The Beach

In 1983, a Belgian friend of mine whom I had known since childhood, invited me on a trip through Brittany and Normandy. It was a lovely trip. We also visited Versailles, since neither one of us had ever visited the famous castle. We also visited of course Omaha Beach, the place of the Normandy Invasion that brought an end to the Nazi terror and WW II. One night in Normandy, after a delicious dinner of local cuisine, my friend and I went for a walk on the beach. It was a beautiful evening, with a gorgeous red sunset, against the rhythm of the crashing waves of the sea. The beach was virtually deserted. A few people besides my friend and I were strolling along the water, and it was then I noticed two women in their late fifties swimming in the ocean. They got out of the water, laughing, topless, their tanned bodies muscular and strong, their long dark hair dripping wet. They seemed completely oblivious to any one around them, uncaring that their aging no longer beautiful upper bodies might offend a squeamish observer on the beach. I was intrigued by their ease with themselves and each other, their joy at being together on this beautiful beach. At 26, it seemed I was older than them in my more modest apparel and apparent reluctance to be equally free of inhibition and need for approval. The two women have stayed in my mind all these years, and I remember them with a certain melancholy. In 1983 my parents marriage became officially toxic, after years of more or less polite discord. My mother was terrorizing my father emotionally and drinking like crazy. My friend had invited me on this trip to get me away from it all for a while, as my parents " Dance of Death" spiraled out of control. Seeing the two women ,free, relaxed, obvious soul mates take life by the proverbial balls, was a powerful anti-dote to the hopeless stress my father and mother's marriage had devolved into. At 26 I was still trying to define myself, and the lethal disintegration of my parents' marriage certainly added fuel to the doubts and insecurities I was struggling with. The struggle for freedom and respect became a theme, and is ongoing, all these years later. So did the determination to continue the path to recovery and identity. On days that the battle for that identity and dignity is particularly challenged, and especially if I am near a beach, the two women come to mind. Free, strong, living life on their own terms. I never spoke to anyone about how strong an emotional impact these two women made on me at that moment in time, until a few days ago when I shared it with a friend of mine from my graduate days in Austin, with whom I have a connection of both honesty and emotional ease. I hope by the time I am old and grey, I will have become a free and strong woman, living life on my own terms, unencumbered by preconceived notions and fears.  

The Bridge

Still waters run deep, so the saying goes
and waters like that need a sturdy bridge.

Your heart and mine are entwined across
a large stretch of life, across desert and meadow.

And I hear the water run across my breath
as I try hard to reach the shore and take a rest.

The bridge I build a part of each and every day
seems finally to reach deep into the waters of your soul.

Allowing my feet to reach the music that is there,
as I wade and peer into the colours that are flowing quietly
in shadow and light , I swim and dive deeply to the bottom
where the bridge is anchored deep.

The water is the colour of your eyes,
its rhythm steady, strong, its feel like silk
flows through my fingers that write your name
into its memories, that are both yours and mine.

Trudi Ralston.
January 20th, 2014.
This poem is dedicated to my husband of 28 years this summer,
a great guy by the name of Michael Clare Ralston. 
 

The Waiting Room

Just the other day I found myself in the waiting room of our doctor's office. A routine checkup, so nothing that provoked anxiety. As many a waiting room, the place is drab, neutral. It is a curious place to be, a waiting room, in this hectic world. It is a place where you have no choice but to slow down, relax if you can so convince yourself, and idle the time away, a sin it seems. The way people busy themselves reading articles they are not interested in, in magazines they would never subscribe to. Of course, now we have cell phones to make sure we make the best of every idle minute in those waiting rooms. And of course, there is an unwritten rule it seems, that you will not engage in conversation with any one else in the waiting room. No conversating, just waiting. I often break that taboo, much to the chagrin of my husband or whoever else may have the fortune to be there with me. The silence in a waiting room is like no other, punctuated with the obligatory rhythm of coughs, chuckles, whispers and yawns. The waiting room to me is a rather mundane but persistent reminder that a lot of life is waiting, it is just that we do not like to think about that, and maybe the reason we do not particularly like waiting rooms is because we have to do so much waiting as our lives unfold. We wait to be born, we wait to walk, to talk, to go to school, to grow up, to fall in love, to study, to work, to marry, or divorce, to get well, to travel, to publish, to eat, to laugh, to cry, ... the list is endless. In the daily rhythm of life, the waiting gets blended in with the rest of life, but step into a waiting room, and the jig is up. There you are, just plain waiting. The chairs in the room tell you to sit down, and well, wait. Time is weird, too, in a waiting room. It goes into suspended animation mode. You never really know how long you are going to be there. Fifteen minutes, or maybe two hours. You have no control. It is a total existential joke, and a bad one at that. Just look around you. Everyone has a sour puss expression. The only people that have fun at waiting rooms are children, even though it is made very clear to them they should just get bored to tears, which they often do, like the rest of us. Children will climb on the chairs, run around in circles, laugh, cry, argue, explore, and are a wonderful reminder that life should be about more than sterile waiting rooms. Children actually have encouraged some kind doctors and dentists to put toys in place for the children subjected to their waiting rooms.They should do the same for the adults. Install a slide for grown ups, maybe a place for tag or hopscotch, anything to get the stale air and stagnation out of these places. There are waiting rooms everywhere, it seems. Airports, train stations, bus depots, subways. We should make them more fun, and some places do just that. Because the way things still mostly are in waiting rooms, it puts into question the whole mystery of modern human existence and its tragic inability to make sense of it.

Entr ' Acte

J'ai l'impression d' exister dans le silence.
Le silence des souffles des autres, proches et loin.

J'entends mon ombre se promener toute douce,
toute tense, evitant le peur que mes passions evoquent.

Ton silence, si delicat, si fier, m'approche
comme un Lancelot son dragon.

Tu ne me connais pas, c'est un choix,
c'est plus facile comme ca.

Mon coeur sauvage t'effraye
et tu cours plus vite a chacque instant.

Et tout ce qui me reste est d'exister
dans le silence de tes bras.

Et de cacher les larmes et les blessures
et crier ma solitude brilliante avec le soleil
le jour et les etoiles la nuit.

J'existe dans la couleur de tes yeux
et quand tu dors, je m'echappe.

Et je vole libre comme un oiseau
dans le monde immense de mes reves.

Trudi Ralston.
January 9th, 2014.
 No one ever said relationships were easy. And if love is
the answer, it is also the price. 

Abyss

The Holidays are bittersweet for me, a mixture of excitement at the celebrations and a hollow ache at all the loss of family. It intensifies the occurrence of nausea, one of the few stubbornly persistent left over symptoms of the trauma of the losses. I recently renewed a friendship with a fellow graduate student from my years at UT in Austin, Texas, an engineering student from Panama. He has a brother, two sisters, and they all have families nearby,and both his parents are still alive. This kind of happiness triggered a sensation I had been trying to pull together into a visual image. What eventually came to mind was the view of me sitting on the floor of a room, and being pushed into a corner, and when I finally was able to get up, and tried to get across the room, so I could leave, the floor is gone, and all that is left is an abyss, bottomless, and so definite, that even now as I write about it, I have to fight nausea. It is a feeling of paralysis like in a bad dream,a nightmare like paralysis struggling with every inch of will to not panic, and instead find a way to build a bridge across the abyss, a bridge made of the invisible threads of fierce determination to defy any and all laws of gravity that obviously no longer exist in that room. Acceptance is a big part of healing emotional wounds, but it sure helps to know that the laws that were in existence before your world fell apart, still exist. I am not so sure about that. I do not know what the answer to this dilemma is. It is hard to even put the feeling into words, it is like trying to speak, thinking words will come out, because they always did before, and realizing now the words are there, but no sound is connected to them, and when you try to use sign language, people look at you like you are insane, and ask you to just speak up already. I have always been fond of surrealism but there are days now that my life feels like a walk in a Dali painting. Rather than me looking at a surrealist painting, it feels like I am part of the painting, and I cannot get out of the frame, no matter how I try. It is not something you want to think about much, let alone try to explain to anyone, if you can avoid it. Six more weeks, and it will be March again, time to go outside, clean up the backyard, and start planting flowers, feeling the first hints of a spring sun , of renewal through nature. That always calms my spirit, and soothes the goblins trying to scare my sanity, my resolve not to let the abyss and its invisible monsters keep me in that desperate corner. Six weeks and counting. 

Le Compromis

Ma vie est ici, c'est ce qu'on me dit
depuis presque 40 ans.

Dix ans au Texas et 26 ans a Washington.
Mon fils qui aura 22 ans, et un mari que je connais depuis 1984.

Tout cela m'est bien agreable
aussi longtemps que je ne pense pas
le fait que la derniere fois de visiter
mon pays de naissance etait en 1987.

Ma vie est ici, c'est ce qu'on me dit
depuis presque 40 ans.

La plupart de mes amis vivent dans leur pays de naissance,
que ce soit les Etats Unis, El Salvador, Le Maroc ou Panama.

Et je m'imagine une famille en Belgique qui m'espere et
qui m'aime, et qui je visite.
Et je m'imagine une famille ici aux Etats Unis pour mon fils
et mon mari et moi, qui nous aiment et nous visitent.

Ma vie est ici, c'est ce qu'on me dit
depuis presque 40 ans.

J'ai quitte mon pays de naissance a l'age de 19 ans
enfant naive, suivant un reve que je ne comprenais guere.
Dansant dans la pluie et le soleil, cherchant toujours
le ciel et le soleil bleus malgre les larmes et les blessures.

Et je m'imagine que ma vie est ici,
et je m'imagine qu'il n'y a rien a oublier
rien a pardonner.


Trudi Ralston.
December 18th, 2013.
The Holidays are always a challenge emotionally, bringing in some bittersweet with the sweet. 

3:10 to Yuma

I recently started a new small tapestry project of exotic butterflies. As I was finishing the outline of the flowers and butterflies, I decided to take a break and revisit a movie I had not seen since its release in 2007, a remake of a 1957 movie by the same title, " 3:10 to Yuma". The 2007 version stars Russell Crowe and Christian Bale in the lead roles. Russell Crowe as Ben Wade, the leader of an outlaw gang, and Christian Bale as Dan Evans, an impoverished Civil War veteran turned rancher. What is remarkable about this gritty western is the effect the two men have on each other, and the subtlety in the characterization of the connection that eventually develops between them, ultimately leading to an unexpected apotheosis. It is a moving and very convincing story of how the definition of good and evil comes with a lot of shades of grey when honesty is allowed. Usually, a western is a perfect set-up for a kick-ass story of good and evil with very clear and visible defining lines between these two poles, making  it easy for the audience to cheer for the good guy and delight at the demise of the bad guy. This movie gets very close to it two lead actors, and allows us to build empathy for the hunted outlaw as much as for the injured war veteran, and that does not change when it turns out that Dan Evans is the one who agrees to take in Ben Wade for 200 dollars, so he can pay off his debts and regain his honour with his wife and two young sons. As callous as Ben Wade is as a gang leader, we learn he has some principles, and in the end when he realizes how much this reward money means to Dan Evans, he agrees to allow himself to be taken into custody for prison transport. He knows he has escaped the prison in question twice already, and it would be easy to do again on the train ride there,and it would fulfill the contract for Dan Evans to deliver the outlaw to the train by 3:10.It all seems to work out fine for both men, until Ben Wade's right hand man, Charlie Prince, played flawlessly by Ben Foster, shoots Dan Evans in the back right at the moment Ben Wade boards the train. In a passionate turn of heart, Ben Wade shoots and kills Charlie and the rest of his gang. Dan Evans' teenage son, who helped his father and the outlaw make it to the train, sees how honorably and bravely his father dies and understands that Ben Wade did his part to help his father fulfill his contract. James Mangold as the director and Cathy Konrad as the producer did a great job with the story as did the actors. The chemistry between Russell Crowe and Christian Bale is so well crafted, so believable, so honest. It is also very moving as this is not a story about friendship, but about two men realizing something very profound, namely that decency should transcend ego and conviction and that sacrifice can be understood by saint and villain alike. It is one of the best westerns I have ever experienced. Because this is not a western you watch, it is one you experience, deep in your own psyche, heart and soul. Both Russell Crowe and Christian Bale are outstanding in this deeply American portrayal of frontier morality and conflict.