Tough Week

Prepping for a deployment this week.   Ruined my good cutting board, burned my feet.

A Bitterness 
Mary Oliver

I believe you did not have a happy life.
I believe you were cheated.
I believe your best friends were loneliness and misery.
I believe your busiest enemies were anger and depression.
I believe joy was a game you could never play without stumbling.
I believe comfort, though you craved it, was forever a stranger.
I believe music had to be melancholy or not at all.
I believe no trinket, no precious metal, shone so bright as your bitterness.
I believe you lay down at last in your coffin none the wiser and unassuaged.
Oh, cold and dreamless under the wild, amoral, reckless, peaceful flowers of the hillsides.



Stephen Fry's excellent monologue seeded some meditations.

I have found, in the most bitter and angry parts of myself, a hideous expectation.

The wailing of a child, 'BUT YOU SAID LIFE WAS FAIR!,' a delusional and egocentric need.

I have a deeply ambivalent relationship with hope. To hope is to begin the process of disappointment.

A poet I am misquoting noted that Bitterness is really a sense of being cheated, of not being given one's due.

Envy and resentment grow well in the shade there.

It destroys gratitude in this sense- it is impossible to see blessings, focused on absences.

How deeply disappointed I have become.