The Ultimate Intimacy

It cannot see the light of day because it is the light of day...the Light of all Life.

We wonder about it. We ponder over it, but usually only when we are in the depths of despair.

That condition is difficult to fulfill, of course. All true conditions are difficult but divine.

When invited, this light of awareness is no longer imprisoned by mechanical forces and is free to fulfil its destiny.

It's destiny is to do everything for us that we have been trying to do ourselves.

This is the light that never fails. It only shines into empty rooms and empty tombs, but oh, is it grand.

There is a place in you that is above the opposites. In this place there is no pain. You find it by conscious intention to rise above your thoughts and be a witness to them.

The mind is a place of division and strife and this is projected outward and shapes your life according to definite spiritual law. If you donât like the way your life is working, it is your outlook that must be changed....nothing else. Exterior change is of little value, but changing your outlook works miracles.

The question arises, how do I find this place above the opposites? You choose it. The minute you choose it, you understand it and not until then, because it is a living experience. We are so unaccustomed to visiting our mind with the intention to heal it that we canât stay there very long.

But you have chosen to heal your life by healing your outlook, so the first step is to admit that you are in mental pain, which leads to emotional and physical pain as well.

The second step is to not be afraid of what you see when you examine your thoughts, because, trust me, most thought is of the negative variety. A conscious thought is curative, but it is rare indeed to think consciously.

The third step is to acknowledge that you are indeed thinking negatively, but you refuse to judge yourself, because this is just one side of the mind judging the other.

Conscious admission of your negativity is your conscious admission into silence. And silence is the spiritual solvent for pain. Be still and know your own pain and you will also know the way out of it. The mystery of choosing to study yourself is spoken of by Dogen Zenzi, "To study the self is to study the way."

Self-study is never boring because it is always healing. We have spent a lifetime buried under the avalanche of our own negativity. There is a shovel that we can pick up and use, but we donât have to do it one laborious scoop at a time. The decision to shovel is all it takes because the sunlight of awareness melts all the snow of suffering away instantaneously.

The steady snow of self-doubt may be hampering your recovery, but your wish to rise above the opposites and learn from your pain melts it all away.

Most of us on the spiritual path have been on it for longer than we care to admit. At least that is the case with me. Suffering, sorrow and struggle have taken their toll. I am now willing to admit something--there is only everything.

Apparently I wasn't wise enough to come to this conclusion any earlier. Like Irina Tweedie, who wrote Daughter of Fire, my inner sheik has been holding my feelings to the fire for far too long. But I am now willing to admit it.....there is only everything.

In spite of having mystical dreams and synchronistic situations, it just wasnât enough for me. I wanted cosmic visions and the rarity of sat-chit-ananda. It wasn't to be.

Instead I got I-opening sorrow, self-searing introspection and many dark nights of the soul. Some got so dark I bumped into the universal furniture until my shins were blue.

But just lately, I am opening up to a wider wisdom...there is only everything. And it seems that everything is enough. The Popsicle Man comes along the street with his truck full of colorful flavors and we think we must make a decision. Do I want lime or grape or cherry enlightenment? The mind must have its favorite flavor. So we let it do its thing. My advice: Pay the Popsicle Man and get on with your life.

My life is currently breaking down and I am seeing that this is freeing. Like a little child, all the flavors of life have stained my white shirt and there seems to be little chance that I can get the stains out on my own....for there is no ãmy own.ä There is only everything.

It didn't have to be so hard. I could have had my flavor of the day and every other flavor to boot. My choices were not mine anyway--they belonged to the mind which is now falling away as fast as I can allow it.

The wisdom of life is inherent in unity and only in unity. But we can only arrive there when we understand that there never had to be a problem in deciding what flavor of life we wanted that day. Everything comes in an astonishing variety....and everything is all there really is.

My heart is being worn threadbare, like an old rag rug. I have paced its perimeters on many a dark night, trying to find comfort in movement. The heart is a metaphor and an organ of omnipotence. It is divine and discontent at one and the same time. Such is the nature of the human heart.

There are many sad stories woven into my heart. They have become soft lilac and shades of blue, rosy gold and soft warm browns. I walk these stories that make up my heart. My Aunt Glenn is in a nursing home now; she was the rugmaker in our family. Now she sits brightly in a little brass bed and uses a walker when she gets around. She is a strip of old fabric that I won't forget.

My daughter's life ended when she was seven. Her little part of the rug seems to be the brightest....a molten golden shade. My grandmother's strip would be dark blue. She buried two little boys and understood my loss as no one else could. "One day it will all seem like a dream," she said to me. "You will not be the same, however."

For four years now my husband has been living with incurable cancer. Needless to say, his part of the rug is by far the biggest. Only his strength holds the rug together, or so it would seem.

Everything in life is more precious than can be explained; that is why we need metaphors so much. You would think that all of this sorrow would have mellowed me, but it hasnât. If anything, I am flinty and hard where I should be soft like the old rug. But that is only my personality on which the old rug lies.

Don't you know people who have hurt too badly for too long? It makes them almost unapproachable. With me, it's an energy thing. I just don't have much to give to idle chatter. Everything with me is essential these days. The old rug would bear witness to that.

If we are all part of the universal consciousness, will it catch me when I fall? When friends wrote letters to my husband, who has incurable cancer, he wept. This is not something that he does very often, but I think he felt the net had been put in place and that he could fall. How often do we trust that this will be so? Does it take years of suffering before we admit our fragile state of existence in this temporary world...the relative world, as the Sufis call it.

"My strength is made perfect in weakness," says the Christ-consciousness. Does our very weakness comprise the net in which we can fall. I remember my brother telling me, many years ago, to lean back and let God catch me. I was flying to Europe with my husband, my first and only time to do that, and I was very anxious. I tried to do what he said, but my own effort blocked the ease I so badly needed. The ego is a fortress of pain constructed of thought. That is the human predicament.

Zen teachings point us to the truth that all of life is suffering. I can attest to that. But conscious suffering can free us from mechanical suffering. When we remember that we are all one, the net of unity becomes strong enough to catch us. All we really want is to let go.

As my husband's illness requires more and more of me, I get tireder and tireder. Does the physical body know how to rest if we have the sense to allow it plenty of time to do so? Do the emotions have the wisdom to quiet down and contemplate peace. No. Only awareness of something higher can dissolve the dissatisfaction. Only light can relax us while we are struggling in the dark.

As I walk the spiritual path carrying my daily burdens, I forget that I can release them and just sit down and rest. My mind blocks out this vital truth and before I know it, I am exhausted. That is why a good strong spiritual practice takes tending. It requires as much attention as a growing child. It must be fed far more than three times a day. Sometimes it will wake you up at night and ask you to soothe it. But why, I think. It is supposed to soothe me. But the opposites are not that easily figured out. I find that paying attention to my pain in the right way helps to disperse it. Go figure.

At the very end of the path is a light--that I have heard. I have also heard that it is at the very beginning and at all points in-between. I have also heard it rumored that we are the path, the light and each other. It's a good thing that we can fall into that net when we choose to do so. Is it in the mind or in the spirit? As we ask ourselves this question, it is good to know that there is no answer, that we are the answer and that is why we cannot be told. We must be one with the question, that is all. That is the net that can hold us.

It is strange how I have taken to widowhood the first two months. As if a great weight had been lifted off of my soul. How can that be when I was married for a week shy of thirty-eight years to the same man? Because he won his freedom and I won mine--at least that is what I would like to believe.

We had a heavy contract together. We agreed to not only keep our marriage vows but to go through years of intense suffering brought on by our daughterâs cancer and also his. I believe we made this pact between the worlds so that neither remembered by the time we grew up and married.

The years were long and hard. We never earned much money, even though he became an assistant vice-president at his air line. He became a workaholic in order to deal with his suppressed grief over Laurieâs death at age seven. I suffered from anxiety, guilt, grief and everything in between. But both of us were on the spiritual path and never thought of compromising our vows. We loved each other, but in a fearful way....would we be required to give up even more? And of course, we were. He was forced into early retirement due to management changes.

I knew that God had a plan for us--that we were meant to live this time in intense togetherness, which we did. The first five years he thought he would be a consultant and he tried to make that happen. Then he got the fatal cancer. I broke down many times over emotionally. I stormed and railed against it. I raged at him and blamed him. But ultimately I buckled down and served the situation to the best of my ability and often beyond. I learned how to be a webmaster and a caregiver at the same time.

In the hospital, Bob asked Rob and I to go and get him a tape recorder. He sat up in bed, in pain and out of breath, telling our story into the recorder. He told of how he saw me in the fourth grade, coming down the stairs at school, looking like an angel. Of how we dated in college...of how we prayed to God that I would marry him. He talked and talked. He said he wanted Rob and I to find our passions and to live them. The day that I got a letter from someone saying that I had helped him, he took a Sharpie and wrote on the letter. "My prayers have been answered," meaning I had found my passion.

So I was married to a good man who believed in God and yet one who suffered loss and pain. Now that is over and I am left with only Vicki, for the first time in my life. She is feeling all right, even in the face of darkness. I give you this as Bob would want me to, as an expression of my passion.

Everything is the whole thing. If my mind could wrap itself around that statement, it certainly would. All it can do is try, try, try again. The experience, you see, is wordless. The age-old problem of the mystics is still with us....how to explain essence to something on a lower level. The mind just doesn't get it.

I will take you into my private world if I may. I have written for four years about my husband's incurable cancer. It ended in his death in 2004. It left me whole in ways I never would have thought possible. You see, I broke down last summer when he had one medical crisis after another. "He's staying alive to take care of you," the hospital chaplain told me. "Of course," I thought, "that must mean I am too weak to take care of myself."

I was lucky enough to have a physican neighbor put me on an antidepressant . At least I was able to calm down a little while the death-fires raged. I was pushed to the limits of my endurance on a daily basis. I knew that ultimately he would die and I would be left alone. I raged this and shouted it so it wouldn't kill me, too. God was silent.

When he went into hospice he only lasted four days. I remember going to the chapel there and making a prayer bundle out of felt and something like cornmeal. I tied it with a colored string and stuck it in my purse. The funeral took place as an icestorm hit the city. My son and I, along with my sister and cousin, were marooned in a hotel the week before Christmas and flew home Christmas day. I had crackers from a machine for Christmas dinner.

Four months have gone by. Two neighborhood ducks wandered into the driveway this afternoon. I ran into the house to get bread for them. I tore it into pieces and tossed them on the concrete. Suddenly I remembered how I had opened the prayer bundle and let the meal drift down around our beautiful Japanese maple. I have always been on this journey, haven't I? Everything is the whole thing and it is good.

Before Breakfast

They say that ego-disappearance is a very desirable thing; I wouldn’t know. As I approach the one-year anniversary of my husband’s death, I understand how leary people are of two kinds of people--widows and people on the path. I am a sort of double-trouble to most people. I might accost them with pamphlets or pathos and either way, I am suspect. Fine with me. But it still feels eerie as I walk on alone.

Let me put this another way; I am still here but people have disappeared. It should be the other way round, now shouldn’t it? Before you deconstruct this before-breakfast essay, let me assure you that it is rhetorical. If there is no one there, there is no one there. I am just shooting off my big non-mouth. In fact, there is no one here to prove or disprove anything that I say. So there.

But people die and others go on without them. As flimsy an excuse as this is, I propose to you that first anniversaries of a spouse’s death hurt like hell. Oh, of course, you have proved that life goes on and therefore so do you--unless you have actually disappeared and no longer have to prepare an estate tax and all that jazz. But I have the paperwork to prove that theorem untrue.

As the seasonal music begins, so does the silent symphony within my soul. And boy, is it good. Yo Yo Ma’s bow makes my heart vibrate with memories of being the beloved. When I look in the mirror I see just another sixty-something spiritual being who happens to be called “Vicki, formerly known as “wife.” The only clothes I kept are the robe and slippers he wore in his last days. I came across two beautiful pieces of my lingerie and wept for the times that I wore them for an appreciative husband. Life goes on alone.

Okay, I have mixed the true and the untrue in this essay, because life is a daily experience of that. My fingers are typing, my stomach is hungry and as Johnny Cash sang, “I still miss someone.”

Dear Myra,

Thank you for listening with a pure ear. This has been a very
difficult week, as it reinforces the fact that grief is not something
one controls but rather allows. This morning I was physically
ill...could not go to the grocery. I lay down and felt the tears
wander down my cheeks and onto my neck. I was nauseous for no reason
and my neck and back are so tight. I can't get anything done, can't
even putter, or piddle as D. calls it. But this, too, shall pass.

I may put this in my updates along with a note I got from a reader.
I have not been writing much lately, as you know. Rob and I cannot
get the MP3 thingie figured out, so no more audio for now. Maybe the
most I can hope for this holiday is fudge pockets on my hips.

I love it!

Thank you for the very clear sharing of spirit.

I heard recently that the 1st year anniversary is
the hardest... and surely that it comes during
this season makes it all the more acute.

But you are blessed to have the distilled awareness
to see it as you do.

B.

It was in the little things that the big things came. After my husband’s cancer diagnosis in 2000, I almost went to pieces permanently. I could see myself as a shattered mirror lying on the floor of my home. As I picked my way among the pieces of my former self, I was already praying for strength to go on...to get a handle on the horror. After all, this had happened to me before. In 1978 our daughter had died of a fatal cancer, too. She was only seven and I was devastated and yet as strong as steel. I had to be in order to go on. But my husband’s cancer found me in a much more vulnerable state. The very idea that it would happen twice in one lifetime to our family was unendurable. And yet it has been over a year since he died and I am walking on. It is in the little things that I find my faith.

The Shivapuri Baba was an enlightened sage whom John Bennett wrote about in his book, Long Pilgrimage. Sometimes I return to this fascinating book when I am focussing too much on the big picture. For the Shivapuri Baba taught about the little things. He would instruct a student to go and buy him flowers from the market and bring them to him. Then he would ask the student to arrange them in a vase. The lessons would begin as the student noticed which flowers were fresh, how they should be cut, etc. He was to do his utmost to arrange fresh flowers in a fitting way. How different is this from arranging a day in the chemo room so that the patient will have the easiest time. There is a black cloth bag to be filled with cheese crackers, reading material and bottled water. There is a check to be written to the clinic, money at the ready for the parking garage and a determination to keep a peaceful mindset. This took me much farther than I thought it would. It gave structure to the ideal that a spiritual student should be a student of the Way. This was no airy-fairy ideal but a walk over stony ground that went on for almost five years. If God is in the details, then that is where we work.

All of us find our minds working overtime and not getting paid. In fact, just the opposite happens. We end up frazzled and furious that our plans do not work out. After my husband’s diagnosis, I had to get a new set of reins for my mind. They were designed to keep it going straight down the road of now. Taking care of the small is one way to do this.

Chemotherapy is designed to keep cancer at bay and it requires paying attention to details. Enough water, enough food and just the right nausea meds, for example. I was in charge of all of this; that is the definition of a caregiver. I also saw to it that we rested every day after lunch, protected ourselves from negative energy, etc. Both of our lives were on the line in some peculiar way. Cancer happens to the whole family, not just the body diagnosed with it.

The little things on the path are where we find our spiritual practice. It is not enough to sit in an easy chair and read about an Indian saddhu who sits in a cave. Some of us have to sit by cancer patients and sleep by them at night. My husband was at home until four days before he died. He would lie in bed and look at a picture that hung over our bedroom fireplace. He began to see things in it that weren’t there. He thought he was in another place where they had reproduced the way our bedroom looked. He found it interesting and so did my son and I. He was readying himself for a far journey in which we would not accompany him. Why am I writing this to you fourteen months later? Because I am moved to do so in the moment. And I know that you are with me

When we had my husband admitted to hospice, he was already transitioning to the other side. The little things still deserved our attention. So we focused on them with loving care. We wiped his nose as it bled. We fed him tiny bites of food. We said small prayers. And then he was suddenly gone. He left when my son and were at home resting. That was the last little thing that he did for us. And it was very big. He knew it would be easier on all of us. So my sister was with him when he passed. She had her little things as well. She picked up a small leaf that blew in with a gust of wind when his french doors blew open. She said the final prayers for him and gave him communion...a tiny piece of bread she placed in his mouth. Little things become big when done with love.

Let no one tell you that the way is grand or magnificent. That it may be, but I know nothing about that. I only know it in bits and pieces strung together by intention. Lately I have been getting overly concerned with what the rest of my life will be like. It will only be divulged in tiny segments. I must allow myself hours and days and weeks to heal. Now I find myself healing in small ways. Watching movies and taking walks, cooking and journalling, meditating and going shopping. I would give the world to have my husband back on earth with me, but I must arrange the flowers of my life in a conscious way. There may not be red roses of romantic love, but there is the possible petunia or the wild violet that arises. My friend Peter knows how to focus on a robin running across the grass. Little bits of life can form a beautiful mosaic. And little bits of truth can shape one’s destiny.

Writing is an intuitive exercise for me. Like falling off a log, I fall off of rational thinking and into feeling where the words want to take me. My personal experience of life has been brutal beyond words. But now everything has changed. The dance has moved into an easy, effortless flow and I now change partners more easily. And I dance alone.

I know that what I have to say is not as important as the energy behind it. My whole life balances on the point of a keyboard stroke and those reading it feel the truth in what I say. They know I have been down so low that God Himself could not pick me up. I had to rise when the time was right. They know my tears have been shed in anger and in remorse. What else is new?

Easter rises early and I go to meet it. The cross is so familiar and ubiquitous. It beckons, saying, “Pick me up and carry me. It won’t be easy but the resurrection morning awaits. So go ahead and meet me early.”

This Easter 2006 contains the cross of Bob’s life burgeoning with lilies and the sweet hereafter. I kneel in wonder and the tears are plopping as I play the keyboard of my Mac. Who knew I could walk on with such strength and fortitude? Bob did. Who knew me like no other? Bob did. And I him. And I him.

Dear Readers, thank you for returning week after week to read what I have to say....sometimes silly and often unimportant. But remember, it is not the words that matter, but rather the music of the heart. Some of us must make it or die.

The little girl for whom the dollhouse was built has been gone for almost thirty years. The man who built it--her father--has been gone for a mere year and a half. I--the mother to the child and wife to the man--am now learning how to let go.

Today I walked into the antique store and saw two dollhouses displayed prominently. “I have a dollhouse I would like to sell,” I told the two women sitting there minding the store. After telling them the circumstances under which it was built, one woman seemed very interested in buying it. All I told her was that my husband had built it for our daughter, who died at the end of the first grade...and that now he was gone, too.

I vow I do not see how thirty years have passed since he built it. She had suffered a recurrence of her cancer and we had been told she had six months to a year to live. That fall, he began making her the dollhouse. He would slip out into the utility room at night and work on it. The roof is made of sandpaper pieces cut to look like shingles. I helped decorate the house and shop for its furniture.

That Christmas morning Santa left her the dollhouse...and she left us that July. Whoever buys this lovely house with its soft yellow paint and white trim is geting more than a dollhouse. They are getting a legacy of love.

Manifesting Your Mission

I can’t manufacture my mission. I cannot create my own bliss. So what can I do? The obvious answer is nothing but know that the above statements are true. My mission and my bliss are one and the same and they both manifest as the Self that I am. Mission and bliss are already accomplished.

The person who moans about wanting to find his mission and follow his bliss is an illusion on the mental plane. I am not excluding myself from that category in which we all want to be somebody, to be a contender. We don’t have to say, “Yo, Adrienne” to be one. We just have to be alive and on the planet and it will happen of itself.

The contending will happen on the mental plane and the non-contending will happen exactly where it is supposed to happen--on the spiritual plane. We do not have access to that code, for a good reason. If we were given the code, we would enter nirvana and it would immediately cease to be nirvana. So you must not go where your bliss and your mission are fully operative. "Then what can I do?" we all ask. You can wait for it to be revealed. Period, end of sentence. Now go have a cookie and some hot chocolate.

The Living Truth

I like to be one with my writing. I don’t think about breathing; I breathe. I don’t think about swallowing; I swallow. Just so, there is a time in every writer’s life when he wants to just write and see what he/she has to say. I will do that right here in front of God and everybody...

False starts are necessary at a certain point in life; but then they need to give way to flow. For example, I began this paragraph and then erased it. I knew it was a false start and not a true part of the flow. But isn’t it all flow, you might say. Yes and no is always a good answer, for it indicates fluency.

Have I gotten over the death of my husband? Yes and no. There is a flow to my life now that wasn’t there before he died. The minutiae of his illness required that I be able to stop and start on a dime. There were calls to be made and forms to fill out and a heart to protect against its ultimate breaking. That was way beyond the job description as caregiver.

No, I will never look at life in the same way. It is better now because I have faced my greatest fear....that death would defeat life. Now I see that life neither needs or wants our fear towards it. That is because we are life itself. We are most definitely not the hobbles and cribbles of our minds. Oh, no.

I cannot tell you that I am joyful; but peace is a prerequisite in my life. I have graduated from Fear 101 and am now studying Faith 101. It’s the same course, actually. The same professor throws the book at you and yells, “Work harder...work faster. You’re in charge here!” He is testing you and when you understand that, you do what you can and leave the rest for another day.

Flowing with life means that when you get bored and eat one cookie too many, you just smile and remember days when you could hardly swallow, the grief was so bad. You recall that although you try your hardest, sometimes you lose the one you love and dare to go on. You wake up one morning and feel a twinge of enthusiasm in your soul. You remember why you are here....to be one with yourself. Once you have achieved that, the tests are revealed to be big, fat bullies with no substance. You allow them to threaten you and then you walk right through them as if they were ghosts. That is the living truth.

And The Soul Moves

The soul moves and the ego has to follow. Christ moved and Jesus had to follow; that is the crucifixion road for the ego. It never wants to go, but if it was in the lead, nothing meaningful would ever happen. I remember when my ego tried to wiggle out of its promises to take care of a dying husband. It was so tired and angry and broken. It only wanted someone to care for it, to say “there, there.” It didn’t happen that way until the very end and it was soul that spoke to me.

Soul is still speaking and darned if it doesn’t speak in silence. It has no words with which to motivate me; it has no physical eyes to penetrate my thick defenses. No, it manages to push me off cliffs of courage that I would never set one foot upon. It is that determined to break the mold called “me.” So far it has not succeeded. But soul never gives up. It calls to us in the dead of winter, when the blinds are drawn and blankets muffle our shivering bones. “Draw back,” the ego calls, “Draw back. Something awesome is upon us.”

The spiritual journey is into the desert and into the tiger’s mouth of the absolute. The partial does no good when life and death hang in the balance. It is one or the other; take your choice. And no one cares or sees that you are being called to take up your cross. It doesn’t matter; you must go. The ego’s fifteen minutes will soon be up.

And then the silence fructifies- not crucifies. The desert in blossom is the soul being raised the third day. Not into fame but into glory...not into high noon but into the timeless. Not into fortune but into love. Everything you have ever done in your life is consumed in the firepit of compassion...forgotten and hallowed, forgiven and consoled. This I have heard. And yet the soul that moves the ego into death is not proud but determined. It will have its way. And the soul moves and the ego is no more.

Straight from Love Street

Suddenly my great room is ringed with angels. Tonight a lovely woman from Love Street Home (yes, that’s really the name) came over and helped me with rearranging things. I had been in the store and made some purchases a week or two before. A wonderful dark wood bowl, a seagrass magazine basket and a gold pottery vase filled with ivy for my bedroom mantel. Nancy not only helped me, but she came over and saw that the placement was right.

I had bought a new brown leather couch and feared it was too dark. My other one was blue fabric, so this leather seemed altogether cold and intimidating. I wanted to return it. But instead, I stopped in at Love Street and told Nancy the problem. She sent me home with some blue pillows and an afghan to try. “Maybe these will help,” she said.

I came home and tried her suggestions, still not sure if I should keep the couch or not. Around seven o’clock, she pulled up and ran up to the door. “I can’t stay long; I have to eat out with my husband,” she said breathlessly. It was beginning to rain and she had already put in a full day’s work.

Soon her talented brain was humming. I had told her how much some of the crafts that my late husband and I had bought, meant to me. There was the bowl we found in La Jolla, the blue and cream vases from Asheville, the one-of-a-kind votive candle holder from Sausalito. She spun around the room placing things in a way that gladdened my heart. Decorating a room with cherished memories....priceless. I had not wept gratitude for far too long. It was as if Bob Woodyard was smiling down from the most gorgeous heaven, putting me on Cloud Nine.

But there was more. The tiny brown clay wren whistle from Phoenix went on the glass coffee table. The Kwan Yin statue from my mother stood under my ming aralia on the hearth. On the end table is a picture of the swan that graces my homepage. My son took that picture in Kurushiki, Japan. There are two blue pinch pots from my late father nestled with the jade turbot shell from my next-door neighbor.

My cup runneth over. Maybe the tears from the last few years have insured a bumper crop of blessings. I certainly appreciate them all. Most of all, I appreciate the days I spent with Bob. I often suppress my grief for him; tonight there was nothing but the softest tears of “thank you.”

Nothing Smaller

Nothing smaller than you can save you. It takes something bigger than the brain to ease the pain. Our “smarts” smart. Society tells us to be bigger and better and soon our egos cannot get through the door.

Sometimes laughter can relieve the pressure of the over-inflated brain. Crazy wisdom works. I know that when my late husband was in the hospital, my son and I cracked wise. We laughed until it hurt. It was already hurting, but the laughter somehow eased it. It put it all into proportion. No wonder we get the “big head.” And yet big-hearted people are always in fashion.

My husband was an engineer and valued his rational mind. But some high-dose chemo put him into the heart zone whether he was ready to go or not. Once it was obvious that he couldn’t handle high-dose steroids to put him into remission, the after-effects had already kicked in. He was paranoid and intensely loving at the same time.

One morning I paid five dollars for a small stuffed dog. It was on the cheer cart. I brought it into his room and put it on his chest. He was six feet, four inches tall and had not had a stuffed toy since he was a toddler. He coulda been smokin’ dope--he was that zoned out about the little brown dog. Deep pleasure...boundless gratitude. They hung in the air like perfect snowflakes. I still have the dog.

I also have the wholeness that remembers my husband’s brain on steroids. It led to a spiritual healing for him a few days later. He saw the light and the mountain top and I knew he would be okay, regardless of any mental state the chemo might have caused. When all is said and done, there is no proof like experiential wholeness. I knew that love was bigger than the mind. Let no one tell you otherwise.

We really don’t want what we think we want. That is the human condition.

Lost and Found

In an attempt to find ourselves, we lose ourselves. Thankfully, God has a Lost and Found Department. He keeps it hidden at the back of the store, but He does indeed have one. After you have shopped for self-esteem, pride and self-congratulation, try Lost and Found. It is a most interesting place.

God runs His Lost and Found Department in a funky way. He sits there in His swivel chair waiting for the next befuddled customer. And He never has to wait long.

What He has is a box of nothing, filled to the brim with emptiness. He bids you look through it to see if you happen to be there. And you always are.

When you find yourself in His Emptiness, He is overjoyed. He says something about the Lost Chord, the Lost Sheep and the Prodigal Son. But you are too busy reclaiming your emptiness to mind His chatter. You mutter thank you and hurry on back to the awaiting world.

The next day or week or month you lose yourself again. You remember God’s Lost and Found and you hurry back to see if He is still there.

Yes, that’s Him all right. And the box of nothing is as empty with fullness as ever. You suddenly know without looking into the box, that you are always a nothing that knows itself.

Regardless of how many trips you must make to Lost and Found, God is always there. But one day He tips you off to something you had begun to suspect. He knew you were coming so He got the box just to keep you busy while you grew in grace and knowledge. He also knew when the time was right you would made the greatest discovery of all. Lost and Found are just words in a dictionary that you believed in. In reality, nothing can be lost or found in God....only experienced as the Self that you are.

It Seems to Me....

It seems to me that once you know yourself, all of the teachings fall away. Energy replaces the alphabet and you can chuck your enlightenment primer. It’s about nothing so much as enjoyment of your own company. If you can’t do that, why bother?

The teachings are necessary and must be disseminated and absorbed. Then like a kid at Christmas, throw away the toys and play with the box. Crawl in and out of the moment as if it were your gift, because it is.

Sorrow is part of the gift. Knowing yourself as sorrow mitigates its intensity, for why would you cry one extra tear. You won’t. All you need do is watch it arise and fall away.

I mention sorrow because we know that the buddha was right when he said that all of life is suffering. Joseph Campbell urges us to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. There is an energy difference between resistance to sorrow and accepting it. First we go through the resistance. Then we are rewarded by the alchemy of accepting it. Accepting it is to bless it. First you are blessed and then everything falls into place.

Cosmic Kerplunk.....