With every joy there is a sorrow.

There are times when we feel that life is slipping into a dark cave and we are trying very hard to find a handhold that will keep us in the light. But grasp as we might the joy keeps slipping through our fingers and we are drawn further and further away from it.


It is the comedy and tragedies of life that when we are in joy we worry about when it will end and when we are in sorrow we worry about when it will go away. Ever since I can remember the advent of what I call the New Age (and always with a smile on my face) presented a mantra that always repeated this chorus: Be here now! This almost seems to be the ultimate Zen of Life.


This morning I awoke and my mind would not leave me alone. It just had to go there. I said, hey Myriam, I have been there and done that. But Ms. Myriam would not listen she had to drag me down memory lane to painful issues so I realized that I can try and fight it or I could give in to these thoughts that needed to be healed.


It is all about being a mother and my sense of loneliness that my children and I do not have the fantasy relationship that I thought we would have someday. Some people are so lucky that they have moderately dysfunctional families where there are a few buttons implanted to keep one within a family norm but when one has mental illness in one’s families the buttons all seem to be bigger than life.


My son Jimmy who lived in New Orleans and is now a refugee in Texas with my granddaughter Joliet, his wife and Joliet’s mother is a drug addict. I want to figure it out. I want to blame me. I want to blame his mental illness. I want to blame my ex-mother-in-law the wacko from hell. I want to blame God or Goddess or Mother Nature. I am so into the blame game now but the truth is I am pointing fingers to keep from feeling the deep, deep sorrow that breaks my heart and stifles me from rising from that cave of depression into the light of joy.


The recent events in New Orleans has not only flooded the Old City, but has flooded my mind with images of people that I met and knew there. I have realized today that each one of those lost souls that I met also had a mother. Many of those mothers are probably feeling the same sorrow that I am feeling as I look at how easy it is to loose a child perhaps to an act of nature but often to just the circumstances of life which can be the rampant drug abuse in our community, the increasing rise in diagnosed mental illness, and the social pressures that are changing us at an accelerated pace.


I think rather than lost souls, the folks I am remembering are wounded souls. Perhaps we are all wounded and the magnitude of recent events are a clarion call that it is now time to heal ourselves individually and collectively so that we can finally climb out that deep pit that has kept us from becoming the manifestation of good that was planted within with our birth.