Spiral

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Death brings close the present moments. The old lovely Shepherd with his nonstop shedding, the fur in endless white whorls blowing across the smooth oak floor no matter how often I vacuum or sweep, ‘til the night after he dies, I awake on the couch with the grieving Labrador, to find my feet wreathed in a mass of white fur. In the morning I greet the butterfly bush planted over his body, and watch a small white moth in its circular dance, for many long moments.

Death brings close the present, and in the present I find that my big old lovely Shepherd is with me, in small ways, intertwined with my life, still, as his body seeps into the cool dark sand and somehow my heart beats stronger for the love I hold for him, for the ache I feel for those who grieve his passing. Like a coil, this connection, even into death. Love, the omnipresent axis around which it all spins.

Like a coil, the heart muscle itself can be unraveled. The heart, the organ of our love and perhaps our soul, and certainly the organ of life, does not pump as is commonly believed, but rather, the blood flows in a continuous helical spiral, spinning around itself, into and out from the beating heart center, which encourages it onward. A pushing and pulling, a dance of life.

A mother, spinning her way through her life, pushing away so many, eight decades of pushing, while pulling at her son, for 50 years. The…