I’m home after driving back from a night spent at Jeff and Jan’s with the wonderful Senna Dog sleeping next to me.
It was a long flight home but again my son Jeff rescued me with meditation. Sitting next to him is meditation. How often do we get that kind of time with our “child”?
As we flew west we enjoyed an hour and a half sunset.
I sit here feeling blessed as though a hummingbird has reached its beak into my heart and nectar is pumped and shared.
The sun is shining through the mist. It’s the first day it hasn’t rained here in CT since my brother passed. We’ll scatter his ashes today. It was meant to be yesterday but, and tears come as I think of the joy of his wife Jan as we went out to breakfast and then she decided to cook Thai food for all of us. No one cooks like Jan and we enjoyed a feast together and she kept saying how much Gar would love it and then she called at 11:00 last night crying, saying we forgot to spread the ashes. I said “We didn’t forget; we thought you weren’t ready.”
So, today is the day. It will be a smaller group, just four of us, and perhaps that is as it should be, an honoring of the two sides of my brother. There was the party Gar, the gregarious, laughing one, and the one who loved to be alone with family and books, the one who radiated a wise and visionary presence. We honor both sides, all sides, as we tighten the circle for a moment.
Jeff will then drive the two of us back to JFK and home we go. Steve left yesterday and is now home.
How do I feel today? Early morning light breathes softness into the room. Three rectangles stand guard at one end and offer concentration and focus. And now the shadow of a branch spreads into one rectangle, offers form and then the rectangles of light spread like rivers rising in their banks.
I am awake, connected at my roots. Ancestors are here. Yesterday, Jeff, Lynn and I drove through the beauty of CT and seeing a small sign turned left onto a narrow road to enter an enchanted realm of education. We walked the land and then entered the building to spend two hours enjoying a private tour, learning the history of this land.
The last Ice Age ended and people came, and here we are. The constitution comes from the people who lived here. The three branches of our government come from the wisdom of the people of this land. There was a fourth piece the Founding Fathers forgot. We are one with the land. How we treat the land is how we treat ourselves. We are one.
May 5th was Cinco de Mayo. Our guide and those who worked at the Institute were wearing red. We learned it was also a day to honor missing and murdered Indigenous Women. And here I pause to honor that every day is that day. May we come to unification, in ourselves, in our world.
The memorial for my brother was beautiful and loving. I couldn’t imagine anything more. I wake, rested and grateful. We’ll scatter his ashes today in soft rain.
Out of the blue, my brother began painting. He and another family spent time on Nantucket each summer. Once, leaving on the ferry, a photograph was taken of the lighthouse. Gar painted it and gave it as a birthday present to his friend who brought it to the “celebration” of his life. Gar’s friend then shared a photograph he’d taken when the light hit the lighthouse in the painting making it shine.
My brother is here in all of us, grace, love, laughter, joy, and trust. We laughed and cried, cried and laughed and I feel my brother beautifully celebrated, honored, and allowed to be here as well as exploring new places.
May the lighthouse in each of us shine and receive.
A good night’s sleep and I feel alive again. I was beginning to wonder who had died. Showered, I walk outside to the river outside our room. Flow; flow; flow.
The day has been full, that raw edge of laughter held in sorrow, the vein of gold within the pain. I try to sleep now, feeling like a box of pick-up sticks dropped on the floor. I need to pick up the pieces and put them back together again. There is pain that pierces, and there is gathering. Perhaps it is that gathering of love that allows the full feeling and expression of pain.
I keep saying to myself the words of John Squadra. “When you love, you complete a circle. When you die, the circle remains.” We are a circle gathered as though around a campfire and campfires warm and before they go out, the embers are hot, the flame within the dark.
Tomorrow, well, really today, as I see it’s 1:00 in the morning of a new day, we will celebrate a life, one life, all lives, joy, laughter, tears, pain.
My son Jeff and I are on a plane heading toward JFK in New York. We’ve talked, eaten, and laughed. We’ve looked at clouds. I think I see happy spelled out in a group of five fluffy clouds floating lightly in a blue sky but Jeff doesn’t see it. We’ve entertained ourselves but when I look at my watch, I see there are hours before we land. We decide to meditate for an hour. A timer is set.
Jeff looks peaceful. I’m trying by inhaling compassion and exhaling compassion and pouring the exhalation over my head like champagne. It doesn’t work. My feet aren’t fooled by the lack of support from the floor. They know I’m 40,000 feet in the air.
In the hyper-alert and hyper-vigilant state I’ve been in since my brother passed, I’m on edge, grumpy, judgmental, over-sensitive, and impatient.
I usually love flying but I’m aware I’m enclosed in a tube and and then I feel it. There’s a hole in my heart. I’m acting like a normal person, or so I think, but I’m a person with a hole in my heart. I look out the window at white, fluffy clouds. I don’t see angels or harps.
Jeff opens his eyes and notices my agitated state. I tell him there’s a hole in my heart. He begins leading me in meditation. I close my eyes and feel the hole, the ache, the pain, and moving up into my head, I feel how all of this is energy and staying with it, there is expansion and peace, and I trust the ground of the plane, the ground of my being.
My eyes are moist as my personal guru is next to me, guiding, leading. I’m the angel and I don’t need a harp because I have my breath. I notice the exhale is rusty and stuck. I cough and cough and stay with it until it smooths and pauses. I come to peace and trust, and in its own circular time the plane lands, and then there is the traffic leading into NYC which comes to a pause as my feet touch the ground under my feet. Relief.
After a lovely dinner in one of the many Italian restaurants that make NYC what it is, I sit wondering why I struggle so with spin and how I strengthen the threads in clouds so I can stand and feel support wherever I am.
I’m ready to leave for the airport. Comments have been made that it must have been frightening to cross a suspension bridge in Nepal, to encounter yaks, and I smile at that because in this moment getting on an airplane feels like a big deal even though it’s safer than the trip to and from the airport.
How do we meet what comes? Fear is excitement without the breath, so I sit here noticing. How deep in my inhale? Not much. Exhale? I’m holding on. Do I really think holding on to my breath will make me feel safe? What funny beings we are. I visualize my brother looking down at me laughing. He had a great laugh. I know he’s laughing at me from wherever he is now, and so a chuckle emerges from my heart, and I laugh too.
When I got into my car, my mood shifted. “Road Trip” shimmered through my being. In over forty years of living in the San Francisco Bay area, I’ve driven 280 south from Mill Valley hundreds of times, but today my inner guidance system requested a new pace and route that honored the passing of my brother eighteen days ago. Jeff suggested a stop along the way and I took it.
I’ve always meant to pause at the reservoir but have sped along admiring it from the freeway. Destination has been my focus, but not today. Today I exit the freeway and turning right, not left, travel along Skyline Highway until I realize I’m on the wrong side of the reservoir, so I turn around and parallel the reservoir to the east. I stop for some pictures and then I enter Holy Gates. I’m at the Water Temple Jeff said to visit. Photos will suffice.
I went to bed on a bit of a high, woke broken apart like a hammered rock.
Today I start the journey back to CT. I’ve made it as easy for myself as possible. I drive down to San Jose today and my son Jeff and I will fly out early Thursday morning to JFK. My husband Steve is already in NYC for work. Friday morning we’ll take the train to CT and rent a car. Such a plan, and yet, I feel sick. From here, I can pretend, somehow, that my brother is alive. I did it when my father died. It will be harder there.
The last time I saw him we were blessed with snow, and as the family gathered, we went through almost a cord of wood in a few days. We were up both early and late, talking, laughing, playing games. We knew it was a goodbye but there he was, and now, well, of course, I’ve written of how I feel him here, in different form, but I feel sick again at all that now comes, and I pause to know and acknowledge I’m here right now, looking out at the ridge as it dances in fog, reflecting tears.
There was a year I traveled. I’ve written one part of that year of travel in “Airing Out the Fairy Tale,” and then while sitting on a granite cliff on Monhegan Island, I felt how clearly the journey is within. I came home. I still travel, but I’m aware of my carbon footprint. My home provides all I need and sometimes we are called to leave.
There is a book I love: City by Clifford D. Simak. It was originally published in 1952 and was prescient about what home might come to mean to some. The main character’s home has become his castle, run and protected by robots. His best friend dies and he tries to mobilize to go to the funeral. While he’s debating his ability to do that, and finally overcomes the hesitation, his robot, his companion and friend, has sent the transport away saying he, the man, never leaves.
I do leave, obviously, and I do love travel. I loved my journey to Zion, Sedona, Tucson, and Phoenix this fall, but this trip is different and this morning there is pain. I allow the pain to be there, and the tears.
It’s almost May Day. As a child in Des Moines, Iowa, my family and I made baskets out of paper and filled them with goodies to hang on the door knobs of our neighbors. I suppose it was a reverse trick or treat, a welcoming of spring and sharing.
I’m entering day 18 of grieving my brother’s passing at the age of sixty-five. Each day seems to present a different stage of grieving, a different step.
Today I am with baskets which leads me to ribs as I prefer to view what some call a rib cage as a rib basket filled with goodies like my heart and lungs. It expands and contracts with my breath.
That brings me to yaks. I first encountered yaks in 1993 when I was trekking in the Everest region of Nepal. Yaks don’t do well at an altitude below 12,000 feet and prefer to live around 14,000 feet. Their lungs are surrounded by 14 or 15 pairs of ribs compared to 13 for cattle and 12 for humans.
In Nepal it’s said that when people pass away, their soul circles around Everest. I wonder if my brother is doing that now, circling round and round, and that’s why Everest, yaks, and breath come to mind.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote that “Every new object, clearly seen, opens up a new organ of perception in us.” Since his passing, I’m seeing my brother more clearly, more wholly. A new organ of perception opens like a pupil in the eye of the heart, and I’m led by his guidance, a yak still connected to my pack.
