Mary Ellen: A Tribute to a Virtual Friend
Mary Ellen was also a seeker of higher consciousness. In fact, we both shared that quality of temperament. She especially admired the American spiritual teacher, Baba Ram Dass, and sometimes attended his seminars and workshops.
I always enjoyed reading her "stuff," and enjoyed her travels vicariously. Her love for faraway places and exotic people and things shone through her writing time and time again.
She was a real voyager. One can imagine her sailing the Seven Seas in centuries past and offering advice on wind and currents to Captain Cook as he rounded the "Horn" or peering around some corner of the world with Magellan.
Well, I certainly cannot say that I knew Mary Ellen Bradshaw well. While we regularly posted notes to each other's articles, we communicated by e-mail no more than half a dozen times.
Yet, Mary Ellen, I liked you and your writing immensely and will most certainly miss you, my virtual friend, who in the end now seems little different from any actual friend. Wherever your spirit is now, some lines from a poem (Ourobouros) I wrote recently express my feelings:
You live long enough
you'll slip into brightness
you'll know of incandescence
and the long memory of the sky.
In striking significance, you live in memories human, and in tune with forever, truly in memories divine.
Author's Notes: From Mary Ellen's Suite101 Bio: "I am the wife of Peter, mother of Julie, Christopher and Timothy Bradshaw. Formerly a registered nurse, I am an instructor of the martial art, T'ai Chi Chuan, Yang Style and a writer of fiction, non-fiction and children's books. I wrote and edited a company newspaper for 8 years. I have published a non-fiction book and have been published in an anthology of short stories, and in "The Noon Quilt", a group effort by Trace, a world wide writing group based in Norfolk, England. I have written newspaper articles and have won a couple of local literary awards for short fiction and creative non-fiction."
Copyright 2004, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved.
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