Sophy Burnham's Blog, page 5

Summertime

Summertime, and the living is easy. Our cultural memories are rich with summertime: the slap of a screen door to the excited calls of children; of dozing in a hammock over a good book, or casting a fishing line onto the black river; of days on the beach, ice cream cones, and iced tea sipped on the porch; of just slowing down; baseball games, and barbecues, or cold suppers served in a long, sweet dusk that extends for hours. More recently it’s remembering to snatch a sweater as you step into the heat, because of the freezing air conditioning at the store.

Summertime. And in this period when we are assaulted—barraged—by our culture of FEAR and the constant recording of inescapable grief, anguish, sorrow and suffering . . . I think we need reminders of the bubbling, playful, lighthearted side of life. We need to remember that all is not lost, and it is our heritage to laugh and play.  I don’t know who first coined most of these sayings, but here I offer to you, little bubbles of happiness:  

She who laughs, lasts.  

Many a man’s tongue has broken his nose.  

Excellence is knowing when not to be perfect.  

A man is closer to God when he stops playing the Lord.  

A bad oyster, like a bad marriage, is not known until too late.  

You can lead a boy to college, but you can’t make him think. (Or her.)  

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that. —Ben Franklin

The loquacity of fools is a lecture to the wise.  

Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead. —BenFranklin

  Time can say nothing but “I told you so.”  

Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end. — John Lennon

Rest is not idleness, and to lie in the sun on a warm spring day, listening to the rustle of the trees in the wind or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.   ——Alba the cat, misquoting Sir John Lubbock, in Love, Alba.

To end on a more serious note (but why, you protest!), here is a thought about our new gods, the idols, Money and Wealth

Money may be the husk of many things but not the kernel.  It brings you food but not appetite; medicine but not health; acquaintances but not friends; servants but not loyalty; days of joy but not peace or happiness.     —Henrik Ibsen, playwright.

And another on the tendency to despair:

TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.               —Howard Zinn    

Summer, the time to enjoy the luxury of leisure. Carpe Diem, Enjoy the Day. Attend this present moment.  Remember that almost everything that is happening is taking place between your ears.  And now to quote my beloved mother on a summer day:  “If you are bored, you’re not looking deeply enough.  Look harder. Listen better. Go deeper. No one should ever be bored.”  —Sophy Snyder Doub

 

 

My Inner Judge and Mistakes

There is a saying in the 12-step Alcoholic Anonymous program that “You will not regret the past, nor wish to close the door on it.” And mostly this is true, except when I find myself awake in the darkest hours of a morning night defenseless against the Inner Judge who prowls the corridors of my mind, slashing the heads off any blooming optimism with his savage cane. Why am I so helpless at that dark hour? Are all the angels sleeping still?

It has set me thinking: Where did I learn that although lesser mortals may make mistakes I’m not allowed to?  Of course, we were taught so many axioms as children that are downright wrong. For example: Opportunity Knocks But Once.  NONSENSE! I shout. Observation and experience have shown me that so generous is Providence, so loving, so adventurous, that She offers opportunities over and over and over again; and never does She feel annoyed by our refusal to accept. “You don’t like that opportunity? She cries out tenderly, Here! Try this one instead.”

Here’s another thing that I was taught at my elders’ perfectionist knees: that mistakes are bad. Yet how many times have I made a mistake, tripped off in a completely wrong direction, only to discover the misstep was a blessing.  Surely you’d think I’d know by now that mistakes have often been my friends. Either the failure taught an important lesson that success would have failed to impart, or else doors opened onto new and wondrous vistas, on opportunities unimaginable before.  Moreover, mistakes are the rule in any creative endeavor, and so true is this that creativity by its very nature demands the right to risk, and that means daring to blunder, fall, mistake. “Ever tried?” wrote Samuel Beckett.  “Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Recently I’ve taken up watercolor—said to be the hardest art form because you can’t easily erase mistakes, and what I find is that it is sometimes the mistakes that make the painting interesting.

As for creative writing, listen: if you don’t want to make mistakes, don’t even bother. Creation is play, and playfulness requires sailing into uncharted territory, which is always a “mistake.” My daughter tells how one day she went to a conference to hear a famous author, who was asked during the program howshe wrote.  “Every day,” the writer spoke thoughtfully, “I sit down at my desk. I take a breath, and I say to myself—” (my daughter leaning forward, to catch each pearl of wisdom)  ‘Well, let’s see what S#%T you can come up with today.'”

Mistakes.

Recently I have been dipping into the Meditationsof Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor and military commander who ruled from 161ce until his death by infection in 180.  One of his admonitions is to allow one initial regret at having failed, then spend no more time on remorse. Apparently he doesn’t lie awake in the morning hours of dawn cringing in memory at his failures.  Or else he did it so often that he had to remind himself to stop.

As I was doing now, replaying my sins of commission, sins of omission. Yet what is sin (I ask in an effort to challenge my I.J.)?  Originally the word meant no more than “to miss the mark” —as an arrow misses the bulls eye and lands on the red circle instead.

Why am I so arrogant as to think I should never do wrong?  (“Should”:  the very word implies more criticism.)   The hawk, folding its wings to drop at 30 miles an hour on his prey, misses the mouse three quarters of the time. Does the hawk awaken in his nest at night scolded by remorse?

“There’s nothing right or wrong but thinking makes it so,” I offer Hamlet’s lines to the stalking of my Inner Judge, as he slashes the head off another chrysanthemum in the garden of my regrets.

To which he answers with a sly and cunning smile, “Oh, so you approve of the Holocaust? Of murder? Thievery? Lies? Deceit?” Which is really a low blow, I think, delivered at that painful hour when I’m defenseless against his charge.

“Do no harm,” is the first principle of Buddhist thought, followed by, “Practice doing good.” and the third: “Activate others to practice good.”

By now the first pearly light is washing into the darkness, and with it my first shreds of courage begin to return, and also my memory of how to deal with the Inner Judge. And doesn’t it always come down to love? But before I tell you what to do, I must introduce the Way.

Years ago, when I was subject to hormonal monthly swings, and long before I knew how to avoid the temptations of the garden of rejection, I used to get horribly depressed. My dejection might last for days or even weeks while I struggled to find my way back to the white picket gate that I had opened so thoughtlessly, enticed by the risky pleasures of beating myself up.

One day I was talking to my friend Natalie about it.  “What do you do,” she asked, “when you get depressed?”

“I whip myself,” I answered. “I scold and tell myself to shape up and stop whining but get to work.”

She was shocked. “Oh no!” she told me. “You have to put your arm around your shoulder and talk baby talk to yourself. You hold and comfort yourself.  You give yourself a teddy bear. Your depression will lift right away.”

“It will?”

The next time I felt depressed I took her advice. And to my surprise, within minutes my dejection had lifted. (Why wasn’t I told that as a girl?)

But back to the Inner Judge who had tramped up the basement steps from the cellar of my unconsciousness to lash me this night with failings and failures and regret.

Years earlier, when I was writing, if my Judge came in too soon to tell me how horrible my work was, I’d agree: “you are absolutely right. But just now I need to create. I’ll call on you in a little while, when I’m ready to edit, revise. That;s when I need you. Right now I’m making a mess. Go back to sleep.”

It turns out all he wants is to know he’s been hears. He’s trying in his own mistaken way to be a guide. It’s only when I resist that he grows violent, locks me in the closet, whips me with chains.

Why do I always forget?

This night, with the dawn beginning to break open the bowl of night, I turn to him.  “Thank you.” I say. “I hear you.”

I drop one arm around his humped and louching back. “I love you.”

“Oh,” he growls. “All right.” And then he trudges back down the stairs, as happy in his disconsolate and critical fashion as he ever gets, and curls up on the rags of his bed to sleep.

I, on the other hand, leap joyfully out of bed, to face the gaiety of another morning, knowing my Inner Judge is on my side.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Mother’s Card

May is Osteoporosis Month, whatever that means. It’s also, as most people in the USA know by now, Mother’s Day on the second Sunday of the month, when I phone my children to remind them that they have a loving mother without whom (plus chance, God, a father and doctors) they would not be doing whatever they are doing right now.

It’s also the month when I remember longingly my own mother. I waken in the balmy dark, the stars still swinging gallantly overhead, and squirm with regrets made harsher by my defenselessness in these black hours. Did I tell my mother I loved her?  Certainly I never sent a card. My mother was a woman of strong convictions. When she told us, voice dripping with scorn, of her disdain for a Hallmark day—created by Business to make people drop their well-earned money on soppy cards for the benefit of some unknown Business—none of us would have dreamt of sending her a card.

But lying anguished in bed at 4:00 a.m. with the bats of remorse battering at my brainpan, I wonder if her scorn was not a defense, to ensure that she would not be disappointed when she didn’t receive a card. Why did I never send my mother a Mother’s Day card in spite of her disapproval?  Or phone. Did I ever phone? Long distance calls cost money in those years. I don’t remember, and I toss, tangling in sheets that are somehow too hot under the whispered breeze of this mild May night.

My mother was the third daughter of a third daughter. From birth, she knew she was supposed to be a boy, just as her mother before her, another third daughter, should also have been a boy. (And if you could not be a boy, at least you were supposed to produce them!) Girls were not favored in those years. Boys were what the parents wanted, despite the fact that your sons would move when married into the families of their wives, while your daughters remained on the matriarchal side.  (I should say that when my second daughter was born—so subject was I to this cultural conditioning—I was so disappointed that I turned my head away, until the nurse placed her in my arms, and I fell madly in love.)

My mother, born before women could vote, was aware from her earliest years that she would never be “enough.”  She would have liked to be a doctor. She’d have made a fine doctor. If she’d been a boy she would have gone to college and probably med school, but being a girl, and a Southern Lady, on whom such an education was wasted, she never went past 12th grade.  But she was smart! And sharp.

I think of her as always moving.  Five foot two, tough and strong, she hauled the little tractor around to mow the grass. She brought in wood for the winter fireplace, repaired the roof, pitch-forked manure in the stable. She was a brilliant seamstress, who made not only her own tweed suits, but clothes for us daughters too, including one silk evening dress for me when she was so allergic to silk that just to touch it brought out a rash on both arms.  She hated to cook but did it every night of her life. “Always laugh at yourself first,” she used to say, “before the others do.”

And then my father had a stroke and she took care of him. And then she got breast cancer and had one breast lopped off with Amazon disdain — and taught herself to swing a golf club again after being told she’d never play again. And after that she got lung cancer. And after it was all downhill.

I lie in bed as the pearly morning light steals into the darkness, and I wish my mother were here with me now to talk about what has happened since she died: Women in Congress. Women running for President. The #MeToo. Women demanding “rights” and pay, and demanding that men shape up. Women who refuse to believe that they are “less than” or “not enough.”

In my imagination, I send my mother a Mother’s Day card. I like to think that even after all this time she opens it Up There, on the Other Side. And suddenly, it’s full morning and time to hit the deck. Get up! I can hear her call out: Lazybones!

A Cat Stevens song floats inadvertently into mind. . . . lyrics shouted to the day:

“Morning has risen like the first morning

Blackbird is singing like the first dawn….”

I think she got her card.

 

Commitment

“Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: That the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issue from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. ”

W. H. Murray The Scottish Himalayan Expedition

 

 

If You Get Lost in Life

If you get lost in life, put your ear to the ground and listen to its pounding heart.

                                    Old Sami saying

 

As I write this one cold and windy March, I find myself longing for April springtime, with the flowers blooming yellow, pink, and blue against green grass and the trees stretch and come awake. By April, here in the mid-Atlantic states, the little leaves of trees uncurl so fast that in only hours they are waving their little paws in delight. The squirrels dash up and down the wrinkled bark, and birds raise a chorus of alleluias to the equinoxian light.

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,”wrote the novelist George Eliot, “it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of the roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

Surely if we had ears keen enough, we would hear the thunder of the tulips as they thrust violently up through the soil, unfurling leaves and blooms, or we’d hear the low bass of the petrichoring rocks, lifting dusty faces to be washed. This is the time when we are called to go out “forest bathing,” as the Japanese call it, though most of us, living in cities, have to make an effort to be in the presence of tall trees. So, let us talk, now, about trees—and of the only vicious tree I’ve ever met.

In one of his cantos Dante, writing in the 13th century, ponders the question of whether trees are sentient.  Do they bleed when cut? Do they cry aloud in pain?  We know that they communicate with their other trees, that they care for their young, and like all green plants they respond to music and in their own magnificent silence to loving words. Scientists have discovered that if beetles attack a particular tree, it sends pheromones out onto the wind, signaling of the infestation, at which the nearby trees eject a counter-scent to repel the attack; and this odor is so specific to that particular insect (and not just to bugs in general) that the trees protect against that singular threat.  Scientists have discovered that a full-grown pine, when starved by drought or lack of nutrients, will send her nutrients to the growing seedlings at her roots rather than utilizing it herself.  Does this imply sentient communication? Some form of dynastic comprehension?

We know they feel pain. Experiments with houseplants using Kirlian photography[1]have shown that if you cut the leaf of one plant in half, the corona or aura of a nearby plants shrink back as if in horror. Wouldn’t it be so with trees?I don’t know, but I know that it is possible to communicate with trees, and here is some of what I’ve learned in my decades on this earth of forest bathing, of observing trees.

FOOTNOTE:

[1]Kirlian photography is a collection of photographic techniques used to capture the phenomenon of electrical coronal discharges,or “auras.” It is named after Semyon Kirlian, who, in 1939, accidentally discovered that if an object on a photographic plateis connected to a high-voltage source, an image is produced on the photographic plate. Kirlian photography has been the subject of mainstream scientific research, parapsychology and art. To a large extent, it has been used in alternative medicine research.

 

 On a windy day, find a small tree, a sapling perhaps 6 or 8 inches in diameter. Put your hands around the trunk. Close your eyes. You will feel it swaying in the wind. You will feel how the tree stretches and bends, and you may even feel the energy rising and falling inside its trunk.  It’s wonderous. Imagine if you had such flexibility!
 Now move to a large oak or maple or tulip poplar, a strong tree with its branches soaring toward the clouds. Find the North Side of the tree (remember moss?). Now pass your hand along the bark until you find a “hole.” I don’t know what else to call it.  It may feel like a little breath of air against the palm of your hand, a puff of wind. It is subtle.  Put your back to the hole.  Now close your eyes and listen to the tree.  It is passing you energy.  It is filling you with quiet peace and energy. I promise you will walk away restored.

Trees think we move too fast.  They are amused by us, in the same way that we think (when or if we do) of rushing ants. Slow down, they say.  Give yourself a hundred years to be. Maybe you’ll learn something.

Of course we humans don’t have time for that, but we can forest bathe, and it has been proven that to go into nature, to walk in the midst of trees, changes our brain patterns, moves us from the harried beta waves of problem-solving critical analysis, the crisis mode of, say, crossing Times Square, into the healing peace of the slower, deeper Alpha waves. Into quietude. It is in alpha waves that problems are solved. It is in alpha brain wave patterns that we find ourselves content, even happy, right with the world. The trees do that for us.

One malicious tree

In all my life I have met only one bitter, mean, and angry tree. It was in Belize. I was walking with a tour group to an archeological site, when I spotted a magnificent tree standing on a nearby hill, and it was so beautiful that I left the group to go closer.  But as I approached, I was hit by a wave of hatred, and the command: Halt:  Come no closer. I was surprised.  I sent out a silent query. The answer came back that in the whole area it was the last remaining tree of its species, because all the others had been cut for lumber. It hated humans for what we had done.

I could only bow in apology to this beautiful, hurt, lonely specimen, and of course, out of courtesy I did not impose.  A tree is rooted. It can’t protect itself from us, unless it drops a branch on our head, and that takes a lot of effort on its part.

Later I learned that it was a mahogany tree, grown extraordinarily large, and, yes, all the others in the area had been clear-cut decades earlier for their valuable wood. It must have been a sapling at the time, too small to be cut down—not worth the effort—and now stood silent sentinel for 100 years on that treeless field.

But most trees are friends to us and earth and sky.  They provide nests for owls, squirrels, songbirds, ‘coons. They permit dens for foxes at their roots, and let fall nuts and fruits for our consumption. They offer shade in hot weather, shelter in rain.  They draw water out of the deepest earth to pour down later from the clouds as rain. They bring us oxygen in exchange for carbon dioxide; and this is so essential that we would not even be alive without the trees.

I don’t want to think about what we humans are doing to the rain forests of Brazil.  But there is a certain justice, don’t you think, in the fact that when we have destroyed all the trees, the rainforests gone, we will no longer be able to survive. It will happen.

Let us go out today, therefore, and walk among the trees.

 

 

 

 

More demons? And then sheerJOY!

My blog is infected with ads.   Does anyone know how to get rid of them? If not, I may shut it down rather than submit my readers (if there are any) to the bullying intrusion of ads. I am furious.  It’s expression of the demonic; and I’m not teasing, for don’t most examples of the Dark Side come as minor irritating insignificant malicious little interventions, and not the dramatic fire and fury that we associate with a fork-tailed, goat-footed, grinning, hairy, evil Satan. What do I do (apart from praying)? Does anyone out there know?

And now for stories, two new and happy ones. Because, especially during trying times, we need the hopeful stories. We need to remember that the Universe is always reaching out to us, loving and laughing. The question is, Can we hear?  Someone once wrote, “Pain is the touchstone of the spiritual life.” But I think joy is the touchstone to the spiritual. So, here comes joy.

Thirteen years ago I bought my beautiful half-Arab mare. I met her when she was only three years old, and riding her that day in New Mexico, I (an experienced rider since childhood) thought how unusual she was. I had never met a horse so attuned to me, so willing, so trusting, so courageous. And so kind! Yet she was still a baby. I remember our small group cantering on the magnificent wide mesa, when we came across the rotting carcass of a cow.  The other horses, older, experienced, lunged, snorted, backed and reared, refusing to walk pass the body, while little Spring, my horse, listening to my voice and seat, stepped, ears pricked, frightened but trusting, past the rotten smell. The other horses followed. That impressed me.

The stable owner wanted me to buy her, but I didn’t want a horse. I live in Washington DC, and was spending only a few months a year in New Mexico. The horse would always be where I was not, whether I kept her in Virginia or in New Mexico. Anyway horses are expensive. I was prudent. So, instead, a young girl bought her, but since she let me lease the horse when I was in New Mexico, I thought I had the best of all worlds, a horse with none of the responsibility of ownership.

One December morning, though, back in Washington, I woke up with a clear “knowing,” that Spring would be sold and move to Portland, Oregon. I would never see her again!  I phoned the stable in New Mexico.

“If Spring is ever for sale,” I said, “let me know.”

“Oh,” cried Katherine, the stable owner, in surprise. “Just yesterday her owner told me that she has to move to Portland, Oregon, and needs to sell Spring.”  I put down an option on the horse, and agreed to spend the month of February in New Mexico. At the end of that month, I said, I would decide if I would buy Spring.  I rode her many times that February (the weather can be lovely in winter), and over and over I came to a firm decision: “No.  It makes no sense for me to buy a horse.”  But no sooner was the decision made than I would feel that tap on the shoulder that I associate with the brush of an angel’s wing —Think again. That’s wrong!

Intellectually it made no sense to buy a horse. I was 68. I was old. How long would I be able ride?  How could I afford a horse? On and on the negatives blew about in my brain.  Until one day I remembered:  “All things are possible with God.  If the Beloved wants me to have this horse, her upkeep will be provided.”

I remembered another occasion, when years earlier I had been praying and praying for direction in my life: What was I to do? Where was I to go? I had felt myself at a crossroads, with no insight in how to be of any use to anyone. On that occasion, too, I was at my little retreat in New Mexico, and I remember waking up one morning again with a clear “Knowing:”  New York City, Six months! And the YES that I associate with the Voice of God.  It was, of course, immediately followed by doubt: NYC! I can’t afford New York. What would I do there? And then I reminded myself, “All things are possible with God.”  That morning I phoned the only three people I knew in New York.  “I’m thinking of moving to NYC for four or five months,” I said, already downgrading  the time. “I’m looking for an apartment to sublet.”

One friend told me to call her friend, Charlotte. I left a message on Charlotte’s phone number at work. It turned out that Charlotte was a realtor, and that morning  at the mailboxes in her building on 66th and Third Avenue, a woman introduced herself. “You’re in real estate,” she said to Charlotte. “My friend Mary just died and the family wants to rent her two bedroom, rent-controlled apartment for six months—if you know of anyone.”  Charlotte went to her office, and there found my phone call about needing a rental for six months. It was while in New York City that I learned my gifts as a psychic and medium and began to give readings. I also became friends with Charlotte, a beautiful young woman, who, it turned out, was dying. We spent hours talking of spiritual matters and of what happens when we die. A few months later, she was gone.  I’ve often thought of that: How do we know when we are in service, helping someone else?

Going back to my horse, I remembered all this. I bought my horse, and she has given me more joy in the these years than I could have imagined in my wildest dreams. So this is what I know: God speaks to me in joy. In a lift of the heart.  If I have a hard decision to make, I place the alternatives, each in the palm of one hand. Then, eyes closed, I weigh my hands, palms up.  Which feels lighter? Which brings a flood of pleasure to my heart? Which is dutiful, hard, difficult? Always I must choose the one with joy.

I know a woman who believed if she wanted something, God would reject it, and if God wanted it (whatever “it” was), the path would be painful and hard. She didn’t know that God puts desires in our hearts in order that we accomplish them. She didn’t know that the love of the Beloved is always expressed by gladness and delight. And if something is taken away—and life is rich with loss of homes, of friends, of loved one, loss of ideals and ambitions, loss of dreams, loss on loss— always something then comes thrusting up, like Springtime flowers, to offer us bouquets of other joy. We have cavalries of angels surrounding us, helping, serving us. The point is, can we hear their siren song? And can we trust?

Here’s a hint:  If you are going into a difficult meeting, send your angels ahead of you to talk to the angels of those you are meeting and to work out the harmonious resolution of the matter, for the highest good of everyone involved.  Then sit back and be surprised!

 

 

 

Praying for the Dark Side

In dark December, when everyone was harking to angels and the return of the Light, the Atlantic Monthlypublished a story about demonic possession. (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arcive/2018/23/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943.) An acquaintance made sure I saw it: “I know you write about angels,” he wrote. “What do you think of demons?”

Well, I seen the demonic, and I guess I have to tell at least one story.   So now I will walk with you into the darkness that I don’t like even to think about, for you cannot believe in the Light without recognizing the shadows that it casts. But first, some background:

The AtlanticMonthlyarticle is long and well researched. I recommend it. It tells of the ancient Babylonian priests who cast wax figurines of demons into a fire, of the Hindu Vedas, that date to 1500 BCE, and speak of supernatural beings that try to spread evil and malice in our lives. It describes one exorcism of 1831, in which the poor girl froths at the mouth and takes on a different screaming personality—until delivered. The article describes through the years the inspirations for Willliam Peter Blatty’s 1971 horror novel, the Exorcism, the 1973, film of which is considered one of the most frightening movies ever made.

Gallup Polls conducted in recent decades suggest that roughly half of Americans believe in demonic possession. Those who believe in the Devil, or Satan, rose from 55% in 1990 to 70% in 2007.

We like to talk of angels, and goodness, of the Light and mysterious and inexplicable spiritual interventions that work invisibly on our behalf, and we like to be reminded that angels are drawn to us by prayer—by prayer and by deliberately turning our will and lives over to a loving God. (“I am not mine but thine,” we say to this Mystery, to the Beloved that we don’t pretend to understand. “Into Your hands I give myself, and that which is for my highest good shall come to me.”)

It would be a lie, however, to say that I have not met the demonic, and the most important thing that I can do is to place myself alwaysin the care of a loving and majestic, all-powerful God, to surround myself with angels, and with all my heart to remember that whatever uninvited influences might try to turn me toward to the Dark Side— I have resources. Love prevails.

I admit that having had a religious upbringing as a child has helped me in my life. It helps to have memorized as a child the most beautiful prayers that the most brilliant men and women who ever lived on this planet ever wrote.  “Almighty God, unto whom all thoughts are known and no desires are hid, cleanse the thoughts of my heart by the inspiration of your holy spirit, that I may truly love you and worthily magnify your holy name.”

Could anyone ever devise a finer or more poetic prayer? “Cleanse the thoughts of my heart.”  Return me to loving more fully. Help me to be more of a lover. And forgive my wrong moves and mistakes. And keep me from temptation.

I guess it’s time to tell at least one story. It is not something I want to dwell on, but it is well to remember that no one is to blame for seeing the demonic; it’s not that you have done anything wrong. It comes in through the cracks of trauma, disappointment, pain. The Dark Side visits even (and sometimes especially) the most spiritual beings, as well ordinary hurt and battered individuals. Padre Pio, the Catholic monk, now sainted, is reported to have come out of his monastic cell in the mornings bruised and bloodied from fighting off demonic attacks.

Once I was reading on my bed, thinking of nothing except the story in the novel— when suddenly I felt—whap!— a weight landed on my chest with a thump.  It was black as pitch (to use a cliche’), black as a telephone, and its little claws at the end of its thin black arms dug into me. It was the epitome of loneliness and of fear. It wasLoneliness. It wasFear. Its grin was malicious, its eyes a burning glow. It was not a demon, but only a minor imp, perhaps, seated on my chest. And yet I could not move. I could no more throw it off than I could toss a Sumi wrestler. With my right forefinger I made an infinitesimal Cross, no more than a fraction of an inch, and possibly no more than a thought. With that signal I meant that I belonged to God. Instantly, it was gone.

I was back in my body, alone.

Was it my imagination? But with that departure I felt, recoiling, the mixture of horror and relief, and the impression of blackness, those little claws; its terror and loneliness was unmistakable.  I had to walk around and pray with thanks to Christ and God and angels and the Madonna, to Avoleketeshvara and all the Buddhas and Boddhisatvas, in thanks for being relieved of such utter Loneliness, such absolute horrific Fear.  And then, as I surrounded myself with the protection of light, pulling my aura around myself, weeping and frightened, and praying to God, I began to feel such compassion for that little imp that I could not help but pray also for IT:  That it might find a pathway into the Light.

I can’t believe that the God of my understanding, the God of love and caring, of mathematical Order and Majesty, the God of Goodness, would ever want anything to feel such pain as had trapped that little demon.  I want to believe that I zapped it into the Light.  I want to believe the Dark Side, too, has a chance at Redemption, for who am I to be so arrogant? Who am I to want even a demon to be so hurt?

We ask: Are there Uninvited Influences inside our auras? I could never prove it, but I can’t deny the possibility. And would they make us do things against our very best wishes, against our own wellbeing?  I’m forced to answer yes. Don’t we see it all the time? The alcoholic who cannot stop drinking; the successful businessman who puts a gun to his mouth to end his pain.

Oh, let us pray for all those suffering.  If thoughts are prayers, and if thoughts have power to move the hills and throw up skyscrapers in their place, if prayers can bring us back from existential anguish to the memory again of connection with the Divine—then surely we must constantly pray, without ceasing.

In one of my books, The Path of Prayer, I wrote of the importance of praying on your knees. I think there are acupuncture points on the kneecaps that take our prayers into the Divine. I think there is something about the physical act of humbling ourselves by dropping to our knees that carries the thoughts of our heart to a Higher Source. Oh, let us pray for all the demons who need to go into the Light.

 

The Light You Emit

Not long ago a Canadian wrote me about a mysterious encounter he’d had with a homeless man, Helmut, who always carried in his shopping bags spiritual books, herbs, treats and notebooks, and you could imagine that many people thought this ragged man was probably a little crazy. But curiously, he seemed to turn up whenever this man was facing a difficult situation, and then he would say something helpful    One night they stood for nearly 40 minutes in the cold outside a Starbucks talking of spiritual matters.    “And in a flash I saw the image of a bright Being behind and around him. He was filled with light, and I could see his light.”

At the same time, “I was filled with peace and joy. Was he an angel?” he asked, and then to my surprise: “Or was he simply a human evidencing the light we all emit—the light of love?”

That’s the question, isn’t it?

Listen, we all live and move inside a bubble of spiritual light. In my book, The Art of Intuition, you’ll find a whole chapter about how to see the light in others or in yourself, for we are spiritual beings, as the cliche goes, living a physical experience. And it is incumbent on us to realize that when we see another creature shining—shining, as Helmut the homeless man did, what you are seeing is . . . the Divine.

We say that God is Love, that Christ became incarnate to teach us that God is not some Celestial Psychopath, but unfathomable Love. Love heals the sick and calms the frightened. And it is visible. The whole earth is shining: trees, dogs, grasses, horses, cats, and probably the lions and bears—every living thing is shining with an inner light.

Do you see it?  It flares off your hands and fingers, and it is easy to see. Here’s how:    Squinch your eyes tight, and when you open them, using soft focus only and in soft light (it’s easiest to see at dusk, or under a quiet light) look at the space above or around your friend’s head or else at the angle between shoulder and head. Don’t look at her face or body, but at the emptiness five or six inches (or even 9 feet high!) around her.

Ask her to think of something she loves deeply. It will be stronger then, for when you are loving, you shine with light.  (Think of the bride, shining!) If you are angry or afraid, your aura shrinks to mere inches around you, like a sea anenome that’s been touched. You can see this light around a tree as well, the whole world gleaming, shining with energy and light.

I don’t see the high colors that some mystics do but always I can discern a colorless, wavering light, like heat waves rising from a hot street in summer.  Then I am humbled. It is that person’s true self that I am seeing.  What if we could all practice viewing it? What if we understood that we are all suffering, that we are all doing the best we can, that we are all spiritual beings pouring out our light? I think we’d have fewer wars or even arguments.  Here is a poem I wrote about it once.

Enlightenment

i cannot see your face

for the light around you

blinding

or hear the words that fall

like watered stones, like black crows

flapping

from the convent

of your mouth.

 

My soul is the silence

of a bell

ringing.

 

You know nothing of the light,

the bell, the black crows,

the ignorant stones

smoothed in the stream

of accidents and incidents,

desires and repulsions

that you think and

name as life.

Once while working at my desk i glanced

outside the window

to the spring-leafed Sycamore–

and disappeared—no i–

into the namelessness that later

shifted back into the bark of tree

and me

and worried itself again into

an i and it.

Why, of all that i have seen

along these many years–why is this

what i remember

best?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My father’s death: ghosts & goblins

 

Every October, with its falling leaves and brilliant colors, I’m reminded of my father’s death: October 30 the night before Halloween. My mother had died three years earlier, leaving our father, stroke-ridden, in our house.  What was curious, whenever I visited Daddy, I could feel my mother in the house. Her spirit was so strong that it was all I could do to keep from calling out to her as I opened the door. I felt as if  her spirit was waiting for him, hovering in the house, concerned for him and for his care by nurses, not wanting to “go over” until he, her lifelong partner, was ready to go with her too. It’s a great love story. And yet, when Daddy died, they were both immediately gone! You felt it. The house felt empty. This was so apparent that I remember asking my brother— “Did you call the limousine for the wedding–I mean the funeral?”

But that wasn’t what I wanted to tell you. I wanted to tell about his death.  At the time I had a writer’s grant to live for three months at the Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico, and I remember that on that morning of October 30 I experienced a very clear “knowing” that I should call my father at 9:00 that night. Moreover, it was clear that the message came from my mother—and how I knew it I could never explain, but I felt as if my mother had come to me in person to whisper gently:  “Call your father at 9:00 pm.”  I waited all that day, therefore, until it would be time to call.

Somehow, (stupid me!) I got confused by the two-hour time difference between Maryland and New Mexico. Nine pm in Baltimore is 7:00 pm in Taos, but somehow I took the message to mean that I should call at 9:00 pm New Mexico time. (Or was it 11:00 in New Mexico when in Baltimore the clock would read 9:00? Which is totally wrong-way round.)  At any rate, that evening I was visiting at another artist’s house, waiting for 9:00 pm my New Mexico time, when I got a phone call asking me to call home. Then I learnt that Daddy had died at nine o’clock Baltimore time.  I’d missed my call.

I remember being shocked. I remember thinking I was supposed to talk to him one more time before he died, but I had no time for guilt or grief. I packed everything and found my way that night to Albuquerque, cutting my grant short to fly back home. It was only later that it occurred to me I might have misunderstood the message—not that I should call home at 9:00, but that he would be called home then.

One thing stands on my conscience. I wanted Daddy’s body to remain in the house for 24 hours.  I pleaded with the nurses. They would not do it. They said they had already called the undertakers, that his body had already been picked up. My sister, calling from France, was crying for the same thing, and my brother—also away when he died—could not be reached.  Why did I care? I don’t know. It was some deep, atavistic idea that the soul would need a few hours to wander about, to say goodbye, perhaps, or to get its bearings comfortably before crossing over. It has lain on my heart, this fact that his body was removed so fast.

Death is life-changing. You are never the same after the death of a mother, the death of a father. For one thing, you step one rung up the ladder. For another the date of their deaths are seared into your brain and being, more surely than the birth of your own child.

It was somehow appropriate that he should die on the day before Halloween—and close to All Saint’s Day, the Day of the Dead, which is November 1. In Mexico this holiday is celebrated with skeletons and candles and feasts in memory of those who have passed before, and in France the entire country heads to the cemeteries to clear weeds off the family graves, wash lichen-ridden stones, and set out flowers in memory of the dead.  In the U.S., children dress in ghostly, ghoulish costumes and gather bags of sweets without a thought to death.

When my plane arrived in Washington that night, my husband picked me up to drive us back to our house in Georgetown, only to discover the first spontaneous Halloween celebration of Washington DC. (It later became a huge and annual event, a crowded Gala with all the joy of Mardi Gras.). But that night, the spontaneous first, traffic had come to a halt. Hoards of people in costume paraded by some pre-twitter-pre-social-media understanding to one cross-road in Georgetown, and created with their celebratory devils, demons, princesses, vampires, elves, ogres, ghosts and skeletons, a total and paralyzing grid-lock. The police were helpless.  Every road was blocked.

We sat in the car, my husband and I, and talked about my father.

I know a physicist who tells me with conviction, “There are no ghosts.” I don’t argue. Maybe in my next blog I’ll tell about some of the many spirits I have seen, not only those of my mother, but even of spirits who were strangers.  I will add, that I have never met an evil ghost, or dangerous one. But that’s for another essay. Right now, I keep thinking about my father, and what a special man he was.

 

 

 

A phenomenon so astonishing it might be a true miracle.

 

My friend Janine who runs http://www.faithscapes.com is running a series on monthly gemstones. The stone for September is sapphire, who knows why? (For that matter who made up the order of any of the 12 monthly gemstones, or put another way—to whose financial benefit? ) Well, I’m not even going to go there. I want to talk about the color blue and then to tell about a miracle, a true miracle, though the miracle, like the color blue itself, might lie in the eye of the beholder.  (Miracle: from Latin miraculum ‘object of wonder’, from mirari ‘to wonder’, from mirus ‘wonderful’.)  

     Blue is a playful, shape-shifting color. “I’m blue,” we say, when we feel low, or “happy as a bluebird,” for up. We speak of the “blue skies” of good fortune, and “flying into the blue” when we feel utterly ecstatic. And yet there are only a few shades of blue in nature—unlike green which has so many hues that you’d think, when walking in the woods, that God would have run out of paints for the palette.

   Hold off on the miracle. We’ll come to that. First, I want to talk about blue.  All of us who love the Greek classics, The Iliad and the Odyssey, notice the curious lack of color. So strange is this that some scholars wonder if the people of 1000 or 1200 BCE were color blind. The poet speaks of “the color of iron,” or “black blood” and “the wine-dark sea” — and this is so pervasive that when I went to Greece I searched that clear turquoise water in puzzlement, expecting the Aegean to be a stormy wine-red dark. True, the Iliad refers to “rosy-fingered dawn,” so the poets saw rose and red. We find sixteen references to green, but not one single reference to blue.

   Not long ago I was listening in the car (avidly!) to a radio talk about this very fact, in which the speaker (of course I don’t know who he was) mentioned how one scientifically-inclined couple purposely never told their little girl that the sky is blue (sometimes). By the time she was three, they had deliberately never pointed out the sky or mentioned the color, until one day the father asked her: “What color is the sky?” She looked into the clear blue and answered, “white.”

   Of course the sky is often white (live in Paris and you’ll know what I mean), and at the horizon it is always lighter than directly overhead, but it’s curious, nonetheless, that unless you have no word for the color you cannot name it. Or perhaps you cannot see it.

    Listening in the car, I didn’t catch the whole story. I can’t tell you whether she had ever, in all her three years, held a blue crayon or heard another child or day-care teacher name it blue, but I’m intrigued that apparently the early Greeks had no word for blue. Dark was the best they could come up with. The color of iron, color of wine.

    Sometimes, I dream in color. Sometimes I dream a color I have no word for at all. How can I see color when my eyes are closed?  (Inside job.) One supposition is that the early Greeks had no word for blue until they found the substance that created blue dye for clothing—until they had a need for just this word.  All of this is just to say again that it’s all in the eye of the beholder—beauty, sadness, happiness, physical sensations and spiritual awareness.

     So, finally, we come to the miracle, and it has nothing to do with blue, but with green. I call it a miracle because I don’t understand it. No one understands it, really, not even the physicists. But like many things we don’t understand, we use the word with the same loose generosity in which we claim to understand anything we’re accustomed to: “I understand the sun comes up today at 6:00,” we say without actually stopping to imagine our planet swinging in its elliptical gyre around a tiny star lost at the edge of an unimportant galaxy that travels at unimaginable speed, swirling  among millions of others galaxies.

  The miracle:  OK. Listen. Light comes from our sun. The light or photons arrive (at the speed of light) in a spectrum of many different energies. Photons have a wave length; the higher the energy of the photon, the smaller the wavelength (Think of the strings of a piano, the higher the frequency or note, the shorter the string.)

  The distribution in the spectrum depends on the temperature of the surface of sun that emitted them.  (Isn’t it interesting that the surface of the sun is hotter than its core? How can that be?)

     The largest distribution of photons are emitted in the green-yellow spectrum. (By the way, butterflies see more colors than any other animal on our planet. Sorry: back to my miracle.)

(I tried to post a drawing/image here but for some reason the website won’t allow it to be picked up, and instead closes down the whole blog (or essay, as I call it).  Imagine a bell curve with GREEN at the top of the curve. Very simple. Draw it yourself!)

    Plants have evolved to use sunlight as a source of energy (photosynthesis, right? Remember that in school?) Over billions of evolutionary years they developed sensitivity to green. (Which is itself wondrous.)

   But now we come to the real wonder, it’s all so preposterous.  Long before there was life on earth, there was water. Water is translucent, allowing light (from the sun) to enter, and the light that enters most just happens to fall on the green spectrum, which means that algae and simplest forms of plant life could form in water in the long-ago eons before any life began. It may be entirely accidental, but if the photons that penetrated water had been primarily blue, for example, the plants and life on earth could not have evolved, in the way they have.  Maybe they would have become some other life-form, but life on earth as we know it, including gardens and forests and birds that eat the seeds and animals that eat the birds, and flies and maggots that eat the dead flesh, and bees that pollinate the almond trees and give us sweet honey—everything—including you and the way you’re dressed this minute, your worries right now—all ourlives—depends on this simple fact that water is translucent, and allows through primarily photons that happen to be green.

  If not, there’d be no life. Coincidence? Happenstance?

   I love that I do not understand. I love the mystery. I love the order and magnificence of this life we live on our beautiful planet, rocking through the stellar spaces, blown by solar winds. I love the miracles.