Be Your Note

The weather is breaking....this last week's long heat leaving me....rain coming in on the wind tomorrow.

I have a coffee with a friend whose husband has the same condition as mine. Her's lives in a care home now. He doesn't speak. He doesn't know her. The path she travelled with him could be my likely future.

My husband doesn't want lunch when he comes from walking with a friend by the river. Says he doesn't feel well and sleeps long into the sultry afternoon while I pick red currants at the allotment and weed round the onions..... while our gardener drowns out the wild anxious thoughts in my head with his chain saw and his strimmer - flinging brown dry grass and weeds across the beds of wilting lettuces and climbing beans.

Much later we sit and watch the tennis on TV while my husband eats his plate of salad lunch and cheese scone and I wait for a call from the doctor. She says it's unlikely my husband's pains in his chest and right shoulder are related to his new anti-depressants but to come in and be checked if they continue.

I lose my appetite for supper...eat crisps and pecan nuts and squares of dark chocolate watching the tennis instead.....and feel unsettled and far away from the sound of my own note  -  Rumi's poem which so inspired me long ago this morning.

BE YOUR NOTE

God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.
Each note is a need coming through one of us,
a passion, a longing-pain.

Remember the lips
where the wind-breath originated,
and let your note be clear.
Don't try to end it .
BE Your Note. 

I'll show you how it's enough.

Go up on the roof at night
in the city of the soul.

Let Everyone climb on their roofs
and sing their notes!

Sing loud!

Rumi