Author: nlondon36

Here’s what I want to tell you: Japanese monks and nuns write poems as they lay dying. Japanese death poems. You can look it up. What do they say? Some version of I am here at the edge of unknowing. It is dark. It is light. The light is within the dark. There is no … Continue reading darkness as medicine

She woke me with the gentle touch of a feather across my face. Get up, she whispered. It’s the dark times. We have work to do. I resisted. I was tired. You got that right, I said. These are the dark times. I need coffee. She followed me into the kitchen and that’s when I … Continue reading sing back the light

we are all saying please My granddaughter toddles to meet me when I arrive. I pick her up and she pats me on the back, reassuring me, letting me know that all is well, no matter that the wheels of my mind are spinning from the latest savage cruelty and violence. All is well, her … Continue reading we are all saying please

When I saw the small ad for a hospice social worker I was zapped, the current straight from the hand of the merciful goddess into my broken heart. It was the year after my mother’s suicide, and my intuition was screaming that only the dying could bring me out of the land of shadow, back … Continue reading soft candies and hard whiskey 

all sickness is homesickness, all roads lead back on a breadcrumb trail that the crows and sparrows have eaten. There is no clue, no feather, no cairn of stones set along the roadside marking the path because the path has been erased, your footsteps blown into oblivion by the wind whose job it is to … Continue reading all sickness is homesickness