A Kind Of Immortality

August 8, 2023August 8, 2023 / Hermionejh / 2 Comments

Books speak to me – especially if they’re an audio book. (bah-da-bump, tss)

The town library in Dennis, Massachusetts is a bright and lovely building to spend a rainy afternoon in.

I’m not sure what attracts me to the Cape. It’s certainly not the traffic or the folks who drive way under the speed limit as though they prefer just driving above all else. I am glad if they are having the time of their life. The 50 cars behind them are not.

I realized that it’s the coast that I love, the ocean, the lighthouses, and the history. The trails in every town take us out of the sitting and waiting and into the doing and enjoying.

We knew rain was forecast today, so we decided to visit a library rather than a museum. On the way, we found the Captain Baker Donut Shop in West Dennis. It was raining so hard we could barely see 10 feet in front of us, so stopping there was an excellent spur-of-the-moment decision. I only regret the calories. The donuts are amazing! – definitely worth the side trip.

The rain became less torrential once we got to the library, but it’s been pouring with off and on ferocity since we got here. The time for the tornado warning we got on our phones has passed, but the severe thunderstorm warning continues for the next several hours.

The rain drumming on the roof is pleasing as I write, but it’s the books that win my heart every time.

The mixture of smells from new and old paper bring me back to childhood, and the treasures I found at our school library which spurred me on to visit more libraries to see what they had.

My favorite discoveries at 11 years old were from Thornton Burgess, who grew up in Sandwich, Mass, on the Cape, I just learned.

His Mother West Wind, and his many animal stories captivated me. I also found The Wind In The Willows, by Kenneth Grahame, along with several other books that I have forgotten the titles of but nevertheless found new worlds to lose myself in.

I thought that teaching would be a good career because I loved reading and I wanted to share those stories (and maybe instill the love of reading in others), but teaching, I learned, was more about managing behavior. I had also hoped to write children’s literature, but the stories that live in my head don’t want to come out on paper – or I haven’t been able to coax them out so far.

Books represent a kind of safety for me. Knowledge isn’t just power, but escape as well. I imagine alternate paths or endings when I read books now, and I often grieve the end of a captivating book.

How I loved those characters! They took me on their journey (or journeys), and let me in on their secrets, their fears, their hopes and their dreams – whether or not they were able to realize or accomplish what it was they thought they wanted to do, or be, or have.

The best characters to me are those who fail, but don’t give up. I get to discover the outcome along with them, and makes me wonder about the outcome of my own life.

My friends who have died have lost their chance to create or progress, and I am doing what I can to take action so I’ll have less regret.

Libraries are full of dreams realized, work completed, and an offering given to all who wish to enter.

The most loved authors have reached a kind of immortality – until access to their works are lost forever.

While I cannot recall all of the books I’ve read (some of which I’m glad to have forgotten), there are those few whose lines still come into my consciousness at times and encourage me to continue on.

Good Grief

July 26, 2023 / Hermionejh / 2 Comments

Time has been a strange concept for me. Sometimes I feel like my life has been one long day, and other times it feels like I’ve lived several lives since I was born.

I have clung to people in my past that didn’t cling back, even though we seemed so close at the time. I am lucky to still have a few people in my life that have been my friends through a lot if not most of the journey so far.

I try practicing the Buddhist idea of non-attachment, and try as I might, I still have attachments. I have put time, love and energy into people who seemed to feel the same, but have detached, or our connection didn’t mean to them what it meant to me.

We change. Our desires or our focus shifts and we either fall into, or choose, new groups of friends or acquaintances that give us more of what we’re looking for, maybe?

It’s about acceptance too. I keep hearing the lyric: “If you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with,” from Love The One You’re With by Stephen Stills.

I naively assumed that the people that were with me then experienced our connection the same way – that it mattered as much to them as it did to me.

It’s not bad or good, it just is. The challenge is to accept that. It’s not like I hadn’t been living my life anyway, but I have to incorporate it differently in my mind, and not interpret it like there is something wrong with me. There is nothing wrong with me – or at least nothing that the right pharmaceutical can’t dampen. (Kidding – sort of). I’m still waiting to get into a therapeutic psychedelics treatment.

Honestly, losing my mother, one of my best friends, and two other very good friends in the space of three years has been really hard. I miss my mom so much lately. It’s more the idea of her, I think – like my longing for someone to make my pain less raw. It’s more archetypal than actual because my mother wouldn’t have won any parenting awards. I think I did better, but guaranteed I still fucked up my kid no matter how hard I tried not to.

This has felt so convoluted, but it’s not, it’s grief. Grief is weird and distorting. It feels never ending and frightening to me – like if I feel it deeply I will dive into the darkness and never resurface – but that’s just not true.

Amnesia seems like it would be an ideal solution, but that would just cause other problems. Balance will return, but it will take a lot longer if I keep stuffing this grief under every internal couch cushion I can find, or shoving it way into my psyche’s back closet.

Leaving Claw Marks

July 10, 2023July 10, 2023 / Hermionejh / 2 Comments

Sometimes you just have to let go.

The problem is that anything I ever let go of had claw marks all over it.

We were a solid group of close to a dozen. Me & Jimmy were the younger ones in the group that ranged from 13 to 18 year-olds, but Jimmy was more fully accepted by everyone. Maybe because he was one of two boys in our group that regularly hung out together.

I had such a crush on him, and I didn’t know he was crushing too until one night we were at a dance and we were laughing and running around when he stopped and turned around to kiss me. I was more shocked than anything, but it was nice.

Maybe because I didn’t pursue more kissing, we just went back to the dance and our larger group as though nothing had happened, but continued dancing and having fun.

I was confused. I liked him, had a crush, but some inner sense held me back. I valued him as a friend – and I already had a boyfriend from school – who I rarely saw, and who lived in another town.

But this was summer, and our group met every day. He never said anything about the kiss, and neither did I.

He had a steady girlfriend before the summer was over, and my school boyfriend broke up with me. I had another crush by then, which eventually turned into my first true boyfriend.

We all continued on as a close knit group throughout the next few years, eventually drifting away as we found serious relationships, had children, or moved away.

A few years later, Jimmy started spending more time with my next oldest sister whose birthdays were two days and three years apart. I started visiting her almost every other weekend & we all grew close, had a great time partying, going dancing, taking trips to the beach, or weekends in New York City, and going to dozens of rock concerts. – the B52’s being one of the stand outs that Jimmy and I had such fun dancing to with my next oldest sister.

My crush on Jimmy, who now preferred James, remained. I nearly confessed my feelings, but something held me back.

It turned out he got into pretty hard drugs, and his life was beginning to invite more trouble than not, and I had college to focus on, but that crush remained true.

I accepted that that was all it could ever be, and I continued to value his friendship, but I think something broke for him about me.

Maybe it had been that first non-rejection rejection, but I was moving away from the drug scene – though I’d end up struggling with alcohol abuse throughout college.

I hadn’t seen him for several years after college, and it was so good to reconnect when we bumped into each other in our old town.

We both had a child about the same age, and chatted for a minute. I went to hug his son goodbye as we were about to part and James told me that his son only liked to hug beautiful women. I stood back and said “oh, okay,” and to my eternal gratitude his son looked at me, recognizing the dis, and gave me a big hug. Years later I got to tell his adult son how much that meant to me, regardless of what he thought about my looks. Lol

But, I continued to consider James as a friend – and I didn’t think I was very good-looking anyway.

He and my next oldest sister reconnected a few years ago, and my sister told me that James had bought her a ticket to go see the B52’s. It was so devastating that they didn’t think to invite me. Hadn’t I continued to be as good and true a friend as I had during all those years, seeing all those great bands together?

It took way too many years to figure out that neither of them are my friend anymore, regardless of the reason.

I must have left behind some of the longest, deepest claw marks in the world. I just wish it hadn’t taken me so long to figure it out.

Wheat and Chaff

July 8, 2023July 10, 2023 / Hermionejh / 4 Comments

I think she’s insulating me from too much pain. While she lived, she was such a comfort through my grief after my mom died in January, 2020 – a month or so before the world was thrown into the Covid-19 pandemic.

My friend sent me a video of the Pretender’s I’ll Sta nd By You, and Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors, when the fall-out from my mom’s death was happening with my sisters, while my younger brother was spiraling from schizophrenia, in and out of hospitals. I was trying so hard to help keep him alive, and I soon realized that I couldn’t (and cannot) save him. I can only love him and hope that he is getting what he needs.

Just three years after my mother died, she died. And now another friend from my youth is slipping away from cancer too. I have had three friends, and likely soon, a fourth, die from cancer in three years. Is cancer more prevalent now? It seems so.

We could and did talk about everything, and she accepted me as I was, and I, her. I feel sad for people who don’t have that person in their life. That person who knows all about you and likes you anyway. That person who answers the phone at 3 a.m., and stays on the line for as long as you need.

We could be who we were, wheat and chaff, and we had so much laughter and fun too.

She was one of the smartest people I knew. She had such a depth of understanding and a thirst to know. about. e v e r y t h i n g.

I have many people in my life who are dear to me. I met them at high points and at low points, and I am grateful for their presence in my life – even if I couldn’t fulfill what they thought I could do if only I’d try more.

I wanted to, is all I can say. I don’t understand why my brain works the way it does, but my therapist tells me all the time that deep trauma and depression is the hardest condition to treat. It just is. It’s like a virus that morphs when you treat one aspect, only to present itself another way.

Having had so many wonderful healers in my life has been a greater bounty than I could ever repay, and I hope each and every one of them know that I love them, and how important they were. I hope I gave them a sense of love and gratitude that they felt.

I hope my friend is singing among the stars now, or I hope that she is doing whatever it is that matters to her. She’s probably just energy now, but there was an essence that was her spirit or soul, or whatever, while on earth, and I think that is what defines us here, and is what we leave with.

I sense her smiling, and waiting for me. She told me she’d be there to meet me when it’s my time to go. It’s not mine to know when this life will be done, but I still have things that are important to me to do.

Don’t wait to do them, she whispers. Don’t wait.

Too Much Information

June 17, 2023June 17, 2023 / Hermionejh / 4 Comments

There’s a pile of papers from several years that have been on my to-do list. I’m an information hoarder. I know it’s illogical – especially today when I can ask the internet pretty much anything and get back more good (and terrible) answers than I could ever want.

I learned that information represents safety. Knowledge is power, right? Only I filed that information away in filing cabinets and boxes. I would look at some of it once in a while, and remember why I kept that information, but most of it pertained to circumstances that never happened – like how to survive in the wilderness.

If I find myself in the wilderness, but haven’t read that damn article stored in my filing cabinet, it’s no better than not having it. I learned from various sources to stay in one place until someone finds me. Well that depends on if I’m in an area of regular traffic.

I know I can eat pine tree bark and needles, and to try to sleep off of the ground, and to try to make a lean-to, but I cannot protect myself in every scenario.

Not once have I ever been lost in the wilderness. I only go hiking with someone, and then only on known trails. I am not an adventurer.

But what if a plane crashes in the wilderness and I survive?

I guess I’d have to deal with that then. Honestly, I hope I don’t survive if that happens. I’ve never been good in a crisis, and I have enough PTSD as it is.

When my son was six-months-old, I was camping near the ocean with three friends and their children. Their girls were eight and nine. I asked them to watch my son, who was clipped into his child seat on the middle of the picnic table, while I went to the bathroom. They said yes, and as I walked away, I hear a loud noise and a thud.

I did that seemingly slow-motion turn around to see that the girls must have each thought the other would stay by the table and they were walking away in opposite directions while my son must have rocked forward and tumbled from the table.

A scream came out of my mouth that I did not know I was capable of making, and I shit you not, at least three mothers from other campsites came running into our site while I stood there frozen in horror, believing my son dead.

They scooped him up, and what I thought was blood turned out to be dirt and nettles. They cleaned him off as I regained the ability to function.

It’s rattling me again as I write this.

I was so relieved, and then ashamed that I froze. I am also forever grateful to those women who jumped into action.

I’m recycling reams of information that is good to know, but useless if it’s not in your head at the moment you need it – and you’re able to act on it.

I suppose I shouldn’t feel too bad because earlier that year, my son was choking, and I pulled him out of his high chair, tipped him upside down and thumped his back – and out came the food.

I don’t know why I froze at the campsite, but I’m glad I was never tested again in a seeming crisis.

In The Beginning

June 16, 2023June 16, 2023 / Hermionejh / 4 Comments

I am about eight or nine years old. My family is at my Grandpa’s house in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. My uncle Louis, and my aunt Cathy are living there with their father. My Grandma had died nearly a decade before.

Many of my nearly dozen aunts and uncles are gathered here in their family home, the occasion is a cross-country relocation of my cousin Karen and her new husband. Karen is the oldest daughter of my beautiful and sophisticated Aunt Francis and my handsome, Clark Gable-esque, Uncle Frank.

Karen is tall and beautiful like her mother, but she didn’t inherit Aunt Frannie’s red hair. She is about ten years older than me, and she tells us all that their relocation is due to a job that her husband got, or that they both found, out in Colorado.

Karen has always been kind to me, and I wished I could be around her all the time. She goes outside to put something in their car, and I follow her out. She gives me a hug goodbye and I start crying and beg her to take me with her. She hugs me tighter, then looks at me and says “I’m so sorry, I can’t, but wish I could.” It was one of the few moments in my young life that I saw that a better, or different, life was possible.

I couldn’t bear to watch them drive away.

Later that year, or the next, I am in a dim, low-ceiling, exposed beam dining room at the Brotherhood of the Spirit commune in Warwick, Massachusetts. That detail isn’t really important except to note that a few years ago I went to a house built by one of my writer friend’s and her husband out in the woods of Wendell, and their layout was so similar to that of the commune dining area that I felt stunned, and my whole body shivered as I was momentarily transported forty years into the past – a small, bewildered girl absorbing my new surroundings like the dark wood absorbed the light.

“We’re all family now,” said Larry, one of the Brotherhood members. “We all look out for each other,” he had said to my mother and me standing outside the day we arrived.

What I heard was that I was safe. We were safe. I wouldn’t be hurt anymore.

Now we had to settle in.

There are so many people around us. Some sitting, some standing – the room abuzz with conversation, laughter, eating, working, or resting. These people seemed happy, purposeful, sincere – and full of love and kindness.

We noticed the bright, fantastical rainbow art painted on the outside of the front building as we pulled up into the driveway, and more art on the rule boards declaring “no alcohol, no drugs, and no smoking”.

The flowing, colorful artwork contrasted starkly with the spiritual principles and laws painted in black on large white boards nailed up for all to see when entering the dining area.

I’m with my mother and my younger brother. I don’t know where my two oldest sisters are, but I’m not worried about them.

The leader of the Brotherhood Of The Spirit, Michael Metelica, is away in California we were also told earlier that day. He’d be back next week, someone said, and we would meet him then. He and all the other full members would decide if our family could stay there permanently.

My mother doesn’t seem worried. I think I’m a little worried.

In Memorium – Dimitra Clark

May 17, 2023August 16, 2023 / Hermionejh

Dimitra Clark

August 27, 1959 – May 6, 2023

Dimitra was a lover of knowledge, devour-er of books (especially science fiction and science discoveries), and she was also a vocalist with a beautiful, clear voice who loved many musical genres, and who sang back-up in various bands as a teen and continued singing with individuals and groups throughout her life, as well as having sung in the Greenfield Community College Choir for several years in the early to mid-1980’s.

She enjoyed playing a range of video games from Zelda, and Myst, to other interesting finds. She especially enjoyed all things Star Trek, and was so excited when William Shatner got to orbit the earth on the Blue Origin rocket ship in 2021.

Dimitra was also a writer who spent years honing her craft. She had so many ideas for books, especially her favorite Science Fiction genre, and she was developing an online marketing business to teach writing.

As a lifelong scholar, Dimitra’s thirst for knowledge, understanding, justice, and compassion was unceasing.

Her spirit and life animals were cats, and she had many throughout her life. Dimitra saw and felt her devoted cat, Skitty, every day while she battled body-ravaging cancer in the last weeks of her life, even though Skitty’s physical body was miles away at home. Dimitra said that Skitty would lay curled up to her neck every night.

Dimitra was a devoted and generous friend and parent who treated all children in her life as she would her own. She raised five children, mainly by herself, and worked several jobs just to keep her children clothed and housed. Her love, wit, and great humor filled in many rough spots along the way.

Through a childhood filled with deep trauma and neglect, she found a way to break those chains for her children to be free, even if lifting those chains off of herself proved too onerous.

Her love and care was apparent through her children’s, and daughter-in-law Audrey’s, devotion, and all of her children: Brendan, Moriah, Levi, David (and his wife Audrey) and Sam, were by her side in the last weeks of her life, along with her adored grandchildren, Penny and Milo, who all surrounded her with love and care. Her best friend, Jerri, was also able to come out to see her, and Dimitra was such an amazing friend that she asked for less pain medication so she could be present for Jerri’s visit – even though it cost her more comfort.

Any who wish to donate for Dimitra’s medical expenses can contribute through her family’s GoFundMe account:

https://gofund.me/8bb65d9d

To Everything…

April 23, 2023May 10, 2023 / Hermionejh / 6 Comments

All morning the rain has fallen, soaking the greening ground in my northeastern town. The growing season is here – the birds trill out their morning song most days, but not today.

The birds are sheltering in while the hard rain falls. Only the deer venture out from the woods to eat the fresh tender shoots.

Spring mornings feel gentle, though I know strenuous work has been (and continues) happening to break new buds open, to push up the snow drops, crocuses, daffodils and tulips from the hard, cold earth in rapid succession.

So many trees and flowers are gorgeous with their blooms, but standing out are the yellows of daffodils, dandelions and forsythia blooms that are now bursting out along their stems.

I once learned at a Chinese medicine workshop that spring is the season of anger, and yellow is its color. That anger offers the force needed to push through the semi-frozen, hard-packed soil of my mind.

It’s a losing proposition to try to regulate my emotions well, and lately The Byrds’ version of Turn, Turn, Turn plays in my mind several times a day as I keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Pete Seeger arranged passages from the biblical book of Ecclesiastes:

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time for every purpose, under Heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep

A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together…

Death is as close as life, but I act as though I will be here forever so endings always feel too soon.

I know it’s fear. I shouldn’t fear the ‘unknown’ because I once knew it, if I were somewhere before I was here – and the conservation of energy tells me that I was because energy is neither created nor destroyed. Energy can only be transformed or transmuted. While that could be comforting, it does not comfort or console.

I don’t know what it was like before this time. I don’t know if I had any senses to determine anything. It appears that this is a unique experience.

Do we report back somewhere? If I am taken to account will I quiver in a dark corner for eternity?

It’s important to me to do my best in this world – whatever my best has looked like, and whatever it will continue to look like until I die.

Another biblical passage from I-don’t-care-where reads that ‘the wages of sin are death.’ Like a bulb flash the other day, I understood that the payment for being born (sin) is death. It’s as simple as that. It’s not a judgement, it’s a fact.

Another passage allegedly from Jesus, is that ‘those who love their life will lose it, and those who hate their life will keep it forever.’ To me that speaks to the ‘middle way.’ Don’t be overly attached, or despairing. This was always temporary.

That still doesn’t answer what the point of having a flesh body is, except that it is a singular experience, I guess.

Maybe we reincarnate and maybe we don’t. Maybe the physical world is like choosing an adventure package from the spirit realm. Maybe there are infinite worlds we can inhabit in different forms – or maybe we never have to leave home and can learn about it from others? I suppose that would make experiencing it for oneself attractive. (Suckers!)

(Maybe being in a flesh body is more like the carnival in Tom Sawyer where you pay your entrance fee, but there is nothing to see inside – you’ve been suckered – but you leave and tell those about to enter how great it is.)

I can ponder the unknowable all day and I will be right back where I am now, no closer to understanding a damn thing. The clue has always been right there in bold type: it’s UNKNOWABLE.

All I can do is focus on the moment.

What stones am I gathering? What should I cast away? Is that something I can know? I think I should cast away what hinders me – but with all the practice from all the therapy and knowledge I have gained throughout my life, I still haven’t cast much away!

I don’t want any of my people to leave this world while I’m here, but so many already have – and one day – sooner than I can imagine, I will too. I just really hope it doesn’t suck.

Motivating

March 30, 2023April 4, 2023 / Hermionejh / 2 Comments

I have a love/hate relationship with working out – with staying healthy basically.

Walking and hiking definitely give me physical as well as soul benefits, but working out does not produce endorphins for me.

True believers (or work-out-ers) would probably say I am not working out enough, which is true considering that I am not working out at all lately.

I actually like moving my body and seeing it getting stronger, but I don’t like pain. I do almost anything to avoid pain, but I seem to spend a lot of time hanging out with pain.

Ironic, I know.

Really, it is because I hang out with motivation’s unhappy cousin, procrastination.

Actually procrastination is pretty chill. It just sits around, thinking about doing things, but never actually doing them.

Procrastination is a stoner that needs more sativa and less indica.

People who are jazzed to work out scare me, and annoy me. Yeah, I know I’m probably just jealous.

When I was growing up, Jack LaLanne, was the man, man.

On his 70th birthday, he towed 70 boats a mile upstream.

A mile – upstream!

I was in my early 20’s and I couldn’t have towed a boat a foot downstream.

Jane Fonda and Richard Simmons were the latest fitness gurus then.

I worked out at my local YMCA, working the Nautilus circuit and doing aerobics, but I was never super serious about exercise.

It wasn’t until my lower back started hurting in my late 30’s that I had to do something to function better. Pain pushed procrastination out of the way and I found the miracle of physical therapy and targeted exercise.

The first thing my PT asked me was if I had any children. (Yes, I thought, my child can be a pain, but that’s not why I’m here.) She told me that my abs were probably weak from childbearing, making my back bear too much responsibility for hauling my ass around the world.

She said it nicer, but that was the upshot.

She gave me exercises to do every day, and she had me check in. It was really hard to get into a routine because I always found a reason to delay, and my physical pain persisted. Finally, I realized that as soon as I woke up, I had to put my exercise mat down, and just start exercising. I had to begin before the voices in my head woke up.

And it worked!

For ten years I did those damn exercises every day with few exceptions.

Somehow I got lost a few years ago. The routine was boring, or it wasn’t challenging me, but I have been in a rut that my mind helps foster. “You’re not in that kind of pain anymore. You’re good.” Says that voice. Except I feel the old pain creeping back in. “You walk or hike pretty much every day. You’re good.”

Or my favorite: “You deserve to take a break.”

From health?

I didn’t question that voice because it’s so inviting. But like all siren calls in my life, it’s bullshit, and it leads nowhere good.

“Get off your ass,” says my militant voice, “- drop and give me twenty.” (I can usually do ten push-ups before my inner three-year-old starts whining.)

My entire work out is a battle of me telling myself how nice it would be to stop, and I think I finally agreed.

Every day is another chance to begin – and I just read an article that said even if exercise is broken up throughout the day, it still counts. I have bundled exercise with another task, and that does help, but it still gives me too much wiggle room to give up early.

My PT also said “motion is lotion” for my joints – and like it or not, my body is aging, but I will never again be as young as I am right now.

I read articles about 90 year-old marathoners (show offs), and 80 year-old weight-lifting women who are jacked! They are like honey badger – they don’t give a shit what their inner naysayer yells.

A body in motion tends to stay in motion, and a body at rest tends to stay at rest. The law of inertia.

Overcoming that inertia, besting that procrastination is my goal – but really – it’s not letting my inner three-year-old run the show.

Burning Bright

March 28, 2023April 4, 2023 / Hermionejh / 3 Comments

She laughed and smiled, and went home planning to die.

She drank or drugged to feel different, and for several beautiful minutes she felt whole and worthy, but it was so brief, and it didn’t fill the gaping hole of worthlessness.

Justifying her existence became her job. Hiding became her daily pursuit. Hiding in plain sight.

She couldn’t afford to let you know her even though she was desperate to be known, to be loved, to be accepted – to matter.

Every failure confirmed her lack of value, and she told herself that everyone knew she was shit – it was a pheromone radiating off of her.

Shame was her cloak – its vile fabric wrapping its folds so tightly around her.

She didn’t even know she had fallen back into the pit. She had reopened all the old escape hatches, but they didn’t hide her anymore.

Until she remembered, and really understood that she had to change her self-beliefs – to love her unlovable self, and learn to act differently, nothing could change.

Living was becoming unendurable, but she was still too afraid to kill herself. In a fog of self-loathing, she was gifted the memory of once having worked hard to like herself – even reaching a sense of love and self-worth.

“No one provides worth or value,” came the small voice. “It is always self-derived. It was never fostered as a child – that shame belonged to others who failed their duties. But it’s still possible,” said the voice.

“Let the flicker become a brilliant blaze, and know that all fires go out if they are not fed. And a fire will burn whatever fuel its given – so feed it worthy fuel.”

Addendum: It’s also okay to borrow fuel from others if all you have is shit to burn.