Loss and laughter

I caught the last bit of Krista Tippett's interview with Kevin Kling, a man who "was born with a birth defect — his left arm disabled and much shorter than his right. Then, in his early 40s, a motorcycle accident nearly killed him and paralyzed his healthy right arm".

Here is the poem he read, called "Tickled pink":

"At times in our pink innocence, we lie fallow, composting waiting to grow. And other times we rush headlong like so many of our ancestors. But rush headlong or lie fallow, it doesn't matter. One day you'll round a corner, your path is shifted. In a blink, something is missing. It's stolen, misplaced, it's gone. Your heart, a memory, a limb, a promise, a person. Your innocence is gone, and now your journey has changed. Your path, as though channeled through a spectrum, is refracted, and has left you pointed in a new direction. Some won't approve. Some will want the other you. And some will cry that you've left it all. But what has happened, has happened, and cannot be undone. We pay for our laughter. We pay to weep. Knowledge is not cheap. To survive we must return to our senses, touch, taste, smell, sight, sound. We must let our spirit guide us, our spirit that lives in breath. With each breath we inhale, we exhale. We inspire, we expire. Every breath has a possibility of a laugh, a cry, a story, a song. Every conversation is an exchange of spirit, the words flowing bitter or sweet over the tongue. Every scar is a monument to a battle survived. Now when you're born into loss, you grow from it. But when you experience loss later in life, you grow toward it. A slow move to an embrace, an embrace that leaves you holding tight the beauty wrapped in the grotesque, an embrace that becomes a dance, a new dance, a dance of pink."

The rest of the interview, transcript & podcast, and other poems & stories by Mr. Kling is here.

Working on Peter & the Wolf & the fist-ful of notes that is the May Pops concert in my future today. I'm going to wait to do any more work on the Wellesley groups until I hear from the vocal director to see which winds he plans to use. Makes no sense to cobble together groups only to have him yank someone out later & then redoing the whole thing.

Photos today from 25 & 26.Aug.2011. Yes, that's a sunflower - just shows how piss-poor our soil is. And that photo that looks like an expanse of lawn? Tons 'o sparrows camouflaged against the earth having their breakfast.