Mourning, but Qualified to Live…

The wall that I hit after my last post in April was thirty feet thick, and it looked like this: 

I was in Target picking up an Rx only to see this display. I ran to the restroom nauseated and in tears at the reminder of my Mother's death. "She was only 51!" That was the litany that replayed in my mind...

Emotionally the wall I faced began to mount, and I felt like I had to dig my way through with a teaspoon. I was dreading my first May without my Mom: the days that lead up to Mother’s Day, the day itself (I slept through most of it), and the residual May mushiness. June couldn’t come quickly enough, but NOW June is here.

The smallest tools are more powerful than we may think; because, the teaspoon worked.  I see the sun.

I have gardens to tend...

TENDING MY MOTHERS' GARDENS IN A ROOM OF MY OWN

The premise for my musings about gardens & rooms:

"Our mothers and grandmothers, some of them: moving to music not yet written. And they waited. They waited for a day when the unknown thing that was in them would be made known; but guessed, somehow in their darkness, that on the day of their revelation they would be long dead...

Walker's article speaks of black women during slavery: "They were creators, who lived lives of spiritual waste, because they were so rich in spirituality - which is the basis of Art - the strain of enduring their unused and unwanted talent drove them insane...

What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is a question with an answer cruel enough to stop the blood." Alice Walker, "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens," MS Magazine Vol. 16 (April 20, 1981).

As I've mention ad nauseum, I am so very blessed to have had overtly creative female elders who encouraged and fostered that same well-spring in me. So rather than searching for my Mothers' gardens', I am reaping the harvest that they have sown in my life and making sure to tend my garden wisely. And although, Walker acknowledges that a room of one's own is not necessary to spawn the creative process, I am fortunate enough to have one.

In "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf deems a room and purse of ones' own a precursor to creativity. Walker uses Phillis Wheatley, an indigent slave, as a prime example that a room is a luxury - a decadence even. In the 21st century, I make the best of both world's in a room of my own with a reminder of the gardens I must tend.