Being in America

Relief

2007-09-24T08:18:00.000-07:00

I don’t know why, but it’s hard for me to ask for help. It used to drive my mom crazy to come to my house for a meal, and I would fetch and carry and my family would sit around like guests. After I quit working my Boyfriend did even less in the house area (which didn’t necessarily mean I did more), and I can’t say I blame him. If I had to go out and spend the better part of my life doing what other people told me to so we could pay the bills, I’m afraid the one at home could have all the domestic chores by default. Still, he loves movies, and he likes my company watching them, and he goes to work before God gets up, which means he’s early to bed, and if we are going to watch movies, we have to start them before the rest of the world even gets off the day shift, which means every evening I am rushing through chores so we can see a movie, to the point watching a movie sure as heck feels like work to me, to the point I often nod off before it’s over, waking up to finish the chores and get a little light reading in before bed.

Yesterday I wanted Indian…palak paneer and something with the cauliflower I had in the fridge before it turned black. And we had Shame (Bergman!=Narcolepsy! if I’m the least bit tired) and Blue (Reading movie!=etc.!). By the time I started cooking, walked the dogs, called the old ladies, I could see it would be late, late, late for us to movie watch. Rushed!=Martyrdom! and why did I ever want a boyfriend anyway? and why don’t I just fall down on the (dirty) floor and whine?

Week-ends my Boyfriend mostly sits around in a housecoat, if he’s not taking a nap. Once again, I don’t blame him. Still, I wanted palak paneer and to watch the movies without feeling like I’m a hostage. I geared up to ask for help and for it to be alright if I didn’t get it. I asked him to walk the dogs. He did. He had to get dressed, but he did.

After that, for some reason, two hours of cooking Indian was a delight…and I did it for—TA! DA!—me. And it was very, very good. As were Shame and Blue, for both of which I stayed awake.

Just hope I’ll also be awake next time life gets too busy to be fun, and that I’ll know what to ask for.

Reality 101

2007-09-23T08:56:00.000-07:00

I had one of those put-upon dreams last night, where people who were supposed to like me didn’t. I woke up in the middle of the night with grievances, and it took some effort to go back to sleep.

This morning I woke up with all the nasty fog in my frontal lobes…the poor-poor-pitiful-me chemicals.

When I joined Kent downstairs, I decided not to check my email immediately; instead, I would drink my coffee and do a little spiritual fancy dancing.

He asked if I had checked my email before going to bed last night. Though it had taken some effort, I had not. “Good for you,” said the man who has bumped my free cell standing from under game 600 to game 2,205.

He’s making fun of my email addiction AGAIN, cried out Evil-Thought Camellia from the fog. “You use my computer more than I do,” I said. You could have called my voice tone peevish. So much for fancy dancing.

“Why are you being so sensitive?” he asked. “Why are you being so mean?”

Me? He’s always the one who has something to say about me and email and addiction. Isn’t he being the mean one?

“I just wanted to know if Susie had answered you.” He and I had been discussing Susie and some unpleasantness she was experiencing. We had sent her some spunky, center-yourself, chuck-up-your-chin advice. "When I tease you about your email, I'm only joking."

Some joke.

But wait. I do think I have an email addiction. I’m beat up on myself about it. So for my spunky, center-yourself, chuck-up-your-chin advice: You can only hear him being the mean voice if you’ve already thought it yourself.

communication V

2007-09-05T04:26:00.000-07:00

People want you to be happy.
Don’t keep serving them your pain.

If you could untie your wings
and free your soul of jealousy,
you and everyone around you
Would fly like doves

Jalal-el-Din Rumi

communication IV

2007-09-04T09:15:00.000-07:00

People want you to be happy.
Don't keep serving them your pain.

Jalal-el-Din Rumi

Communication III

2007-09-03T10:48:00.000-07:00

A friend was dying with uterine cancer. A couple of days before her death, I was sitting by her side. As I have done with other dying friends, I tried to match my breath to hers. She seemed to be floating in and out of sleep. Thoughts drifted in and out of my consciousness, and I began reviewing the time we spent together. She was a private person, not a hippy-dippy spiritualist like me. I often felt like we spoke a different language. When she was well, sometimes it seemed it was more important to her to see me than it was for me to see her. “I wonder if we were really friends,” drifted though my head. She flailed to a sitting position, her eyes wild, fierce and accusing. “We are,” I said aloud, “we really, really are friends.” The fire eased out of her eyes, and she sank back into her restless sleep.

And we really, really were. I know by how much I miss her.

© Donna Warner, August, 2007

Communication II

2007-09-03T10:22:00.000-07:00

I was asked to stay with a friend in the hospital. She was dying of lung cancer and hooked to all kinds of lines and needles. Late in the day she drifted off into a fretful, moaning sleep. I cleared my mind, watched her face, and tried to match my breathing to hers. To sooth myself, I silently repeated words from A Course in Miracles, “There is no pain, the son of God is free. There is no pain, the son of God is free.”

Suddenly my friend spoke out, “If she knew how much I hurt, she’d quit saying that.”

© Donna Warner, August, 2007

Communication

2007-09-03T10:14:00.000-07:00

My neighbor’s 93-year-old grandmother has had a stroke, and is doing her time in rehab. While her automatic speech—yes, no, fine—is clear, anything she tries to tell you comes out as meaningless garble. My neighbor says for the last ten times when her grandmother becomes agitated as she tries to speak, my neighbor prays, “Holy Spirit, please help me understand what she wants.” Then she waits in silence until some idea pops into her head. “Do you want the shades closed?” my neighbor asks. “Yes!” her grandmother will say. “Do you want ice-cream?” “Yes!”

© Donna Warner, August, 2007

Alien-Nation

2007-08-30T09:31:00.000-07:00

I often find an ant running up and down my computer, or feel one tickling across my arm. Of course it’s not the same ant, but all those lone ants have one name: Paladan. Remember the song from Have Gun, Will Travel-- "...a knight without armor in a savage land”? Admiring its courage, I’ll let it travel on, or I'll use as gentle a breath as possible to help it relocate. I’ve yet to hear one yelling "Auntie Em…Auntie Em.”

If there’s a little bunch of ants gaggling around my sink, I offer them a deal: leave before I wipe down the counters and live.

Today I crushed an ant hill with my lawn mower. When faced with a massive invasion of ants who want to colonize my yard or house, I swoop in like the Witch of the West. I wonder what Buddha would do, but I react like a Cylon-- you know, Cylons--the Battlestar Gallactica robot race bent on eliminating the hapless but resourceful humans.

Anybody got another way?

© Donna Warner, August, 2007

when all there is and the best there is--is not enough

2007-08-29T12:58:00.000-07:00

Tell me why the pecans in PLANTERS Deluxe MIXED NUTS are better than the pecans in any of the PLANTERS PECAN LOVERS MIXes? And even though my boyfriend leaves me (it’s REAL Deluxe LOVE) every single pecan in the PLANTERS Deluxe MIXED NUTS, I just can’t get enough pecans among all those other nuts and will buy the PLANTERS PECAN LOVERS MIX, even though the PLANTERS PECAN LOVERS MIXes are way more expensive, and even though I eat every one of those pecans wishing they were the PLANTERS Deluxe MIXED NUTS pecans.

And is the difference all in my head, anyway?

Reframing

2007-08-21T12:02:00.000-07:00

Have you heard AD36, a common virus that causes colds in humans, also causes weight gain in animals? One-third of obese folks test positive for this virus, as compared with only one in ten of leaner people, and we know those ones in tens virus-carrying skinnies are probably anorexic.

I’m recovering from a twenty-year-old cold, okay? Pass the doughnuts.

© Donna Warner, August, 2007

ON REVIEWING MY VACATION

2007-08-21T05:52:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Keetha and Nicole and the Rolling Stones:

You cant always get what you want
You cant always get what you want
You cant always get what you want
But if you try sometimes well you might find
You get what you need

Looks Like Heaven to Me

2007-08-20T05:20:00.000-07:00

Cabin! Sunsets! Sunrises! Fishing! Pool! Restaurant! Restaurant! Restaurant! Fun, remember?

Before we left town I hit the bread store for three grocery sacks of reject bread, and the local bakery for sour dough. I returned home three (3!!!) times before Sandra, Tristan and I made it to the city limits. How could I forget the little phone, the antibiotics and the swimsuit…separately? We got turned around in the last-city-to-have-a-bathroom-before-the-resort-Tristan-had-to-potty-how-did-we-end-up-going-North-when-we-were-headed-South, and were so late we had to stop to eat fried fish that had been sitting under warming lights. On the road again, a little fawn ohmygod ran right in front of my big car, whamp, the car behind me swerved wildly to miss rear-ending us, we made it, at the campground there was no pool (wishful remembering), the swimming area was closed in hot, hot August because all the lifeguards had returned to school, there was a brown spider in the tiny bathroom, at the Restaurant! Restaurant! Restaurant! the gumbo was gray and lunch’s fried-fish-under-the-warming-lights had been better than hot-out-of-the-kitchen-fish here, when Tristan’s grand-daddy came for the night, the beds were ill arranged for sleeping three and one, Tristan’s grand-daddy forgot the fishing poles, the air-conditioners in the cabin almost didn’t work, nobody could really sleep, something bit me in the bed at night and left an angry red welt. This is a for-fun vacation? Thanks, Universe.

In lieu of swimming we hit three discount stores before we found the big plastic ball and bat, and in the process we managed to land a haul of bubbles and a miniature 18-wheeler and a package of five little super balls. We rolled the beautiful beach towels to block the space between the couch and the floor so we wouldn’t have to constantly bat the little super balls out with the broom handle. Wish you were there?

But we did have the pier and more old bread than the geese could eat. The little fish loved bread, too, so you could see them with their eerie blue fins silently gliding through the water, and did you know the sign for fish is your hand in front of you, little finger on bottom, thumb on top, fingers together and waving as you move your hand from right to left? Try it. Wave those fingers a bit faster. You’ll know immediately you’re signing fish, it’s intuitive. Have I told you Tristan is deaf?

The second day we got the big cabin with extra beds and good air-conditioning. We saw sunsets and sunrises, had pimento cheese on sour dough for breakfast, drank coffee, fed geese and fish, blew bubbles, pitched, hit, and caught balls, read books, practiced sign language, early to bed and early to rise. A grandma and a great-aunt seemed to be just about enough grown-ups for an active four-almost-five-year-old who can’t hear, and when he doesn’t like what you’re signing, has selective seeing.

After our last meal, Tristan tried to take the money we’d left on the table for the waitress. Though he had seen us pay for meals before, perhaps this was the first time we had left money so alluringly in the open. Sandra helped me sign, “That’s to pay for our food.” We could see him understanding that the money made the food possible. I’m the great-aunt, and I gave him a dollar just because, and when he wanted the quarter on the table, I gave him a quarter, too. He grinned and immediately began waving his money, trying to attract the interest of the waitress. “Ask him what he wants,” I told Sandra. She did. He was sparkling. "Ice cream!” he signed, “Candy!”

In the car he spread out both his arms, made little fists with his hands, the little finger and thumb extended. He waggled one hand toward Sandra and then toward himself, and toward me and himself with the other. The sign for together, the three of us.

That Universe. It’s intuitive.

© Donna Warner, August, 2007

Clarity

2007-08-13T21:07:00.000-07:00

My sister Sandra, coming to visit me, was flying with her grandson Tristan for the first time. They would be riding in other people's cars after they arrived. What are the car seat laws, she asked me. Tristan is only four, and by state law would require a child’s seat once he was here. With his stuff and her stuff and nobody to ferry them to the airport, Sandra could not see herself lugging his seat, too. I asked my friend with a five-year-old if she had a car seat we could borrow. She had just gotten rid of hers, so I put the word out among the with-small-child group, only I had discovered what we needed was a booster seat, not a car seat, and nobody I knew had one.

On the ground and headed to my house, Sandra stopped at Wally World and picked up a booster seat for under twenty dollars. With the booster seat Tristan rides high enough to see out the window, and he is also legal.

Today my friend emailed me: When is your sister coming in? I have a booster seat…could her grandson use that instead of a car seat?

If you're feeling a lack in your life, remember you have to know what you want before you get what you think you're asking for or you have to know what you're asking for to get what you want or something like that.

D. Warner, August 13, 2007

Good Vibrations

2007-08-12T19:20:00.000-07:00

Researchers have discovered your facial expression releases emotionally charged chemicals in your brain. A smile releases happy chemicals, a frown releases negative ones. So if you’re happy because you're going on a beachy trip with your sister and her grandson, you’re smiling, right? And when you’re happy, then walking the dog, calling your grumpy daffy old aunt, cleaning the toilet, washing the dishes, just about anything is A-Okay. And you discover August, heat wave and all, really is fun. Go ahead. Try it. Put on a happy face.

© Donna Warner, August, 2007

RECEPTIVITY

2007-08-12T09:08:00.000-07:00

Always in August it seems as if Fun has surely drained from the weave of the world. Those towels striped the color of the tropics, six lush feet of Egyptian cotton and half-price, a mere pittance for such sweet promise, reminded me of that. The old Happy Talk song from South Pacific played in my head—you know—‘you got to have a dream, you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?’ Somehow here it was, another hot, grim August, another year without a beach, how did this happen again, last year I said next year, and now, here under the bright glare of this week’s shopping at Wal-Mart, this year was already spinning out of sight

I’ve read the books, I know the Secret, act as if your dream has come true and it will, so I piled the lengths of Aztec gold and orange with that thin strip of sea blue into the bottom of my basket. At this stage of my life I could afford a frivolous notion, so why at the check-out stand did I tell the clerk I had changed my mind? What I could not afford was to open a drawer some future August and discover the forgotten towel packed in the bottom, dusty and never used.

Though I put it back, acceded to the nonclutter wisdom of my new housekeeping creed, the colors of the towel hovered in my dreams, soft and bright and full of hope.

Then my sister called. She was coming in the middle of the month, bringing her lone grandchild with her. I have told you: August. Hot. I did not tell you that judges are ordering school children to stay inside, forbidding outdoor sports in this heatstroke weather. What’s a four-year-old, alone with the oldies to do? How are the oldies going to keep him occupied without losing their sanity? What a child needs in the throes of such a month is water.

On a notion, a beach towel wish, I called our favorite little family resort, the one we go to each Easter before the pool is open, the one that by January is booked solid into next winter, the one that has had no openings the previous two times I called this year.

The week my sister and my nephew were coming, our favorite cabin was open. The cabin has air-condition and plenty of beds and a nice little kitchen for breakfast and sandwiches and guacamole. The cabin is on a lake, with a pier and turtles and ducks and fish. The resort has a restaurant with yummy, melting-in-the-mouth vacation food, cooked and served by other people. It is hot, hot summer August and the pool is open.

Cabin! Sunsets! Sunrises! Fishing! Pool! Restaurant! Restaurant! Restaurant!

The connection between beach towels and a trip to a small family campground and receptivity might be a bit subtle, but for me that’s how this Universe/God/Law of Attraction/miracle stuff happens, even when I get the glooms and forget what’s possible. It’s all ideas. We’re ideas. And we get to choose the ideas we want to color our lives. Beach towels dreams, real-time pool trips…Universal truth working out, or hum-drum coincidence? And small stuff at that…what about world peace and joy and love? But the next time I feel like a weary traveler in a glum world, I hope I remember to choose the good dream.

Yesterday in Wal-Mart I bought two six-foot-long gleaming Egyptian cotton beach towels. “You’re going to a beach?” the clerk wistfully asked.

"Yeah," I said, though the beach part wasn’t exactly true. I grinned big time. "I'm gonna have some fun."

© Donna Warner, August, 2007

Forbidden Fruit

2007-07-11T06:33:00.000-07:00

We have a mail slot in our door, and we accidentally trained our dogs to kill the mail. I say accidentally because we caught them snatching the mail, and we thought it was so funny that we would feed them junk mail through the slot. It’s what old, not-too-bright people do for entertainment. Then the little darlings managed to take a chunk out of a refund check one too many times and we got a new mail carrier with a dog phobia. Up went the new outside mail box.

We changed our wicked way, but the dogs didn’t. When the mail comes and is safely deposited in the outside box, they go wild, running and barking and gouging claw marks in the front door. They do this, occasionally falling in a snarl on one another, until I retrieve the mail. The big dog is satisfied when I’ve done my job, but the little one, the Yorkzilla, is still determined to shred anything incoming. He performs wild leaps and twists that would make any Olympic ice skater proud. Occasionally he’s managed to snag a mail-order book or a Netflix cd, and anything accidentally hitting the floor is hamster bedding.

But my husband has taught me a new trick. Select a piece of junk mail. Offer it to him. In the middle of a feeding frenzy, Little Bo gets a befuddled look on his face, and chagrined, turns away from the offering.

When you're playing at being the bad dog, it’s only really good if they don't want you to have it.

© Donna Warner, July, 2007

Redemption

2007-05-24T07:03:00.000-07:00

A friend writes me of her aunt ‘who longs for God and has gone the scary fundamentalist route that still hasn’t filled her up (but she’s scared the beejeezuz out of the rest of us). My mom keeps telling her that she has everything she already needs but she doesn’t get it. It makes me sad for her. She tries so hard and gets no happier. Not saying that I completely get it. Sometimes I still think shoes are the answer but it is a temporary insanity.’

Remember the Three Stooges routine where Larry starts yelling he can’t see, and Mo says what’s wrong, and Larry says I’ve got my eyes closed?

And there’s a Rumi poem about the guy knocking at a closed door, wanting what Methodists from Cleveland would call God to let him in, and then he finds out he’s been knocking from the inside?

So why does the search for God always end in disillusionment? If you think you’re lost, Baby, you best open your eyes and quit banging on the door, because God has always loved you, and could never, would never, never, ever, not in a zillion years, not in eternity, misplace you.

It Really Is That Simple

2007-05-24T06:39:00.000-07:00

“The alarm woke me this morning,” my husband said, “and I was glad.” Usually he is awake before it goes off, and if he is sleeping, it means he’s really tired. “I was dreaming. I don’t remember the dream, but I know I was confronted with an unsolvable conundrum I didn’t want to solve. Then the alarm went off. ‘Eureka!,’ I said, ‘That’s the answer. Wake up.’ So I did.”

Gotcha

2007-02-02T08:12:00.000-08:00

I’m fat. Like the rest of America, I think Fat is a pejorative. A character flaw. Nay—a sin!

And I want to be skinny. But more than I want to be skinny, at times I want chocolate. Or those macadamia nut cookies that cost $1.25 EACH, but then they are SO huge.

Recently my husband uncharacteristically commented on my pulchritude, but not way before I acknowledged to myself the results of cookie coddling was getting out of hand. “I’m trying,” I say. “No more sugar.”

And I avoided the peanut butter cups for over a week, until I felt I had stepped up to lead the brigade on the stress front, and there they were in their covered glass bowl, small and snackable and sweet. That was three days ago.

“We still have any of those little candies?” said my husband who smokes and eats honey buns for breakfast.

Of course not.

“Who ate them?” His smile was sly.

How I hated him. And he knew it.

“I wasn’t being mean,” he said.

Was to.

I thought I was over this. I sometimes encourage myself to believe if I had all those years to live over again, due to my sustained spiritual practice I wouldn’t be so sensitive, tearful, downright rageful. If I had it to do over again, I’d definitely do it better.

Wrong.

“You’re just feeling guilty, or this wouldn’t get you so upset,” said the smoke sucking, honey bun guzzling guru.

And he’s not guilty of a crime that no one other than some awful, catty woman who’s not your friend would commit?

But I knew if I was angry, I was wrong. So I prayed that prayer where I recognized God didn’t create my anger, and it was a mistake, and Love was my only Reality, and I was willing to let the anger go, only I didn’t know how, but I was willing to let it go, and be shown the truth.

And it went. It did. I realized he had done nothing to me, and I really did know him, he wasn’t trying to be mean, and I was even able to let go of putting it off to he was just a man which meant stupid, and I did get to the Love part, and the evening wasn’t ruined, and the willingness to let go and the willingness to receive a different answer worked again.

But why again? Why was I still going insane over something like five peanut butter cups (the little snack ones)?

Then it occurred to me: I had felt guilty.

And there was so much of it I was still lugging around.

Guilt.
Guilt.
Guilt.
Guilt.
Guilt.
Guilt.
Guilt.

What would happen if I let go of guilt? If the next time I was ready to go off on the cretins, instead of getting to the tears, the rage, the finger-pointing justifications and then praying to let them go, why not go for the jugular? Why not just let go of guilt…not theirs, mine.

Would I possibly be done then?

The God-Shaped Hole

2007-02-02T07:25:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I wrote about do-nuts and how, if indulged, there seems to be no end to wanting do-nuts. I ended with “So is there really something else we are longing for? Some wholeness, healing, limitless holiness that offers not more desire, but peace?”

Last night I realized I got the do-nut message wrong. Wholeness, limitless holiness, peace is. Got it? That’s what we are. Now.

If we are longing, even for God, then we’ve forgotten who we are, what we are. And with that longing, even for God, we are just opening up a hole we are unsuccessfully going to try fill: with do-nuts, with trinkets, with people, with new skills, with new experiences, with God.

Won’t happen.

Got it? Just relax. What you really want is already here. Peace.

Letting Go

2007-02-02T07:08:00.000-08:00

“How’s Alton?” I ask my friend.

“He’s okay,” she says. Her voice dips a little, deferring to ambiguity, acknowledging ‘okay’ can accommodate a lot of pain. “He calls his dad a lot to ask him to come home. Now that Justin has had papers drawn up, Alton may understand his dad’s not coming home, maybe he can get a little closure.”

What’s closure to a ten-year-old? The kid is great, full of vim, dedicated to whatever interests him, nice to old ladies, generous…an all around fine person. I know the statistics. I know children of divorce often carry wounds long into their adulthood. I do not want this for any kid, not for this kid.

“Tell him you know he loves his dad. Tell him even when he’s grown, he may still wish you and his dad were still together. But tell him sometimes when you love someone, you have to let that person do what he thinks is right, even if you don’t understand how it could possibly be right.” I want to help Alton, give him someway to honor his own feelings and still love his dad. I want something to heal the wound before it gets too deep.

Later I don’t know if I helped Alton or his mother, but I do realize I’d been teaching myself crazy pain doesn't come from what is gone, but from grasping for what used to be.

Two Minute Musing

2007-02-01T07:48:00.000-08:00

“He’s filed papers,” my neighbor said of her absent husband. She is wan, and her eyes are dark and distant and full of sorrow.

They have been married for 22 years. She could not tolerate me if I told her not to be sad. Instead I offer her the prayer I have to repeat often in my journey, using for her benefit God, since I know that is what she would use, as I often to do to name the Source of All Being.

Tell God you are sad, and that you know it is not His Will for you to be sad. Tell Him you are willing to let the sadness go, but you do not know how. Tell Him to take the sadness for you, and to show you what His happiness really is. Tell Him you are willing to accept what He wants for you.

This is how I have to do it…from having a fellow shopper slam my grocery cart, to some imagined offence by my husband, to the really scary life events I can’t control:

I do not deny how I feel…my sadness, anger or terror.
I acknowledge my feelings were not created by Source/God/Being/What I Am.
I acknowledge my feelings are a mistake.
I acknowledge my willingness to let them go, even if I don’t feel willing at the moment.
I acknowledge I cannot do this on my own.
I acknowledge my willingness to accept instead what God intends for me.

I don’t know how, but for me, it works every time. We are not talking about circumstances here; if I try to direct God’s Will, I am putting a limit on what I will allow Him to do for me. We are talking about feelings, as my husband likes to say sardonically. We are talking about peace/love/joy/happiness. And when I say my prayer (though sometimes I have to say it more than once…sometimes I say it feverishly, repeating it like an incantation…peace/love/joy/happiness always happens. I don’t know how it works. Maybe because that is the Source of my creation, because that’s all that I really am. The rest is just a foolish nightmare, from which I can easily awaken.

The Hungry Ghost Do-nut Jones

2007-02-01T06:56:00.000-08:00

Last year a new do-nut shop opened in the strip mall a block from my house. Sometimes in the early morning as I walk my dogs the air is filled with the smell of cooking do-nuts, a heady mixture of yeast and sugar and sizzling oil that hits me like a rush. At that moment I want do-nuts, one, then another and another, all the do-nutty goodness promised by each intoxicating breath.

Only do-nuts make me queasy. One hot do-nut would melt in my mouth, so light it is almost nothing but an explosion of sweetness, and then I would want another, and even though I would not be nearly done tasting, tasting, tasting, I would feel my stomach roiling. Not to mention what limitless do-nuts would do to my already cautionary blood pressure, cholesterol, and body mass index. And the almost immediate carb coma.

I know this, and though I never buy them, still I want do-nuts. I am not hungry, and still I want do-nuts. I am seduced by the idea of do-nuts.

As you can guess, do-nuts are a…you know…metaphor.

For me the metaphor is the longing for an illusive temptation, something I don’t need, and is, indeed, bad for me, and even makes me ill, and that can never, ever give me enough to be enough. Like the next game of free-cell. Or another new book I don’t have time to read. The right recipe that will knock your socks off. The grievance I would control, expose, punish, forgive, and not forget because, darn it, you really hurt my feelings, and I never, ever want that to happen again.

Go ahead, name your own.

So is there really something else we are longing for? Some wholeness, healing, limitless holiness that offers not more desire, but peace?

That Which Is Lost

2005-04-26T10:46:00.001-07:00

Few people act as if they believe me when I tell them this: I have rarely been happy in my life. I know other people who felt they have problems with depression, but even they did not seem to understand when I would say, “I’ve never been happy.” One friend took a rebirthing class, and reported she experienced deep happiness, the kind she had only felt in childhood. I must have been an anxious baby, anxious in the womb. Happiness was a word I had no context for. Even in the most pleasant, the most fortunate of circumstances, I skittered on the surface of enjoyment, with my footing unsure on the edge of a chasm. Another friend in the upheavals of peri-menopause chemical surges said, “Every time I go out the door, I feel like I have stage fright. I don’t see how people live with this.” My friend was often angry or wary. I had not noticed happiness to be her dominant trait, but even she had known life without that amorphous cloud in the sacral chakra. I was astounded. Perhaps happiness was not an emotion, like the emperor’s new clothes, everyone else was faking.

The search for happiness has been the impetus for my entire squandered life. First I wanted to fit in the bosom of my family, then be a best friend, then have a boyfriend, interspersed and followed by self-help and how-tos, then spirituality, seeking the God Who Would Save Me from Myself. Perhaps I equated love and competence with happiness, but somehow, no matter how I was petted or praised, both seemed illusively out of my grasp, perhaps because I was constantly dancing for approval from someone else, while myopically focused on my frantic steps.

After years of pleading, bargaining, practicing, failing, maintaining, I began to have breakthroughs. On occasions, sometimes for a couple of days at a time, I was not unhappy. I was actually timorously optimistic. Sometimes, usually with someone who was in a state more angsted than mine, I was confident and calm. But not happy. I simply had no reference for happy.

Then one day while I was taking care of my paralyzed father, a stranger in a check-out line began to berate me, telling me how stupid I was. In my frazzled and frumpy existence, I had no trouble believing him, but I had been working on the concept of peace, the peace that passeth understanding, and I just wanted to pay for my goods and take my fatigue home. I had to call on God, and not very nicely, to handle the situation. Then a strange thing happened. My tormentor gleamed like honey. The store was suffused in an amber glow, a heavenly golden light. And from somewhere, not from me, but like a sea that had birth me, Laughter…. I have no words for it. I, the angry young man, his harried mother, the weary check-out clerk, the shoppers, we were all loved and supported by Laughter, and we were of It and It was of us. Nothing else changed, except I was at peace, and I was happy. I was of Happiness, Who had just shared a marvelous joke with me.

Though there were good moments after, Happiness did not reappear until two years later when I was trapped in the car with a woman with whom I had formed a contentious bond, a woman with whom I spoke more sharply than any other person in my life, a woman whom I was constantly telling she was Wrong. If I had not had hardening of the arteries, I would have left most encounters with her with a migraine. Still we were called together, and on this day, my spiritual lesson was “God’s will for you is perfect happiness.” Like magnets , we had been drawn into a difference of opinion that finally resulted in war. “You,” I hissed to the God of Lies who promised me happiness, “You need to fix this, because I cannot,” because she and I were broken, and even if we separated, we would be infected and could not expel the deadly toxin.

Then she spoke softly, discussing the meal we had just shared. And when I heard the music of her voice, I also noticed the amber glow enveloping us. I felt the leap of Laughter. I knew, once again, I was home, and I was glad. My friend, the Saint, and I could not go back and repair the damage done, for in that instant there was no damage. There was only Now.

The Laughter and Heaven’s glow ebbed, but I carried its memory everywhere, for I now knew happiness was real, and I expected to meet it again. Several months later I was sitting on my couch, watching a silly movie with my husband, when I noticed a weird feeling. Something was different. I checked out my body, part by part, until I realized the cloud of anxiety in my belly wasn’t present. Then I recognized the amber glow. Nothing was happening, and I was happy.

It lasted for a day. The following afternoon I felt something was slightly amiss. I realized I was missing the anxiety I had lived with for fifty-four years, as if a difficult family member had suddenly disappeared even though nobody had been fighting. By night, my sacral chakra was cloudy again. This was not what I wanted, even if somehow I had chosen it, chosen it in the womb, or some other life time ago, by some habitual action.

But I have learned, happiness is not the result of anything I do, or anything anyone else can do for me. It is the Eternal Source of my being. God is Love. God is Happiness. And though I have chosen to think I have been the source of my own happiness, though I’ve always failed miserably in achieving it, I can choose again, every day. I can choose to let Someone choose for me. And In Love, in Laughter, I know I am at Home, where Peace passeth all understanding. One day I will know it, forever.

Little Awakenings

2005-04-26T07:46:00.000-07:00

4-19-2005

In the German movie, Mostly Martha, Martha, the second-best chef in Hamburg, obsesses on her work to keep the emotional world at bay. All of that changes when her sister dies, and Martha must provide her orphaned niece with the love the child requires in order to heal. But healing love is unlimited, and Martha is unwillingly included in its cure. In the final scene, Martha’s therapist has cooked a dessert for Martha, following her instructions, but his effort falls short of perfection. “Did you do this, add this, stir just so?” Martha asks, trying to pinpoint the error. Finally she addresses the sugar. He had not use the kind she suggested. “You can taste the sugar I used?” he says. “Of course not,” she says. “I can taste the sugar you didn’t use.” And as it is with sugar, so it is with love. If my life is not quite sweet, perhaps I am tasting the love I haven’t used.

4-14-05

Pallets

Miss Fran wanted pallets for her garage and basement. Being twenty years younger and having truck access made me the get-it-girl. I quickly became pallet aware: Sears, Wal-Mart, the grocery store, the in-business plant nursery and the nursery for sale. Sears had pallets, sometimes, on Tuesday afternoons only, and we would have to come and get them before the mysterious pallet man swooped them up. Wal-Mart, the grocery store, and open plant nursery used theirs (those things cost twenty dollars apiece, the grocery man said). The For Sale telephone number on the closed nursery was wrong. I remembered years ago when all the pallets were free, behind every building to be snatched by teen-agers for bonfires; but no more. Finally the deli had five wooden pallets and two plastic ones, and the skinny young manager helped me load them because his momma would be mad at him if he didn’t. Other than being slightly taken back I was old enough to be somebody’s momma’s concern, I had netted the prize.

But I remained pallet aware. The neighbor who owned the auto parts store said she got them in on occasion, and was always happy to give them away. The For Sale sign and the pallets disappeared from the closed plant nursery. Today I went to the lumber yard. Back in the corner were haphazard stacks of pallets, plus some littering the edge of one of the tin buildings.

“Do you sell those pallets?” I asked the check-out clerk.

“No,” he said. “If you want some, ask Travis. He’s not here right now.”

Fran doesn’t need more pallets, but I’ve seen my lesson for today. If you want something, keep looking. Somewhere it’s waiting for you, in abundance.

4-16-05
Strawberries

For a while I’ve been eyeing the strawberries in the grocery. They are big and red and look very eatable. Next to them is a flat cake called Bavarian sponge cake. The package of strawberries is huge, and I have resisted. Until yesterday, in honor of delicious spring weather, when I went whole hog…strawberries, Bavarian sponge cake and whipped cream. After I got home, I waited until late afternoon. Then I sliced the berries, sprinkled them with a tiny bit of sugar (even though the berries were so large, and not real juicy, they were sweet), layered them on the cake, and topped it off with whipped cream. I could barely wait until I was seated to munch my first bite. And the cake was dry, tasteless and crumbly. Which brings us to today’s lesson…if you choose a poor foundation, no matter how much lush sweetness you layer on top, you’re going to be disappointed in the end.

4-16-07
Awareness

After my dad was paralyzed and we came home from the hospital, we badly needed a ramp. I cannot now remember how long it took us to get one. The men from his church group were going to build it, then the carpenter down the street. I read everything I could get my hands on concerning ramps. All I remember now is that the incline should be one inch of rise for each twelve inches of height, which means, I think, if your front door is two feet off the ground, you must have 24 feet of ramp. Let me tell you, that’s a lot of ramp. We finally hired the lumber yard to build it, and it was beautiful and liberating. My father’s been dead for two years now, the house sold, the wonderful ramp dismantled, but to this day I admire the fine slope of a well-built ramp.

When we cleared out my parents’ home of fifty years, I scrounged packing boxes for months. It’s still hard pass a good box wasted in the trash.

Recently it’s been pallets that I’ve been hunting for a friend. Though she’ll never require another pallet in this lifetime, I now note the location of every pallet I pass.

Busted up concrete. Yep. My neighbor landscaped her walks and flower beds with slabs of concrete, and I decided to do the same. While I don’t have the tenacity of my neighbor, I do have piles of concrete I’ve begged, and I think the guy who helped me in my yard a while, stole. Don’t ask. He’s not working for the city any more.

The church two blocks over is tearing down their original sanctuary, and I walk past it every day. A couple of days ago, I saw an amazing sight, and when I passed my neighbor’s house, she was working in the yard, in her new herb bed bounded by small, symmetrical hunks of concrete.

“Mary Jane,” I said, “you won’t believe the prize rubble over at the church.”

She fell out laughing. “Keith was so happy when I quit forcing him to pick up broken concrete,” she said. “I don’t know if I can break his heart, but I’ve got to go and look.”

Somebody else’s ramp, boxes in the trash, pallets, and rubble. Dogwoods, geese, kittens. Harsh words, misdeeds, a helping hand, a kind remark. Be warned. If you focus on it, you’re going to see it for a long, long, time.

Oil Change

2005-02-19T05:25:00.000-08:00

January 20, 2003

My husband needed the oil in his car changed, and I volunteered to do it, squeezing the time in around my constant migration between Greenwood and Cleveland and all of the things that mostly never get done. I wanted to tell him I loved him, but I wanted to do it quickly. Slam, blam, thank you, m’am….get in, get out, get on to something really important.

My irritation meter counter quivered on neutral as I pulled onto the rack at the lube-in-a-hurry place. It skittered up the negative scale when I couldn’t find the hood release. I rarely used his car, and didn’t know the location of the levers and dials.

I found the latch, and the hood popped open. The attendant who had directed me onto the rack with hand signals disappeared beneath it. I sat behind the wheel, closed my eyes and breathed in and out. I tried not to think of my unmade bed, the dirty kitty litter that remained one of the few household chores I still did at my own house, the bags of unread books I insisted on ferrying to and from my father’s house each week, the minutes ticking off the time before my father’s morning help was due to leave and I would need to be on duty. I tried not to think of all the things I had to do to survive, and, if my life was going to be worthwhile, all the things I needed to do but never got to.

On my in-breath, the attendant rapped on the window. “Need the mileage,” he told me.

I looked at the black square in the center of the instrument panel. Nothing there.

I rolled down the window. “Should I turn it on?” I said.

“Just click on the ignition,” he said, “don’t turn it over.”

I clicked the ignition, and we looked at the black square together. Nothing.

“You can click it one more time,” he said. He didn’t have a lisp, but a way of thickening his words that made him sound less than bright. My irritation flared. If I were going to give this place my time and money, they should give me an attendant who knew more than I did.

I clicked. Still nothing. The attendant reached in and turned the lights on. Nothing again. My lack of knowledge about the car frustrated me. I wanted to rev the engine to get the information he wanted, to be shed of my ignorance, to get my show on the road without any more minutes shaved out of it than necessary.

“Now I see it,” he said, his thick voice almost gleeful, as if we had pulled this chestnut out of the fire together.

I looked harder at the dark glass and could still see nothing. I squinted my eyes, waiting for numbers to cohere.

“Here,” he said, laughing and tapping to my left. Once I would have considered the stupid joy in his voice that of a slow man accomplishing a simple task with great difficulty, but in one glad instant I recognized the laughter. I knew Who was speaking to me. I knew a message was coming. I needed only to listen. With a deep thirst I drank in the foolishly beaming face.

“We was looking in the wrong place,” he grinned.

“So we were,” I answered with a rippling joy of my own.

My Brother grinned bigger. “I bet if we had started up the car,” he said, “we still couldn’t of seen it.” He tapped the odometer again. “Because we was looking in the wrong place the whole time.”

Coyote

2005-02-19T05:14:00.001-08:00

Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass. Marc Leeds, The Vonnegut Encyclopedia, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1995, page 348

Thursday January 23, 2003

Sometimes the idiot at the head of the line is a chubby woman who has totally forgotten the McDonald’s breakfast menu. Usually it’s me. Usually I am either too easily distracted or way over focused, and strangers discover I am a clot in the artery of commerce.

I don’t have a job and a paycheck. All my money comes from the sweat of my husband’s or my father’s brow. My husband obsesses about retirement. In recent years his motto seems to be a penny pinched is more money in a meager retirement portfolio. My father worries that his savings will end before he does. Shopping for all us often becomes an art in juggling.

To complicate shopping, some things my dad needs are tax deductible, and I have to keep those separate from the ones which aren’t. Also I have set up a small account of my own just to keep track of my personal spending. A person ready to check out might spot me standing alone at the counter and make the mistake of thinking my line will be short and quick. Wrong. There could be at least four different transactions occurring at the register: my father’s, my father’s, mine and my husband’s, and mine.

Which is what happened at Wal-Mart the day after the blessing of grace at McDonald’s.

No one was around when I wheeled the basket up to the counter. I bought first Dad’s medical supplies, then his household goods, then the Warners’ pet supplies, all with different credit cards I had to fumble to find, making sure I used the right one, signing for each, then making sure I put the card back in the right purse pocket instead of dropping it on the floor. In my usual hurry, I was goading myself to juggle more artfully.

I carry cash to pay for my personal purchases…the pens and notebooks and paper I will scatter between my Cleveland household and the one in Greenwood. I have a small pocket in my tiny purse for the cards, but my cash is kept in a fold down flap pocket with ripped lining. The change slips under the lining and collects in a heavy mass on the backside of my purse. I never seem to find the time to get a new purse, or fix this one that works best for me in most ways.

The clerk rang up my goods, and not wanting to add any more coins to my extensive collection, I scrabbled for the correct change, thinking, as I always do when I dive for dimes, of my mother and my stepdaughter. My mother hated old ladies who hunted in their purses for pennies. My stepdaughter thought change was something poor people used.

I am a poor person; an almost old lady who digs through her purse. On Thursday I couldn’t stop myself as precious minutes whizzed past. With my hand creeping up behind the pocket lining, I saw my stepdaughter when she was young standing in the moonlight on the curb outside a Burger King. She looked at the change she had just received, shrugged, and then flung it in a graceful silver arc into the empty field in front of the car. I fussed at her then; now, I understand the relief of the gesture.

I threw some of my own pennies and nickels and quarters on the counter. Not quite right. I had to go back for more. What an idiot, I thought, and almost heard my mother hissing. Why am I doing this, I wondered, it doesn’t make any difference to anybody but me. I finally pieced out the correct change and pushed it toward the clerk before beginning my search for dollars.

“……know you,” I heard someone say behind me.

I looked up and was shocked to discover my line was at least seven customers deep. The speaker was a tall, neatly dressed black man who seemed to be standing with his mother. A woman about his mother’s age separated us.

“You know me?” I asked. For years people have remembered me long after I have lost any memory of a connection. Though I couldn’t place this man, I didn’t want to be rude.

He looked back right into my eyes. He seemed amused. “I know you’re stupid,” he said.

Well, wasn’t that obvious? Hadn’t I just been calling myself stupid for who knows how many lost minutes, seconded by my mother’s ghost and engaged in activity my stepdaughter at eight-years-old had outgrown? And now all these folks who probably counted exactly how many minutes I had lost were piled up behind me. I knew I should turn away, but since I had made eye contact with the man, neither thanking him nor ignoring him seemed the polite thing to do.

“I am stupid…,” I agreed, willing to make a joke of this as I pulled dollars out of my purse. I thought of all the stupid things I had done all of my life. Most of my major decisions have been absolutely stupid, not to count all the little daily stupid things I do. I almost laughed because this stranger could never imagine how deeply stupid I was. I thought all this even as I finished the sentence “ …but I don’t think you really know me well enough to know that.” I flung a wad of dollars on the counter to sort.

“I know you are stupid,” he said.

Now how do you get out of this one, I thought. I could feel the tiny splash of what could be a tidal wave of irritation, but ignoring him seemed more hostile than acknowledging him. “I agree,” I said, “but I don’t think Miss Manners would approve of your pointing that out in a public place.” Like Miss Manners would approve of my pointing out his breach of etiquette in a public place. The pained look of the two women between us made me think they wished Miss Manners were shopping there instead of the two of us. I know I did. I teased out what I hoped was the right domination of bills. I pushed them toward the clerk. “Is that right?” I asked.

The clerk flashed an edgy smile as she picked them up.

“You are stupid,” he said. “You could have handed the lady your money.”

I looked back at the black man in line. He didn’t look crazy or as if he were packing a gun. He didn’t even look angry, so why was he doing this? I looked at the clerk sorting the money into the drawer. She was black, too. In Greenwood a year or so back the letters to the editor had hotly debated the issue of white customers refusing to touch the hands of black clerks. Was that what this was about? Had this very nice looking man confused my whole stupid life gestalt with racism?

The clerk handed me my receipt. I don’t know if our hands touched, but I was closer to getting the hell out of Dodge.

“I don’t know you,” the man said one more time in a voice that boomed over our heads, “but I know you are stupid.”

I was confused. What was I supposed to do now? When had the peace of McDonald’s departed? How had it arrived in the first place? I had refused to fight for a banana. But this guy and I both had our hands on the banana. Anything I could think of doing seemed like jerking harder.

Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God, said the Voice in my head, the Voice that doesn’t debate or incite, the Voice with stillness and space around it. God reads Kurt Vonnegut? This was peculiar all right, but what were the travel suggestions? And what about all that peace-of-God stuff?

Okay, Buster, I thought, you asked for it. You’re gonna get what should be the answer.

I looked my tormentor in the eye. “Oh, you do know me,” I said. His eyes were, I swear, merry. “And I know you.” Everyone around us were faded as ghosts. He seemed to glow like butter. I delivered my benediction like a bludgeon. “And may the peace of God go with you.” And may it go with me, I silently pleaded. Please may it go with me.

Though I couldn’t hear anything, just before I turned back to the register, it looked as if he were laughing. And not knowing why, I wanted to laugh with him.

For the love of Christ, I thought as quick anonymous hands loaded my cart, Jesus-is- trying-to-love you is not the peace of God. But even if I had not been able to step back now, it seemed possible next time, or the next. It felt as if I had released some unnamed burden. As I left the store I could see the man’s smiling eyes and the buttery glow of his skin. I could feel the unuttered laughter floating freeform around us.

I thought of Coyote, of Raven, of the old Trickster who comes to devil you and leaves you with a gift. I was irritated, frustrated, tickled. I was happy. What a great joke, I thought, not quite knowing what the joke was. I wanted to share it with my teacher, but I was afraid if I waited for the man in the line to leave the store, I would find my teacher was already gone, and I would just convince some stranger I was as crazy in a parking lot as I had been stupid at a check-out counter.

This time I hadn’t been able to step back, but the blessing came anyway. I could feel it flowing through me. And I had been right about one thing. I did know the man in the line. With gratitude and laughter, I will know my Brother forever.

2005-02-19T05:05:00.000-08:00

January 15, 2003

Desperate for my first complete cup of coffee, I stood in a clutch of McDonald’s customers. Six of us milled in front of the counter, half hanging back in a quasi-line in front of the one open cash register. Six customers in front of the counter, six employees behind it and only one person taking orders.

A chubby woman directly in front of the cash register two-stepped to the right. “I don’t know what I want,” she giggled as she looked up to ponder the menu board.

It’s always the same menu! snapped the voice in my head. How can you not know what you want?

In front of the counter we stood on hold, reading the selections with her, except for a young man holding a Styrofoam container and repeating the third time, “But I ordered the Big Breakfast Deluxe, not the Big Breakfast.” Behind the counter the woman dressed in the mustard brown manager’s uniform gazed bleakly over our heads before turning her back to fish out a rack of hash browns.

Jeez, I thought amid the sizzle of grease and the alarm of the buzzers, it’s never going to be my turn.

Those few morning hours should be my time, the only time of the day when someone else is responsible, but the morning help had been a no-show. Instead of drinking a second or a third cup of coffee at home while I read or worked on some writing of my own, I was the one who mixed Dad’s medicine and waited for it to slowly drain down his feeding tube, bathed and lotioned him, did his range of motion with the legs he could not feel, diapered and dressed him, hoisted him into his wheel chair, combed his hair, gave him his glass of Ensure to drink while I threw my clothes on, warmed the van, worked the lift, and drove us to McDonald’s. I had barely combed my own hair. And when we returned home there would be beds to be changed, clothes to be washed, more diapers, not to count the time Daddy just needed company, a body sitting next to him at the table or by the bed with no space in my brain for solitude and reflection.

Dad in his wheel chair was at the table catty-cornered to the entrance where some of his cronies meet six out of seven days a week, for that hour from nine to ten o’clock sharp. While I hadn’t had time to bath or brush my teeth, if the folks in the McDonald’s breakfast crowd got their act together I might have time to read, or contemplate the spiritual nature of life, or at the very least, consume one whole cup of coffee before the rest of the day consumed me. I didn’t just need caffeine. I needed what little time that could be my own to be mine. I needed my turn.

A graying man who had been aimlessly off to the left drifted vaguely into line in front of me. Not fair. He needed to do his wait in purgatory with the rest of us. My inclination was to side-step him, do a little body block that would inch me forward and reward me with an extra minute or two alone at a table where I could close the world out. It was a Clara Pilcher moment.

Clara was a little old lady at a day treatment program where I worked years ago. She had been sent there from the nursing home next door for stealing food from the cafeteria. We were supposed to behavior modify her into being a more acceptable citizen, only we were constantly busy and our clients’ lunches were in easy access on a table in the front of our own kitchen. “Clara ate Ruby’s sandwich and she’s leaving with Ruby’s banana,” someone tattled as I was passing from my office through the kitchen. Clara and I met in the doorway, blocking staff members and other clients on the move. I towered half a foot over Clara, who had the pink pudginess of a spinster princess. No space between the door frame for behavior modification. “That’s Ruby’s banana,” I said. “You need to give it back.” “No,” Clara vowed. I am sure this exchange occurred more than once, and somehow both Clara and I were holding on to the banana. It was fairly firm and did not squish. I don’t know how many times I yanked up and she yanked down, while the crowd encouraged me and admonished Clara. They knew fair.

Suddenly I woke up.

I was fighting an old woman over a banana.

I let go.

Only the crush of the spectators kept Clara from toppling to the floor. I know she ate Ruby’s banana, and Ruby got a free lunch on the center. I don’t know how long Clara kept coming, or what we did about the bagged lunches. I know I vowed never again to wrestle an old lady for a banana.

For me it has been a metaphor with endless applications. That Wednesday, thanks to Clara, I didn’t body block the gentleman to my left.

I stepped back.

Not with graciousness, but with an aggravation that scoured like grit on my day. So what if by the time I got my coffee it would be time to leave. So what if I went unread as well as unwashed. So what if my life was filled with longer stops than starts, and there was always some idiot at the head of the line overwhelmed by the mystery of McDonald’s breakfast menu.

“See,” said the guy opening the Styrofoam container. “It’s not the Deluxe.”

Your only function is to extend peace, said the Voice in my head.

This message I had read many times in many books, a message that sounded true, that should be true, but somehow never penetrated the cowl of anxiety that must have swaddled me in the womb, so long it had been with me. But on this Wednesday a Voice that sounded like my voice, the one that herded my grievances and exacted scores with the dim tenacity of an English sheepdog, said, “You’re only function is to extend peace.”

And it made sense.

I laughed.

How simple.

My only function was to extend peace.

Nothing had changed, but a heaviness had fallen away from the counter section of McDonald’s. Everything was somehow lighter…the clatter, the movement of the bodies, even the quality of the air.

I stood in line and relaxed.

My mind tried to take up the threads of worry that I use to harness my life. All the needs and wants and shoulds and oughts would come later, but right here, right now, they were not my concern.

My only function was to extend peace.

Peace to the woman who had finally made up her mind. Peace to the line-breaker. Peace to the manager in her ugly uniform who directed her workers in a choreography with the single purpose of moving food from the back out front to us. Peace to the young man who didn’t get the Deluxe he wanted. Peace to me.

Briefly, in the midst and muddle of life, I woke up.

I knew it wouldn’t last for, oh, maybe the rest of my life. But this morning it was my turn. Our turn.

And I was glad.

A+

2004-12-02T19:27:00.000-08:00

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.

Trojan

2004-12-02T19:18:00.002-08:00

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.

Thirst

2004-11-21T10:27:00.000-08:00

“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

Invitational

2004-11-12T06:19:00.000-08:00

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

Getting to Here from There

2004-11-10T07:34:00.000-08:00

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.

One of Life's Little Lessons...

2004-11-07T18:54:00.000-08:00

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.

Lights, Action, Camera/Cut

2004-11-07T17:19:00.000-08:00

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.

Aunt Camellia's Rules for MOPB

2004-11-06T08:52:00.000-08:00

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.

The Power of Prayer

2004-11-05T13:21:00.000-08:00

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.

A Small Salvation

2004-10-26T21:01:00.000-07:00

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.

Force Field

2004-10-24T09:41:00.000-07:00

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!

Cornucopia

2004-10-22T19:37:00.000-07:00

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.

Hello

2004-10-21T09:23:00.000-07:00

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