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My Last Surgery Will Be a Lobotomy

I’m slated to have surgery soon on a particularly nasty fistula/hernia in a particularly unpleasant place (pelvis,butt). There’s a chance it won’t happen as I have an unusually nervous-about-lawsuits-PCP. She’s already expressed concern (liability risk) about my possible death on the table if she clears me. Sigh. While it’s frustrating (anger-producing) to have that possible decision in her hands not mine, a small part of me doesn’t actually care.

The irony here of course is the six-plus centimeters of bowel I sit on could blow open and kill me anyway even if I don’t have the surgery, but hey, I guess she’d feel vindicated! While I have spent several weeks fretting-and-stewing a good head of steam about it all, I’m beginning to be at peace either way. At least part of me is.

A New Medical Model

A few weeks ago I saw Dr Ezekiel Emanuel interviewed on a news show about a decision he’s personally made: to decline a good number of medical treatments and/or tests after hitting age 75. It sounded initially quite shocking to hear a world renowned oncologist and medical ethicist go public with his decision. But the more I think about it, the more understandable it might be, highly rational even!

Keeping people alive and doing whatever it takes, from carving up body parts to pharmaceuticals laced with life prolonging drugs is starting to feel crazier and crazier to me. I’ve had eight surgeries for a tumor that began in the rectum and traveled south to the anus, the body parts no one likes to mention. The whole problem began twenty-plus years ago though with far less invasive procedures. At some point however, and after two trans-anal surgeries, a zillion colonoscopies to scrape out double digit polyp growth, it had finally graduated to ever-greater proportions and invasions which, as night follows day, resulted in a permanent colostomy. The bag!!

After five years (which isn’t really all that long I suppose) of dealing with hernias and several complications such as a kinked colon, a skin separation that ended up with exposed flesh that then became necrotic (dead) and infected, etc. and now the worst complication of all in terms of discomfort and fright, there is a decision to make if not by my primary care doc, potentially by me. 

Expiration Dates

The lengths we go to in modern medicine to keep people alive is extraordinary and often wondrous. But it’s impressive and valiant efforts looking back seem more worthy of younger bodies sometimes. I’ll be 71 years old very soon and a part of me (if the decision is mine alone to make even) is inclined to let this ole’ animal let nature take its course. Dr Emmanuel’s cutoff is 75, I’ll be 71, both still arbitrary numbers.

I like to think in practical terms sometimes which can be disconcerting to many in the medical community. Most professionals are hard-wired to keep people alive. At whatever cost. While I too want to make prudent decisions to preserve life, including my own, at what point do we consider surrendering to the inevitable? And the inevitable for me does not include hastening death but does not include avoiding it either. I heard one doctor say that Medicare “requires keeping the patient alive.” I don’t know how it’s worded in the manual (do they have a manual?) but suffice it to say, we’re all caught between a perpetual rock-and-a-hard place loop of sorts.

(I told one of my doctors that I’ve had a “do not resuscitate” document signed for the past 10 years. He literally told me that in the OR, they’ll ignore it and try to resuscitate me anyway!)

Different Strokes for Different Folks 

My elderly friend Magie used to occasionally say to me “won’t this ever end?” She lived to be 96! My other elderly friend, Bennet, lived to be 94, which is nothing short of a miracle since he survived the holocaust which included several years of malnutrition (to put it mildly) while in the camps. But I think his drive to survive those years turned into an insistence on living well and long afterwards, a fierceness to go on with purpose and passion as an example of a different sort.

My role on the planet may be more nuanced. It may not require such heroic measures at all. Maybe, just maybe, letting the body run a natural decaying falling-apart course (which mine is clearly doing!) can also be an ethical example of not just choice or protocol but rather surrendering to the inevitable. I mean, come on!

Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t want to die at all, ever!! And actually because I believe in the eternal—of life before life as well as after death—my preference is to stay in this, oh-how-shall-I-put-this, “incarnation”. It’s all I know of me. But that does not mean there isn’t a “knowable me” in a different context, a different state of being. Just because I have no memory of existence other than the one I currently inhabit, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. How arrogant to think otherwise.

So I’m in a state at the moment that seems uncertain, to have this next abdominal surgery or not; to have doctors decide based on their best interests or mine. However it plays out, if the surgery does occur, I know one thing for sure it’ll likely be my last, or at least second to last. Unless of course there’s a lobotomy in the offing! I’d consider that!

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Learning Is As Learning Does

Good God! What a year, what a lifetime. In so many ways I’ve been incredibly blessed throughout. Trouble in the Middle East and what feels at times like a narrow escape out of it. Surviving my dysfunctional family of origin with reasonable wit, occasional depression, and believe-it-or-not optimism (which at times seems like a friggin curse!) A dozen moves in childhood that left me feeling nestless!

Fast Forward To Now

So here we are, here I am, entering 2023 with a bang or a whimper. I can’t decide what mood to settle on, instead lurching uncontrollably back and forth between the two states.

I won’t lie; I could but what would be the point?! I’ve always been too transparent even to myself. I’ve had a hard road these last few years with health issues, surgeries, occasional “ah ha” moments followed by self-doubt and dare-I-say again, optimism! At heart, I am a forager for the puzzle. And the lesson!

Why won’t it leave me alone; that pesky perverted instinct or drive to unmortify things, look for the lessons regardless of emotional states I inhabit, contained within an insatiable hunger to learn? I insist on looking for what I need to know. If I can’t find it initially, I wait (sometimes patiently, sometimes not.) Occasionally, I make it up, inventing a lesson, however small, until a greater insight arrives. I’m just that restless, driven.

What on earth do other people do with their heads if not trying to figure out what things are for, from personal and world events to good and bad people, triumphs or tragedies alike? What their meaning is to them subjectively or not, that deeper meaning? Growth is everything, why else would we be here?

Everybody Loves Raymond

I’ve been mainlining Everybody Loves Raymond recently for comic relief; you know, that sitcom of years ago that replays on one of the streaming channels. There’s so much wisdom besides insatiable humor, in most of the episodes. One I recently saw had the little girl Ally asking her dad (Raymond) why does God send us to earth? Why do we come here? Let that hang in the air for a second.

Of course Raymond, being the perpetually struggling simpleton that he is, actually has the most amazing and uncanny ways of learning himself, whether it’s through his wife, Deborah, or flat out events that demand he address issues in some way by their very existence, all by himself like a big boy. It seems he’s helpless on his own, but with the help of others (ding, ding, ding) including his family, which is dysfunctional as any in America, serves as the grist for helping him along to new insights, one way or the other.

When he goes to Deborah, the insight seems simple but profound. She tells him God just wants us to be with other people, to not be alone. Implied in that of course is the very earth school that is serving Raymond through Deborah in the whole crazy clan of his family. The metaphor is apt in the comedy and also apt for everyone’s individual life contained therein, subtle and obvious both.

All In This Together

Everything I see in the world around me is about growth, death, regeneration, and furthering more growth (evolution perhaps??) but all from learning some nugget, a component atom in the larger molecular structure of the small and big Self and the community it lives in. From a plant as a simple expression to holocaust survivors or the war in Ukraine; from the bottom of the food chain to the top. But always, always within the context of others.

My Own Classroom

Having been blessed to know a Survivor, and write about his life, Bennet mirrored that from his experience. One of my favorite speakers is Esther Perel. Both of her parents survived the Holocaust, which, of course was only but brilliantly the ginormous earth curriculum that they “grew up out of.” 

Perel describes other survivor friends of her parents, after creating new lives post-liberation, chatting about their concentration camp experience minus the drama of the tragedy but within its milieu. Instead, their intuition was to glean their own sustenance from it to forge new individual selves, transcending it, knowing somehow, some way they are greater than the sum of its parts, as a tribe which by definition includes “together.”

An Uncanny Therapy

In the very act of asking one another things like ‘whatever happened to so-and-so’ from camp ‘such-and-such’, their experiences become unmortified from the larger tragedy itself. While their experiences were gigantically large, I have my own Rosalie lessons as paltry as they seem in comparison, but included in an environment of people parts (as well as body parts.)

Fast Forward the Physical

My body challenges have surely demanded I pay attention to and learn what I need to know to grow emotionally, psychologically, but especially spiritually. It is my curriculum if you will, but too often have resisted. How many times have I spouted this little mantra while actually living from that belief and heavy identification of mySelf as “the body,” and therefore separate from others. My belief in “others as teachers” is heavily challenged.

For whatever reason, I am faced with more bodily breakdown, decay and surgeries, and cannot help but intuit this remains an opportunity for learning something I need to see but have heretofore denied.

The Excitement of the Drama 

It doesn’t need to be so hard, but we—I— insist on having tragedy even in the face of incredible gifts, because we—I—misunderstand the purpose and value of things including tragedy. Tragedy as well as comedy is a learning device. Just ask Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy can surely attest to. It (the war) may be couched in an oversized drama, but his drive to transcend it is clear, palpable. It is preceded by comedy, his earlier life’s work, but for whatever reason, a different “energy field” of tragedy has been required for him.

And so in an odd way, like Ally, Raymond, Zelenskyy, Holocaust survivors—pick a category—my seeming tragedy of yet more body breakdown is no tragedy at all. Nor is it a comedy either. It simply serves as a learning device, a vehicle for communication. Instead, it strikes me as I am greater than the sum of any of my individualized body parts. If I believe I am spirit as the real me—I must view “me” through the whole of those folks I know and love…and sometimes even those I don’t. Whenever I ultimately do leave the planet, I’m not hauling this body thing along with me. Rather, I will be in a field of spirit—not woo woo, mind you—but from that field of love which is the only true “me” there can be.

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All Of A Sudden

How is it that one can feel such gratitude in a moment followed by immense sorrow? The whole slow leak of a body, and dare I say, perceived sense of human spirit, is almost interesting when you just observe it. And yet to be swallowed in a moment’s mood can be equally disorienting, confusing. 

Is the body’s slow disintegration a glorious opportunity to reflect, refine, recover from one’s earthly errors? Can it be that it’s golden in the very fact of mature preparation for one’s earthly departure? I simply cannot know at this juncture.

REFLECTION IS AS REFLECTION DOES

What I do know is that for me at least, reflection is unavoidable when backed into a proverbial corner. How others approach their own valuations of a life, I cannot know. But for me, it nags at times, insisting on some sort of owning and accountability. While I’d really rather not do it, somehow it seems unavoidable.

“Don’t look away” my spirit whispers. How horrible and wonderful I see I’ve behaved at times. How complex the “human” experience is. Or should I say how complex the soul’s expression is in having a human experience!

Are repeated lifetimes a mere opportunity for growth? Can earth school afford such incredible opportunities? A nun once told me the early Church used to “believe” in reincarnation, but then later scrapped it for the concept of Purgatory. 

While nearly disbelieving, I looked it up and low and behold, Platonic Christians early on incorporated a belief that included physical rebirth as part of spiritual rebirth. For me, a continuation of a soul in some “form” is wholly consistent with everlasting life. How could it not be?

AND YET

We humans are such literalists in so many ways, trapped in duality — a this OR a that — is a mental juggernaut. It seems we have been binary thinkers long before computers. And regardless, of what the rightness of one’s chosen belief system is, I’ll leave it to the great beyond to inform me later where the truth actually lies.

In the meantime, an accounting or reflection of a life is what is most valuable to me and dare I say, inescapable. How others live “on the inside” I do not know. What seems important is to take responsibility for and learn from one’s errors in life. But this process does not include condemnation, rather must include reflection, forgiveness and an “aha” opportunity to see more clearly— a pathway out of seeing “at first dimly but then face to face.”

AND SO I SIT

And so I sit in this discomfort, reflecting on a life where I have made errors, accounting for those I’m prepared to see, forgive and forgive again without condemnation but instead, transcend to a greater understanding. In the end of course, the process for me includes sorrow, an “I did not know any better” perception that resulted in pain inflicted on myself and others. As my old friend Bennet used to say, “I did the best I could.” Or put another way, I didn’t know any better at the time!

It seems a mature regret is what is warranted, nothing more. After all, if I “crucify myself,” savage myself for not knowing better, is that not incompatible with compassion and forgiveness so prevalent in the New Testament, Jewish and and other Eastern traditions?

Whether I live 20 more minutes or 20 more years (highly unlikely,) it seems inescapable that sorrow and gratitude can coexist as part of this reflection, this accounting. How else can meaningful recompense occur? Yet the sorrow must be transcended in the end. 

The body, this communication device, this temporary container for the soul, is a miraculous machine when working well, one we take for granted. But I have come to believe in the weirdly divine gift of its slow demise as well, one that facilitates reflection and accounting however messy it may be.

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Stumbling Towards Nirvana

When I was a little girl, I remember playing under an evergreen tree with the lower canopy that allowed for a teepee-like experience. I even imagined (or remembered?) being a squaw in a previous life. Actually, it is not relevant whether it was imagined because the essence of the experience was that of serenity, solid and complete.

STATE OF BEING

There are moments in life when you know there’s something else going on, tangible but ineffable. It is not just in the most intimate recesses of what you believe yourself to be, it is outside of you as well. This awareness is pervasive and infinite, an atmospheric river. Most importantly, it is love-saturated, a palpable, crackling calm yet energetic field of seeming potential. 

I am inclined to know this state is the reality of our being. It is reliable yet all-too-often fleeting in its awareness. So much of our lives, at least my life, has been on the physical plane. But I have constantly been drawn back like a homing device to the other state, the real one, in various forms. I am both helpless yet helped in the process of the return.

Many people call it God or the Presence. It can go by a lot of different names but suffice it to say, the overarching definition is beyond one’s small self, limitless. It is the certitude that there is something greater than a small self, that one has no power over yet participates with as an individual cell contained therein.


WHAT’S IN A NAME

I remember when working with Bennet Mermel, my holocaust survivor friend—cantor, atheist, believer in a different way—and us arguing periodically, about the existence of God. I think it was the name that tripped him up, and all the baggage it implies. Why the Old Testament lets humans name things is beyond me but such is one of our traditional beliefs. With the naming of things comes an implied assigned meaning that is fixed. 

Naming invites us to think we have some sort of power (not to be confused with responsibility) over the thing itself which is absurd of course on the face of it. I laugh at myself that I ever had this argument with Bennet, he being one of the best examples I’ve ever met of a human contradiction—that tension between the physical and the etheric plane.

THE ZONE

In the end of our back and forth, Bennet did tell me that he believed there was something greater than himself. I think he called it nature if I remember correctly. Vividly, I recall watching and hearing him sing as was his nature. Not only was his voice stunning, but I was witness to what Jamie Wheal would call flow or zone. Bennet would be smack dab in the middle of that zone when he sang, hitting the center of the note like a laser drawn to a tractor beam.

Regardless of what we humans name it, it is a state where there is unadulterated awareness of the cessation of time, even physicality. The transcendence of form is in the background yet pervasive. I was aware in my imagination under the lower canopy of the fur tree of that zone, much like I witnessed Bennet when he sang. And while there have been other times I’ve inhabited the zone, they are not frequent. Rather, they come unbidden, as if by accident yet not.

LETTING GO

In the end, I gave up trying to convince Bennet of the existence of God. While that was my instinct to finally let it go, it wasn’t until after he died that I knew for a fact, a fact mind you as reliable as gravity, that it was the semantics that were the problem not the experience itself. He knew it by another name. He couldn’t help but operate in the field, the zone by another name.

Bizarrely, there are moments in time that are outside of it. Some people discover it through ritual or traditions. Some people stumble on it by being on holy ground, in nature, around art, or even something as mundane as waiting for a train. Others by hitting the center of a note while singing. Songbirds know! Still, others experience it while looking at a daisy. Or into the eyes of a cow.


STATE OF CHANGE

How much time I wasted trying to convince Bennet of a noun confused by our conflicting definitions. Ah, the arrogance of the ego! Yet, I remain grateful beyond measure for his voice, his arguing, his insistence on expressing it and in the only way he knew. The pristine quality through his singing was his witness, not all its man-made baggage and assumptions. It was the state he understood, the energy of something greater than himself that facilitated his very act.

The world is currently on a precipice, with so much strife everywhere. So many traditions and institutions are failing us, a critical mass buildup of disintegration witnessed in the current moment. Yet it is only a moment. While all that which has seemed reliable in the past is no longer so, there is an opportunity for reinvention that transcends the moment—not just by renaming things but by creating new paths through imagination, and discovery.

All this is true on an individual level as well as a communal level, from the micro to the macro and back again. It’s kind of funny that Bennet keeps teaching me things he professed to not believe in, even beyond the grave! It is a Grace, one of those mysteries of the living and the dead, in and out of time. Nameless and waiting.

SHIFTING

At some point as a species we will have to surrender our perceptions of supremacy and arrogance though not responsibility. So many old thought patterns and ideas have become extinct. It is time for us to put on our big boys and girls pants and grow up! Humility is the primary vehicle in that turning, just as much as a maturing, playful confidence in ourselves and our own creativity with internal and external exploration.

How all this turns out is anyone’s guess. Between Jaime Wheal’s stunning work in Recapture the Rapture, as well as others research that is pivotal, an emerging potential for devising new ways of living, reinventing rituals, institutions and relationships, there is a promise for unlimited discovery and definition. One thing is for sure: we will not be going backwards, any more than the dinosaurs could! 

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Oh To Go A Hiking

Christmas 2021

(For Sam & Lauren, with Love)

My son and daughter-in-law love to go hiking, particularly in areas that have lots of trees. Redwoods are of great interest and grab Lauren’s heart in particular. While I think Sam’s draw to hiking is also about the trees, I sense it includes elevation, providing sweeping vistas to the Pacific Ocean and beyond.

When I was much younger—and fit—I used to love to hike and run in the woods. Living much of my adult life in Iowa before moving to California more than two decades ago, there were fewer trees and certainly no Redwoods. Growing up in Michigan, however, the land was peppered and clotted with firs and pines. To this day, the fragrance of evergreens restores me to something primal, pure, even spiritual.

As a child, some of my deepest experiences and memories restore instantly some fibrous ingredient to my soul, like wood pulp to tree trunk strength, a venous stalwart delivery system feeding my very core. There is a quality about nature, at once essential, restorative, binding to all life.

A memory from age five renders such an evocative energy and life force. Our family was renting a cottage on Indian Lake, a vacation spot in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It was a short distance from Manistique where we would move in a few months once our home was purchased and readied for move-in. 

It was winter, cold and thick with snow but I was safe and warm inside, though still longing for the out-of-doors. As I gazed through a foggy window to the thick woods across the road, I thought I saw a bear making its way through the branches. I felt startled yet envious, close to fearfulness yet safely tucked inside, buttressed by a longing to be out among the trees as well.

Even now just relating this experience brings the longing back, wishing for an instant transport to the vapors that are at the core of the physical expression of pine, mammal, and the drive to some sort of movement to a nameless and unseen destination operating as a homing device.

Transfixed, I felt helpless to extricate my interior emotion from that visual field for a time. At some point the bear was no longer in view. I have no idea how long this observation happened in minutes, maybe even seconds. But there are experiences in nature that are timeless, that enrich our lives, refueling an unstoppable forward momentum when time seems to have slowed or halted altogether.

Hiking for me (and likely my son and daughter-in-law) is such a mechanism for all of it, whether internally described for themselves or not, where this nurturance on One Strange Rock aptly named Mother Earth resides. And while I still walk a lot these days, it’s rare I’m free to do much of it in the ruggedness of nature; rarer still to do it in my physical condition. So when Lauren and/or Sam “go a hiking” I am reverent at their very act while also envious I’m unable to participate with the mechanical breakdown of an aging body. 

Still, Lauren and Sam’s pictures take me back, even if just a little, to that all important whispered fragrance that fuels and propels us all magnetic-like to the divine, to our very source. And I feel resurrected if even for an instant. It is a kind of Grace, one I do not take for granted.

photo by Lauren Mendelsohn

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This Thing Called Hope

What be this thing called hope, this state? To wander back-and-forth between hopelessness and hopefulness, why at times it feels as crazy as the mad hatter in Alice in Wonderland. It is amazing how it seems to swing so slowly for a period. Yet at others, it lurches uncontrollably in staccato fashion between the two states. 

THE NATURE OF LIGHT

We sit confined, in a prism of our making. Yes, that’s the correct word: prism. Besides the traditional definitions of refractive light, the case I make for the word thusly is, “prisms can be made from any material that is transparent to the wavelengths for which they are designed…prisms can be used to reflect light, or to split light into components with different polarizations.” These latest words depict a state of both a claiming and rejection of elements of ourselves, as well as the implied polarization that is its consequence.

We will not always be home-bound. At some point we will be set free to roam the social gathering places, like gazelles to a watering hole but will not feel the same. For many, it may pale in comparison to the interior depths of ourselves we have plumbed during confinement, finding solace and comfort in a more authentic manner with those we hold most dear, including our own hearts. 

THE TEMPORARY IS JUST THAT

For others, being let loose will provide only temporary thrills, acknowledging a lack of appetite for the shallow and trite, intoxicating though it may be for a time. Somehow freedom to wing-spread will undergo a new definition, an acknowledgment of sorts. Given enough lack of interior sustenance they will begin to miss what began in their heretofore home-bound state, that unnamed itch for growth that has been awakened.

There will be those that carry on as if nothing has altered their perception of the world (and those in it), behaving like drunken sailors and raucous wenches, repressing the recent sting of social isolation, only to behave as before. Yet a seed will have been planted for future enlightenment, ripening once they have germinated long enough, whether in this lifetime or the next. 

ITERATIONS

Regardless, many things will be redefined, restructured and changed, for a quality left to the living will capture enough people’s imaginations to speak it, to live it differently. The “it” is that intangible and beneficent regard for others that acknowledges the depths of connections we all share as a species, regardless of malvescence by some, dependent on heroism by others. Those that have harmed the herd will endure accounting of it, there is no doubt. But with any luck, the subtle change in the refracted light of our better selves will triumph with enough heat and pressure of the current moment. 

And it is this process, the evolution of us as individuals and groups, having come out the other side to a new order of things that hope births. I see glimmers of it already: in nurses, doctors, deliverers of goods and services, in some public servants, and in the ordinary of us carrying on, socially isolating not just for ourselves but for the good of the whole. We KNOW inherently these acts are “in the service for more than us, they are for others too.”

THE PENDULUM SWINGS

Many will not be able to see this change but more folks likely will than not. Of that I am confident, hopeful even, regardless of the human, political and social “infection” we will have survived. Or because of it? While it may not be loud, there will be evidence. There already is in fact, in that subtle shifts are visible in the compassion shown by some media leaders, medical individuals interviewed, common neighborhood helpers and many ordinary people. The angry ones, the bitter and noisy gong people, critical and venomous will pale in comparison.

Not all moments seem to call for hope. There are times that call for despair, and we will have experienced the state far too often during this pandemic. Yet despair can be temporary at best, ultimately fostering hope from which emerges a slow but sturdy light refracted from the prism. After all, we do know why the caged bird sings.

AND SO MUST WE

And so we stand on the edge of sorrow and joy, despair and hope with the intuition that there will be better days, better angels and greater things to come. 

For we are not just refracted light. We are reflected light as well, created from a nature that in the end claims us all. Whether one believes in the divine or not, nature has its way with life, always continuing onward. Groaning though we may be in the current morass, hope is greater than even itself for it reflects something more. Out of it springs a faith in things unseen, of the promise by and for the living; for life ongoing forever after.

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Covid-19 Rising

I sit here on a gloomy-stew Sunday, just me and the rain. It continues to feel like such a surreal existence, the social distancing, the subtle fear of others—could they have “it” or could I infect them, crossing my mind all too frequently. The odd wariness of people, be they strangers or even friends, it’s disconcerting, but a near curiosity nonetheless.

KEEP YOUR DISTANCE

Through no fault of their own, everyone is suspect, including myself. The rain makes me think the earth is weeping for us. But maybe not out of sadness. Maybe just maybe, it’s a way to cleanse the world and metaphorically, us in it. How many mistakes we  humans make. If I wasn’t so personally involved and engaged in the whole pandemic, from a distance it presents as a puzzle, curiosity about the human race, however briefly. Oh, the folly of us.

It’s impossible not to judge although as quickly as I do, I try desperately to chastise myself for doing it. I watch people walk around without any protection, though not too many of them, and marvel at governors who still don’t have statewide orders to social distance. They are making an assumption because they only have four people in the state who are infected, that they are exempt from tragedy somehow. Oh, the folly of human thought. And the arrogance.

I LOVE ME WHO DO YOU LOVE

Arrogance is as arrogance does, or so they say. So too ignorance, and too many Americans, certainly suffer from it. Sadly, both conditions are part of the human experience, part of each of us in unequal measure. We either think we know best, think nothing bad will ever really seriously happen to us, or believe in wacky political ideas that are naive at best, nefarious at their worst. 

Then there’s the greed and selfishness of people hoarding, sometimes out of downright fear I realize, but all too often out of a belief system that “I’ve got to get mine so I won’t lose out” mindset, strutting their behavior like terrified peacocks. I, I, I! It is the bane of our existence.

COVID-19 RISING

They say the next couple of weeks could be very grim with the contagion spreading like wildfire, infecting many more people, with a rising death toll as a result. It will be an uneven contagion no doubt, much like it has been to date. Still, there’ll be some in disbelief, denial. Still there’ll be people who think it’s a conspiracy, some absurd plot. For what end? What global purpose? Remarkably we still live in an age of the superstitious. Still!

And so we soldier on, trying as we might, to protect ourselves as best we can from “the others” be it person or germ. What lesson is it that we must individually and as a collective learn? What spiritual, ethical and social nugget have we yet to break open and discern? Can it result in a “dear God please let us be better than our former selves, please let us think of our brothers, please let us have compassion and caring,” at least those of us who are capable of it. To expand that intent and cover, not just this nation in an atmosphere of love, but indeed the entire world, is our mandate besides the practical behaviors we all must exercise. 

If only…

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Out of Sight, Out of Mind

COMFORT

At two and a half, without completely understanding it, I was already heavily identified with the body. Of course I didn’t really know what that might mean. I, Rosalie, was a little person. There were other bodies in my family: my mother, my father, an older sister and a baby sister a bit younger.

I really only have two significant memories or memory shards below the age of five. One was of myself playing in a little sand pile outside our backyard, with toy cars and trucks on an imaginary town or ranch I created. I loved to invent the storyline of me driving around on roads in a truck. Oh, the freedom of it. I’m not even sure where I got the idea of a ranch, maybe from a little story book? or maybe having an imprint from going with mother past farms? Regardless of where it came from, it existed and for some inexplicable reason, it brought structure, organization and inventiveness to my world.

And the sun. I was always aware of light—bright, bold, effervescent light!

Why this memory sticks in my mind at all is mysterious, other than to say the ?????? also included a sense of something else that existed: nameless, peaceful, reassuring, warm. It was more reassuring and peaceful even than my mother although I had a strong impression she contained a solid measure of those qualities. 

But this is from the rearview mirror. Regardless, naming it at the time was not relevant. All I knew was that I felt the scene’s quiet power. It was carried by the sun’s light and heat, existing in the space both within my being and outside of it, separated only by a thin but potent membrane. I was aware of this otherness through not only light and sunshine but also nature, other physical elements of the world. 

Light seemed to be a primary delivery, however, communicating in a wordless language. And as much as I knew anything, it was my first crude memory of a sense of being cared for, by protection that was massive even beyond my mother but included her too. I’d be tempted to call it love with a capital L, maybe Divine, but I knew of no such construct then.

CONFUSION

The other significant memory occurred at around two and a half. I had a lump on the side of my right eye, near the temple. I think my mother had been fretting about it for quite some time. As it happens, she took me to an eye doctor and it was confirmed to be a cyst, a reasonably benign protrusion, harmless in and of itself. While I didn’t understand that at the time, I had a sense of no real danger. If anything, I had an awareness it was of more concern to my mother, which stands in stark contrast to her otherwise unflappable demeanor. 

I was told this particular cyst was problematic because of its location. Internally, it was pressing on my optic nerve and had the potential to compromise vision in that eye. Okay. But events overtook any crude understanding I had of the situation. One morning my mother led me by the hand, purposefully, walking across a large lobby. Bizarrely, I remember her walking quickly. This is bizarre in that it was out of character for my mother to do anything quickly. It simply was not her style—for walking, working, or anything else. Normally her gait was slow, methodical, determined, anything but quick. I’m assuming she had some sense of urgency about this little trip to the doctor’s office. This perception was new information for me.

The next part of the memory is hazy. I remember being in a little room, my mother speaking with the doctor, and him talking to her, then me. But I didn’t understand what either of them were telling me, not really. The best I can cobble together is of her saying I was to have a little procedure. She may have used the word procedure, surgery, etc. I cannot say. What I best remember was that I had to come back to have the cyst taken out.

IT’S NOT NICE TO TRAUMATIZE SMALL CHILDREN

Whether the procedure was the next day or a week later I do not know. Regardless, at some point I found myself again being led by the hand across a lobby and into a small room. Mother tried to explain that I had to stay overnight in the hospital, though I don’t really recall. What I do recall is a gauzy image of her trying to comfort me, that “everything will be fine” once the cyst was gone. She also swears she had explained more about what was to happen, that my eyes would be patched after the surgery but it would be temporary. Did I know what Temporary was?

All description about this cyst and the resultant eye surgery has likely been reinforced over the years while my mother was alive and throughout my childhood when I would bring it up. Even in my young adult years, I would question her about the event, all in an effort to understand why this was so upsetting to me even years later. 

The only reason I questioned her was because I had a lingering fright and even greater confusion as to the event’s meaning, along with the actual events themselves. Memory is a funny thing, the perception of a very small child in particular. It gets filtered through limited language and even less comprehension, as to its meaning. Perception by definition is distorted and memory further distorts what was initially perceived.

THE TURNING

There are two aspects, scenes really, mother could never explain, memories that she was not physically present for. After leaving me in the hands of a nurse the day of the procedure, the nurse put a little nightgown on me. Then she took me to a large room that was very, very cold. There was a lot of light in that room but I swear, even the light was cold. This was NOT like the light experienced in the sand pile. It was its opposite! The nurse helped me onto a very cold table while trying to explain what was to happen.

I recall a man—the doctor?—coming over to the table and saying a word or two. None of what he said do I recall. Rather, the scene is fixed like a cartoon character’s “wha-wha” description from Charles Schultz’s Snoopy before he leaves, goes over to the other side of the room to what I think must have been a sink. The nurse at my side whispers something to me and all goes black.

BLINDSIDED

The next thing I remember is waking up in a bed and screaming. Desperately. Both of my eyes were covered, thick patches obliterating sight, even light! I continued screaming even after a nurse came in and tried to shush me. I thought the doctor had removed my eyes! How would I navigate the world? I was terrified and would not be consoled. 

Evidently, the nurse tried to explain my eyes were there, they were just covered to protect them after the operation. Regardless, I had no faith in what she said because all I knew was that I could not see, believing instead there were no eyes to see from. Distorted as it may have been, my fast conclusion was to rely on myself and not anything she was telling me.

The hospital must have called my mother because I was told later that I kept screaming until she came, that no one else could calm me. How mother convinced me my eyes were still there I couldn’t tell you. I don’t remember her words but I do remember her energy. My mother was never a very affectionate woman but she was calm, reliable, steadfast, to be counted on. I knew that even then as sure as I knew there was a sun and a moon. But there was a change, palpable and real, in how I perceived her and more importantly, myself. A kind of doubt crept in. It was about the world and me in it. 

WHAT YOU THINK YOU SEE IS NOT WHAT’S THERE

At some point I go home. The patches have been removed. I can see again but there is a difference in what it is I think I see. While everything looks the same, my perception has changed, my understanding of what I can count on is off kilter. I am told I have to go back in a week or two to have stitches removed which seems like such a small thing at this point. 

I suppose one could draw all kinds of conclusions from this traumatic event for a very small child. Without entirely realizing it, however, perceptions occurred in my little brain as a consequence of all that had come before. The first was that my mother was cemented in my mind, and I suppose my heart, in her reliability, her constancy. After the surgery, however, the gravitational pull of her felt weakened and, in a turn, the gravity of her love and protection changed, modified somehow. My impression now included some inexplicable need to look to my small self for verification of the world and all things in it.

The second was that I firmly believed—without knowing I believed —the brightness of the sun had dimmed, was remote in a way that turned me into a separate “me” and less connected to that brightness as if I had been cast off from it. A sense of separateness and on my own had replaced the previous feeling of connectedness. No notion of a greater Other existed as comprehensively as the impression I previously held from the sand pile days, and of mother! It was a kind of grief I didn’t understand. Though not completely gone, it would be some years before I felt that powerful presence, and 50-plus years before I recontextualized my life.

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Quiet

How hard it is to stay quiet. Sometimes, I’ve become aware of fearing the very thing I crave. This morning when I was doing my meditation ritual, a sliver of sunlight insisted on showing itself through the olive tree branches in front of my window. All was quiet. I was aware of it, it being a kind of willing participant in silence. Actually, the longer the light pierced the leaves, the more aware I became.

Power and Light

I became immersed in a natural, diffuse yet potent quality that was far more definition of me than all the other personality traits I insist on clinging to. My sense of self was part of the field, a member of the whole which revealed itself. I was essential. As my awareness expanded through the quiet, not only did it feel organic, I also began to associate a sense of home to it.

Home is a funny thing. As mammals, we have such a physical need for nesting, over-associating a sense of comfort and security with physical space in which we reside. But the sense of quietness as home, maybe even womb-like, is different.

The Pull

There is something unique, inexplicable and indistinct that draws me to quiet. The phrase “moth to a flame” comes to mind. Quiet is both a lure and a disorientation. It carries with it a subtle fear of extinction. Scientists believe moths are drawn to light when their navigational systems become disrupted, leaving them confused and disoriented. And yet, drawn in they must be, even at risk of death, of which they cannot really know. There is something inevitable suggested in eventual death and transformation. Yet who rushes to it.

For me, as time slowed and I entered the subtle perception of a difference of being, it struck me as I, too, had become disoriented, though for a time, I seemed powerless to resist. Continuing, I rode the wave to its peak.  Up to a point! For a time, it was certainly worth the risk. Of what? Of the fear of losing my previously assumed sense of self, of what I’ve defined myself to be in mortal earth terms? In a flash, I had awareness that quiet is sourced from a different dimension, the quality of the Divine. It is outside of time and even space once you really settle into it. And therein lies both the comfort and the fright.

To Be or Not To Be

Quiet suggests a fright that is both compelling and repelling. Sometimes I just cannot stand all the noise of the world and must escape. At times even, quiet contains a whisper of ultimate freedom yet one with an eventual loss of a sense of self as I have previously been defined. Quiet presents the ultimate conflict because I both want to lose that sense of self which is purely fiction and an architecture of my own ego’s creation, as well as maintain the very fiction I have made. What am I if not my sense of self definition? While I personally believe I reflect an expression of God, I have gone about my physical existence segregated from that belief all too often.

If God exists as the silence, as pure potentiality as some scientists and theologians believe, then there actually seems to be no definition whatsoever other than potential expression as defined by… What? Me? A conscious human being that has been blessed to be born a human like the Buddha suggests, being endowed with the raw ingredients from which to evolve into greater consciousness? If God has created all things as expressions of his potentiality, which is infinite, He is everywhere and nowhere. He is both alpha and omega, beginning and end, over and over again.

 Context is Everything

He/She/It spins out a potential within a context, be it inanimate or animate, be it a life form, a liquid or a solid. What a sense of creative joyful play He must have! He gives each thing parameters, a context in which to further develop and continue his initial creation, active participants, a sort of “God thinned down” within, to carry on what He begat! Each thing carries the torch of ongoingness. One of the problems with us humans—and of me— is that we think we have done it all. That pesky ego we have been endowed with, an outgrowth of animal evolution, presumes to think we are the creators of ALL of our own lives instead of realizing we are merely stewards of His raw ingredients. We are so very arrogant!

But back to quiet. Quiet is both a whisper and a thunder, a lure and a resistance. At times I crave it whether I’ve cultivated it or stumbled into it by Grace. Regardless, I cannot ultimately stay away. The noise of the world becomes a pressure cooker after a time, one that requires a release of steam. Plus, I know in the quiet resides a real “me” to be rediscovered!

So of course I continue on, alternating between quiet’s pull to its very fright. At the end of the day, it makes no matter whether I understand or try to define it. Ultimately, I acknowledge the reality of creation and the rules that guide it are not up to me. Rather, I am aware of being a kind of project manager, a steward of gifts given me by a Source greater than I can truly comprehend. At the end of the day, I must surrender to a power greater than myself to follow the light of Home, that flame that calls us all, whether inside or out of time. It is the ultimate peace.

 

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Chafing Against The Constraints Of Earth School

I swear, I don’t know which is worse: to lose vital functioning body parts or to lose one’s memory and therefore mind. I’d say they both pretty much suck! And if that sounds indelicate, too bad. You’ll just have to get over your proper, persnickety selves. Yes, I’m in a kind of a funk today, and all too often, too many days. I can be an Eeyore like the best of them. Just keeping it real.

Sometimes it’s hard to keep a sense of humor or to have a whole lotta Grace in the face of either intermittent, ongoing pain, or the inability to do simple functions I used to be able to do like go for a walk without the aid of hiking poles or a walker. I have come a long way and can even walk short distances on my own, but I cannot sustain it throughout the day without pain.

Pullease

 And I must say, it really frustrates me to hear someone complain about what seems to be, in relative terms, a little ache, a little pain, the equivalent of a hangnail or a papercut. Now, I know that when I am in this kind of a mood I not only do not want to stay in it long, even though I indulge myself. Just as importantly, I can guarantee I will end up laughing at myself. It never lasts (although I sure seem to circle back to it.)

But sometimes I get stuck. It is hard to have the body continually deteriorate bit by bit, body part by body part—this otherwise exquisite, yet prone to break down communication device. Quite frankly, I’m too friggin young for this! Besides the tumor that was removed a year ago, along with 2 1/2 GI portions, I also have had a series of vertebrae’s fracture and collapse. (Yes, yes, I know I’ve complained about this before.)

I really have made tremendous progress since, but it seems the deterioration and decay is not done.

Eye to Eye

Recently I was diagnosed with Macular Degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in old people. But I’m not old! Am I? This really should be someone else’s problem, a much older person, not a 67-year-old’s. This latest diagnosis has been particularly sobering. How will I write?? Of course there’s a way. Braille. How will I drive? The flat out fact of that is, I won’t. While I haven’t been driving since my surgeries a year ago, I was viewing that as only a temporary condition. That could change.

And then of course—horror of horrors—how will I change my colostomy bag? Do they have bags in braille? Can I have little dots put on my belly right around the stoma so I can guide the bag opening exactly where it needs to be? This is important stuff for me. It’s certainly more important than teeth although they are going too. (Resorption!)

Eruption and Turning

I started this little series of paragraphs really pissed – – at people who are healthy (how dare they!), at young people, people who encourage me to keep on keeping on (oh sure, you try it,) at well-meaning folks who tell me this is a “growth opportunity”… a blessing in disguise for serious spiritual advancement!

And then of course, as night follows day, as I am writing this, I cry, feeling sorry for myself, pitifully, pitifully sorry for myself, and always, always, dammit, end up laughing at the absurdity of it all. For I know deep down where the One True Thing of me really lives, I survive. I am completely intact! The cursed package, the previously robust, svelte, athletic even, container is a facade. The cute clothes adorning curvy hips, the bobbles dangling from ears once nibbled on by seductive men, the ferocious energy I once displayed in jobs and select social occasions as a younger version of myself has all been part of a long one-act play.

My Body Not My Self—The Gameboard

Play, that’s it! A fraud perpetrated on myself, a kind of make believe  colluding along with everyone else in our society. The lies we tell ourselves about who we are are just that: lies. A deception so sophisticated we drink it up like Adam and Eve, until of course the body starts breaking down and we are naked. But the beauty about being naked, which is to say, exposed for not the Who but the What of us—of me—the essence that lays beneath the facade, is not just the truth insisting on being released. It is that kernel, the seed that carries the One True Thing of “me” effortlessly given by life’s originator itself, a Grace not of ourselves. I can pretend I make myself but at the end of the day I know I cannot. I can only grow, morph, transform even as I chafe against the constraints of Earth School.

And of course I understand, clearly, “ah yes, this is how it was always meant to be.” The thing we thought we were will always unfold, or emerge, or transform— whatever language you want to ascribe to it—into the state of being, of awareness, evolution one could say, it is meant to be. The beauty of each state has been intoxicating until of course, it wanes, followed by disappointment, anger, regret, sorrow, a husk of its former self waiting for the new perspective to gradually come into focus, with or without benefit of a literal, physical vision loss that forces not a narrowing of sight and understanding, but an expansion of it.

 

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