Sudden Death, Sudden Life

"Unicorn"

2010-05-01T08:22:00.009-04:00

"Sudden Death, Sudden Life"

and

"Prickly Pear Spirituality"

(See chapter links on side panel)

"Unicorn," a tapestry by Savitri L. Bess

Visit my new blog
"All the Colors"
http://spirittapestries.com/blog.htm

And my new website

Spirit Tapestries

Images from Dreamtime

2010-01-09T10:20:00.007-05:00

Spirit Tapestries

http://www.spirittapestries.com/

"Noah's Arc" detail, by Savitri Bess

When I weave a tapestry for someone, it becomes a partnership.

I draw from many threads—meditation visions, archetypes, ancient cultures and mythologies, psychology and spirituality, even the person's astrological birth chart.

The act of creating the weaving is like an archeological discovery of soul. One can contemplate the finished tapestry in the same way one would a mandala or sacred object.

http://www.spirittapestries.com/

Timothy's Hawk

2009-10-09T10:55:00.026-04:00

"Timothy's Hawk"

by Savitri

Timothy’s Hawk

My sister’s son Timothy killed himself, violently, at age forty-five, three years ago. The bereavement counselor at hospice where I’m a volunteer here in Maine, agreed with the California coroner and the police, that it was not advisable for the family to see the body. Ordinarily it is affirming and healing to view the loved one, as a step towards closure. But not Tim.

Now, three years later, seemingly unrelated to Tim, my sister and I, through e-mail, reached an agreement about a tapestry she wanted me to create for her, including price, size, and free-flowing abstract design. Brilliant colors of lilac, magenta, burnt orange, amethyst, red, gold, in loosely spun bulky wools.

Minutes after our e-mail, I headed to the grocery store. On a branch of a leafy green maple, above my car I spotted a hawk. Just to be sure it wasn’t just a branch looking like a hawk, I edged to the side of it. The hawk’s brown eye followed me. Auspicious, I decided. A good beginning for my sister’s weaving.

When I returned from the store, hawk gone from tree, I lay on my carpet to relax. I thought how I’d seen Ospreys, Peregrine Falcons, Eagles, but never, in the seven years I’d lived on Mount Desert Island, had I seen a hawk. Crows started raising a ruckus outside. Suspecting the hawk, I jumped up to have a look.

Just below my balcony, on the lawn, there it stood. Crows, about ten of them, were settled and silent now, in sentinel positions on various trees, one on top of a dead pine. Hawk looked up at me with its brown eye. Then it took a few limping-style steps. Crows scattered, cawing. Hawk stood still. Crows returned to their posts. Then, hawk flew low to the ground and into the forest, with crows scolding, in zigzag flight, racing after.

I wrote my sister the story, asked if I could put a hawk in her weaving, asked if the hawk meant anything to her. She wrote that her son Tim had had a fascination for birds of prey, and most particularly hawks. “Yes,” she said, “put the hawk in. The weaving needs a subject. It’ll be Tim’s gift to me.” It was a Red-shouldered Hawk, about the size of a crow, not the larger Red-tailed, as I’d thought. And so Timothy’s Hawk was begun.

One or two days into the weaving, I began to have nightmares, every night, waking up with a start, sucking in air, someone or something chasing me. I rarely have nightmares. After sharing with a friend, I connected the dreams to Tim. At that point I realized, that while I wove, I was to visualize Tim’s release from pain and suffering, and from the the ways he might be stuck on the other side.

According to the Tibetans, the images encountered in the after-death Bardos, can be infinitely more terrifying than those encountered in life.

Later my sister told me Tim had been plagued with chase dreams, from childhood into adult, sometimes waking him, screaming in the night. Meanwhile, during the weaving of Tim’s hawk, my sister was having her own experiences and recollections, including a dream of deep grief.

For days I wove and watched Tim’s hawk, under my fingers, rising out of a fire and soaring into color and light. During this time I had a numinous dream:

I am standing on a cliff above a Caribbean-blue ocean. I want to swim but someone tells me it’s dangerous. I see why. Not far out from the cliff is a huge, being-like mass of tangled seaweed that floats several feet above the water, rising and falling as if flexing muscles. Soon I find myself at the bottom of the cliff, diving into the ocean and swimming along the narrow passage between the cliff and the seaweed being, towards a white sandy beach. I feel awe but no danger as I swim with abandon, in the center of the turquoise waterway.

I awoke feeling elevated.

Detail

Note:
My sister and I are reading Timothy through The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Great Liberation Through Hearing.

Another source: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche

Tapestry Migration: The Beginning

2009-09-26T10:30:00.018-04:00

"Ganesha"

Tapestry weaving by Savitri

Tapestry Migration

Om Sri Maha Ganapatayae Namah!

Tapestry Weaving. Aha! An electromagnetic-free profession. (read about EMF sensitivity in “Red-Zoned into the Arms Nature” link on the side panel)

So what do I do now? And what does weaving have to do with my blog, "Sudden Death, Sudden Life"? Well, if I stretch a bit, maybe it's related...transformation, transfiguration, transmigration, and all of those trans-whatevers that often have to do with all kinds of death and dying, from minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day.

Meanwhile, I’m a bit shocked because you’d not have convinced me a month ago that I’d return to my earlier profession of tapestry weaver. These days I like to write. Not that I make any money at it, but monetary gain is something to strive for, not the goal. Isn’t it? If I’m going to allow myself to be turned all the way around, then I’ll have to buy a loom. Looms are expensive. Try $2,000 to $3,000, new. Price is one of my excuses as friends tell me, over and over: “You should weave again.”

Okay, okay. Maybe I will, but first, to start such an undertaking, I’d be smart to call upon the elephant-headed lord, the remover of obstacles, Ganesha. He’s is a pretty jolly fellow because one of his lordship activities is to open the way for new ventures, all comings and goings, even for in the door, or out the door and down the road. Practically every Hindu taxi driver in India has a picture of Ganesha (also known as Ganapati) on the dashboard, along with the deity of choice. These drivers know that before you pray to Shiva or Lakshmi or Hanuman or any of the gods of the Hindu pantheon, you pray to Ganesha first, because he clears the pathway, even for your worship endeavors. And maybe he’ll even open up the wall-to-wall traffic jam. You never know.

If you want to look at this crazy move from writer to weaver, or any combination thereof, you might take into consideration Mercury (Hermes), the Greek god with the wings on his heels, the messenger god, the trickster. From my viewpoint, which is a bit topsy-turvy after having given up tapestry weaving about fifteen years ago, to take up writing, and now maybe weaving again, there has to be some crafty business going on. And that would be Mercury’s department. I take into consideration that Mercury rules over both writing and weaving, and that my Moon is in a Mercury-ruled sign, and my Mercury is in my house of profession.

Do you know the story about Mercury stealing Apollo’s cows? Right after Mercury’s born, he runs off with the cows and then climbs back into his crib. Apollo gets word of the cow heist. When Apollo confronts him, Mercury says, “Who me? I’m just a baby. How could I steal your cows?” Well, Apollo, being who he is, sleuths out the location of the cows and then retaliates, threatens to curse Mercury with God-only-knows what. To appease Apollo, Mercury crafts a lyre for him, the very one you always see in the depictions of Apollo. Oh, well, I digress. I was always a better weaver than writer.

So one day about a month and a half ago, I tell my friend Juniper (not her real name) that I’m going to take up weaving again. Next time I see her she says, “I want to give you money towards your weaving loom, and in exchange you can weave me something.”

“Thank you! Oh, my God. A commission?” I ask.

“I hadn’t looked at it that way,” she says.

“Yes, that’s what it is, a commission. And so now you need to tell me what to weave for you, something to wear, something to put on your wall? Like that.”

Juniper says she’ll think about it. Next week she shows up with a check made out to me and tells me what she wants. “A gull and fog, to remind me of our times by the sea, on our weekly walks down there to sit by the water in the early morning, and our talks. And the lone gull that sometimes sits behind us.”

I go stiff. Can I pull it off, a gull and fog after fifteen years of no weaving? “I don’t know how to make fog,” I say. “I’ll need some practice.”

“Oh, Savitri, don’t practice. Just do it. You’ll remember how.”

What trust. I believe her faith in my abilities helped me pull it off. Say nothing of Ganesha, who hangs on the wall behind me as I weave, and Amma, my guru, who’s picture is on the wall in front of me. How can I go wrong? Well, I can definitely go wrong, even with divine intervention. What do they say…look for the positive in the things that go wrong. Be optimistic.

That week I find out about four used looms for sale—yes, four of them—three in the $1,000 range and one $600. All near home. A friend drives me to Belfast in his truck, and we lug home a loom, an excellent four-harness loom, a Herald (never mind the metaphor, unintended), for $450.

To avoid an attempt at gull and fog I do everything to distract myself, just as I did as a writer (and still do), even decide I need to refinish the loom because I'm not sure I like the walnut stain.

Eventually, I get myself going, without refinishing the loom.

Here is "Gull."

Prickly Pear Spirituality: Stories from the Southwest: Under a Dark Moon

2009-08-19T07:36:00.066-04:00

If you've come to my blog to read my EMF (electromagnetic fields) stories, please use the links on the side panel, starting with "Red-zoned into the Arms of Nature."

Under a Dark Moon

Berneice Falling Leaves is a storm walker. That's how she spells her name---"Berneice." She was born during a thunder storm, and if you're a medicine woman that makes you a storm walker, and that means you take on dangerous and difficult assignments. She's tall, wears ankle-high moccasins, hair in a Native American bob, died black, white at the part. She's half Sioux and half Danish.

We talk about her work as we cross paths with one of her several peacocks that roam free on the property around her old adobe home outside Phoenix, Arizona. Another peacock is sounding its blood-curdling screech from behind the chicken coop. I know it's a peacock calling, because my mother used to take us to the San Diego Zoo and there you can hear the peacocks all the way from the bear grotto.

Strolling along with Berneice and me is William the trance medium, middle-aged, with large balding head, and a tumbling baritone laugh. As we squeeze into single file to make our way past a cholla cactus, Berneice says, "So, anyway, Moon has invited me to Korea again if I'll bring two other ministers along with me." She's referring to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

William and I don't say anything.

"I'm not done with him and his Moonies," says Berneice, as she bends over to unhitch her purple squaw dress from the cholla cactus. "It's a free round-trip," she says, "all expenses paid at five-star hotels. And you both qualify as ministers---I'll vouch for it. We've got work to do in Seoul and the cards say you're coming." She's referring to the Tarot cards.

We pause under the sparse shade of a mesquite tree. William looks at me, blue eyes round and ready for fun. "Come on, Savitri, Let's do it."

For some reason, I'm booked on an earlier flight arriving in Seoul in the afternoon, time enough to poke around and scope out the neighborhood. At about midnight, Berneice lugs her suitcase into the room. She's laughing. "William is furious because he had no idea the bottle of wine he ordered downstairs was going to cost him $100, all his spending money for the trip."

Meanwhile, Berneice pulls out her cards and spreads them out on her bed. "He," meaning Moon, "is going to lie low. There's a plan to assassinate him," she says pointing to the Tower card and the Ten of Swords. "We're not going to see him on this trip. Anyway, we'll work on the other planes so it doesn't matter."

I still have no idea what work we're going to be doing, but figure she'll let me know. I'm guessing Berneice is operating on the principle that when you witness a dubious act---really see, clearly, what's going on---your job is nearly done.

"I found out there's a Buddhist service down the street at four in the morning," I say.

"Good, we'll go to it."

I've never traveled with Berneice before and feel excited that she responds to my desire for adventure, but I also suspect her reasons for wanting to go to the Buddhist temple is somehow related to "our work."

The next morning, the Moon program begins at 9:00 AM sharp. William is jealous that we didn't tell him about the Buddhist service. I look around the hall at the two hundred or so ministers, half of them Afro-Americans. I find out later that nearly all people on the Moon trip are from the South, mostly Baptists and Methodists. I supposed that a free trip would be tempting to just about anyone, except Episcopalians and Presbyterians, Catholics, who are conspicuously absent.

For several hours we watch videos on a huge screen about Moon and his mission, complete with testimonials and shots of his mass weddings. Moon arranges marriages, pairing all colors and races in his attempt to create a utopia of one color, one race. That evening after a Korean banquet, we are bussed to Moon's opera house, a monumental building reminiscent of the architectural grandiosity of the Nazi era. And, like Hitler, Moon is a connoisseur and patron of the arts. We are dazzled with song and dance for three hours, a Korean ballet folklorico.

I've mentioned that William is a trance medium. He channels Dr. Peebles, a Scotsman, though I've never been clear as to why Dr. Peebles would be found to have any more wisdom than the rest of us. I remember one day when I'd invited William to channel at my yoga center in Tucson, Arizona. William sat in a chair while the thirty of us in the "audience" sat on the floor in my temple room, on my European Oriental rug. My temple cat Bok Choy, a large white tiger point Siamese with Egyptian profile, sauntered in and sat in front of William, looking up at him, obviously waiting for the show to begin. William, when he took notice of Bok Choy's profound attention, burst into his loud baritone laughter. Bok Choy stood, flipped his tail a few times, and walked out of the room, head high. William, covering his smile with his hand, said, "O Lord...I think I insulted your cat." When William recovered his calm, he brought on Dr. Peebles.

Anyway, the day after the Korean dance gala, the Moonies bus us to a parking lot not far from the Moon headquarters. To get there we walk down a quaint street with up-scale oriental-style homes. Berneice says, "His house is one of these. I know it." And William agrees. At the surprisingly modest headquarters, a young American woman shows us around, and I take note of the surprisingly ordinary-looking office workers, mostly Koreans.

At the tour's end, while everyone in our group files out, William signals for me to linger, and whispers, "Let's walk back." Though I'm not sure how far the walk will be, I follow his lead. Berneice doesn't want to stay. With our group gone, I notice that nobody in the office seems to find our presence strange. William strikes up friendly conversation with a Korean woman in her forties. After a bit he says to her, "I'm a spiritualist."

The woman smiles, nodding.

"Are you familiar with spiritualism?" he asks as if it were the most normal question in the world.

"Oh, yes," she says, "In fact we have several among us who are learning to channel. When he dies, that's how he'll communicate with us."

I try really hard not to look at William and I'm pretty sure he's trying really hard not to look at me.

Later the next day, Berneice and William and I huddle in the hotel lobby during a break in the program. Berneice says, "I just found out that about 70 of those ministers from the South have already been persuaded, because of what they've seen so far on those videos, to spread the good word about Moon to their congregations. They're buying the idea that Moon is the new Messiah."

"You can't be serious," says William.

"Dead serious. And, I want you to know that they have Moonies assigned to us, to pick our brains." She punches her fist into her palm and says, "Just send them away whenever you feel them probing around in your brain."

Now I know why I've been feeling irritable and out of sorts. "One of them came up to me, the tall American who introduces the program every day, and told me that we'd get sent back home if we didn't attend every program. I understand, now, how he knew I was planning to play hookie. And he said to stop going to the Buddhist temples."

"Creepy," says William.

"You better believe," says Berneice. "Anyway, we've got an afternoon break today, so let's go look at those masks you wanted to see at the folk art museum, Savitri. And just remember...our mere presence is throwing off their energy."

I feel I'm just along for the ride, but am glad our storm walker thinks we might be making a dent in Moon progress.

On our seventh and last day in Seoul, we three hike up a hill spotted with shaggy trees and wild grasses, the sight of a bloody battle during the Korean War. We'd been up the hill, not far from our hotel, earlier in the week and had decided to do a ceremony to help release what William referred to as "trapped souls," souls who hadn't realized they were dead, were deep into the war trauma, unable to move on. Additionally, we had learned that a good deal of Moon's fanaticism towards creating utopia is fueled by his bitterness over that war.

It is a windless afternoon when we settle in a shady spot at the top of that lone hill that overlooks brown haze surrounding the sprawling city. Berneice pulls out her eagle feather and a braid of sweetgrass which she lights while she's saying her prayers; William calls on his spirit guides, Dr. Peebles included; and I light some incense and say a Sanskrit chant. When we finish, a gentle breeze brushes across our faces and flutters the leaves on trees.

A couple of weeks later, at my yoga and meditation center in Tucson, about thirty people gather to hear Berneice and William and me tell stories about our Korean adventure. First off we let everyone know that we'd developed a taste for Kimchi, the sour cabbage dish served with every Korean meal. In most neighborhoods in Seoul, we saw Kimchi "brewing" in large clay pots on roof-tops.

Then Berneice tells about the assassination expectation, and reveals that she wasn't the only person to know about that possibility. "And he knew about it, too," she adds. "He's no dummy." Berneice punches her fist into her palm and lets us know that her last Tarot card spread, with the Sun and Moon cards prominent, the Joker in the middle and the Five of Swords at the top, indicated that our work in Seoul had met her measure of success, for the time being---though she didn't say how.

To round out the evening, William offers a short channeling session with Dr. Peebles, who seems to answer the unasked question: "Mr. Moon may aspire to build a trans-Pacific bridge, but a Scotsman, such as myself---embodied, of course---is more likely to find a pot of gold at the end of an Irishman's rainbow."

***

Note: The above story took place in the 1980's. We'd heard of countless, similar stories, of people like Berneice working to defuse Moon's progress. On February 13, 2009, Rev. Sun Myung Moon celebrated his 90th birthday. The world is pretty much the same as it was in the 80's---no Moon-designed utopia, no bridge across the Pacific, and Korea, unfortunately, appears to be quite a bit worse off than before.

Credits: Korean scarecrow photo: www.fotosearch.com/photos-images/korean-traditional-mask.html

More Prickly Pear Spirituality Stories:
"Owl Head Buttes Connection"
http://suddendeathsuddenlife.blogspot.com/2009/05/red-zoned-into-arms-of-nature.html

"Shaman of Wands"
http://suddendeathsuddenlife.blogspot.com/2009/06/prickly-pear-spirituality-stories-from.html

Prickly Pear Spirituality: Stories from the Southwest. "The Owl Head Buttes Connection"

2009-07-17T16:24:00.026-04:00

Arizona Sonoran Desert

The Owl Head Buttes Connection

“I’m gonna show you the Owl Head Buttes,” said Gum, short for Gumbert, a balding skinny fellow with a leathery tan. “That’s where you want to have your place.”

I’d been searching for land where I could build a yoga and meditation retreat. Now, where Gum and I sat on an old Perisan rug I’d saved from the dump, I held yoga classes in my rental in Tucson, Arizona.

Next day Gum picked me up. While we headed north on Interstate 80 to the Owl Head Buttes, he told me about his time as a dealer at a casino in Las Vegas. “I could count cards, see.” In those days that meant you were invincible at winning. “I was breaking the house when I’d play for myself, so they banned me from playing, but not from dealing, of course. So I used to go places where they didn’t know me. I’d pretend I was drunk. After a few days, they’d catch on and throw me out.”

About ten miles outside Tucson, Gum said, “Get off here! Jesus, we almost missed it.” Then he guided me down a well-graded road, with lush desert vegetation—palo verde trees with yellow blossoms, giant saguaros raising their arms to the sky, ocotillos with their orange flame blossoms at the tips of spiny branches. Flatlands all around, not a house in sight. Tuscon Mountains to the southwest and Mt. Lemon to the southeast.

“There they are,” he said, pointing to three reddish mesas, flat on top, steep rise, maybe 400 feet high. We couldn’t figure out how to get close to them, but close enough for me to know this was where I wanted my yoga retreat. Then one of my favorite desert birds, a cactus wren, whistled its wheet wheet from a mesquite tree, cinching my sense of “right place.”

A week later Gum showed up with the classified section tucked under his arm. “Look here,” he said, snapping the paper open. “Owl Head Buttes. Property for sale.”

The next morning Gum and I met the broker, Mickey, at Dunkin Donuts, and he spirited us off in his new broker's jeep. Mickey was a big guy, football player big, maybe fifty, with snow-white hair that seemed to glow, and eyes translucent blue. I’d been reading Ruth Montgomery’s book Strangers Among Us, about “walk-ins.” Not to beauty parlors, but dead people walking into someone else’s recently-dead body. Meaning there were these souls wandering around bodiless, searching for a body to occupy. If someone died, one of these souls would enter the dead body and suddenly, the person who’d been pronounced dead, would come alive again. Usually the souls that did this, according to Ruth Montgomery, were very advanced beings, compassionate people who hadn’t finished their life-tasks on earth.

While we drove down the interstate, I got this idea that Mickey was a walk-in. I kept looking around at Gum in the back seat, who had no clue what was on my mind. Finally I got up my nerve and asked, “Mickey, are you a walk-in?”

Much later, after I had gotten know Mickey a bit, he confessed he’d nearly driven off the road when I’d asked him that. Now he was silent for a minute. “What makes you ask?”

“Just a feeling.”

“Our instructions were to always tell the truth when asked, though we weren’t necessarily supposed to go around telling the whole world about this. So, yeah, I’m a walk-in. But not the way you think. I’m actually from another planet.”

“Another planet?!” I let that surprise grind around in my throat as Mickey made a right off the graded road, and bumped along over potholes, towards the Buttes.

“We’re almost there,” he said. “I’ll show you the 80-acre parcel that I think you’ll like best for your project. It has a great view out to Picacho Peak, spectacular at sunset.”

Using my trained psychological counselor voice, I said, “Okay, that’s nice, but can you tell me a little more about being a walk-in from another planet?”

My heart lurched as he maneuvered his 4-wheel drive through the deep sand of a fairly wide arroyo. “You won’t have any trouble crossing this in your old Oldsmobile,” he said.

“How’d you know I have an old Oldsmobile?” Gum and I had driven to Dunkin Donuts in Gum’s car.

“It comes with the territory,” he said as he pulled over and got out, and then Gum and I got out, too. Mickey’s face was rugged and kind, not handsome, but pleasant. He stood, thumbs in his jeans pockets, next to a mesquite tree and looked me up and down. “We have x-ray vision, too, and I can see you have some obstruction in your intestines.” It was true. I’d been having indigestion and didn’t know what was wrong. “I don’t mean to scare you,” he said, “ but you wanted to know.”

As we started walking the property, Mickey waved his hand in the direction of the Owl Head Buttes that rose up at the end of the 80 acres. “That flat area to the left of the Buttes, that’s where we’re going to lift people off when the polar axis change happens. No one will be able to survive the winds. So my mission here, as commander of a space fleet, is to lift people off planet Earth. So this won’t be a bad place to have your retreat.”

Good grief, I thought. “Hmm,” I said as I nearly tripped over a barrel cactus.

When Mickey wasn’t looking, Gum raised an eyebrow, while whirling his forefinger around his ear.

“Come on over here,” said Mickey, trudging up a small incline. “This would be a good building site.”

I made my way between two jumping chollas, with their spiny, ball-like growths at the ends of their stems that can suddenly end up on your pant leg, or on an unwary animal’s fur. "Oh, look!" A small herd of javelina, wild desert pigs, were scuttling along through a wash. On the knoll, I surveyed the land’s bumps and gullies, the rich colors of the desert, then took in the view of Picacho Peak, shimmering on the horizon like a spire on a distant planet. “It’s gorgeous, isn’t it, Gum?”

“Yup. It sure is.”

Back at Dunkin Donuts, as soon as Gum and I climbed into Gum’s car, he said, “That guy’s totally whacko.”

“I don’t know. He sure knew his stuff.”

“Sick psychic tricks, just like the ones they’ve got working in Vegas to spot smart card players, or players who are also psychic.”

“I like the idea of living right there at that pick-up spot when all those earth changes happen. Crazy or no, I’m going to purchase that land, but it’ll take a while for my mom’s estate to finalize, and we have a lot of planning to do. Like how are we going to take calls for retreats when there aren’t phone lines out there?”

“There ain’t gonna be no earth changes. Believe me. That stuff doesn’t happen over night, not all over the whole damn planet. Maybe Vesuvius exploding onto Pompeii, yes. One spot or two, now and then, just to keep us on our toes, one year at a time.”

“What about the great deluge of Noah?”

“Yeah, how often have you heard of that happening?”

(Twenty-five years later, Gum’s take on earth changes proved to be true, though it is a known fact that the axis will shift, as is does now and then, perhaps sooner than thought because of how we’ve been messing up the planet. But the “sooner” numbers are in the hundreds of thousands of years, give or take a few. But then there is the ice melt now in 2009, raising the sea level).

Meanwhile, Mickey didn’t want to wait around for me. He sold “my” parcel. I was pissed. But, as it turns out, even if I had bought that land, I’d not have had enough money left over to build a retreat place. But since my belief is that most things happen for the best, I bought an adobe home on Hacienda del Sol Road in Tucson’s Catalina Foothills, on three and a half acres, with a huge great room perfect for classes, and even a swimming pool closed in with an ocotillo fence. A friend of Mickey’s, another walk-in from another planet—not Mickey’s planet—helped me find the place, using his brand of other-worldly talents.

Since the yoga center showed signs of success in the first year and Mickey still had some undesirable land left out there in the middle of nowhere, I took part in his buy and sell scheme, dividing my new 80-acre parcel into three. In short time I doubled my money. Gum had a laugh. “Better than Vegas,” he said.

I invited Mickey to come to my yoga center one night to give a talk about his planet and his mission here on Earth. About forty people showed up. At the end of his talk, he promised he’d let us know in advance when he’d be getting ready to land his ship. And so we all had fun waiting—not on pins and needles—for the Owl Head Buttes lift-off.

Prickly Pear Spirituality: Stories from the Southwest. "Shaman of Wands"

2009-06-28T18:42:00.015-04:00

Woven mask by Savitri

Prickly Pear Spirituality:

Stories from the Southwest

"Shaman of Wands"

A sound, like sizzling sparks from exposed high wires, disturbed the quiet of the hot desert air. My dog Delilah, a fun-loving Old English Sheep Dog mix, barked and wouldn’t stop. I’d been reading my friend Yarrow’s tarot cards, even though I didn’t really know how. She was the tarot reader. She insisted that I let her know what was going on between her and her Yaqui chief husband. She’d giggled when I said I couldn’t. In her little girl’s voice she’d said, “Why, any woman can read the cards, and especially you.”

We were sitting cross-legged on a rug in my yoga and meditation center in Tucson’s Catalina Foothills in Arizona. I’d been examining the Shaman of Wands card in the Motherpeace deck, using a relationship spread, when that loud buzzing started up. Yarrow leapt up and out onto the adobe brick porch. I tore out after her. In the flower bed next to the sliding glass doors was an enormous rattle snake, coiled to strike, rattling its tail.

I grabbed Delilah’s collar and held her back. “Hold on, girl, hold on.”

Yarrow bent over and started talking to the snake. “Grandfather. Please don’t hurt my friend’s dog.” She spoke low and soft, a mumble of words. “Settle down, Grandfather; go back into the desert sand. Go back into hiding among your relatives, the giant saguaros and the barrel cactus. Wait there for the small beings, the rabbits and the mice, the ones who are ready for you to take them.”

Delilah was shaking and so was I. Hoping for some sign, I gazed over at the saguaro cactus, with its leathery, accordion-like skin, towering above my adobe house, its arms reaching to the sky. The rattler uncoiled and slithered away. Yarrow stared at me with a vacant look, her usually tanned face white, her brown hair limp. “Angelo doesn’t want you to read the cards for me.”

“What?!” I said, as I looked around for my husky. “Where’s Shaman? Come here, boy.” I ran the perimeter of the ocotillo fence that surrounded the swimming pool, and no Shaman. “The gate’s open. How did the gate get opened! I raced out and called some more.

“Oh, please don’t hurt my friend’s husky,” said Yarrow, as she followed me out the gate.

My stomach was doing deep sea dives. “What are you talking about?!”

“Angelo…his totem, besides deer, is rattlesnake. Don’t you remember? His hat band is a rattlesnake skin.”

I hadn’t remembered that, but I had remembered visiting their home amidst creosote bushes and prickly pears, near the Tucson Mountains. I’d been sitting, cooled by the overhead fan, on a faded bedspread, where Yarrow and I had been talking. We’d just returned from a walk through the graveyard. She’d gone out to get something in another room. Angelo appeared at the doorway, pausing ever-so-briefly, in the posture of a deer, his eyes wide and doe-like, looking straight at me. No…into me.

Now I reminded Yarrow of that scene. She smiled. “Yeah…he liked you. He doesn’t show himself to just anyone.”

And I’m thinking, when am I going to get it that medicine people can be dangerous. “Come on. Let’s go find Shaman.”

You’d think, after Yarrow had talked that rattlesnake into leaving my back porch, she’d be able to find my dog, but instead she dragged along behind me like a child who’d lost its rag doll.

We zigzagged over the hard-packed sand, around the cholla cactus and the Palo Verde trees, calling for Shaman. I was very careful where I stepped. We slid down a shallow ravine into the deep sand of an arroyo, and scramble up the other side, heading in the direction of Mount Lemon that rose high above the hills. At the top of a knoll, in front of the Hacienda del Sol Guest Ranch, there was my husky, poking around the flowers lining an adobe wall.

That night I dreamed of the Native American deer dance, woke up feeling uneasy. Shaman, Delilah, and I went for our morning walk along the arroyo across Hacienda del Sol Road. About three hours later, when Shaman had not followed me home as he usually did, I called the humane society in hopes that someone might have found him and turned him in.

“Yes,” the guy said, “We have your do…” But then he was silent. “Ma’am. Someone brought your dog in. He’s dead. A car ran over him.” He paused. “I’m sorry…do you want to come and pick him up?”

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t pick him up. I’d saved him just one year ago from a pet shop, to the tune of $400. I’d paid $20 for Delilah. When I happened upon him in that pet store, Shaman had grown too big for his cage, and was circling, chasing his back foot. And I fell in love with that yellow-eyed, red Siberian Husky. For the first several months I had him, his eyes didn’t see, didn’t look at you with recognition. He didn’t understand human touch. He didn’t understand that you don’t mess in your own bed. Then, bit by bit, his eyes had brightened, got that far-seeking, mysterious look of his breed. He had begun to lean into me when I hugged him, sinking my fingers into the down of his fur.

Now I couldn’t bear to see him dead. I’d trusted him to run happy and free while we walked through the desert. I wanted to remember him that way. People had warned me that huskies run away. But he was never more than five minutes behind me.

After a few days of non-stop tears, I called my friend Berneice Falling Leaves, an elder, to seek advice.

“Your dog took a hit for you,” she said.

That night a couple of friends and I went out into the desert, lit a fire, and did a little ceremony for my dog, under clear desert sky, stars sprinkling down out of the August Perseids. A great horned owl swooped, settled in a saguaro, and hooted. I went ahead and did what Berneice said to do. I imagined Shaman standing there, looking at me with those eyes, like he knew everything there was to know. Then I called out to him, “Run, Shaman, Run!”

Red-Zoned into the Arms of Nature

2009-05-24T21:30:00.029-04:00

"Red-Zoned into the Arms of Nature"

“It’s the WiFi. That’s what’s going on with you.”

“WiFi?”

“Yes,” my friend Gordon said, “Northeast Harbor where you work is blanketed with WiFi.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you need to call the town office and find out where the tower is, and ask them about the Red Zone.”

The next day at work I did call the town office. I knew nothing about Red Zones and I’m not sure the woman who answered the phone did either. “If you don’t know where the Red Zone is, can you tell me where the tower is?” I asked.

She put me on hold for a while. “It’s on top of the elementary school.”

I knew what she was talking about, as I’d recently gone over that way, and noticed the eerie-looking, sci-fi complexity rising high above the school. I’d actually gone inside to ask what it was. No one in the school office knew. “Is it a cell tower?” I pressed. The woman looked up once more from her computer. “I don’t know.”

After work Gordon dropped by again. “So what do I do now?” I asked. “The thing is right across the street and down a bit from where I work.”

“Seems the only way, is to get away from the source and pretty much stay away." He had first-hand experience about EMF symptoms, as he'd had to move his office to the country, from his in-town location next to a WiFi cafe. "After six months, I can go online for an hour or so now and then. I can’t stay in Northeast harbor for more than an hour either.” He'd suffered the same vertigo, lack of focus, anxiety, depression, and irritability, that I was experiencing.

After my friend left, I didn’t get up from my chair for a long time, wondering what I was going to do. It was clear I had to quit work; the WiFi sensations had escalated, affecting my nervous system to the point of intolerable, as though something foreign had invaded my body, spinning around inside of me. That night I watched a video about the dangers of cell towers and phones, and about a man in Sweden who was so EMF-sensitive that he had to wear a space suit to work.

I wasn’t going to wear a space suit. I would quit work and then something else would have to happen. But first I tried EMF shielding devices—hats, aprons, and such, which only had the effect of furthering the piercing headaches and dizziness, as though sealing in the electromagnetic fields that had built up inside of me.

The next morning during my daily meditation it came to me how I would heal myself. First of all I was not to worry about how I was going to take care of myself financially. I had enough money saved to live for two months and whatever was to happen after that would be revealed.

The other meditation insight was that healing would begin if I spent hours out in nature. For starters I was to find a tree and lean against it—every day, no matter what the weather. I was to do this for at least fifteen minutes. Now, it was hard to even reach a tree, it being February, dead of winter, with ice crusting deep snow. I was also to spend time by the sea, meditating in nature.

Meanwhile, I was pretty deep into the labile effect of the EMF symptoms, feeling edgy and ungrounded, with unpredictable emotional swings. A medical doctor friend, knowledgeable about EMF, walked me through what I needed to do in my apartment to feel safe and EMF-free. She brought along her ELF meter that measures “extremely low frequency” electromagnetic fields and took readings all over the place. She advised me to move my bed out from the wall, and turn off all my machines (humidifiers and air purifiers) and get rid of my cordless phone.

She recommended Graham Stetzer filters to clean up the “dirty electricity” coming from outside transformers and strong electrical fields caused by appliances and such. I needed seven of these filters. Large homes need as many as twenty. As soon as I plugged them into the outlets, they made a huge difference in the crazy electrical energy zigzagging all through the apartment. My home now felt safe, and energetically quiet.

On my first day into nature, the trails were ice rinks because of rain on snow the previous day. Even with ice-grippers velcro’d across my boots I took care while walking. I’d fallen on black ice once, and one fall on ice was plenty. In a forest of red pine I soon found “my tree.” I crunched through the snow drift and leaned my spine against the trunk.

I had imagined the tree would take the electromagnetic toxins down into the roots and release them into the earth. So I was trying to help it do that, but nothing happened. Something inside of me said, “Just relax. Let go.” I shut my eyes and did just that. After a short while I began to feel energy flowing upwards, up through my spine into the top of the tree, skyward and dispersing into the air. Feeling finished, I wrapped my arms around the tree, touching my forehead to it, and thanking it.

On my first day at the ocean shore, down at the end of Wonderland Trail, it was an overcast day, pretty cold. After meditating for a while, I lay down on the sand and pebble-speck of a beach, arms out, legs apart, in the yoga corpse pose. I fell asleep to the sound of lapping waves and the sound of gulls calling.

Addendum:

It’s almost June now. I still contemplate in Nature two to three hours a day, but as weather grew warmer, my Dr. friend warned me to stop the tree practice because of deer ticks that carry Lyme Disease. Lying and sitting on rocks, or sand, by the shore does the same trick.

For another WiFi story, see the one Yeoman Gardener and I wrote:

http://www.suddendeathsuddenlife.blogspot.com/2009/05/wifi-tsunami-report-from-walking-dead.html

About Dangers of Cell Phones and Solutions:

http://www.feastandfamine.blogspot.com/

For EMF symptoms:
http://www.weepinitiative.org/talkingtoyourdoctor.pdf).

More EMF information: http://www.energyfields.org/pdfs/Bioinitiative_pressrelease_73107.pdf

Cell tower information: http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2009/01/preparedness-in-interesting-times-babel.html.

WiFi Electromagnetic Pollution: Up Close & Personal

2009-05-04T15:53:00.035-04:00

"WiFi Electromagnetic Pollution:

Up Close & Personal"

by
Savitri Bess and Yeoman Gardener*

A writer friend, Yeoman Gardener, and I collaborated on this WiFi piece; we’re featuring it here and at her blog.*

Yeoman's Introduction:

After long New England winter of snowshoes and crampons, daffodils are in bloom! And that's not all that's popping up. Even in the back of the beyond, WiFi has become the must-have du jour. Locals clamored for access, and wowie-kazam, an 18th century church steeple now sports an oblong WiFi doodad, jutting from the belfry.

Telecom builds without oversight, and we buy, buy, buy. A marriage made in heaven, right?

Certainly, free connectivity with the world is thrilling. Although it’s an interconnectedness dependent on WiFi hotspots and viewing screens, it’s also a transformative metaphor set in motion, even if the grid were to go down.

We now see or remember that minds resonate, catch fire, and roar like Niagara, in contact with one another and energies larger-than-self. There is much to celebrate as we enter times of solar and galactic energies beyond the norm.

Down here on earth in day-to-day living, is WiFi safe? Is the US even asking?

We’ve scurried along, lab rats in a maze, on the greatest biological experiment in human history—electrosmog 24/7—an experiment bigger than the bankster-bailout, that greatest wealth transfer in human history. Savvy consumers, or docile lab rats and serfs?

The Why-Fry debate is much more heated in Europe. I decided just to link, and not to post this graphic found on a Czech site, as it’s disturbing, but does give the brain cells a jolt about the relative safety of EMF-emitters http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_JW4j2kgtRkI/Sf10rSuE17I/AAAAAAAAB5M/XC8KDNHtsso/s400/Femme+enceinte.jpg

Many towers are now being camouflaged in flagpoles, obelisks, faux-trees. What we don’t notice can’t hurt us? And for the guffaw of the day, here’s a Hawaiian palm in Kona necklaced with electronic beamery: http://img.groundspeak.com/waymarking/small/d2eb4e33-17af-41e9-940b-595aa0016de9.JPG

Savitri’s Up Close and Personal

Has WiFi been messing with your ability to alphabetize? Done any dyslexic number-jumbles lately? How about short-term memory loss embarrassments? Gone flying off the handle for no good reason, speaking of embarrassments? Had a headache from hell in the midst of it?

All that from WiFi? Come on; sounds absurd.

What if I were to tell you that electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) from your WiFi, and your cell phone, cordless phone, nearby cell tower, and TV’s are sending out gazillions of invisible and mysterious, pin-like frequencies piercing your skin, your brain and nervous system? Waves which impair mental and physical capacities.

“Oh, sure,” you might say, “why don’t I feel it then, huh?”

EMF symptoms are cumulative. Sneak up on you without your awareness. You begin to feel that an impaired state of being is “normal.” 30% of the world population experiences the symptoms, but don’t realize what’s going on. Only 3%, the “canaries in the coal mine,” feel it in debilitating ways, at this stage of the EMF electromagnetic game.

I turned out to be one of the canaries. I had been known, over the two years I worked in a church office, as a high-functioning secretary, very much on point. Gradually I found myself confused, unable to alphabetize the church directory, leaving important information out of the Sunday bulletin, and doing off-the-wall typos, like “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Boast.”

It turns out that the town where I worked is blanketed with WiFi, sending out 24/7 EMF to everyone, like it or not. A friend fortunately identified my symptoms; his office used to be right next to an internet cafe. His medical doctor was appalled at his symptoms of impairment, and advised that he move his office out to the country.

I listened to his story, but hoped I could recover from the WiFi-symptom build-up on weekends, which did seem to work for awhile, though my weekends were blotto while recovering. Over a year’s time, I invested in shielding-antidotes to office EMF and town WiFi.Despite my best efforts, the day came that I simply was too stupefied and headachy to work, and quit my job.

Studies about the dangers of being exposed to EMF have been conducted for years, since in fact the 1930’s. And why has this not been front page news? Funds for US studies are generally doled out by the WiFi and cell industry, never mind government, an interesting selection process. Corporate scientist-handpuppets produce research often at odds with independent findings, especially from Sweden, UK, Canada, and Russia.

Paul Brodeur, in his book The Zapping of America, writes: “During World War II, Soviet scientists had taken complaints of headaches, eye pain, and fatigue on the part of Russian radar workers seriously enough to conduct full-scale investigations of them, whereas in the United States similar complaints had been dismissed as ‘subjective symptoms’…

“Soviet investigators found that in addition to headache, eye pain, and weariness, workers undergoing prolonged exposure to microwaves complained of dizziness, irritability, emotional instability, depression, diminished intellectual capacity, partial loss of memory, loss of hair, hypochondria, and loss of appetite.”

Yes…the Soviets took serious note, but the USA did not. Why not? The USA made a different sort of decision: Vested interests in war and industry took precedence over the well-being of soldiers and workers. (Shades of “Erin Brokovich” and PG & E).

During the Cold War, Soviets checkmated the US denial about microwave dangers, and beamed EMF into the US Embassy. When the plot was uncovered, the US, to save face, assured their employees that there was no danger, even after children had come down with leukemia, sixteen women diagnosed with breast cancer, and two ambassadors had died of cancer.

We can guess at the state of efficiency of the rest of the embassy—emotionally volatile, mentally impaired employees in various stages of EMF instability, unable to focus or remember a phone call from a few minutes ago.

Today EMF-based industries are mushrooming, unchecked—cell towers, WiFi antennae; Blue Tooth and cell phones in pockets next to reproductive organs, or stuck to ear next to brain. It’s rare to find a library without WiFi installed.

Meanwhile, I needed an official diagnosis, so I went to my doctor and handed her the World Health Organization’s official description of symptoms of Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity. http://www.weepinitiative.org/talkingtoyourdoctor.pdf She examined the list, and said, “A lot of people come in with some of these problems, like hair loss, fatigue, itching, pain in the eyes, dizziness, and we can’t figure out what’s wrong. Our tests don’t show anything.”

The one known option that Yeoman Gardener and I have read about or been told, is to get away from the source. We will put up another post about ways we’ve investigated to heal the problem, though for many, it means moving to the country.

After a few days away from the EMF emitters, headaches, disorientation, anxiety and other symptoms do subside, however, it may take several months for the brain to feel relatively vibrant again.

Imagine our governments’ mandating WiFi and cell technology, without the slightest certainty that it is safe. Think of it. Our country okay’d the use of DDT, until Rachel Carson blew the whistle, that it was destroying all of nature and ultimately our ability to farm edible produce.

So here we are, most of our population walking around with cell phones in our ears, totally unaware of the environment—wind in pines, reflection on lake, sound of first robin of spring. Without realizing what’s wrong, we lose focus, and feel out of touch, depressed, forgetful. Numbed-out-dead while presumably alive.

Yeoman's Conclusion:

The Obama presidency has expressed a willingness to get science back on track, as a source of independent R&D. This would mean questions can be asked by scientists without threat of reprisal for "wrong" answers.

The EU is questioning ever-increasing electro-smog from cell towers, WiFi and military. Is it safe for living things, us humans included? Has the US even posed that question?

European research says, no, it's not safe. Rampant EMF has caused cancer clusters, loss of well-being, deterioration of mind. Some researchers are uneasy and wonder if children and teens, so constantly exposed to cell phones, video toys, and now WiFi in schools, may be at risk for early senility.

You read that right, early senility—the "greatest biological experiment in human history" may = timebomb ticking. Medicare beware.

US research is funded by industry and military. How helpful to humans are there reports? How much motivation, you figure, in those quarters and boardrooms for reporting any risk which would imperil their agenda?

EMF health hazards reported in science journals abroad go unreported by US media.

Before providing WiFi to the entire Eastern seaboard, how about if we first determine if it's a military-industrial good, or a human disaster in the making?

*Introducing Yeoman Gardner: http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/

"Red-Zoned into the Arms of Nature" http://suddendeathsuddenlife.blogspot.com/2009/05/red-zoned-into-arms-of-nature.html

WHO info:
http://www.weepinitiative.org/talkingtoyourdoctor.pdf

“Babel of Towers” by Yeoman Gardener: http://feastandfamine.blogspot.com/2009/01/preparedness-in-interesting-times-babel.html

Bio-Initiative Press Release, introducing much info: http://www.energyfields.org/pdfs/Bioinitiative_pressrelease_73107.pdf

Florida's EMS (Electromagnetic Sensitivity) Month, May 1009: http://electromagnetichealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/charlie-crist-announcement-ehs.pdf

Death to Life, Life to Death--It Can Be Confusing

2009-04-12T10:25:00.011-04:00

Death to Life, Life to Death: It Can Be Confusing

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting…
—William Wordsworth

Catching the edge of a storm at sea a few days ago, I sat a log at the end of Wonderland Trail about five yards from the farthest reach of the high tide. Waves thrashed and boomed. Rocks tumbled and cracked like loose bowling balls. At the end of the little beach, breakers pummeled granite outcroppings, splashing rockets of water skyward. Sun burned through fog for a while, casting silver light onto the island-studded horizon.

Suddenly, a brown head emerged close to shore, during a lull that was by no means calm. A seal! It dove under swells, undulating along like a dolphin, playing, paying no heed to the raging waters, on its way, sleek and fast, to the next fish, I supposed.

I longed to dive in with that seal. I love to swim in waves and know the ocean water would soothe the osteoarthritis pain in my left hip and knee. But not in the North Atlantic, not a sea for lolling about in without hypothermia setting in pretty fast. Anyway, my task at hand right now—the task I’ve set for myself—is to go inside and not seek healing from external sources. And this little seal, in his own environment, seemed to express the kind of joy you find when you’re just you and going about your business, not judging, not worrying about the next big wave.

To that end, I’m studying Stephen Levine’s A Year to Live, following the way of it intuitively, not step-by-step. This morning I read his suggestions for being with pain—emotional and physical:

Breathe into it. Open a space around it. Let it be soft. Don’t judge it. Stay with it. Pay attention to how it really feels, not your reaction to it and how you think it feels.

After reading, I make my daily foray to the sea, on the day before Easter. At Seawall I sit on a picnic bench at the edge of the pines, out of the wind, just above the flat rocks with gentle waves are washing over them. It’s several days after the seal, sky overcast, temperature 42 degrees, tide coming in. Under my yellow rain jacket, I’ve got on plenty of layers. After contemplating the sea for a while, watching gulls soar and eiders bob and dive, I close my eyes to meditate. For the last few days I’ve felt deep and peaceful while meditating.

Now a sharp pain attacks my knee.

Stay with it, I tell myself. Hold on. Let it be soft.

Then my hip starts acting up. I want to move in the worst way.

Give it space, I coach myself. Hold on. Stay soft.

After a while I notice the pain is gone. But I’m restless. Time to stop. I’ve been here long enough. It’s cold. Nothing’s happening.

Stay with it, I say. Sit into it.

The sound and feel of waves enters my body, from down up, through me, raising energy that feels too strong, electrical.

Hold on. It’s okay.

I let the washing though me be there for quite a while, falling into peace with it.

Presently I see, as I meditate, a body rolling with the tide, bobbing back and forth on the rock beach.

Is it mine?

Might be.

Is it dead?

I’m not sure.

But now my urge to get up and out of here is so strong I can hardly bear it.

Open the space. Make it soft.

Okay. I’m soft. I’m watching. If that’s me, there I am, most probably dead, bobbing about. Then I notice several bodies washing in and out, bumping into each other. Is this a scene from a war? I think so. Yes, it is. Then I rise up somehow and float over the twenty or thirty bodies, witnessing. I don’t know what war it is, but it feels like early 20th century, maybe World War I.

I watch this silent bobbing and tumbling of bodies for some time. And then I find myself assisting them, the souls of them, to rise up and into a light. One by one, they reach one arm up, and then seem to be pulled by some force to rise and disappear into a brilliance that shines through gray clouds.

When it is over, my guru, Amma, wearing her white sari, appears and sits beside me on the bench. We’re just quiet, listening to the gulls and the waves, watching the water edging into crevices and tide pools. At some point Amma fades away.

I stand, bow to the sea, and then search for a place to pee in the woods. My boots go soft on the moist leaves. All the snow has melted now, warm enough for pines to release their scent. I’ll write about this ocean experience when I get home, so I won’t forget. It’s the kind of thing that could just slip away, unaccounted for.

Make it plain that this communication [to a mother from her dead son] is given from my mind to yours as plainly as an old man at 26 Broadway talks to his secretary about other invisible riches….What I want to do is to rid this system of all its bewildering and mystic features…Everyone fears the unknown and minimizes the commonplace.

Thy Son Liveth: Message from a Soldier to his Mother (1919)
— Grace Duffie Boylan

Part II: Stories and Reflections: Conscious Dying --Would You Want to Remain Alert?

2009-03-03T09:29:00.013-05:00

Conscious Dying:

Would You Want to Remain Alert?

The other day Nan, the head of hospice on the island where I live, called me. “Can you come to the hospital and sit for a couple of hours with a ninety-year-old man who’s actively dying? He doesn’t have any family. One of the nurses called me.”

“Sure,” I said. “The nurse asked?”

“Yeah,” Nan laughed. Normally it will be the family who requests hospice. But that’s the beauty of living in a small community, and a nurse who cared enough to make a call, and hospice volunteers who don’t always act on formalities.

When I entered Alex’s hospital room, a good-looking man in his forties, wearing a baseball cap, greeted me. Nan had told me I might run into Alex’s Power of Attorney, Dave. I introduced myself and we shook hands. All smiles, he launched right in to telling me about his relationship to Alex, how Alex had showed up to mentor him when Dave’s parents had died, leaving him an orphan in his mid teens. He looked over at Alex. “I think he hears us, don’t you…talking about him. It’s perking him up, don’t you think?”

“I sure do,” I said, and made eye contact with the doctor, a friend of mine, who happened to be in the room when I arrived. My doctor friend stayed for a while to listen to Dave’s stories. I might as well have been in Alex’s home, with family members all around instead of hospital staff. That’s how friendly and comfortable the atmosphere was. Then Dave had to get back to work. As he was heading out the door, I asked him, “Have you had a chance to say ‘good-bye’ to him?”

Dave’s eyes welled up and he quickly looked away. “I don’t believe in that,” he said. “I don’t believe in that,” he said again, then turned and hurried out.

I sat down in a chair next Alex’s bed, and next to a machine on a pole, apparently monitoring him and delivering an intravenous supply of something, which I supposed was the morphine drip, and probably hydration, too. Alex had an oxygen mask over his nose. The machine buzzed and clicked and gurgled, and the needle on a dial swung back and forth. Alex’s skin was gray, mouth wide open, breathing deeply, erratically, chest rising and falling in huge effort. Not a limb, or an eyelid, or other part of him moved during the two hours I was there. The morphine drip must have kept him pain free, but he was otherwise unresponsive.

I’ve done this sitting in the hospital with the dying before, for the ones who don’t have family near, and who don’t have many hours to live, and have been put on a morphine drip. Sometimes I sing softly, and often feel a slight energy shift from corpse-like to life. However, I felt no response, energetically or physically, from Alex when I touched him gently on his arm, or when I chanted in a low voice. But then, towards the end of my time, when a nurse’s aide came in and gently massaged his forehead, I felt an infinitesimal change in his energy, like a breeze on a butterfly wing.

A friend of mine told me about a time when she went with the hospice singers, invited to perform for two patients in a hospital in a nearby town. The group of about eight gathered to sing for the first patient, a woman on a morphine drip, lying alone, gray and corpse-like, as Alex had been. The room smelled of sterilizers and machines, felt empty and hollow, looked dingy and worn. No friends, no relatives, no hospital staff were present. The woman, mouth hanging open, erratic breathing, gave no indication she was aware of the singers, but I suspect some far away part of her heard the song.

Then the music group moved on, a few doors down the hall to sing for Janet, a woman in her early sixties who was dying of cervical cancer. Janet had elected not to go through the stress of chemotherapy, and had decided to stop eating when it was clear her end was near. Before she knew about her terminal illness, she had joined one of the many groups that had formed in the area, studying and going through all the exercises in Steven Levine’s book, A Year to Live. She had wanted to experience a conscious death.

Janet’s husband, her daughter, and a couple of friends were there when the hospice singers arrived. A stunning afghan of bright colored squares, knitted and sewn together by bereft women friends, lay across her bed. Awake and alert, eyes bright, with no tubes or respirators, and only minimal pain medication, Janet nodded, frowning, when the lead singer asked what Janet would like to hear.

“No angels, no mush,” said Janet.

A challenging request, but the group came up with three pieces from their repertoire that qualified. Janet’s husband lowered her bed from sitting up position to reclining; then she closed her eyes and folded her hands over her chest. My musical friend reported that while they were singing, angels filled the room, hovering, bright and luminous.

When the room settled into silence after the last song, Janet opened her eyes and smiled. “I’d like you to come again,” she said. And they did, a week and a half later, to sing at Janet’s memorial service. Janet had died two days after the hospice sing.

I spoke with another of Janet’s friends who’d visited her in the hospital; that friend had also had seen angels over Janet’s bed.

Come, my beloved,

Let us go out into the fields

And sleep all night among the flowering henna.

Let us go early to the vineyards

To see if the vine has budded,

If the blossoms have opened

And the pomegranate is in flower.

Credits:

Poem: from "The Song of Songs"

Photos: freestockphotos.com/Sky.html

Part II: Stories and Reflections. Mandalas in the Sand: The Year My Brother Died

2009-02-09T07:35:00.024-05:00

Mandalas in the Sand:

The Year My Brother Died

It can be scary to sit in silence after a calamity—a death of loved one, a natural disaster, job loss. Or after a far journey, or great accomplishment. Perhaps we might fear we'll find emptiness in the silence, or a loneliness too difficult to bear. In an interview with Shankar O’Callaghan, I found out how, as a young boy, he coped with the death of his younger brother, and the particular ways he found his own brand of silence.

Shankar and I had just run back from a sunset meditation on the beach with Amma, and were breathless, damp from the light rain. The lanky nineteen-year old and I ducked into the dining tent on the Gold Coast where Indian humanitarian and spiritual teacher Amma was giving a retreat as part of her Australian tour. Black clouds were closing in, wind whipping tent flaps. Other retreatants were rushing to the hall where the program would begin in a few minutes. Shankar's cupid-like face was framed with locks of sand blond hair, and he rocked back in his chair, hesitating at first. Then he leaned forward, elbows on the table, clearly eager to tell me his tale. As he started to speak, lightening struck with an ear-shattering crash of thunder, and then again. Rain pelted the roof, thudding like stones. I pulled my chair closer so I could hear him.

“Jay was eight when he died, so he was three years younger than me. We were throwing paper airplanes in the back yard. A couple of them had gone on top of this roof that covered a back porch. He went onto the roof and . . .he’d thrown a couple of planes onto the roof. . . I was sort of yelling because I could see where they were. So I’d say, ‘Go get that one there.’ The next thing I knew the beams gave way and he’d fallen though, down about two and a half meters. He landed on his bum, legs up and head up like a ‘V’ shape. And sort of fell back onto his head then just immediately started screaming. And I ran over to him, ‘Jay, Are you okay?’ Then I ran inside and got my dad. I remember I’d told Jay off because that was the first time he’d been onto the roof, because normally I’d climb onto the roof. I’d told him off, not to step on the weak beams.

“Dad took him inside because he had a lot of pain, and dad was cuddling him and comforting him for a while. Then slowly he stopped crying, and went into a silent sort of a whimper. Then he had a couple of convulsions and went into a coma and passed out. Then we took him to the hospital. Back home I was awake all night until my step mom came and told us Jay wasn’t going to survive, and that they had him on life support until my mom could fly down from Brisbane.”

“We felt his spirit go before we turned the life support off at around eleven the next morning. It was as though at that point he felt as though . . . or we felt. . . or whatever. . . that he’d lost the attachment, and realized, ‘Okay, you’re going to die.’ That was when we felt his soul leave.

“That was a big change in my life. That was also why it was so important to have Amma’s influence. I saw how life is such a delicate thing. I don’t know how to explain it—temporal, fragile. Amma, by coming into our lives, gave us a way to deal with that. We went to India. We took my brother’s ashes to the Ganges in Hardwar and did a ceremony on the river. . . oh, I don’t know. . . we’d always wanted to go to India, Jay and me. So we finally made it to India, and. . . yeah. . . so he was in the Ganges. . . getting a dip in the Ganga. That was a nice thing. It was a special moment.

“Then we went to the ashram. Amma helped me to see it as a learning experience. I can’t think of physical examples of why it helped me. She played with me a lot. And I sat still with her for hours while she gave darshan, while other kids were running around. I became more patient. Before my brother died I didn’t used to have any patience. There was a game Amma taught us—a game with rocks. You put a handful of rocks on top of your hand and try to catch the rocks in thin air. She played tag with us. She taught me how to draw pictures, like mandalas, in the sand. Other times she’d rest her head on my lap. I'd be running on little kid energy and she used to send me to go get things for her. I was a messenger. She didn’t speak to us much but she’d play. I don’t speak Malayalam and she doesn’t speak English. Amma was the comfort; she was the supportive force after my brother died.”

When Shankar stopped we listened for a while to the rain that now pattered gently on the tent roof, thunder rumbling in the far distance. Then I asked him what he was doing now. The dimples in his cheeks deepened. “Studying medicine,” he said. “I’m enjoying science. Some people say it’s contrary, but I don’t see it that way. Everything that I see has God inside, so I don’t see the beliefs to be contrary at all. Science is a way of looking at life, trying to understand life.”

What did you notice?
The dew snail;

the low-flying sparrow;

the bat, on the wind, in the dark;

big-chested geese, in the V of sleekest performance;

the soft toad, patient in the hot sand;

the sweet-hungry ants;

the uproar of mice in the empty house;

the tin music of the cricket’s body;

the blouse of the goldenrod.

What did you hear?
The thrush greeting the morning;

the little bluebirds in their hot box;

the salty talk of the wren,

then the deep cup of the hour of silence.

—From “Gratitude” by Mary Oliver

Credits:
Boy drawing circle in the sand: http://www.inmagine.com/paa328/paa328000004-photo

Sunset photo: www.panhala.net/Archive/Index.html

Musings: Life After Death

2009-01-18T08:29:00.020-05:00

Chapter Eleven

Musings: Life After Death

I headed down the sand road towards my home on the Cupeno Band of Mission Indians reservation in San Diego County, California. At the river crossing I paused. There’d been rain. I inched my Honda through water, more swift than usual, six-inches deep. Out of the river bed, my car burped and stuttered as I picked up speed down the trail, with barren land all around, chaparral-covered hills, an occasional tree, and a few homes and trailers on about an acre each. A couple of blond-gray coyote mixes trotted behind me as I pulled up next to “my” trailer, loaned to me for my year-long government-sponsored stint in 1977, teaching crafts to locals. One of my wishes was to inspire the older women to revive their basket-making tradition. They’d look down when I’d ask. “All the grass is on private land, now,” they’d say, meaning they could no longer harvest the reeds for weaving.

Pat, my neighbor, a pretty Native American, who worked in a high position for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was heading over as I got out of my car. Her three-year old, face smeared with chocolate, hung onto her mom’s leg. Pat’s long, black hair was tangled and her black eyes not as bright as usual. “My dad died.”

I shook my head, put my hand over my mouth, and then gave her a hug, her body limp, arms at her sides.

“Come with me to the funeral?”

“Yeah…sure.”

I rode with her in her VW bug up the winding road to the La Jolla Reservation where her dad had been chief, a detail Pat had never told me. In fact she’d never told me about her dad in the several months that we’d been friends. We arrived just in time for the Air Force salute—another fact I’d not known, that her dad had been an Air Force pilot. Three fighter jets dove out of the sky, flying in formation, low, maneuvering between the low peaks of the Palomar Mountain Range, thundering by several times, wings dipping from side to side in salute.

We milled around for a while. I’d spotted the open coffin lying on a dusty knoll, off by itself. Then people began to line up and file past, pay their respects. “Come on,” said Pat. I cringed. Only dead person I’d ever visited was my grandfather, when I’d been five years old. I was afraid of dead. But now I had no choice. I got into the line. As my turn came I took a deep breath, held it. Then I looked down at the man lying there, dressed in an Air Force uniform. “Oh…” I thought. A slight smile came across my face. “There’s no one there.” Now captivated by my new understanding, I lingered and focused my attention on the empty shell of Pat’s dead father.

That night as I lay in bed waiting for sleep, I ran through the events of the funeral. In the very second my mind paused at the coffin scene, fascinated, I felt the Air Force pilot and chief, brush past me and then attempt to enter my body. “Jesus!” I thought as I sat bolt up, immediately remembering something my spiritual teacher had taught me. Loud and fast, I intoned, “whish, whish!” repeating over and over as I waved my arms and flapped my hands, for him to get out of there.

He obliged.

I don’t believe there’s a scientific explanation for my experience, and in most social settings, people do seem to need an explanation. Movies like “Sixth Sense” may attract a huge box-office draw, indicating that either people believe in spirits that don’t occupy bodies, or that they at least find the idea fascinating, or at best scary. Ghost stories around campfires are popular among campers. Native peoples around the world tell of departed spirits that tend to stick around. And, the belief that spirits might prefer to linger after death, is at least one of the reasons rituals are performed, to help the soul find its way after death, to help it find the light pathway, God.

Not all departed souls stay behind to haunt. In the Buddhist tradition, for instance, a person who has attained a high level of spiritual consciousness, might wish to help others from the “other side,” after they’ve passed out of the body. Saints who’ve died and serve as guideposts for people seeking insight on how to live well, how to remain optimistic in the face of life’s obstacles.

Yet the immediate question in my mind after my experience on the reservation, was about life after death, as it relates to a normal person like me. I remembered Raymond Moody’s book, Life After Life, about near death experiences. He made an in-depth study after discovering that the phenomenon of “almost dying” was more common than he realized. In fact, he concluded that about one in eight people who’d been “resuscitated, or had a similar brush with mortality, had at least one of the traits of an NDE [near death experience].” In his book he interviews people who’ve died and come back.

Moody has identified the following traits of people who’ve had near death experiences: out of body, accurate visual perception, audible sounds or voices, feeling of peace and painlessness, light phenomena, life review, being in another world, encountering other beings, tunnel experience, precognition.

I have spoken to two people I know well, who’ve had near death experiences.

My sister’s doctor told her, when she was ill with an intestinal pain, that if she began feeling euphoric it meant she was about to die and then she’d better call 911. She called 911. While on the operating table she says that she left her body and found herself in the most peaceful place she’d ever experienced, and that she now knew God. She didn’t want to return, but decided she must as her youngest child was only four. When she awoke, the nurse said, “You’re supposed to be dead.” My sister, once well, said that life was never the same after that, and that she no longer feared death.

I learned about another near death experience from a friend. As she told me the tale, her face took on a beatific glow that grew brighter and brighter as her story unfolded. She had become ill with a high fever and friends had taken her to the hospital. There my friend said she found herself rising above her body. “Then I rose up above the building, and then above the town, and then above the state, and then above the earth. And up into a blinding light… and I saw God...”

"You saw God? What was that like?"

She paused, shook her head.

"Please tell me."

"I can't now." She sat silent, eyes downcast. “I met some beings who told me I had to return, though I didn’t want to…after I came back I didn't feel driven by societal have-to's anymore. I did sense a tide swell to be of service, though, in however long or short my time remaining. The veil has remained thin for me, which is both a people-rich and a lonely journey.…” She smiled, looked up and then bubbled with laughter. “People who’ve had near death experiences have a certain light about them.”

Later my friend and I talked about it. I had felt ashamed about interrupting her, that maybe I'd have heard what her experience of God was like had I remained attentive and quiet. I asked her again to tell me. I could tell from her face, distant and soft, that she wasn't going to, that it wouldn't be possible to raise the same divine mood she had been in. She said that sometimes people are frightened to hear about the awe of a divine light, about life after death. Yet at the same time, I realized, they do want to know because they want to believe in a beyond, something that gives meaning to life, that will help them to live with passion, within the exquisite beauty of the earthly realm, its joys and anguish.

Saints and sages throughout the ages have told, in myriad ways, of the experience of God, and all admit that it is impossible to describe. One has to experience it. One Indian saint explained that such a question is like asking a salt doll to tell what it was like to be immersed into the ocean.

Photo credit: "Fog at Sand Beach" by Greg Hartford on AcadiaMagic.com

Silence: The Cycle Comes to a Close

2008-11-30T10:28:00.016-05:00

Chapter Ten

Here in Maine, in the presence of extreme low tides, my insides feel like shore critters scattering for cover; I’m imagining the suck-out before a giant wave. The feeling doesn’t keep me away from the seaside, however. In fact I’m drawn there. I often hike down to the shore and across a low stone walkway next to seaweed and sand, over granite blocks that divide Norwood Cove and the inlet that opens into the Atlantic.

Today gulls are flapping wings after baths in mud flat tide pools, and orange star fish are feeding on mussels in crystal clear water. Off in the distance, a couple of sail boats head out to sea. On the wooden foot bridge supported by huge, square stones, I lean over the rail to view the small tidal river, every time a new sight—raging waterfall outward-bound, river rapids roaring in, streamlets gurgling in or out, nearing end of cycle.

Now, as I watch, the ebb has slowed to placid. I’ve always wanted to watch the tidal river change directions, preferring to happen upon it by chance rather than checking charts. I climb down the granite blocks, sit a hand’s reach from the water, and wait. For about fifteen minutes, water swirls in gentle circles with narrow channels continuing to ebb against flow, sounding like the rippling of a mossy creek.

The sea water slows to trembling, undulating ever so slightly, then pauses, smooth and silent like a woodland pool.

Seconds later, a ribbon of water flows inward-bound along the bridge’s granite wall, widening into streamlets, and then merging, rolling like a gentle ocean swell into the cove.

Sometimes silence at the end of cycle is the hardest part after a long journey. Many women suffer post-partum blues after giving birth, making it difficult for them to be fully present for the newborn; most men, after winning a boxing match, can only think about the next challenge; many climbers, after reaching mountaintop, take brief note of the view and plan the next trek; or the marathon runner, crosses the finish-line and while cooling down pictures the next twenty-six-mile event.

After the Greek hero Jason had sailed with his Argonauts through unimaginable dangers to recover the Golden Fleece, he was not content. He didn’t pause before continuing on with his life to experience his inner change, to view the ways his hero’s journey had made him different. Jason, by returning with Golden Fleece in hand, had won his right to rule and won the hand of the beautiful and powerful Medea, who had helped him retrieve the fleece. Yet he failed to simply be in the calm after victory, and to enjoy the presence of gracious beauty. Instead, he tired of Medea after a while and took another woman as bride. In revenge, Medea slaughtered their own young children and Jason’s new wife; and then she escaped in a chariot drawn by dragons. After that, Jason plummeted downhill in a steady decline, and when grown old and impotent, he was killed when a timber from his rotting ship fell on his head.

During the third part of the journey—the return—the traveler comes back to help others, according to Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. In the full cycle of the journey--departure, the initiation, return--you might say that Jason has wasted whatever he gained when he brought home the Golden Fleece.

An example of completion of all three parts of the journey can be seen in the Native American vision quest. The person, through his initiation rite during the quest, is usually given a task, something to do for his people, and ultimately for the world. The vision quest has a built-in contemplation component in the silence of the mountain-top wilderness where the person receives the vision. And the mentor guiding the vision quest waits at the bottom of the mountain and afterwards helps the initiated to understand the vision, and gives hints as to how to make it real, or concrete, or to integrate the experience into life and life’s tasks.

The Buddha, after receiving enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree, was tempted to stay in meditation, not to come back. He loved the silence too much. The wise beings pleaded with him to come out of the bliss of deep silence, to bring his new wisdom to the world.

What will we find there in the quiet of our minds? For many of us, it might be a little scary to sit in the silence after a calamity—a death of loved one, a natural disaster, job loss. Or after a great journey or accomplishment. Perhaps we might fear we'll find emptiness in the silence, that perhaps there is nothing in the quiet place inside of ourselves.

These are the times when it might be important to find a mentor, someone who has traveled the same path and who can offer guidance, like the Native American vision quest guide.

Bernadette Roberts, in her book The Experience of No Self, describes one day after she’d been contemplating in a little chapel near her home, that she no longer experienced what she knew as her “self.” Afterwards she had difficulty managing the simple task of shopping, had to keep repeating to herself, “Now I’m buying oranges, now I’m buying potatoes.” She had lived as a contemplative Carmelite nun, and so she had tools and skills, and she had faith. But she was not able to find in her religion a map to deal with her experience of no self, nor the events surrounding it. Her faith and perseverance, however, moved her along. Her experience, though it took a long time, is equivalent to the Native American vision quest, especially in her challenge towards the end in which she experienced something dreadful, beyond frightening. Bernadette writes:

I knew I was going to crack, crack wide open, but never having done this before I had no idea what would happen…I was not aware of the moment when the dreadful thing departed, for the next thing I was aware of was a profound stillness wherein there was no physical sensation at all. After a while, something must have turned my head because I found myself looking eye-level at a small, yellow wild flower…I cannot describe that moment of seeing, words could never do it justice. Let us just say it smiled—like a smile of welcome from the whole universe.

In Mac Bigelow’s Faith and Experience discussion group we talked about the Beatitudes last time, the Blessed are the meek and the rest of the Blessed ones on the list. Again I folded my arms, especially when everyone seemed to agree that God took favorites, didn’t bless everyone. One man, a minister in his eighties, uttered “Harumph!” when I suggested that we are all blessed by God and sometimes just aren’t aware of it.

And the case where no map seems to be available, sometimes we might not feel blessed, the welcome from the universe that Bernadette Roberts describes. She didn’t for a long time. She felt she’d been passed over. But she had strength of her spiritual practice she’d learned as a nun.

So I’m suggesting there are things that can be helpful in this silence of no self—which is how a profound silence can feel after a trying event. To meditate, to contemplate in nature, to write in a journal, to keep track of dreams, to find a good friend to share with who understands or at least has compassion. And to have perseverance and optimism.

Conclusion:
In Tony Hillerman’s mystery, Hunting Badger, Navajo Tribal Police Sergeant Jim Chee is sitting under a half moon with his relative, Hosteen Nakai, at the sheep-camp place. Nakai, who is dying of cancer, is Chee’s elder and mentor, the one Chee has known since childhood, the one who’s been teaching him to become a shaman. Now, on his death bed, Nakai wants to give Chee the final instructions. Chee had not been ready before now.

“I must do it now,” Nakai said. “And you must listen. The last lesson is the one that matters. Will you hear me?”

Chee took the old man’s hand.

“Know that it is hard for the people to trust outside their own family. Even harder when they are sick. They have pain. They are out of harmony. They see no beauty anywhere. All their connections are broken. That is who you are talking to. You tell them the Power that made us made all this above us and around us and we are part of the Power and if we do as we are taught we can bring ourselves back into hozho. Back into harmony. Then they will again know beauty all around them.”

"...the old man had managed to hold death at bay until he saw sunlight on the mountain-top..."

Credits: Bernadette Roberts, The Experience of No Self.
Tony Hillerman, Hunting Badger.

Photo and tapestry weaving by Savitri

Breaking Patterns that Bind: Coming Home to Yourself

2008-11-10T10:33:00.054-05:00

Chapter Nine

Two years after I return from my tsunami experience in India, I accept a part-time job as parish administrator (secretary) in the United Church of Christ of Northeast Harbor and Seal Harbor, Maine.

I remember a fisherman in India, after the killer wave hit his village, who said, "The fish aren't where we used to find them." The tsunami had altered the sea. And there were the deaths, the broken bones, the mass cremation, the homes and fishing boats smashed into rubble. As a result of my experience in India, something was shaken loose inside of me, an inner shift that now allows me to accept a job in a Christian church, an institution for which, over the years, I had developed an intense disdain.

Why disdain? It began in college where I learned about the Spanish Inquisition and the burning of women who knew how to heal with herbs. The Crusaders who destroyed Mosques in the Holy Land. The priests and missionaries who subdued and converted native people from all lands, for the sake of a "better God." And because, as a teen-ager, I had dreamed of being a Christian minister, and in college found friends of other religions that spoke of the same truth. I could no longer justify my religion's belief in "we are the only way." A few years later I entered an ashram and lived for most of my adult life as a Hindu monastic.

Now, at the church where I've taken the job as secretary, Mac Bigelow, the minister, invites me to join his monthly “Faith and Experience” discussion group that meets in a private home. The topic at the next meeting is “What is Holy Spirit?” I don't know why I accept, but I swallow hard and say I will.

Bracing for an Inquisition-style mind-set, on the appointed evening I follow a pathway to a house nestled in the woods. Ten or more of us gather around the fire in a well-appointed living room. I listen for the first hour, arms folded across my chest, looking around at the faces, solid New England types in corduroy pants and L.L. Bean boat shoes, an intellectual set. Hands hot and wet, pulse quickening, I open my mouth. “Is it possible that Holy Spirit is feminine?” No one crosses their legs or taps their fingers. They listen. Then Mac reads a quote about just that, and something else from C.G. Jung supporting the notion. I breathe deeply and say more about God as She.

Several months later Mac invites me to speak on Hinduism from the pulpit. The congregation has asked to learn about other religions. I’m not sure who’s converting whom, but my distaste for Christianity, at least the way it is with Mac’s church, has softened to melting. I find none of the religious exclusivity Christians are known for. On the designated Sunday, I begin by telling about my teen-age desire to become a minister and my subsequent contempt, about Hinduism’s belief that all desires are ultimately fulfilled, and that now here I am, nearly fifty years later, standing in the pulpit.

Two older women come up to me after, hesitant. One of them speaks, nearly whispering. “What you talked about… it isn’t much different than what we believe.”

Some will return to life-as-usual after a catastrophic event or death of a loved one, or any opportunity for change, like finding out that you no longer need to hold on to the belief that all Christian churches are intolerant. Patterns tend to bind—family patterns, social patterns, self-concept patterns, religious patterns.

To break constricting habits one must complete what Joseph Campbell calls the hero’s journey, which means any time a person steps out of reality as that person knows it, and enters into the challenge of a potentially life-changing experience, big or small, and then comes back with a story to tell and a way to help others.

Some typical archetypes of the transformational crossing can be seen in such stories as Hansel and Gretel, Jonah in the belly of the whale, and young Arthur pulling the sword from the stone. The metaphors contained in myths and fables signify one’s own sacred journey, the path to what Carl Jung calls individuation—the fulfillment of who one is at the core.

Here’s an example in a Greek myth : Persephone, daughter of the fertility goddess Demeter, frolics in the meadows and among the olive trees, picking flowers and fruits, communing with animals, and dancing under the stars on full Moon nights. She helps her mother with the harvest, and lives without fear, assured that her mother and her father Zeus will keep her from harm. One day while Persephone collects flowers to adorn her hair, the earth begins to shake; a chasm opens; Hades, Lord of the Underworld, rises up and kidnaps Persephone, carries her off to the lower realms.

Demeter, archetype of the Great Mother, searches for her daughter everywhere. When Persephone is no where to be found, Demeter goes mad and the fields and trees stop yielding. Since all beings and all living things will die without Demeter’s harvest, the gods plead with Zeus to persuade Hades to release Persephone.

Finally the Lord of the Underworld strikes a deal. He will let her go up, but because she’s eaten some of his pomegranate seeds, she must return to Hades every year, for a third of the year, during winter when all things die.

Satisfied, Persephone’s mother once again resumes her task of nurturing a fruitful harvest. When Persephone returns to her mother's realm, Persephone breaks her usual pattern of relationship with family and friends. She has undergone a death to her old self, and has come to love Hades, to enjoy his loyalty to her. No longer going about her daily life under her mother’s apron strings, Persephone is now equal to Demeter. She is grown into a woman of power and wisdom, and as Queen and Guide of the Underworld, she now ushers people between realms.

When one changes patterns, there is often grief, or at least profound challenge, at the loss of the same old relationships with friends and family members. Loved ones often cannot or will not adjust to the one who has changed. It can be devastating to live with others when you have faced death and they have not. Or to stay in friendship when you have met calamity in the face, and your friends have not.

Sometimes the pain of separation is too great for the one who has returned from a far journey—be it war, living in a foreign land, wilderness trek, death of a loved one, or experience of a natural disaster. Sometimes the traveler, feeling pressure, chooses to return to old habits and patterns simply to avoid loneliness, to feel love no matter how disingenuous. Others, no doubt, will develop new associations that support the shift in consciousness, perhaps finding in new friends a pathway to unconditional love. Others will simply remain lonely, perhaps growing accustomed to the depth of solitude, perhaps finding a new kind of companionship there, a solace at the core of being.

Blessed are you in the midst of persecution who, When they hate and pursue you even to the core of your being, Cannot find “you” anywhere. —Gnostic Gospel of Thomas

Imagine the freedom in that!

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. --Chuang Tse

Coda: Consider the Native American Heyoka, the sacred clowns who are known for doing things backwards, upside down, or in some way contrary. One clown might ride a horse wrong-way-around, put on a woolen blanket on a hot day, question sensitive taboos, or speak aloud ideas others feared to express. These clowns’ strange ways cause people to laugh, to think, to penetrate more deeply into themselves, to become aware of fears, hatreds, and weaknesses, to examine self-deceptions—to look at what lies underneath the rock. The Heyoka are the carriers of sacred knowledge.

Sacred Clowns/Heyoka

Credits: Woven Mask by Savitri The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell Close-up of watercolor on paper, Native American Holy Fool or Heyoka, Courtesy Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, . http://groups.msn.com/TheHolyFool/sacredclownsandfools.msnw

Healings in Endings: Dying to the Fear of Death

2008-10-31T16:47:00.016-04:00

Chapter Eight

I was raised to be afraid of death and the dead. My mom never thought dead or dying was a good idea. She did believe, however, that it was best for me, at age five, to see my grandfather lying in his coffin than to never have met him at all. We didn’t talk about it and I knew the subject was taboo after that.

Soon after I arrive home from India after the tsunami, a friend needs help with her husband who is dying of stomach cancer. I gulp down my fear as I enter the room in my friend’s home, see the husband lying ridgid and skeletal on the rented hospital bed. With my friend’s permission, I sit next to him and chant. During the droning sound his facial muscles relax and his hands let go of whatever they’ve been holding on to, and so do mine.

One day about two weeks before his death, he lifts his head and his eyes take on that translucent brilliance of the visionary, of someone seeing an angel or a god, something above and behind me. His wife sees him seeing something; later she says she doesn’t want me chanting for him any longer. Now when I arrive to help out, the TV in her husband’s room is on full volume, telecasting an incessant barrage of football games.

After that experience, I took the ten-week hospice training course and became a volunteer. One of my patients, Ann, was dying of breast cancer. We kept a pile of maroon towels on hand in case the fine membrane between her breast wound and heart would break. I’d eye the towels and wonder if I could manage it. While lying in her hospital bed in a room in her nephew’s home, with a view out to trees turning to fall, Ann would hold my hand in long silences. “How do you meditate?” she asked a couple of days before she died. “You’re already doing it,” I said. “All it is really, is being still and quiet and letting all that nature in, and all that’s beyond it, too.” She turned her head towards the window, her eyes deepening like pools in a forest.

Mary, dying of an unusual kind of stomach cancer, loved food and feared the aftermath of eating because she couldn’t keep anything down. The first time I opened the door into her house and smelled the vomit, I was sure I’d retch before my three-hour visit was up. Taking a few deep breaths, I sat on the couch with her and then listened—just opened my heart and listened. She told me her life story, said she wanted to die.

One day she told me that before her husband died, she’d waked up in the middle of the night with an intuition to go to him in the nursing home and let him know it was okay for him to die. He passed away the next week. Ann confessed that she feared she’d killed him. I assured her she simply allowed him permission to go peacefully. She said, “I wish my children would tell me it’s okay to die.” And, with a little coaching, they did. Previously Mary’s three adult children had thought all their mom needed was more exercise and doing for herself. I had a quiet image of Mary, smiling and full of energy, paddling a canoe down the River Styx, into the sunset. She died soon after while holding her daughter’s hand.

When I asked Gerry Gregersen, Program Director of Hospice of Hancock County in Maine, about death as nexus for transformation, she said sometimes with families that have been experiencing discord—separation, anger, and whatever—something changes, or someone changes. Gerry told of a feisty 74-year-old women dying of ovarian cancer. “She had four adult children—a daughter who lived close by and took care of most things most of the time, but was emotionally unavailable. A successful son who worked for a corporation, the manager who would figure things out, but who was not present for his mother. A daughter who was emotionally available, but lived far away and had to take care of her small children. At the time of the mother’s death, they all rallied around, and these three children pretty much kept to their usual roles.

“In the mother’s final days, the one who came through with the most caring attention, was the fourth son, the black sheep, the deadbeat drug addict. The dying mother had affection for this son, but she was always worried about him. As she lay in her hospital bed in her bedroom, when she was in pain, this son would give her the prescribed drugs and joke, ‘If she only knew who was doing this.’ He knew exactly what place he had in the hierarchy of siblings and it didn’t matter to him. What mattered was that he was there, giving the longest shifts, doing the hardest work, being the most present. I don’t know if his siblings were aware of how perfect that was. He was aware and I was aware.”

Conclusion
In hospice there is the undergirding belief that one can live well, while dying. To this end, everyone involved makes every effort to keep the patient as comfortable and pain-free as possible, paying attention to the person’s needs and wishes, allowing silences and deep rest as the body and mind go through settlings in the final days.

Once I was called to help Ann in the middle of the night because she had a sharp pain that frightened her. At the time she was living alone, without a primary care-giver. She decided to go to the hospital. For hospice clients, ambulance folks knew not turn on the siren and to be sensitive to the patient’s wishes. And if there was a “Do Not Resuscitate” order, which Ann had, they knew not to perform heroics to keep the patient alive.

Ann's distress had disappeared; she was in some discomfort as the ambulance made its way to the hospital, but she didn’t need anything more than a caring presence.

The Advance Directive (see links below). When we arrived at the hospital, I showed the medical personnel Ann’s "advance directive," a legal document that spelled out her desires for medical care and for personal and spiritual preferences. Some patients want music; Ann didn’t. Some want prayers; Ann didn’t. Some want certain medical interventions and not others; Ann wanted minimal medical intervention; she just needed to feel safe and she felt safe in the hospital that night. Most want pain medication; Ann did not, not even in the end. She didn’t want drugs, or to be kept alive by artificial means. She wanted to allow death to come naturally and to leave the world with dignity.

Ann died in her nephew’s home about a week later, holding her sister’s hand on one side and, on her other side, the hand of the hospice volunteer who stood vigil that night.

There is no horror in death. The soul leaves the body as a boy jumps out of a school door, suddenly, and with joy.
—from the movie, “A Rumor of Angels”

Credit:
“A Rumor of Angles” starring Vanessa Redgrave, is based on, Thy Son Liveth: Message from A Soldier To His Mother (1919) by Grace Duffie Boylan

NOTE: An "advance directive" is good to have in place no matter how old you are. You never know what will happen and the directive assures you that you'll be taken care of according to your wishes should you have an accident or suddenly become ill.

Five Wishes: Living with Dignity While Sick, Injured, or Dying: www.agingwithdignity.org/5wishes.html

Advance directive explained: http://www.dora.state.co.us/Insurance/senior/stern12.pdf

Looking Within: Who Are We and What Do We Do Now?

2008-10-13T10:10:00.028-04:00

Chapter Seven

Back home in the U.S., I get curious. What did that wave look like in other parts of Asia? I search the internet, something I wasn’t able to do in India. In deep ocean a tsunami travels, hardly visible from above, at the speed of a jet airliner, about 400 miles per hour; as it approaches land, the swell condenses like an accordion bellows, rises up considerably, and slows to 25 or 40 miles per hour, depending on the slope of the terrain. I grew up by the sea; a 25 mile-an-hour wave is unheard of. At six feet high, a wave traveling that fast would smash through brick walls as if match sticks.

Then I open to a picture from a beach resort in Thailand, a snap shot of a thirty-foot breaker, apparently sounding like a steam engine as it roars across sand flats laid bare when the tide was sucked out. Bathing suit-clad tourists run away, except for one woman who sprints towards the wave. Her husband and four children are out there.

One lone woman confronting a colossal wave—more concerned about her family than her life. As it turns out, they all survive without injury. Over the next days, I return to that picture; I print it; I stare at it; I can’t explain my emotional response; but maybe the image epitomizes the heroic and transformational experiences of all who lived through the tsunami—or any calamity.

Here in Maine, I told my India tsunami story on a radio talk show, at a library gathering, at a grange meeting, and in my living room. Friends and strangers gathered as if around a fire, to listen. Beyond the value of story-telling, there was another element that figured in—the digging into the archetype of calamity and the inherent potential for rite of passage.

Many enjoy seeing a movie about Israelites passing through a parted Red Sea or the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts or Hansel and Gretel getting lost in the woods. A good number enjoy watching a TV reporter out in an 80-mile an hour gale, telecasting news about the hurricane about to make land-fall, showing clips of wind-whipped sea and downed trees. In the movie “The Thin Red Line,” in a calm moment after a bloody enemy encounter, a lieutenant confronts his colonel who had never been in the fray of battle. In the midst of gunfire and from a far distance, the colonel had been shouting impossible commands over a walkie-talkie. The lieutenant, who had refused to send his men into the line of fire and certain death, asks the colonel, “Have you ever had a man die in your arms, sir?”

Watching from a distance is very different than experiencing.

What causes one person to go through a rite of passage as a result of tragedy, and another come away bitter, complaining endlessly about how awful the event was? The former faces life with a feelings of hope and inspiration, a renewed sense of purpose; the later pulls away from enjoying life, raising all barriers possible to prevent further shocks.

The answer often lies in an individual’s ability to remain optimistic in the face of all obstacles.

In India, the return to their practice of evening devotional singing was just one of that culture’s solutions against falling into hopelessness after the tsunami.

What have we to draw upon in our culture? What sustains us as individuals and as community in the face of down-slide? Over and over again as hurricanes hit the Southern United States in the past years, our community and federal government leaders have failed to supply the most simple of human needs—food and shelter. In the shelters that were provided, human dignity was shockingly neglected. When evacuations were necessary, buses were either not available or the destination shelter was not prepared. In the midst of hell-hole shelters, such as the New Orleans stadium and the FEMA boxes, no one came forward to inspire or consol, nor did anyone of that ilk arise from within the amassed refugee groups.

In his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell writes: “The modern hero…cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding…It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal—carries the cross of the redeemer—not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.”

“In the silences of his personal despair.” Can the average human being understand how to find redemption in such silences? Perhaps. Some come to know through an enigmatic inner gift; others by trial and error; some through a mentor; some through scripture study; others through meditation. There are many ways. I know a woman who pulled out of desolation through extended trips into the wilderness.

There are rhythmic cycles. Most find their pathway into the inner self by paying attention to their nature and feelings, by being alert and aware, watching for crossroads, for subtle changes in direction. To sustain the chosen journey, some include art therapy and journal-writing; cultivating kindness; making a living doing what they love to do, without selling out; developing support of a trusted community; going back to the land; seeing a mirror of self in others.

Joseph Campbell writes: “‘Truth is one,’ we read in the Vedas; ‘the sages call it by many names’…The way to become human is to learn to recognize the lineaments of God in all the wonderful modulations of the face of man.”

God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.
Each note is a need coming through one of us,
a passion, a longing-pain.
Remember the lips
where the wind-breath originated,
and let your note be clear.
Don’t try to end it.
Be your note.
I’ll show you how it’s enough.
Go up on the roof at night
in this city of the soul.
Let everyone climb on their roofs
and sing their notes!
Sing loud!
—Rumi

Credit: Picture at the top: from Savitri's art therapy practice
Picture at bottom: Woven tapestry by Savitri

Rekindling: Psychological and Spiritual Healing

2008-10-01T16:42:00.016-04:00

Chapter Six

Amritapuri, India

4,000 of us Westerners and Indians walk three kilometers in two single-file lines down the ocean road to the site of the mass cremation. It is the sixteenth and last day of the daily funeral rites after the tsunami. As we walk we chant a prayer for the peace and well-being of the world. At the beach, forty-two palm frond lean-tos cover the ashes where pyres burned. Amma leads the rites. Holding clay oil lamps in our palms, we circumambulate the funeral site, praying for the living and the dead all over the world.

Amma speaks to everyone: “We may claim that we are the ones who are doing everything, but before we could even blink our eyes, the waves came and destroyed everything…One thing we can do in this situation is to invoke love and compassion in our hearts. Pray with your hearts. Act with your hands. The dead are gone. To bring them back is impossible. Let us use this situation an opportunity to share peace and love with the living.”

Ankle-deep in water, we place lighted lamps onto lapping waves and watch the tide carry them away. One fisherman tells Amma he's become frightened of the water; she helps him gather courage by inspiring him to wade out chest-deep where he offers his lamp to the sea.

In the days and months to follow, beyond restoring lives through construction of new homes and boats, feeding thousands a day, replenishing necessities, offering medical aid, and providing vocational training, there was more. There was the rekindling of spirit.

Amma and several Westerners taught thousands of children to swim so they would not fear the water. Many women and children who died in the 2004 Asian tsunami had not known how to swim. The lessons took place in the swimming pool during several 3-day yoga camps held in the ashram. Children learned about their cultural heritage, Indian philosophy, how to cultivate optimistic thinking, and to practice yoga and meditation. They also enjoyed play-time, including how to make paper airplanes and then sending hundreds gliding from upper floors of the ashram.

To help children in the temporary shelters catch up with school work, the ashram arranged tutoring classes and provided school materials.

Over several years before the tsunami, quite a few villagers had abandoned their tradition of singing devotional songs at sunrise and sunset, in favor of watching TV. Most took up their spiritual practices again following the devastation. To help villagers revitalize their faith, a couple of ashram monks would ride bikes up and down the coast, stopping to give inspirational talks and lead the people in chanting.

Psychologists from Amma’s hospital in Cochin visited villages to offer music and art therapy, to help alleviate and heal post traumatic stress. Adult villagers composed hymns and lyrics, expressing their feelings and experiences. Children drew pictures of clinging to the tops of palm trees, floating under water, struggling in the wave, and of homes submerged with fish all around.

The children and adults were encouraged to talk about what happened. In addition, ashram residents visited temporary relief housing projects daily to play sports with children and to sing devotional songs with them. The community-style living and lighthearted activities that went on in and around the temporary shelters helped people heal emotionally and to remember what it was like to feel happy.

The ashram psychologists attributed the rapid emotional, psychological, and spiritual recovery to this re-creation of community and human connection that went on the shelters. These people who had lost everything, had the wealth of community.

Spiritual and psychological rehabilitation programs conducted by many organizations, took place all over tsunami-torn Asia.

In contrast to the above stories of tsunami relief, are these from Hurricane Katrina:
New Orleans, August 31, 2005. Excerpts from CNN.com
…three shootings, widespread looting and a number of attempted carjackings had been reported near the Louisiana Superdome, where more than 20,000 people were holed up in the city's shelter of last resort, where toilets were overflowing and there was no air conditioning to provide relief from 90-degree heat. Bathrooms had no lights, making people afraid to enter, and the stench from backed-up toilets inside killed any inclination toward bravery.

“When we have to go to the bathroom we just get a box. That’s all you can do now,” said Sandra Jones.

From the Associated Press, Sept 3, 200
Evacuations of the last remaining refugees at the arena were halted before dawn Saturday …The Texas Air National Guard estimated that between 2,000 and 5,000 people remained at the Superdome on Saturday amid a frightening scene of filth, violence and despair.

The last 300 refugees in the Superdome climbed aboard buses Saturday bound for new temporary shelter, leaving behind a darkened and stinking arena strewn with up to five feet of trash.
The sight of the last person — an elderly man wearing a Houston Rockets cap — prompted cheers from members of the Texas National Guard who were guarding the facility. “I feel like I’ve been here 40 years,” said Louis Dalmas Sr., one of the last people out. “Any bus going anywhere — that’s all I want.”

Conclusion:

In this, the wealthiest nation in the world, we witnessed in New Orleans, man's capacity for inhumanity to man.
Our American leaders did not know how to organize a practical and dignified solution for the simple matter of food and shelter, nor how to inspire connection to root traditions and spirit in ways that would use the fertile ground of tragedy to raise the human spirit, to give hope for the future.

In India, the lotus flower, symbol of spirituality and beauty, has its roots growing out of mud and garbage. All over Asia, tsunami relief efforts, efforts suitable to local culture and community, demonstrated how transformation can rise out of the mud of calamity.

Credits:
Photo:http://www.flickr.com/
cherry965 photostream
Amma quote: Amma and the Tsunami: Pray & Serve (MA Center, San Ramon, CA, 2007)

The Return: Clean-up and Restoration

2008-09-20T11:46:00.014-04:00

Chapter Five

New Year’s Eve, 2004, 11:25 PM.

Thunder rumbles in the distance. Strange. Monsoon season was over months ago. The temple bell rings, summoning all of us. I dash down the ramp from my sixth floor flat, over the sand, through the iron gateways, and towards the ashram’s open-air auditorium behind the temple. Coconut palm fronds lash against each other in the wind. More thunder. Huge drops splash on my forehead. I make a run for it along the dimly lit grounds. Scattered groups dressed in white also rush along.

Water pounds the auditorium’s fiberglass roof and pelts palms, sounding like grain crashing through a silo. Thunder strikes again and again, in ear-shattering claps. The downpour blinds vision beyond the hall. A friend nudges up against me, eyes round. “It’s going to flood again. I know it.” I shrug. I hope not. As soon as the storm began I felt the rain was sent by the heavens to clean the grounds of sludge, to remove salt from the ocean’s flood five days ago when Arabian Sea water gushed across the narrow South Indian peninsula, flattening homes and tossing loris like toys in a bathtub. Now rain water is rising by inches, threatening to spill over into the hall.

After returning to the ashram just hours ago after our five-day stay in our refugee camp on the other side of the backwaters, I was shocked to see so much filth and debris littering the grounds—clothing, thongs, pieces of metal, bits of tattered palm frond huts, wood, plastic bags. The killer wave washed through the sewage pond spreading it over the grounds, sand now black with stink.

Now, at about five to midnight, someone brings Amma a mic. She leads us in the chant Lokaha Samasthaha Sukhino Bhanvantu—“May all of the beings in all the worlds be happy and peaceful.” For fifteen minutes we repeat the prayer. Tears stream down the eyes of some as our chanting echoes across the land. Waves pound in the distance. The downpour slows. Then stops. Water drips from the palm fronds. The wind calms.

Over the next days leaves on trees turn brown, dropping off, unable to survive the salt water soaking.

In the ashram everything had to be cleaned and scrubbed—water tanks, walls inside and out, temple ritual items, new books, press equipment, cassette tape covers, used clothing, thousands of stainless steel dinner plates, gift items for sale. Many computers were beyond repair. On my first day back from refugee camp, I wiped sludge off photos.

Teams were sent to clean up in the villages and to consol villagers. I jumped on a mini-bus moving out, filled with Indian ashram residents and a few Westerners, on the way down the ocean road to the worst-hit village. Buckets and shovels were propped behind the driver’s seat. I felt like a troubadour, finally going out to help in the field, no longer isolated in our refugee camp where one of my only hardships had been wearing the same clothes for five days, five days in tropical heat.

Now I clung to the pole at the open door of the bus, witnessing the devastation. Desolation—torn walls, flattened buildings, auto rickshaws tossed against palm trunks, trash burning in oil, villagers sitting, backs against beams that were once home. No one spoke on the van except to point now and then. When we arrived in the center of the village, we sat on the bus for about a half an hour and then returned to the ashram. The government officials would not let us work—some permits were required.

On subsequent days I’d heard that work in the field had moved forward unhindered, but I was not on the bus, because I never learned when or where. I settled with cutting vegetables, cleaning stainless steel plates and spoons, laundering used clothing. We left washed items in the sun for several days to purify. Monks and nuns spread new layers of white sand over the dried sludge.

Thousands of villagers lined up at the meal stands on the peninsula’s ocean road where food was served three times a day.

Medical care continued uninterrupted.

Men were at work building temporary shelters for over one hundred homeless families—to be ready in a few days. All to be equipped with running water, cooking stoves, and TV in a common room. Plans were underway for Amma’s ashram to rebuild village homes and new fishing boats, in many parts of India and Sri Lanka.

Amma would create jobs for fishermen, refurbishing damaged boats and building new ones. From the new fishing boats enough fish would be caught to feed several families a day. Job training for women who lost husbands would include tailoring and nursing. Men and women would be trained as emergency medical technicians and in computer technology.

Many private organizations provided ample food and shelter in various countries hit by the tsunami. With plenty food, shelter, and job training, there was minimal looting. Otherwise, there were countless stories of unbridled stealing.

All over the tsunami ravaged parts of Asia—Banda Ache, Indonesia; Thailand; Nagapattinam and Chennai, India; Andaman and Nicobar Islands; Sri Lanka—clean-up also took place. In Indonesia, for weeks workers wandered the countryside removing bodies. On the coast of India thousands of fishing boats lay splintered along the beach.

The clean-up and restoration would take years.

What is the message of the tsunami?

When Amma looks into nature, she sees that nature’s fury is not yet abated. Nature is still turbulent, agitated. Only the cool, gentle breeze of prayers can shift these dark clouds.

The tsunami was a warning, but nobody heard it. It is easy to wake up someone who is sleeping, but difficult to wake up someone who is pretending to be asleep. --Amma

All over the world over-use of nature continues unabated— air and water pollution, genetic engineering, threats to wildlife through oil drilling, clear-cutting forests, unheeded global climate change messages, sonar blasts killing sea life.

Some say greed is the cause for waste and depletion natural resources. Overpopulation is most likely the primary reason, and yet is not a well-advertised approach to the problem.

The tsunami was followed by the earthquake in China, the typhoon in Myanmar, the flooding in Louisiana from hurricane Katrina in the USA, and now in 2008, the flooding in the Midwest in the USA, and devastation from hurricanes Hannah and Ike in Texas, USA. In spite of the huge numbers of natural disasters happening all over the world, the people of Galveston, Texas, had not understood the power of nature—and most stayed to ride out the storm. In the aftermath, they found it impossible to live there as sewage was running down the streets; there was no electricity for cooking; many houses were flattened. Restoration of power would take weeks, clean-up perhaps years.

How many losses of land and city will it take before we catch on, before we return to our more human side, of caring for neighbors and friends and paying attention our intimate connection to nature. We cannot live without nature, and yet we continue to destroy her.

When I lived in Taos in the early ‘90’s the Hondo fire burned 8,000 acres, including sacred land. Many locals and natives referred to the natural disaster as The Great Smudge, referring to the Native American way of cleansing by smoke, burning branches of sage and sweet grass.

Nature knows well how to help us clean up the stage, in those times when we do not rise to the occasion.

Galveston, Texas, after Hurrican Ike, 2008

Credits:
Amma and the Tsunami: Pray & Serve
Photo at top, courtesy of http://www.amritapuri.org/

photo of Galveston by US Geological Survey

The Rites: Caring for the Living and Their Dead

2008-09-13T09:00:00.026-04:00

Chapter Four

Kerala, India.
Two days after the disaster, in the worst-hit village on the peninsula, monks from Amma’s ashram and villagers—including members of rival political groups—help collect and stack wood for funeral pyres; and then they prepare and lay the dead into wooden coffins. Several women, searching for their drowned babies, rush to a coffin where an infant lies wrapped in white, with beach sand stuck on partially closed eyes. At sundown, monks, following Hindu tradition, preside over the mass cremation for forty-two dead, and then sit vigil with the bereaved throughout the night as the pyres burn.

Experiencing the death of a loved one is one of the most difficult events, often transformational. For this reason, many cultures prescribe several rites for the dead that take place over a year’s time and sometimes longer.

In tsunami-ravaged countries, many of the dead received funeral rites; many did not; some long after the fact. In southern Sri Lanka, the chief priest of a Buddhist temple, said: "We did what we could…The grief was immense, especially at the loss of children and mothers.” The Buddhist priest led funeral rites in the main hall of the temple where the bodies were honored before being buried in family plots. Hindus cremated their dead. Thousands of bodies were not recovered.

In Thailand, nearly two years after the tsunami, Muslim and Roman Catholic priests, and Buddhist monks joined together in an inter-religious burial ceremony for last of the unidentified bodies. During the ceremony, through a preserved DNA sample, a woman who found her aunt, said, “The feeling of happiness or sadness now is equal, as I have been waiting for my aunt’s body for almost two years.”

In Banda Aceh, Indonesia, after the wave flooded the land, it looked as though a bomb had been dropped. Over 200,000 died and thousands were lost to the sea. Some mass burials took place without funeral rites.

Funeral Rites
Funeral rites allow the bereaved to live into their grief. At the same time these rituals assist the deceased toward the journey beyond life. To prepare for a Hindu cremation, family members wash the body, dress it in a clean cloth, lay the corpse into the wooden coffin, and then place the coffin on the pyre. Usually the eldest son or remaining male member of the family, will ignite the flames.

The fire encourages the departed soul to move on, to give up attachment to the body, and not to linger, disembodied, with the living. The fire has a similar effect on those who mourn, allowing them to take the first steps toward releasing the loved one. The cremation rite is followed by an eleven-day or fifteen-day mourning period that ends with a ceremony, a right of absolution after which helps family members return to their normal lives.

In Buddhist funeral rites, sometimes the soul must be convinced that it is no longer a part of the mortal world, especially in the case of sudden death by accident such as the tsunami. In most ceremonies, for several days priests ring bells, chant religious texts, beat drums, and blow bass horns, and then the burial takes place.

In Tibetan Buddhism, a spiritual teacher or lama recites inspirational prayers and instructions from The Tibetan Book of the Dead. For forty-five consecutive days, the deceased is guided through difficult passages and presented with opportunities to recognize the true nature of Reality.

All the different funeral rites help encourage and guide the soul, unhindered, on its passage into the next world.

Knowing and understanding the inevitability of death, one should strive hard to realize the eternal truth before the body falls off… Only a person who leads a moment-to-moment life can be completely free from fear. He alone can embrace death peacefully.
—Amma

Philosophy of Living and Dying
Most Hindus and Buddhists will be familiar with their respective philosophies regarding living and dying, and for the ways a person, throughout life, prepares for one’s final days. Sages all over the world have passed down the wisdom, that to be happy and feel free, it is recommended to remain unattached to the physical reality. To live in the world, to enjoy it fully, and yet at the same time not be bound by it. Ideally, through rites and teachings at each stage of life starting with birth itself, individuals gain an understanding of where they come from and where they are going.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to escape the profound grief experienced with the death of a loved one.

Boy at funeral pyre

Mass Cremation
Near Amma’s ashram in India, two nights after the tsunami, the cremation for the forty-two dead took place on the beach. With waves breaking in the distance, monks and nuns chanted from the eighth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita:

Brahman is the Imperishable, the Supreme; the essential nature is called Self-knowledge…whosoever, leaving the body, goes forth remembering Me alone at the time of death, he attains My Being… Whosoever at the end leaves the body, thinking of any being, to that being only does he go…Therefore, at all times remember Me only…with the mind and intellect fixed in Me, you shall doubtless come to Me alone.
—excerpt from the eighth discourse

People listened to the scriptural passage, sitting in the sand, bathed in the ancient knowledge. They sat until dawn, watching the fires dwindle and the embers burn down to ash.

Credits:
Photos, courtesy of www.amritapuri.org
Amma and the Tsunami: Pray & Serve (San Ramon, CA, 2007)
Sri Lanka report: www.helptsunamisurvivors.org
Thailand report: www.iol.co.za

Aftermath: Immediate Response

2008-09-01T09:09:00.046-04:00

Chapter Three

Gray salt water mixed with sewerage floods the ashram grounds. Lower-level offices, computer rooms, storage spaces, press equipment and workshops, newly-printed books—all submerged. Brick walls around the ashram—tumbled into rubble by the tsunami. From the balcony outside the temple where Amma (Indian humanitarian and spiritual leader) was giving a Sunday program, Amma calls out evacuation instructions to a few monks, and then joins them in the waist-deep water. The ashram and several fishing villages sit on a narrow peninsula; 15,000 surivors must evacuate to the mainland on the other side of the backwaters.

Amma orders a rope tied around the temple railing and stretched to the boat jetty about fifty yards away. The ocean water slowly recedes. People emerge from upper stories. Scores of ashram residents guide individuals along the rope, through the mud, to the boat jetty. Men use chairs to carry the old and infirm to safety. On the opposite shore, several boatmen stir into action—yelling and carrying on, they jump into canoes and pole them across the backwaters to the ashram jetty. Canoes and two motor ferries transport the elderly and the villagers cross first.

Amma queries villagers before they board, “Is everyone in your family with you?” Some don’t know. Some grieve over family members taken by the wave—children, husbands, parents—walls collapsed, trees fell. Some have left frail grandparents behind. After getting directions to hut or home, ashram monks go in search of the old and the sick, and then guide them to the boat jetty where family members wait for them.

After I help an elderly Indian ashram resident off the first evacuation ferry, she pleads with me to stay with her. “I’m going back,” I say, as I guide her into a shuttle. When I try to board the ferry back to the ashram, the young monk in charge, riding the bow as if over a stormy sea, says, “No.” He is frowning, his forehead beading with sweat. “Amma wants everyone to go to the engineering school.”

Reluctantly I join the parade of the disheveled as they wander in the hot sun towards the refugee site, ten minutes down the village main street and off onto a dirt road. My Japanese friend Eko and I—together we go. She has lived in the United States for forty years, married to an America who died recently. We stumble over the rubble outside the humongous university construction site, passing the odor from workers’ dirt-hole outhouses near temporary grass shacks. Inside, in the courtyard, I tip-toe around the sacred space of grief surrounding villagers huddled together in groups. It is they who have lost loved ones. A monk pours water for them from a pitcher.

On the way upstairs, Eko picks up a dusty piece of corrugated cardboard—her bed for the night. I’m still convinced we will return to the ashram when everything settles down. Villagers are quiet downstairs. An in-charge Western fellow, face white, eyes hollow, calls out several times,“No one…I repeat…no one is allowed to return to the ashram for any reason. Come to the third floor now and get your passports.” After the scrambling for passports settles, Indian and Western helpers serve the lunch that was floating in pots in the ashram kitchen and transported by canoe.

Filling the dead space of what-do-we-do now, many of us, Indian and Western devotees, gather to chant devotional hymns to harmonium accompaniment for a couple of hours. A white-bearded Frenchman who doesn’t speak English, joins Eko and me. Singing wanes when at around nine the evening meal of watery rice with a dollop of curry is served. Later we find out that the ashram has prepared meals for thousands of survivors in our camps and for over 15,000 at various government camps that were not prepared for the disaster. In Amma’s relief camps in Tamil Nadu, on the Bay of Bengal, 670,500 meals were served beginning on December 27. For four months the ashram would feed over 15,000 tsunami survivors in Kerala, three meals a day.

After the meal, people swarm Western and Indian men who are hauling grass mats for us to sleep on. Some of the Western guests staying in the ashram for one night only, fight over mats. The Frenchman, Eko, and I watch. After most have gone to bed, a mat-bearing friend of mine appears and hands me four. I give one to a Swedish friend, standing slack-shouldered. The Frenchman adopts Eko’s abandoned cardboard, tears it and gives me half; he grins wide, rubbing his thin back side and pointing to mine. The classrooms are sardine-like full, and so Eko and I lay our mats on the cement floor in a balcony alcove. In one of the large bathrooms, one for women and one for men on every floor, I spot the Swedish woman brushing her teeth. I hold my forefinger up and make as if to scrub my teeth. “May I have some?” She gives a vigorous nod, dabs toothpaste onto my fingertip. Once bedded down I am grateful for the scarf end of my sari for cover against the damp chill, my purse as pillow, and corrugated padding under grass mat.

In the night I am awakened by a village woman wailing.

The 2004 Asian tsunami took the lives of over 250,000 people in India, Thailand, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and other parts. On the small peninsula on the Arabian Sea in India where Amma’s ashram stands and where Amma was raised, over 150 people died. Brick homes were flattened, walls crumbled, palm frond huts washed away, loris and auto rickshaws tumbled into palm trees, fishing boats splintered.

Consoling
The morning after the killer wave struck, Amma consoled local refugees at the engineering school (see opening photo), held them in her arms, herself shedding tears; a few villagers lay in her lap for a long time while she stroked their backs and wiped their eyes. Throughout that next day Western and Indian ashram residents sat with villagers and comforted them. Along with scores of others, I chopped vegetables and sorted donated clothing. Several Westerners volunteered in the make-shift hospital a few blocks away; there, Eko administered Reiki and gentle massage to the injured and ill.

"We saw bodies strewn everywhere."

On the Bay of Bengal side of India, near Chennai, in Nagapattinam, twelve seaside villages washed away and more than 7,000 people died. Immediately after the wave hit, Amma sent monks from her Chennai ashram to the devastation, along with scores of local volunteers. One monk said, “We saw bodies strewn everywhere. My first instinct was to help remove them, but then I decided that the living, who were without food, needed our help more. So we started the cooking.” Volunteers prepared meals for thousands, three meals a day.

Medical team

Concurrently, Amma dispatched medical teams in twelve ambulances—staffed with nurses, paramedics, and doctors— from her high tech hospital in Cochin, to the worst-hit areas in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Over the two days following the tsunami, they tended to 2,000 patients.

The world wanted to help

Meanwhile relief organizations all over the world were flooded with callers wanting to volunteer in Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka—however too many well-known organizations, including governments, were unprepared for immediate action. As fast as they were able, such religious groups as the United Church of Christ, United Methodist Committee on Relief, and Scientology Volunteer Ministers, responded, without strings attached, with funding and volunteer work in various affected countries.

In many coastal towns stuck by the tsunami in Sri Lanka, people sought refuge in Buddhist and Hindu temples, mosques and churches. Local religious leaders were often the first to offer food and shelter. Survivors streamed into the temples, distraught and traumatized by the tragedy that came on an ordinary, clear blue day.

Often foreign medical aid and volunteer help from churches and private groups, began arriving as late as two weeks after the disaster. Some organizations sent out volunteers from abroad on December 26 itself. Many foreign volunteers roamed affected areas unable to locate in-place operations, or the ones they found were often ill-equipped to take on helpers. Nevertheless, thousands of local and foreign individuals who were determined to help relieve the suffering, found ways. A mass of humanity—giving their lives to meet disaster needs, with on-the-spot training, or with only instinct and common sense to guide them.

NOTE: As I prepared to post the third phase of dealing with calamity, I read this story about Hurricane Gustav relief efforts, in the NY Times today, September 1, 2008:

ABOARD A BUS FROM NEW ORLEANS — The 40-odd people boarding the black, red and white bus that the city provided late Saturday afternoon embarked on a journey of pure faith. They did not know how long they would be away or whether they would have anything to come home to. It would be many hours before they even learned where they were going….They had no way of knowing that when they finally reached their refuge, roughly 350 miles away, it would be ill-prepared for their arrival.

CREDITS:
“Bodies everywhere" quote, and some of the details about the ashram’s tsunami relief efforts, are from the photo documentary, Amma and the Tsunami: Pray & Serve (Mata Amritanandamayi Center, San Ramon, California, 2007)
Sri Lanka information is from http://www.helptsunamisurvivors.org/
Photos: courtesy of http://www.amritapuri.org/

Facing into Fear

2008-08-16T12:14:00.033-04:00

Chapter Two

December 26, 2004.

Near Amritapuri Ashram in India, by the narrow pennisula that separates the Arabian Sea from the brackish backwater river, a lone, pole-driven canoe carrying a European couple on a pleasure ride, glides along the backwaters. Jungle birds whistle in the coconut palm forest. On the opposite shore we wait in the hot sun for the small motor ferry to carry us across to the ashram. The pleasure canoe drifts alongside the ashram boat jetty and moors; the man helps the woman step out, and they stroll away.

Seconds later, dark gray water surges through gullies, shoots into the backwaters, capsizing the pleasure canoe and dumping debris in its wake. A village fisherman shouts, waving his arms. Many Sunday visitors who’d been waiting for the motor ferry, run away. I’m transfixed. Where is all that water coming from and why? Then it dawns on me.

“Was that a tsunami?” I ask Indian man in his Sunday best.

He’s walking away, slowly, head down. “Yes.”

“We better get to high ground,” I say to him and my friend, “I think another wave is coming.” We head down the pathway to the ashram’s four-story computer school, five minutes away. A group of students saunter along in front of us. “We need to move quickly,” I say, all the while imagining giant waves from movies I’ve seen.

Meanwhile, on the peninsula across the backwaters, minutes from the ashram complex, the Arabian Sea waters have receded to about forty feet beyond the average tidal mark. Visitors, ashram residents, and villagers delight in the strange phenomena, the exposed expanse of beach. A messenger comes running—“Quick. Get away. Run to the ashram. Go up to the second and third floors.” The ashram’s PA system blares, an announcement in eighteen languages for everyone to climb to the upper stories of the temple building or ashram flats, and for visitors to move the few cars parked by the ocean. 10,000 guests had gathered for a special Sunday program, and another 4,000 Indian and Western ashram residents had been engaged in their daily routines.

We wait for what becomes known as “the killer wave.”

Fear of natural disaster festers in the recesses of the unconscious mind in most human beings the world over. Beginning with the flood of Noah, told about in scriptures from cultures all over the world—Vedic, South American, Sumerian, and Biblical—our ancestors have known the threat of deluge. The memory, passed down, lives within us all. Throughout the ages, again and again, the winds and the rains rise and whip the waters, uproot trees, batter homes. Like an erupting geyser the archetypal emotion of fear surges out of the depths of its hiding place. We have little recourse over wrath of sea and sky. Scientists cannot stop it; they can only notice the signs and even then, might not know. In the old days, soothsayers and astrologers often predicted calamities, but even they were limited.

You and I—suddenly there we are, standing alone in raw emotion with only instinct to guide us. Fear on the most fundamental level is a primal urge to survive. As with animals, most of us will run or find shelter from fire, volcano, typhoon, and wave. And, as with animals, some of us will have the impulse to save others along the way. A friend of mine told of a fire from a propane tank that had exploded inside a festival’s kitchen tent. Scores of people were racing away from the raging heat. But not my friend. He tore into the flaming tent where he crawled on the ground under the smoke and found a woman lying there, burning. He carried her to safety. He had no other explanation for his act, than that he was compelled. He had no forethought, no plan, only an inner impulse that drove him into, rather than away from, the fire.

Here’s another kind of primal fear: Who can we trust in calamity or in calm? The same question was posed thousands of years ago in the parable of Cain and Abel, the children of Adam and Eve. After Cain murders his brother Abel, God asks, “Where is your brother?” To which Cain answers, “I do not know… Am I my brother’s keeper?” Throughout the ages, fear of loss or fear of being lesser-than, drives some people to lesser deeds. Some cannot be counted on; tales of intrigue abound in most governments, as do plots among brothers and sisters niggling over inheritances. What do you do when you can’t trust family members or friends or colleagues? Some will be inclined like Abel, to live in harmony at all costs, and some will be disposed like Cain, to do the unspeakable.

A mother tells her child,
“When you’re walking through the graveyard at night
and you see a boogeyman, run at it,
and it will go away.”
“But what” the replies the child, “if the boogeyman’s
mother has told it to do the same thing?
Boogeymen have mothers too.”
--Rumi

Do stories of natural disaster and personal drama—old and new—indicate that we must live in fear?

Maybe not.

In the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, a few people took advantage and looted, and thousands rallied to help--to feed the living, to collect and cremate the dead, to offer medical relief, to rebuild homes and boats, to inspire and give hope for the future.

But still the question of fear and how to live with it persists.

I’ve heard some say fear ought to be eradicated from the array of human emotions, or that cultivating fear’s opposite, which some theorize is love, is the only balm.

Looking at the two poles can be revealing: Experience tells me that fear contains its own apparent opposites. On the other end of terror that erupts in the face of natural disaster, is the hair-raising experience of divine awe. Imagine it. If in the face of blazing fire or giant wave, we are shaken to the core, what about face to face encounters with stunning beauty? At Niagara Falls I step out of the comfort of my car, into the roar and power of water, engulfed. At the Grand Canyon’s North Rim, I head down the trail, smelling the spruce along the way, and suddenly there I am at the edge a great gaping chasm, vast, with endless layers of earth, exposed.

Remember the Biblical tale of Moses trembling in front of the burning bush—“‘Put off your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground’…and Moses concealed his face, for he was afraid to gaze upon God.” In The Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna asks Krishna to reveal his cosmic form. Upon witnessing the blazing vision, Arjuna says: “On seeing Thee, touching the sky, shining in many colors, with mouths wide open, with large fiery eyes, I am terrified at heart and find neither courage nor peace.”

How different are the experiences of divine awe, really, than the sight of an encroaching volcanic lava flow or tsunami wave? Think of it. The universe burst forth out of the greatest natural disaster of all—the big bang. Stars explode into their brilliance out of nuclear combustion; the Eagle Nebula, the Orion Nebula—stellar nurseries.

How to let fear be an ally.

Fear has the potential to lead us to something inside of ourselves that is quite marvelous, a connection to creation itself. Getting in touch with terror and ill ease can allow us to uncover our creative power, to live more freely and with a sense of love and joy pervading all things.

What can we do when many aspects of life—the behaviors of Mother Nature and people— lie beyond our control and seem to threaten? How can we settle in with fear?

The exercise below can help you tune in to feelings of alarm and trepidation, and at the same time help you avoid living with fear. Because going about your day in a state of constant worry is debilitating; it cuts off the flow of life breath and creativity; it stops your vital energy.

Preparation for the fear exercise: Sit down in a quiet place and get in touch with the power of your inner self by practicing the breathing meditation described at the end of the first post (See archive: "Preparing for the unforeseen: Overview"). As you practice the exercise below, notice the ways fear can be a useful emotion in daily life; through the breathing meditation and the fear exercise you can learn to discern the presence of actual danger from imagined threat. You can develop valuable intuition.

Only a person who leads a moment-to-moment life can be completely free from fear... This moment-to-moment living is possible only through meditation and doing spiritual practices.
--Amma

Fear exercise:
First, when you notice a persistent fear around certain aspects of daily living, or an old dread or horror that rises up inside of you, sit with the feeling, close your eyes and breathe into the feeling.

Second. as a sense of peace comes over you, feel the fear as pure energy. Feel the power of it. Feel the love in it. Feel its connection to creation itself. Sit with the feeling.

Third, have writing materials and/or artist materials ready. Write about your experiences and/or draw them.

Fourth, share your experiences with a trusted friend who also practices the fear exercise.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
—Rumi

Preparing for the Unforseen

2008-08-02T07:30:00.073-04:00

Chapter One

Preparing for the Unforseen

Day after Christmas, 2004, Amritapuri, Kerala, India, on the shores of the Arabian Sea. Around noon. It’s a hot sunny day, with crows swooping and scolding, seemingly a normal sort of day. Then crows scatter and squawk as though disturbed about something, flying around like crazy. Suddenly a whooshing flood of ocean water explodes through brick walls enclosing the ashram. Men wildly shouting, women screaming. Water surges across the narrow peninsula and through the fishing village, smashing fishnet rigs that line the backwater river. What in God’s name is happening?

Only retrospect releases the story, and only piece by piece—your story, your friends’ stories, and the villagers’. Even then will you ever really comprehend it?

What about the morning of? Did anyone know? Had anyone felt what was coming the way horses and elephants do? I can’t honestly say I did. But I did feel the quake—all the way around, from the Sumatra Trench to the Arabian Sea side of India. I was sitting on the toilet and everything started to rock. Thinking I was dizzy and ill, I put my head down between my knees. When everything kept rocking, then I knew it was an earthquake. Having been raised in Southern California I was used to earthquakes. Big deal; I put it out of my mind.

Throughout the morning I felt dense, thick-minded, less-than-alert, maybe even depressed. But, in an ashram when you’re working on yourself, you can get depressed and not know exactly why. You accept it as a bummer, not as an indicator you are about to be inundated by a tsunami.

I’d always wondered how a person could avoid feeling, in the midst of accidents and tragedy. How could you not feel? With sirens blaring and red lights of emergency vehicles flashing, I wondered why? What happened? What was all the fuss? Maybe it’s over, for heaven’s sake. Let my friend Eiko and me go back to the ashram now. How was I to imagine we would spend five days as refugees, with only the clothes on our backs to wear and sleep in. Under equatorial sun, after half a day your clothes urgently need changing. And here I’d worried about dirty clothes, when villagers’ homes had been flattened, all their family’s possessions washed out to sea.

Do you see? From my position I hadn’t comprehended the damage the waves had wrought in the villages on the peninsula and in the ashram. My only solace is that I hadn't understood, because my friend and I were not in the ashram, not in the wave. We had been in the village on the other side of the backwaters and waiting for the ferry boat to take us across. While standing at the boat jetty, we saw the first wave flush across the peninsula and capsize a canoe; quickly we took to high ground fearing another wave, which became known as the killer wave.

And so bit by bit, I will tell the story as it was revealed to me, from others’ vantage points and my own, and all about the days that followed—the mass cremation, the cleanup, the sheltering and feeding of 15,000 villagers three meals a day, for many months. And the rebuilding of lives, of homes, of fishing boats—and the restoration of spirit.

Meanwhile, in our refugee camp we carried on. Many of us recognized that a little story our guru Amma had been repeating to us over the years had suddenly come to fruition. We talked about the fable one day as we sat chopping vegetables for tsunami refugees. One of the Indian women, a middle-aged ashram resident, told the tale:

There was once a little bird living on a dead twig. The bird made no fuss that its home-twig was dead, but kept pecking at the tree bark, finding insects for food; building nest for shelter, laying eggs, and raising young; flying here and there, always returning home; getting into discussions with other birds. Despite knowing that some day the twig would break, the bird enjoyed living there. And then, the day arrived—the twig broke, and the little bird simply flew away.

When my Indian friend finished recapping the story, she wobbled her head from side to side Indian-style, and said, “Nothing is permanent, isn’t it.”

I reflected on how easy it was to assume I would never experience a calamity personally, that heartbreaking events only happen in other parts of the country or the world. In the midst of the tsunami and its devastations, in the moments when I felt frightened and numb, I realized that just as everyone else, I am subject to death and loss.

At the same time I was aware that underneath my fear and emotional disturbance, I felt a subtle spiritual strength that sustained me throughout all of it, and into the weeks to come and beyond. Then there was the sense of community, helping each other, pitching in however we could with all that needed to be done. And remaining open to a larger picture.

How does a part of the world leave the world?

How can wetness leave water? ...

No matter how fast you run,

Your shadow more than keeps up…

What hurts you, blesses you…

You must have shadow and light source, both.

Listen, and lay your head under the tree of awe.

—Rumi