Sophy Burnham's Blog, page 4

Afraid to die

Every now and again, and often, it seems, when I’m most discouraged, I’ll suddenly get an email from a total stranger, telling me how much my books have affected their life. As if the Universe is trying to encourage me. It’s always surprising. And humbling. I’m made aware each time of how the angels, spirits, guides, gods and goddesses, totems and devas, are manipulating time and space, to bring us our dreams and the desires of our hearts. “Buck up,” they say.

    I don’t think I was the only little girl to have pondered unanswerable questions:  Who was I before I was born? How did I ever end up on this planet of suffering and sorrow and joy and love? Or, most often: What happens when you die? Now I have to tell you I know a number of people who announce with conviction that the answer is “Nothing.” Nothing happens. The corpse is tossed underground or onto the fire, and that’s it.  It’s over. Think black void.  

     But even as a child I could see that my beautiful cat, now dead, was no longer inside her body. Something had “left.” Walked out. The Greeks called it the Psyche, George Bernard Shaw called it the Life Force, and most western religions name it the Soul. Or maybe it’s the Buddhist “I” that is observing our beautiful world and noticing the miracles and marvels around us (a tulip thrusting up in spring, the hawk in flight, the wind in the high branches of the bare winter trees that hardly touches you walking down below. . . . Such beauty.) And also that observes ourselves. Who is this “I?”  Is it possible that we really are cared for? Are there truly spiritual guides loving and adoring us, who think we are beautiful? 

     Well, here is one recent letter, and you can decide for yourself where you stand and how much you trust that cavalries of angels are riding to our help, that we have some purpose to our lives and that we go somewhere when we shed the body and (so-called) “die.”  The fact that communication so often comes in the shape of butterflies or birds should not surprise us: Don’t we, too, remember when we once could fly?  (I’m sorry I can’t find how to insert “read more.” I can no longer find the icon that allows it, much less how to add a photo, now that I’ve been upgraded mysteriously.)

Dear Sophy ~

Having worked as a doctor in a New York City hospital for 30+ years, I have been around death a lot – especially during the AIDS epidemic, when I sat at the bedside of many dying children and teenagers, and the mystery of dying has always intrigued me.

If I may, I’d like to share two near-death stories with you.

The first one is about my husband Charles. He was scheduled to have a titanium “stent” placed in his heart to increase his heart’s longevity. This is usually a simple and speedy procedure, and the surgeon who was to perform it, knowing that I was a fellow physician, had invited me to “scrub up” and observe the proceedings, which I was delighted to do. But minutes later, things went terribly wrong. Charles’ heart suddenly stopped beating, and the overhead monitoring devices began screaming their loud alarms.

I was immediately asked to leave the room so that resuscitation activities could begin. Out in the hallway a strange silence seemed to hang in the air. It felt as if time had stopped, waiting for an irreversible decision to be made.

And then, suddenly, the sound of the cardiac surgeon’s voice echoed down the hall. I leapt to my feet with joy! My beloved husband was fine! In fact, he was more than fine, for while his medical attendants were working on his body, he had gone on an adventure of his own, being drawn down a dark tunnel, at the end of which he was greeted by several “advisors” who told him that it wasn’t his time to die yet, for he still had important work to do on Earth before his final departure. And indeed, Charles has acquired a strong desire to assist others in many different ways.

The second story is about my parents. My father was a surgeon, and I grew up hearing him rushing out the door in the middle of the night, again and again, to help people who were seriously ill or injured. Meanwhile, my mother was a kind and caring person who enjoyed helping our many neighbors, and I loved her deeply.

When she developed pancreatic cancer, I took a leave from my hospital work to be with her, as I knew she didn’t have long to live, with such a serious diagnosis.

Then one night, she called me to her bedside, where I found her in tears. She reached for my hand, and, holding it tight in hers, confided that she was afraid to die.

I wanted very much to reassure her that there was nothing to be afraid of, but she was clearly overcome by her fear. Suddenly, an intriguing idea came to me. “Maybe you could send me a sign of some kind, to let me know if I was right about not needing to be afraid, Mom. I’ve heard that birds can sometimes deliver messages, and you’ve certainly been a friend of birds, what with all the bird-feeders you’ve maintained in your yard. I bet one of them would be happy to do that if you asked!”

She looked at me oddly, not knowing whether to take me seriously or not. “We’ll see,” she murmured. Then my mother closed her eyes, and that was the last thing she said. She passed away that very night. And, interestingly, my father, who liked to boast that he’d never been sick a day in his life, died the very next night. Out of nowhere, he suddenly developed acute lymphatic leukemia, and in two days he was gone. I couldn’t help but feel that he was rushing off to catch up with her!

When Charles and I finished taking care of their affairs, including selling their house to some neighbors who were delighted to acquire it, we got on the next plane we could find that was going close to where we currently live. In a short time we were tumbling into bed, and minutes later we were sound asleep. 

But not for long. Just as dawn was breaking, we were woken up by an 

insistent tapping on one of the two windows that flank our queen-sized bed—to be precise, the window on my side of the bed. There, to our amazement, was a small bird fluttering repeatedly up and down and pecking on the window with its beak, stopping occasionally to sit on the sill and peer into our bedroom, as if to make sure we were paying attention. After about ten minutes it departed, only to reappear the next morning for a repeat of this performance – and then the next morning, and the next and the next. Each time, I couldn’t help but exclaim, “I can’t believe this is happening!”

As days turned into weeks and then into months, with no apparent intention of the bird to stop these visitations, we began to worry that the poor thing might exhaust itself in its efforts to get our attention, so we tried taping a large beach towel over the window, preventing the bird from looking in and theoretically dispelling whatever odd fixation it had. But this strategy did nothing to deter the bird: the determined little creature simply flew to the window on Charles’ side of the bed, where it continued its determined tapping. One day, the bird even brought a flock of friends who perched in a tree close by, chirping excitedly as “our” bird perched on our window sill and tapped away.

And every day I repeated the same six words: I can’t believe this is happening! It became like a mantra for me.

Finally, some friends to whom we had been describing this mysterious behavior suggested that we try speaking with an “animal communicator”, and though we had never heard of such a profession before, we immediately set up an appointment. When the day came, we said nothing about my mother or ourselves, not wanting to influence her perception of what was going on.

She listened closely, then asked us to wait while she “connected” with the bird. A moment later, she exclaimed, “Why, yes, I can feel how strongly this bird is drawn to you. How strange!”

She paused, then continued with surprise in her voice, “But wait, I’m sensing another presence here too – a human presence! I’ve never dealt with humans, but this presence is saying that she’s your mother! Could that be true?

Astounded, I said, “Well, yes, I guess it could. My gosh, I can hardly believe this is happening. But can you tell me this: why is the bird still coming after all this time? I don’t want the poor thing to get totally exhausted and not be able to live its own natural life.

The answer the animal communicator got was immediate: “What you just said is exactly the issue. The reason the bird is still coming to you is because you haven’t fully believed what is happening!

Suddenly, I was flooded with an overwhelming sense of my mother’s love. My heart opened wide in response, and all my stubborn doubts melted away. I was finally able to take in her amazing gift of reaching out to me from another dimension to let me know that all was well with her. Tears of joy ran down my cheeks, and inwardly I heard myself saying, “Thank you Mom, thank you! I love you!”

The next day, I awoke just as dawn was breaking and found myself automatically listening for the familiar tapping, but alas, it didn’t come. Sadly, but rightly, the little bird never returned. It’s mission had been accomplished.

As an expression of thanks, Charles and I maintain several bird feeders in our yard, where many different kinds of birds partake of our offerings on a daily basis, just as they did in Mom’s yard.

If you have any thoughts about these two stories, I’d love to hear from you.”

And if you, dear reader, have any thoughts or want to share your own experiences, I, would love to hear from you.  I have no doubts anymore: but I admit I’m not ready yet to die. I don’t want to leave this beautiful planet or the people that we are given to care for, and to love. Sophy

All Creatures Large and Small

All Creatures Great and Small

Today I saw a fox pattering along the edge of the forest, nose down, intent on its journey to catch mice in the horse pasture a quarter mile up the road.  The birds are twittering, a single crow cawing, and, high above, a vulture sways on the wind looking for voles and other small dead carrion in the fresh mown hayfield. As the pandemic  slows and shutters human activity, the hidden animals are coming boldly out.

    This spring I found a huge hole in my flower bed, so deep I could put my entire arm in up to the shoulder.  “Groundhog,” I thought, though I’d never stuck my arm in a groundhog hole in my life.  I rocked back on my heels wondering to do about these stubborn creatures who were surely eating the roots of my peonies.

     I couldn’t imagine killing it even if I owned a gun.  I would have to trap it.  I bought a Have-a-Hart trap, a cage big enough to hold a smallish dog. I baited it with cantaloupe, which I’m told is groundhog ambrosia, and some carrots and lettuce leaves, and I set it carefully that night.

   The next day to my dismay I discovered something crouched in terror in the cage, surrounded by dirt that it had scraped and thrown into the cage in its frenzied efforts to escape.  It was a skunk.  A small and beautiful black-and-white skunk, no bigger than a cat.  Her little paws must have been bleeding from the heavy wire bottom of the cage, where she’d tried to dig her way out. Now, exhausted, defeated, she lay there, unable to move for the dirt that held her in place on all sides. The hole she’d dug was so steep that the cage had settled half into it weight.

     Carefully I lifted the cage to level ground, heart twisting and opened the door. I would never have hurt her, given pain.  She stared up at me with huge sad eyes. I backed away to give her space to run, and after a few moments in which I could see her gauging the situation, wondering that escape had miraculously opened before her or if it was another trap; she put one tentative foot before another, then shot out of the cage and down the hillside away from the house to disappear into the woods

    She was never seen again. I could imagine her later describing what had happened to the other animals:  “Don’t go up the hill to that garden.” I imagined the groundhog taking it seriously.  

    I put the trap in the garage. 

    So, all summer we fought, the stubborn groundhog and I, about who owned the petunia blossoms on my deck.  Once, when I was reading there, the groundhog came right up onto the deck to eat petunias before seeing me. I screamed at him, which made him twitch his whiskers and waddle clumsily (and quickly – they are FAST!) away.  In the end, you see, I surrendered.  I don’t have petunias or even bitter marigolds in my pots anymore.  Just little green stubs, gnawed down. But it pleases me to know that down there, somewhere in the woods, a wild groundhog snuffles and lurches in its search for food — as do the bear that came into my yard last winter, the deer, the rabbits; and I rejoice at how fecund is nature, how rich, how inexorable, how bursting with reproduction, all the things that crawl, walk, skip, skulk, fly, hop, skitter, all of them stubbornly alive.

    Bears, groundhogs, squirrels, chipmunks, foxes, owls, bats, mice, birds, butterflies, hummingbirds, coyotes, deer:  my woods, even here in the middle of a town, are overflowing with life, not to mention the ticks, spiders, ants, beetles, worms, maggots, flies, wasps and god knows how many billions of insects that dwell in the hidden darkness underground, feeding, chewing, laying eggs, spawning young.  Why?  Because of plants. All this vegetation. Because of the abundance of plant-life for some to feed upon and of flesh for the others, and of decaying, rotting matter for the hidden creatures in the dark earth. It’s because the pandemic skies shine clear and clean; and because the moonlit nights seem silent now, except for the scurrying of the whispered hunt.

    Now, the animals trudge up the wooded hillside to partake of my flower garden, and I think – Yes, Come. Eat. This is Eden, where God walks in the evening to view his garden. This beauty is what our great, great, great, great grandparents knew, and what we moderns have hardly known since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.  Come into the garden of Eden. 

    I find myself singing praise.  Praise to the beauty.  Praise to the groundhog and the skunk and the beetles chewing in the dark; praise to life, to death, to the eternal cycles of seasons, and to the trees and plants of this Eden that sustain us. Praise to the sorrows that draw us together, and the longing that shows we, too, are still alive.

The Healing Power of Animals

I want your story of your animals, dog, cat, birds, skunk. I think our animas are like angels, come to teach us how to love. For example: Sixteen years ago I prayed to God to bring me a Relationship, the companion of my heart.  I was lonely.  I wanted a man to share my life.  I thought a man would heal the ache in my soul.  Instead I got a horse.      

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   A horse? I didn’t want a horse, but once having ridden this young Arab mare (only three years old, just a baby), I was captivated.  I’d never met a horse so smart. Or so courageous.  One day we were riding with a group out on the spacious New Mexico mesa under that huge Western sky, when we came to the carcass of a cow.  The older  horses shied, balked, twisted, lunged, refusing to walk past the carrion smell.  It was my little girl, Spring, who at my urging stepped daintily past the corpse, leading the others in her wake.  

    I won’t go into my refusal to buy her. But one morning I woke from sleep with a sudden clear “knowing” that Spring was going to be sold and moved to Portland, Oregon— that I would never see her again. I telephoned the stable in New Mexico.  “If Spring is ever for sale,” I said, “please let me know.”  

    “That’s strange,” said Katherine, the stable owner.  “Only yesterday her owner called to tell me she’s moving to Portland, and she’s putting Spring up for sale.”

     When God is in charge, there’s nothing you can do,.  I put an option on the horse, and flew to New Mexico for a month to make a decision.  But I’d already made up my mind.  It made no sense for me to own a horse. I lived on the East Coast, with a vacation cabin in New Mexico. I’d always be in another state, far from my horse. And horses are expensive!  How could I afford a horse?

      But all that month, every time I sensibly decided to deline, I’d feel that little tap on my shoulder that I think of as the voice of angels: “Try again.”

      There is a character in Shakespeare’s play, The Merchant of Venice, who “talks only of his horse. That’s me. (Actually that’s every horse owner that I know.)

      I won’t bore you with her beauty, the way she lifts her head or tail when she steps out in her long walk, the way she moves into the bit, or she lowers her head to make it easier for me to latch her bridle, or thrusts her head into her halter; and if she could, I think she’d probably buckle the snaps.  

     Moreover, she loves me.  Non-horse people don’t think that horses love.  Once I was brushing her beautiful hind quarters when she swished her long tail—and held it by muscular force draped over me. I was veiled in her embrace.  After three or four seconds, she relaxed, letting her tail fall free. I was shocked. That takes effort.  She deliberately held her tail over me, in a kind of touch.

     We have been together now for 15 years.  I brought her East. We have fox-hunted, done dressage, won ribbons in horse shows, but our favorite is jumping and trail-riding, and we trust each other enough that she will even go out alone on trails we’ve never seen before.  I say this because some horses I know will hardly leave sight of their stable, they get so nervous all alone.

   Now with the pandemic, she has become even more significant. My sister has a lap dog. One child has budgies. I have a horse.  Masked and isolated in lock down, I went for months without touching another human or being kissed or hugged. I was avoided by grandchildren and daughters and friends.  At the end of four months, I felt myself going bonkers. Humans are pack animals. We are supposed to touch, relate, not live in sequestration, like a prisoner in solitary. Few can live like hermits or a yogi in a cave.  (And this has given me new rage and indignation at how we throw prisoners into solitary confinement, letting them out once a week to walk outside one hour: some confined to solitary for months and years! Cruel and unusual punishment: that’s torture.) 

     Intellectually, I knew this sequestration was enforced for my safety, but my Unconscious mind had other ideas: that my children, grandchildren and friends wanted nothing to do with me— that I’m old, worthless, useless, unwanted, unloved. It was a message I fought and often lost.   Still, I had my horse. 

   Every day I could drive to the stable and brush my horse, or give her a carrot or apple. Even if we didn’t ride, I could run my hands down the smooth muscles of her beautiful neck, rub her ears, kiss her soft muzzle, breathe into her nose, so that we exchanged breath in an intimacy as deep and calming as sleeping with a lover. She would nuzzle my neck, gazing at me with her enormous brown eyes. The eye of a horse is the largest of any land mammal, exceeded only by that of an ostrich, whale, or seal. A horse is so sensitive that, even through layers of a heavy leather saddle, it can feel the blood pulsing in your thigh.  She knows, therefore, when you are excited, angry, frightened, irritable, and likewise when you are quiet and calm. Being flight animals, a horse responds to your emotions as she would in the herd, so that she jiggles or jumps in appropriate fear, according to your emotions, or else she walks calmly along, trusting you even in danger (a cow, for example, or smelly pig or goat, if she’s never seen one).  On the other hand, you learn to trust your horse as well. She snatches the scent of bear long before you, and tells you with startled hooves and ears of peril. Believe her. She knows more than you.

    Sometimes I would go to the stable anxious and upset, but in only a few minutes of brushing her, I would grow calm under the influence of her love. I think I could feel her sending out waves of loving tranquility.

    Lockdown is easing now. Restaurants are carefully opening outdoors. People still wear masks, stand apart, careful not to touch.  My grandchildren still will not come near me, fearful of infecting me. But when I go to the stable, my horse out in her pasture pricks her ears and lifts her head at hearing my car. She steps out in her loose long walk, approaching me, and she lowers her head for her halter.  Then we walk along together, companionably, to the stable, where she will be brushed and touched and massaged and then ridden, she and I out for an adventure together. I will feel her muscles moving under me in a walk or canter.  I come home, take a hot shower, and all is well with the world.

   I had wanted a man. I got a horse.  

[image error]at a horse show

How Strangely Needs Are Met

This is a story of how our needs are met. It’s also about an angel, but mostly about how Spirit, the Guiding Principle, the Universe, God, whatever you choose to call this incomprehensible Mystery, works invisibly to heal our pain. The solutions are not what we’d impose if we were in charge, but the quiet, almost unnoticeable outcomes work miraculously not only for ourselves but for people we never even thought involved.

I felt I was managing the pandemic pretty well. I have it easy: a cottage, a garden, a car, the internet, TV, radio, a phone with which to call a friend. How could I complain?

But one morning, after 12 or 13 weeks, I woke up exhausted—at end of my rope.  I was undone by loneliness. I felt I couldn’t go another day without a hug, a hand on my shoulder, just human touch. My two daughters live nearby with their families, but they have carefully avoided coming close. Intellectually, I knew they’d withdrawn to protect me. But, unconsciously, the interpretation that pounced that morning – like a lion— was distaste.  If I were loved, said the primitive brain, I would be touched, hugged, kissed.  I knew it wasn’t true, but I pitched into a hole of despair.

A recent article in the New York Times confirms our need for touch.  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/04/well/family/coronavirus-pandemic-hug-mask.html

It’s so powerful that babies left untouched, uncuddled, don’t develop properly, and surely we adults, left alone for too long, fall back into mire of “not good enough,” “unloved,” “useless,” “undesireable.” Indeed, scientists now find the stress and isolation of the pandemic has created a historic wave of mental-health problems.

Looking back, I felt I’d been infected.  Was it because of the recent news— protests, and tear gas, and military troops in the streets, or was I picking up the global loneliness of billions around the world? I have no idea, but I fell into a pit of hell.

I asked my daughters if I could join their family pods, and both refused—for valid reasons, when doing so might risk my life, but it hurt.  The next morning, I took the car and drove alone to a beautiful gorge to ease my despair. I walked along the high cliffs that towered over the rushing, white-water river far below, tears pouring down my cheeks. I howled at God. I pleaded and raged. I told of loneliness, despair, demanding HELP!   At one point, I looked up at the white sky, an overcast, gray mask of cloud. There, right overhead, stood a patch of blue-sky angel, its wings formed wispily of  white cloud and azure sky.

“Big deal,” I shouted aloud to the Holy Spirit, to my Beloved from which I felt utterly divorced. “Ok. An angel. But it doesn’t touch my heart.  I reject it. You have to give me more. I want touch. I want to be loved, hugged, held.”  And then in a wash of understanding I realized it wasn’t only touch. I’d lost my center, my connection to God, my spiritual anchor.

I remembered another time, years earlier, when I had fallen into a funk, and, walking along the canal in Washington DC,  had prayed for a sign that all was well.  “And not just some skimpy sign,” I’d prayed. “I’m not in a good space.  You need to hit me over the head. Show me that everything will be all right.”  Hardly had I sent out that prayer when out of the canal rose a flock of pigeons (strange birds to roost in water). The light flashing off their white wings, and the arc of their flight was so beautiful that I stopped in awe— at which moment SPLAT! I was hit with green slime, right on the top of my head. I burst out laughing. Wasn’t that what I’d just asked for? To be hit over the head?

But this time, walking along the gorge, the angel image had not lessened my loneliness. I walked on, tears pouring down my cheeks.

Later I found myself leaning against a tree, down near the water.  It was a young tree, no more than two feet in diameter. Inadvertently, one arm crept round it, and then the other.  In the blowing wind, I could feel its trunk swaying gently against mine, like a living, sentient being, and then I found myself kissing and nuzzling the smooth bark of the tree, and I realized it had  been months since I had kissed anything—not even the back of my own hand. I held the tree, and a great quiet came over me.  I stroked the bark of that healing, sentient being, breathed out —and I was back in my body again, connected again to my Higher Self, the Holy Spirit, connected spiritually to love.

Then I walked home.

You see it’s just a little story, quite meaningless, except for what happened afterwards.  A few days later, one daughter asked if I could watch my 11-year-old granddaughter for the day.  I jumped at the chance.  Careful to keep on our masks and our distance, I drove her to the same wild gorge for a picnic by the river. I wanted to show her the beauty of this place, and I add without shame that I wanted to see my tree again.

We ate on rocks by the river. At a certain point, I asked about her two little budgies. To my surprise she burst into inconsolable tears! “They don’t love me. They won’t come close. They won’t sit on my finger, and I love them so much! I love them so much! I love them so much.”

Nothing I said would comfort her.  I left her to her despair, and when she had calmed down,  we walked and talked intimately. I passed a huge hollow, dying tree. “See how it leans on that other tree?  That’s what we do for one another. We lean on them.”  I told her about my meltdown earlier, and about hugging my tree. She glanced up at me, brow furrowed:  “You mustn’t think we stay away because we don’t love you.”  I didn’t say anything about her two little birds, but she’s smart. She got it.

Before we left, I found my tree.

“I’m going to hug my tree,” I said. “You go find one you like and hug it. Then listen to what it has to tell you.”

She wandered off to hunt her own tree.  As we walked quietly  back to the car, I asked,  “Did your tree tell you something?”  Then she told me what it said.

I thought how wonderous is the Holy Spirit, how much we’re cared for, and how, if I had not had my own horrible meltdown of loneliness, I would not have experienced such intimacy with  my granddaughter.

I thought how strange is life, how rich, how inexorable, how miraculously entwined, and how each moment offers meaning to the next; and how my heart was bursting with joy.

 

 

Talking to Myself

If there is one benefit to this coronavirus isolation, it’s in offering the luxury of time.  But when, like me, you live alone, the days are sometimes long, especially on dark, rainy, soggy, sad days like today— which gives me time to watch what I’m thinking about.

Here’s what I’ve found:   90% of what’s in my mind is none of my business. It involves things I can’t do anything about:  gossip, daydreams, politics, ecology, past disasters or future ones to fear. But the other 10% is my business, and this is where it’s interesting. I wouldn’t talk to a dog the way I talk to myself. When I meet a dog, I burst into happy smiles:  “Oh, look at YOU,” I say, bending down to stroke his ears and face.  “Aren’t you beautiful!”

I never talk like that to myself. I say, “What nonsense!” and, “Well, that was stupid.”

I read recently about a little girl, maybe four years old, perched fearfully on the top of  the BIG sliding board. Finally she took the dare and SLID. As she hit the bottom, she raised her fist in the air and shouted, “YAH, ME!”

I never do that.  I never say, “Yah, Me!”  I say, “Ok, you’ve done the dishes. Now for the laundry. ”

Yesterday I decided to say, “Yah Me!” all day long.  When I did a load of laundry, I fist-pumped as I moved the wet clothes to the dryer — “Yah, me!” And when I took a walk, “Yah, ME!”  When I painted the back steps,  “Yah, ME.” And when I cleaned the brushes and put away the paint without having spilled paint anywhere, “Yah, ME!” I cried, and really meant it.  By nightfall I felt unutterably happy!

I remember reading that the Dalai Lama, when young, asked an American psychotherapist, “I’ve heard there are people in  the United States who don’t like themselves.  Is that true?”

When assured it was, he murmured in bafflement, “But who would you like, if you didn’t like yourself?”

Mostly I like myself. So why do I scold and reprove? Why do I move from one job to the next, scratching off items on my daily list as if  I’m in a race, as if it matters whether the task is finished on that single afternoon. It’s not just the Inner Judge, pointing his Finger of Fault that I’m talking about.  It’s my habit of not wreathing myself in praise.  Are we taught at some early age that self-approval leads to Vanity or Pride?  Or Selfishness?

When I consider that probably most of my thoughts are ndulging in resentments or criticism‑‑ of others, or government, or friends, or total strangers, and another ten percent is probably spent considering the future or regretting about the past, (“How COULD I have said that?!”), there’s little time left over for simply being:  for glancing up, captivated by the beauty of a tree.  Or bird.  Or child.   And still less time for  the hugs and kisses that we’re all deprived of these days, while living in coronavirus sequestration. It’s true, I’m sometimes scared. I’m touch-deprived. But so what?  (“Yah, ME! I’m human.” It’s healthy to want touch and social contact: Yah, ME.)

Observing my own mind in a kind of Buddhist meditation, I think my fears and resentment, anger, irritation, worries and sense of inadequacy are actually displaced grief. I’m grieving, and I don’t even notice it. I don’t acknowledge it.

I think we are all in a state of grief, a kind of global as well as individual sorrow that we don’t know what to do with.  We cope.  We berate ourselves for not doing better. Sometimes we even weep, which is appropriate when our hearts are breaking with planetary pain.

But there’s more.  In our country, we aren’t taught what to do with grief.  We’re embarrassed by it. We dismiss it. “Get over it,” we are told.  “It’s been two months, get a grip.”  In earlier times, grief, the state of desolation at the loss of a child or husband or mother or dream or house or situation, meant the person went into mourning. She wore black for a year perhaps— or a lifetime.  If she was lucky, she was put to bed and fed chicken soup in a darkened room. It was expected that she would be fuzzy-minded, not fully present.  She was ill.

Today, as I watch the slow movement of my thoughts and emotions, I realize how traumatized I am by the daily barrage of bad news, how affected by the stress. How much I grieve. Perhaps I am blessed with shelter, food, water, heat, with family and friends, while others are hungry, frightened, homeless, ill and lost. Even so, I’m traumatized.

Like everyone.

It’s not easy what we’re doing.

Watching the slow churning of my thoughts, I remind myself to speak with gentleness, and please, with encouragement and praise.

“Yah me!” I tell myself.

“Yah, you!”

 

The secret of getting well

 

A few weeks ago I “pulled a muscle.”  You’d think at my age that I would know better than to shovel snow; but it was such a pretty, blue-sky day, and I felt so good, that I simply didn’t think.   Two days later my back ached. By the end of the week I couldn’t walk, and soon an old sciatica, reignited, was shooting pain down into my foot.

I’ve done everything imaginable to get well again, including doctors, chiropractors and PT, heat, cold, back brace, and prayers by wonderful Silent Unity, plus energy work like Reiki and Cranial Sacral. It’s just going to take time. Meanwhile I would find myself falling sometimes into such self-pity that I started scolding myself for the pity-parties I despise.

“If self-pity hastened the cure,” laughed one friend who has her own problems,  “I’d have an amazing recovery!”  And yet the pity is not wrong.  Instead of critical self-pity, though, why don’t I call it self-compassion?  When I acknowledge my sorrow,  my low spirits shift, move off.   Let’s talk, therefore, about loving ourselves with all our frailties and failures.

Last week as I lay on the massage table for a long and luxurious cranial-sacral treatment, drifting in and out of awareness, I found myself praying to my body.  All my life my body has done whatever I asked of it, and I don’t think it had ever occurred to me before to give it thanks. Lying there, responding to the osteopath’s gentle suggestions, I was aware of the miracle of having a body. Imagine! I live inside a body! What a privilege!

And then I remembered that Forgiveness is the most powerful prayer you can make.  All Christ needed to do in order to heal the leper or the man blind from birth or the adulteress was to murmur, “You are forgiven.” And they walked off healed.

Lying there, I asked my body to forgive me for all the times I have abused it, or invaded it with surgery or flushed it with powerful emetics for some unnecessary colonoscopy demanded by my doctor, for mashing my breasts under mammagraph machines or blasting my belly and limbs with x-rays and MRIs.  How many times have I slashed my body open to remove some inner part, beginning with tonsils and adenoids and appendectomy when I was only a child and going on right into adulthood, cutting my flesh open to toss out cysts and organs as if they were just trash.

Lying there, asking for forgiveness, I thanked it for everything it has done for me.  The fact is, I live inside this miraculous self-healing organism that cares for me and enfolds me and that functions without my having to do a thing. My heart beats 4800 times an hour, 42,000,000 beats a year and billions upon billions of beats for my lifetime without a single pause; my lungs fill and deflate with air, circulating nutrients to every muscle, tendon, cell. My brain sends forth electrical currents to feed this magical system.  My bones regenerate every ten years, white blood cells every week, my skin every two or three weeks. And I take it all for granted.

Then I forgave my body for growing old, for having wrinkles and sagging skin and loosening stomach muscles, and shifting itself out of alignment.

Here’s what’s odd.  Was it my imagination?

As I prayed, I could feel my body relax. I could feel it accept—am I crazy? — my thanks, and stretch, as it were, take a breath, and settle down to heal.

Here’s another idea.  In the last few days I’ve been experimenting with something else:  When I feel loved, and when I am openly loving something else (cat, dog, human, tree or bush), when my heart opens and I am flooded with spiritual well-being, the pain vanishes. Also when I am meditating. Also when I am painting or concentrating on writing or creating.

I’m not saying this is easy. When I am tired, or become anxious and afraid, when I start to scold myself impatiently for not healing faster or better, when I berate myself as old and useless and finished — used up.  .  . my back begins to spasm, and I am weak and sick again.

Can this be possible?

Is healing simply another word for love?  I mean, love for myself and fearless, unfathomable love extending out toward  others? Is it possible that self-compassion and an open-hearted delight is one of the secrets to getting well?

 

Intentions. Connections. Only Connect

Oh boy, here we are in January. The new year. This time the new Decade. January is the month when we make Resolutions—and usually forget them in a week. Instead of resolutions, I offer myself one word, an Intention, that I can muse on and meander beside throughout the year.

One year I took the word Gratitude.

Another year Generosity, and a third Beauty and Bounty, which I liked so much that the following year I repeated it as Bounty and Beauty.

An intention requires no effort, no demands for success.  It is simply that throughout the year I remember my word and pause to look around, especially in challenging moments, reminding myself of gratitude or the beauty and bounty and goodness and generosity that lies about me, that fall as blessings with mercy and grace, unearned.

An intention is similar to an affirmation, but different. Those who remember Shakti Gawain’s book Creative Visualizations  know the power of affirmations: to affirm in clear, positive language what you want—that is, to make it firm by imagining it as already so.  The prayer of affirmation is one of the strongest prayers you can pray.

You might, if unemployed for example, use the affirmation, “I have the perfect job that fulfills me creatively and financially.” Isn’t it a prayer?

One woman I know affirmed: “I am a clearing for the unexpected, unimaginable magic coming in my life.”

An Intention is different.  It is merely a reminder of blessings, It asks for nothing. (This, by the way, is the highest prayer of all.)

==Yes, Gratitude! For all my blessings, including for setbacks for these lead me to deeper understanding or bursts of creativity.

== Beauty, Bounty. Do I see it? Can I live it? Why do I allow in thoughts of doubt and fear? If my thoughts are full of fear, anxiety, insecurity, inadequacy, envy, worry– then these becomes my reality. With our thoughts, says the Buddha in the Dhammapada, we make reality.

“We are what we think. 

All that we are arises with our thoughts. 

With our thoughts we make the world. 

Speak or act with an impure mind 

And trouble will follow you 

As the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart. 

…. 

With our thoughts we make the world. 

Speak or act with a pure mind 

And happiness will follow you 

As your shadow, unshakable. . . .”

This year I’ve taken the intention CONNECT.

It seems like such an easy word. “Only connect,” wrote E. F. Forster.

It turns out it’s hard.

What I want is to connect (with friends, family, earth, air, world) at deeper, more intimate levels, to communicate better. To be open, authentic, without posing or pretension or protective barriers. Already I discover, only a few days into the month, that it involves a dozen other qualities as well:  TRUST. PATIENCE. STILLNESS. DEEP LISTENING.  And finally, FORGIVENESS—of myself and others.

Take TRUST. First, I must dare to become vulnerable. I must trust the other person will not hurt me if I’m authentic, “real.” This does not come naturally.  Most of us were reared on axioms of self-reliance, stiff upper lip, self-governance. Never ask for help. Never reveal weakness. Solve the problem, and only afterwards admit (if you must) that you were vulnerable, confused, or scared.

It means, too, that I must not barge into a conversation to hear myself talk or solve the problem under discussion. Sometimes the person talking to me is actually not looking for answers but processing information, or analyzing an upcoming decision. I must practice PATIENCE, therefore, when she starts repeating herself or stumbling in her efforts to reach for words.  Sometimes, I must just be STILL. Often a person wants nothing more than validation for what she’s feeling. What she wants is simply to be heard. Can I do that?

Instead of solving her problem, can I simply listen? Or prompt with questions. “That’s interesting, tell me more.”

Oh boy, I thought I was taking on something easy, like an attitude of gratitude, or recognition of the beauty in people and our world.  Instead, I see it demands attention:  to dare to trust, be vulnerable, to stumble, fail, and then get up and try again in my intention more deeply to Connect.

I need all the help I can get. Does anyone have ideas?

 

gifting and Receiving

We all know Christmas is about giving. We forget that receiving is another gift.  It’s hard to receive.  It’s as hard as asking for help.  Some people naturally know how to do it: They open the present slowly, shaking the box, pulling off ribbon with delighted attention, mischievously examining the paper, wondering what’s inside . . . followed by a cheer of delight. But others—I know a man who just can’t manage it. As the son of an alcoholic, he was never taught to break into a smile, eyes crinkling with pleasure, much less leap to his feet and give the giver a kiss at receiving “just what I wanted!”

It takes some of the pleasure out of giving. Not everyone is by nature exuberant. But this man is an extreme example. Another person might cast down her eyes in shy embarrassment, or slide the present under a pillow in an effort to take the attention off herself; and still you know she liked the gift. Sometimes a gentle smile, a quiet nod, is enough to tell you that your gift hit home, and moments such as these are treasured as well.    On the other hand I know a little girl who, without any training at all, knows everything about the gift of receiving. “Oh!” she cries, her face lighting up. “This is the just the best!”  And even if you know it isn’t, that you had to buy a less expensive version than you wanted, her pleasure is so infectious that you feel the warmth lift up your frozen heart.

But giving is hard too, and fraught with perils, like sunken shipwrecks ready to stove us in. Once my former husband gave me a whole set of cooking pots for Christmas. I burst into tears. I wanted something related to my work. A typewriter ribbon would have done. He wanted cooking pots, and since I hadn’t rushed out to Macy’s (to his puzzlement) to buy any, he bought me some. To me, it was a message that he wanted me in the kitchen. I sat on the floor and bawled.

But I’ve done the same to him. I still hear about the Christmas when I gave him Supp-hose for his varicose veins. It was tactless, I agree, but they weren’t cheap. I wanted him to be free of pain, while he interpreted it as drawing attention to an ugy handicap.

It happens all the time, this misreading of the meaning of a gift. What are we saying? What are we hearing?  Giving should be an easy exchange.  Instead it becomes an ordeal. I know a man who, for several years, refused either to give or receive any presents at Christmas. He thought it was extortion — emotional blackmail. Add to the pressure you’re walking a minefield. With every gift you send a message — but what? You hardly know yourself.  And does the recipient use a different code?

One year I was over at my friend Evie’s house. She is fragile, delicate, with wild hair and she wears gorgeous peasant clothes that offers the look of an ethereal Pre-Raphaelite. She turned to me in appeal. “Look what my brother gave me,” she said. “Do you mind if I show you? Tell me. When you see this, do you think of ME?” She pulled out a large and hideous carpetbag, which must have cost a fortune. Tears filled her eyes. “Is that what you think of when you look at me?”

I had to say no. “But he doesn’t know what you want, Evie. He sees you like outrageous clothes. He was trying to please you.”

“Do you think so?” She brightened, though still appalled that the ugly bag might reflect herself.

Sometimes the gift is indeed a reflection of subconscious truth, a tangible Freudian slip. One friend of mine gave an expensive belt to an enormously fat friend, and could have kicked herself! Later, she wondered what it meant when her mother-in-law gave her a stunning gold belt (her worst memories are about belts) in the shape of a viper. She wouldn’t wear it. Eventually it was lost, to her relief.

Part of the difficulty is that . . . each family has different rules for giving gifts, and no one talks about them. I remember when I first married how lost I felt with my new family’s rules. I had to guess them by osmosis, because no one knew they even had rules for giving gifts. So how could they articulate them?

In my family, for instance, the favored present was inexpensive: high praise went to some charming object that cost little. Or was made by yourself.. It was quite acceptable to give a hammer or screwdriver, some necessity, or any item on the Santa list.  Books were adored. But it had to reflect the pleasures and interests of the other person

In my husband’s family, the dollar value of a present reflected your opinion of the recipient, and therefore the more expensive it was, the greater your esteem for that person. I was terrified. We didn’t have money. How could I show how much I cared for them? In that family you never gave a necessity, and if the item appeared on the “want” list, you ignored it in favor of the unexpected surprise. This puzzled me. For years I asked for galoshes or Christmas, not understanding why I never received them.

Sometimes we give presents with strings attached — the father whose Christmas present to his daughter is a fat check, though she is struggling to claim her independence and make it on her own; she doesn’t know whether to be grateful for assistance or resentful because she knows (subconsciously they both know), that on cashing the check she accepts his dominance, and is again reduced to “his little girl.”

Sometimes we give what we want ourselves, like cooking pots, and I will never forget the longing look in the eyes of little Sammy Smith, as he handed me marbles at my fifth birthday party, and how touched I was by his gift.

Sometimes we just feel inadequate.

When my brother was just a little boy, about four or even three, he had just learnt that people gave presents on Christmas (imagine!) as well as Santa. He was enchanted. He decided to buy a present for our sister, Anne. He had one nickel. He went to the dime store (in those days you could still buy things for five cents), and after grave deliberation he chose a gigantic ball of rubber bands. It cost five cents.

On Christmas morning, he slipped the rubber bands into his dressing gown pocket and went excitedly downstairs.  The living room door was thrown open—to a dazzling scene of lights, tree, ornaments, stockings, boxes in piles . . . .

Later that morning he took the ball of rubber bands upstairs and returned them to his top bureau drawer, where they stayed until he went away to college. Our mother found it cleaning out his room.  “Whatever do you have rubber bands for?” she asked. “I’ve never seen such a enormous wad.” The gift he’d been ashamed to give.

In my family we give faux-pas for Christmas. They became so common we’d wait all year to see who would give offense this time, and we’d store up the stories, bubbling with laughter, and recounting them like the poems of ancient bards. Outsiders think we’re nuts.

But how else do you learn forgiveness?  Love?  Once my brother forgot to buy a present for his girlfriend (itself a faux-pas, though he later married her).  It was Christmas eve. He went to our mother in dismay. “Don’t worry,” she said helpfully, and threw open her closet door. “Look, I have a half a dozen bottles of perfume. Yo I never wear perfume and people keep giving it to me. Here, take one.” You can guess what his present to Mummy was that year.

We laugh, but sometimes it hurts.

One year we gathered at the house of my 80-year-old aunt. She was very beautiful with social graces that I’ve tried for a lifetime unsuccessfully to emulate. But this time she  turned to her sister out of the blue. “Have you seen this magazine on China? We’ve been getting it all year. I can’t imagine why. I have no interest in China. Would you like it?” She tossed the issue back on a table, baffled by the magazine and its appearance in her mailbox every month. My cousin shot out of the room, breaking up with laughter. “It was my present to her last year,” he said, laughing through his hurt, and loving her anyway.

Ah families!  Ah, gifts! I am struck by the poignancy of our reaching out to one another, over and over; and over and over missing the connections.  If only a gift were a simple exchange, one sheep for two quail. $10 for $10.  But then it would be barter, not a gift.

Love is so easily misunderstood.  Lewis Hyde in his wonderful book The Gift (fantastically subtitled, “Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property”) describes how we have two economies in our culture: a gift economy and a market economy, and this is why we become confused about the properties of gifts. A gift, he says, is not a commodity. It cannot be bought and sold, or extorted forcibly. It is given in generosity and is as generously given away again. Unlike a market economy, it must circulate. It cannot be locked up. This does not mean you can’t keep the item, or love it as coming from a person whom you love.  But something else of value must be passed on, a word, a deed, another object. For the gift is only alive when it circulates.

All ancient people knew this, and we think of the ancient Greeks who heaped gifts on their guests, or the Japanese who still give beautifully wrapped presents on every ceremonial occasion, to hosts, to visitors, even to the guests who come to dinner. We think of the Kwakiutl Indians of the NW Pacific Coast, who at their “potlatches,” or banquets, proudly passed extravagant gifts to guests, who likewise received honor by giving them away again in their own later potlatches.

In the Trobriand Islands, the people give “the Kula,” a gift of an arm shell or necklace, from island to island. The gift is passed in a specific ritual according to family and social relationships. You have a year to pass the shell on to the next in line. If you keep it too long, people begin to talk behind your back. You are considered “slow” or “hard.” For the object cannot be retained, just as love cannot be trapped and cage when you fall in love, but spills out generously onto everything in a kind of overwhelming gratitude.

Perhaps this is the message hidden beneath all the other gifts— your love. “I care about you,” we are saying with our gift.  “This is all I have to give, and I give it joyfully.”  And had I known this, would I have wept when my husband gave me cooking pots, and would he have been offended at stockings for his varicose veins? Or would we have decoded the secret message beneath the grosser one we heard?

 

Fear and Anxiety, ghosts and ghouls

“Writing is a form of therapy: sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in a human situation.”   Graham Greene

 October, and again we have the pleasure of frightening ourselves with witches, goblins, ghouls, and ghosts; with skeletal hands reaching from the grave, or zombies clunking heavily toward us with sightless eyes to drink our blood.

Why do we like to frighten ourselves? Most animals find life quite scary enough without adding in imagination. We court fear.  We pay to watch horror films (there is always a girl who descends the basement steps in the dark where you KNOW the murderer lies waiting!). When I was just a little girl, I remember reading Dracula late one night in my father’s study, and being so frightened that I couldn’t leave the lighted room to go to bed! Such is the thrill of being afraid—when it’s safe.

Then there’s unsafe fear.  Once when I was a young girl I met a man who confessed that he saw a therapist for his anxiety—and my innocent response, “What’s anxiety?”

I don’t think I ever heard the word as a girl, but as I grew older, a wave would wash over me sometimes, boiling me like an ocean breaker. I’d be sitting at a swimming pool watching my little children play, and suddenly I’d be overwhelmed by the sense that I ought to be somewhere else, except I didn’t know where—at market, or cleaning the house or doing the bank accounts—anyplace except having a good time at the pool with friends. Running helped. Actually running, running, foot-pounding running.

Some professionals postulate that anxiety is really fear of death. For me it’s about missing deadlines, or it comes from my own judgmental expectation that I’ll misjudge, make a mistake, get less than A on God’s implacable report card.

I will FAIL!

It’s a fear familiar to artists, poets, trial lawyers, politicians, and probably to painters and plumbers working on a house. It’s the kind of fear that caused Gloria Steinem to write, “Writing is the only thing that when I’m doing it . . .  I don’t feel I should be doing something else instead.”  

    Or that made Tennessee Williams write, “I work seven days a week, Sundays included. . . I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t write. I’d probably go mad.”

Fear and anxiety are not the same. Fear is close to excitement.

But anxiety is a low-grade, existential worrying, and that’s what I want to talk about, and maybe how to battle it!  Mind you, I’m not talking about extreme and chronic anxiety, like that of one friend, who can’t leave the house because of her agoraphobic fear, or that another who wakes up at night heart pounding with terror and can’t go back to sleep. They need medications. I’m talking about the mad nervousness everyone feels sometimes—men more than women, I am told, although men often express their anxiety as anger and aggression, for fear is weakness forbidden to Western men.

Let me tell three stories.

    Story # 1.     Once I was working at my typewriter (which shows how long ago this was) when I was stricken with anxiety. I sat paralyzed, unable to think. I held my head in my hands, heart pounding. An article was due. I huddled against the sandstorm swirling inside me. No words. No concentration. Every bone in my body shuddered in the inner winds. By then it was no longer a matter of wanting to finish the article. I wanted total freedom from fear. I wanted to be happy. I prayed that wordless, heartfelt plea: “Oh God!” Have I said that prayers are always answered?  Suddenly it came to me with a flash of insight that the alternative to my fear was not happiness. The alternative was to be dead!  So long as I am alive, I get to experience all the emotions, the dark as well as the light, negative and positive. Fear is simply part of being alive.

Shocked, I sat up straight. “All right!” I said, in a manner of speaking. I choose life.”

Instantly the anxiety was gone. I turned to the typewriter and finished the article. Piece of cake. But what had happened? I’d said a prayer and had it answered— not as I’d expected with removal of anxiety but with an absolute acceptance of the pain—which in turn defeated it.

I’m reminded of the words of the poet Goethe:

The gods, the eternal ones, give all things to their darlings,/ A ll joys, all sorrows, to their darlings, everything.

I’m older now, and I notice with curiosity that anxiety descends more frequently. Is the protective chemical mix swishing inside the sack of my skin weakening with age?

Story # 2.    The next story happened to my dear friend Dorothy Clarke, who was well into her nineties at the time. She lived like a hermit on a mountain. In the morning she dressed carefully in corset and stockings, dressed her hair, put on makeup, tottered to the kitchen for the one small yoghurt that served as breakfast, then spent the rest of the day in her arm chair, reading or watching TV.  Sometimes no one at all would come to visit. She knew the depths of loneliness. One day she was swept by anxiety.

She grabbed a pencil and began to write, almost by dictation. Afterwards she phoned me, marvelling at what had poured from her pen, and she gave me the page, covered with her beautiful cursive.

         Don’t fret. You have nothing to worry about!  Just relax and let things come alone in their proper time. Let Quiet, Peace, and Harmony rule, and avoid stressing situations. Let them be born, live, and straighten out pleasantly, not with fretting or urgency but by simply accepting the fact­— it will work out if you let yourself be led instead of trying to force matters. All is well and will remain well. 

    Please Heed!  

I tacked her paper to the bulletin board over my desk, and many times it brought a smile.

There’s more.

Years passed. One day I was lying on the couch in my little house in New Mexico, overwhelmed by fear, and as usual praying, praying for surcease, when to my annoyance I spotted a piece of paper flapping on the floor. I’d just swept and vacuumed the whole house. There should have been nothing there! It really irritated me. I rose from the couch and snatched up the offending paper — only to find it was Dorothy’s: Don’t fret. You have nothing to worry about!. . . Let quiet, peace and harmony rule. . .  It will work out if you let yourself be led. . . .

But how did it get to New Mexico?  I’d left it tacked to my bulletin board back in Washington D.C.

I was stunned. I still am. What are we to make of this?

Well, we can’t always count on angelic interventions as dramatic as this. Not when the human condition is to worry, be afraid. So how do we fight back? How do we conquer anxiety without alcohol or drugs or meds?

First pray. I say this because it is my experience that prayers are always answered, and this is true whether you believe in a Higher Power or not.  Pray to your own soul. But pray. to be released.

After prayer, the best thing to do is to distract yourself.  Go running (if your knees allow it), or clean a closet, or cook a special meal. Do something physical!  Talking to a friend is also ok, but only if you tell her how you hurt, and if you both decide to laugh.

Then, third, go do something nice for someone else. Smile at a begger. Ask him how he got into this sad situation. You don’t have to give him (or her) money. Just give the gift of seeing her: he is not invisible. Take a cookie to the old lady next door, or rake the leaves for her. And then don’t tell anyone what you have done: a service to another asking no reward. I promise you will feel better.

Fourth, think small. Anxiety likes the ineffable. It hangs out in Future Fear, or even Past Regret. Therefore, to combat it, look deeply at the Thing itself. What does it feel like inside you? Where is it? What color? How big?

Go smaller yet.  Go right inside your body. Where is your elbow? Your knee, your foot in space. Feel the footstep you’ve just taken, the curious shift of heel, ball, toe. Or consider for a moment your own thumb. Watch how it moves, full circle. What an amazing part of you! (Only humans have thumbs – and angels, I suppose, although why they’d need one I don’t know.)  Go smaller yet—one fingernail. Imagine what it would be like to have no fingernail, (or have it pulled out in a torture chamber; there’s room for anxiety!).  And meanwhile, listen: What do you hear? What do you smell? Right now.

What I’m saying is very simple and very hard to do.  Be present. Be right in the Moment, Right Here. As Ram Dass wrote:  “Be Here Now.”

Anxiety and worry are like ghosts and ghouls. They can’t live in the light.

 

 

September: Journeys and Transitions

“Look, the trees are turning,” she said, glancing out the picture window toward the New Hampshire woods, and everything in me wanted to cry out: Not yet! Too soon!

September marks the beginning of the new year. The children are back at school, anxious or excited, happy with their new classes, or disappointed. You see them on early mornings at the side of the road waiting for their yellow buses.  The little ones are so brave, their enormous book bags towering over their heads, almost taller than their tiny legs. The big kids jostle and push, overflowing with energy too strong to allow just standing still. My garden, too, is in transition. The grass grows slower now, needing less mowing. The straggly, leggy plants have given an explosion of defiant berries and bloom, as glorious as springtime but more beautiful somehow, yet moving inexorably toward decline– as leggy as my teenage granddaughter, who is also in transition, but in her case toward young womanhood.  The squirrels dash heedlessly across the roads and spiral up the trees, as if there’s no time left to relax in late summer heat.  Burrs fly onto our clothes if we take a walk, clinging to be carried to new environments, and all of life—bees, moths, chipmunks, squirrels, children, grass, trees, and, yes, we adults too—feel the planet tilt in its orbit, sharpening and shortening the light:  Time speeding up.

        We are all in transition. To be closer to her children, my sister has sold her house and is moving to a city where she knows no one. (“It may be the worst decision of my life,” she says, “but at least it’s short.”) A family member suffering from a brain tumor, cares for her demented husband. A friend has  just buried her husband, and another worries about the health of hers.  I think of how brave they are—like  all those kindergarten children stepping onto the yellow bus for the first time and into the next growth spurt.  I think how valiant we all are, all of us humans, and how little acknowledgement we get for the courage of just living out our daily lives. I live in Washington, D.C., but like my sister I, too,  am in transition, made nervous by decisions that blow their dragon breath at my back. Do I move closer to my daughters in Massachusetts or do I stay in the city where I’ve lived almost my whole life?  I have bought a cottage there, and gradually I am spending more time up north, but I’m cautious. I keep

options open.  I have friends in Washington, and for three seasons of a year (forget summer; never go to D.C. in the summertime!) the weather is as close to perfect as you can get: Springtime carries on for months, and autumn offers a rage of color before shifting to our blue-sky winter days.

Oh surely that’s all life is:  transition—until we transit into the next life.  Against our will, we are rushed from child to adult to old age, and what takes me by surprise is how despite our efforts we are forced to leave worn-out beliefs and open ourselves always to wilder and increasingly more compassionate views. We lose jobs, dreams, houses; we move, marry, divorce, have children, or sorrow that we don’t.  Inside, the transition is always about becoming larger, more open to life and our own emotions; inside we are constantly shifting our thinking expanding our sense of justice and right.

In just my lifetime! The Civil Rights Movement for Blacks and minorities, equal pay for women, marriage rights for LBGT, women running for President!  I could never have imagined it!  Why I remember when you lost your job in the government if they discovered you were gay! Now you can marry your beloved, run for President.  I think that all of life is shifting us forcibly, inexorably toward a wider, wilder consciousness.

How? Some of us are offered a mystical or spiritual revelation, and others are given the gift of imperceptible slow shifts, fragile as gauze, and still others suffer a Near Death Experience. Afterwards nothing we had thought important earlier is.  Afterwards, we are subsumed by Love, and Love is seen in . . . everything.  It is seen in the squirrel dashing across in the road, in the mice that creep inside to find a winter nest in the warm basement, in the tomato plants that spread across the garden like some alien life-form, reaching out their little paws in an effort to redden, fructify, increase. Life is so rich. So good!  Or do I say that only because I am now an older woman looking back and unfrightened by the many problems to be solved: climate change, migrations, imperishable plastics, violence, mental issues, meanness and hatred, fear and impossible ideas about education. As an older woman, all I see is the rightness of it all, including our fear of change.

I remember as a child being taken to museums to look at paintings— perhaps a Rembrandt of an old woman nodding outside her hut, arthritic hands in her lap, and perhaps one shaft of sunlight cutting the dark shadows to hit the shining, white lace of her cap. I remember shuddering: “So that’s old age,” I thought.  “I never want to be old!” (not recognizing the alternative.) What I didn’t know—what they don’t tell you— the secret I tell you now—is that sitting there beside the canal she is ringing with an inner joy.  Her soul is a bell tolling with delight and love.

Ram Dass, the spiritual leader recently profiled in the New York Times,says that the ego is afraid of dying, but the soul is not. The ego is afraid of aging, too, and of any change, for change is always viewed as fearful and decline. The soul, however, knows that transition is merely a movement: like shifting from summer to fall.  It knows there’s more. There’s always more .