A chance listening to a mountain dulcimer and a string orchestra performing Connie Elisor’s Blackberry Winter (1997) quickened my imagination: Succulent blackberries and frigid winds erupted into a honied ache, a puckering of the lips, a twinge of sweetness. What was the composer up to?

In my perception, he used the literary device called juxtaposition in which two dissimilar images are purposely placed together, their resonances morphing into a larger reality. The desired surprise gladdens the listeners/readers.

It might be stretching the meaning of juxtaposition to apply it to persons seeded at birth with life and death, but here goes. Only the wise see mortality in a newborn, but it is there. Only the wise sense our living both in kairos time and chronos time. Only the wise intuit the interplay of spirit and matter as we develop through the decades allotted us.

And I’ve had many. Strange beauty characterizes my spiritual path fraught with rheumatoid arthritis, now damaging my lungs: like an irritant developing seed pearls buried within the soft tissue of a mollusk shell. At times, such rubbing terrifies and sickens; at others, it gentles and assuages: but it must be endured for the emergence of the new Elizabeth.

Such juxtaposition awaits me: the outworn will give way to something totally other.