Tag: sorrow

Moonlit Maze of Sorrows

May 14, 2025

This last Sunday brought back many memories of long lost family members and friends, some exceedingly beautiful, some heart wrenchingly sad.

A magnificent Flower Moon rose up from the trees and, beneath its tender glow, I pondered how fragile and fleeting life is —here one breath, gone the next.

Because someone dear to my heart – who a few months ago was a total stranger whom I met through a purely business transaction, but soon reached out to me with a gentle and comforting hand – suffered a life altering traumatic experience that very Sunday: a shattered backbone.

As I looked at that Flower Moon I realized how insignificant our own problems can be. How a freak accident alters the course of our lives and makes us stumble under fate’s cruel weight. Sometimes the pain we survive comes from a broken body. Other times, from a broken soul.

There’s not much I can do, other than provide encouragement and trivial support. I find prayer has always helped me cope, heal and recuperate.

Last year, when I found out someone was facing a major health downturn, I discovered that the patron saint of sick people and doctors and surgeons is St. Luke. Yes, the one who wrote one of the Gospels. I know, I know. Leave it to the Catholic Church to have a patron saint or two for anything that ails us or spooks us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it.

However, I had forgotten that St. Luke had been the “beloved physician”. So he is not just an à-la-carte saint du jour. So, in the spirit of ecumenical brotherhood, since Luke was most likely a Jew and my friend is a Jew, I told my friend I would reach out to the patron saint of surgeons before the delicate operation. What do we have to lose, right? And as my friend said, at this juncture, we take all the help coming from any which way.

As I stared at my Flower Moon I reflected on how fleeting life is and on how we can navigate a moonlit maze of sorrows while dancing the eternal dance between life, love and death.

The Love of Bare November Days with Its Withered Trees

November 3, 2024

An amazing photographer, Kim Allen Goff, posted this beautiful photo on social media and commented,

“I’ve loved to peer into windows since I was a child and the older the house the better! The reflections on these windowpanes spoke the language of November.”

Immediately, her comment and photo reminded me of this Robert Frost poem, below. I read somewhere that, in this particular poem, “Sorrow finds beauty in its desolation”.

It is true.

Sorrow does bring forth reflection, and from that reflection springs clarity of understanding, and from that clarity -eventually- those turbulent waters reach their destination and may turn into a beautiful and calm and crystalline cove or lake. So there. I have to thank Kim for making me be happy about my birthday month! There is beauty in those reflections of the bare, the withered tree…

MY NOVEMBER GUEST
by Robert Frost

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.