Category Archives: Woman of a Certain Age

Returning to you . . .

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Why does it take time to become a child again in seeing and playing? Why should it take years before you go forth without protection, to know you are safe in yourself?

. . . . .

It has been eight, nine, maybe even ten months since I have written. A lot has happened in the world. It has been confirmed repeatedly that the president of the United States is a dangerous ego-maniac and compulsive liar. Also, he is stupid in the way that narcissists know nothing except their delusions, impulses, and desires. Narcissism always catches up with you and is guaranteed to turn you into a toxic slab without the means or impulse to help other human beings.

So, we are left less than leaderless during a crisis. We have to work our way around a dangerous obstacle in the way of our care and the care of others.

I write this in a semi-sequestered state as someone well over the age of 60, which seems to be the assumed age where you start disintegrating and where, if you get Covid-19, your life could be considerably shorter than you anticipated–precious years you planned to watch your grandchildren grow into young adults, to publish the book in residence in your mind, maybe even go on a trek to Nepal or a walk in the African bush. Maybe, we think, there is still time to become wiser and do last forgivenesses.

Perhaps the musing of this writing is to say, most of us resent having time taken from us by trivia or mistakes. Most of us? Perhaps we have differing definitions of trivia. Perhaps fewer definitions of mistakes. Trump is a mistake.

My definition of trivia is anything that repeats itself in banality. Flowers could repeat themselves infinitely and never be banal. Plastic wrap is banal.

Let’s get right down to it. Humans are not good at earth management. We tend to break things, crush things, shame each other and ourselves, have tirades, destroy beauty, and discount our senses. Well, we kill each other and other living creatures and plants is what it comes down to.

Now we are in a real crisis and I am semi-sequestered. Surely you are too, and we fear our time to get it right is shortening.

So I’ve decided to love in an undisciplined way, and I bring up memories of how I felt in my 30s. How I felt in my body, how I ran and whirled, how I sang, and still had body hair. But you know what? There is an even greater sensitivity and increase of pleasure now in observing what is around me–truly tasting, basking in sunsets, feeling nuances of poetry, seeing the smallest living miracles surrounding me.

Now I have a bird feeder, bird bath, and bee and butterfly patches in my garden. It is important to lure the birds, bees, and butterflies back. Each is a revelation. Tell me again how feathers and wings came to be!

I taste fine wine in my mouth by simply imagining it. I see colors across the room through my mind. Lime green, fuchsia, mustard, cyan, teal … Ah, they flash before me now.

Can one explain these things to others? I think not, but perhaps the joys of them can infuse me and be shared simply through my being. Yours, too.

Why does it take time to become a child again in seeing and playing? Why should it take years before you go forth without protection, to know you are safe in yourself?

Why did we have to miss so many years getting here?

Yes, I am aware I am jumping from subject to subject but you need to keep up. If I am indecipherable, it is not a fault. Don’t think I am blathering, because I am not. Pay attention.


Letter to a Young Woman: Is it safe to love?

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You wrote, though we scarcely know each other, entrusting me with two questions. 1) How can you go beyond past injury to love, trust, and commit to another? 2) How in our world of grief and pain can you love, how can you be happy?

Well, you said it more eloquently and passionately: “It is time for me to take risks being vulnerable with another human and trusting and ‘loving’ as best I can. The brave part of me says ‘No regrets! Love fully!! Fearlessly!!’ and that somehow makes me feel better, even though I know it could go wrong in many ways.”

You have fallen in love, and it has shaken your isolation. “It is time to take risks being vulnerable with another human and trusting . . .” A dilemma! 

You said “The more I have known and connected with other people in this world the more heartbroken I am. It is not that I am not happy, I am. But also deeply heartbroken.

“It is difficult to live and more difficult to love while living because you see others as yourself and so the pain feels SO real and urgent and many times we cannot do anything. Why do we feel if we really cannot do anything?”

Do you understand your question of being vulnerable to a loved one and your question of surviving the pain in the world are variants of the same question—is it safe to love? 

Oh, no, my dear, it is not safe to love. It is not. You will be hurt, perhaps brought to your knees. You will suffer small wounds and large. You will lose people, places, and things. You will be betrayed. You will lose beliefs, your sense of what is real, and of who you are. Oh, no, it is not safe at all.

You told me of your earliest wounds and your decision even as a child to be separate, to be a warrior without human attachments in order to be more brave in the world, in order not to have personal friends and family you would need to protect. But, dear, warriors of any value will have their armor lanced. Love will do that to you.

Love will also make you real. 

The Skin Horse told the Velveteen Rabbit, “Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Do with this quote what you want. Perhaps this is not the kind of advice you were looking for. Perhaps by the time you read this, you will have already figured that out. You are meeting your lover. Perhaps I am late returning to you—expect it is never too late.

So, I will add a few meandering thoughts, important ones. You trusted me, surely I can offer you more words about being real in our world of pain.

Dear, there is so much grief, hate, violence, prejudice, hunger, poverty, illness, and cruelty that you have no choice but to love. If you do not love openly, vulnerably, you will perish, you will stultify inside your armor, and have no hope of saving yourself or anyone else in the world.

Caring for yourself—your first priority as a created living being—includes loving, and love includes laughing, playing, singing praises, and celebration. You came into this world with the right to joy.

Far from the Velveteen Rabbit, let me tell you the words of a Holocaust survivor: “I beg you, do something. Learn a dance step, something to justify your existence, something that gives you the right to be dressed in your skin and in your body hair. Learn to walk, and to love, because it would be too senseless, after all, for so many to have died while you live, doing nothing with your life.”

Those in need do not wish of you to be sad. That simply makes one more sad person in the world.

They wish of you to be touched with sunlight so you can bring to them light and laughter along with equality and opportunity. They need reminders of the truths beyond their pain. They need hope and shared happiness. You spoke to me because you believe I know something.

Well, this I know. The bravest thing you can do, what a true warrior would do, is bring your courage and talents, your innate joy, your vulnerability, and your commitment of love for yourself and for others into your actions. Bringing them into actions makes them real in the world. It helps create the reality you long for.

It took decades for me to stop vacillating between sorrow and joy as though they were polar opposites. They are not. With time and intent they meld. I carry grief in my heart at every moment for the pain in the world. It is entwined with my joy and celebration of existence. This is what comes with time and intent.

It is what is real inside the Real You. Give yourself time. Allow mistakes, they are inevitable and boundless. Do not fear difficult times or sorrow, and do not force laughter. It will come naturally from your soul when it is freed from armor. 

The same will happen with crying. It will come naturally and not lessen your courage. There may be times when your crying may be best done in private or with only a friend or two. That can be the nature of relationships and circumstances, but whenever you cry, honor yourself with those tears. They, too, are part of being real.

I realize as I am coming to a close that I feel you so closely as a young woman that I have not thought of young men or older men. It is more complex for most men, this meeting and embracing of conflicting emotions. Certainly, if you wish, you can share this letter with them. Certainly it pertains even more to them.

But for now, remember that you cannot curve yourself to fit men or any loved one. Well, you could try but such a terrible hazard to your freedom! Such a threat to your joy! Be careful with that. You may choose to give a great deal to a man, but do not let one take parts of you.

With love,

patricia

Life, Loss, and my Dog

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Shall we talk of loss kindly and politely as though these things happen all the time, as often as tying shoes and drinking water? Shall we try to bring loss into form when it is the absence of form, the disappearance of form, replaced by a hollow that nonetheless has its own sound, a slack key guitar twang or tremolo of a loon or ache of a squeaking gate to a chamber next to your heart? We relearn the location of our heart with every loss, every major loss, the ones that rise above noise level, the ones that remain open and enhance the purple of hyacinth in May and sunsets in October. 

Yes, let us talk of such losses politely and with poise.  

My dog has had a sudden spike in the negative indicators of his chronic kidney disease. I measure the wobbles of today against yesterday. I entice him with salmon hidden under ground chicken thighs and rice. Just please eat. Please eat. He still prances when he walks. He will be with me as long as he is happy, and he is still happy, but how did that expectation go from years to months?

My friends’ friends are dropping like flies. Mostly people I do not know. 

We are in a sieve. People slip through the holes, making room for the next ones. Gravity is persistent and greedy as it cleans the slate–pulling babies into the world, giving goodness ongoing chances, eliciting poetry, song, and dance. It pulls us from origin and returns us.

If there is a time to come to terms with the rounding of organic life from beginning to end, to make sense of it, to accept it, old age is our last chance. 

Poise, hard learned over time, helps us not to panic, not to scream, not to complain, but to accept—helps us say “Well, that was a helluva thing, wasn’t it?” Helps us say, “Glad I was here.” 

When we recognize there was no reason for us to exist at all, but that we were made nonetheless and allowed to flounder, squirm, love, breed, and give, and discover that whatever that didn’t need to make us did make us, and loves us in its own way, then we can hold the whole of being loved and feeling loved against the shortness of living, the violence, horrors, devastation, cruelty, losses. 

When we can hold love and joy and surprise, and wonder and amazement against a sort of in-born rot of ignorance, greed, and arrogance, then we can feel our place as carriers of the immensity, then we know we have had our turn. 

When we can say “I understand little but know I am in the presence of a nameless force that makes flowers and welcomes poetry,” we can yield. We can yield to continual loss that is, in fact, a filling of the story of our lives and a gaining of what it is like to live. 

My dog is barking at a delivery man, not so loudly as before, not throwing himself against the door, but barking nonetheless—barking in the way I would have always preferred, though not at this cost. 

He does not think of these things, but pushes himself against me and allows me to nuzzle my face in his fuzzy ears in ways that are new. He stares at me and yields.

We will do this beautifully, my Phoenix. I promise.


How My Mother Showed Love: My dolls’ wardrobes

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My mother had the farmhouse door painted red, a protest to something though as a child I did not understand what. She also planted one Oriental poppy and nursed it through several seasons of Iowa winters. They were the same red, both testifying “I promised myself I’d never marry a farmer.”

I too was her proof of being special. What she could not reveal of herself, the world would see through the brain and beauty and poise of her daughter. She believed in genes and hated being underestimated. She had sold apples on the street corner during the depression as classmates walked by on their way to school.  

The house was not a typical white wooden farmhouse with creaks and openings around the windows and doors. It had wooden floors, but they were narrow slats of prime grade oak fit together as tight as Puritan’s lips.

The house was a top-of-the-line Sears prefab house built by a man from Minnesota who invested in Texas oil and wanted to live out his life on an Iowa farm. Seems he invested in the only spot in Texas without oil. Before he ever lived in the house, it was foreclosed to people who put a potbellied stove in the middle of the living room. 

The house was stucco with leaded windows, built-in china cabinets, and a solarium. My mother, in a misguided attempt to be modern, bastardized it with fleur-de-lys Wall-tex and blonde Swedish furniture. The ceilings were lowered with acoustic tiles, the copper chandelier replaced by a Nordic thing of teak.  

I, the child, cringed for myself and the house. 

I look now for the ways she showed love for me, and it is difficult unless I go inside her and feel the trap that held her from affection. Then I understand, then she is young, then she is lost, then she is determination, then she is a 20-year-old teacher in one room school houses who drove up a 1/4 mile lane to ask directions and saw a young man asleep in the yard after lunch and before returning to farm work. She felt ugly and saw a handsome man in the grass. 

Now, old enough to be her grandmother, I look for ways in which she showed love for me. She took her talent for sewing and knitting, and created cloths for me that made those bought in stores for the town children look second-hand. Still, I longed for store-bought clothes in their bright colors and round skirts. My fine clothes made me stand out.

She took her talent for sewing and knitting into creating whole wardrobes for my dolls— precursors of Barbie and much more beautiful. She made skating outfits, skiing outfits, Dutch girl outfits, cheerleader outfits, and a wedding dress with lace and net. They are now with her great-granddaughter and only slightly the less for time and wear. 

She took her talent for sewing and knitting into matching ensembles for me of wool skirts and intricate sweaters that made me stand out in college in ways that set me apart and that I liked. By then, I appreciated them and wondered, as I do now, at her craftsmen. 

My closet has jackets she made for herself, some with false labels of designer fashions—one in thick golden wool labeled Dior.

Who was this woman who knew clothes, who needed an Oriental poppy, who painted the door red, who scaped decades of shellac off the oak floor, the cabinets, the window seats, and stairs, but had no sense of interior design or art. The woman who made sure I got contact lenses when the town girls did because we were not less than them. The woman who did not allow me dance lessons but made sure I had piano lessons from the time I was eight. 

I ask myself, how did she show me love that was not tied to showing me off? I remember no hugs, no sweet touch, no “I love you.” That is because there were none. The trap inside her, the fear of touch, the possible coming undone of showing love. 

I remember the ski poles that went with the skiing outfit, the skates that went with the skating outfits, I remember the skating outfit itself knit in yellow with fuzzy baby blue trim and matching cap. I remember the wooden Dutch girl clogs. I remember the skiing pants in deep blue and the top in deep red with gold double-vested buttons down the front. 

I never learned to ski or ice skate, but she dreamed something, and made it for me. 

Knowing that is not quite enough, but knowing that and now being able to feel inside of her—the strictures, the determination against insecurity and feeling ugly, her resentment towards her mother for making her tend the five younger and more adored children—her resignation to being a farmer’s wife. Those two are enough. I shelter her in my arms across time.

I escaped. I think she wanted me to. 

End of our World: This is not a time to be stupid

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Formation of earth—explosion, fire, water to land, hot core, first ferns, beginning of eyes, of seeing, hearing, knowing—to humanoids arriving in the last sliver of a 10-foot-long timeline or last millisecond of since forever. Yet, this truth never convinces us how wispy we are. After all, we tickled out the timelines. We are the culmination, where the timeline always intended to go. We are creatures that know we know.

Years ago in Davos, Switzerland I heard a woman crow that her astrophysicist husband had done the math and it is impossible that advanced life exists anywhere else in the cosmos. Please, if you’re going to be stupid, do it on your own merit, don’t borrow from someone else. 

But we are all delusional. We may read timelines but know nothing of what was before. We may split atoms, chart elements, discover there are no smudges, only separate units going infinitely into minutia and infinity. We may study weak and strong forces, gravity, magnetism, inertia, and pheromones, but we only learn what they do, not why they do it. 

  It’s easy to believe something really really weird is real, but hard to think how it could be.–7-year-old girl

We resist the bald truth that there seems to be no reason for us, that we may exist only because we can and the value of our lives is a construct of evolution that we should be happy and reproduce–or seek happiness and therefore reproduce. We resist it by creating myths that are not nearly so interesting.

  Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?—Mary Oliver 

The chill is still on for this spring. I sit inside by a fire with my dog beside me. I pet him behind his ears as we stare at flames as humans and gentler wolves have always done. Fire has been fire since the beginning of the timeline—atoms vibrate off each other faster and faster, faster than local gossip, faster than lust, touching our skin, our hopes, our tomorrows, taming and recharging us. 

There is nothing of his ancestors in my dog that I can see, his killer instinct limited to barking over his weight class and slamming himself against the door when men in uniform deliver packages or other dogs intrude on his territory. He is fed from cans supplemented by home-cooked basmati rice with ground chicken or turkey. He can carry a grudge but only for a little time. He is getting older and sometimes wobbles. I worry. A lot.

  A dog is one of the few things in life that is as it seems.—Mark J. Asher

You and I may never see hard evidence of complex life elsewhere in the universe, but we know that whatever created light and dogs isn’t going to stop with us. Whatever expands, creates, and melds substance with wave and intent is not going to stop now. 

If we demolish earth as a home for complex organisms, the universe will not care. We are a millisecond, a sliver. We will be hopped over for millennia until another life form emerges, new creatures that believe they know what they know. Perhaps they actually will, perhaps they will be kinder than we have been. 

God, I think, is what is alive in us. God is life—balance, rhythm, stop and start, nectar for bees, seeds for birds, buds for blooms. She is nesting, reproduction, line and form against line and form. She is what is physical and what is beyond physical, the transference from fire to air to face. She is movement, orbs, attraction, spinning atoms, laughter at strange times out of nowhere. 

Evolution will continue if we knock ourselves out of the running. Life does not need humans.

  Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, it’s not going to get better. It’s not.—The Lorax

We are a creative, beguiling, and misguided millisecond. If we wish for more than that, we can no longer be stupid on our own or borrowed from others.

The Paradox of Existence: You can’t get there from here

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Time is an illusion–Albert Einstein

The way it stands is we experience ourselves as physical beings even though time and, therefore, space are illusions. Space cannot exist without a time to put it in and, if time and space are illusions, so are we. That is the Paradox of Existence, also known as the Trials of Illusion.

Our past is not here and our future is a filament of imagination—fireflies.

Even so, the illusions of time and space are usually enough for us. With them, we experience intention, dreams, thrills, expectations, miseries, mistakes, tragedies, bliss, orgasms, cookies, poems, snails, bunnies, paper cuts, families, and sense of self. 

There are great mysteries here, and we will not solve them by believing in time and space.

Curiouser and curiouser–Alice from a place much like ours

There is a storyteller in us or beyond us, or both—and the storyteller creates stories with us at the center, which allows us to feel real because the story makes time and space feel real even though stories have no physicality of their own. 

A case could be made that we imagine gods in order to believe in an Grand Storyteller with answers to what we cannot comprehend, such as where we come from, where we are going, who we are, and what is happening.

Or the case could be made that there actually IS a Grand Storyteller, an Ultimate Intention beyond time and space that we dress up as petty gods because it is the best we can do with such magnificence—and that Ultimate Intention creates stories, our lives, so it can “see” bits of itself. Perhaps It binge-watches Itself through us even as we strive to see It through the blinds of our limitations.

  Have I made up my belief that I can think?

We are incapable of understanding the whole of It, but we inch our way like worms measuring marigolds to fleeting glimpses of what is beyond the usual resources of our illusions. Through quantum theory, mystical initiations, and exploration of the microcosm and macrocosm we inch our way to pure energy, to pre-story, all potential energy.

The Paradox of Existence, however, means we cannot “hold” these fleeting glimpses of what is behind time and space in normal consciousness. Our normal consciousness can hold only one thing in its awareness in any (presumed) moment. Beyond time and space is the whole thing at once, all time and all space as one before it presumes a separateness.

Nor can we fully know ourselves since there is no substantive “me” to capture, examine, dissect, and hold to the light. Held to the light, we are pure energy.

   . . . and who would hold us to the light? 

We are of stuff we cannot hold in our hands or minds. We cannot be labeled or contained. We are ever-dynamic energy. Few of us hear the space between lines of poetry or the silence between notes of music. 

  Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought. So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.—T.S. Eliot

Not having receptors for the non-material, we become faith-based in that we are material. We equate non-materiality with death. We want things to divert us, move fast, and assault our emotions, to lock us into the sensations of being in space and time. We ignore what is not easily sensed. We embrace what seems obvious and ignore what is esoteric.

We don’t want to ride that bicycle. “Look, Ma, no me.”

Still, there is a still place that calls us. We long for “home,” we can feel misplaced, sometimes even evicted. The untouchable essence of who we are wishes to return into its source. 

We are worshipful creatures—we worship and we are to be worshiped. There is no apparent reason for us or rational explanation for us. That makes us miracles. We may be dreams that experience themselves as having substance or we may be manifestations of an Ultimate Intention wanting the company of bits of itself. Both are okay arrangements.

I experience a “knowing”—perhaps you do too—that love is real and core to the call “home.” It connects substance and essence, and cannot be captured or explained. 

Does love come in innocent—pre-story—and, through the stories of us, is tattered and reassembled, new, expanded? Are we the Grand Storyteller’s venue to Its own love?

  Let there be light—the Great Storyteller


Being at One with Rocks

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The unexamined life is not worth living. Really, Socrates?

How can an unexamined life not be worth anything? Does the robin in my garden examine her existence as she flies on yet one more mission for worms or insects or whatever baby robins eat? Does she think “Those kids will be the death of me yet.”

At rest, does she wonder if Schrodinger’s cat is in the tree or not in the tree? I doubt it. She is lovely, chirps in the sun, and chose her mate because he was capable of helping her create demanding children. Is more than that necessary?

Does my dog examine his life? I believe he often wishes he was with the dog sitter who takes him on long walks on trails with deer, raccoons, and foxes, and cooks him homemade meals with chicken, ground beef, and rice. I believe my dog experiences longing, but while longing can lead to examining, it is not in itself examining. Still, I believe if he were verbal, he would say his life is worth living. All the smells!

Pressed, I say that everything is alive, if not self-examining. It is all made of atoms, the basic carrier of “aliveness.” My last ex-husband and my daughter argued with me, saying a rock is not alive. But, of course, it is. We just happen to think while a rock probably doesn’t⏤but then my ex was an entrepreneur and my daughter a scientist, both tending towards certifiable facts as determined by humans.  

Question: Do atoms have self-sensations? A buzzing of some kind? 

You see, I am a mystic, and it’s annoying that in our society that is like saying “I am an dingbat from the 15th planet out from of the star Siegfried in a galaxy 300 million lightyears to your right.”

And I am a mystic by experience, which trumps faith.

To continue, perhaps only creatures with what humans presume is higher consciousness can examine their lives. 

Question: Is self-consciousness the beginning of a need to believe there is a higher power that will save us from meanness?

Question: Will that pint of chocolate almond ice cream I ate last night while watching that program on giraffes show up on the scale?

Whatever, we cannot not examine our lives, born as we are with raging curiosity. Even more important, when we are born, we seek out patterns in order to discern what is around us. In the process we will make mistakes. It is inevitable. We will pile misconception on top of misconception, and we will define ourselves, we will say “this is who I am,” in relationship to how we feel about the world around us as we see it and people in it as we see them.

Question: Are immigrants more criminally active than Episcopalians? 

The dilemma is, we cannot truly examine ourselves⏤our make up, history, the influence of events in our lives on our sense of being⏤without examining the make up of time and space. You read me correctly. We cannot understand who we are unless we examine time and space and their co-dependent physicality, and we cannot examine time and space without trying to grasp pure consciousness beyond time and space.

Question: Is that the most condensed complex paragraph I have ever written?

Physicality is energy in form, atoms making alliances among themselves until, pow!, at some point in some creatures self-awareness comes into being. 

Question: Has self-awareness been in the division of form out of beyond time and space, i.e. pure consciousness, from the beginning?

Question: How can there be a beginning within pure consciousness beyond time and space?

Whatever you tell yourself, you don’t really know when self-awareness comes in. You can only guess, and if you think self-awareness is assigned only to higher intelligence, you might want to reconsider. I don’t have a dog in this fight except accuracy, AND that what you come to believe makes a difference because what you believe is real determines how you live⏤not only your ethics and actions but how you feel inside. 

That is, you fit yourself into the world you create and perceive in your unique individual way. If you perceive everything in the physical world is alive in a shared “One-ness” down to rocks and atoms, it affects how you feel. It provides nourishment and companionship and strength. It expands you, you feel the hunger of the baby birds. The robin feeds you. You begin to perceive a pervasiveness of love. (Sorry, but I’m really not an alien from 300 million light years away even if you wish I were a dingbat.)

Question: Is anyone listening?

To continue: We examine our lives, but we examine them at different levels. Is the worm food, or is the bird a murderer? It depends if you are the bird or the worm. (But that is just a clever thing to say rather than being totally on point.)

To continue on point: 

Point 1) We must examine our lives at minimum because we think, act, love, care for others, and live in a world of form and we want to stay alive, usually. Whether in any moment we realize we are “examining” and determining our lives is up for grabs and depends on the person.

Question: Is this the best color fingernail polish for me? I tried blue on my toes, but it was only fun for a couple weeks.

Question: Do I have obligations to strangers?

Point 2) Curiosity and irregularities pull us to figure out who we are, the stuff of us, the alpha and omega of us. We are pulled to something that feels like “home.” We need help. Without a sense of connection to a “larger,” we feel gaps. It takes immense courage to stand in awareness of the “gap” with its profound loneliness.

Some of us choose to examine that space. Many of us try to avoid it. We are each forced to examine the “gap” when events slam us into darkness. It, too, is inevitable.

Question: It that last statement such a cliche that it needs to be edited out?

Question: Do I need to put in the part about the light at the end of the tunnel? 

We both create and perceive divisions in our daily lives, unending differentiations, some of which are only in our minds but are as real to us as our own existence. . . 

. . . and it is our existence that is at question here. Are we a higher life form than a rock or the same level of life form? If rocks did not exist, we would have nothing to live on as self-conscious life forms. 

Question: Which came first, the rock or Beyond Time and Space?

I am a mystic through experience, not through books or thinking. “I” disappeared along with rocks and time and space into pure consciousness free of time and space. It doesn’t mean I can explain how time and space come out of beyond time and space. Don’t ask me.

There is a reason why the Grand Unified Theory hasn’t been captured. Pure consciousness does not respond to questions. The whole is not the whole if divided into answers. It is being, and it is enough, and it fills the gap most of the time.

The mystery is not if the rock is alive⏤and do consider that it is⏤but that all physical existence is simultaneously beyond time and space and within time and space.

Think of time and space as a microscopic jungle gym on which unlimited differentiations (“things”) born out of beyond time and space have a field day. A jungle gym built of aliveness and overrun by creation.

Question: Does pure consciousness, i.e. beyond time and space, watch us, turn us into entertainment, intrude with synchronicity or loss or glimpses of itself to further the storyline? 

Question: Have glimpses of beyond time and space, in their reassuring peace and love, been codified by humans into a thing and named  “heaven”?

As differentiated beings, we cannot go as “Dick, Jane, and Sally” to beyond time and space. We cannot return to pure consciousness as separate creatures but we can get inklings when we feel the rocks are alive.

We have no choice but to examine our lives, like it or not, but how deeply we go seems a matter of free will. Interesting thing, free will. Think of it, your will has freedom to re-examine your life, re-examine the alpha and omega of you, to guide you to where love pervades everything.

 

Weeding to Eden: a life

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A gathering in comes toward the end of many people’s lives, not of friends and family though that can happen too, but of what has been and who we thought we were. Not that we know when we will die, but we know when we are, at best, in the last decade or two.

We revisit our lives as a storyline, connecting dots, finding patterns, rediscovering visions, accepting failures. With luck we are able to love where we once did not. Ourselves and others.

Then we edit. What is to be weeded out? What to be given gently as gift? What to be treasured? What to be forgiven? What to be wrapped up and set aside to free ourselves for one more great discovery or great work?

. . .

I have a garden, a city garden. It’s relatively quiet, with robins, cardinals, mourning doves, wrens, and a woodpecker – and wisteria arbor, cherry trees and Japanese weeping maples, flowering bushes, ferns, iris, peonies, walls of ivy, and a pool. Over years of tweaking, tending, planting, and weeding it has become my eden. In warm weather I eat breakfast there and in the late afternoons I swim.

Homesteading in Tennessee 40 years ago, I had a raised-bed vegetable garden alongside a slate-bottomed spring-fed creek. It included several varieties of tomatoes, lettuce, squash, and potatoes, plus broccoli, cauliflower, eggplant, okra, peas, green beans, cucumbers, and prize asparagus. It was surrounded by purple iris transplanted from the woods where a house had burnt to its foundation decades before.

That garden saved my life by saving my spirit when my then-husband descended into violence. 

. . . 

The vegetable gardens of my youth could hardly be called gardens. They contained tomato and cucumber plants entwined with weeds. Lettuce and cabbage were also planted but, courtesy of worms, became green lace before we could eat them.

Even so, the tomatoes and cucumbers bore fruit. My brother would snap off a tomato or cuke to eat whole and unwashed.

The garden shamed me somehow. It was theoretically a 4-H project of my brother’s, but so far as I knew no one tended it. Truth is, my memories are vague, tied up with do wives and girls do farm work or not? There was a sharp divide between the families where women worked the farm along with the men and those where women did not. Those who did were in the majority, but I’m sure my mother made clear from the get go she was not going to be among them, which is probably why I did not do outdoor chores either except for a pre-teen period when I was to give a bucket of crushed oyster shells daily to the hens and “pick” the eggs from the filthy nests. That only lasted a few months. I believe I vomited in the henhouse.

The sweet corn was in my father’s domain, weeded by machine and tended as diligently as the field corn. Sweet corn was next to God.

. . . 

My mother did have a flower garden, a sort of flower moat that provided protection for the lawn and house from the farm buildings. Roses covered the crumbling facade of the porch, lilac bushes blocked out the unkempt woods, and a single Oriental poppy stood, tall, red, and flashy among humble bleeding hearts, daisies, and tiger lilies. 

The poppy still occupies space in my dreams as I weed the flower garden, tending my mother’s and my weedy relationship.

. . . 

So I gather in and round out as I sit in an eden neither my mother nor father – nor I – could have imagined. I weed so the field is clear for one more great discovery or great work. 

 

Listen to Your Conscience

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Your most intimate relationship is with your conscience. It won’t ever go away, even if you leave it huddled in a corner afraid of you and quivering at your ruthlessness. It will not go away.

You can trample on it, ignore it, deny it, but it will not leave. It may become ill, jaded, damaged, but it will not go away – but it can return to health if you change your awareness of it and change the patterns of your life. For some people that can be very difficult, especially older frightened people, especially people in power, especially people who like power.

Consciences whisper. Perhaps below your normal level of hearing, but they whisper, like itches on dry skin, like the scurry of small animal feet in the attic at night. If you’re a real bastard, you won’t even try to hear them. Instead you will make up your own theories of what is good and what is evil in line with what you believe serves you, and perhaps the inner ring of what you consider your “tribe” of people like you. You will literally create a “conscience dummy” and use it as a ventriloquist would to spout your made up beliefs.

We live in an era of ventriloquist “conscience dummies” where we are told we are safest (and still somehow good people) if we split up families and export people from our country where they have been living, contributing, working, adding to the GNP back to nations where they may be killed. We are told that walls are needed to keep out rapists and criminals. We are told the safest we can be is to have our nuclear arsenal ready as our leader taunts a crazy man with a nuclear arsenal.

We are told we are at our greatest when we are racist, engorge the wealthiest among us, strip health care not just for the neediest but nearly all of us, belittle minorities, align education with huge debts, own assault weapons, insult other nations, break treaties, degrade allies – and replace the science, and daily evidence, of disastrous climate change with voluntary ignorance that left unchecked will destroy human life.

Somewhere along the line, too many of us stopped listening to our conscience (and our own brain power) and started listening instead to voices of problematic, at best, government leaders, corporate leaders, media willing to compromise facts, hate groups, social media trolls, even some religious leaders who have limited understanding of “love your neighbor.” It has became natural to be foul-mouthed, disrespectful, and to express hate through social media.

It becomes easy to disrespect others when we do not respect our own conscience. Disrespect then becomes an inclination, a habit, a perspective on life that we claim as “reality,’ while cynicism is thought of as clever though it is only a cover for despair.

A conscience can be a pest. It can lead you to do things you never thought of, to be more bold than you ever imagined, to leap across divides, to reassign how you use your energy, to care less about some things, and a great deal more about others. It can urge you to change the world and keep after you until you do, no matter how small, no matter how large.

First you have to listen.

Then you join with others of conscience.

Then the world starts to make sense again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A 1.7 cm bag of newt’s eye, fingernail clippings, hag’s tooth, boar whiskers, and bits of lost socks

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Eight days ago a cardiothoracic surgeon cut a Cheshire cat’s grin 3+ inch long under my right armpit, separated my ribs and went inside to remove a substantial part of the top lobe of my right lung.

I write to you from my bed at home trying hard to concentrate on spelling, grammar, syntax. There will be mistakes, but they will be genuine mistakes like the difference between naïve artists and trained naïve artists. My mistakes are part of the message. (Spell check and my brain are not adequate to this task.)

The anesthesia will take weeks to wear off, and I stopped the painkillers two days ago when I could not remember the name of the current president. Obama and Trump were on the two ends of a see-saw vying up and down for the position.

It was only 7 days before surgery that I even heard of VATS, video-assisted thoracic surgery, the gold standard to get, ah, well, specifically, yes, ah, to get cancer out of lungs. It was only minutes before that I was told I had a 70 percent chance of lung cancer. A couple days later the surgeon who would do a pre-operative bronchoscopy (camera down my thorax to check suspected “lymph involvement”) said the odds were 80 to 90 percent. The “mass” was “almost certainly cancerous.”

I hadn’t felt sick, but my internist a month before listened to my lungs, and that started an avalanche of dominoes from X-rays to CAT scan to PET scan to an appointment with the cardiothoracic surgeon (thank you, Johns Hopkins and Sibley hospital) who said “This needs to be removed. I can schedule you for Friday.”

WHAT? WHAT? This is not my movie! I have been miscast. Nothing about this part fits. This is fundamentally “off,” not wrong so much as “off.” Even as a tidbit in the back corner of my brain said “Isn’t denial the first step of grief?”. . . and I said, yes, but, NO.

I didn’t believe I deserved less to have cancer than anyone else. It just wasn’t my movie.

In the first few days I told only a few people, but we had to move fast, and Christmas was upon us . . . jing-a-ling.

Who do you tell? Who is strong? Who is experienced? Who needs protecting? Who can help you the most? Who would you betray if you did not share this intimacy?

Is this a private matter, a public matter? Are there rings of inclusion?

Is it sympathy begging to post on FB? Or does transparency give new possibilities to this passage for myself and others?

I chose transparency. Soon after, more than 100 FB friends were sending messages, and love, and hearts, and wishes. A cascade of goodness. And the congregations of three churches in Iowa were praying for me plus a circle of high-powered women in northern California, and amazing friends everywhere.

Their strength didn’t tiptoe in. It arrived bold and present with a soothing weight that surrounded me and filled my body and occupied all space around me.

Now let’s look at something else. Today is the fourth anniversary of my mother’s death at age 96. That woman was not ready to go into another Iowa winter. She was buried in -30 degree weather. It felt like a betrayal.

It was also 8 days after my brother, then 59, came home from the hospital after surgery for advanced lung cancer that he died of a clot blocking blood from going through his lungs. This is my ninth day after surgery. He was looking into my eyes as he died.

They are with me tonight.

The kicker is, I never had cancer.

My surgeon beamed when he said “I only get to tell 10% of my patients this. You do not have cancer, never did.”

WHAT?! WHAT? . . . . Yes! This is the movie. It’s a weird part, but I can play this role, and I understand the obligations of the blessing.

The mass, examined cell by cell, was scar tissue, fibrous crap, enmeshed tentacles of arteries, and other junk held together under more fiber like a lid over a trash can. In other words, newt’s eye, whisker of wild boar, fingernail clippings, hag’s tooth, and bits of lost socks. If it weren’t in its own trash bin somewhere. . . though I suspect it was more thoroughly destroyed . . . I would burn it over a sandal wood flame and sing “Hymns to the Silence.”