Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you freedom. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. The stairs are your mentor of things to come, the doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you, and the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
“The hallmark of the coming decades will be grief.” (Francis Weller)
I’ve had an unsettled feeling lately, even though things in my life are going well. It’s like an absence, a loneliness for something that I didn’t know was gone. Lately I’m missing the hummingbirds, but their leaving is a scheduled departure, and my heart was unsettled before that.
Underneath is grief – the grief of looking at the beauty of our world, and wondering how long I will hear birds on a spring morning. It’s watching the news, or social media, and wondering how long we will have anything resembling peace. Or how long we will have stability before the bird flu becomes something like the “Spanish Flu”.
This spring it was the frogs. There seemed to be plenty of “spring peepers” but all summer long, only one deep voiced frog called from our pond. Last year was so dry. The water was exceptionally low. Perhaps the herons and mergansers were happily feeding on frogs who had nowhere safe to hide. I hope it’s that. I hope frogs will be back next spring. I really missed frogs.
I know I am not the only one feeling the deep grief. I catch tears running down my cheeks unannounced, when I don’t even think I am feeling sad. It’s something deeper than sadness. It is deep deep grief that I can’t avoid. I might distract myself, but Francis Weller says we need to learn “to sit in that space and not flinch.” And to do this together. We are all grieving, if we allow ourselves to notice.
I watched this video, How to Navigate Our Collective Dark Night, a year ago, and wrote a draft of this post immediately thereafter, to remind me to watch it again. Today was the day.
Francis Weller describes himself as “psychotherapist, writer, & soul activist”. He talks about the “Long Dark”, the change we are facing – now, not somewhere in the future – changes big enough that the future is likely to be something we won’t recognize. He has written a book about grief, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. I expect I’ll be reading it soon.
Meanwhile, I will allow myself to feel. Just feel.
I dig my way into the back corner of the storage space, past suitcases, sleeping bags, the keyboard I bought to console myself in 1990 when I… (I find myself not wanting to finish that sentence.) …in 1990 when I left my marriage, my home, and my piano.
My piano and my songbooks were what helped me cope in the days before social media. The small keyboard was easier to carry into an upstairs apartment, in any case, much easier than a 70 year old upright. But that’s not what I’m digging for.
I open the trunk I’d always called Grampie’s trunk. It used to sit at the head of the stairs in my childhood home. I lift the top tray, heavy with Bibles of people long gone. I am the keeper of these things, things like my mother’s photo albums from her college days, her father’s papers from the war, an ancient Methodist hymn book, complete with a clasp to keep it closed, and an inscription inside that it belonged to my father. “Please return.”
Most of what is in the trunk is not what was there when I was a child. There’s still the stencil used to paint my great-grandfather’s name, a blanket woven from the wool of sheep that wandered these fields well over a hundred years ago, tiny shoes from a precious baby who died in 1918, and a silver plaque, engraved with the death date of my grandfather’s sister, after a botched abortion in 1917. Pieces of lives. Photos of faces I miss, as well as those I wish were not a part of my family history.
At some point I’d tucked in mementos of my own for safe keeping – my Gideon New Testament, autograph books from school and summer camp, the tiny pink sleepers my premature daughter wore to come home from the hospital, so small a size, but far too big for her little body.
None of these were the artifacts I was looking for. I looked in other corners and storage spaces, and finally decided they were gone, the letters he wrote me fifty years ago. Today would be our fiftieth wedding anniversary. I wanted to ritualize this day, but without the letters, how?
This morning I sat with my coffee and that question in the early dawn light. And then I knew. I could do an astrological chart for our wedding date. I really don’t know the right way to do that, so I pretend our marriage was born on September 11, 1976, at 2 in the afternoon, in this place where I still live. I don’t know what a true astrologer would say, but I was struck by the shapes in the chart, and the meanings of the placements.
Ours was a marriage that valued relationship, begun in optimism with an expectation of perfection. We were idealistic and religious, with a vision that touched on missionary zeal. But we were deceiving ourselves, confused about our motivations.
The chart has a powerful yod, or Finger of God, and a massive Talent Triangle, with a four planet stellium. With four planets at the top of the triangle, it is like four Talent Triangles stacked on top of each other. Talent Triangles represent significant advantages, but they can lead to complacency, if the potential is not developed through hard work.
This marriage had the potential to turn dreams into reality. It felt like it held a karmic mission and purpose. But this would require letting go of safety and comfort. There was a misalignment between that sense of safety and the ideals we held. So much possibility, but the powerful yod meant we would need to pivot away from safety toward transformation. As I look at this chart, I wonder at how that marriage set me up for my own personal transformation. I had to let go of my own safety and comfort in order to become who I am becoming today.
I took a printed copy of this chart out to the compost pile, and lit it on fire. I watched as it burned. The ashes and charred paper will become part of the soil – fifty years of my life, composting.
This morning, as usual, about 5am, I went outside before turning on any lights. The wind was blowing, and it was strangely foggy. Not the damp sort of fog I sometimes encounter in the early hours, but a windy dry fog. What a weird morning, I thought. Then, I came back inside and turned on the light.
It was foggy indoors too! It wasn’t the weather. It was my eyes! After a while things cleared, back to normal, but my concern has not faded. Why do things like this tend to happen on a long holiday weekend?
The number one reason for foggy or cloudy vision is cataracts, and I do have cataracts. They seem to be on a fast track, but apparently getting this fixed is not. A year ago, my eye doctor told me I had cataracts, but seemed to have no concern. This spring, my new eye doctor expressed surprise that I was seeing as well as I do. It was time to refer for surgery, she said. She warned me that it could be months before I had a consultation with a surgeon.
Since I am planning to be away for a little while in mid-winter, as soon as the details were confirmed, I thought I’d better let the surgeon’s office know. What did I find out, in August? The referral, sent in May, had not arrived. Even now, with the referral in the proper hands, I’m told I will be waiting a year.
Most things about cataracts, at least in my experience, show up gradually, so gradually you hardly notice. But my eye doctor’s surprise in May has helped me understand that it’s not the fault of the light bulbs that things are not as bright around my house. Still I’ve been doing okay, except that my usual acuity for small print and threading needles has drifted off into the past. But this morning’s fog scared me. I will eventually get this fixed, and I expect my vision then to be better than it has been for most of my life. It’s just that adjustments will be needed between now and then, and I tend to be impatient.
Around the world, cataracts are the leading cause of blindness, and despite programs such as the World Health Organizations’s VISION 2020 Right to Sight, lower-to-middle income countries still carry the burden. People (and more often women) go blind and stay blind when cost is prohibitive, and surgeons are few.
I am grateful for the privilege of living where I do, for the ability to advocate for myself, and the foresight that led to the discovery of the missing referral. I am also grateful for trust that my inner vision will remain clear, regardless of foggy eyes.
(The photo is of my backyard, but not as it looked this morning. I’ve adjusted the Black Point, to simulate the weird fogginess I was experiencing.)
(One way to help all those others is to donate. One option in Canada is through Seva.)
These were not the usual mosquitos to greet me in the predawn hour. Every morning, unless it is raining, I am up and out the door with my coffee, my journal, and my many thoughts. When a mosquito or two come to join me, I wave them off with instruction to “go feed the birds.” They usually do.
But this particular morning was not usual. So many mosquitos came that I wrapped myself more tightly in my robe, covered my head, and sprayed repellent on my feet and legs. They hovered around me, touching down softly here and there, and rested! On my coffee cup! On my journal! Easy to kill, sitting like that, but I let them be. I did not run into the house for safety.
My meditation and quiet time that morning was focused on the question, “What can be fully seen now? What can I see when I look with my intuition?” That’s when the mosquitos arrived. That’s when I noticed them acting differently. They did not seem to be out for blood. They were content with my coffee and journal. What were they trying to show me? What could be seen in this moment?
I remembered, then, an ancient story about a man named Elisha – prophet, seer, psychic, follower of the Holy One of Israel. At that time, a king in what we now call Syria was at war with Israel. Time and time again, when this king prepared ambush attacks, somehow Elisha always knew, and warned Israeli leadership. Every single ambush failed. When the king accused his own people of treason, he was told that somehow Elisha knew what was said even in the king’s bedroom. The king immediately sent out horses, chariots, and a strong army to capture Elisha, surrounding the city where he was staying.
When Elisha’s servant looked out in the morning, all he could see was that army, far and wide. “What are we going to do?” he asked. Elisha simply said, “Don’t be afraid. The army with us is bigger than the army with them. And then he prayed, “Open his eyes, so he can see.” All around, encircling the enemy, the hills were full of horses and chariots of fire.
In that instant, with that memory, it seemed like this army of mosquitos was the army of the Sacred Wild, an army that often sends even the most stalwart inside for cover. You can read the rest of the Elisha story yourself. And let your own eyes be opened. What is there that can be seen? What are the eyes of your intuition ready to show you, even in these troubled times?
