PAINFUL CHANGE

Park Sculpture
My heart feels a little bruised this morning. The corners of my mouth are dragging in a way I’m not usually aware of. Despite the perfect, cool temperature of the air wafting through my house and the bright sunshine I stood in before as I pulled weeds outside, there is a little pain that slows my breath this morning. I see the beauty in the shifting leaves on the trees and hear the life in the birdcalls, but my mood does not easily shift. Even watching the blur of my little dog’s five inch long legs as he trots speedily along on our morning walk doesn’t engage my interest.

I spent way too much time in the realtor’s office yesterday afternoon. My ex-husband and I had an accepted offer on our “marital house.” The house that should have sold five years ago when our divorce became final. The present deal fell through, ultimately, because the people who were buying our house lost their buyer. “However, it might not be totally lost,” the realtor says, though it seems that way to me.

My ex-husband and his girlfriend made an offer on a townhouse. The people who own the townhouse made an offer on another place. It seems the chain goes on even beyond that. Now, basically, it would appear that everyone, realtors and regular people alike, are sitting around with their proverbial thumbs up their behinds because everyone assumed the deal was going to go through, and then it didn’t. The only domino in this line I care about is my house.

It’s not really that, that has me so disturbed. We all had to be there because there were amended contracts to sign, and language changes in the MLS listing had to be agreed upon. What bugged me was sitting before we even got in the realtor’s office in the agency waiting room with my ex-husband and his girlfriend. The girlfriend blathered on the way anxious people do about how much she wanted her townhouse to go through, and how Mojo, my dog who is currently living with my ex-husband, can live in their unfenced property-less home via a long leash strung out the sliding glass door. Mojo is currently used to a dog door and a half acre of fenced yard. My ex-husband has refused to give me “our” dog.

The girlfriend, running out of things to chat about, read the town paper out loud, making fun of things in the police blotter for their insignificance compared to the larger town to which they are moving. “Really?” I thought. “You listen to this constant chatter?” I said in my head. “It must be like having the TV on 24/7 for the interest level of the content and the noise.”

My ex-husband has fallen pretty far if this is what he has to settle for as a live-in companion. She didn’t strike me as very bright, either. The only reason he is buying a townhouse with her, I realize, is because he can’t afford it 100% himself. Oh my. I see that my self-talk is not helping. As they say in a spiritual program of which I am a part, “Never go into your mind alone. It is a dangerous neighborhood.” Yes, mine is.

And that was all before we got in to talk to the realtor. I don’t know why we had to be there together except that there’s one realtor for the two deals, and revisions need to be made for the contracts on both deals.

It’s not the first time I met the girlfriend. I’m not usually so full of judgment about other people but this woman takes the cake on several levels. I’m burnt out about wanting to reach some kind of closure to a thirty year marriage. Holding on to this house even another minute is anathema to me, and I want it sold. I had to initiate a court action to even get the house back on the market.

Now I feel like I’m still unable to move on. My ex-husband has become a total stranger to me. He refuses to talk to me about anything, including the children, unless he has to. He would prefer I didn’t still exist. I dared to leave him behind, after all. Except I haven’t.

It just breaks my heart to have to still slog through this swamp of leftover and unresolved feelings, broken dreams, and marital property still to be divided. “In God’s time, not mine,” the saying goes and I get it. There have been lots of reasons to hang on to the house this long but now that it is time for it to go, I am out of patience. I want God to help me move on, and I want it yesterday.

I am the one who most desperately needs new psychic space. “Let it go, Chris,” I say to myself. “The house will sell, sooner rather than later, and these people really, really, want the house. Something will happen if you can be patient.”

Yeah, patient. “Not in my gene pool,” I think. It doesn’t matter how much I’ve worked on my spirituality, my relationship with my Higher Power, in the last few years. Some days just don’t work out the way you want them to. Some days just hurt.

LISTENING

When I Was Five
It is a morning of exceptional peace as the day begins. The very air is refreshed and glowing, washed clean by the wild winds and raging waters of localized thunderstorms that tore through the area last evening. I see pictures of piled-up hail and posts of flooded theatres from my friends on Facebook, but for me it was none of those things. I heard the ominous growl of thunder roll in sinuous waves across the sky above my neighborhood and went to the picture window to look at the purple clouds.

Behind the mountains to the west, the golden light of a sunset splashed upward across the underbellies of thunderheads. Closer to my house the sky was purple, roiling with an approaching storm. I thought about the weather as I had seen it on the area news an hour earlier. It had been a day in the high 90’s yet again, with only a 30% chance of rain, and that only if you were lucky enough to experience purely local storms that might not even deliver more than a few lightning strikes and a little sprinkle of quick-to-evaporate water. There wasn’t even a splotch of green storm shape over my area of the state map.

Once again I thought as I looked toward the mountains, that the weather forecasters needed to look out the window more often instead of relying on radar and computers to tell them what was happening, and where. The wind picked up and tossed the limbs of the young Locust trees in the little park across the road, and stirred the tall ornamental grasses and flower bedecked rose bushes of my neighbor’s yard. I opened my front door wide, hoping the outside air was cooling and would clear my house out of stale air conditioning.

Soon rain poured down in absolutely straight lines out my front windows. Not so much as a sprinkle wet the brown patch I had just watered in my back yard. I kept waiting for this strange situation to change. Finally I heard the pattering rainwater climbing over my roof until it teemed down in the back yard as strongly as it was in the front. A few minutes later it was slamming sideways out of a darkened sky into the siding on the back of my house, cutting from an unusual direction and streaming across my little patio.

The wind blew so hard I wondered if my gas grill was going to blow over into the gravel. Lightning flashed ominously and so quickly overhead I wondered what would happen if my house was struck. As quickly as it came, the storm went. It poured rain a couple of additional times before I opened all my windows and went to bed, but nothing like that first onslaught. From somewhere to the west came the scent of growing sage, filling the air with life. The dirt and grass and even the rocks and wood fencing added to the stew of rich smells. I could feel gratitude for the drenching radiating from everything, even my own heart.

This morning I went to pull weeds out of the gravel edging around my property before the sun rose high and found me in the retreating shade of my house. I hate pulling weeds, and I go out very early to avoid the scorching sun. The sun and the heat have been relentless the past couple of weeks.

There was no hint of heat or too much sun in the cool breezes washing over me as I knelt in the gravel earlier. Birds chirped their crisp morning songs as if there was all the time in the world to sing the joy of another day. The weeds pulled more easily than normal from the damp earth. My attitude was patient, my mind unusually empty. I listened reverently to the sounds of the stones clicking and the roots tearing as my breath moved through my nostrils. I felt like a bird, singing in the tree.

Thank you, God. Thank you for this life. Thank you for this day. Thank you for the rain. Thank you. Oh yes, did I remember to tell You? Thank you.

GLITCHY DAY

Noisy
This isn’t promising to be a good day. As a matter of fact it seems as if it might really be a day I don’t like at all. I can feel the anger building, the kind of anger where I imagine myself throwing a brick through my living room window just to hear the crash of broken glass, and the sight of the brick flying out surrounded by lethal looking shards of sparkling crystals. It’s how I feel inside. I’ve had enough. I don’t want to deal with another decision, another problem, or another minute of the suffering of my little dog.

His situation seems to be the culmination of a whole series of events that have added up to more than I have the resources to willingly carry right now. Of course another way of looking at this, and the piece I would point out to any friend talking to me about it, would be to think that I’ve finally reached a limit on the feelings I’ve been stuffing for years. I call it “enough,” but what am I really saying? Enough loss, enough pain, enough change, enough personal evolution for about three lifetimes and I don’t want anymore, ever. I want to throw the brick through the window, as if that would help. I want to stomp my feet and have a hissy fit.

I’m thinking instead maybe this is an opportunity for me to allow my own humanity and sensitivity to come to the fore and acknowledge that making a decision about what to do with my buddy, my little yellow dog, hurts. It hurts because I can’t seem to find a decision to make about him that doesn’t involve lots of pain for him in the form of surgery, or death.

The surgery might not even help. It looks like he needs one of the disks in his neck worked on or replaced. Otherwise he’s in terrible pain and just lies around the house, or in his bed, and does nothing. He tips his tail if I walk over and talk to him or pat him. There’s no easy answer. I’ll take him to the vet, yet again, later today. We’ll probably do another round of steroids, muscle relaxants and pain killers, and for a couple of weeks my dog will feel better and maybe act himself. Maybe not.

When I got him at the Humane Society almost three years ago, his name was Rocky. His disposition was so sunny and happy and full of joie-de-vivre, that I changed his name to Chipper. I call him “Chippy” for short. His delights in life were chasing squeaky toys and going for walks and leaping up onto the couch back every chance he got to look out the window at the world going by. Every time I came in the door to my house he was there, dancing on his hind legs in joy at seeing me. Now he stays in his bed, not even walking across the living room to say hello. He’s three and a half years old. He holds his head absolutely still, only his little brown eyes following me wherever I go.

Ten years ago, well, really ten and a half since it’s June now, my brother died a few days before Christmas. I was devastated. I had a German Shepherd/Malamute mix at the time that became semi attached to my leg after Jim was gone. She walked with me upstairs, or downstairs, or lay on the floor next to me if I sat. She put her big head under my hand and leaned on my leg whenever we walked anywhere. She put her head on my feet when I sat in my armchair. Without her my grief might have had no relief. I knew she sensed my pain. At Thanksgiving that year following Jim’s death, she was poisoned and died within a couple of days.

The next year my daughter graduated from high school and went off to college. True, her school was a state school and not that far away, but she was no longer part of my everyday life. We sold her horses and the arena stood empty in the sun. My first baby had flown the nest.

The majority of the following year was tough because my marriage was breathing its last gasps. No matter how much I tried to work on it, or talk to my husband about what was going on for me, there was no resolution. Add to that my mother, who lived in another state, was in failing health and struggling to keep living independently. She seemed to have lost most of her spark after her son died, shortly followed by the death of her last good friend. The next spring my mother died.

I’ll rush through the last five years…I filed for divorce, got divorced, my daughter moved to New Zealand and then Australia, my son graduated from high school and moved out, I had a hysterectomy, we put the oldest dog, Lucy (16), to sleep, and a bunch of other stuff, too. We put the other old doggie to sleep shortly after my daughter came back from Australia. She moved in with me while she finished college and then moved out again when she graduated. Not everything is bad, but even good changes require work to adust to.

The nice way to put this is that I have had a lot on my plate. Some days I lose patience with what I have to deal with, even though I appreciate the fact that my load to carry is much less than some. Some days I’m looking around for a brick.

Resilience, according to the Encarta Dictionary, is “the ability to recover quickly from setbacks…to bounce back quickly from challenges.” People who have had a lot of recent setbacks sometimes have a hard time being resilient in the face of challenges, like illness, or loss, or having your best furry friend have health issues.

Here’s my sense of my own “resilience.” Right now I don’t have any. I just don’t see myself as Tigger in Winnie the Pooh. I’m afraid I’m all out of bounce. I don’t want my dog to have an iffy, dangerous, expensive surgery with an unpredictable outcome. I don’t want him to be in pain anymore, either. Least of all, do I want to lose him.

Some days, no matter how much you might want to, you just can’t start over. You simply have to “Keep on keeping on,” as my grandfather used to say. I’m trying. The majority of the time I do fine. Today, however, I’ll be frank with you. Today, I’d still like to throw the brick.

ONE COOL NIGHT

Chippy
The stench of freshly sprayed “eau-de-skunk” wafts with growing strength through my open kitchen window. There are wooden fences all around the properties near me as well as bordering my own, so I know it is highly unlikely the skunk is right outside my back door in my yard, hiding in the night. The thought does cross my mind about whom I might call to help me with skunk spray, though. Despite my reservations and the slowly fading reek, I decide to step outside.

My old house, the one in the country that still belongs to both me and my ex-husband and is currently for sale, has a huge deck running all along its eastern side. Skunks love the real estate underneath that deck and no matter what we used to do to discourage them, they moved in every summer. The dog door, too, was located on that side of the house near the barbeque.

At least once a summer our dog, Mojo, would get herself sprayed, prompting her to immediately come roaring back in through the dog door to wipe herself with frantic intent all across the living room carpet. This usually took place about 3:00 a.m. We learned to keep the dog door shut on summer nights.

Occasionally, checking just because I was curious, I would turn on the outside light by the door only to see a fat black and white form waddling its totally unconcerned way along the deck. Yes, the skunks were still there, even when it didn’t stink.

It is dark and cool on my patio as I walk over to its eastern edge to look up at the night sky. My patio is covered, so I have to stand near its edge to see many stars or the moon once it has risen above the horizon. The crickets chirp loudly in the chill air. It is part of my nightly ritual to say goodnight to the world, literally, before I go to bed. Tonight I take a couple of deep breaths, fresher air mixed with a remaining hint of skunk, and feel my body relax. I like to carry the peace of those few minutes into the world of rest and dreams.

It is going on five years since my divorce became final. I am still amazed at how intensely I lived in that country house. The slightest thing, like the darkness and the smell of skunk, can bring me instantly back to that place and my nightly rituals. I have never been a good sleeper. As a child I wandered my family house checking on my siblings, and sometimes my parents, as they slept. Once in a while I would climb into bed with one of my siblings, only to bask in their warmth for an hour or two before returning to my own bed.

My “marital house” as the divorce decree calls it, or the “skunk house” if you prefer, was no exception. I slept very lightly for years. My son had asthma and I would wake at the slightest change in his breathing. I would sit in his room in the dark as he coughed and barked, praying for him, or waiting to give him another dose of his medicine, or trying to decide if I should call the doctor. My husband traveled all the time for his job. When he was home, he was never the one who sat with our son. The night was mine.

Years later, when my brother was sick and after he died, and following not so long afterward when my mother died, I would wake and wander the house. Grief is worse at night. The world is still, and quiet, and the moonlight on the landscape, or the light on the side of a neighbor’s barn in the distance can make sadness bearable.

Sometimes I would sit outside on the cement patio under the stars, away from the skunk deck, and just listen to the darkness. Cows lowed, the horses snorted in the barn, cars moved on the highway far away, coyotes sometimes sang, and my heart absorbed that peace. God is easier to find in the emptiness. There is Someone to talk to without having to use words. In the winter whether there was a moon or not, snow on the ground made an almost heavenly light. Bushes, fences, even the pole with the birdfeeders stood in stark relief against the night.

I thought of none of these things when I filed for divorce. All I wanted was to get out, get away, get free of an oppressive situation. I fled into the minuscule town we lived outside of, fled to a patio home surrounded by other suffocatingly close patio homes. I handled things badly with my children and with myself because I was an emotional wreck, but somehow I found this perfect brand new house. Its walls were close enough, the neighbors present enough to create a kind of cocoon. I could wait out all that change and somehow survive. I live by myself now, with just my little yellow dog for company.

I stand out on my covered patio at the very edge where it extends out beyond the roof of my present house, and search the sky for stars. I find I want that kind of open space again, the space around that house in the country that will soon be gone. I have let go of all the dreams, all the safety, all the illusions that that house once anchored for me. I have let go of the boundaries this smaller house that is my home now seemed to provide. I hear something calling me from the stars in the night sky. The streetlights are too bright here, the neighbors too close.

The emptiness and the darkness no longer scare me. I thought for a while I would never survive. I find I have, with more strength than I would have imagined. I say goodnight to the world I can see around me every night and touch back into that vastness I used to love. It isn’t so boundless any more. I’ve worked hard on my relationship to the God of my understanding. Someone stands with me as I look at the sky.

“Good night, God,” I say. “Thank you for this day.”

WHEN I WONDER

Lillies
I woke this morning to the barest hint of light creeping up the sky behind the far houses on the eastern edge of my little subdivision, where the farmland begins. I had had a restless night, as I do sometimes when I feel my faith in “a benevolent Universe” as a friend of mine calls God, waivers. I have been ruminating lately, like a cow chewing her cud three times too long, over the meaning of life. My life, specifically.

I really don’t know what sets off a period of time like this, but I am ever so grateful when it comes to an end, usually in a profoundly simple way. I have been doing a couple of things differently every day that always help me shift if I will be patient and stick with it. The first thing I do after I get out of bed is go into my healing room, light a candle, put on some soothing music, and then meditate. I try to find some gratitude, first thing, for the new day.

A few minutes of meditation is enough, I tell myself, even if I’m mostly just sitting and thinking and doing everything but meditating. My body in the chair is an acceptable start. Then I read a bit of “spiritually uplifting” material such as a Rumi poem or two, or a bit of the “I AM” discourses, or perhaps the Bible. If I have the time, and sometimes if I don’t, I make myself write a line or two about what I’ve read in my daily journal. Less than a week of this will produce a lightening of spirit for me. I will begin to see the world in a brighter light again, regardless if outer circumstances have changed or not.

So it was today. I had put my recyclables out by the curb last night and this morning I found a few more things in my kitchen I could put in the bin in my driveway. It was very early, before the neighborhood was stirring, but the birds were singing and the light was that glorious yellow that comes with dry, cool air and altitude. A steady breeze blew through the mostly young, thin trees causing their trunks and branches to wave briskly across the sky. I held my breath for a minute, absorbing the texture of the air moving across my skin and the colors of the bright blue sky and the new green leaves on every limb.

My son’s birthday is in mid-May. When he was a little boy and the idea of weeks and months was still pretty much beyond him, I told him he would know that his birthday was getting closer once the leaves started coming out on the trees. He would know that his birthday was almost there as soon as all the trees had their new leaves, I said. He would get excited when I would point out the blanket of green emerging in the spring. “What day is coming soon?” I asked him.

“My bert-day!” he would exclaim.

This morning I thought again of that ritual we used to share, though it is long past the time I could hold him in my arms and point to the trees. He turned 22 a couple of weeks ago after all, on his journey to manhood and no longer a curly-haired toddler. When I was a girl and the old Maple trees in our front yard made shade again, I knew school would soon be out and summer would begin. Summer was my favorite season.

It’s this kind of gentle and life-affirming shift in thinking that I’m talking about that a few days of meditative practice miraculously produces. There is a part of me that gets discouraged if I watch too much news, or spend too much time alone and brood about all the “what ifs” and “if onlys” that will never come to be. I can lose perspective thinking about how my marriage ended or the gnawing fact that I still miss the family members who have passed away. Emotionally it’s kind of like taking a can of black paint and splashing it over everything indiscriminately.

So when I can look out the window and have my thought process arrested by the shimmering shadow of a tree, vibrating and undulating across the garage door of the house across the street, I celebrate. The part of who I am that is alive and well and joyful in each moment has come to the fore. With no conscious effort on my part, the melancholy dissipates. I have found my connection to God again.

Oh yes, and there is an added bonus to the leaves returning to the trees. It’s my birthday when they all come back, too. This year I turned 60.

A DAY IN MAY

Long's Peak
Today is Memorial Day, May 27, 2013. In my little patch of Colorado this day is starting with cool temperatures, blue skies, green grass, and the sound of my little dog lapping water from his bowl before he clunks through the dog door to bask in the sun on the patio.

My grandfather was a World War 1 veteran. Every Memorial Day he was able, he rode in the parade his little Ohio town held to celebrate victory and honor those who had fought and died for our freedoms. He was the last WWl veteran from his area, outliving every other survivor by several years. He never talked about his experiences, even when asked a direct question. To me he was a gentle soul. He taught me to love the rolling hills of southeastern Ohio, the little country fair held every September along the banks of the Muskingum River, and the quiet of the dusk as late afternoon became evening and then night.

I wonder sometimes whether he appreciated his tiny town roots all the more in his later life because he understood the cost of our way of life better than I ever will. His was “the war to end all wars,” yet for the rest of his life there was always war somewhere, hundreds of thousands of young men just as he had been, giving the ultimate sacrifice of their lives. It still goes on to this day.

My father didn’t serve in WWll because he had had TB as a boy. His scarred lungs made him unfit for military duty. He was also in his 30’s by the time the United States got involved in that war, but I am sure he felt guilt and frustration as he stayed home and lived a relatively normal life while so many of his friends went off to war. He was a strapping 6’ 5” healthy looking man. Did anyone ever confront him about his life?

My brother was the next generation confronted with a great war, the War in Vietnam. There wasn’t any choice about serving in the military at that time, the draft made that impossible. My brother received a scholarship to Union Theological Seminary in New York when he graduated from college. He went, and stayed to finish, at least partially because it gave him an exemption from the war.

Interestingly, his two roommates who went on to become very close friends for the rest of my brother’s life, were Vietnam vets. One man was on permanent disability because he had shrapnel in his back it might have killed him to remove, so it was left there. The other chose his path of faith precisely because he had survived unimaginable experiences in combat.

I think back now and remember that Vietnam vets were booed and spit on sometimes when they returned from war. They were the first to routinely leave the jungles of war and arrive within a day or two to “normal” life back in the United States. What was it like to be despised because you had served your country honorably in an extremely unpopular conflict? I read recently that Vietnam Vets make up some huge percentage of our homeless population. I think that is a very poignant testament to the destructive power of war, and a shameful one to the power of mass opinion.

Now young men and women the ages of my children are coming back from Iran and Afghanistan, many with wounds that don’t show on the outside. Traumatic brain injuries cause personality changes and behavioral complications medical science is just beginning to learn to deal with. PTSD ruins not only the lives of the vets, but traumatizes the lives of each family member and friend who loves that vet. Medical advances make it possible for so any more people to survive the kinds of wounds that would have been unsurvivable even a few years ago. It seems to me these vets aren’t coming back to a system prepared to help them deal with the consequences of what they have been through very well. It takes months and years to get help. Some of the help isn’t very effective.

My heart goes out to our vets. It is Memorial Day, a day to honor and celebrate these people for their service. A good thing seems to be happening in society these days, and I hope it continues to grow and evolve. People are rallying together to create supplementary and alternative healthcare practices that pick up where the VA leaves off, or isn’t able to offer support. Our consciousness is waking up so that no matter what your opinion may be about the politics of war, or your support or disapproval of our goals in other parts of the world, we seem to be agreeing on one thing.

The people who fight these wars are our friends and neighbors, or the family members of our friends and neighbors, or our own families. They are human beings with dreams and hopes and desires just like ours. Our vets deserve honor and recognition and support on every level. It is shameful to me as an American when I sometimes see them struggle to get the help they need, or when it is so hard for them to ask, or when a vet chooses living on the street as a primary way of life.

I hope I live long enough to see exactly what my grandfather may have thought he was helping to bring about as he fought in WWl. I hope I live to see the end of war as a way to resolve conflict in our world. I don’t just mean technological advances that make it so costly to engage in war that we don’t, like nuclear bombs, or terror so great it paralyzes a foe, but a true end to war. I may be a dreamer but I don’t want anyone to suffer any more like this. I don’t want lives shattered forever, or lost, because one side has different views than another.

I would like to live to see the day when Memorial Day is a day to remember the sacrifices of the past. I would like to see it as an honoring of what was, but is no more. I would like my children, and everyone’s children and grandchildren and all the generations to come, to truly live in peace. As John Lennon sang in his song, Imagine, I hope I live to see “the brotherhood of man.”

In the meantime I salute, and support, and honor each man and woman who has made my way of life possible by your sacrifice, your courage, your humanity. Thank you. God bless.

PAINT ON PAPER

Spiral
I’ve just returned from an extraordinary week of process painting in Taos, New Mexico. Two days before I left to drive down there from my home in northern Colorado, we had about ten inches of new snow. I was hoping the mountains in Taos would not be full of the remainder of that snow and make the driving tricky. It is May, after all.

For most of the week the sky was that magnificent New Mexico blue that comes from low humidity with fat, contented white clouds sprinkled here and there around the mountain tops and over the rooftops of the town. Only once did we get a real spring thunderstorm rumbling and crashing through one afternoon, beginning and ending over the course of a couple of hours. For a few minutes rainwater poured off the roofline of our painting studio before quickly disappearing, leaving the sage and juniper lush and fragrant in the temporarily humid air.

The Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos is a wonderful place to retreat and live in seclusion for eight days of hard work. Our group had a lecture on the nature of creativity and painting every morning with the creator of the process I find so brilliantly stirs my soul. Her name is Michele Cassou, and her process is all about living without rules. Of course there are some “suggestions” about what that means as it applies to paining, but the whole point is to try to free yourself from expectations and judgments enough to just paint for the joy of it. This turns out to be much harder than you might imagine.

The mind, it turns out, is not a happy camper without anything to grab onto. “Start by picking a color,” says Michele. “Just let the paintbrush find its way. Follow the line around. Creativity always knows where it wants to go. It will never let you down.” Oh my, so much easier said than done, I think.

The few days after I return home are full of insight. It seems as if my intuitive soul has been cleared and opened. I see subtleties of color in the awakening plants as spring spreads over the land around me. I hear the slightest emotion in the words people speak to me. I review the paintings done while I was in Taos, and remarkably the process seems to have picked up where I left off so many years ago. The imagery is no more or less colorful or descriptive, but I can see my own evolution as a person.

The process is ever so much more profound and deep even than therapy, and I’ve had hours and hours and hours and types across my life. It is ever so much deeper and quieter and gentler than what I know of religion.

I think I am beginning to understand the meaning of what she is saying when Michele suggests that this type of painting can be, and to her actually is, a spiritual path. What is “creativity” but the creative power of our life force flowing through us? And where does that come from, one might imagine. To me the answer is at once simple and profound. I did not give myself life. I do not sustain my own life, except to feed myself and do my best to keep myself healthy. There is a Power far greater than me at work. Even if I try to copy an image that appears in the painting of one of the other members of the class, the way it comes through me is different. Each of us is, indeed, unique.

“The Universe is benevolent,” Michele said to me one day in a workshop years ago as I was sobbing over something I had painted that brought up very deep feelings.

“Yes, it is,” I can say now. It doesn’t matter that some of what I’ve gone through in life has been hard to bear. It doesn’t even matter that some of life has been beautiful, or full of love. What matters to me is that I realize I am part of a greater whole. The fact that I can’t define it, or limit it, or put words to it leaves me in awe. To me this is proof of “things unseen.” The hand of God, in other words. I am so fortunate to have taken this workshop.

The drive home through the mountains in New Mexico is beautiful. Here and there snow still touches the tops of the peaks. I can wind down and enjoy the landscape before I hit an Interstate again. I can preserve the inner space that helps me remain open in the week that follows. I look forward to how this experience will continue to blossom in my life. I feel it at work, stirring and moving. “How will it show up?” I ask myself. I can’t answer that right now. I am only left with one certainty. All is well. No matter what is to come. All is well.

ORANGE-CHESTED ROBIN

Forest View

A large, orange-chested robin stands sheltered under the rear bumper of my neighbor’s car, looking out at the snow madly whirling and falling on this first day of May. The birds are chirping and calling and flying after each other in spite of the weather. I saw several earthworms roiling around in the shallow gutter water as I put my recycling out on the curb for pickup earlier. The ground is too warm for the streets to hold the snow, even as slush, but it is gradually building on the grass and trees. I think it would be rich pickings for the robins inspecting the puddles and gutters for breakfast.

Yesterday I flew home to Colorado from Oregon where spring is erupting everywhere in lush shades of green and the dogwoods and wild cherry and rhododendrons are blooming. My two friends and I were blessed with being able to hike some of the Columbia River Gorge with a medicine man from the Wasco tribe who is the husband of our mutual friend.

He is one of the last true wisdom-keepers, full of plant knowledge and the oral history of his people. He is one of the last of his tribe who can speak his language, he says, and he is forgetting because he has no one with whom to speak it. He pointed out all the wooden platforms along the river where Native Americans are still allowed to catch the salmon that come to spawn and take them as food. He also pointed out places that have been turned into parking lots where the elders used to sit and talk and dry the fish for winter food.

This is not knowledge of times past, but part of the legacy of the 20th century and how our government still treats the tribal members with whom treaties were signed shortly before Oregon became a state. Only very recently, he told us, has the state allowed the sovereignty of the Indians to be returned to them, and only in limited ways. These are not things publicized, but things he knows from living through them and seeing the changes with his own eyes.

“There were two longhouses there when I was a boy,” he points, showing us where, as we enter a box canyon along the river. The park service requires a permit to hike some of the areas he took us, but he is a native. They can’t require him. We saw a couple of magnificent waterfalls roaring over cliffs, their water so clean the foam is bright white and the water itself a tropical green.
“There is wonderful fishing in those pools below the falls,” he tells us. “The trout are huge and delicious.” He pointed out fish spawning in the rocks of the roaring streams. Brown trout so well disguised they matched the streambed perfectly, but he could see them. “They come up here in their third year and spawn” he told us. Then they go back to the river and the ocean. “They live for many years,” he tells us. “Not the five or six years they tell you in books.”

He is going to be 80 this year and I know he is going slowly so we can follow easily as he marches up the sides of mountains and along the switchbacks, but I have to dawdle and catch my breath here and there. He shows me a fern and removes a small frond from a clump growing along the cliff. “Here, take a little bite of this,” he says and hands me the frond with a fat, short root. I nibble a bit. It tastes like liquorice. He takes the frond and carefully plants it back among the others. He shows us wild celery and mugwort and red cedar. He knows all the plants and their medicinal and food uses.

He talks to the park service rangers he meets on his journeys. They consult him about the history of the land. He knows where the ancient petro glyphs are buried by rockslides caused by the earthquakes, and by the building of the railroads. He worked for the railroad for 36 ½ years. He points out the trout and fish in the streams way up in the mountains above the towering waterfalls to the park service rangers. “How did they get up here, so high?” they ask.

“That’s where the Creator put them,” he says, a look indicating the ignorance of the questioner crossing his face as he tells me this. He is at once a man of mystery, and complete practicality. Not only is the wilderness an alien land to me, but so is most of what we are walking through as we trail behind him. He brings everything into sharp focus, full of life. I regret my careless attitude. I label myself with one of my father’s favorite words, “ignoramus.” I see the land with new reverence. He is simply teaching me to respect the world so blithely ignored and discounted by the white settlers.

Outside the snow is still falling, smearing the trees with wet stripes and white snow on the windward side. I remember a story we were told about the grandfather of our medicine friend. He lived in the wilderness with a blanket and a couple of skins for warmth. Even as a very, very old man he stayed warm, fed, and lived in harmony with his Creator without any of what I consider essential for survival. I wouldn’t make it through the first blizzard, never mind a winter with what I know. Perhaps I should take a class…

CALLING GOD

Giant Tulip
There is a certain happy advantage to technology these days. I like to drive and talk out loud to God. Some people might think of this as praying out loud. I think of it as having a conversation with my Creator. I am grateful for cell phones when I’m stopped at a traffic light and glance over at someone in the car next to me only to catch them staring, perhaps because my mouth has been moving. I immediately think of people I would see talking to themselves in cars before the advent of cell phones. I instantly assumed they had to be a little coo coo. I mean who talks to themselves out loud without being a little coo coo?

I barely pay attention to anyone “talking to themselves” any more at all. Even the people walking down the street or in the grocery line next to me busily blabbing with someone on their headset has become simple to ignore. It’s easier for me to get away with my unusual habit and do it invisibly these days because of things like this. Lest you think I truly am “coo coo,” let me tell you I have a friend who reminds herself to “take God with her” wherever she is going by literally opening the passenger door of her car to let God enter, shutting it, and then going on her way.

We have shared a laugh or two over stories of people’s occasional peculiar reactions to seeing her do this. Doing things literally, like speaking out loud, or opening car doors, is a way to bring contact with God a bit more physically into this 3-D reality. In my mind, not unlike lighting candles or burning incense before we pray.

“Why on Earth would you want to do this?” you might ask.

“I don’t know,” I might answer. “Perhaps because it makes me feel better.”

I live by myself these days, except for my little yellow dog, Chippy, and sometimes his bigger, older sister dog, Mojo. While they are sweethearts of the first order and I love them dearly, they do not fill that space in me that longs for some deep and meaningful connection of a higher order. It’s a space that really isn’t ever even filled by friendships or family or bags of potato chips, though I’ve tried all three. It remains empty when I seek the rituals and dogma that soothed me in earlier times in my life, like going to church and the once comforting religious tenets I found there.

I want to know why I’m here, why I exist at all. I want to know what I’m supposed to be doing every day with my life, my health, my well-being. Surely I can’t be here just to sit in my house and wonder on a warm Saturday in early April. Surely who I am and what I’ve lived through could be helpful to my fellow human beings, somehow. On mornings like this when it’s so quiet the only sounds I hear are the ticking of the old clocks in my house and the hum of the refrigerator in my kitchen, I get a little frantic.

“Okay, God,” I say. “I’ve done my meditation and praying this morning. I’ve read some spiritually comforting pages, this morning. Right now, writing these words, is a kind of talking to you, too. What is it I should be doing today?”

The only thought that comes to mind is that it’s time to get out of the house. I put on my gym clothes and plan to head to the rec center. I won’t have much to say to God in the car, since I’ve spent a bit of time writing about all this just now. If I’m lucky, however, I’ll find the peace and quiet in myself to listen.

A bit of birdsong might drift through my open window and cheer me up. I might overhear a snatch of conversation when I get to the rec center that makes me think of a friend. A small child holding her mother’s hand as they walk by might look up at me and smile. Then I will know that my talking with God has been answered. I am where I am supposed to be, doing what I am supposed to be doing. It doesn’t matter what that looks like to anyone else. I’ll know I’m watched over, that I’m never alone. All is well, indeed.

SUNDAY BUZZ

Two Trees
It’s a beautiful, sunny, promising-to-get-very-warm early Easter Sunday at the very end of March in Colorado. The air has that watery, almost milky quality as I look out over the fields on my way home from the grocery. I had to dance my way through a cloud of ecstatic fuzzy, yellow-ochre colored bees swarming the Easter flower display smack in front of the doors, next to all the grocery carts.

There were lilies and tulips and hyacinth and daffodils, among others. It smelled wonderful to me, and even more obviously to the bees, who had discovered this treasure trove of flowers in an otherwise totally barren landscape of acres of parking lot, cars, and humans frantic to get in the store and get last minute food. Thanks to the bees, not very many people even glanced twice at the flower display with intent to buy.

I was intending to go to church this Sunday to see if I can find a spiritual community that even remotely fits my beliefs without glaring contradictions, like the subservient place of women in the church. Instead I went to a twelve step meeting to pick up the collection for my friend who is the treasurer and couldn’t be there today. Twelve-step lets you find a God of your understanding, but some part of me is yearning for that sense of belonging that long ago I found in the church of my upbringing.

I liked the granite walls and oaken pews of that church. I liked the stained glass windows and the voices of the choir as they stood in their beautiful robes and sang. My friend’s father was in the choir. He sang Tenor and was often in shows on Broadway. I liked the fact I knew the man singing the beautiful solos. The brass pipes of the organ filled the altar alcove below the huge multi-colored window that was the back end of the church. These things were as meaningful and comforting as any dogma I might have heard preached.

At Christmas this atmosphere was enhanced by the smell of the evergreen wreaths which hung from the heavy, dark wooden ceiling beams and the flicker of hundreds of candles that lined the aisle from the entrance of the sanctuary to the altar. It was a familiar place, full of families whose children I mostly knew. At Easter the altar was lined with hundreds of fragrant white lilies donated in remembrance of loved ones, both dead and alive. The choir and minister wore white; the congregation was clean, well-dressed, and colorful.

I talked to my shrink once about how much I liked that style of church and the sanctity it created for me. When I was in my early thirties I went back to the church, hoping to find that place again in my heart that I thought of as God-space.

“You’re not looking for God,” my shrink snorted with disdain. “You’re looking for your father.”

“Typical shrink,” I thought. “He’s really missed the boat.”

Yes, my father had died a few years before and I still missed him, but I knew I was looking for so much more.

Unlike my mother, whose gods were money and social status, my father had some real faith. We never really talked about “God” as such, but he moved through the world, lived a certain level of union with “All that Is,” that was and is the root of my own spirituality. He is probably why I have always been attracted to Native American spiritual traditions, and their earth-based, grounded realities.

My father was a commercial landscape architect. We lived on the northern edge of New York City where even fifty or sixty years ago there wasn’t much “wild” space left at all. When I was quite young, he would take me out to the eastern end of Long Island to the plant nurseries and tree farms to “help” him select plant material for his commercial jobs. All that open space has gone to summer homes for the mostly rich and famous now, but at that time was truly rural.

I loved putting the red marker tags on trees and bushes. I inhaled deeply the smell of the dirt and the tinge of salt in the air from the nearby ocean. At one farm I got to feed the mules still used to plow and haul loads around in wagons. My father took me sometimes to see a job when it was still just a foundation of a new building going in, and then took me back when it was done; a glass and steel box glinting in the sun surrounded by a park of flowers and grass and trees. To me it was magical, full of mystery. Even long after I understood his job and how that transformation of the landscape took place, it still felt magic.

I live in Colorado now, a state as full of rugged and wild natural beauty as anywhere I could choose to live. I’ve been to visit most of its most beautiful spaces and I have indeed become less of an urbanite than the first forty years of my life would indicate. If I am to be truly honest here, however, I consider myself more of a nature watcher than one who actually gets out into the real wilderness.

Living on a few acres of land and tending a couple of horses, driving all over the state to rodeos in teeny tiny towns out in the flatlands east of the mountains taught me a bit about a more rural life. The moon rising orange on the plains to the east and setting along the sharp crags of the Rocky Mountain’s “fourteeners,” moves my very soul. Here you can still see the Milky Way on a clear night, crossing an indigo sky. These things are “nature” to me.

I will always be, at least on some level, an urbanite and a New Yorker. Like the trees my father used to dig up and move to a new location to grow and thrive, it took a while for me to recover from the “shock” of leaving one home environment, and learning to adapt to a new home in Colorado. My spiritual search is taking me many new places these days, too.

I find myself envying those bees flying around the display of Easter flowers. There is no delicate, sweet scent reaching far across a tarred and barren landscape to call me home. All I have at the moment is a “still, small voice” gently tugging, tugging, tugging at my heart. Though gentle, it is a far stronger call in the end than a sweet scent. I’ve just got to keep moving.