What you leave behind

Hi! I'm just returning to the blog after a solid 4 months of hiding from what can only be described as the most terrifying, teeth pulling, bladder excavating time of my relatively truncated adulthood. I've missed telling you things about the back of the store. I have some new post-its. The store is doing well, so I have plenty of paper supplies. Most of them recycled, re-purposed, re-used. We are vigilantes about our scrap paper, and our Eco footprint, has been reduced to that of a small water fowl.

I was looking for an image to illustrate this, and I managed to come across this article on Sokushinbutsu , or self mummification. It got me thinking about what legacy, if any we actually want to leave. I mostly think about this kind of thing when I'm riding my bike without a helmet or my once a year reading of Emerson's  Self Reliance. (I highly recommend this practice, it's easy, and you are likely to sign up for a community class on, oh, let's say... beaver pelts or viola stringing.

The most interesting part of Seppuku, (if you ask me) is the fact that the Samurai must write a death poem before they eat their final meal and get on with it. Again; here is the idea of legacy creeping across the white glow of my google search bar and into my fingers. I tried with little luck to find a collection of these poems, and instead I rediscovered the incredible, brilliant  final collection of poetry written by UMASS professor Deborah Digges, called The Wind Blows Through the Doors of my Heart .

The poems in here have the scent of her suicide on them, and she wasn't completely finished with it before she passed, but despite this the collection stands whole, a triumph of will and life. Every time I walk past our poetry section, and see this cover prominently faced out, I am reminded of her incredible strength, and her luminous, grim genius.

And there again, is legacy. What will I have left if god forbid my little bike takes me on a rogue mission into oncoming traffic? A few blog posts, some unfortunately age inappropriate tshirts, Easter cards form my mother, and my poetry collection. That should do it.