The Marriage of True Minds

In 1983, I was at a loss to write a song for our wedding. I pored through love poems and readings. One night during dinner I jumped from the table and wrote a song based upon a Shakespeare sonnet (#116). His words are copied below... they are truer for us now than they were when Sharon Martin sung them at our wedding. Gerry and I are recording a Blue Moon Revue CD -- I am hoping that Suzi Eldridge will sing a beautiful rendition of this wedding song.
(BTW -- a bark is a ship.)

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.


Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.


William Shakespeare

Love Note

Humans are the most unformed creatures
When they are expelled, kicking and screaming,
Into the world.

Still shapeless, they unite with each other
To bring another generation, clawing at the air,
Into their lives.

I was formless when you took me in
And pledged your troth, glistening and hot,
Forever and ever.

Forever and ever and ever.
Through sickness and health, not to destroy,
But to build up.

How could I know the turmoil
Life had in store, crouching in the dark,
Waiting to pounce?

How could I know that you,
Of all the women in the world, would be
The one to stand by my side?

We face the world together.
Nothing in all its animal rage can
Defeat us now.

In the end you and I
Walk slowly and carefully, arm in arm,
Into a forest

Teeming with life and sound.
Aware of the power, subtle and strong,
To complete each other.

Endurance

MEN WANTED: FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. SMALL WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS, CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOUR AND RECOGNITION IN CASE OF SUCCESS.

- SIR ERNEST SHACKLETON

The third season arrived about 2 weeks ago. Immediately after surgery, I was trapped in a hospital bed with nutrition, pain and waste managed through medical tubes.  For a couple of days, there was no need to leave the bed. By Day Three, the "self-serve" dilaudid was replaced with oxycodone (probably a good idea). On Day Five, I went home. Like Shackleton's ship, I am trapped in Subarctic ice.

Forward progress is blocked. The pressure of unforgiving circumstances forces cracks in a normally sea-worthy hull. I would prefer to do nothing. But, knowing that inaction will lead to disaster, I force myself to do the things that assure my survival -- move, drink, eat, sleep, take meds, make music, interact with others.

I watch videos on Youtube that show how others cope with ileostomies. I joined an "ostomates" social network. I see and read how others normalize their existence while wearing a pouch. The more I see, the less I want to be a member of their club. Shackleton and his crew voluntarily sailed into the Antarctic -- I had less choice about my journey. Still, I willingly head in the direction of a warmer future.

Shackleton and his crew had to leave the ship behind as it was swallowed by the thawing pack ice.

"Thus, after a year's incessant battle with the ice, we had returned........to almost the same latitude we had left with such high hopes and aspirations twelve months previously; but under what different conditions now! Our ship crushed and lost and we ourselves drifting on a piece of ice at the mercy of the winds"

Shackleton, On New Year's Eve 1915

Some of the crew undertook a momentous journey, battling frigid temperatures and a raging sea, while the others waited on Elephant Island. Shackleton returned 105 days later to rescue the survivors, who were all well.

"..... we had entered a year and a half before with well-found ship, full equipment, and high hopes. We had 'suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole.' We had seen God in His splendours, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man"

The naked soul of man. I, too, feel stripped of the daily masks I wear to appear hale and hearty to my shipmates on this voyage. Underneath lies uncertainty, sadness and inertia. Yet, as the captain of my own ship, I must sight the stars when possible and, when impossible, proceed by dead reckoning. Seasons change, pack ice melts, storms calm. I will set a sail and mind the tiller. I will catch the same wind that churns the sea and navigate out of this inhospitable region.

The name of Shackleton's ship? The Endurance.