Purple orchid song

Centres sorrows in the heart

Moment of relief

Extract from Purple Orchid Song

My daughter has been sad.  Sad to see the trees gone from many a park.  Sad to see the stumps and dust where they once were.  She has been feeling a tightness in her heart and stomach.  Now she verbalises it and it releases.  A smile creeps across her face, and today she played the guitar after 5 months of giving it up.  She will learn it again perhaps along with piano and flute.  She craves the music.

On wet days in rainy environments music is a source of calm, a balm to the heart, a way to reach and express for the unreachable.  It is a place to take the heart and translate it into melodies of things we can imagine.  It brings moments of relief.

I have been thinking a lot about backbone.  ‘Have a bit of backbone’ the comment goes.  What does that mean?  Having inner strengh and resolve when all seems lost.  Does it mean moving beyond fear ?  We say someone is ‘spineless’ meaning they don’t have strength, courage, moral rectitude.   I think now of the Hunch Back of Notre Dame, with the distorted back, but many elements of the pure heart.

Does tragedy confuse people, and lead some to have backbone, whilst others become greedy and uncaring?  Where is the spine of a community and a country when the chips are down.   Spineless – looters, profiteers, rubber neckers,  backbone – volunteers, helpers, carers, kindness, givers, and then you know there’s a line where people start to say.

‘What about me- I am of the forgotten?’  and jealousy at the aid given to others creeps in. Even in their need something is taking away their backbone.

And there’s the people who didn’t really lose anything standing fradulently in lines. And there’s the lack of dignity of standing in a lineup to collect food, and goods, and yet so many have trod this path.  Country’s beyond our shores where the tragedy is poverty, famine and war and we maybe watched those lines not really thinking it could be us. Yet, now it is us, and we have to find our backbone.

And a new feeling creeps in, that of guilt.  Guilt for having anything others don’t – shelter, food, security but why have people not felt this before.  It has always been so to some degree.  The truth is starker, made visible, and impossible to avoid.  We need to address inequities of wealth and poverty in our world.  The magnitude of the human spirit needs to be rebirthed.

The simple joy of arranging flowers, is a life saver when it all becomes just too deep to think about.  A little beauty in a vase, with flowers opening and closing in the light, is an eye into peace.

I have been in the eye of a storm, come out the other side.  Sometimes turning inside out ones own self is healing.  Finding backbone is like finding a pool of light to throw upon the garden of the heart. Today the butterflies began to return to the garden and whilst I haven’t seen the most glorious coloured ones, these ones are still something to be impressed by.

My quest for 1000 verses of Haiku continues. I have done nine and three have been contributed by friends. So it continues, along with our communities across the worlds quest for backbone.

(c) June Perkins all rights reserved, words and image.

For more Healing Haiku go to my site http://thousandhaikuhealingquest.wordpress.com

For the rest of this series http://thousandhaikuhealingquest.wordpress.com/2011/03/26/purple-orchid-song/