and mine more robust contemporary stuff of the seventies and eighties...that now I see they are getting as old as his stuff compared to what my students and younger colleagues dream with.

Is healthy to pause and remember. Mourning all the dreams gone awry, avoiding the pitfalls of self pity....allowing a soul clean-up to prepare fresh space to receive what life will have in store for a future that will never settle in a soul cluttered by soured regrets.

Bob Segar and his modest masterpiece Against the Wind, released when I was about to leave the teen age was on the radio some days ago and sent me to that scraggly rocky slope, hit by the wind far away in the southern part of Mexico City. A place where my heart flies back so many times when I need to get the batteries charged and the deck washed with healing tears.

It seems like yesterday
but it was long ago
[......]
There in the darkness
with the radio playing low

And the secrets that we shared
the mountains that we moved
Caught like a wildfire out of control
'Til there was nothing left to burn
and nothing left to prove

I have to make a little change... to me is a HE not a SHE :)
but the story is pretty much the same...dreams and words scattered by the wind...until nothing was left to burn.

And I remember what [..he....] said to me
how [...he...] swore that it never would end
I remember how [...he...] held me oh so tight
wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then

Yes, I wish I had seen with super human eyes it was not going to last, that it had never started...but it did and the Master Plan might had needed it to go wrong exactly as it did. Life polishes hard, and soon you learn that if someone from your past is not in your present it was not meant to help you build the future. So -I hate to admit it- ALL is well as it is.

Against the wind
We were runnin' against the wind
We were young and strong, we were runnin'
against the wind

Whee! I close my eyes and I can still feel that wind. Brings a smile to my face. No regrets.

The years rolled slowly past
and I found myself alone
Surrounded by strangers
[That]... were my friends
I found myself further and
further from my home

Home? What is that? I guess the place you set your books, your stuff and your head to rest. But yes, I had to make another change, I DO HAVE friends. And I´m alive because they are with me here to help me walk the road. God bless them all.

And I guess I lost my way
there were oh so many roads
I was living to run and running to live
[......]
Moving eight miles a minute
for months at a time
Breaking all of the rules that would bend
I began to find myself searching
searching for shelter again and again

Against the wind
A little something against the wind
I found myself seeking shelter
against the wind

Running in deep mud. Slowed to a crawl. Romantic to read "if there is not a road, leave a trail" but doing it is another story. Pretty hard and pretty lonely. Yet I have found rest...I have found more challenges...I´m taking them ...I´m still alive.

Funny. Found comfort comforting others, found a shelter being there for others, showing up, serving God thru service....

Well those drifter's
days are past me now
I've got so much more to think about
Deadlines and commitments
What to leave in
what to leave out

No more time to waste, because now that I´m old -I´ll turn 50 in two more days- I know I´m really short ot time. I hope this year will be full of good surprises. May God keep me expanding continuosly my comfort zones. But to do that not a bit of past bagage can be left.

Against the wind
I'm still runnin' against the wind
I'm older now but still
runnin' against the wind

[......]

I still enjoy the feeling -and the memory- of running against the wind.
Dad shared one day in his late seventies he did not felt old inside. The body was no longer the one of a young man but there was something ageless that had to be tapped to recover fuel to live fully every experience to the end.

Now I know he was right.

Light can be refracted, but not destroyed

"Adios - Sunset over the Xitle range, south of Mexico City" 2010 fetched a bidding of $500 US Dlls. in the Marni Fund Auction of Krav Maga Worldwide Houston.

I was able to contribute with this donation to the Breast Cancer Research Fund made in memoriam of Marni Levine. I did not had the honor of meeting her in person, but there is something in the eyes of those who were close to her that whenever she is remembered there is a strong positive emotion very difficult to hide.

Who was Marni?

In Memoriam of Marni Levine

A brief appearance she made in an interview for the video of Krav Maga Worldwide shows a strong soul wrapped with care in a delicate body. Like the fiery sunset over the Xitle in this painting, her spirit is still igniting the heart of that association. Light can be refracted but not destroyed.

I feel very happy I could jump in and help this time. I was told the person who bid and got it had found it stunning. To me the idea of someone falling in love with an art work made by an unknown foreign artist, to the point of purchasing it, got my heart...I´m ecstatic.

Thank you, Lord. Thank you, guys. I feel so honored....

Fed by Ravens

Similar raven that fed Elijah the Tishbite with bread and meat. From http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/3qGs_ronYOiW0ttlC2yDdg

Funny bird wearing a prayer shawl of grey feathers. Yet these big birds of the surrounding areas to Mt. Carmel in Israel appear in the Scripture as instruments of God´s grace towards Elijah, one of His obedient beloved in trouble:

"So he went and did according to the word of the Lord, for he went and stayed by the Brook Cherith, which flows into the Jordan. The ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and bread and meat in the evening; and he drank from the brook." (I Kings 17, 5-6)

Leaving aside the controversies about the accuracy of this miracle, the story is worth reviewing. The main character happened to be a prophet, but God shows such care for His children in trouble, whether because of obeying His direct command or for performing with good attitude a simple duty ... another way to refer to do God´s will.

God has no limits when choosing His ways to give aid and comfort when seems to be no human way out. The ravens brought the food Elijah needed to go by every day; to an estranged wife her dog or cat becomes God´s instrument to provide her the daily love and warm emotional closeness her husband denies her, making her situation more bearable; a stranger was guided to point the way for a desperate man to find a job: a misplaced cell phone message on Christmas Eve stating the urgent need of a ceased pipe yard worker for a job led a school teacher to search the web and find a pipe yard in the area who was hiring the first week in January. Many report having received lost checks in the mail that arrived when the need was greater....the list would be infinite.

It is so mind-blowing that many will be tempted to disbelieve. "Those are New Age fantasies"... "Miracles do not happen like THAT to people like THOSE"...No? Think again, for GOD KNOWS NO LIMITS ..... When there is no human way out, God provides what is needed to go from point A to B, using whatever is at hand.

God cares deeply for those He has chosen to befriend. He might disent from some humans in His choices. Elijah was too outspoken and unwilling to sugarcoat and bend to power for King Ahab´s standards, so he had to flee and hide in order to save his life. The woman was considered unworthy of any kindness and affection for she was discovered a disgusting real person with her own desires and ideas, so she had to be punished. The pipe yard needed to cut personnel and started with the workers with less seniority, not considering this man had a family to feed....but ALL of them were dear in God´s eyes.

Some may ask chagrined WHY those guys are considered "dear to God"? He is the only one who can give an answer to it. Were you a know-it-all, controlling-all, self-sufficient self-centered person, God will honor His grant of free-will to you and make sure to leave you REALLY alone. When a house has a glass ceiling, a hail storm may be a problem. Well, if you are not the house owner or the builder, you had not caused it, you cannot fix it and you cannot control anything about it. So listen and learn.

My father was always willing to give a hand in times of strife. He was concerned that if I moved to the USA he would not be able to help me as he did when in Mexico. Yet when he got ill, my Heavenly Father stepped in and after my father passed away He stayed there at my side in complete faithfulness, providing more than anything my human father could had ever been able. It is me the one who gets worried when things seem to take too long, but He is there and His resources are infinite.

This post closes with one of the most valuable teachings the year has brought forth: God is there, watching closely and lovingly over us.

Jeremiah phrased the message well:

"For I know the plans I have for you," says the Lord. "They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope." (Jeremiah 29:11)

"Plans of life and not of death"....even if He needs to send the ravens twice a day to help.

After September with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, October gets us closer to the Holidays marking the tie end of the calendar. On October 11 this blog celebrates a year online. The Architect would had been 92 years old were he still among the yet-to-be-resurrected. While writing all the posts I have kept in my heart his patient and intelligent listening as if he were one of my readers.

Thank you all who have followed From my Reflecting Poolside these twelve months. May you always find here a welcoming virtual space to find beauty in Art, and in Life, food for thought and encouragement to seek your own path to the fullest.

So, when in a tough spot, do not forget the ravens will always be there.

Blessings!

June to the last "yarns"

M.H. Cole. Breaking surf. 16x20in. Acrylic on canvas board. May 2010










Gemini month, dual, chaotic, unpredictable....Might not remember a single end of May and June in my life without the ripples turning into maelstroms and then, all of a sudden, quieting back. Most of my life´s turning points have happened "under the influence" of this astrological sign of blessings and curses. Time for the gentle art of rolling with the punches and the rough sport of growing -amazed to discover I´m still a work in process thru the bloody sand out of the crut of naivete tenaciously clinging on some spots.

The weekly task of editing the book on the art work of Fr. Gonzalo Carrasco: the rich conversation with Michelle, my editor, far and away in Culiacán, in Mexico´s West Coast. A moment of true enjoyment and usually four to five hours non stop of hard work, enough to pause and review my writing and the flow of ideas but also to realize that three yeas ago the person who wrote that book is not the same I´m now. I am getting older and abler to see things from other perspectives. I can laugh more about my own shortcomings. My memory is waning, flashing sharply old stuff and blurring in a haze what has been just done. I do realize that a lot in my life will never be completed, but far from the comfort of complacency, I embrace this certainty with the peace of knowing that if up to there it has been God´s plan for me, all is well. To HIM the frantic strive to become a celebrity is irrelevant. Maybe I´m starting to LIVE.

I count Michelle as a blessing ....Spanish speaker, her enthusiasm, her SEAL-like efficiency and approach to problems: addressing the issues and coming always with more options than we will ever need, her soft glove capacity to meet deadlines with a plus.... Working together has helped us both reconnect with a lot in our past lives regarding the Society of Jesus world we share. And all thru a Skype conversation, exchanging paragraphs and links by chat....a XXIst century editorial work, postmodern and globalized... yet Michelle has been a good old fashioned godsend and I am very grateful.

I have resumed painting: wind, wave, sea and dawn, a memory from the Merici old school yard back in 1968 or 1969. The soft hazy blue mountains and the sand mines amidst the reddish scraggly wild flowers. The eyes of a seven year old girl opened in someone much older capable of setting her vision in a canvas board.



When challenges came pounding hard I painted the rocks on my way...and ended up with the boast-plea of Caleb:

"Now give me this hill country that the LORD promised me that day. You yourself heard then that [...] their cities were large and fortified, but, the LORD helping me, I will drive them out just as he said." Joshua 14, 12 NIV

M.H.Cole. Cerros pedregosos. 30x36in. Acrylic on gessoed canvas. June 2010

Give me another mountain, Lord. In a foreign land, still unable to find a stable job, hitting all glass ceilings possible, yet with the blessed assurance that, despite all odds, God has a good plan in store for me. Summer courses, making them count, finding some good receptive groups but at the cost of investing myself a 101% into them. When a student meets me and tells me that all his/her college was worth just for having been in my class, even if the subject was not his/her major...I know I´m where God wants me to be.

Doing service: knowing about abject ungratefulness and other-wordly gratitude, going "by the book" and messing it out so good....only to find out that God seemed to have wanted to show me how the Israelites were delivered from the control of a hard hearted Pharaoh. Standing ovation, Lord. Yes, YOU ARE GREAT.

Taking a break in a dream...in some peaceful shore. Naples or Herculanum. Somewhere in the Caribbean...A memory of Mom and Dad, as they are now...A safe haven, painted with hands and fingers, blurred, yet shiny as all dreamscapes must be.



Loving my cats: allowing love to go beyond the point of hurt until it becomes all enfolding. Even if they do not realize it, I feel they live constantly in the presence of God as a mystic does, for what they give back is pure unconditional love. They have made me strong in a way no human could teach me: embracing vulnerability and making me show my best as "their human".

Training Krav Maga with all my heart, body and soul: finding out how a martial art can enhance a life without striking a blow out of the training room. Not the awesome SAC, an adventure and a challenge with the taste of the toughest military, but a home-based hard core civilian equivalent. Meeting new and amazing people, law- abiding and peace-loving but perfectly capable of setting hell in motion if the situation demands it. They prefer to keep things very informal, but the more I train the bigger my respect to the instructors and their teachings. They insist there is more "martial than art" in Krav Maga....I disent: is the lethal art of conciously unleashing a wild life force if circumstances become uncivilized. Comes to me the memory of a frail and over sensitive little girl with thick glasses unable to excel in sports at school, yet in her late forties God decided things were going to change in that arena. A fighter all my life, now I have a technique and a method and an exhausting intensive training and I am surprised how my heart has joined in.

And more praying and painting....believing that God still sits on top of any possible storm or darkness.

"They have forsaken me, the spring of living water,
and have dug their own cisterns,
broken cisterns that cannot hold water". Jer 2, 13

M.H.Cole. The fountain. 6x8in. Acrylic on canvas board. June 2010

Humming in my mind the tune of the old hymn "Come thou Fountain of ev´ry blessing"... No, I would not trust anymore the path of the ego, another name to my own "wisdom". Lord of Provision, Lord of Timing, Lord Almighty AND Abba-Father, title of all titles, because that is how Jesus called him, and invited us to do so... have your way, Lord.

June...in a non eventful life but well lived to the last "yarns".

You can´t start a fire withouth the spark

A year from the graduation of the SEAL Adventure 24 hr. Challenge held at Fort Story, Virginia Beach, VA for the May 2009 class, this blog will publish a special post in gratitude to the classmates and instructors that made this possible.
COMING SOON!