legacy

Painful and unhelpful patterns in love, relationships and marriage are repeated from one generation to the next. I know this is true because I have seen it in my own family and relationships.

For example, my father didn’t speak to his sisters for forty years over an inheritance issue. He didn’t speak to me for twenty years, again over a money issue. Now my brother doesn’t speak to me, once again essentially over a money issue. My father didn’t get along with his father, now my brother doesn’t get along with his son. I have no doubt that if that relationship is not healed, my nephew will have the same kind of relationship with his son should he have one.

There are many other examples of patterns in my family (not all of them painful and unhelpful); thus: my grandmother left the farm in Nova Scotia at age eighteen to go to Montreal where she studied nursing, met my grandfather, married, etc. Likewise, my mother left Montreal in her early twenties to marry my father and live in Vancouver. I left home at sixteen to go to university, and then left Quebec at age twenty-two to live in Calgary.

Not all patterns have negative consequences. But I believe we must try to break the ones that cause us pain so they won’t be repeated in future generations and also cause them pain.

And of course we must identify and change the destructive patterns that repeat themselves and jail us in our own lives if we want to be truly free.

legacy

©2019 punkie

legacy

you trudge through the trees
tapping this one then that,
finding the truth
in a beaver fur hat

the sap runs in streams
down lines of light blue
flows into barrels
with things you once knew

it’s gathered and filtered,
boiled over wood fires
reduced to its essence
the bass note in a choir

when the life-giving fluid
is amber sticky and sweet
you pour it on snow
for grandchildren to eat