RONDEAU REDOUBLÉ | SPIRITUALITY
Keep Faith and Hope of Love and Light When Tragedy Strikes
A poem and companion essay for my friend in need of reminders of lessons of the soul from the spirit world
When tragedy too close to our hearts strikes How soon forget lessons from souls learned Vast trenches dived and mountains we hiked Please together hold onto what we’ve learned
Write this for you, me, and all concerned Gentle yet tough love friends do not dike Karmic moments from which we all burn When tragedy too close to our hearts strikes
Coeurs ripped like flesh by piranhas’ razor spikes Pain exceeds nightmares from and in which we burned Curse God why do you show my family such spite How soon forget lessons from souls learned
Let emotions settle so truth we discern Fear and self-pity to our spirit knifelike Hale and hearty to Heaven’s beauty return Vast trenches dived and mountains we hiked
Embrace uncertainty and hope alike Both here and in Heaven unite and sojourn Gain strength of spirit from psychic heights Please together hold onto what we’ve learned
Relieve our fears and pains we so yearn Death’s the illusion that feels lifelike Searing pain we loved ones feel the burn Souls escape this mortal coil we might delight — When tragedy strikes our human hearts
I felt inspired to write this poem after finally speaking on the phone with Anne yesterday for the first time since I and dear readers learned about her daughter Marissas’s traumatic brain injury resulting from 30 minutes of cardiac arrest.
Much gratitude to all who have prayed for Anne and Marissa and with extra special thanks to those that have reached out to me for updates. I shared these words from Anne with many of you that she wrote me after I shared many of your responses with her:
“I have no words for this. I am touched in the deepest places in my heart and my soul. I can barely speak. I am crying from a place of peace and surrender. I will do exactly what jules said about touching her heart and I am trying so hard to absorb the love and the light from these wonderful people that you sent to me. Please let them know that I am humbled and touched beyond words. Thank you so much, my friend… I love you.🌷”
Marissa is now breathing on her own and at times her eyes track people in the room. I feel that when Marissa is less present, that’s because her soul is working behind the scenes to rewire her brain. When Anne gets upset, Marissa comes back and cries. Thus, she is clearly not braindead but a long road of positive thought and neuroplasticity¹ remains ahead, concepts that seem foreign to the psychopathic/narcissistic doctors, who repeatedly ignore orders only to discuss their opinions with the siblings (a doctor and a nurse) and seem to take pleasure in only suggesting the worst possible outcomes to Anne. Thus, please keep those prayers coming.
[post publication edit — I misunderstood Anne when I said that Marissa was breathing on her own — she was on reduced breathing support and they had hoped she would soon be breathing on her own but that has not happened]
This poem is not specific to this occurrence, and I hope that if I am ever faced with such almost unimaginable events, I will remember my own words, which are easier spoken to a friend than likely remembered in that hypothetical. I say almost unimaginable because every parent at one time or another imagines the worst but we can never truly imagine the actual emotions.
Anne is my psychic medium for over 13 years and she knows more about me than anyone alive — we have been through countless conversations with my spirit guides, Andrew’s soul (suicide), Jason’s soul (fear of living despite his outward projection of joi de vivre), and innumerable conversations with Lindsey’s (Sitara) soul in the 3 plus years since her accidental overdose (yesterday at the end of our conversation Anne brought her in and she and I then spent the day together, reading a book, watching TV, and then I took us out to dinner for a two-days belated celebration of the 4th anniversary of our meeting).
Together, we, including all the souls, have learned so much from those channeled conversations. It struck me yesterday how easily all that goes out the window when one is faced with searing emotional pain, and one starts to curse God and wonder whether one’s entire family is being punished for past lives rather than retaining all we have learned together about soul contracts (I prefer the term improv scripts) and karma. I tried to remind Anne of what we had learned and that which she knows better than anyone else but under this stress so quickly regresses away from soul to animus— one really shouldn’t ask a psychic for a prediction, and that the souls of dearly departed and our spirit guides will in the mold of zen masters seek to impart wisdom and ask us to learn from our experience rather than provide us with certainty.
Lest anyone think I may have been too tough, I was so pleased when Anne told me that I was soothing for her to speak to. I have come a long way, and that also stems from my learning through writing, reading, and commenting here on Medium.
Thank you for reading my share. If anyone knows a shamanic healer in, or near New Jersey, Anne is interested in exploring that.
A Couple of Poet’s Notes:
- Form
A rondeau redoublé consists of six quatrains using two rhymes. The first quatrain consists of four refrain lines that are used, in sequence, as the last lines of the next four quatrains, and a phrase from the first refrain is repeated as a tail at the end of the final stanza. Source Schematically, that’s A1B1A2B2/babA1/abaB1/babA2/abaB2/babaR.
2.
Hale and hearty to Heaven’s beauty return
I know I have read a few times that which I instinctively knew and from talks with souls — that the ill and injured do not carry their physical pain and illnesses with them to heaven. I imagine I’ve read that in articles by Jodie Helm and Kat Medium and others but I couldn’t put my fingers on one today. I recently wrote a poem, Learning to Love by Observing the Art of Dying Well, inspired by my reading of the Latin term ars moriendi (the art of dying well) in Hermann Hesse’s Peter Camenzind. Here’s a passage from that novel I didn’t quote then:
Often, [Boppi] would suddenly start talking about dying. … “I’ll really have reason to laugh, once this torture is over. Dying is really worth it in my case. I’ll be getting rid of a hunched back, a clubfoot, and a stiff hip. It’ll be pity when you die — with your broad shoulders and fine, strong legs.
And once, in his last days, he woke from a brief sleep and said, quite loudly: “The priests’ heaven doesn’t exist. Heaven is far more beautiful than that. Far more.”
When I read that I thought of this story I read over two years ago by Laxaa:
He was seeing Heaven for the first time as he passed from this life to the next. What he saw was so exquisite, so extraordinary, so beautiful that it shook this man out of his comatose state to share one final moment with his beloved wife.
Related Works of Mine and Others
¹ Recommended Outside Reading — The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge, M.D.
“The power of positive thinking finally gains scientific credibility. Mind-bending, miracle-making, reality-busting stuff … Straddles the gap between science and self-help.” — The New York Times review excerpted on the front cover.
Per Amazon’s synopsis: “An astonishing new science called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the human brain is immutable. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, MD, traveled the country to meet both the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity and the people whose lives they’ve transformed — people whose mental limitations or brain damage were seen as unalterable. We see a woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole, blind people who learn to see, learning disorders cured, IQs raised, aging brains rejuvenated, stroke patients learning to speak, children with cerebral palsy learning to move with more grace, depression and anxiety disorders successfully treated, and lifelong character traits changed.”
In Rama I create, with soul energy surging through my body, inspiring me and breathing wind into my sails,
Marcus (Gregory Maidman)