death as an adviser...

"Death will come for each of us and yet, with our realignments of time, we have an opportunity to have death move into a different position: death is now just behind our left shoulder. The reality is unchanged, but death now becomes an adviser." Francis Rico

I talked to my cousin on the phone yesterday. Two months ago I wrote "the crossroad..." about a choice she was given: to die within days or take "brutal chemo" treatments which had few guarantees.  She asked what I would do. Neither of us knew the answer. She is now home from the hospital although she still has to take the chemo once a month if she wishes to live.

Although much thinner, her voice is hers -- strong, inquiring with a humor that simmers but not quite fruits. I asked how she is, "I'm great. I am loving today and I am not dying right now. Besides, I want to enjoy my house. (She just had it renovated.)The way she said it was as if this one day was golden, glorious and glittering. Mine felt rather ordinary in comparison.  She continues to tell me of the meaningful conversations that are happening with family and friends who come from across the country. Hanging up I hear, "I love you."

Times gives us "an opportunity to have death move into a different position" -- to allow it to become an adviser -- time to adjust one's life, out look, loving and caring beyond self. I don't want to find that different mole or lump no matter how wise death is. I'd need time to "re position", to allow myself space to grieve what will be lost on "this side" and ponder what awaits on "the other". I know that death is not an ending but another beginning, an act of love, an act of birthing into a larger consciousness.

I  also do not need to have an illness to walk with this great adviser. Experience and age rest it neatly on my left shoulder, now. An ancient friend from the "other side" once told me, "'Death' is not the word we use..." I asked why and she replied, "As it is merely passing from one life experience to another life experience."  And when she pointed her finger at me, somehow I knew it was true.

So like my cousin I trust death will illuminate with light, change mountains into molehills
and teach me again that the moment is precious. I have a choice of response right here, right now -- a major act of power.* I don't have to wait. Maybe on posting this writing, I will invite this wing creature who will take me into a larger awareness to rest softly on my left shoulder. Then as my cousin would say, "You, look and listen..."

my cousin on the right this past week-end

* Rico
image source: fotolia.com

watering...

“The geranium just died on the window sill but teacher you went right on talking.”
Albert Cullum

A little geranium here in the corner has not been watered for days. The flower is dried crisp. I had not noticed. How many times have I just gone “right on" typing?  My grand children want to watch a  program, so easy to let them while I "catch a few moments for myself." A senior down the street is lonely, I say “good morning” and keep on walking.  I read in the paper last week, a woman in Pakistan, had gone to the police station to report being raped by her brother-in-law and was pregnant.  She was sentenced to death by stoning. I have done nothing.

I consider myself sensitive, informed, and spiritual yet I have not written an email to the Pakistani government, stopped and talked to the senior or watered the geranium. I get spun off so easily by everyday-ness and too busy meeting my own personal deadlines. I console myself with cliches. In my busy day, “I can’t do everything or help everybody.” All trite but true. Even good posture like  holding my shoulders back, my stomach in are lucky to get any attention at all.  And they are right below my chin.

I get too thin in spirit, swim in a pool too shallow for resonance, presence, or thoughtfulness. Am I cold-hearted, selfish, or is it just I can’t be bothered?  Is it a momentary forgetfulness of who I really am, my soul-self, my relating self? Are these its choices?

I pause, letting my eyes drift slowly across this mahogany desk to the green curled leaves of the geranium being played by the breeze coming through the screen door. I wrote not long ago about Masuro Emoto's photographs that witness to how water responds to emotion or neglect. I would speculate it is the same for plants. I remember the worn face on the senior (and I am one). How different it begins to feel. Now the hand holding this pen, is coming to life. Relatedness begins to stir.

Everything thing resonates and beats the same heart. The dried flower is me when I stay in my busyness, when I keep "right on talking/typing" instead of watering. So I begin again, the geranium is watered, the justice email is sent and maybe tomorrow on my walk, I'll take more time than saying a "hello" in passing.

*photo source: fotolia.com

the little dog with a golden tail...

"Be thou comforted, little dog, Thou too in resurrection shall have a golden tail." Martin Luther

My friend just lost a love, her dog Marley. Love is love, lost is lost in whatever form it takes, often wounding us deeply.

She dropped in for a visit several weeks ago. Feeling grief, she was telling me what a vacant hole his presence leaves in her life. They walked the beaches, the woods, and went to choir practice. A fun loving companion: he consoled her when down, licked her hand when necessary. Now he felt gone and leaves her desolate for his companionship. She tells me people don't get it. They think because Marley was a dog she "shouldn't" grieve to any uncomfortable extent. Ah, but love is love.

As I listened, in my minds eye, clear, almost solid, a little dog was wagging it's tail till it blurred. I seemed to be just in front and above his head.  I am familiar with my invisible guides so know reality does not have to be visible to be real. This little dog did not appear to be grieving or absent.

The next time my friend visited there he was again but this time sitting down: perky, happy, patient and waiting? She had gone to a beach where they had often visited, a few days before. Wanting a sign from him, her attention was drawn to a spot on the sand. Stopping her story she took a kleenex-wrapped object from her purse. Tenderly unwrapping it, her hands cradled a rock about two inches wide and shaped, undeniably like a heart.

A journey of love.  I find that those strong spiritual energies that beacon us want to be clothed, want to serve, want to be in-form so they can inform, so they can love -- with the wisdom of the ancients, the enlightened ones, the shamans, and the quantum physicists. Even the gods desire a language.

We need to allow their spirit language side by side with our human language. We need to learn to hear it and speak it. The universe is too large, too rich, too multi-dimensional for merely one voice, ours and one language, ours. The invitation is out. Will my friend learn a new language? Will she allow her beloved companion his invisible form, his golden tail or will his presence be dismissed?

photo source: fotolia.com

if only she had known...

“We all shine on...like the moon and the stars and the sun...we all shine on...come on and on and on...”  John Lennon

The star was shining out of the center of my mother's head as she stood on the hill some distance from me. A radiating star. I was fascinated in the dream and somewhat lost in it's beams flashing out like an aura.

She died when she was ninety-two, a decade ago. In this place she is in her fifties. I notice her own unique attractive hair style which she created herself. For me, hair in my dreams symbolizes the condition of my spirituality -- hair mussed, spirituality mussed -- hers was perfect.

My mother and I had a difficult relationship that caused her to be deeply hurt and me to be continually protecting myself. Yet I always admired her for her integrity. She was self reflective and honest about herself to a fault, taking the blame in our relationship for far too much. I thought of my own flaws and "if wishes were fishes..." or something more tangible... .

I get lost in my humanity, my short comings, in my five senses trying to get along in the world, often bogged down as if this is the only reality. My mother loved me greatly, tried her best, looked after everyone and everything in her sphere. Yet her childhood had left her damaged. No self-help books, no social services to work through a shame that was not hers. Opportunities for her smarts and artistic creativity were limited by her role of wife and mother.

In the dream, as I watched her from the distance, I was transported into a larger knowing, into a personal/impersonal love not only for her but for myself, and every face I've ever known. I longed to tell her, to shout up the hill to her, "Oh, if you only had known how perfect you were. If only..."

My mother belongs to the invisible now.  I suspect she knows stars need not stay in the sky. “We all shine on...like the moon and the stars and the sun...we all shine on...come on and on and on...”

photo source: fotolia

sand days...

The golden moments (days) in the stream of life rush pass us; and we see nothing but sand; the angels come and visit us and we only know them after. George
 Elliot

Another ordinary doing-nothing (sand) day looms ahead. Where is my merry heart? Gone and seemingly replaced by a feeling of mundane-ness, routine, habit, and getting chores done. Dropping in on a friend I mention my droop. She picks up a children's book from her coffee table, bought at a second hand store last week. Flipping through the pages I noticed some are worn, some stained and the pictures are faded. This book does reflect my day.

Yet when closing the book, the edges of the pages coming together are embossed with gold.  Focusing on the faded parts, I had not noticed.  Maybe my no-nothing-droop has a purpose and isn't a wasted day after all "in the grand scheme of things." (I hope.)

Maybe just being and doing nothing is enough. The yellow finch sits here on the deck and breaths. I glance up and feel a flutter of beauty in my chest. I never tire of looking at it doing nothing. The water just lays here horizontal in the lake yet my eyes are always drawn to it, calmed by it. The fall flowers sit here on the table dressed in maroons, oranges, reds, not moving yet filling me with meaning as I write. All do nothing. Twenty minutes later and water is still in the same place, so are the flowers and so will they be tomorrow morning.

I find it comforting that soul-gold possibly etches my do-nothing days when there is nothing new; same chores, same routine, and no potentially exciting things to do.  Hopefully, like the water and flowers merely being is enough. Maybe when the book closes on  all my days, each will be embossed whether I feel it or not. Like George Elliot, maybe my ordinary days, my sand days are angels, too.

photo source: fotolia.com

Flash! Bam! Alakazam!

On my morning walk, sunlight dazzling its way through the trees created leafy lace -- mostly ignored, I focus walking the hill fast, getting the most out of my workout. On the way back, stopping suddenly, my friend points excitedly; I see nothing but a little red drive-way marker half buried in dirt-road ditch. With sun warming my shoulders, taking a step back, then sideways; with a catch of breath, I see it: reddish, orange, yellow, light rays bursting through dusty grasses.  My nose catches the early morning scent off the alders, the ripened blackberry bushes are laden-ed with fall fruit and sea salt scents the air. I am being held by this miniature fabric of light -- a piece of the universe working on my behalf.  My friend exclaims, "Oh look, oh feel, I am in love. God just dropped in." Words to an old song* come to mind,

I was walking along, drinking in sunshine,
When out of the orange colored view,
Flash! Bam! Alakazam!
I got a look at "You."

This transformation of grass, reflector, eye and heart lands me in a divinity. However, when I am not lined up, light is merely glare off the water, glass, or car. Sometimes irritating, sometimes annoying and quickly dismissed. How many times have I waited it out before even being able to see, let alone feel anything. Yet now in this moment, it is a little like giving birth to a resonance that makes music behind my rib cage (not so poetic but true). Then I let it go into any place inside me or out to do what it needs to do. I hold it until it is mine.

We are the reflector. It's imperative we line up with frequencies that work for us, that call forth our larger selves, our awesomeness, our humbleness. How do I know when I am aligned? I don't but my instincts do. I come alive, my senses respond and always in a perfection not my own. In the most mundane things god winks, the lover drops in, tapping us on the shoulder saying, "Here I am." Flash! Bam! Alakazam!

I was walking along, minding my business
When love came and hit me in the eye...
I went into a spin and started to shout,
"I've been hit, this is it, I've been hit!"
Flash! Bam! Alakazam!
Out of an orange colored, purple-stripped, pretty green poka-dot sky.
Flash! Bam! Alakazam! 
A wonderful You came by.*

* have a listen -- a popular old song, Flash! Bam! Alakazam! written by Willie Delugg
** this writing came out of a recent conversation with a friend

photo source: fotolia.com

the crossroad...

One operates at a peculiar crossroad
where time and place and eternity somehow meet.
The problem is to find that location.
                                      Flannery O'Connor, a paraphrase

The phone rang. My cousin's daughter's voice was low and unsteady. "We just took Mom to the hospital." I had talked to her last week, her life force was wonderfully in tack. Suddenly, my healthy eighty-four year old cousin who walks four miles a day, works out at the gym three times a week and volunteers at the hospital has lost half her blood and the transfusions are not correcting the situation.

We wait for the tests. Two day later: she has an excessively aggressive, acute leukemia. Her choices: "brutal chemo treatments" or do nothing and "die within days."  This is Thursday. God, first of the week? I am deeply shakened. What must she feel? I can't imagine no more talks, visits, no more cousin on this side.

Knowing she has come to a crossroad, I call her dreading the question she may pose. Her breathing is labored. However, she is self possessed, matter of fact but her voice is quiet, weakened. Normally, her energy comes bursting through the phone. Not this morning. Her first words are, "Augusta, frankly I don't have time to die (business, family's needs and hospital work). This is all so shockingly fast. Yet, if this is it, I want you all to be happy for me."

She is no stranger to "death" having lost her husband and her forty year old son within the last few years. Her awareness-veil between here and the "other side" is wonderfully thin. She knows life, love, learning, and awareness continue -- that a mere capsule of dust cannot contain or explain these immensities.  Yet I sense her indecision.

She continues, "I don't know what to do. I am thinking of taking the chemo." She pauses, her voice is strained, "What would you do?"

What bothers me is that I don't know what I would do -- and more importantly why don't I? I have read the books, was a hospice care giver for years, spent a week with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross*, hear from Guides who are certainly not on this side and know in my being everything my cousin does. With our experience why don't either of us know?

As she talks I see a tableau taking place in my mind's eye. A four year old brother is coming up behind his smaller sister. He gives her a forceful shove, caught unaware, she falls to the ground. Disorientated, undecided whether to cry or not, she needs time to get her balance as she struggles to her feet saying, "I'm ok Grandma."

My cousin needs time and space for her balance, wisdom, knowledge and instincts. A cross road with more directions than merely Yes or No -- a way forward that allows for the rich sea chest of probability, possibilities that are not definitive. She may well decide by the second week to discontinue the chemo or she may not. I do not know "where time and place and eternity somehow will meet." I simple do not know the answer for her or for me.

On the phone she is quietly waiting. I reply, "Cousin of mine, 'I don't know' is the answer."


*Kubler-Ross: a pioneer in near-death studies and the author of the groundbreaking book "On Death and Dying" identifying for the first time in western medicine, the five stages of grief.

photo source: fotolia.com