Suddenly there is much to be done. Projects, his, mine, ours, a friend’s, hers, always with a reminder I have more projects in boxes and closets. His daughter needs a little extra help. My son is coming home. The holidays are approaching, parties are in the offing. Cheese wafers to be made. I need my hair cut, I need to cut his.
Take one step at a time. Be in the moment. Participate with love. Breathe.
Today he asks for quarter round, which means a trip to the lumber yard. I don’t want to go, but I must. It’s in my job description.
Trucks pack the parking lot; several are parked along the access road. Definitely not a good time to be buying a measly thirty-two feet of quarter round. Who is going to care about quarter round except he who wants it? Breathe.
Inside the store are eight customers, most of them on the tool side, and two clerks. I head for the supply side. The man in front of me wants some kind of pump; he and the clerk play word association. Sump pump. That’s it. They head for the bowels of the store. More customers come in. One guy sports dreads and a kerchief; his jeans are patched. He disappears into the aisles. A round man comes in and stands in front of me, next to the counter. He pulls a package out of a bag. A return. Obviously he feels his bad purchase trumps my potential one. A woman, red ankle length coat, red four inch heels, red lipstick, wanders the store. She leaves the supply side for the tool side. In the back my clerk is still talking sump pumps with the man who doesn't even know the sump part but needs one. They could be gone a while.
The dread guy resurfaces with a clerk. Where did he find a clerk? A pack of guys leave from the tool side, and the woman in red stands at the counter. I’ve made the wrong choice. I head for the tool side. The one clerk on the tool side is cutting keys. An office door opens, and a man in khakis stands in the door way, talking. Maybe he will see me. He doesn’t glance at the sales counter. Maybe he is a customer, or a salesman. Some guy goes behind the counter to meticulously tape a small package. He doesn’t look my way, but he does say hello to the woman in red. The key cutter asks me what I want. Quarter round, two twelve foot sections, one eight foot section. He heads for the computer to put in my order, but is diverted. A new sales clerk comes from the recesses of the tool aisles with a new customer. What have they been doing back there? The sump pump seminar is still being held on the supply side.
I suddenly understand. I’m having a miracle pop quiz. The Universe is giving me the opportunity to discover how much I’ve learned. I understand it’s a quiz, and I realize the chemicals churning in my brain aren’t the right answer. I can ask for a miracle. I do. Breathe.
The khakis guy comes behind the counter. He asks me what I need. Quarter round, two twelve foot sections, one eight foot. He goes to the computer. The new sales clerk is using it to check out the new customer. The new customer needs two of something, and both men disappear into the aisles to look for it. The khakis guy smiles at me. I breathe. “Computer’s busy,” he says.
I breathe deeper. I ask for a miracle. Jumping up and down and giving them what for won’t get me anywhere. Somehow-- apparently by magic or secret handshake according to the random pattern of converging clerks and customers -- with only two computers, this store, the only lumber store in my small town, manages to service the building needs of the community. Whole buildings are erected, new houses, remolding jobs. Thirty-two feet of quarter round is not going to impress these mystics of raw wood and sump pumps. I can’t get quarter round anywhere else in a fifty mile radius anyway. Obviously a miracle is in my best interest.
“Let’s go to the other side,” the khakis man says. We do. He rings up my sale. The computer doesn't stall or crash. He gives me my receipt, directs me to the warehouse in the back. I’m on my way, with only a mild churn burning through my brain. C-, probably, on the miracle pop quiz.
I drive around back, squeezing past the huge truck and trailer unloading stacks of something, to get to the back where they have my quarter round. I don't even bounce over the rotted landscape timber jutting into my cramped space. Luckily I have a small truck. What do the big truck guys do if they have to pick up lumber?
A weasely fellow comes to get my ticket. He disappears into the tunnel of lumber, and begins pulling quarter round. We've done this drill several times in the past, so I know it's easy sailing now. I read the paper. Weasel appears at my window. “We only got two fourteen and an eleven,” he says. I can interpret. He’s taking about feet and quarter round. “I bought two twelves and an eight,” I say, feeling the chemicals simmering. I've never before had trouble with these measurements. This test must be a two-parter. He disappears.
A dapper man, obviously a supervisor, replaces him. “We can’t cut the fourteens,” he says. “We can give you two fourteens and a four.” I decide to decipher the rules. “How come you can cut four feet, but not eight or twelve?" I say. I sound evil, a cat smirking at a mouse. “I’m not supposed to,” he says. He sounds exasperated. “It’s the only way I can give you your thirty-two.” I remember to ask for a miracle, but the brain chemicals are telling me to give them hell. “I can send your paper work back up front,” he says. “No!” I say. I feel like I’m about to draw a Dismal Swamp card in the Candy Land game. Miss two turns. Not up front again. Never. Breathe. “Give me the two fourteens and a four,” I say. I am not gracious. Two fourteens and a four, and no miracle. We’ll be piecing quarter round along the baseboards. “Want me to tie it down?” he asks. I look at the six foot of quarter round bending out the back of my little truck. I want to go home. "No." I’ll go slow.
I drive to the check-out point. The checker looks at my drooping quarter round. “Want me to tie that down?” he says. He picks up the piece that is now lying on the ground. I give up. I have to accept help. “Guess you better,” I say. He begins to position it across the back of the bed. I wonder how I’m going to drive home with six foot of quarter round poking the cars behind me. There must be a better way, I think. Again, I have to give up. I must join in. I get out, looking for a way to tie the quarter round with the extra extending over the cab. The checker decides to lay it along the side, tying it to the rear view mirror in the front and to a hook at the foot of the truck bed.
The dapper man reappears. “I knew it needed to be tied,” he says. He works two sheds over. He has come to make sure I can get home. I am out of the truck, in the parking lot of the town’s only lumber yard, in the clear November sun. I realize the brain chemicals have receded. I am breathing. I am light. “You were right,” I tell the dapper man. Travis. His uniform reads Travis. We are grinning at each other, as if we have just discovered a delicious secret. He is explaining the intricacies of quarter rounding to me. I am telling him I have been cranky. The quarter round lies snug along the length of the truck. At home, with what we already have, it will turn out to be just enough...no piece work will be required. The cheese wafers will be made and declared good. I will get my hair cut. His girl will be steadier. My boy will come home. Some projects will be completed; some will be deferred. But when time gets constricted and I get tense, my path will ease when I remember this moment. “You weren’t cranky,” he said. “You just wanted what you wanted.”
He was right again. And I got it. Those little miracles, they’re a giggle.
Thursday, December 02, 2004
Trojan
The dog wakes me earlier than I need. Wearing only glasses, I stumble downstairs, hide in the door’s shadow so the dog can go outside. I do not plan on being up yet. In the kitchen a light is on, and I realize it is already Monday. Monday, and my husband is smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, waiting for the world to close around him.
I go to the sunroom, tell him hello. He must be shocked by my round belly and sparse thatch. We seldom see each other naked. Still, shock may be good for him, remind him life is earthier than we choose to remember.
He goes to work. The morning is mine. Today I want to clean. I want to own the house, claim its space. Sleep burns my eyes, lures me back to bed. A couple of hours and my mind will clear, my eyes will sooth. My husband naps on week-ends as he feels the call. Perhaps a nap will unfumble my morning.
I cannot sleep. No ease here. I turn on the computer. A postcard message waits for you, an e-mail says. I know better, and still I hit the URL, I don’t know why, too close to sleep, or maybe I want someone out there to be reaching in toward me. VIRUS pops up, quarantined. I knew better. The morning bottoms out; I have been stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid, I knew better, why did I do that, is the virus really trapped, have I infected the world, stupid, brought my friends’ computers crashing?
I remind myself there is no black hole. Virus, no virus, I have not destroyed the universe. Most days a person can be stupid and live. Today I will live. The house is mine. I will claim it, as soon as I read this letter my stepdaughter has sent, a letter from her soon-to-be ex-father-in-law.
Camellia this, the letter says, Camellia that, Camellia has burned the halls of the marriage of my son and you, he tells my stepdaughter. What do you think of this, she asks me. I am Camellia. Virus. Quarantine.
The house is mine. The house awaits. A woman arrives seeking a favor, only the favor she doesn’t need, it’s the wedge in my door, my house. Coffee she needs, and an ear, my ear, which she fills with stories of who has done what wrong, no need for me to say a word, virus, virus, virus. Quarantine.Lunch.
The soon-to-be-ex son-in-law calls. Tell her, tell her, tell her, I promise, please, please, must not must not must not. Virus. Quarantine.
Some days I am simply deaf and blind. Stupid in the dark. Earth-locked. Some days the world, like a hollow horse, bids me to invite the invader in. Quarantine. Some days I can do no more. I thickly wait, dumbly muffled, to wake up, to remember Love has saved us all.
I go to the sunroom, tell him hello. He must be shocked by my round belly and sparse thatch. We seldom see each other naked. Still, shock may be good for him, remind him life is earthier than we choose to remember.
He goes to work. The morning is mine. Today I want to clean. I want to own the house, claim its space. Sleep burns my eyes, lures me back to bed. A couple of hours and my mind will clear, my eyes will sooth. My husband naps on week-ends as he feels the call. Perhaps a nap will unfumble my morning.
I cannot sleep. No ease here. I turn on the computer. A postcard message waits for you, an e-mail says. I know better, and still I hit the URL, I don’t know why, too close to sleep, or maybe I want someone out there to be reaching in toward me. VIRUS pops up, quarantined. I knew better. The morning bottoms out; I have been stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid, I knew better, why did I do that, is the virus really trapped, have I infected the world, stupid, brought my friends’ computers crashing?
I remind myself there is no black hole. Virus, no virus, I have not destroyed the universe. Most days a person can be stupid and live. Today I will live. The house is mine. I will claim it, as soon as I read this letter my stepdaughter has sent, a letter from her soon-to-be ex-father-in-law.
Camellia this, the letter says, Camellia that, Camellia has burned the halls of the marriage of my son and you, he tells my stepdaughter. What do you think of this, she asks me. I am Camellia. Virus. Quarantine.
The house is mine. The house awaits. A woman arrives seeking a favor, only the favor she doesn’t need, it’s the wedge in my door, my house. Coffee she needs, and an ear, my ear, which she fills with stories of who has done what wrong, no need for me to say a word, virus, virus, virus. Quarantine.Lunch.
The soon-to-be-ex son-in-law calls. Tell her, tell her, tell her, I promise, please, please, must not must not must not. Virus. Quarantine.
Some days I am simply deaf and blind. Stupid in the dark. Earth-locked. Some days the world, like a hollow horse, bids me to invite the invader in. Quarantine. Some days I can do no more. I thickly wait, dumbly muffled, to wake up, to remember Love has saved us all.
Sunday, November 21, 2004
Thirst
“I cannot remember how I felt when the light went out of my eyes. I suppose I felt it was always night and perhaps I wondered why the day did not come.” Helen Keller
Helen Keller, a bright and interactive toddler, fell ill with ‘brain fever’ when she was nineteen months old. Her parents thought she might die, but she did not. When she recovered, she could not see or hear. Waking up to a dark, silent world, she often grabbed and screamed and thrashed her way through the next five years, while in the world of light and sound, her parents continued to love her and protect her from her own destructive fury.
Many of the spiritual teachings I read would say Helen’s story is reenacted with each new birth. I think of my own bad behavior, the too many times I’ve felt thwarted, thrown tantrums, large and small, snatched at relationships or food or books or ideas or new clothes, trinkets, gadgets, or experiences for comfort. I would have used alcohol or drugs (I was a dedicated cigarette smoker) if only I had the capacity for it. Looking back, I realize at those times I felt alone, separated from some bright love I longed for with all my soul. Most of my life I have searched for the language of love and truth, a language which would connect me with the larger universe and with my neighbor, with my children, husband, parents, friends. When I can’t connect, often I get mad. More often I get sad.
I believe the spiritualists. I believe the world of absolute love, friendship, and communication…communion…surrounds us, even though we are deaf and blind to it. But I want more than to believe it. I want to experience it. Others have experienced a reality greater than the one we normally see, or at least reported they have. I know because I keep tabs.
Once my husband, who had been practicing meditation in our back yard, sat on the deck outside of his office and smoked a cigarette. The building next to him dissolved, and he could see, not bricks and mortar, but shimmering energy, a reality which he says underlies the seemingly solid form of the bricks and mortar. He stopped his back yard meditating immediately. He felt he couldn’t work in the corporate world if he couldn’t see the corporeal world which housed it. He knew the energy was no more real than the bricks, but he will always have the knowledge of the brief moment the veil covering our work-a-day world lifted, and he was shown more.
A man I know works in a liquor store. One day while he was updating the books, he was enveloped in a white light. “What did you do,” we asked. He said, “Kept working until it went away.” He plans to have his eyes checked, but since the white light has never returned, he keeps putting the examination off. I think he, no matter how reluctantly, glimpsed the Other World.
The daughter of a friend said she meditates. She had been troubled by her childhood religious tradition. Once in a meditation she ‘saw’ a clear light, and knew Jesus was in the light. She was miffed. He laughed. “I’m not like you think,” he said. “I’m like you.” Then she was washed with an incredible sense of peace and love. On another occasion the walls of her bedroom dissolved, much the way the building did for my husband. Like him, she was a bit daunted.
The woman who worked for my father took off too often for my taste, though she was wonderful in many respects. When she missed one more Monday, I prodded her for details. She had not been sick. She had been to church in Houston, Texas. No, it wasn’t a church group trip. Finally she told me the whole story. God had told her to go to Houston. He spoke to her in voice just like hers and mine. A real voice. She and her husband drove all day Saturday to get there. God hadn’t revealed the exact location of where she was headed, or the reason for the trip. He said she would recognize the destination. Once in Houston, she told her husband to exit the interstate. They pulled into the parking lot of a McDonald’s. On one side was a Days’ Inn. On the other was a church. The woman knew they had arrived. They ate burgers, slept in the Days’ Inn, and went to church the next morning. They joined the congregation in the fellowship hall after the sermon. A parishioner came through the crowd. My friend recognized her, though she had never seen her before. “God sent me to tell you that you are making the right decision. You must do what you’ve been resisting,” my friend said. The woman from the church began crying. She had been praying so long for God to send her guidance she could believe.
My stepdaughter tells me when she meditates she ‘sees’ a ball of radiating energy, and knows everything emanates from the same source of energy. One internet acquaintance tells me she has caught glimpses of the Other World since she was a child. Another friend meditates, too. She is guided in her life’s path with symbols and flashes of phrases. When she follows this direction, her path smoothes out before her.
These are not by any means all the accounts of which I have read or heard, and does not include the flashier incidences of famous and minor mystics who received direct transmission of “the peace that passeth all understanding.”
This is what I want and have not received: the peace that passeth all understanding. I have moments of a sense of space, which brings with it an easing. For some of those moments I am so grateful I almost swoon….as if I am on the crest of a cosmic roller coaster, and the world as I know it is about to fall away. For others I feel as if I am afloat in a field of possibility I would call Love.
You would think that would be enough. You would be wrong.
My spiritual teachings say consistently the Voice of God will give me specific directions. Have I heard the Voice of God? No. What I do hear is a small, quiet voice which if spoken aloud, would sound just like my own. I am not reassured. If I already knew the answers, I wouldn’t be seeking them in prayer.
A childhood friend developed paranoid schizophrenia in his late teens. In his thirties, he used to drop by my house and talk about his instructions from God. He was to wash the world in the Blood of the Lamb. “The problem is I can’t be sure if it’s God or the Devil,” he would say. “If I’m ever sure it’s God, I’m going to have to do it.” It’s the message of War and the Sword we have heard since the advent of even a notion of God. With relief I do trust my spiritual teachings, which says everybody wins. If anyone must lose, I may be sure the Voice of God isn’t the one I’m hearing.
But like my childhood friend, I want to be sure the Voice I am hearing is God. Or some sign, maybe not the complete dissolution of worlds the renowned mystic Paramahansa Yogananda saw, or even the walls of the building next door or my room. I don’t even require a burning bush. And if I heard a Voice, just like yours and mine, directing me on a mission with only the name of a large city as my instructions, I might be a wee bit recalcitrant. But Jesus in a clear light, flooding me with love, even for a moment, would be a moment to cherish as I plodded my way forward. A white light would be nice, a ball of energy, or a Voice, not my own, giving me specific instructions about how God expects me to do Her Will today.
Oswald Chambers, in My Utmost for His Highest, says wanting that Voice of Direction is spiritual impertinence; “you are expecting God to tell you to do a big thing, and all He is telling you to do is to ‘come.’” Chambers also says God’s silence is His first sign of intimacy, for when God graces you with His silences, you are moving into a deeper level of communion where, without pretty pictures of reassurance, you can still move in this world with perfect trust that God has heard you.
Jacques Lusseyran, blinded when he was eight, learned to move through the world with that perfect trust. Instead of darkness, he discovered Light, a Light he needed as much as air. “There was no way out of it,” he said in his autobiography, And There Was Light. “I was the prisoner of light. I was condemned to see.” When he was afraid, the light disappeared. When he “hesitated, calculated, thought about the wall, the half opened door, the key in the lock...” objects reached out to trip him. Anger, impatience, being anxious to win, to be first, becoming jealous or unfriendly, all locked him into a world dark and hostile. “But when I was happy and serene, approached people with confidence and thought well of them, I was rewarded with light.” Jacques did not need a sign, or a seeing eye dog, or to have his physical sight miraculously restored.. “I always knew where the road was open and where it was closed,” he said. “I had only to look at the bright signal which taught me how to live.”
But I, a seeing woman, still feel blind. Because I can’t see Jacques Lusseyran’s sure Light, I long for Word from God.
“God speaks to you all the time,” my stepdaughter said. She means through other people, and that is true. I’ll be barreling along, sulky and grim, when something happens, a word is spoken, usually by someone whom I’ve suspected of being in that moment a drab, bitter, hard pebble of a person. My world cracks, and God’s generosity shines though.
At those times I feel about God’s Education the way Helen Keller, in The Story of My Life, spoke of the gift of language Anne Sullivan gave to her. Helen had been learning to spell words with her fingers, “monkey-like” and without comprehension of any meaning behind them. Miss Sullivan had been trying, without success, to make Helen understand the difference between mug and water; then she tried to help Helen realize the word for doll applied to both her old rag doll and her new china doll. In exasperation Helen broke her china doll, and was glad the source of her irritation was destroyed. Miss Sullivan did not give up. She didn’t punish Helen for her tantrum. Instead, she took her outside, which delighted the child. She took her to the well house. There she placed one of Helen’s hands under the spout as the water gushed out. In Helen’s other hand, Miss Sullivan spelled the word ‘water.’ “Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me,” Helen said. “I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free.”
She went back to the house, eager to learn the word for every object she touched. That night she went to bed, her world blossoming with words, and thoughts behind the words, and “for the first time longed for a new day to come.”
When God speaks to me through this solid world around me, like Helen Keller, I am washed in the Living Word. The world which had taunted me takes on new meaning, one I am eager to learn. Like Jacques Lusseyran, my step is light, my foot is sure, and I, too, can move around obstacles with ease. Then I begin thinking again. Once more I am blind and vexed.
“Why don’t you speak to me?” I cry to the Holy Spirit, the name with which my spiritual teaching refers to the Voice of God.
I speak to you through your writing, a voice said today. It was a small voice, with space surrounding it, the voice I have heard clearly in my head, the voice I so often discount because it seems to be mine. It’s true. Whatever I write stays with me. Over and over events happen, illustrating something I’ve recently explored with keyboard and words, and the correlation surprises me.
I was chagrined, but not mollified. “How can I trust you?” I asked. Trust me until I’m wrong, the voice said.
Suddenly I am aware I am the child of God. Why wouldn’t God speak to me in my voice? Is not my voice in His service? What measure do I have to mistrust it? I am reminded of my deafness, my blindness, and God’s immense, reassuring silence. In the enormity of that silence I must be still and listen. Who would God send to call me home, except His children, my sisters, my brothers? What Voice would He use but theirs, and mine? If I were given a cherished moment to carry with me as I plod my way forward, would that moment become my treasure, in place of God’s Living Word? Would I discover what I thought was a jewel had become a boulder? What need have I of flashy tricks and fancy illusions when goodness and mercy surround me, and God is with me always, sustaining me with joy? And in this day, God blesses me with His silence.
*******************************************
Both Jacques Lusseyran and Helen Keller present me a metaphor for seeking my Voice and my Light, more complete than any I can articulate. Below are excerpts from their autobiographies:
“A light so continuous and so intense was so far beyond my comprehension that sometimes I doubted it. Suppose it was not real, that I had only imagined it. Perhaps it would be enough to imagine the opposite, or just something different, to make it go away. So I thought of testing it out and even of resisting it.
At night in bed, when I was all by myself, I shut my eyes. I lowered my eyelids as I might have done when they covered my physical eyes. I told myself that behind these curtains I would no longer see the light. But light was still there, and more serene than ever, looking like a lake at evening when the wind has dropped. Then I gathered up all my energy and will power and tried to stop the flow of light, as I might have tried to stop breathing.
What happened was a disturbance something like a whirl pool. But the whirlpool was still flooded with light. At all events I couldn’t keep this up very long, perhaps only for two or three seconds. When this was going on I felt a sort of anguish, as though I were doing something forbidden, something against life. It was exactly as if I needed light to live—needed it as much as air. There was no way out of it. I was the prisoner of light. I was condemned to see.
As I write these lines, I have just tried the experiment again, with the same result, except that with the years the original source of light has grown stronger.
At eight I came out of this experiment reassured, with the sense that I was being reborn. Since it was not I who was making the light, since it came to me from outside, it would never leave me. I was only a passageway, a vestibule for this brightness. The seeing eye was in me.
Still, there were times when the light faded, almost to the point of disappearing. It happened every time I was afraid.
If, instead of letting myself be carried along by confidence and throwing myself into things, I hesitated, calculated, thought about the wall, the half-opened door, the key in the lock; if I said to myself that all these things were hostile and about to strike or scratch, then without exception I hit or wounded myself. The only easy way to move around the house, the garden or the beach was by not thinking about it at all, or thinking as little possible. Then I moved between obstacles the way they say bats do. What the loss of my eyes had not accomplished was brought about by fear. It made me blind.
Anger and impatience had the same effect, throwing everything into confusion. The minute before I knew just where everything in the room was, but if I got angry, things got angrier than I. They went and hid in the most unlikely corners, mixed themselves up, turned turtle, muttered like crazy men and looked wild. As for me, I no longer knew where to put hand or foot. Everything hurt me. This mechanism worked so well that I became cautious.
When playing with my small companions, if I suddenly grew anxious to win, to be the first at all costs, then all at once I could see nothing. Literally I went into fog or smoke.
I could no longer afford to be jealous or unfriendly, because, as soon as I was, a bandage came down over my eyes, and I was bound hand and foot and cast aside. All at once a black hole opened, and I was helpless inside it. But when I was happy and serene, approached people with confidence and thought well of them, I was rewarded with light. So is it surprising that I loved friendship and harmony when I was very young?
Armed with such a tool, why should I need a moral code? For me this tool took the place of red and green lights. I always knew where the road was open and where it was closed. I had only to look at the bright signal which taught me how to live.”
Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was
Light ,p. 19-21
“Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour was. “Light! give me light!” was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.
….The morning after my teacher came she led me into her room and gave me a doll….When I had played with it a little while, Miss Sullivan slowly spelled into my hand the word “d-o-l-l.” I was at once interested in this finger play and tried to imitate it. When I finally succeeded in making the letters correctly I was flushed with childish pleasure and pride. Running downstairs to my mother I held up my hand and made the letters for doll. I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed; I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation. In the days that followed I learned to spell in this uncomprehending way a great many words, among them pin, hat, cup and a few verbs like sit, stand, and walk. But my teacher had been with me several weeks before I understood that everything has a name.
One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan put my big rag doll into my lap also, spelled “d-o-l-l” and tried to make me understand “d-o-l-l” applied to both. Earlier in the day we had had a tussle over the words “m-u-g” and “w-a-t-e-r.” Miss Sullivan had tried to impress it upon me that “m-u-g” is mug and that “w-a-t-e-r” is water, but I persisted in confounding the two. In despair she had dropped the subject for the time, only to renew it at the first opportunity. I became impatient at her repeated attempts and, seizing the new doll, I dashed it upon the floor. I was keenly delighted when I felt the fragments of the broken doll at my feet. Neither sorrow nor regret followed my passionate outburst. I had not loved the doll. In the still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment or tenderness. I felt my teacher sweep the fragments to one side of the hearth, and I had a sense of satisfaction that the cause of my discomfort was removed. She brought me my hat, and I knew I was going out into the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure.
We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Some one was drawing water and my teacher place my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed on the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free. There were barriers still, but barriers that could in time be swept away.
I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and shame.
I learned a great many new words that day. I do not remember what they all were; but I do know that mother, father, sister, teacher were among them—words that were to make the world blossom for me, “like Aaron’s rod, with flowers.” It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come.
Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, p. 35-37
Helen Keller, a bright and interactive toddler, fell ill with ‘brain fever’ when she was nineteen months old. Her parents thought she might die, but she did not. When she recovered, she could not see or hear. Waking up to a dark, silent world, she often grabbed and screamed and thrashed her way through the next five years, while in the world of light and sound, her parents continued to love her and protect her from her own destructive fury.
Many of the spiritual teachings I read would say Helen’s story is reenacted with each new birth. I think of my own bad behavior, the too many times I’ve felt thwarted, thrown tantrums, large and small, snatched at relationships or food or books or ideas or new clothes, trinkets, gadgets, or experiences for comfort. I would have used alcohol or drugs (I was a dedicated cigarette smoker) if only I had the capacity for it. Looking back, I realize at those times I felt alone, separated from some bright love I longed for with all my soul. Most of my life I have searched for the language of love and truth, a language which would connect me with the larger universe and with my neighbor, with my children, husband, parents, friends. When I can’t connect, often I get mad. More often I get sad.
I believe the spiritualists. I believe the world of absolute love, friendship, and communication…communion…surrounds us, even though we are deaf and blind to it. But I want more than to believe it. I want to experience it. Others have experienced a reality greater than the one we normally see, or at least reported they have. I know because I keep tabs.
Once my husband, who had been practicing meditation in our back yard, sat on the deck outside of his office and smoked a cigarette. The building next to him dissolved, and he could see, not bricks and mortar, but shimmering energy, a reality which he says underlies the seemingly solid form of the bricks and mortar. He stopped his back yard meditating immediately. He felt he couldn’t work in the corporate world if he couldn’t see the corporeal world which housed it. He knew the energy was no more real than the bricks, but he will always have the knowledge of the brief moment the veil covering our work-a-day world lifted, and he was shown more.
A man I know works in a liquor store. One day while he was updating the books, he was enveloped in a white light. “What did you do,” we asked. He said, “Kept working until it went away.” He plans to have his eyes checked, but since the white light has never returned, he keeps putting the examination off. I think he, no matter how reluctantly, glimpsed the Other World.
The daughter of a friend said she meditates. She had been troubled by her childhood religious tradition. Once in a meditation she ‘saw’ a clear light, and knew Jesus was in the light. She was miffed. He laughed. “I’m not like you think,” he said. “I’m like you.” Then she was washed with an incredible sense of peace and love. On another occasion the walls of her bedroom dissolved, much the way the building did for my husband. Like him, she was a bit daunted.
The woman who worked for my father took off too often for my taste, though she was wonderful in many respects. When she missed one more Monday, I prodded her for details. She had not been sick. She had been to church in Houston, Texas. No, it wasn’t a church group trip. Finally she told me the whole story. God had told her to go to Houston. He spoke to her in voice just like hers and mine. A real voice. She and her husband drove all day Saturday to get there. God hadn’t revealed the exact location of where she was headed, or the reason for the trip. He said she would recognize the destination. Once in Houston, she told her husband to exit the interstate. They pulled into the parking lot of a McDonald’s. On one side was a Days’ Inn. On the other was a church. The woman knew they had arrived. They ate burgers, slept in the Days’ Inn, and went to church the next morning. They joined the congregation in the fellowship hall after the sermon. A parishioner came through the crowd. My friend recognized her, though she had never seen her before. “God sent me to tell you that you are making the right decision. You must do what you’ve been resisting,” my friend said. The woman from the church began crying. She had been praying so long for God to send her guidance she could believe.
My stepdaughter tells me when she meditates she ‘sees’ a ball of radiating energy, and knows everything emanates from the same source of energy. One internet acquaintance tells me she has caught glimpses of the Other World since she was a child. Another friend meditates, too. She is guided in her life’s path with symbols and flashes of phrases. When she follows this direction, her path smoothes out before her.
These are not by any means all the accounts of which I have read or heard, and does not include the flashier incidences of famous and minor mystics who received direct transmission of “the peace that passeth all understanding.”
This is what I want and have not received: the peace that passeth all understanding. I have moments of a sense of space, which brings with it an easing. For some of those moments I am so grateful I almost swoon….as if I am on the crest of a cosmic roller coaster, and the world as I know it is about to fall away. For others I feel as if I am afloat in a field of possibility I would call Love.
You would think that would be enough. You would be wrong.
My spiritual teachings say consistently the Voice of God will give me specific directions. Have I heard the Voice of God? No. What I do hear is a small, quiet voice which if spoken aloud, would sound just like my own. I am not reassured. If I already knew the answers, I wouldn’t be seeking them in prayer.
A childhood friend developed paranoid schizophrenia in his late teens. In his thirties, he used to drop by my house and talk about his instructions from God. He was to wash the world in the Blood of the Lamb. “The problem is I can’t be sure if it’s God or the Devil,” he would say. “If I’m ever sure it’s God, I’m going to have to do it.” It’s the message of War and the Sword we have heard since the advent of even a notion of God. With relief I do trust my spiritual teachings, which says everybody wins. If anyone must lose, I may be sure the Voice of God isn’t the one I’m hearing.
But like my childhood friend, I want to be sure the Voice I am hearing is God. Or some sign, maybe not the complete dissolution of worlds the renowned mystic Paramahansa Yogananda saw, or even the walls of the building next door or my room. I don’t even require a burning bush. And if I heard a Voice, just like yours and mine, directing me on a mission with only the name of a large city as my instructions, I might be a wee bit recalcitrant. But Jesus in a clear light, flooding me with love, even for a moment, would be a moment to cherish as I plodded my way forward. A white light would be nice, a ball of energy, or a Voice, not my own, giving me specific instructions about how God expects me to do Her Will today.
Oswald Chambers, in My Utmost for His Highest, says wanting that Voice of Direction is spiritual impertinence; “you are expecting God to tell you to do a big thing, and all He is telling you to do is to ‘come.’” Chambers also says God’s silence is His first sign of intimacy, for when God graces you with His silences, you are moving into a deeper level of communion where, without pretty pictures of reassurance, you can still move in this world with perfect trust that God has heard you.
Jacques Lusseyran, blinded when he was eight, learned to move through the world with that perfect trust. Instead of darkness, he discovered Light, a Light he needed as much as air. “There was no way out of it,” he said in his autobiography, And There Was Light. “I was the prisoner of light. I was condemned to see.” When he was afraid, the light disappeared. When he “hesitated, calculated, thought about the wall, the half opened door, the key in the lock...” objects reached out to trip him. Anger, impatience, being anxious to win, to be first, becoming jealous or unfriendly, all locked him into a world dark and hostile. “But when I was happy and serene, approached people with confidence and thought well of them, I was rewarded with light.” Jacques did not need a sign, or a seeing eye dog, or to have his physical sight miraculously restored.. “I always knew where the road was open and where it was closed,” he said. “I had only to look at the bright signal which taught me how to live.”
But I, a seeing woman, still feel blind. Because I can’t see Jacques Lusseyran’s sure Light, I long for Word from God.
“God speaks to you all the time,” my stepdaughter said. She means through other people, and that is true. I’ll be barreling along, sulky and grim, when something happens, a word is spoken, usually by someone whom I’ve suspected of being in that moment a drab, bitter, hard pebble of a person. My world cracks, and God’s generosity shines though.
At those times I feel about God’s Education the way Helen Keller, in The Story of My Life, spoke of the gift of language Anne Sullivan gave to her. Helen had been learning to spell words with her fingers, “monkey-like” and without comprehension of any meaning behind them. Miss Sullivan had been trying, without success, to make Helen understand the difference between mug and water; then she tried to help Helen realize the word for doll applied to both her old rag doll and her new china doll. In exasperation Helen broke her china doll, and was glad the source of her irritation was destroyed. Miss Sullivan did not give up. She didn’t punish Helen for her tantrum. Instead, she took her outside, which delighted the child. She took her to the well house. There she placed one of Helen’s hands under the spout as the water gushed out. In Helen’s other hand, Miss Sullivan spelled the word ‘water.’ “Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me,” Helen said. “I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free.”
She went back to the house, eager to learn the word for every object she touched. That night she went to bed, her world blossoming with words, and thoughts behind the words, and “for the first time longed for a new day to come.”
When God speaks to me through this solid world around me, like Helen Keller, I am washed in the Living Word. The world which had taunted me takes on new meaning, one I am eager to learn. Like Jacques Lusseyran, my step is light, my foot is sure, and I, too, can move around obstacles with ease. Then I begin thinking again. Once more I am blind and vexed.
“Why don’t you speak to me?” I cry to the Holy Spirit, the name with which my spiritual teaching refers to the Voice of God.
I speak to you through your writing, a voice said today. It was a small voice, with space surrounding it, the voice I have heard clearly in my head, the voice I so often discount because it seems to be mine. It’s true. Whatever I write stays with me. Over and over events happen, illustrating something I’ve recently explored with keyboard and words, and the correlation surprises me.
I was chagrined, but not mollified. “How can I trust you?” I asked. Trust me until I’m wrong, the voice said.
Suddenly I am aware I am the child of God. Why wouldn’t God speak to me in my voice? Is not my voice in His service? What measure do I have to mistrust it? I am reminded of my deafness, my blindness, and God’s immense, reassuring silence. In the enormity of that silence I must be still and listen. Who would God send to call me home, except His children, my sisters, my brothers? What Voice would He use but theirs, and mine? If I were given a cherished moment to carry with me as I plod my way forward, would that moment become my treasure, in place of God’s Living Word? Would I discover what I thought was a jewel had become a boulder? What need have I of flashy tricks and fancy illusions when goodness and mercy surround me, and God is with me always, sustaining me with joy? And in this day, God blesses me with His silence.
*******************************************
Both Jacques Lusseyran and Helen Keller present me a metaphor for seeking my Voice and my Light, more complete than any I can articulate. Below are excerpts from their autobiographies:
“A light so continuous and so intense was so far beyond my comprehension that sometimes I doubted it. Suppose it was not real, that I had only imagined it. Perhaps it would be enough to imagine the opposite, or just something different, to make it go away. So I thought of testing it out and even of resisting it.
At night in bed, when I was all by myself, I shut my eyes. I lowered my eyelids as I might have done when they covered my physical eyes. I told myself that behind these curtains I would no longer see the light. But light was still there, and more serene than ever, looking like a lake at evening when the wind has dropped. Then I gathered up all my energy and will power and tried to stop the flow of light, as I might have tried to stop breathing.
What happened was a disturbance something like a whirl pool. But the whirlpool was still flooded with light. At all events I couldn’t keep this up very long, perhaps only for two or three seconds. When this was going on I felt a sort of anguish, as though I were doing something forbidden, something against life. It was exactly as if I needed light to live—needed it as much as air. There was no way out of it. I was the prisoner of light. I was condemned to see.
As I write these lines, I have just tried the experiment again, with the same result, except that with the years the original source of light has grown stronger.
At eight I came out of this experiment reassured, with the sense that I was being reborn. Since it was not I who was making the light, since it came to me from outside, it would never leave me. I was only a passageway, a vestibule for this brightness. The seeing eye was in me.
Still, there were times when the light faded, almost to the point of disappearing. It happened every time I was afraid.
If, instead of letting myself be carried along by confidence and throwing myself into things, I hesitated, calculated, thought about the wall, the half-opened door, the key in the lock; if I said to myself that all these things were hostile and about to strike or scratch, then without exception I hit or wounded myself. The only easy way to move around the house, the garden or the beach was by not thinking about it at all, or thinking as little possible. Then I moved between obstacles the way they say bats do. What the loss of my eyes had not accomplished was brought about by fear. It made me blind.
Anger and impatience had the same effect, throwing everything into confusion. The minute before I knew just where everything in the room was, but if I got angry, things got angrier than I. They went and hid in the most unlikely corners, mixed themselves up, turned turtle, muttered like crazy men and looked wild. As for me, I no longer knew where to put hand or foot. Everything hurt me. This mechanism worked so well that I became cautious.
When playing with my small companions, if I suddenly grew anxious to win, to be the first at all costs, then all at once I could see nothing. Literally I went into fog or smoke.
I could no longer afford to be jealous or unfriendly, because, as soon as I was, a bandage came down over my eyes, and I was bound hand and foot and cast aside. All at once a black hole opened, and I was helpless inside it. But when I was happy and serene, approached people with confidence and thought well of them, I was rewarded with light. So is it surprising that I loved friendship and harmony when I was very young?
Armed with such a tool, why should I need a moral code? For me this tool took the place of red and green lights. I always knew where the road was open and where it was closed. I had only to look at the bright signal which taught me how to live.”
Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was
Light ,p. 19-21
“Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour was. “Light! give me light!” was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.
….The morning after my teacher came she led me into her room and gave me a doll….When I had played with it a little while, Miss Sullivan slowly spelled into my hand the word “d-o-l-l.” I was at once interested in this finger play and tried to imitate it. When I finally succeeded in making the letters correctly I was flushed with childish pleasure and pride. Running downstairs to my mother I held up my hand and made the letters for doll. I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed; I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation. In the days that followed I learned to spell in this uncomprehending way a great many words, among them pin, hat, cup and a few verbs like sit, stand, and walk. But my teacher had been with me several weeks before I understood that everything has a name.
One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan put my big rag doll into my lap also, spelled “d-o-l-l” and tried to make me understand “d-o-l-l” applied to both. Earlier in the day we had had a tussle over the words “m-u-g” and “w-a-t-e-r.” Miss Sullivan had tried to impress it upon me that “m-u-g” is mug and that “w-a-t-e-r” is water, but I persisted in confounding the two. In despair she had dropped the subject for the time, only to renew it at the first opportunity. I became impatient at her repeated attempts and, seizing the new doll, I dashed it upon the floor. I was keenly delighted when I felt the fragments of the broken doll at my feet. Neither sorrow nor regret followed my passionate outburst. I had not loved the doll. In the still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment or tenderness. I felt my teacher sweep the fragments to one side of the hearth, and I had a sense of satisfaction that the cause of my discomfort was removed. She brought me my hat, and I knew I was going out into the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation may be called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure.
We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Some one was drawing water and my teacher place my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed on the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free. There were barriers still, but barriers that could in time be swept away.
I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and shame.
I learned a great many new words that day. I do not remember what they all were; but I do know that mother, father, sister, teacher were among them—words that were to make the world blossom for me, “like Aaron’s rod, with flowers.” It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come.
Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, p. 35-37
Friday, November 12, 2004
Invitational
My stepdaughter asked me to go to a Barrage performance in a town fifty miles away. “We can go out to eat, and have girly night,” she said.
Sweet….but fifty miles away, for a show that didn’t start until 7:30 at night? Just what was Barrage? Would my snoring disturb the rest of the audience?
I thought about it. My daughter recently separated from her husband, and we haven’t made time to talk. She might need support, or at the least I could satisfy some motherly curiosity. I make farther trips for other people all the time…going with this neighbor to the doctor, picking that friend up at the airport. If she had said, “I want to go, and I can’t go alone,” my answer would have been yes. Girlfriend is my best role. What she said was, “Do you want to go?”
No. Yes? I decided to ask for a miracle...remembering with miracles everybody wins.
I thought of the disciple of the Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri who barely missed the train for a festival she wanted desperately to attend. At the station she cried out to the Swami, miles away at the festival, to help her with her dilemma. The train stopped, then rolled backwards to fetch her. When she arrived at the Swami’s compound, she thanked him for his help. He suggested in the future arriving at the station a few minutes earlier might be less dramatic.
Most people don’t require a miracle in order to decide whether to accept an evening out, but my spiritual study says there is no order of difficulty with miracles, so I figure there is no order of magnitude, either. I had conflicting interests. The sum of the parts really is less than the whole when you don't want all the parts, which meant to me since I didn't want it all, I didn't know what I did want. Why not make miracles the grounding principle for living my best life?
“I really want to see this troupe,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. She had appealed to The Girlfriend, and The Girlfriend doesn’t rely on miracles. She is putty for any person who has a need she can fix. “Let’s do it.” But it didn’t feel okay.
“Why do I get the feeling you’re not real committed to this?” she said. “E-mail me when you’re sure.”
For two days I waited for word from the Higher Intelligence. The day of the performance I broke. I e-mailed her: “And where do you stand on Barrage? I've been so ambivalent on that one, I turned it over to the universe, but kept expecting the skies to part and the best answer for all to be broadcast.”
She wrote me back. She was tired and was heading out of town for the week-end. No hundred mile trip for her tonight, maybe we could eat out, maybe the Mexican place?
Yes, on eating out. No, on Mexican. I had my perfect answer, and I didn’t need a miracle for deciding where not to eat. The Mexican place was the only restaurant where my husband does eat, and was definitely off the girly night list.
My husband had been checking with me on our plans. He hates for me to be on the road after dark, so I figured he would be happy with the dinner in town. “Am I invited?” he asked. He rarely initiates a social occasion out. How could I say no? “Yes,” I said. But my heart wanted girly night. This was not my perfect answer. “Where are you eating?” he said. “Mexican,” I said. “Where else would we eat if you’re invited?” This was definitely an imperfect answer, but I am The Girlfriend. Pleasing everyone else has been my stock-in-trade. I know most people outgrow this trait. We all have our issues.
I thought about it. I have been working at telling the truth. I always thought I told the truth, mostly; maybe I hedged numbers when I related an incident, said somebody did something five times when they really did it four, but otherwise, I pretty much stuck to the facts. Only I have discovered The Girlfriend will tell the truth when she tells, but often she doesn’t tell. My practice kicked in. “About supper,” I said. “I don’t want Mexican. The cheese is always bad on Thursday.” That’s true. It is. We didn’t eat out on my birthday because we only eat Mexican out and my birthday was on a Thursday and the cheese….never mind. "We're going to the Crystal, if you want to come." I told the truth, but not the whole hog truth. I didn’t say I wanted girly night, but I needed to leave something for God to do.
Which isn’t quite true. I knew his answer when I asked. He’s a great husband and an excellent friend. I didn’t need to throw his gender in his face. I figured if he surprised me and said yes, that was the answer from God.
He said no. He is more used to making up his own mind than I am. “But ask her how Pistachio is doing.” He is curious, too, but he has his source for getting information. Guess who Pistachio is and who is the source.
At last I had my miracle. Girly night in town, no Mexican. My husband didn’t have to worry about us being on the road. We would eat Mexican tomorrow night, when the cheese was fresh. This felt right. Everybody wins.
But the real miracle is this: I am learning to speak my truth. With truth, no matter what the outcome, everybody wins. Maybe next time, I’ll tell it all. If I don’t know it all, I’ll know Who to ask. Camellia
Sweet….but fifty miles away, for a show that didn’t start until 7:30 at night? Just what was Barrage? Would my snoring disturb the rest of the audience?
I thought about it. My daughter recently separated from her husband, and we haven’t made time to talk. She might need support, or at the least I could satisfy some motherly curiosity. I make farther trips for other people all the time…going with this neighbor to the doctor, picking that friend up at the airport. If she had said, “I want to go, and I can’t go alone,” my answer would have been yes. Girlfriend is my best role. What she said was, “Do you want to go?”
No. Yes? I decided to ask for a miracle...remembering with miracles everybody wins.
I thought of the disciple of the Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri who barely missed the train for a festival she wanted desperately to attend. At the station she cried out to the Swami, miles away at the festival, to help her with her dilemma. The train stopped, then rolled backwards to fetch her. When she arrived at the Swami’s compound, she thanked him for his help. He suggested in the future arriving at the station a few minutes earlier might be less dramatic.
Most people don’t require a miracle in order to decide whether to accept an evening out, but my spiritual study says there is no order of difficulty with miracles, so I figure there is no order of magnitude, either. I had conflicting interests. The sum of the parts really is less than the whole when you don't want all the parts, which meant to me since I didn't want it all, I didn't know what I did want. Why not make miracles the grounding principle for living my best life?
“I really want to see this troupe,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. She had appealed to The Girlfriend, and The Girlfriend doesn’t rely on miracles. She is putty for any person who has a need she can fix. “Let’s do it.” But it didn’t feel okay.
“Why do I get the feeling you’re not real committed to this?” she said. “E-mail me when you’re sure.”
For two days I waited for word from the Higher Intelligence. The day of the performance I broke. I e-mailed her: “And where do you stand on Barrage? I've been so ambivalent on that one, I turned it over to the universe, but kept expecting the skies to part and the best answer for all to be broadcast.”
She wrote me back. She was tired and was heading out of town for the week-end. No hundred mile trip for her tonight, maybe we could eat out, maybe the Mexican place?
Yes, on eating out. No, on Mexican. I had my perfect answer, and I didn’t need a miracle for deciding where not to eat. The Mexican place was the only restaurant where my husband does eat, and was definitely off the girly night list.
My husband had been checking with me on our plans. He hates for me to be on the road after dark, so I figured he would be happy with the dinner in town. “Am I invited?” he asked. He rarely initiates a social occasion out. How could I say no? “Yes,” I said. But my heart wanted girly night. This was not my perfect answer. “Where are you eating?” he said. “Mexican,” I said. “Where else would we eat if you’re invited?” This was definitely an imperfect answer, but I am The Girlfriend. Pleasing everyone else has been my stock-in-trade. I know most people outgrow this trait. We all have our issues.
I thought about it. I have been working at telling the truth. I always thought I told the truth, mostly; maybe I hedged numbers when I related an incident, said somebody did something five times when they really did it four, but otherwise, I pretty much stuck to the facts. Only I have discovered The Girlfriend will tell the truth when she tells, but often she doesn’t tell. My practice kicked in. “About supper,” I said. “I don’t want Mexican. The cheese is always bad on Thursday.” That’s true. It is. We didn’t eat out on my birthday because we only eat Mexican out and my birthday was on a Thursday and the cheese….never mind. "We're going to the Crystal, if you want to come." I told the truth, but not the whole hog truth. I didn’t say I wanted girly night, but I needed to leave something for God to do.
Which isn’t quite true. I knew his answer when I asked. He’s a great husband and an excellent friend. I didn’t need to throw his gender in his face. I figured if he surprised me and said yes, that was the answer from God.
He said no. He is more used to making up his own mind than I am. “But ask her how Pistachio is doing.” He is curious, too, but he has his source for getting information. Guess who Pistachio is and who is the source.
At last I had my miracle. Girly night in town, no Mexican. My husband didn’t have to worry about us being on the road. We would eat Mexican tomorrow night, when the cheese was fresh. This felt right. Everybody wins.
But the real miracle is this: I am learning to speak my truth. With truth, no matter what the outcome, everybody wins. Maybe next time, I’ll tell it all. If I don’t know it all, I’ll know Who to ask. Camellia
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Getting to Here from There
Violet and William Kaczmark of Florissant, Missouri headed out for a family party one Saturday and got lost. Violet, 83, wanted to stop and ask directions. William, 81, refused. For nearly twenty-four hours they drove, stopping only for gas.
My first husband once got lost in a minor city in Louisiana. “Ask directions,” I urged. He, like William Kaczmark, refused. At one point he was reduced to wishing a flood would wipe out the city. He would have rather had an entire population struck dead than to ask a convenience store clerk which turn would take us in the right direction.
I chalked his stubbornness up to personality peculiarities until I went with my second husband and his brother to locate a family cemetery. We circled around the countryside for a good while, neither of them willing to find a local who could direct us. When they stopped for gas, I went into the little country store under the pretext of getting a Coke. I asked the man behind the counter which way we should go, and he told me. I wasn’t sure that the guys weren’t going to think I cheated by asking, and so would keep rambling until some cemetery, any cemetery, appeared. But I finally understood: Men don’t ask directions.
What do directions have to do with the spiritual path? For me it’s simple, and not just a guy problem. Often, as long as I can gas up and chug along, I keep puttering on a route which will get me nowhere, doing more of what got me so lost to begin with, hoping to recognize my destination if I arrive.
You would think by now I would instantly recognize this method is not only futile, but silly, because for me there really is a better way. Miracles. To me miracles are asking God, the Universe, a Higher Power, a Greater Intelligence for a different way of looking at where I am, for help to see what I can not now see. Each time I am able to do this I am given an answer, one much better than any I have been able to devise with my own, lonely, limited perception.
Take the kitten I found recently. I couldn’t keep it. I had already tried to find homes for kittens earlier, and knew the difficulties involved in private placement. The pound…well, it does what it can, but I know there is a lot it can’t do. I did remember to turn this kitten and its well-being over to God, and I also peddled it from door to door, guided from one animal-loving neighbor to the next. I refused to go to houses where I knew the kitten might not fare well, or to try to guilt a susceptible party into taking it, and thus transfer my burden. I got pretty disgusted along the way, thinking that what was futile and silly was my behavior. A grown-up simply must have better things to do with her time. But I had made it my intention to trust God that day. The kitten was taken in at the last house on my list, people I originally suspected would not be physically able to care for it. Not only did they want this little kitten, they wanted one more.
Maybe to you, this story sounds as if I got lost on the road and forgot to ask directions. No. I had turned the problem over to the Supreme Navigator. A friend told me, "I am more of the "prayer moves mountains, but you should keep pushing while you are praying" school.” I told her I thought a frumpy 55 year-old woman pushing a kitten off on the neighbors was pushing on the mountain. But more than that, I had been reminded of how miracles work.
According to my spiritual study, miracles do not depend on the magical powers of wishful thinking, or of any particular rituals. I was reminded miracles never take from one person while giving to another. Having requested, I can be sure I will be given the means by which the miracle is accomplished. My spiritual study tells me when I am not relying on myself to find the miracle, I am fully entitled to receive it when I request it, and that I should not be satisfied with less than the perfect answer.
The new kitty parents stopped a couple of days ago to tell me about the kitten’s progress. Not only was she thriving, but they adopted another one, one I already knew about. Why? Because I had dropped by a vet’s office (not my regular one) to pick up some dog food when a woman came in with a cat who had ridden to her office on the motor of her truck. I gave her my neighbors’ name. They did want the cat, and they said they were also adopting a friend’s soon-to-be homeless cat. No more, they said. They now had a full house.
And I was reminded, not only is God’s answer perfect, it is abundant, more than I could have asked for.
When I asked for a miracle, I wasn’t given a map. I was given a way. If I had done it on my own, I might have put the kitten back where I found it, taken it to the pound and let them do the dirty work for me, kept it even though I had all the pets I could manage, bullied someone else into taking it, given it to someone I knew couldn’t take care of it. I would have kept driving without asking for directions, which I have done plenty of times in the past.
When the Greater Intelligence gives me an answer, the Voice does not sound like Charleton Heston saying, “Lock and load.” I have to be alert. God might be speaking to me through my neighbor, or the person I’m entangled with. Maybe through the clerk in a convenience food store.
Or through an ominous looking stranger in a parking lot in a city far from my own town. That happened once during a particularly stressful period. A man who looked as if he could mug me asked as he was passing by, “Are you going to make it?” Maybe the stress had already driven me crazy, because I answered him. “I can only hope,” I said. I hurried on, afraid he might want to start conversing, when I heard him yell, “Stop!” Instead of bolting for my car like a sane person, I did stop. I turned to face him. I could not quite comprehend what he was telling me, but instead of nodding my head in agreement and making a break for it, I asked him to repeat himself. “Prayer,” he said. “Hope and prayer. Remember. It takes both.”
If I am particularly obtuse, if I have forgotten it takes both hope and prayer, sometimes God has to speak to me the way He did to William Kaczmark. A stranger who heard the missing persons report observed the Kaczmarks’ vehicle weaving erratically between lanes. He got them to pull over. Then he grabbed the keys and called the police. Violet said if the stranger hadn’t stopped them, they would still be lost.
So it really is not just guys who are challenged when it comes to asking directions. Any time I think I can bull my way through a situation based on sheer perseverance, I’m bound to make a bad situation worse. I’ve found it does take hope and prayer. That’s when I need to ask for directions. I need to ask for a miracle. I’m going to be lost until I do.
My first husband once got lost in a minor city in Louisiana. “Ask directions,” I urged. He, like William Kaczmark, refused. At one point he was reduced to wishing a flood would wipe out the city. He would have rather had an entire population struck dead than to ask a convenience store clerk which turn would take us in the right direction.
I chalked his stubbornness up to personality peculiarities until I went with my second husband and his brother to locate a family cemetery. We circled around the countryside for a good while, neither of them willing to find a local who could direct us. When they stopped for gas, I went into the little country store under the pretext of getting a Coke. I asked the man behind the counter which way we should go, and he told me. I wasn’t sure that the guys weren’t going to think I cheated by asking, and so would keep rambling until some cemetery, any cemetery, appeared. But I finally understood: Men don’t ask directions.
What do directions have to do with the spiritual path? For me it’s simple, and not just a guy problem. Often, as long as I can gas up and chug along, I keep puttering on a route which will get me nowhere, doing more of what got me so lost to begin with, hoping to recognize my destination if I arrive.
You would think by now I would instantly recognize this method is not only futile, but silly, because for me there really is a better way. Miracles. To me miracles are asking God, the Universe, a Higher Power, a Greater Intelligence for a different way of looking at where I am, for help to see what I can not now see. Each time I am able to do this I am given an answer, one much better than any I have been able to devise with my own, lonely, limited perception.
Take the kitten I found recently. I couldn’t keep it. I had already tried to find homes for kittens earlier, and knew the difficulties involved in private placement. The pound…well, it does what it can, but I know there is a lot it can’t do. I did remember to turn this kitten and its well-being over to God, and I also peddled it from door to door, guided from one animal-loving neighbor to the next. I refused to go to houses where I knew the kitten might not fare well, or to try to guilt a susceptible party into taking it, and thus transfer my burden. I got pretty disgusted along the way, thinking that what was futile and silly was my behavior. A grown-up simply must have better things to do with her time. But I had made it my intention to trust God that day. The kitten was taken in at the last house on my list, people I originally suspected would not be physically able to care for it. Not only did they want this little kitten, they wanted one more.
Maybe to you, this story sounds as if I got lost on the road and forgot to ask directions. No. I had turned the problem over to the Supreme Navigator. A friend told me, "I am more of the "prayer moves mountains, but you should keep pushing while you are praying" school.” I told her I thought a frumpy 55 year-old woman pushing a kitten off on the neighbors was pushing on the mountain. But more than that, I had been reminded of how miracles work.
According to my spiritual study, miracles do not depend on the magical powers of wishful thinking, or of any particular rituals. I was reminded miracles never take from one person while giving to another. Having requested, I can be sure I will be given the means by which the miracle is accomplished. My spiritual study tells me when I am not relying on myself to find the miracle, I am fully entitled to receive it when I request it, and that I should not be satisfied with less than the perfect answer.
The new kitty parents stopped a couple of days ago to tell me about the kitten’s progress. Not only was she thriving, but they adopted another one, one I already knew about. Why? Because I had dropped by a vet’s office (not my regular one) to pick up some dog food when a woman came in with a cat who had ridden to her office on the motor of her truck. I gave her my neighbors’ name. They did want the cat, and they said they were also adopting a friend’s soon-to-be homeless cat. No more, they said. They now had a full house.
And I was reminded, not only is God’s answer perfect, it is abundant, more than I could have asked for.
When I asked for a miracle, I wasn’t given a map. I was given a way. If I had done it on my own, I might have put the kitten back where I found it, taken it to the pound and let them do the dirty work for me, kept it even though I had all the pets I could manage, bullied someone else into taking it, given it to someone I knew couldn’t take care of it. I would have kept driving without asking for directions, which I have done plenty of times in the past.
When the Greater Intelligence gives me an answer, the Voice does not sound like Charleton Heston saying, “Lock and load.” I have to be alert. God might be speaking to me through my neighbor, or the person I’m entangled with. Maybe through the clerk in a convenience food store.
Or through an ominous looking stranger in a parking lot in a city far from my own town. That happened once during a particularly stressful period. A man who looked as if he could mug me asked as he was passing by, “Are you going to make it?” Maybe the stress had already driven me crazy, because I answered him. “I can only hope,” I said. I hurried on, afraid he might want to start conversing, when I heard him yell, “Stop!” Instead of bolting for my car like a sane person, I did stop. I turned to face him. I could not quite comprehend what he was telling me, but instead of nodding my head in agreement and making a break for it, I asked him to repeat himself. “Prayer,” he said. “Hope and prayer. Remember. It takes both.”
If I am particularly obtuse, if I have forgotten it takes both hope and prayer, sometimes God has to speak to me the way He did to William Kaczmark. A stranger who heard the missing persons report observed the Kaczmarks’ vehicle weaving erratically between lanes. He got them to pull over. Then he grabbed the keys and called the police. Violet said if the stranger hadn’t stopped them, they would still be lost.
So it really is not just guys who are challenged when it comes to asking directions. Any time I think I can bull my way through a situation based on sheer perseverance, I’m bound to make a bad situation worse. I’ve found it does take hope and prayer. That’s when I need to ask for directions. I need to ask for a miracle. I’m going to be lost until I do.
Sunday, November 07, 2004
One of Life's Little Lessons...
Last year for Christmas my sister gave me a basket full of kitchen gadgets and four 'recipes in a jar'….jars full of the ingredients for pasta and for cookies. The cookies were whole grain chippers. We ate through the pasta pretty quickly. We don’t often eat cookies, and the jar sat on the shelf, looking pretty. The first week in November I got a hankering for something sweet. I pulled the jar down and whipped up some cookies. They would have been wonderful except something, probably the oatmeal, was rancid. Into the trash with the batch of them.
The morals of this story are evident: Never confuse decorative and delicious. Goodness can't be hoarded. Better to be fat last winter than disappointed this fall. The Universe can give you a gift, all ingredients and instructions included, only if you are willing to receive it. Camellia
P. S. Does anybody have the recipe for whole grain chippers? Being denied, I now have a craving.
The morals of this story are evident: Never confuse decorative and delicious. Goodness can't be hoarded. Better to be fat last winter than disappointed this fall. The Universe can give you a gift, all ingredients and instructions included, only if you are willing to receive it. Camellia
P. S. Does anybody have the recipe for whole grain chippers? Being denied, I now have a craving.
Lights, Action, Camera/Cut
Researchers at the University of Rochester set ferrets to watching the movie Matrix, then measured the neural patterns in the ferrets’ visual cortex. Don’t worry if you don’t really know much about neural patterns, or you only have the vaguest idea a ‘visual cortex’ might be brain related (it is), or how you feel about the reality-altering Matrix, though exploring all those lines of thought are attractive. Today I want to talk about the results of the experiment: neural patterns in the visual cortex of adult ferrets correlated with the images they viewed. Not so with the young ferrets…which indicated, at least in ferrets, that young and old don’t comprehend what they are seeing in the same way.
But the experiment went further. Once the movie was over, the ferrets were placed in a darkened room. The researchers discovered the young ferrets’ brains did not keep working as if they were processing visual information, but the adult ferrets’ visual cortex kept working at 80 percent, only 20 percent less than when they were actually watching the movie.
Michael Weliky, associate professor of brain and cognitive science at the University of Rochester, says this study suggests the brain is doing 80 percent of its processing without any immediate, concrete visual data, processing which isn’t necessary for survival, since young ferrets don’t do it and still manage to breath in and out.
After reading about this study, I immediately incorporated it into the wash of ideas I’ve been gathering over the years, reconfirming my own superstitions: When we’re young, we don’t really have a fixed concept of what the world is about. As we grow, we make up a movie, playing it over and over again, elaborating, changing details, enhancing. Situation by situation we take external circumstances and adapt them to fit the reality we’ve already established in our brains. I know this is a slippery concept, but think about it. How else could your cousin have seen something encouraging enough in that scoundrel to have actually married him?
Check it out. The next time you are doing a mundane task—probably not folding clothes, because from what I hear, nobody gets around to actually folding the clothes any more— but anything else—rinsing the dishes, say. Try to notice your brain. What’s it doing? If you were a young ferret, it might be noticing how warm the water is, or observing the way the bubbles collect on the surface of glass. Of course young ferrets might have discovered the fun of splashing water, or wish to see how far a plate might sail across the kitchen…okay, my analogy is running away with me. But what are you doing, you who are neither ferret nor quite so young? Making a grocery list? Trying to explain to an ex-spouse how certain behaviors are really harmful to the kids? Wondering why you are doing the dishes—alone—again?
What happens when you just wash dishes? What happens when you walk to the car, you just walk to the car, aware of the leaves crunching under your feet, the dark clouds gathering in the west, the light haloing the edges.
I’ve tried it, hoping to find the joy the spiritualists talk about. I discovered I was more aware of the world about me, but for the most part I was still grim. One day I realized though I had stopped the movie in my head, I had retained the main character—me. And Me was grumpy…there were no victims to save, no villains to vanquish, no great feats to perform. A ferret brain with nothing to fiddle with. Who wouldn’t be grim?
What I do most of the time, even in my sleep, is rerun the movie. Like the ferrets, we are continually making the world in which we live…making it up with bits of that and pieces of this, matching them with the reality we’ve already constructed in our heads. But is the world in our heads the one we want to live in?
One day, for a brief moment, I gave up the Me. Now I was in the day, the walk, the step. And this is what happened when I gave up the movie and the concept of the main character… I can’t describe it. No drum rolls, no heralds of angels, no dissolving of the corporeal bindings of the material world. Nothing like the big-time mystics experience. Maybe peace. That’s as good a word as any. Peace and space. When I’m not running the movie of Me, external events still continue, but now, if I’m coming from peace and space, my ferret brain is still, peaceful, and I have left enough space for a different reality to emerge.
But the experiment went further. Once the movie was over, the ferrets were placed in a darkened room. The researchers discovered the young ferrets’ brains did not keep working as if they were processing visual information, but the adult ferrets’ visual cortex kept working at 80 percent, only 20 percent less than when they were actually watching the movie.
Michael Weliky, associate professor of brain and cognitive science at the University of Rochester, says this study suggests the brain is doing 80 percent of its processing without any immediate, concrete visual data, processing which isn’t necessary for survival, since young ferrets don’t do it and still manage to breath in and out.
After reading about this study, I immediately incorporated it into the wash of ideas I’ve been gathering over the years, reconfirming my own superstitions: When we’re young, we don’t really have a fixed concept of what the world is about. As we grow, we make up a movie, playing it over and over again, elaborating, changing details, enhancing. Situation by situation we take external circumstances and adapt them to fit the reality we’ve already established in our brains. I know this is a slippery concept, but think about it. How else could your cousin have seen something encouraging enough in that scoundrel to have actually married him?
Check it out. The next time you are doing a mundane task—probably not folding clothes, because from what I hear, nobody gets around to actually folding the clothes any more— but anything else—rinsing the dishes, say. Try to notice your brain. What’s it doing? If you were a young ferret, it might be noticing how warm the water is, or observing the way the bubbles collect on the surface of glass. Of course young ferrets might have discovered the fun of splashing water, or wish to see how far a plate might sail across the kitchen…okay, my analogy is running away with me. But what are you doing, you who are neither ferret nor quite so young? Making a grocery list? Trying to explain to an ex-spouse how certain behaviors are really harmful to the kids? Wondering why you are doing the dishes—alone—again?
What happens when you just wash dishes? What happens when you walk to the car, you just walk to the car, aware of the leaves crunching under your feet, the dark clouds gathering in the west, the light haloing the edges.
I’ve tried it, hoping to find the joy the spiritualists talk about. I discovered I was more aware of the world about me, but for the most part I was still grim. One day I realized though I had stopped the movie in my head, I had retained the main character—me. And Me was grumpy…there were no victims to save, no villains to vanquish, no great feats to perform. A ferret brain with nothing to fiddle with. Who wouldn’t be grim?
What I do most of the time, even in my sleep, is rerun the movie. Like the ferrets, we are continually making the world in which we live…making it up with bits of that and pieces of this, matching them with the reality we’ve already constructed in our heads. But is the world in our heads the one we want to live in?
One day, for a brief moment, I gave up the Me. Now I was in the day, the walk, the step. And this is what happened when I gave up the movie and the concept of the main character… I can’t describe it. No drum rolls, no heralds of angels, no dissolving of the corporeal bindings of the material world. Nothing like the big-time mystics experience. Maybe peace. That’s as good a word as any. Peace and space. When I’m not running the movie of Me, external events still continue, but now, if I’m coming from peace and space, my ferret brain is still, peaceful, and I have left enough space for a different reality to emerge.
Saturday, November 06, 2004
Aunt Camellia's Rules for MOPB
MOPB—Minding Other People’s Business—is a spiritual path as much as any other, and Aunt Camellia, Crone Extraordinaire, is the expert due to background, focus, and avocation. She issues from a long line of Tenders of How Things Ought to Be. Many a family member has traveled to far climes to escape the scrutiny of the Tenders. As a cousin said of one of the escapees, “If she didn’t want us talking about her, she shouldn’t lead such an interesting life.” Aunt Camellia also spent her youth and a long time after observing. Other people seemed to know the right way of doing things, and she felt if she looked closely enough, she would know, too. When that didn’t work, and Camellia found the enjoyment of outrageous behavior of her own wasn’t sustainable, she began reading, searching for great words to lead her on a better path. Now, after nearly a whole lifetime on this journey, Aunt Camellia has codified the process of minding other people’s business for herself, and will gladly share her insights with you.
Rule 1—Aunt Camellia often finds herself taking more than merely entertainment value upon hearing about the to-doings of others. She offers advice, thinks about it, offers it again, keeps thinking about it, offers it…well, you have the picture, and probably have had the benefit of such advice from one of Aunt Camellia’s many counterparts. Aunt Camellia has become, as the Buddhists say, attached to both the advice and the outcome. Which means, as she has often said without understanding the import of her own words, she is talking to herself. The world is Aunt Camellia’s mirror. When she points a problem out in others, the Universe is drawing her attention to a problem she has with herself. And if she really really doesn’t want to address this problem, telling others how they can fix themselves certainly keeps her too busy from noticing and changing her own behavior. On the spiritual path, when Aunt Camellia finds herself in swivit over other people’s behaviors, she is relieved when she remembers it is all about her. When she can finally muzzle herself and take a deep breath, she can hear all that good advice she has been shoveling out. Aha, she’ll say. And smile, remembering Rule 1—the best advice is given to yourself.
Rule 2—You, dear soul, might come to Aunt Camellia and say, “My life is so unruly, and I really think something must change….here, him, her, them, more, less…etc.” Next to herself, this is Aunt Camellia’s favorite topic, and she will gently answer, “The world is your mirror. What you see outside yourself is merely a reflection of confusion within.” Now you will probably bristle, thinking Aunt Camellia is telling you to stay and suffer in some untenable situation. Not so, and she will be glad to discuss this for hours. It’s so much more fun than dusting, especially if coffee and chocolate are included. But in essence the discussion always comes back to Rule 2—when you are in a stew, unless you recognize the thinking which got you there, you can leave, but you will only take the stewpot and the fire with you.
Rule 3—Perhaps you plan on coming to Auntee and saying, “Should I change…here, him, her, them, more, or less…?” No. You don’t have the stamina for it, and you will only come back later whining how nothing worked out. Aunt Camellia can’t abide a whiner (which probably means she is one, but she isn’t handing out advice on whining, so doesn’t have to deal with it herself right now) and will do anything to avoid even the future possibility of listening to one. She firmly believes in Rule 3—if you have to ask permission, don’t do it.
Rule 4—You have just come to Aunt Camellia and said, “I am going to do such and thus..” incredibly stupid thing. If Aunt Camellia has managed to notice you have not asked for discussion, and she is not wrestling with the same idiotic issue herself, she figures it is a done deal. She’ll say, “Have fun.” Because as is stated in Rule 4—if you need the lesson, the Universe will provide it. Just remember, you are about to live an interesting life.
That’s it. Four rules which cover all the bases Aunt Camellia can think of. You might want to keep a copy of these rules in your billfold for a handy reference, in case Aunt Camellia isn't available (she's never learned how to answer her cell phone), and you are in need of some emergency advice. If you are old enough that giving advice is far more interesting than doing the things that generates it, congratulations. You are probably a Crone, and already an expert on Other People’s Business. Feel free to adapt Aunt Camellia’s rules for your own use. If you get them wrong, somebody will tell you about it.
Rule 1—Aunt Camellia often finds herself taking more than merely entertainment value upon hearing about the to-doings of others. She offers advice, thinks about it, offers it again, keeps thinking about it, offers it…well, you have the picture, and probably have had the benefit of such advice from one of Aunt Camellia’s many counterparts. Aunt Camellia has become, as the Buddhists say, attached to both the advice and the outcome. Which means, as she has often said without understanding the import of her own words, she is talking to herself. The world is Aunt Camellia’s mirror. When she points a problem out in others, the Universe is drawing her attention to a problem she has with herself. And if she really really doesn’t want to address this problem, telling others how they can fix themselves certainly keeps her too busy from noticing and changing her own behavior. On the spiritual path, when Aunt Camellia finds herself in swivit over other people’s behaviors, she is relieved when she remembers it is all about her. When she can finally muzzle herself and take a deep breath, she can hear all that good advice she has been shoveling out. Aha, she’ll say. And smile, remembering Rule 1—the best advice is given to yourself.
Rule 2—You, dear soul, might come to Aunt Camellia and say, “My life is so unruly, and I really think something must change….here, him, her, them, more, less…etc.” Next to herself, this is Aunt Camellia’s favorite topic, and she will gently answer, “The world is your mirror. What you see outside yourself is merely a reflection of confusion within.” Now you will probably bristle, thinking Aunt Camellia is telling you to stay and suffer in some untenable situation. Not so, and she will be glad to discuss this for hours. It’s so much more fun than dusting, especially if coffee and chocolate are included. But in essence the discussion always comes back to Rule 2—when you are in a stew, unless you recognize the thinking which got you there, you can leave, but you will only take the stewpot and the fire with you.
Rule 3—Perhaps you plan on coming to Auntee and saying, “Should I change…here, him, her, them, more, or less…?” No. You don’t have the stamina for it, and you will only come back later whining how nothing worked out. Aunt Camellia can’t abide a whiner (which probably means she is one, but she isn’t handing out advice on whining, so doesn’t have to deal with it herself right now) and will do anything to avoid even the future possibility of listening to one. She firmly believes in Rule 3—if you have to ask permission, don’t do it.
Rule 4—You have just come to Aunt Camellia and said, “I am going to do such and thus..” incredibly stupid thing. If Aunt Camellia has managed to notice you have not asked for discussion, and she is not wrestling with the same idiotic issue herself, she figures it is a done deal. She’ll say, “Have fun.” Because as is stated in Rule 4—if you need the lesson, the Universe will provide it. Just remember, you are about to live an interesting life.
That’s it. Four rules which cover all the bases Aunt Camellia can think of. You might want to keep a copy of these rules in your billfold for a handy reference, in case Aunt Camellia isn't available (she's never learned how to answer her cell phone), and you are in need of some emergency advice. If you are old enough that giving advice is far more interesting than doing the things that generates it, congratulations. You are probably a Crone, and already an expert on Other People’s Business. Feel free to adapt Aunt Camellia’s rules for your own use. If you get them wrong, somebody will tell you about it.
Friday, November 05, 2004
The Power of Prayer
A therapist friend of mine recently told me she sees many anxious clients in her practice. She said she teaches them new language skills, ones which allow them to comfort and reassure themselves. When they use the skills, they are happier and more confident. They have changed their emotions, they have changed their world, and science has the MRIs to prove it.
Unfortunately, what she sees is that these people just plain get tired of practicing new skills. It is work, and even though they like the results, they weary of the effort getting there.
This fits in with my theory, a metaphor if you choose to call it that, of how the world works. Our thoughts are electromagnetic impulses in our brains. We come into this world with certain tendencies, based on genetic and chemical make-up. Influenced by our environment, our genes instruct us to fire off synapses and flood our brain with certain chemicals, reinforcing our view, what we are teaching ourselves about the world. We begin a story line, embellish it, and tell it to ourselves over and over, until this fable we’ve concocted, pumped up by chemicals, entrenches certain habitual reactions, and we think we know reality. If the story becomes problematic enough, we try to change it. But it’s like trying to learn to ride a bicycle from start every morning of the world, and we give up from the fatigue, find ourselves plodding along on our crippled, mental feet, thinking the same old thoughts, getting the same old painful results. But at least it’s something we know. A little truth we can rest on.
Think about it. Think about something you would like to change. Let’s not even go to esoteric personality traits such as anxiety or irritation. Pick something physical. I smoked. I tell people I only smoked for three weeks, and quit every week after that for twenty-five years. I loved smoking. I hated smoking. Smoking made me calm. Smoking made me feel like a no-worth felon. Sometimes I quit for two hours. Sometimes I quit for three weeks. I would cry, I would rage. Where once I smothered my otherness in burning nicotine, I no longer had a defense between me and the prickful world, no pacifier. Even so, once I quit for three years. Why did I go back? I would tire of the effort it took to not smoke, even though during the three smokeless years I could not think about smoking a good deal of the time, and really preferred the not smoking life most of the time. But let something stressful happen, let me get around folks who were having a pleasant social time and drinking, let me surface from a deep concentration and want some instant relaxation, and I thought of my old friend, the cigarette. At those times, I understood when one of my friends told me, “I knew I could choose cocaine or life,” she said. “So I quit. And felt I had chosen second-best.” Finally, the third time the police came to the house in the life of our tempestuous child, I grabbed a friend, jumped in her car, told her to give me a cigarette and dare not to say a word.
How did I finish for good? I reached that juncture. I knew it was cigarettes or life. Still, I could not quit. One day in my back yard, I fell to my knees. Okay, so the yard’s private and nobody could see me. I don’t know exactly what I said, but I imagine it something like this, “I made this addiction, and cannot unmake it, but I am willing to let it go. Please help me.” A great cry from the heart. Then I immediately got up, went to the swing, sat down and lit up.
And it tasted bad. I looked at the smoldering cigarette. I did not want it. I put it out. I’ve never smoked again in my life. I’ve never wanted to.
It did take me about three weeks to get over the ritual aspects, and perhaps some physical side-effects. I was tired. I slept more. I prayed to let go of my thoughts of cigarettes. And they did pass. My husband still smokes. Unlike the previous times, this time his or other people’s smoke didn’t make me nauseous. It didn’t drive me crazy with desire. Once I dreamed I smoked, something which occurred in my past quitting episodes. In the past I would wake up devastated, with the feeling I had lost and cigarettes had won again. This time in the dream I realized I was smoking, and like that morning in the swing, I looked at the cigarette. “It’s just a choice,” I said to myself in the dream, “I can smoke if I want to, or not.” I didn’t want to, not even in the dream. After all those years, I had finally let cigarettes go. I was free.
Now if it worked for cigarettes, why am I still grappling with fat and salt, clutter, anxiety, the need for reassurance and approval? What is it I have not been able to let go of?
I don’t know. I am still struggling in these areas, still practicing, still having some success and some setbacks. But I believe this. I believe change can come, and when it does I won’t have layered new thoughts or new ways to practice over the old ones, though for now the practice may make me stronger. When change comes it will be because I have, with help from an Intelligence greater than I, let go of that which I have made and which no longer works for me. I will have asked, and I will have received. I will have changed my mind.
Unfortunately, what she sees is that these people just plain get tired of practicing new skills. It is work, and even though they like the results, they weary of the effort getting there.
This fits in with my theory, a metaphor if you choose to call it that, of how the world works. Our thoughts are electromagnetic impulses in our brains. We come into this world with certain tendencies, based on genetic and chemical make-up. Influenced by our environment, our genes instruct us to fire off synapses and flood our brain with certain chemicals, reinforcing our view, what we are teaching ourselves about the world. We begin a story line, embellish it, and tell it to ourselves over and over, until this fable we’ve concocted, pumped up by chemicals, entrenches certain habitual reactions, and we think we know reality. If the story becomes problematic enough, we try to change it. But it’s like trying to learn to ride a bicycle from start every morning of the world, and we give up from the fatigue, find ourselves plodding along on our crippled, mental feet, thinking the same old thoughts, getting the same old painful results. But at least it’s something we know. A little truth we can rest on.
Think about it. Think about something you would like to change. Let’s not even go to esoteric personality traits such as anxiety or irritation. Pick something physical. I smoked. I tell people I only smoked for three weeks, and quit every week after that for twenty-five years. I loved smoking. I hated smoking. Smoking made me calm. Smoking made me feel like a no-worth felon. Sometimes I quit for two hours. Sometimes I quit for three weeks. I would cry, I would rage. Where once I smothered my otherness in burning nicotine, I no longer had a defense between me and the prickful world, no pacifier. Even so, once I quit for three years. Why did I go back? I would tire of the effort it took to not smoke, even though during the three smokeless years I could not think about smoking a good deal of the time, and really preferred the not smoking life most of the time. But let something stressful happen, let me get around folks who were having a pleasant social time and drinking, let me surface from a deep concentration and want some instant relaxation, and I thought of my old friend, the cigarette. At those times, I understood when one of my friends told me, “I knew I could choose cocaine or life,” she said. “So I quit. And felt I had chosen second-best.” Finally, the third time the police came to the house in the life of our tempestuous child, I grabbed a friend, jumped in her car, told her to give me a cigarette and dare not to say a word.
How did I finish for good? I reached that juncture. I knew it was cigarettes or life. Still, I could not quit. One day in my back yard, I fell to my knees. Okay, so the yard’s private and nobody could see me. I don’t know exactly what I said, but I imagine it something like this, “I made this addiction, and cannot unmake it, but I am willing to let it go. Please help me.” A great cry from the heart. Then I immediately got up, went to the swing, sat down and lit up.
And it tasted bad. I looked at the smoldering cigarette. I did not want it. I put it out. I’ve never smoked again in my life. I’ve never wanted to.
It did take me about three weeks to get over the ritual aspects, and perhaps some physical side-effects. I was tired. I slept more. I prayed to let go of my thoughts of cigarettes. And they did pass. My husband still smokes. Unlike the previous times, this time his or other people’s smoke didn’t make me nauseous. It didn’t drive me crazy with desire. Once I dreamed I smoked, something which occurred in my past quitting episodes. In the past I would wake up devastated, with the feeling I had lost and cigarettes had won again. This time in the dream I realized I was smoking, and like that morning in the swing, I looked at the cigarette. “It’s just a choice,” I said to myself in the dream, “I can smoke if I want to, or not.” I didn’t want to, not even in the dream. After all those years, I had finally let cigarettes go. I was free.
Now if it worked for cigarettes, why am I still grappling with fat and salt, clutter, anxiety, the need for reassurance and approval? What is it I have not been able to let go of?
I don’t know. I am still struggling in these areas, still practicing, still having some success and some setbacks. But I believe this. I believe change can come, and when it does I won’t have layered new thoughts or new ways to practice over the old ones, though for now the practice may make me stronger. When change comes it will be because I have, with help from an Intelligence greater than I, let go of that which I have made and which no longer works for me. I will have asked, and I will have received. I will have changed my mind.
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
A Small Salvation
I arrived home late one Tuesday afternoon and my husband told me something needed rescuing. “In the garage around the corner. I think a cat’s got its collar caught on something.” We pass the garage when we walk the dogs. “If you have time to find it tomorrow, just let it go.”
No need to ask why me. It’s in my job description. “It’s a kitten,” I said. “I heard it before I left yesterday morning.” I had been away overnight.
“Don’t come home with it,” he said. If he had been wearing boots, he would have been shivering in them. We live with five cats and three dogs, none of which we have because either of us in a moment of madness said, ‘Pet! What a good idea.’ “Take it straight to the pound. Just rescue it; don’t save it.”
Easy for him to say. I’m the rescuer, and I have to deal with the consequences. Finders, weepers; law of the ‘hood.
It was a kitten, solemn green eyes, upturned nose, fuzzy black fur. Hungry. A talker who thought I was scarily fascinating. We made introduction Wednesday morning, but the kitten was demanding and illusive, which might be why it was still alive alone.
By Wednesday night it had moved across the street into the Freeman’s irises. Gena Freeman waved at me as she left on errands on Thursday morning. When she returned, she asked me if I needed help. We really aren’t on a neighborly name basis, and I guess she wondered why I had chosen to spend the morning sitting in her flower bed. I admitted to what I was doing and asked if she wanted this kitten, even though when I had tried to give the last one to her husband he almost snarled when he turned me down, so I already knew the answer. I won’t tell you about their dog and the stray kittens, two litters born at their house, and they don’t have a cat. Gena did say the dog was at the vet, and I could go in her back yard if I needed to, which was friendly of her, but it might have been because I wouldn’t be visible behind the fence.
I don’t know how long I sat among the fall debris while the ants swarmed the nibbles almost as soon as I put them down. I wondered if I was going to entice this tiny kitten to its death by ant bite. My husband is fond of repeating, ‘No good deed will go unpunished.’ I guess that is why he sends me to do good. I wondered if people with day jobs would even bother. But I had declared myself retired, and could waste time any way I wanted.
And I suspected a waste of time it was because this was the fifth lost kitten of the season, a very testy season. I have long known folks who liked animals had their full comportment, whether that happened to be one or eight; the folks with twenty-three were purely crazy and best avoided. Come to think of it, that might apply to folks with eight….look at me hunkered down in my neighbor’s plants. I also knew folks who didn’t like animals shouldn’t have them. That our neighborhood’s cat population had recently exploded, and this was likely not the end of the abandoned kitty season. That the Humane Shelter did its best, but was often overrun and if I took the kitten there, the only thing I might be saving it from was starvation. I also knew my limitations, and if there were nothing else available, this kitten would have to go to the pound. Really. It would.
But there I was, and there it was, looking at me with those huge green eyes, and nibbling out of my hand, alert enough to jump if I shifted. It would run back behind the azalea stems while begging me to be its momma, then come out to wrestle an iris leaf, climbing almost to the top before it tumbled down in surprise, it was that tiny and light. Under its fuzzy black coat it gleamed brown in the sun.
Chocolat, I thought. I made the mistake of giving it a name because, in spite of all I knew and all the kittens who can’t be rescued, here it was, and here I was, and God would just have to take over. I swooped my hand down and came up with kitten. Now it was God’s turn.
“Cute,” said Stephanie at the vet’s. “Wish we could keep her.” She pushed the chewed-ear cat off the desk. It was their fourth office kitty. No telling how many barn cats they had. All former strays. Stephanie wormed the kitten, defleaed her, and clipped her nails, all for free. “She’s seven weeks old, and a she.” Stephanie would also furnish stomach medicine after the kitten got the new-home diarrhea. And she promised to help look for a place for it, right after the three kittens someone called about yesterday. A woman was coming in the door as I left. “I have this kitten in car…” I heard before the door shut. No telling how many office cats the vet would have tomorrow, but Chocolat wouldn't be one of them. I didn’t have the essential pushiness…it’s why I never got caught up in parties selling cosmetics and plasticware at home, which might have helped me bypass the rescue business all together.
Miss Fran denied ever telling me when I found the next kitten, she would have to buy a baby gate to keep her little Shitzsu out of the litter box.
Kathy told me she thought the Freemans were responsible, or the Walkers who owned the garage where it was originally heard. Kathy has one twenty-three year old cat, and an orange tabby, a cantankerous aging rescue himself. She feeds them outside, and her oldest cat has to have Fancy Feast, which means so do the possums, coons, the pound puppy on the east, and at least three of my bunch. She is aware of the Kitty Rules of the Wild, rules I am sure the Freemans and Walkers wouldn’t abide by even if they happened to know them. What Kathy really wants is the miniature sherbet poodle she often baby sits.
Diane loves chocolate and kittens, and Chocolat and I spent an afternoon in the country, waiting to see if a match could be made. But her fat cat wasn’t interested in a kitten, and her husband even less so. Diane has been ill, and Ray felt one more thing, even a tiny kitten, might be the one must-do too many. Diane said when her cat was no more, they would get two kittens to grow up together and keep each other company.
Saturday I drove a friend to the airport. Of course we talked about the kitten dilemma. “I could take it the pound,” I said. I had already had this discussion with my husband. “I know the director. She would make sure my kitty had a home, but some other kitty that would have been adopted might have to die. I wouldn’t really have saved anybody from anything.”
“Take it and leave and don’t look back,” my friend said. She didn’t like cats anyway. “Think the best will happen.”
I looked at her. Within four years of each other, both my parents died from lingering, devastating illnesses. I was their primary caregiver. Somehow I reckoned if I were going to believe in God, I wanted One Who helped me to look the hardness of this life in the face—there’s more to truth than pretty. “There are no good answers,” I said, quoting my husband. “I guess I would rather know that up front.”
While I was gone, Chocolat was confined to my bathroom. My husband was prudently keeping his molecules separate from the kitty’s molecute ones. That, and the dogs thought it was a new squeaky toy. He could afford to be prudent. He had me. What I had when I returned was a bathroom tracked with kitty litter and the new-home diarrhea. Did you know kittens are messier than cats? Ach. I didn’t mean to tell you that, not with the fertile season still upon us. They outgrow it really soon. They do.
Sunday. This kitten didn’t need to live in a bathroom. Every day was a day its brain was being hard-wired. It needed a person to bond with. Every day it was getting bigger, already no longer the air and feather creature who could climb an iris leaf.
I had turned this kitten over to God, a quick, brief venture into openness because I had been much too busy for an extended session of meditation and prayer. But if I didn’t make some effort on this kitty’s behalf, it was going to soon be at the pound, God’s plan or no.
I could have made my step-daughter adopt it. She’s got a big heart and only two cats, but that's a chancy path to follow. Our three dogs were originally hers. You have to think about those things.
Sunday. Jesus said when your ox was in the ditch, pull it out. The kitten was in the bathroom. I did the only thing I could think of. I put it in a box and started down the street. I met up with Miss Fran and her Shitzsu, Pooky, out for a walk.
“I guess if I were a nice person, I would take it,” she said.
“If you took it and didn’t want it, you would be too cranky to be a nice person,” I said.
Miss Fran made the rounds with me, standing in the road while I knocked on doors, feeling like a kid delivering a Halloween trick. People, interested and friendly and generous to a grown woman standing on their steps with a box of kitten, didn’t want kitty litter, didn’t want more cats, didn’t want cats, didn’t want this cat, wanted this cat but couldn’t have it, had toddlers, had killer dogs, weren’t idiots. “But if you find a Russian blue,” said the woman who feeds all the cats—outside—in her part of the neighborhood. “But if you find a puppy…,” said the man whose ancient Lab had recently died. They passed me from house to house, with a smile and a touch on the shoulder, to someone down the street or around the corner who might take a cat. Miss Fran and Pooky got tired and went home. I was almost out of houses, and the ox was still in the ditch. I was tired myself, and grim, but I had begun the course, and I would stay it. I wouldn’t push this cat on people who didn’t want it. I wouldn’t give it to the woman with the two-year-old. I would knock on the next door, and the next, and then go home, giving God enough time to show me what I needed to learn, even if it was to let go, even if it was the pound.
I decided I would check with Mary Jane, though she had bad arthritis, because she had just one cat, and her's was the last house before I was caught between my step-daughter and the pound. She came to the door, looked in the box. She called to Keith. They looked at each other. “Shop kitty,” they said. They grinned. They would come for the kitten after they went downtown and got a carrier. They would keep this kitten to live in their store and kill mice.
“It’s too little to be a shop kitty,” my husband said. He was holding Chocolat, petting her up before her lonely shop life began, now that she wouldn’t be around to permanently bond with him.
“She’ll be all alone,” Miss Fran said when I called her to tell her the news. “She’s too little to be alone.”
Fine help they were. Was this God’s answer? Making do?
Mary Jane knocked on the door. She’d come for Scarlett. She was still grinning. “Green eyes, black hair,” she said. And a pointed face. They didn’t just have any name for her; they had the perfect name. They had fixed up a little room for her until she got big enough to be out on her own. They were at the store seven days a week. They were going to the pound and get her a kitty for company.
“Scarlett will have a long, happy life,” Fran said.
Once I had a cat with an inoperable goiter which would eventually strangle her. I was dallying with visualization at the time, but wasn’t sure what to visualize. I ‘saw’ my kitty five years in the future, healthy. Her goiter vanished. The vet couldn’t explain it. I had started feeding the cats tuna just about then; maybe there were healing properties in tuna, maybe the iodine of the ocean. Or maybe it was something else, something less explainable. But my cat got well when the vet thought she was terminal. Six months later, just about the time the goiter would have killed her, she disappeared.
I don’t know if Scarlett will have a long and happy life. I don’t know if God, with a lot of trudging on my part, provided her with just the right people. What seems to be miracles to me often look like minute shifts in the world of form, if you want to be objective. Who can tell?
This I do know, thinking of Chocolat, and the people who helped us, the people who listened and advised, all the people who had enough, too much, who wanted more, who wanted different, all the sunny days and dark nights of people, living and trying and failing and reaching out to extend a hand--maybe we can’t always be rescued. But here I am and here you are, and if we are steady enough, sturdy enough, we may well discover we’ve always been saved.
No need to ask why me. It’s in my job description. “It’s a kitten,” I said. “I heard it before I left yesterday morning.” I had been away overnight.
“Don’t come home with it,” he said. If he had been wearing boots, he would have been shivering in them. We live with five cats and three dogs, none of which we have because either of us in a moment of madness said, ‘Pet! What a good idea.’ “Take it straight to the pound. Just rescue it; don’t save it.”
Easy for him to say. I’m the rescuer, and I have to deal with the consequences. Finders, weepers; law of the ‘hood.
It was a kitten, solemn green eyes, upturned nose, fuzzy black fur. Hungry. A talker who thought I was scarily fascinating. We made introduction Wednesday morning, but the kitten was demanding and illusive, which might be why it was still alive alone.
By Wednesday night it had moved across the street into the Freeman’s irises. Gena Freeman waved at me as she left on errands on Thursday morning. When she returned, she asked me if I needed help. We really aren’t on a neighborly name basis, and I guess she wondered why I had chosen to spend the morning sitting in her flower bed. I admitted to what I was doing and asked if she wanted this kitten, even though when I had tried to give the last one to her husband he almost snarled when he turned me down, so I already knew the answer. I won’t tell you about their dog and the stray kittens, two litters born at their house, and they don’t have a cat. Gena did say the dog was at the vet, and I could go in her back yard if I needed to, which was friendly of her, but it might have been because I wouldn’t be visible behind the fence.
I don’t know how long I sat among the fall debris while the ants swarmed the nibbles almost as soon as I put them down. I wondered if I was going to entice this tiny kitten to its death by ant bite. My husband is fond of repeating, ‘No good deed will go unpunished.’ I guess that is why he sends me to do good. I wondered if people with day jobs would even bother. But I had declared myself retired, and could waste time any way I wanted.
And I suspected a waste of time it was because this was the fifth lost kitten of the season, a very testy season. I have long known folks who liked animals had their full comportment, whether that happened to be one or eight; the folks with twenty-three were purely crazy and best avoided. Come to think of it, that might apply to folks with eight….look at me hunkered down in my neighbor’s plants. I also knew folks who didn’t like animals shouldn’t have them. That our neighborhood’s cat population had recently exploded, and this was likely not the end of the abandoned kitty season. That the Humane Shelter did its best, but was often overrun and if I took the kitten there, the only thing I might be saving it from was starvation. I also knew my limitations, and if there were nothing else available, this kitten would have to go to the pound. Really. It would.
But there I was, and there it was, looking at me with those huge green eyes, and nibbling out of my hand, alert enough to jump if I shifted. It would run back behind the azalea stems while begging me to be its momma, then come out to wrestle an iris leaf, climbing almost to the top before it tumbled down in surprise, it was that tiny and light. Under its fuzzy black coat it gleamed brown in the sun.
Chocolat, I thought. I made the mistake of giving it a name because, in spite of all I knew and all the kittens who can’t be rescued, here it was, and here I was, and God would just have to take over. I swooped my hand down and came up with kitten. Now it was God’s turn.
“Cute,” said Stephanie at the vet’s. “Wish we could keep her.” She pushed the chewed-ear cat off the desk. It was their fourth office kitty. No telling how many barn cats they had. All former strays. Stephanie wormed the kitten, defleaed her, and clipped her nails, all for free. “She’s seven weeks old, and a she.” Stephanie would also furnish stomach medicine after the kitten got the new-home diarrhea. And she promised to help look for a place for it, right after the three kittens someone called about yesterday. A woman was coming in the door as I left. “I have this kitten in car…” I heard before the door shut. No telling how many office cats the vet would have tomorrow, but Chocolat wouldn't be one of them. I didn’t have the essential pushiness…it’s why I never got caught up in parties selling cosmetics and plasticware at home, which might have helped me bypass the rescue business all together.
Miss Fran denied ever telling me when I found the next kitten, she would have to buy a baby gate to keep her little Shitzsu out of the litter box.
Kathy told me she thought the Freemans were responsible, or the Walkers who owned the garage where it was originally heard. Kathy has one twenty-three year old cat, and an orange tabby, a cantankerous aging rescue himself. She feeds them outside, and her oldest cat has to have Fancy Feast, which means so do the possums, coons, the pound puppy on the east, and at least three of my bunch. She is aware of the Kitty Rules of the Wild, rules I am sure the Freemans and Walkers wouldn’t abide by even if they happened to know them. What Kathy really wants is the miniature sherbet poodle she often baby sits.
Diane loves chocolate and kittens, and Chocolat and I spent an afternoon in the country, waiting to see if a match could be made. But her fat cat wasn’t interested in a kitten, and her husband even less so. Diane has been ill, and Ray felt one more thing, even a tiny kitten, might be the one must-do too many. Diane said when her cat was no more, they would get two kittens to grow up together and keep each other company.
Saturday I drove a friend to the airport. Of course we talked about the kitten dilemma. “I could take it the pound,” I said. I had already had this discussion with my husband. “I know the director. She would make sure my kitty had a home, but some other kitty that would have been adopted might have to die. I wouldn’t really have saved anybody from anything.”
“Take it and leave and don’t look back,” my friend said. She didn’t like cats anyway. “Think the best will happen.”
I looked at her. Within four years of each other, both my parents died from lingering, devastating illnesses. I was their primary caregiver. Somehow I reckoned if I were going to believe in God, I wanted One Who helped me to look the hardness of this life in the face—there’s more to truth than pretty. “There are no good answers,” I said, quoting my husband. “I guess I would rather know that up front.”
While I was gone, Chocolat was confined to my bathroom. My husband was prudently keeping his molecules separate from the kitty’s molecute ones. That, and the dogs thought it was a new squeaky toy. He could afford to be prudent. He had me. What I had when I returned was a bathroom tracked with kitty litter and the new-home diarrhea. Did you know kittens are messier than cats? Ach. I didn’t mean to tell you that, not with the fertile season still upon us. They outgrow it really soon. They do.
Sunday. This kitten didn’t need to live in a bathroom. Every day was a day its brain was being hard-wired. It needed a person to bond with. Every day it was getting bigger, already no longer the air and feather creature who could climb an iris leaf.
I had turned this kitten over to God, a quick, brief venture into openness because I had been much too busy for an extended session of meditation and prayer. But if I didn’t make some effort on this kitty’s behalf, it was going to soon be at the pound, God’s plan or no.
I could have made my step-daughter adopt it. She’s got a big heart and only two cats, but that's a chancy path to follow. Our three dogs were originally hers. You have to think about those things.
Sunday. Jesus said when your ox was in the ditch, pull it out. The kitten was in the bathroom. I did the only thing I could think of. I put it in a box and started down the street. I met up with Miss Fran and her Shitzsu, Pooky, out for a walk.
“I guess if I were a nice person, I would take it,” she said.
“If you took it and didn’t want it, you would be too cranky to be a nice person,” I said.
Miss Fran made the rounds with me, standing in the road while I knocked on doors, feeling like a kid delivering a Halloween trick. People, interested and friendly and generous to a grown woman standing on their steps with a box of kitten, didn’t want kitty litter, didn’t want more cats, didn’t want cats, didn’t want this cat, wanted this cat but couldn’t have it, had toddlers, had killer dogs, weren’t idiots. “But if you find a Russian blue,” said the woman who feeds all the cats—outside—in her part of the neighborhood. “But if you find a puppy…,” said the man whose ancient Lab had recently died. They passed me from house to house, with a smile and a touch on the shoulder, to someone down the street or around the corner who might take a cat. Miss Fran and Pooky got tired and went home. I was almost out of houses, and the ox was still in the ditch. I was tired myself, and grim, but I had begun the course, and I would stay it. I wouldn’t push this cat on people who didn’t want it. I wouldn’t give it to the woman with the two-year-old. I would knock on the next door, and the next, and then go home, giving God enough time to show me what I needed to learn, even if it was to let go, even if it was the pound.
I decided I would check with Mary Jane, though she had bad arthritis, because she had just one cat, and her's was the last house before I was caught between my step-daughter and the pound. She came to the door, looked in the box. She called to Keith. They looked at each other. “Shop kitty,” they said. They grinned. They would come for the kitten after they went downtown and got a carrier. They would keep this kitten to live in their store and kill mice.
“It’s too little to be a shop kitty,” my husband said. He was holding Chocolat, petting her up before her lonely shop life began, now that she wouldn’t be around to permanently bond with him.
“She’ll be all alone,” Miss Fran said when I called her to tell her the news. “She’s too little to be alone.”
Fine help they were. Was this God’s answer? Making do?
Mary Jane knocked on the door. She’d come for Scarlett. She was still grinning. “Green eyes, black hair,” she said. And a pointed face. They didn’t just have any name for her; they had the perfect name. They had fixed up a little room for her until she got big enough to be out on her own. They were at the store seven days a week. They were going to the pound and get her a kitty for company.
“Scarlett will have a long, happy life,” Fran said.
Once I had a cat with an inoperable goiter which would eventually strangle her. I was dallying with visualization at the time, but wasn’t sure what to visualize. I ‘saw’ my kitty five years in the future, healthy. Her goiter vanished. The vet couldn’t explain it. I had started feeding the cats tuna just about then; maybe there were healing properties in tuna, maybe the iodine of the ocean. Or maybe it was something else, something less explainable. But my cat got well when the vet thought she was terminal. Six months later, just about the time the goiter would have killed her, she disappeared.
I don’t know if Scarlett will have a long and happy life. I don’t know if God, with a lot of trudging on my part, provided her with just the right people. What seems to be miracles to me often look like minute shifts in the world of form, if you want to be objective. Who can tell?
This I do know, thinking of Chocolat, and the people who helped us, the people who listened and advised, all the people who had enough, too much, who wanted more, who wanted different, all the sunny days and dark nights of people, living and trying and failing and reaching out to extend a hand--maybe we can’t always be rescued. But here I am and here you are, and if we are steady enough, sturdy enough, we may well discover we’ve always been saved.
Sunday, October 24, 2004
Force Field
My little Yorkie, Bo, is fond of a squeaky toy. His greed tickles us. He reminds me of a three-year-old, so wild for a new plaything he requires presents if someone else is getting them. Lately he has learned toys come in bags, and we have had great fun, pushing the excitement to a crescendo with ‘find the toy.’ When all the goodies are distributed (we have three dogs, and they think there should be a prize for each), he goes back to the shopping bag, hoping for more. Since he discovered toys in bags, he greets me at the door whenever I go shopping. Lately, if there isn’t something for him, he noses the bags forlornly, or, if I place the haul on the counter, leaps and twirls, trying over and over to reach the counter top where he is sure we have hidden something good that is rightfully his.
“That’s so sad,” one of us is sure to say.
The last time it happened my husband asked me to stitch up some of the old toys I’ve stored in the spare bedroom, waiting for a day when I will repair them. Observing Bo’s delirium, I thought it was a reasonable request. So I spent thirty minutes, cramming stuffing back through rips, sewing up seams, and (only once, since I could hear Bo go crazy downstairs) testing the squeaker.
When I finished, I snuck outside, then came in the back door with a Wal-Mart bag full of long unseen squeaky toys. The two other dogs thought it was a good game. Not Bo. He can smell new.
Which is why, when I went to Wal-Mart the other day and thought of squeaky toys in the parking lot after I had finished my regular shopping, I went back in to check out the dog section. I had also forgotten baby Benedryl for our itchy dog, so it wasn’t entirely a spoiled dog return trip. No Benedryl, and only two acceptable squeaky toys. As I said, we have three dogs.
No problem, I would stop at Fred’s on the way home. Fred’s had no Benedryl, and no suitable squeaky toys. Next on the route—Eckard’s, which had Benedryl, but no squeaky toys. Which is why I found myself in Big Lot’s parking lot, thinking in the simplest terms about energy and attractor fields: Thoughts are energy. Types of energy vibrate at different levels, or fields. Energy vibrations attract similar energy in that field, which is why, when you feed an addiction, you crave more. And here I was standing on asphalt, having stretched a thirty minute shopping trip into two hours, trapped in Bo’s squeaky toy attractor field, which requires much more energy than you would ever suspect.
Money—that’s one aspect of the field. Without our money Bo would have never been introduced to squeaky toys (let’s not explore squeaky toy history or American and Chinese industrial empires, which are tied into squeaky toy consciousness). My husband is the one with the job. He has to expend energy in order to attract money. I do the shopping. When I am shopping, I am expending energy I could be using in other ways if I weren’t shopping. You get the picture.
One day I had a good idea, and ideas are energy. In fact, spiritual teachings say you are only an idea, no matter how much it seems you are made of solid matter, so pay attention. That day I thought the dogs needed toys. Sugar and Spunky, the white, pound terriers, agreed it was a good idea. But Bo immediately developed a squeaky toy gestalt on which the whole material world might be turning.
Bo’s squeaky toy energy has incorporated my husband’s and my energy in order to attract more squeaky toy energy, which has materialized into a basket full of colorful squeaky toys in various states of disrepair which often litter our floor, which requires more energy to pick them up, or, more likely, to tug and toss whenever Bo gets a notion, which is often. And I just stopped writing about squeaky toy energy to take many minutes to look up squeakers. I’ve been thinking I could make those squeaky toys, as well as repair them. So even though on Monday in Big Lot’s parking lot, I realized my brain had been captured and trapped by the attractor field of squeaky toy energy, I have not been able to raise my own vibrational level to escape velocity.
If some scientist wants to investigate, she may discover squeaky toys and Bo’s thought process may be central in the formation of gravity, time and space.
Parallel universes abound. If it weren’t squeaky toys, it might be….pansies. A friend recently took me shopping with her. She needed a few pansies for her yard. Six in fact.
“Do you want any?” she asked.
“No,” I said, wondering if we had time to stop by the discount store on our way home, so I could add to my emergency stash of squeaky toys. “I’d never plant them.”
But the colors…the violets and blues, the velvety reds and rusts and yellows and mauves. Chocolates. Pansies…a nice gift to take to friends.
Which is why, after buying enough pansies to supplement my friend’s traditional six and getting some to take to a couple of people we plan to visit, I now have six of my own, waiting. Six? Could that possibly be enough? I wonder if they have gotten any new ones at the nursery. So bright, so bon vivant here in the waning of the year.
Quick, Bo, wake up. Catch this!
“That’s so sad,” one of us is sure to say.
The last time it happened my husband asked me to stitch up some of the old toys I’ve stored in the spare bedroom, waiting for a day when I will repair them. Observing Bo’s delirium, I thought it was a reasonable request. So I spent thirty minutes, cramming stuffing back through rips, sewing up seams, and (only once, since I could hear Bo go crazy downstairs) testing the squeaker.
When I finished, I snuck outside, then came in the back door with a Wal-Mart bag full of long unseen squeaky toys. The two other dogs thought it was a good game. Not Bo. He can smell new.
Which is why, when I went to Wal-Mart the other day and thought of squeaky toys in the parking lot after I had finished my regular shopping, I went back in to check out the dog section. I had also forgotten baby Benedryl for our itchy dog, so it wasn’t entirely a spoiled dog return trip. No Benedryl, and only two acceptable squeaky toys. As I said, we have three dogs.
No problem, I would stop at Fred’s on the way home. Fred’s had no Benedryl, and no suitable squeaky toys. Next on the route—Eckard’s, which had Benedryl, but no squeaky toys. Which is why I found myself in Big Lot’s parking lot, thinking in the simplest terms about energy and attractor fields: Thoughts are energy. Types of energy vibrate at different levels, or fields. Energy vibrations attract similar energy in that field, which is why, when you feed an addiction, you crave more. And here I was standing on asphalt, having stretched a thirty minute shopping trip into two hours, trapped in Bo’s squeaky toy attractor field, which requires much more energy than you would ever suspect.
Money—that’s one aspect of the field. Without our money Bo would have never been introduced to squeaky toys (let’s not explore squeaky toy history or American and Chinese industrial empires, which are tied into squeaky toy consciousness). My husband is the one with the job. He has to expend energy in order to attract money. I do the shopping. When I am shopping, I am expending energy I could be using in other ways if I weren’t shopping. You get the picture.
One day I had a good idea, and ideas are energy. In fact, spiritual teachings say you are only an idea, no matter how much it seems you are made of solid matter, so pay attention. That day I thought the dogs needed toys. Sugar and Spunky, the white, pound terriers, agreed it was a good idea. But Bo immediately developed a squeaky toy gestalt on which the whole material world might be turning.
Bo’s squeaky toy energy has incorporated my husband’s and my energy in order to attract more squeaky toy energy, which has materialized into a basket full of colorful squeaky toys in various states of disrepair which often litter our floor, which requires more energy to pick them up, or, more likely, to tug and toss whenever Bo gets a notion, which is often. And I just stopped writing about squeaky toy energy to take many minutes to look up squeakers. I’ve been thinking I could make those squeaky toys, as well as repair them. So even though on Monday in Big Lot’s parking lot, I realized my brain had been captured and trapped by the attractor field of squeaky toy energy, I have not been able to raise my own vibrational level to escape velocity.
If some scientist wants to investigate, she may discover squeaky toys and Bo’s thought process may be central in the formation of gravity, time and space.
Parallel universes abound. If it weren’t squeaky toys, it might be….pansies. A friend recently took me shopping with her. She needed a few pansies for her yard. Six in fact.
“Do you want any?” she asked.
“No,” I said, wondering if we had time to stop by the discount store on our way home, so I could add to my emergency stash of squeaky toys. “I’d never plant them.”
But the colors…the violets and blues, the velvety reds and rusts and yellows and mauves. Chocolates. Pansies…a nice gift to take to friends.
Which is why, after buying enough pansies to supplement my friend’s traditional six and getting some to take to a couple of people we plan to visit, I now have six of my own, waiting. Six? Could that possibly be enough? I wonder if they have gotten any new ones at the nursery. So bright, so bon vivant here in the waning of the year.
Quick, Bo, wake up. Catch this!
Friday, October 22, 2004
Cornucopia
When the Boy came home fleeing before Hurricane Ivan, I rejoiced. The second night he was here, we ate waffles. He prefers Blackburn’s syrup; my husband and I like maple. We made the store run to obtain the right syrups—“because we are celebrating,” I told my husband.
An agreeable fellow, he asked, “What are we celebrating?”
“Waffles!” I said. We had not made waffles in a long time. Waffles and the Boy home again for a while and safe tonight from the storm, silly Man.
Waffles are a celebration. My uncle used to serve them on Sunday, or when he had guests. After a waffley breakfast at his house, I bought my own iron. Then I began the search for the perfect recipe. “My mother swears by cornstarch,” said my friend Cindy. Her mother, a true Methodist casserole lady, therefore one of the region’s great cooks, was out of touch when I needed a recipe of my own. I choose one from the internet because cornstarch was the key.
When my friend Barbara recently came to spend the night, it was time to celebrate again. I had sent the Blackburn’s home with the Boy, and we were low on maple. Time to make syrup. All I had was a cup of white sugar. I poured it into a pan and set it over a low flame.
“What are you doing?” Barbara said.
“Making syrup,” I said. “I want brown sugar, but don’t have any. I want it dark.”
“How do you know how to do that?”
“The Old Ones are telling me.” Between us Barbara and I had accumulated one hundred and ten years of living. Our friendship this lifetime stretches between us for a total of seventy-two years of loving and sharing. Together we are magic. Together we become a conduit for the secrets of Ancient Ones. Didn’t she know?
I stirred. We watched. A waffle steamed in the iron.
“It’s not changing colors,” she said.
The sugar was still white, but had begun to look like lumpy sand. “It’ll work,” I said. “Maybe.” It took waffles about five minutes to brown. We were making eight of them. We had time.
Now brown spots began to appear in the concoction on the stove. I stirred pretty constantly, but I don’t think it’s necessary. Barbara took over waffle duty. The brown spots spread, and liquid formed in the bottom of the pan. The brown spots darkened, melted to clear amber.
“Now water,” I said. I added a cup of water, a little at a time, because the sugar liquid sputtered and hardened, then melted again.
“It’s working,” Barbara said.
I hoped.
Something more was needed. I opened the refrigerator. Plum jelly. A friend had gifted me with nine jars, a luxurious blessing. Too fine to squander on sugar water, but I had an older jar in the cabinet, one I had made and forgotten about until recently. I fetched it along with an unopened jar of Elizabeth’s shimmering jelly for Barbara to take home. She held it to the light. It glowed.
The sugar and water simmered on the stove. I added two tablespoons of jelly. The jelly sank, two continents of spring settling below the surface. Then they, too, began to dissolve. Butter, a tablespoon, not too much, just round enough.
Breakfast was ready.
The waffles were crisp and light, the syrup sweet and plumily tart. Barbara and I added butter for good measure, but my husband ate his without. We also had soysage and facon, for a soy touch of the salty. The three of us munched in the morning light, sharing with the dogs who made their rounds, noses intent on tidbit rights.
“Janet told me the French, who are notoriously thinner and healthier than Americans, say if you really enjoy your food, it will be good for you,” I said. Janet is another friend, full of information. “Americans say if you like it, it’s bound to be bad for you.”
Who are you going to believe?
Good friends. Morning light. Honeyed time. Friends and family and dogs and waffles and ripe gifts of sunshine from luscious days already a dream away. Secrets from the Ancient Ones and from the ones who share your earth-bound journey. How can it not make glad your heart?
Barbara said she wouldn’t give the waffle secret away. I told her it was in the home-made family cookbook she had. “I still won’t tell,” she said. I don’t know if she just meant she wasn’t about to get into waffle-making, but if you have the time and friends, or just sunshine and sugar, is that not reason enough to celebrate? Is not any reason enough, or no reason at all?
Crisp Waffles
(check out www.taunton.com/finecooking/pages/c00164.asp for Pam Anderson’s recipe and plenty of waffle hints)
1/2 oz. (3/4 cup) bleached all-purpose flour
1 oz. (1/4 cup) cornstarch
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. baking soda
3/4 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup milk
6 Tbs. vegetable oil
1 large egg, separated
1 Tbs. sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
Heat oven to 200°F. Heat the waffle iron. Mix the flour, cornstarch, salt, baking powder, and baking soda. Mix the buttermilk, milk, and vegetable oil together. Stir egg yolk into liquids.Beat the egg white almost to soft peaks. Sprinkle in the sugar and continue to beat until the peaks are firm and glossy. Beat in the vanilla.
Pour the buttermilk mixture into the dry ingredients and whisk until just mixed. Gently fold in egg whites. Do not overmix. Pour the batter onto the hot waffle iron and cook until the waffle is crisp. Keep waffles warm, unstacked, on a rack in the oven until all are cooked.
Barbara’s Crone Plum Syrup
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
2 tablespoons plum jelly (may substitute jelly of your choice, but you know as well as I do it won’t be plum syrup)
1 tablespoon butter
Heat sugar in heavy saucepan over a low flame until it melts and becomes dark amber. Stir occasionally. It helps to have a friend to talk to. If you get distracted and your sugar gets too dark, it might be bitter. If you get distracted long enough for something really disastrous to happen, I won’t accept responsibility. It’s best to mostly pay attention. When the sugar gets dark enough for your liking, remove to the heat and add 1 cup of water a bit at a time. Stand back! The stuff will sputter. It might be best if you add the water already hot. Return to heat and add jelly. Stir until dissolved. Add butter and stir until well mixed. Pour over waffles. This syrup is thin if it’s hot. If you prefer a thicker syrup, let it cool a bit.
Open your heart. Listen. Celebrate.
An agreeable fellow, he asked, “What are we celebrating?”
“Waffles!” I said. We had not made waffles in a long time. Waffles and the Boy home again for a while and safe tonight from the storm, silly Man.
Waffles are a celebration. My uncle used to serve them on Sunday, or when he had guests. After a waffley breakfast at his house, I bought my own iron. Then I began the search for the perfect recipe. “My mother swears by cornstarch,” said my friend Cindy. Her mother, a true Methodist casserole lady, therefore one of the region’s great cooks, was out of touch when I needed a recipe of my own. I choose one from the internet because cornstarch was the key.
When my friend Barbara recently came to spend the night, it was time to celebrate again. I had sent the Blackburn’s home with the Boy, and we were low on maple. Time to make syrup. All I had was a cup of white sugar. I poured it into a pan and set it over a low flame.
“What are you doing?” Barbara said.
“Making syrup,” I said. “I want brown sugar, but don’t have any. I want it dark.”
“How do you know how to do that?”
“The Old Ones are telling me.” Between us Barbara and I had accumulated one hundred and ten years of living. Our friendship this lifetime stretches between us for a total of seventy-two years of loving and sharing. Together we are magic. Together we become a conduit for the secrets of Ancient Ones. Didn’t she know?
I stirred. We watched. A waffle steamed in the iron.
“It’s not changing colors,” she said.
The sugar was still white, but had begun to look like lumpy sand. “It’ll work,” I said. “Maybe.” It took waffles about five minutes to brown. We were making eight of them. We had time.
Now brown spots began to appear in the concoction on the stove. I stirred pretty constantly, but I don’t think it’s necessary. Barbara took over waffle duty. The brown spots spread, and liquid formed in the bottom of the pan. The brown spots darkened, melted to clear amber.
“Now water,” I said. I added a cup of water, a little at a time, because the sugar liquid sputtered and hardened, then melted again.
“It’s working,” Barbara said.
I hoped.
Something more was needed. I opened the refrigerator. Plum jelly. A friend had gifted me with nine jars, a luxurious blessing. Too fine to squander on sugar water, but I had an older jar in the cabinet, one I had made and forgotten about until recently. I fetched it along with an unopened jar of Elizabeth’s shimmering jelly for Barbara to take home. She held it to the light. It glowed.
The sugar and water simmered on the stove. I added two tablespoons of jelly. The jelly sank, two continents of spring settling below the surface. Then they, too, began to dissolve. Butter, a tablespoon, not too much, just round enough.
Breakfast was ready.
The waffles were crisp and light, the syrup sweet and plumily tart. Barbara and I added butter for good measure, but my husband ate his without. We also had soysage and facon, for a soy touch of the salty. The three of us munched in the morning light, sharing with the dogs who made their rounds, noses intent on tidbit rights.
“Janet told me the French, who are notoriously thinner and healthier than Americans, say if you really enjoy your food, it will be good for you,” I said. Janet is another friend, full of information. “Americans say if you like it, it’s bound to be bad for you.”
Who are you going to believe?
Good friends. Morning light. Honeyed time. Friends and family and dogs and waffles and ripe gifts of sunshine from luscious days already a dream away. Secrets from the Ancient Ones and from the ones who share your earth-bound journey. How can it not make glad your heart?
Barbara said she wouldn’t give the waffle secret away. I told her it was in the home-made family cookbook she had. “I still won’t tell,” she said. I don’t know if she just meant she wasn’t about to get into waffle-making, but if you have the time and friends, or just sunshine and sugar, is that not reason enough to celebrate? Is not any reason enough, or no reason at all?
Crisp Waffles
(check out www.taunton.com/finecooking/pages/c00164.asp for Pam Anderson’s recipe and plenty of waffle hints)
1/2 oz. (3/4 cup) bleached all-purpose flour
1 oz. (1/4 cup) cornstarch
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. baking soda
3/4 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup milk
6 Tbs. vegetable oil
1 large egg, separated
1 Tbs. sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
Heat oven to 200°F. Heat the waffle iron. Mix the flour, cornstarch, salt, baking powder, and baking soda. Mix the buttermilk, milk, and vegetable oil together. Stir egg yolk into liquids.Beat the egg white almost to soft peaks. Sprinkle in the sugar and continue to beat until the peaks are firm and glossy. Beat in the vanilla.
Pour the buttermilk mixture into the dry ingredients and whisk until just mixed. Gently fold in egg whites. Do not overmix. Pour the batter onto the hot waffle iron and cook until the waffle is crisp. Keep waffles warm, unstacked, on a rack in the oven until all are cooked.
Barbara’s Crone Plum Syrup
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
2 tablespoons plum jelly (may substitute jelly of your choice, but you know as well as I do it won’t be plum syrup)
1 tablespoon butter
Heat sugar in heavy saucepan over a low flame until it melts and becomes dark amber. Stir occasionally. It helps to have a friend to talk to. If you get distracted and your sugar gets too dark, it might be bitter. If you get distracted long enough for something really disastrous to happen, I won’t accept responsibility. It’s best to mostly pay attention. When the sugar gets dark enough for your liking, remove to the heat and add 1 cup of water a bit at a time. Stand back! The stuff will sputter. It might be best if you add the water already hot. Return to heat and add jelly. Stir until dissolved. Add butter and stir until well mixed. Pour over waffles. This syrup is thin if it’s hot. If you prefer a thicker syrup, let it cool a bit.
Open your heart. Listen. Celebrate.
Thursday, October 21, 2004
Hello
I was a child who never fit comfortably in her skin, or felt at home in her small corner of the world. I think of myself as a turtle during those long years, only my shell wasn’t really a home, it was a hard defense to keep the world away. I was always poking my head out to see if the weather was good, but most of the time I thought it was stormy, so I would draw back in. Diffuse anxiety, I called it, and there was no occasion festive enough to overcome its gloom. Like Joe Btfsplk, the well-meaning character in L’il Abner who was constantly followed by a rain cloud, I was a human jinx…and, though I didn't know how, I was jinxiing myself.
Early on I started reading any book which promised to help me find some way out of my perpetual gloom, to at least get on the train headed for Happily Ever After. Finally in the past few years I've discovered sunshine. At first the moments were rare, a few hours, then days of everything being all right. The days have lengthened, and though I still occasionally notice that cloud of anxiety, I find I am living in a different world. It’s not Happily Ever After, a mythical country always somewhere down the track. It’s an immediate place, as large as the Universe. I call it Now.
What made the difference? I am sure many factors have contributed, and I have tried to look at some, as well as those moments when suddenly I realize the air is lighter, the sky is brighter, and I’m at home at last. I am using this web spot to share those moments with you, and hope you have some to share with me. With love and peace, Camellia
Early on I started reading any book which promised to help me find some way out of my perpetual gloom, to at least get on the train headed for Happily Ever After. Finally in the past few years I've discovered sunshine. At first the moments were rare, a few hours, then days of everything being all right. The days have lengthened, and though I still occasionally notice that cloud of anxiety, I find I am living in a different world. It’s not Happily Ever After, a mythical country always somewhere down the track. It’s an immediate place, as large as the Universe. I call it Now.
What made the difference? I am sure many factors have contributed, and I have tried to look at some, as well as those moments when suddenly I realize the air is lighter, the sky is brighter, and I’m at home at last. I am using this web spot to share those moments with you, and hope you have some to share with me. With love and peace, Camellia
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