Loss – THE DAILY ROUND

4-legged companions, Becoming, Gifts, Gratitude, Grief, Healing, Listening, Loss, Love, Silence, Spirit, Transformation

Spinning Straw Into Gold

September 29, 2015March 23, 2020by Kitty7 Comments

A hard summer of loss has eased into a colorful autumn full of comforting signs and wonders, like the love and presence of supportive family and friends, a hummingbird’s kiss, encounters with a visiting butterfly, walks on the trail, and last night’s amazing full moon in eclipse.

A good friend asked me what was getting me through all this loss…and had I perceived any spiritual invitations? (I am blessed with many friends who are chaplains, healers, and spiritual directors; these are the types of things we ask each other: how cool is that?!) Another dear friend asked when she could come and hear stories about the pups, another profoundly loving response to loss.

It took time to discover invitations, and I’m still working on it. But the question brought to my mind the tale of Rumpelstiltskin, who helped the bragging maiden spin straw into gold. Rumple bartered for her firstborn… but she learned his name, spoke it, and sent him packing.

Straw is dried grain, and so many tales and parables tell us bread made from living grain is the staff of life. Straw, then, seems a natural symbol of death, loss, and grief. I’ve imagined the grief that marked this summer as straw, piling into mountains before me, waiting…

So I’ve entered the grief and it’s entered me, and I’ve sat with it and listened and wept and watched, and now, finally, I’ve begun to spin…

If I wove a tapestry with these golden threads, it would include images from the day my sister-in-law dropped everything, drove over an hour, arrived with a bouquet of sunflowers and zinnias, and remained tenderly present to my grief. At one point, we sat beside each other on the steps of the deck, watching dozens of butterflies flitting so energetically around and within the great purple aster that it seemed it might fly away.

We spoke of “visits” we’ve experienced after losing those we love, that felt sense that the one who has died is able to be present in new ways. I said I’d received a few feathers from Riley and Clancy so far, nothing more. “But,” I said, “these visits never happen when I ‘expect’ them; they just seem to gift me when I most need them.”

No sooner had I said, “…need them,” than a hummingbird flew to the space between our heads and froze there, for 30 seconds or longer. Neither of us moved as the tiny bird “hovered and hummed,” its wings beating mightily, nearly brushing our cheeks. After a long while, it flew off, its message deeply held in our hearts. We hugged and then sat in silence for a few minutes, both of us tearful. Such a sacred experience, and all the better because someone I love shared it with me. Someone who also believes the proper response to mystery is awe, and silence.

Spinning straw into gold…All the daily routines that stemmed from the dogs’ needs have vanished, and–as with any loss–there are now many holes in the day when I miss them especially dearly. If I’m home during the day, I take my camera and go out to the gardens, seeking diversions from the constant and tiring “missing.” This butterfly visited the garden another day, and stayed for a few hours. Her company offered delight and peace. When you’re grieving, such hours of respite are truly restorative. She let me follow her all around with my camera and seemed to enjoy posing from every angle.

It’s been challenging to head out on the trail without Riley and Clancy. I tend to check both directions for bikers and walkers, and when I’m sure I’m solo, I talk to the pups, as if they were with me. I grew quiet watching this heron in the river last week. He looked like a monk doing a standing meditation, calling me to deeper reflection. One of the great gifts that comes with grief is this call to go to the center of the center of our being and houseclean, in a way. All of our values and goals and beliefs come up for inspection and reassessment. Certainly, this is another source of gold on the journey of transformation that grief creates: Grief creates.

The pups and I celebrated our walks with parties up and down the trail for over 14 years…I’d break little treats in pieces and we’d have routine and spontaneous parties that always ended with Bridge Party. They’d each give me a paw and I would thank them for coming on the walk, and then they would get the last treat before we ran up the path to our home. A little holy communion, like our morning party.

So it seemed fitting that Phillip and I bring wine, cheese, crackers, and our cameras down to the bridge last night for a perfect viewing of the eclipse. What a lovely Bridge Party, with owls calling, frogs and toads singing and distant coyotes howling. Their cries rose and tangled as the moon became fully eclipsed and shadows disappeared. Then it seemed that everything fell to silence. Definitely a keeper, as far as memories go, and the sense that the pups’ energy surrounded us made it all the more special.

Something in my heart was woven back together during those magical hours on the bridge. I felt my spirit, eclipsed and resting in darkness, was ready to begin moving back towards the fullness of light again.

I’m still spinning these last piles of straw, still weaving, still healing, but so grateful for all the blessings in my life that are helping me turn the straw into gold.

We never want to lose those we love. But we do; we will. And what saves us is the rest of those we love, and who love us. They carry us through our grief and help us see the glints of light that guide us towards greater light, until we can stand again in the sun, in joy. Gradually, we’re led towards those wonderful moments in the world when we can see its devastating beauty and the eternally renewing cycle of life. Through the love of others and the love of the world (all of which, to me, is the love of the Sacred) the grief, in its time and the time of our hearts, transmutes to golden memories, a lifetime tapestry that tells us who we are, finally, as lovers and loved.

© Copyright of all visual and written materials on The Daily Round belongs solely to Catherine M. O’Meara, 2011-Present. Unauthorized use is strictly prohibited, without Catherine O’Meara’s written approval. No one is authorized to use Catherine O’Meara’s copyrighted material for material gain without the author’s engagement and written permission. All other visual, written, and linked materials are credited to their authors.

4-legged companions, Blessing, Change, Clancy, Community, Daily Round, Death, Family, Full Moon Cottage, Gifts, Gratitude, Grief, Loss, Love, Riley, Transformation

Farewell to Riley

September 15, 2015March 23, 2020by Kitty14 Comments

May 12, 2001 – September 13, 2015

And can it be that in a world so full and busy, the loss of one small creature makes a void in any heart, so wide and deep that nothing but the width and depth of vast eternity can fill it up? ~ Charles Dickens

Yes. Yes, it can.

4-legged companions, Balance, Becoming, Blessing, Centering, Change, Daily Round, Death, Discernment, Family, Full Moon Cottage, Gifts, Gratitude, Grief, Healing, Home, Hope, Loss, Love, Relationship, Transformation

The Forest, Having Blown Up

July 21, 2015March 23, 2020by Kitty17 Comments

We’ve had an unexpectedly dramatically dramatic summer, and I would be most grateful if the energy that’s hurled us thus far through the green-flowered and golden weeks would flatten out a bit into some semblance of balance and peace.

But, there is too much, so let me sum up:

Part One

My soul is a broken field, plowed by pain. ~ Sara Teasdale

I guess we’re always, most of us, both prepared and unprepared for loss. We’re full of intellectual wisdom and knowledge about death and grief. We believe we’re fortified by these words and the stages and steps they describe.

And then we step into the land of loss, and the barren, rough landscape opens up, and every surface we encounter in this new world scrapes away at our sense of the known and bloodies our fragile attempts to touch and learn, and sucks the words out of us, and the walls that encompassed the reality we’d come to recognize and rely upon utterly fall away.

Of course, they were only made of paste and cardboard to begin with, but we had so carefully constructed the stage set that encompassed our lives for so long that we disregarded the potential for its devastation.

And how easily, and quickly, it can all collapse and be blown away.

The utter strangeness when a circle of love is broken and the presence of that circle’s heart is removed, requires tricky navigation, and, for a time following Clancy’s death, I chose not to move at all. A week after his death I turned 60 and it meant nothing but that I’d existed for another week.

I didn’t know it then, but I was ill. I had lost contact with my senses, sheltered—or hidden–so deeply within my grief that I didn’t understand that something “out there” was wrong. When I tried to move through my yoga, bicycling, and trail walks with sweet Riley, I felt like the tin man in need of oil. Every joint and muscle hurt, first a bit, and then unbelievably. I stopped trying.

Phillip, family, friends, the four-leggeds, and the gardens helped, as they always do.

We focused on tending Riley’s loss of her lifelong companion and littermate, began to adjust to our own sadness, and I met with my wonderful physician, who helped identify the disease that had taken up residence in my body. Some knowledge does lend power, and over the past month, prescribed treatments have largely eliminated my pain. It’s being “managed,” as they say. (I say, “Hooray!”)

Gratitude always walks with grief, a partnership that, if we choose to recognize it, helps to make us whole again.

Part Two

Little by little God takes away human beauty:
Little by little the sapling withers.
Go, recite, “To whomever We give a length of days,
We also cause them to decline.”
Seek the spirit;
don’t set your heart on bones.
~Rumi

Since I felt stronger, we traveled to an area Phillip had already explored for our retirement. Never sure if that should happen now or later, we visited the communities we found most attractive. We looked at some homes for sale. Mostly, we hiked and sat, and listened. Sweet Riley’s ability to join us on the trip proved a wonderful opportunity to reconfigure our circle of intimacy, settle into each other’s energy, and learn more about the family we are now, without Clancy’s physical presence. Knowing the felines were in good and loving care, we relaxed into the healing offered to our spirits by a landscape we love.

On the way home, we looked at another home that intrigued us, and made an offer to buy it. It was a Friday afternoon, so I called a realtor in our hometown and arranged for her to visit Monday morning, to list Full Moon Cottage for sale. How exciting, to make a change, we thought…perhaps this was the new path Clancy’s death had created for us.

The universe had other plans. Early Monday morning, a storm propelled straight-line winds speeding across the area, and twirls of small tornado tails bobbed down, here and there, twisting bits of the world into unrecognizable designs.

A single kind of thunderous crash caused us to leap out of bed, adrenaline lending us a rather impressive athleticism. Phillip grabbed the flashlight and, through the darkness, assessed that possibly a tree or two had fallen. As the sun rose and daylight scattered across the yard, we saw instead that, without warning, and in an instant, the forest beside our home had exploded.

Part Three

My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon. ~ Mizuta Masahide

Through a fog of dazed shock, I began to clean the decks as Phillip saved what he could of the front garden. Several of our trees had fallen, but the more dismal reality was that about 30 or 40 of our neighbor’s white pines had crashed across our front yard. There was no way we could clear the havoc ourselves.

A few hours later, covered in dirt, mud, and pine needles, we greeted the realtor, an impressive false smile frozen on her face as she stepped over branches and bravely proceeded to draw up the contract, assuring us that when the home actually came on the market, 10 days later, all would be well.

Home insurance doesn’t pay for storm damage, except for that sustained by the physical house, and we miraculously had little of that. But that’s where the miraculous aspects of the story stopped, we felt, since we did have about 40 trees, in a hundred thousand pieces, that had to be removed.

The morning after the storm, I watched as the two turkey hens we’ve come to know over the years paraded their new chicks through the rubble, over and under branches, accepting of the changed landscape and inviting me to be as well. A doe and her fawns leapt across the yard nimbly. Easy for you, I thought. Can’t you see the world’s been upended?

A few days and a small fortune later, we were left with what we called a muddy “trail of tears,” and worked about 80 hours between us lugging, raking, tossing and scraping together branches and limbs, in 91° heat and a sour funk. I mourned the little crab tree that had anchored my front garden, the vegetables and berries we’d lost, the lovely old hickory tree. A sad business indeed.

Still, Riley seemed happy to be home, reunited with her cat buddies, and unfazed by the need to jump over or circle around trees on the trail, or stop and re-route altogether, so that was a blessing. And I was feeling physically stronger every day, another light in the darkness.

By Friday, we decided to put off buying a new home, moving, or selling Full Moon Cottage. We were fairly spent, almost on empty, and fully exhausted.

We set down the rakes and shovels and took off our gloves and sat on the deck, sipping ice cold beer and surveying the altered scene before us.

And we began to laugh. And, of course, we counted the many blessings that had equally fallen all around us. We had been spared injury; the house was minimally damaged, the gardens would recover, and many were still growing madly…

I shared that I’d had the Masahide quote running through my mind all week. And then I told Phillip, making a sarcastic joke, that, at least we could now receive better internet and phone reception, which the wall of white pines had always prevented. He replied, “The forest having blown up, I can now receive three bars,” which really set us off…and I knew we would be OK. Better able to see the paste and cardboard of life for what they are, we can set them aside and focus on what’s really real and lasting. Like the turkeys, and the deer, and sweet Riley, we will make our way across these losses and come to new places, feeding on the blessings that are all around us, and loving the memories of all that’s come before. Our family’s circle of love was never broken; I see that now. It’s only changed, and Clancy, and Riley, and our precious four-legged felines will always be that circle’s heart.

4-legged companions, Blessing, Change, Dogs, Dying, Loss, Love, Transformation

Clancy, the Heartbeat at My Feet

June 10, 2015March 23, 2020by Kitty23 Comments

CLANCY

May 12, 2001 ~ June 10, 2015

How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard. ~ A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

I knew when I met you an adventure was going to happen. ~ A.A. Milne

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. ~ Crowfoot, a leader of the Blackfoot Nation

My little old dog
a heart-beat
at my feet
~ Edith Wharton

Balance, Becoming, Blessing, Centering, Change, Conscious Awareness, Creativity, Daily Round, Dying, Family, Gratitude, Healing, Hope, Loss, Love, Noticing, Relationship, Spirit Level, Transformation, Wisdom

Counter Posture

January 20, 2014March 23, 2020by Kitty22 Comments

40 years of yoga practice have yielded gifts I never expected when I started down the path, much, I suppose, like any long-term relationship one consents to pursue will continue to surprise the heart and spirit if attention is paid and the relationship is bound more by love and flexibility than a rigid repetition of steps learned long ago and in all the years since rarely or never opened to inspiration.

Consider, for example, the wisdom and elegance of counter-posturing, balancing in-breath and out-breath, uniting a backbend with a forward bend, marrying a reaching with a contraction. The unfolding understanding of a counter-posture’s gifts has broadened my ability to remain increasingly present and mindful to my life and its core of mystery, to its blessing and suffering, and to its continual flow of dying and rebirth. Life, at its essence, is an unending exercise in counter-posturing. Over and over, life asks that we disintegrate and reintegrate, from our birth, through the breaths enclosing each succeeding moment until our death. If we can enter our life mindfully, co-creating equanimity and balance, how much lovelier our experience of its gifts can be.

Counter-posturing is inherent to the flow of yoga, as it is to the philosophies and theologies we recognize as our guiding wisdoms. For example, it forms the holistic essence symbolized by the yin and yang’s embrace of both the empirical and transcendent. It is expressed beautifully in the Hebrew Ecclesiastes verses that tell us everything must have its season. It pulses at the heart of every line forming the beautiful Prayer of St. Francis.

It is revealed throughout nature’s perfect balance, offering the rounded whole of existence to guide our spirits towards their own rounded fulfillment: Summer’s outward energy and exuberant volume, winter’s inner withdrawal and soundless stillness, the expansion and retraction of spring and autumn. Every force has its equal and opposite force that, if embraced, creates a perfect marriage of balance.

The universe conspires to teach us the wisdom of counter-posturing, to help us choose paths, practices, and actions that keep us balanced and centered, which is to say authentically healthy and whole. When life is flowing easily, these practices may heighten its joy. When life is overcome by suffering, the ability to counter-posture becomes as necessary to our spiritual survival as oxygen is to our body.

Our first breath is an in-breath; our final an exhalation. Whatever we choose between these, whatever existence offers, life originates and concludes in perfect balance. Our choice to counter-posture—or not—all those moments between our human beginning and end determines the degree of elegance, the trajectory of growth, the depth of meaning, and the awareness of the Sacred that infuses our life.

My beloved brother-in-law died last week.

Days were circumscribed by his rapid decline in health, an accelerated rhythm of swirled energy and emotions, rising hopes and dashed hopes, long vigils and sleepless nights, the gathering and parting of family, the brutal lack of equanimity often offered by the hospital ICU, the sense of everything heightened and held out of time, and moments when reality screamed with unrelenting heart-slamming truths, grounding us in medical minutiae and the process of dying.

By training and inclination, the camera of my perception continually moved in and out, assessing the degree of shock and anxiety within and without each participant, and, of course, myself. When the life of one we love is so suddenly compromised, our emotions, bodies, and spirits are thrown out of coherence. Numbed engagement is often the best that can be managed and also serves to protect us, and so we offer automatic responses that cushion our completely exposed vulnerability from jarring contact with more than this moment, and now this one.

If we can listen deeply during such times of spiritual, emotional, and physical trauma, some inner knowing will tell us that our spirits are trying to catch up with us, and if we can hang on, and intuitively counter-posture each moment’s invitations and assaults, we will again find our way home to our center. Until then, we travel with sails tossed by raw emotions, and if we are blessed, love is the one we allow to carry us through to journey’s end.

Years of accompanying others and their families through such experiences have taught me to seek, support, and encourage the counter-postures that will renew balance for all involved in the drama of dying and loss. As a midwife to the dying, I have witnessed myriad responses to the invitations this final journey offers to the one who is dying and to those who accompany him or her. I have felt and considered them all myself when I have lost someone I loved, as I did last week. Every new wave that crashes against us can either be met with love or rejected and futilely battled in anger, fear, anxiety, and despair.

Here is how it might happen when we surrender to the experience and meet it with intentional equanimity: We can recognize the horror of our individual and collective journey and choose to translate it into sorrow by meeting it with love. We can counter-posture our howling pain by acknowledging that mystery and grace are also our companions. We can embrace our fellow-passengers on this journey of stunning transformation, and through the energy of our words and silence, our actions and stillness, our in-breaths and out-breaths, comfort our own and others’ hearts, subdue the storm, and steady our spirits. We can focus our energy and gratitude upon the one who is departing, on his comfort, his peace, his need to know we will be alright, and that our love will go with him.

These are some of the choices we can make to counter-posture the energy created by such profound storms in our lives, and so guide our spirits back into a substantial presence where they can eventually rest in weary peace.

My brother-in-law was blessed, as he was blessing. His wife and children never once let themselves be unmoored by the ferocity and velocity of invitations to let go into fear, anger, or despair. They embraced each other and all who joined their circle, shining light on their beloved and holding him in love through his final exhalation. They intuited elegant counter-posturing and preserved the fullness and wholeness of this loss and every moment of gratitude and community it offered.

Hallowed life, hallowed death: oh, such gifts we can offer ourselves and others if we choose intentional equanimity and balance.

And as we enter our grief, I am consoled by the beauty of our gatherings to be peacefully present to the death of our beloved one, to his burial and commitment to Love’s turning circle. I’m heartened, too, by the sense that together and alone we’ll dance with our grief, counter-posturing sadness with joy, weariness with rest, sharing with conserving energy, breathing in with breathing out, deepening our recognition and understanding of all the ways our loved one’s death opens his life to our sustenance.

May we continue to honor this great loss and use this great love to create sacred balance in our lives and holy equanimity in the lives of those we love and meet. May we counter the world’s brokenness with our loved one’s example of creativity; may we help heal the world’s hatred with his lessons of love, may we counter the world’s joylessness with his model of enthusiasm, and the world’s sadness with his encompassing delight. May we always hear the invitations to discover and use our gifts, as he did, to bless the world and to assure the Earth, over and over, that she is precious, loved, and worth saving, in all her infinite variety, and work to make it so.

Becoming, Change, Gardening, Healing, Loss, Photography, Transformation

Transformation

June 8, 2012March 25, 2020by Kitty10 Comments

A few years ago, a lovely willow in our back yard uprooted and crashed to the ground during a storm that swept through, riding on extremely high winds. Phillip and I happened to be in the living room facing the tall windows overlooking the yard when an earsplitting crack suddenly exploded through the wailing winds of the storm. We instinctively ducked, then turned towards the direction of the sound and saw the tree falling, crashing across two gardens. Bushes, perennials and annuals were crushed beneath the huge trunk, and the willow’s shattered branches lay in pieces, everywhere.

We spent the next week cleaning up and cutting the trunk of the tree so we could remove it from the gardens in sections. Huge “willow boulders” still form a pile of firewood near the river. We can only use such large pieces in outdoor bonfires, as they’re too hard to cut for the indoor wood-burning stove. Thankfully, all of the plants were saved, as though the willow had tried to do the least amount of damage as possible as it fell to its own death, missing far more plants than it touched, and those that were crushed now look healthy and revived.

We left the base of the willow’s trunk and a few massive pieces where it had been rooted, and formed a garden around it…at first, haphazardly, since it hadn’t been a planned garden, initially. Phillip built a trellis and set it at the back of this space, and I set a few plants around, intending to design and shape a garden when we had time. Throughout the next year, we added seeds or plants when we had leftovers from other gardens, driven by necessity and still without a design. The space gradually became attractive, but it made me sad to think about losing the willow.

For some years, I’d collected rose hips from the wild roses along the trail, saved them in the freezer and then, at some point, opened them and scarified a few of the seeds…I couldn’t find a lot of help on the internet in those days, so I had to guess at the techniques that would work: freezing and burning some, slicing others with a razor: scarification is challenging for the seed and the gardener… I planted these seeds around the yard and forgot about them for a couple years. Surprisingly, a few wild roses started popping up here and there, and within two years of the “falling willow,” a huge white wild rose was embracing, then overtaking the trellis, and forming an elegant backdrop for willow’s garden. Poppies thrived there and so did irises, lilies, and flax.

It has become a very lovely sanctuary in that corner of the yard, a memorial to our beautiful willow and her gentle spirit. The wild rose has become a symbol of what the pain of scarification can lead to: vigorous new growth and a surprising beauty that was unforeseen.

A few nights ago, we burned pieces of the willow’s trunk in our bonfire, and the holy fragrance entered my dreams as the fire smoldered through the night. It said: See what beauty can come from loss, and how spirited is the growth born from pain!

And all my dreams were stories of hope.

© Copyright of all visual and written materials on The Daily Round belongs solely to Catherine M. O’Meara, 2011-Present. Unauthorized use is strictly prohibited, without the author’s written approval. No one is authorized to use Catherine O’Meara’s copyrighted material for material gain without the author’s engagement and written permission. All other visual, written, and linked materials are credited to their authors. Thank you, and gentle peace.

Creativity, Listening, Loss, Silence, Story, Writing

Lost and Found

April 30, 2012March 25, 2020by Kitty8 Comments

Dear St. Anthony,

Come around,

I’ve lost my _______,

And it can’t be found.

That was the prayer-poem we were taught when we were very, very young and trying to locate a toy, or shoe, or homework assignment that had been misplaced. In the Catholic Church, St. Anthony of Padua is the patron saint of lost articles (extrapolate and extend metaphors as needed), and the prayer seemed to work. At any rate, it alleviated anxiety and allowed us to focus on finding what we’d lost, but I’ve never discounted the energy of holy mystery and its role in easing life’s burdens, either.

I’ve been reciting the Prayer to St. Anthony this past week, not in search of my mind, which I sometimes think would be a recommended “best practice,” but in search of a novel begun and stored on my computer and then one day accidently deleted or carried over to the trash bin. Poof. Lost. Without any recollection on my part. This is proof that age doesn’t automatically yield wisdom: I certainly know my manuscripts should be backed-up and stored on a flash drive and/or in a cloud. (Would that sentence have made any sense at all a few years ago?) But my new computer seemed so strong and safe; I relied upon it and let down my guard.

I forgot to practice safe text.

Writers will sympathize with the torment and agony this causes; the loss is real and deep. The child of my creativity is alone, abandoned, and floating somewhere in the ether. I can’t retrieve it…I can’t duplicate it. All the work; all the magic…gone.

My husband took the hard drive to the local computer doctor, who has been running searches for the past week; so far, unsuccessfully, but I haven’t surrendered all of my hope yet. Maybe St. Anthony will help me find my story. If not the actual document, perhaps I’ll be inspired to re-create it anew. Still too heartsick.

Damn! I loved the way it flowed, and I had so finely polished the words; each was a jewel, artistically conformed to the mood, setting, and action and poetry. The characters were distinct and intriguing…oh dear; even writing this hurts.

And on top of the loss, to be without a computer for days and days was initially like lemon juice on an open wound. I felt like I was floating free in the ether myself. The lack of my computer seemed to expand the day by innumerable hours. Had I really spent all that time checking e-mail, writing, visiting Facebook, reading links…?

I’d thought my days were fairly silent; I believed I wrote in stillness all day long. I discovered, though, that my hours had been full of the endless chatter the world creates and thrives upon. My computer was like some techno-umbilical cord connecting me to the constant stream of the world’s anxious head-noise.

Without it, I had time to enter my meditation space and stay for an hour. Meditating. I wrote in longhand, wandered and weeded in the gardens, meditated some more, and still had plenty of time to complete my share of our family’s tasks…and all of this in real, deep silence. Unplugged. Listening.

I had no idea until I lost my computer how silent silence could be. I knew this once, but I forgot. Technology seduces us and even when we think we’re being mindful, we’re enticed, led into reliance upon its endless connections and the desire to keep in touch. I HAVE to know what is occurring in the world now, and now, and now…

No; I don’t.

Phillip gifted me with a little (as in Lilliputian) notebook this weekend, so I can write and post, and e-mail. I appreciate it, but I don’t want to lose the lessons this past week taught me, lessons I thought I’d already mastered, but hadn’t. Twice a week, I plan to refrain from turning on any computer.

I learned again that moments of deep healing can come when we are silent and our spirit is deeply still. We can enter a space where everything we’ve ever been, and dreamed, and suffered, and where everyone we’ve ever loved lives, and waits for us to meet their energy and be with them.

I lost my story last week, and I lost a very precious friend. He was 86 and had been my spiritual director for several years. This will be a deeper grief to heal, a longer journey in the landscape of loss. But I know again that when I travel in silence to the still point in my heart, I’ll find my story and my friend. Both of them are there, alive, forever.

Thanks, St. Anthony.

Tag: Loss