By Elaine Mansfield

It has touched deeply my heart when I read this wonderful essay by my dear friend and teacher Elaine Mansfield.

I am not a religious person but a pagan who believes in divine and despite born as a Muslim was in love with Jesus. Not because of the belief in his being offspring of God, sorry, I believe that we are all the children of God, I just love his power of forgiveness and love.

My not so easy youth-life had leaner me not to hate, I have found the jewel of forgiveness than being jealous or thinking of revenge. As I was arrested once in Iran because of my different way of thoughts, I’ve been tortured every day and when I could get out I have just forgiven them because I did believe that they didn’t know what they were doing, as I have learned by Jesus, Buddha, Socrates, Gandhi, and many others who are my real prophets.

I learned to be humble and respect everyone not because of their range or class but because of their being and living as humans. (Though, I must add I’m trying not to be stupid! 😉 )

Anyway, it’s enough of me first 😀 . Let’s enjoy reading the lovely article of Elaine Mansfield about the color of Forgiveness; Blue is my favourite colour ❤ ❤

https://elainemansfield.com/

“Will you meditate with me?” he asks.
I’d said yes for many years.
Chemotherapy was ordered hours ago.
Salvage chemo.
A cursed name
That hasn’t yet arrived.
I have nothing left to give.

At 3 AM that morning, my cell phone rang.
He’d called from downstairs.
“I can’t breathe,” he said.
“Will you help me?”
“I’ll be right there,” I said.

It’s been like this for days,
For months.
I feel his pounding pulse and call the hospital.
“Take him to the nearest ER,” the doctor says.
I’ve done that many times.
They don’t know what to do with the mess of him.

“Can you make it to Rochester?” I ask.
“There are hospitals along the way.”
He nods.
I pack his bag while he uses a borrowed cane,
Staggers to the car.
My warrior husband reduced to this.

I hold his hand while I drive through darkness
Toward his doctors at the cancer center.
Listen to him gasp.
We arrive in a pink coral dawn.
Birds sing as I run inside for help.
Two men in blue scrubs bring a wheelchair.
No rooms ready in oncology.
I beg and change their minds.

No one stops me when I raid the linen room for sheets.
No one helps me make his bed.
I roll his head up so he can breathe,
So he can rest,
But I cannot.

Two kinds of cancer now his doctor says.
He offers one last chance.
Salvage chemotherapy.
It will kill him fast or give him months.
My husband’s name is Victor.
He considers the choice.
His hero energy flickers.
Mine is snuffed.

“Will you stay with me until the chemo comes?” he asks at midnight.
“I must lie down,” I say.
That means no.
For the first time I say no.
“I’ll be back early.”

Burning with shame and hopelessness,
I drive to the Cancer Society Lodge,
Crawl in bed and sob before I fall asleep.
My phone rings at 6 AM.
“I’m OK and I love you,” he says.
The infusion has begun.
He’s not OK, but I’m forgiven.

Alone in bed, eleven years later,
Regret drops me like a wave.
A memory so raw and deep.
I sob until I fall asleep.

At dawn, I dream a Blue Morpho Butterfly,
Sapphire wings as wide as my outstretched hand.
As blue as the Virgin Mother’s robe.
The color of forgiveness.

***

I rarely write poetry, but the memory came in this form along with the dream. Thanks to Ellen Schmidt of Writing Room Workshops who encourages my experiments. Do you have regrets, even though you know you did the best you could? How do you forgive yourself for being human? For other posts about marriage and caregiving, see Bookends of a Marriage or Give Thanks For This Imperfect Life. I also suggest Dealing with Regret and Grief by Claire Bidwell Smith.

I’ll be in Columbus Ohio May 17-18 giving a workshop called Finding Wisdom in Aging and Loss. Please leave comments. I’ll respond soon.

To put it bluntly, I have not a tiny problem if any hit song sounds like any other song!! If you might heard about; Beatles Yesterday sounds like a piece of whom or,,, I know an example: the famous song; Hotel California seems being a sincerely copy of Jethro Tull’s “We used to know” but Ian Anderson the head of Jethro Tull after hearing this annonce, shrugged the shoulders and answered: what a… it is a wonderful song isn’t?

Anyway, I am since a long time a musician and I have some experiences about composing musics (I was not a lucky one 😀 ) and I know how it is a wonderful feeling when you get an idea from your most favourite song from your beloved musician.

anyhow, the music world is unlimited, and also the sonority is floating all in the air, we only must keep silence a listen to them; it is just wonderful.

via: http://www.openculture.com/

You might wonder what would I mean, yes, sure it looks a little weird but I can explain it; I have many experiences about finding out how many masterpieces in the music world, might be stolen or pilfered by any other song in the past. That is actually bullshits!” because, as I once was a musician and I had got also many themes from the older music hits and combine a new one, it was a great enjoyment for me as I’d believe that it would be surely a great enjoyment for the compositor for seeing how could be music unlimited.

Wayne’s World kind of ruined “Stairway to Heaven” for me. Yes, it’s been 27 years, but I still can’t help but think of Wayne turning to the camera with his stoner grin, saying “Denied!” when the guitar store clerk points out a “No Stairway to Heaven” sign. It was not a song I took particularly seriously, but I respected the fact that it took itself so seriously… and threaded my way out of the room if someone picked up a guitar, earnestly cocked an ear, and played those gentle opening notes.

Now I giggle even when I hear the magisterial original intro. This is not the fault of Zeppelin but of the many who approach the Zeppelin temple of rock grandiosity unprepared, attempting riffs that only Jimmy Page could pull off with authority. At least the joke gave us a way to talk about the phenomenon: in lesser hands than Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway” can sound… well, a bit ridiculous (with apologies to Dolly Parton.) Although accused (and acquitted) of ripping off the opening notes to Spirit’s instrumental “Taurus,” the song is all Zeppelin in every possible way.

“Stairway” is a representative sampler pack of the band’s signature moves: mixing folk rock and heavy metal with a Delta blues heart; exploding in thunderheads of John Bonham drum fills and a world-famous Page solo; Plant screaming cryptic lyrics that vaguely reference Tarot, Tolkien, English folk traditions and “a bustle in your hedgerow”; John Paul Jones’ wildly underrated multi-instrumental genius; bizarre charges of Satanic messages encoded backwards in the record…. (bringing to mind another Wayne’s World actor’s character.)

“Stairway… crystallized the essence of the band,” said Page later. “It had everything there and showed us at our best. It was a milestone.” It set a very high bar for big, emotional rock songs. “All epic anthems must measure themselves against ‘Stairway to Heaven,’” writes Rolling Stone. It is “epic in every sense of the word,” says the Polyphonic video at the top, including the literary sense. It can “make you feel like you’re part of a different time, part of a different world. It can make you feel like you’re part of a story.”

That story? “One of the greatest narrative structures in human history,” the Hero’s Journey, as so famously elaborated by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces—an archetypal mythological arc that has “permeated stories for as long as humans have told them.” Not only do Robert Plant’s mystical lyrics reflect this ancient narrative, but the song’s composition also enacts it, building stage by stage, from questioning to questing to battling to returning with the wisdom of how “to be a rock and not to roll.”

The song’s almost classical structure is, of course, no accident, but it is also no individual achievement. Hear the story of its composition, and why it has been so influential, despite the jokes at the expense of those it influenced, in the Polyphonic video at the top and straight from Jimmy Page himself in the interview above.

Out of all of Zeppelin’s many epic journeys, “Stairway” best represents “the reason,” as cultural critic Steven Hyden writes, “why that band endures… the mythology, that Joseph Campbell idea of an epic journey into the wild that Zeppelin’s music represents, the sense that when you listen to this band, you feel like you’re plugging into something bigger and more profound than a band.” Or that the band is opening a doorway to something bigger and more profound than themselves.