In doubt's light and due time comes a new path to the waterfall. Sometimes I see you in the corner of my eye, although my acceptance swings from joy at knowing this short life is simply a continuum of love and the warmth of being with loved ones--to disparate sorrow and continuing grief at an opportunity lost...or horribly staunched. Michael you would have celebrated 31 years of life here on this planet, nine days ago, on the gorgeous solstice birthday you had, coming into this life the sweet light little towheaded wiseman that you were...and growing into such a compassionate and good man. You'd complain at how the world wanted to define you for what you lacked in the way of "education"...and it was so easy for me to laugh the rest of this planet off for the wisdom so clearly in you, higher than any overpriced education could ever give anyone. I wish somedays that all of our conditioning would relent. I feel like I lost you, my dear and beautiful love, and often see myself losing my fellow humans to conditioning and all the blocks that ensue. Who is to say what it is that is needed, and right, if not for the truth coming from within? We all have it. I know that each and every one of us on this planet, deep down, have the wisdom and guidance to carry in faith and absolute truth, the full and truest meanings of their lives. What happens? This crazy society blogs the hell out of peoples' self and soul, thru media bombardment, tunnel visioned lifepaths, the bullhonkey surrounding so-called 'security', and all the added bonuses of living in this post 911 country of fear and accusation.
No wonder you'd said that you didn't see much hope....on one side of the spectrum you were right...it doesn't feel very hopeful here in this country...we are killing our natural resources--those which mirror and teach us and that which we own not--we are being led by beady eyed liars into places of corporate domination sheathed by 'protection and patriotism'. We are endlessly tested these days, baby, and I'll leave it at that.
I hold in my heart every time I cross the golden gate bridge, a prayer for all those who have jumped:
May those of you who've jumped instead of stayed the course
know how much you are loved, and be guided by that love, knowing it is understood that the moment you tripped and fell
you took many of us into the waters with you, way down below,
we rise then together, all of a sudden realizing
that this immense love was there for us the entire time
May all who fell off
feel not ever alone
nor burdened any more
but at peace
and if you so wish, to have the window open for you to those left behind
so that you may help comfort them, as I was comforted by Michael,
even as what is called death shimmers more of a lost horizon
and no finality
but patience
lingers
as the rising sun brings your life's breath like the mist up to the heavens.
For all those who left too soon,
may you know you are dearly loved.
May you be the Light you always were, and always will be,
and may you know without any question you are forever forgiven.
As I drive from marin into san francisco and back, often, I come to the apex of this beautiful bridge and send my heart skyward, then scooping below, then back up again, with this wish and prayer, for all those who left too soon.
i love you mdw. sweetness abounds, and my light shines in wonder at all the gifts, at all the lessons. i miss you baby. goodnight. happy 31st, and "7th" in potter's shangri la!
Sweetheart.
I will always be with you. I don't know what to say tonight..christmas eve, things so far away from calm and yet so much beauty in this life. this holiday continues to make me sick...for its materialism and plasticity. i wanted you to sit with me tonight by the fire i built under these stars....i felt you in the subtle, yet doubted the messages.
Michael
in time we come into a new path
and your love, and mine foryou, who is to say
all is left behind?
in this night starlight of literalist holiday,
a tradition I love and question, simultaneously,
you are ever present in my heart,
your dichotomy of soul
if it were to be that you were here....i'd give you the way the rain felt tonight as I sat near the fire.
i'd give you the way a deep breath running up a hill feels, like wings in tremor.
somehow you'd know the expanse of my human feeling, and all the reasons for it all.
i'd look you in those green eyes again
knowing.
we alight like children at the monkey bars
no wisdom,
yet all knowing.
depth of experience beyond years,
childlike, distant, peruvian night.
In your eye is glass,reflecting light
and continuity
as if
nothing changed
nor will it ever.
At the time of the waves that washed upon your shore
I was a turquoise dolphin,
oregon baby, alight in Neskowin
You, Huntington Beach and fallout.
Now, it's been threehundredandsixtyfive days times six, plus two months
red eyes, full of joy and trust
give way to forsaken cleft.
Your eyes, their hold.
I'm sorry but you weren't just someone anyone could forget. I'm sick of people tellin me to get over you. I'm movin on Mike but I ain't got any more sense of it than i did when the phone call came. Maybe less.
That kind of love, the kind we had on this earth it continues forth on its own way you and i passengers,participants in the dance of light. what can be said of this short existence but a thanks that love, here, brought healing brought light brought hope.
In carrying you I weight, in flight you're always with me. Michael, coming to Boise for the holidays has not been easy. I am filled with strength, with a huge purpose in this life, of love, of carrying the beauty we share even still, of attempting to manifest wings while still a very solid human being. It has not been easy to come back into our space. This Idaho of boundless wind and sage, of space and light, of sunset stretching like waterlight west towards our birthlands. Of breath and fully alive, of walking and collapsing, of starlight and strangeness, your image under the streetlamps of december, walking in purple and a direct tunnel of light, shirking smallness and blame, finding joy, knowing, knowing.
I sense you are confused and when I dreamt of you it was like I was some strange being you had no time for. Is this your way of telling me to live on? Can't you see that that is exactly what I am doing? But how can you ever truly put to words the kind of love we had here, the kind of trust and connection, and the kind of confusion and exit? I'm left here, feeling a great deal of beauty more than pain in the past year, but my heart holds you with a yearning and understanding that noone but you or I would ever comprehend. I refuse to hold back these feelings. I refuse to not somehow join with you in the process of this. You must feel it too, I am almost sure of it! We are both growing, deepening our souls, coming into our own. I am afraid of depending too much on all the things you've given me, while alive, and while not. I am afraid of not carrying those things with me, as well. In essence, I am concerned for your peace, and for you to know and see me, my truth, my love, my work, my art, my clay, my heart, my failings, my faults, everything, and know that I desire to know you and love you no matter where you are. How could anyone in this earthly life proclaim to know the extent of two souls lessons and connection? Truly, it is a thing known, in immense beauty, only to those two whom feel it. And within my soul, I feel it. I feel something profound and true, and I feel you guiding me.
Mike, you aren't a guru to me, I am not weighing overly on you nor on the past, or wish to do so, ever. The experiences we have in this life are few and blessed, and what you gave me I wish to carry as a light, into tomorrow. Does that mean I block out any possibility of another? I wouldn't think so, but that issue doesn't really matter to me. I could carry you with me as if you were here.
Honey, this world becomes more and more beautiful, and surreal, by the year. I feel a heaviness in looking out into what our society defines itself as. It can't be true, that definition. It can't be true that money and greed and war is the objective. I'm certainly wondering where the Goddess is. We have a bunch of little dumb boys playing with very horrible weapons, as if this were some stupid football game. Our mother earth is crying and at the same time holds a strength that we can still cull up if we are smart and choose not to play out the drama. So it is the little things that I try to do, by going to mobilizations for peace, or just giving my love silently via a smile to a stranger, that I pray make a small difference. Michael, this world is indeed overwhelming. America is overwhelming. Money is such an insignificant thing, yet look at us!!!
I know you felt overwhelmed too, when you left, by these things,. You saw these things coming, like a prophet. You felt heaviness in your soul all your physical life for things that had yet to come, and folks always wondered why you were so moody or didn't smile big. You knew the pain before it happened. Your soul had the reverse forward tool and you couldn't help it. I'm so sorry about the mental illness in your Mama, I am sorry about it in my mama as well. I am sorry you felt so alone, and am sorry you didn't have somewhere inside yourself to harbour. I offer my love to you, always, as a way of finding the tools for creating your own peace and harbour within your soul. I offer my heart and love to you always, that your soul and being may know a place of joy, no matter where you are, with or without anyone else. If you stand alone in the starlight and can dance and laugh with joy, you shall know me and my love for you fully, and my wish for you that you know and love yourself. Alone, my dear Michael, you are not, but alone in the human sense of the word you must find peace. I am with you for all time, for the extent of what goes beyond that which is imaginable to my small human mind, my huge heart, my irrevocably loving soul.
With these words, I intend light and immense love to reach you tonight. I do not know all the answers. I know that I've done the best I could, and can, with what I've been faced with. I pray that I might live a future that brings hope to those who are suicidal, healing to those that need it, and creativity through the medium of clay for myself and all those drawn to it. I wish not to ever take anyone or anything for granted, and am thankful for all of the lessons. Michael, I love you no matter what. I love you no matter what. I love you no matter what.
I love you, for all eternity, no matter what.
Sweetly tonight not without sadness,
M
You in the canoe, us facing one another, Stanley Lake. That light in your face and the day, and the water, and the way the fish were dormant. they knew, that kind of love, it might not be able to stay.
I didn't know anything then, but I knew enough.
The way you stared at me, that love, no words'd ever get.
We saw the sun come down on the lake, brought the canoe home to shore. I convinced you into a yawp for Walt and it resounded up the other side
We walked the path up to the chevrolet wagon, mud hindering us from leaving the waters.
sleeping that night above the treeline,
two snug cubs
it rained
you woke me, gently
we found shelter
and I was home, for the first time.
"Resounding within me"
or, "I am with you"
december eighteenth nineteen ninety six,
we walked the street between your home and minet
they felt the same.
I remember your ease, your seeming trust of this world. I would have never thought it different. The way your heart laughed, your ease with me. the years before we met I felt I understood, fully, and wanted to embrace you like a child, newborn, alive and so real, gasping for some sense of truth. I envisconced us as lovers healing, renewing, seeing so much clear from the frothing, fallic life, shameful pain, senseless heaviness, walking vain. you loved me sincere, and I the same. what can I do now, but feel such pain, such beauty, all the same, knowing you live on, you walk with me in this december, two thousand two, there is a road lit light with snow. There is wind, and cold, and then your hand appears. I see its map lit up like the rivers of the earth, and the inlets you send your light to like a velvet glove. I'm there, at the lumined point, where the night meets the snow. I feel a connection to you, an immense sense of Know. and at that light post, you take my hand, I see you now clearly, your face alight. it is clear. We are forever lost in thinking we are not near.
we walk on, towards something,
together,
that we do not know.
January 12, 2002
Mike, I've turned a corner. It has been almost 4 1/2 years now, and I truly can say that I'm beginning to live again. I have come into a space of faith and trust on many levels: trust in life beyond this one, trust in the importance of the Now, faith in the fact that it is going to be alright....and not just alright but indeed beautiful.
I feel you with me even still, almost as if we do work together from separate spaces. It is a liberation and joy instead of a sadness and pain, for the most part. There are still times when I can't believe you did what you did. I think that will probably always be a part of my life. But Baby, Wow, I've done some amazing work, some incredible experiencing and growing, and further I've had some incredible people come into my life. Your gal is going on with a lot of purpose and belief in continuing with pottery, reaching out to others, and living simply. I'm becoming the woman I've always been in my heart, by honing my path, choosing where I invest my energies, and cultivating joy and love in my heart and others. I think that moving away from Boise has helped as well. It felt like I was drowning there. I am confident that you are with me as the days move into years, and that your light, your beautiful light, will shine through me all my days on this earth. I love you, beautiful Too Tall! I carry you with me, Harpman! I fire the kiln in ritual for you, beautiful artist! May you be healing and sensing all the love held for you on this earth.
It is May 13, 2000, and I ache. Michael, your absence in this life has confiscated my happiness. I try to find little things to take joy and hope in, and try to live on knowing a part of me lives for the both of us, and for our love and what we shared here on this earth. However, the reality of your dying and leaving us behind takes further root as each day passes. It is like a slow and deep wound that seethes with disparity and pain for your love and loss. I have been sponsored for a Ceramics workshop this summer in Colorado and I want you here to share it with me. I also will be teaching at the university this fall. Where are you? Where are you? Where are you? I love you so much. I miss you more and more as the truth sets in that you will never look in my eyes again, like you did here. Your cornea saved the eyesight of someone in need, and if I were to gaze into that eye of yours would there be any less pain knowing your soul no longer shone out of it? I think about your gifts, your life, and I long to turn back the clock. I long to revisit your boyhood, go to Huntington Beach and see what you saw---or would I truly see what you 'saw'? How could it have come to this? "They" say time heals. That is b------t. With the loss of a gentle and beautiful giant soul like yours how could it get any less painful? You were too good for this world and damnit you never gave yourself any credit for your kindness and beauty. I will love you forever, and I mean FOREVER. We are tied by the string of eternal love and life, and I believe I shall never be the same until the day our souls rejoin on the same plane and dance to that Coltrane song. I LOVE YOU MICHAEL D. WILLIAMS.
I finally brought up the courage to go to the Coroner and request your file, and I viewed you at your time of passing. I had to. Since noone told me about your passing until three weeks after, I had no chance to have a humane goodbye, nor a chance to even kiss you one last time or hold your hand. That is something that hurts really bad. And when I viewed your file and your picture, I felt reality cave in. I felt like time reversed, and I was given the chance, at least in my imagination, to be with you, on the fourth of September, 1997, and hold your hand, and cry out loud, and scream and wail. While I sat alone in a private office in the Coroners', I felt that I finally realized what has happened is not some sort of dream. But I also felt even moreso that this life, in fact, HERE, is a dream. Peter Gabriel has a song called "I Grieve", and he says, "did I dream this Belief, or did I belief this dream"....and that entire song depicts my feelings for this life and for how it has all fallen around me. I don't want to become a martryr, Mike, I just feel that if I don't put on all the stops for a while I am going to lose it. I need to rest, to regather my soul. I don't feel myself at all. I feel like a bystander, an onlooker, to some strange Hellenic event. I feel like never finding another man to love, I feel like our bond could carry me throughout my life. And yet I feel so alone, so abandoned, so ultimately betrayed and hurt and robbed of any chance to help the man I love most in this world.
You wouldn't believe the extent of emotional distress, mind baggage and intrinisic static that your suicide has left in its wake. It is like an empty chasm, a vacuum. It cannot be altered, noone can bring you back the way you were. Nothing can be changed, and everything has been left unsaid, undone, and cut off with sharp edges gauging. My heart is stabbed and the one who could help it to heal is forever gone from this life. My ability to pull myself together is burdened by the weight of the thoughts that won't stop circling, cyclic in nature, around how I could have been able to be there for you, how if just ONE thing could have gone differently, maybe you would still be alive. If just ONE person would have said something, even you, then I would have been right back in Boise to talk to you, to hug and hold you. The silence is what is painful, the silence. It is all quiet. No words for me, no final chances. Nothing to be discussed. Only a .22 bullet and Heaven. And I feel stuck and never thought I'd feel ambivalence towards this life, but I do. I feel like a shell lacking a core purpose, a passion. I feel that no material nor physical thing can help me; I am willing to give up all my belongings, all my possessions of this cursory existence, if I could have just ONE last talk with you--even if you still decided to go through with it. One last talk. To say that I Love You, to explain to you my heart.
(Easter Weekend, 1998)Baby, it's been seven
and a half months since you passed. Yesterday I felt like I was at the
bottom of a deep, deep hole. I felt as you probably felt before you decided
to take your own life. And you've been by my side so strongly. I can feel
your presence on my arms, and on my back when I lay on my side. It's a
numbness, coolness, sometimes warm, feeling that I feel even as I write
this. I know you are living on, and I want you to never forget that I love
you, and that I know your suicide was an accident, and that you just felt
that it was the only way out at that moment. You did the best you could
with the "tools" you had in this life, and your soul is still so beautiful,
honey. Don't feel ashamed, not for a minute, ok? I need you to remember
all the gifts we shared while you were here and we will both focus on those
gifts. Our love was and is truth. And you are coming through to me even
now showing me that love truly transcends death. And what is death anyway?
Now that you have the perspective you do, I wish only for your peace, and
that you realize how much you are loved and forgiven. I hope that Grandma
Ruth is with you, and Pap, and Little Walter (our cat). In the scheme of
things, it won't be long and we will be together again, although it is
as if we never parted. I miss you so much in this life, though. I just
hope that I can make it through. I don't know how I'm going to do it. I
have no idea. I haven't much strength left, I have no money, I only have
my being and my love for you. I sit here and the radio plays harmonica
tunes, almost like you were right here with me, playing as you did so beautifully.
We are as one. I love you Michael. Help me, honey. I will continue to send
you all of my love and prayers.My Love, You will forever be a part of me.
I don't have the answers for most of the questions that life has presented
me. I only want to do the right thing with what I have. I miss you every
day, every moment. I miss you in this life. You and I were connected at
our hearts. I wonder where you are now, and what you are doing. I know
you live on. It is true that you and all who are "dead" live on.You are my best friend still. I hold you with me like you held my hand on all the long walks we took. I'll take the next day slowly, just one day at a time now that you aren't here. But you are. And it's so hard to go on.
When I saw you that first time, I came home.
How could this have happened
I love you, baby, and I was here for you. I am here for you now, although I need you more now than you could believe.
(November 18, 1997) Dearest Michael, I'm
up in the sky, Denver is behind and I'm moving West. I hurt beyond belief,
thinking now of the reality that you are gone from this life, your earthly
presence so much, so much. I feel a sadness that spans the eternal sorrows
of this horrible yet beautiful world. It goes beyond words into my core,
sinking into the dualistic nature of the spirit of existence.I am haunted by what we won't be, and by our last conversations, for I know no matter what we are, and were, soul companions. Maybe we would have walked different paths--earthly--or maybe we would have had children as you and I at times discussed with so much hope.
I DON'T KNOW HOW TO LET YOU GO
I reach out my hands in the empty apartment to you, want my love to travel a transformation into your realm and give you peace and forgiveness. You were the only one whom I shared all my fears, sadness, and joy with in its entirety, and you let me; you let me do what I needed, and you held my spirit by my hand and your long arms around my soul.
And now your ashes, a part of what was you, lays within the pottery you made for me. It's too much for me to bear.
I don't know where it's all going from here. Your death is mine in so many ways. I know I must keep on, but sweetheart my energy is waning. Losing your presence on this earth leaves me feeling that I've lost that only one who knew me completely, despite the rough times, you helped me like NO OTHER to a sense of catharsis, as if you helped to open the cocoon of my renewal.
I was able to FLY because you nurtured me. And God please give you this knowledge.
After my moms' tragedy you came into my life as an angel and we'd known one another somehow before.
I'll be in Boise not too long from now. I want to dance with you to that Coltrane song. I love you so much Michael. I hope you are in the arms of the angels, and that you feel my embrace that will never end as I near the city that we shared so much in.
Baby, I can't believe it. Even so you have all of me and my forgiveness
eternally. We are one. I love you Michael David Williams.
(October 1997) Dear Michael, You are dead.
I am in Denver tonight and will be in Boise tomorrow morning. Your memory
is excruciating. I don't understand. I fell immense pain for many things
that were left amiss. I don't think you made a decision you truly believed
in. We talked about this before. You always told me it would be your dad
that did this and now the paradox of pain befalls on those of us who loved
you.I think of our last phone call, I hurt. I hurt terribly. Why couldn't you have given it time? Why couldn't you understand how much you had? Why blame your childhood and take your entire future away? I have extreme pain for some of the things I said to you this summer. I wonder if you will give me some sign sometime so that I know you know that I am wearing your ring. I never stopped loving you.
I will be in Boise tomorrow to be with your spirit and to give my love to your family. Do you somehow realize that I am back from Prague because of you, and that my parents only told me three days ago that you were gone?
I am so sad, sadder than I thought I could ever feel. And I am confused. I can't believe you are gone from this life. It is a mirage, this life. I will be with you always even though your physical being ceases to exist.
I will always love you more than anyone in this life for the time we had together as mere humans. Your love and belief in me played a huge part in my being able to be where I am now. I wish you were here, I wish you were here, I wish. I love you Michael, and it's certain that I am "your girl".
April 7, 1999. The day's wishes have watered down the wine of tomorrow's hopes, your lack of presence here gets worse, not better, for I'm beginning to see its reality. I'm beginning to see that I will never actually feel you or see you like I did while you were here; that you are gone, but not, and it leaves me feeling that I live in between worlds. I have given so much to living for you and I both now that I have no other choice. It has been 19 months now Michael. The reflection of fallacy is no longer dormant in my heart, I feel betrayed and blessed in an instant. Your gifts to me as a person, as the one who knew me, the one who truly knew me, my kindred soul--I am luckier than most to have even had you for the moment of an iris. Life is so heavy, persistence of pain and longing to hold you and know you feel it. Longing to tell you things only you can know and know you hear me. Longing to track the centuries of love between us and come to some grasp as to why we chose these challenges taking us down beyond the knees, face flattened in the mud by some wicked hand of Lesson? I cannot assume we signed into this lease without the option to pardon. I love you with all of my heart and know that there was much more we, as a team, had to do and learn together, HERE, before time ceased to matter. I love you very, very much Michael David Williams. My life is a poem to you.
Back
To Main Page
To My
ADC Contacts with Michael
SOS
Bookgallery, an amazon.com associate
I will continue to add to this journal, since I have so many entries
and writings--it will take a while. Please come back.
Last updated: January 12, 2002
