Resting in the Grace of the World

Tags

Addiction, comfort, Family, grandparenting, greif, Nature, opioid crisis, personal, spirituality, Wendell Berry

“Crystal Light” by Erin Hanson

“When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” ~ Wendell Berry

I have not lain down where the wood drake rests, but I am coming to find a kind of grace in letting loose, more than letting go, in pressing steadily forward without attachment to the outcome, in a kind of letting be, come what may.

My granddaughter came to live with me at the beginning of summer and she is with me still, having started first grade at a nearby school in which I enrolled her. I am petitioning to become her legal guardian. This comes with the blessing of my son, but not the child’s mother, who will fight this. Both are struggling with addiction, both victims of this opioid crisis.

I grieve for my son and my heart breaks for the mother, even as I fear for my granddaughter. Sometimes it seems overwhelming.

Then I take a deep breath and do what must be done, regardless the outcome.

I move toward “the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief.”

I rest in “the presence of still water,” and feel “the day-blind stars waiting with their light.”

I cannot say I “am free.”

But I do feel the grace of the world, and love of God, surrounding me and mine. I lean on that, and it comforts me.

Advertisements

Secluded Pool, Secret Garden, & Summer Plans Gone Astray

Tags

art, grandparenting, oil pastel, painting, personal, watercolor

I haven’t been painting as much this year, but I thought I’d share these two. Both were meant to be abstracts, but the one became a secluded pool and the other, while more abstract, I think of as a secret garden. Secret, I suppose, because it exists only in my mind. Both are watercolor and oil pastel.

One we’ve framed but not hung yet.  Unfortunately, I forgot to photograph it before it was covered in glass, and you can see some reflection there at the far right.

My plans for the summer—more painting, more writing—have gone astray. The acrylic class I was supposed to take was cancelled. And then my six-year-old granddaughter came to stay with us for a couple of months. So I’ve been spending more time in the pool and playing games with her than painting or writing.

But I did finally get back to playing the piano again, teaching my granddaughter to play, and then playing duets with my daughter who plays guitar when she was with us last week.

And we’ve been watching parades of the wild turkeys and quail with their baby chicks passing behind out house, and the deer eating our roses, and hundreds of the squirrels scampering across the hillsides and digging beneath our oak trees.

My granddaughter will be with us a few more weeks and I am going to cherish every sweet moment I have with her. She’s still young enough to love cuddling and holding, and we’ve been reading lots of books together. I am so blessed to have her in my life.

The writing and painting can wait.

Life through a Lens, What We Gain & Lose, Redux

Tags

Family, life, Philosophy, photography, writing

How much of our lives do we view through a narrow lens, whether through the lens of a camera, our own limited viewpoint, or the stories we tell about ourselves and each other?

When we walk through life with a perpetual camera around our necks, we are tempted to see everything through that narrow focus, framing everything we see–the city streets, the sunsets and landscapes, the people we pass, the objects that come into view. As we frame what we see and take photos, it helps us to notice things we may have overlooked otherwise, and to see these things in a new light. It intensifies our ability to discover the extraordinary in the ordinary, and allows us to capture and preserve those visions.

But it also breaks the whole into parts, raw experience into the photo-worthy and not-so-much.  We experience things not as a participant, but an observer, a spectator or voyeur at worst, a curator of the significant at best.

When we were sailing around the world, I wish I had done more of that capturing and preserving. There were no digital cameras then, and film was expensive and hard to store in a hot, damp climates. So now I have only a handful of photos from hikes through the enchanted valleys of the Marquesas. Three or four of our stay in legendary Bora Bora, a dozen from our three months in Samoa. Now I wish we had dozens more photos of each place to view and remember.

On the other hand, by the time my first grandchild was born we had a digital camera.  Because I saw him so seldom, when I was with him I photographed him almost continuously, following him everywhere and capturing every sweet smile, every cute incident, every new thing he did.

Until I stood back one day and realized that by indulging the urge to “frame” everything for posterity, I was missing out on now, on just being with him–soaking up his presence, our time together–in the moment, raw and unfiltered.

Now though, I do not regret all those photos I took. For I am able to relive those moments with greater clarity and in more detail that I might have been able to do so without them.

It’s all a balancing act, I guess.

As writers we do that too—viewing the world and our experiences through a mental lens, framing things for posterity, seeing images, events, interactions, as fodder for our stories. We couldn’t write without doing that, consciously, or unconsciously.

But we have to know when to see things through the writer’s mind, as observer, spectator, curator, and when to put away that lens and become a participant in the raw experience that evolves around us. To “step barefoot into reality” as the poet Wallace Stevens once evoked.

It’s harder than we might imagine, to put away all the filters through which we experience life, and just “be” it. Life itself. Unfiltered.

NOTE: I wrote this post six years ago, but it shows, even then, my keen interest in photography, and even more in how we capture and reflect experience, limit and distort it. As you know, I’m researching a new novel with photography and the creative endeavor at its core, and the reading I’m doing meshes quite nicely with what I wrote here. So I thought I’d share this, my own take on this subject, before sharing what I’ve gathered from others. 

Wrapped Around Schrodinger’s Cat

Tags

ambiguity, death, life, Limbo, paradox, personal, Philosophy, quantum physics, Schrodinger's Cat

Watercolor by Endre Penouac

That’s where I’ve been these last ten days or so, wrapped around Schrödinger’s cat in that state of unknowing. My son went missing and I did not know if he was dead or alive. Both possibilities seemed so potent. I wanted to know and not know at the same time. I wanted to peek beneath that lid and keep it securely closed forever.

I’ve always been fascinated by the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat, that something can be and not be at the same time. That it exists within a perpetual state of ambiguity until the lid is lifted and someone peeks inside. The act of observation is what breaks the spell and catapults a thing, a cat in this instance, into a single state of being– either alive or dead.

Apparently, according to quantum physics, at the level of the infinitely minute, where atoms and quarks and such are the substance of reality, things exist in a fluid state of infinite potentiality. Yet at this macro level where we experience reality, all appears fixed and certain. Only during heightened times, such as when loved ones go missing, does the dilemma of Schrödinger’s cat become not only real, but preferable.

The hope that my son might still be alive seemed too fragile and fleeting to hold on to. Instead I wanted to wrap myself within a state of unknowing, where there was neither life nor death, being or non-being, but just this rich, potent potential with no edges.

I wanted to remain in that limbo forever because I knew that once the lid was lifted, the dilemma did not really end. If he was dead the long, anguished darkness would descend. If he was alive, the joy would be brief and mixed, because the eventuality of his death was so certain and could come at any instant. Life is fragile and fleeting. Death is the one great certainty.

The lid to my dilemma eventually did lift. The whole time of my unknowing was his as well, it appears. He had been in a hospital in a coma. They called me when he awoke and I went to him. But he was clearly not fully awake. He was in purgatory he told me, neither alive nor dead, and he could not tell if I was real and really there or just a figment of his imagination. He truly believed that he had died and was existing in some hellish limbo. I cannot tell you, but you may well imagine, the anguish I felt hugging a son who thought he was dead.

By the next day the lid was raised for him as well, and he knew that he was indeed alive and that I was really there. His recovery was swift and he was discharged from the hospital.

So all is well, for now, at least.

But I cannot shake this sense of uncertainty about the nature of reality. I would rather live in that quantum field of endless potentiality, rather than being stuck in this macro world of duality where the cataclysmic forces of right and wrong, good and evil, life and death, clash so ferociously, and appear so fixed.

I wonder if it truly is that lifting of a lid that “fixes” a thing? That ties it to one end or the other of an apparent duality, and makes a thing dead or alive?

Or rather, is it our firm belief in a dualistic reality that forces our rational mind into “seeing” either one thing or its opposite, and not the state between?

Is this another paradox to puzzle through? Another box to open?

Let all six sides fly apart.

Let all  hard edges dissolve.

Let me wrap my mind around the soft warm body within where nothing is fixed or final.

“Endless Love” – A 6th Year Celebration

Tags

Anniversary, art collage, celebration, daughter, life, personal, wedding

I created this collage to celebrate my daughter and her husband’s 6th wedding anniversary, today. They were married January 12 in Shell Beach. Her husband made a surfboard called “endless Love” for all the guest to sign, and she made and decorated her dark chocolate, chiptole pepper wedding cake. Their best friend officiated as they stood barefoot in the sand with the waves unrolling in the background.

Aside from the births of my children and grandchildren, it was the happiest day of my life.

I wrote a post about that day six years ago Sea, Sky, Earth, Fire – My Daughter on Her Wedding Day,  which began:

She was married beneath a cliff on the edge of the sea standing barefoot on the rocky beach. Barking seals sunning on rocks and crashing waves nearly drowned out the simple ceremony.

Hunchbacked boulders rose from the sea behind her like giant guardian sentinels. A single guitarist played flamenco music to match the red rose in her hair while the late afternoon sun glimmered across the waves.

Sea. Sky. Earth. Fire. All four essential elements holding the world together blended beautifully together that day.

Below are a few photos and memories that I tried to capture in my collage.

 

Happy Anniversary, Kelli and Andrew!

A Happy Ending for My Novel? For My Son?

Tags

Addiction, amwriting, happy endings, heroin addiction, Novel, novel writing, Publishing, revision, writing process

Florence Harrison, 1887 – 1937

One of the publishers we sent my novel to wants a rewrite of the ending. While their readers said they loved the first 2/3 of the novel (the novel is divided into 3 parts), they felt I tried a little too hard to tie up all the loose threads into what they called an “uber happy” ending for my characters.

I can’t say I’m surprised by this reaction. I too worried that I might have tied up the novel in too pretty a bow. Perhaps I should have left at least one or two threads dangling for the reader to play with. But I believed, despite that, the transformations of the characters, their coming to grips with their past, their fears, their demons, their very real struggles and eventual triumphs are what we all hope to find at the end of our stories, both the real and the imagined.

Happy does happen, after all.

But, of course, in reality, our stories and struggles do not end as they do in a novel. Our lives keep on going after that final page, whether it ends on a high note or a low. We all know that. So what’s the harm of ending the novel on an upbeat tick?

I wanted that for them, for these deeply flawed characters who I had come to love. Weren’t their flaws and failings, their addictions and anxieties, their grief and doubts and fears enough grit to ground the story? Couldn’t we soar a bit too, near the end?

Happy happens too, right?

But does it last?

Probably the most improbable part of my ending is the struggling son’s recovery from heroin addiction. Not an easy thing to do. The statistics are all against it. Few survive, and those who do never feel completely free. It’s always there, slippery beneath their feet, breathing hard down their necks, a giant question mark dangling on the horizon like a sharp, deadly hook.

Some parts of this novel are based loosely on my son’s struggle with heroin addiction. For all I tried, I never could completely wean him of his addiction. I could help him: Pull him off the street, put him into rehab, pick him up from jail, search for the medication and counseling he needed; call an ambulance when he overdosed.

Sometimes it worked. Woven through his battles with addiction are the times he won, the year, or two, or three he was free and happy and thriving. But it never lasted much more than that. Four, tops.

I always thought: If only he would listen to me, take my advice, do what I say; if I could lock him in a closet and keep him safe; if I could trade places with him, get into his skin and live his life for him, beat down the addiction once and for all and then give him his life back again, I would. But I couldn’t. I never could control him any more than he could control his addiction.

But I could control my characters. I could manage their recovery. I could give them a happy ending. It does happen, doesn’t it?

Rarely.

So I’m rewriting the end of my novel with that sharp, thorny question mark dangling in the air. As it always does, for each of us, whether we struggle with addiction or not.

Paradise burns to the ground. Mudslides swallow homes. Daughters lose babies. Sons relapse. Again, and again, and again.

But strangely, miraculously, hope never dies. Not completely. Homes are rebuilt. Lives turned around. Marriages mended.

Families come together at Thanksgiving and look across the table at each other with all their flaws and fears, their unhealed hurts and scars, and they love what they see. Through it all, despite it all, they just love.

That’s what my novel is all about. That “despite it all” kind of love, happy ending or not.

Seeing the Self in What We Love

Tags

inspiration, Love, Philosophy, self-realization, spirituality, The Self, Upanishad

I’ve become mesmerized by the quote below I found on The Beauty We Love. These first four lines, especially, move me.

A wife loves her husband not for his own sake, dear, but because the Self lives in him.

The husband loves his wife not for her own sake, dear, but because the Self lives in her.

Children are loved not for their own sake, but because the Self lives in them.

Everything is loved not for its own sake, but because the Self lives in it.

Reading these words, I feel the truth in them. When I look at and love my husband, my son, my daughter, what I’m seeing and loving is something, a Self, so much larger than what we each are alone. Something that resonates within me and within all the things I love. Something that is not an other, but what runs through and connects all others. It makes each loved one more dear to me, more rare, more real, than what mere personality or even individuality,  personal affection, or familial attachment alone would support.

The tenderness in the Chagall painting above captures that reflective love, that mirrored Self, so beautifully.

The rest of the quote lies before, which I also sense to be true, although more abstract.

This Self has to be realized.
Hear about this Self.

As a lump of salt thrown in water dissolves
and cannot be taken out again,
though wherever we taste, the water it is salty,
even so, beloved,
the separate self dissolves in the sea of pure consciousness,
infinite and immortal.

Separateness arises from identifying the Self with the body,
which is made up of the elements;
when this physical identification dissolves,
there can be no more separate self.

~ from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

The self dissolved into “a sea of pure consciousness” is a lovely, restful image. But it’s missing the intimacy and immediacy of those first four lines where that sea washes through the faces I love. That image is far more meaningful to me, and truer, I believe, to the intent those verses imply. That Self is not abstract. I feel it in my bones.

True Tales Growing Up in a Haunted House

Tags

Ghost Stories, Halloween, Halloween reads, Haunted House, Hauntings, memoir, nonfiction, Supernatural, writing

Have you ever had any ghostly encounters?

Each year around this time, I like to reblog a series of tales about my encounters with the ghostly and unexplained, starting when I was a child, and later full grown with children of my own. The first is printed below with links to the others.

While ”intellectually” I don’t believe in ghosts, demons, and the like, I have experienced such. And I cannot deny that the phenomena which I and others–indeed, all known cultures and societies–have laid claim to, are “real.” The reality they seem to have is unexplained, often unverifiable, and usually fleeting and ephemeral. And yet they persist in haunting humanity.

I can neither explain, verify, nor dismiss the reality of the experiences that I relate here. I can only state that these things occurred as I remember them, or as others I trust related them to me. And most were witnessed by more than one person

Happy Halloween!

Our House on a Haunted Hill

When I was a kid “House on Haunted Hill” was my favorite spooky movie. I first saw it a few years after my own family had escaped, just barely, from a haunted house experience. While living there I was not aware of all the horrors that house contained, and only learned the full account when my mother felt I was old enough to learn the truth.

I was eight years old when my parents rented a home set on a hillside in an older, respectable neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska. The attic had been converted into two rooms, a tiny room overlooking the back yard and garage; and a huge room overlooking the front yard. This larger room had been recently renovated and then abruptly abandoned, it appeared. The high pitched ceiling and walls were covered in a richly varnished, knotty pine paneling. Finely crafted drawers and book cases had been built beneath the eaves. But the floor, made of rough, unvarnished planks of wood, had been left unfinished. And a large reddish-brown stain that looked like a puddle of blood had soaked into the wood.

This was my bedroom and I loved it. Being an avid fan of Nancy Drew mysteries, the giant blood stain only added to the allure of the room–that and the trap door on the floor of the walk-in closet. While the door had been nailed shut, I could still probe the cracks with a ruler, detecting steps that led downward—to where, no one knew. My discovery sent chills of delight down my back.

In fact, I was thrilled to have the whole second story all to myself. Even though the second smaller room could have easily accommodated my little brother, my mother made him sleep down below in the tiny room at the bottom of the stairs. She claimed the small room upstairs was “too cold” and used it as a storage room instead. She filled it with unpacked boxes and unused furniture, forbidding me to play there—which, of course, made the room seem even more desirable.

I remember entering the room often to play by myself and looking out the dusty window toward the mysterious barn-like structure that faced the alley. The structure, which could easily have accommodated several cars, sat empty nearly the whole time we lived there, and my brother and I were forbidden to play here as well. It too was considered “too cold” for human habitation. The one time I did enter, my eyes were drawn upward to the high rafters where, through the rotting roof, splinters of light filled with ghostly dust motes fell to the floor. I did not enter again. When some teenage boys wanted to use the garage to rebuild a car, they moved out after a couple of nights, never to return—even though they had paid rent for a full month.

I thought it strange when my mother kept wanting to move me out of my lovely upstairs “apartment” to a room below and I refused to be moved. She kept asking if I was afraid up there all by myself, but I insisted I wasn’t. This was true. I knew what needed to be done to stay safe, although I never shared this with my mother. It was a ritual that I religiously followed. Every night after my mother heard my prayers and tucked me into bed, I would pull the covers tight over my head and stay there until I fell asleep. I knew somehow that no harm would come to me if I followed this ritual. And no harm ever did come to me.

I might well have been very afraid if I had heard what my parents heard at night as they slept in the room below mine.

Often my mother was woken by the sound of heavy, dragging footsteps lumbering across room over her bed, and she would wake my father and make him go upstairs to investigate. At first he did so wearily, thinking she was imagining it. But once he woke early enough to hear it himself and went dashing up the stairs—but nothing was there and I was sound asleep in my bed.

We moved shortly thereafter. That’s when the neighbors told us about the horrible tragedy that had taken place in the house before we moved in. They hadn’t wanted to tell us earlier and scare us away. Apparently the previous owner of the house had murdered his wife in my bedroom and then hung himself afterwards from the rafters in the garage.

If some other tragic event took place in the small room next to mine upstairs—the coldest room in the house–we never learned. Whatever haunted that room did more than drag its feet across the floor or blow cold air down our spines. During our final days in that home, my mother, to her terror, found this out–with no one but my three-year-old brother at home to save her.

More about this in my next post.

You can read the full series of true ghost stories at the links below which were first posted in 2013

• True Ghost Stories, Part II – Attack of the Poltergeist
• True Ghost Stories, Part III – When the Dead Refuse to Leave
• True Ghost Stories, Part IV – Resident Evil: In the Belly of the Beast
• True Ghost Stories, Part V – A Demon on My Chest
• True Ghost Stories, Part VI – Evil Incarnate
• True Ghost stories, Part VII – Do I Believe This Stuff?

“Perfect Love” – All We Need for What Ails Us

Tags

Fear, healing, inspiration, Love, spirituality, transformation

Francisco “Paco” Zúñiga

The highest common denominator for all spiritual practices and religious teachings is Love. Love with a capital L, meaning that which transcends a personal or ego-based sense of love. Love that embraces all and everything. Love that is the ground, or source, of all being.

It’s a “perfect” love, a powerful love, a love that can change lives, and nations, even as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King have shown.

“Perfect Love casts out fear” is from the Bible, but it is one of those highest teachings and practices found across cultural and religious divides.

If these teachings cannot be made practical in our ordinary, flawed, imperfect lives, they are of no use to us. But as a mother who has struggled with an almost debilitating sense of fear at times, an understanding of what this verse means has saved me many times.

Fear is at the heart of all manner of darkness. “All that ails us” is some mutation of this life-crippling, joy-killing, action-paralyzing, energy-sapping, emotion. I have found myself in its grip many times. And the only way I’ve found to peel back the strangling fingers of fear is to let a more perfect sense of Love rise within me.

It is understanding that without Love, I am nothing. That love truly is the ground of my being, the source of all being. That love is what makes life worth living. And that when the time comes to depart from this life, all that will have mattered is how much we have loved; not how much we have fallen at the feet of fear. How much we have given, not how much we have taken; how much we have expressed the best in us, and sought to see the best in each other.

“Perfect Love” means to love others more perfectly. This doesn’t mean to love others in spite of their flaws or failings.

It means to love them unconditionally because we know that they are not their flaws and failings. And to know that so clearly and so fervently, that we can keep that love pure, even while doing whatever we can to help them let go of their own fears, and all the failings that go with those fears.

We are not our fears. We are not our failings. We are not our hate, or greed, or selfishness, or addiction, or anger, or violence. These are all manifestations of our fears. And the only thing worth saving or savoring in each other is what we love, and what expresses that love.

“Love your enemies” is the same as saying you have no enemies, a wise woman once said. For those who would appear as our enemies are those so overcome by their own fears that they have failed to see what they love in another. And if we hate them, we have fallen into the same trap.

Isn’t that what the great moral and inspirational figures of our age have taught us? Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela? That love conquers all, even the most insidious, unjust, hateful systems of government that would try to separate, enslave, and dehumanize us?

We are not our prejudices, we are not the cruel things we say or do, the cruel systems that we create and justify. We can’t condone these things, or ignore them.  We don’t give them a pass.

But we understand that, to some degree, the most hateful and cruel among us, are us, in other circumstances. That there, but for the grace of God, go I.

That even the most loving and kind and wise among us, when governed by fear, rather than love, would be the same.

We have no enemy because we see ourselves in him, and the only way to un-make an enemy is to see his humanity, to see us in them.

That’s how Mandela was able to overcome Apartheid and lead to reconciliation.

That’s how Gandhi was able to face the oppressors and free his county.

That’s how Martin Luther King was able to peacefully resist an oppressive system and usher in the Civil Rights Act.

It’s fear for ourselves, our children, our families, our community, our country, our way of life, that leads to resentment and anger and blame and shame and discouragement or despair. That eventually leads to resignation and indifference and apathy and depression and joylessness.

And it’s learning to love ourselves and each other more perfectly that casts out those fears, and frees us from all its crippling mutations.

“Perfect Love” – a powerful antidote for all that ails us.

I reblogged this as a gentle reminder to myself in time of need. First posted in December 2013 in a slightly altered form.

Romancing Europe – Coming Soon!

Tags

Europe, photography, sailing, travel

Sailing by the Almafi Coast, Italy

The last time I was in Europe we were sailing on La Gitana. We came up the Red Sea, through the Suez canal, and stopped in Cyprus, Turkey, Greece, Malta, Spain, and the Baleraic Islands. I waved wistfully at Italy as we sailed by. We have to save something “for later, ” I consoled myself.

We were on our way home then. We wanted to get there in time for our daughter to start High School, and to bring our son home, who had stayed behind in Australia with friends.  They were eight and eleven when we sailed away from Ventura Harbor six years earlier.

Now, at long last I am returning to Europe, this time with cousins, one of whom won a grant to visit the castles of Europe to enrich her 4th grade classroom. Lucky kids.  Lucky me! I get to tag along.

We will be flying into Madrid and visiting Segovia and Barcelona as well, before heading on to Paris. From there we will take a train to Bruges, Belgium, then on to Frankfurt where we will rent a car to tour Germany and all the castles along the way.

At Freiburg we’ll catch a train over the alps to enter Italy, at long last.  From Milan we’ll head down to Lake Como and the Almafi Coast we had sailed by so long ago. We’ll spend several days there and on the island of Capri, before heading to Rome, and from there home again.

A whirlwind romance in 30 days! For me, the highlights of the trip will be the art museums. To see some of my favorite artists’ paintings in person will be such a thrill. But the castles, the cathedrals, the cities, the hillside villages, the architecture, the history . . . all will be a close second.

Sadly I will be missing all of Tuscany, including Florence, Vienna, and Venice. For an art lover, this will be a huge sacrifice. But I can’t complain. I’m thrilled to be going at all.  Besides, I remind myself: I need to save something for “later.” Hopefully it won’t take this long to return.

I don’t want my blog to go dark while I’m away, so I’ve pre-scheduled a few posts to cover the month I’m gone. That way I can keep in touch with all you lovelies through comments on my blog and on yours. I won’t be blogging about my trip until I return though. I promise not to turn this into a travelogue.

A few photos from our last trip to Europe before I go. Ciao!

My daughter in Athens, Greece

In Spain. (Note the limited wardrobe, poor baby.)

In Marmaris, Turkey, with her friend, Sarah, another yachtie child living her parents’ dream.

Two fair maidens listening to Heavy Metal in Kolossi Castle, Cyprus