My Story! – Page 164 – Cathy's Blog!

Posted on May 28, 2019May 28, 2019 by Cathy Edgett · 2 Comments

Day 45: Dreaming

It’s the forty-fifth day since my brother passed and I feel him here. He was a cheerleader for me in life, and now in death, I feel him pushing me to speak. I’m uncomfortable with that, at times, and even as I type this, a crow flies to the railing of my deck and peers in. Crow symbolizes shape-shifting and now friend crow flies past my window to land on the roof and tap, tap, tap, over my head.

This morning I’m with John Lennon’s song: “You may say I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one.”

I was inspired this morning to send an op-ed submission to the NY Times, and then, I realized a letter to the editor might be more appropriate so I applied to both. My husband said that Nepal needs the money generated from climbing permits, that I need to recognize income disparity. The people of Nepal need to make a living. Yes, I agree, and so I wonder if my proposal is outlandish, but isn’t that what it’s about?

I’m requesting we step out of the outer landscape into an inner landscape, so we can honor even more the landscape of which we’re part.

Submission to the NY Times:

In my book Airing Out the Fairy Tale: Trekking through Nepal & Midlife, I explore my experience in 1993 in the Everest region of Nepal, Khumbu. I focus on death because I almost died there. Ego and the belief system in which I’d been raised, mind over matter, led me to keep stepping up Kala Patthar, even though it was obvious I was pushing beyond what made sense.

With mixed feelings, I read the news of overcrowding and lax permits leading to people dying on Everest. I suggest, like Jan Morris before me, that we cut off climbing and “conquering” this mountain. We change her name to mean the “peak of kindness” in whatever language is being spoken.

I have personally experienced that there’s something about the region that leads one to lose boundaries around life and death. Perhaps it’s because it’s said all souls circle Everest when they die. It can be tempting to circle right there but I believe we can have the same exploration by turning within, and exploring the landscape we are, the mountains climbing and rivers running in each of us.

I understand Nepal needs the money the permits bring to the country, but perhaps as we more thoroughly meet what circulates within us, we could donate to this land that inspires, that leads us to look upward and meet in the clasp where mountain touches sky.

Perhaps then we can allow Everest to represent a landscape we humans leave untouched.

You may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

I hope some day you’ll join us

And the world will be as one

Let’s Dream!

Elaine’s photo of the Imagine Mosaic in Strawberry Fields in NYC

Posted on May 27, 2019 by Cathy Edgett

Day 44: Memorial Day

It’s the 44th day since my brother passed and a day to honor those who’ve died while serving in the Armed Forces.

I pause, slightly stunned, as though I’m a bird who’s flown into a window and fallen for a moment. I shake myself awake, sit outside as squirrels run up and down the trunk of the redwood tree. A woodpecker pecks into the trunk of a tree on the other side of the deck. I feel that peck as though my insides ask for a nest, request room for breath and rest.

I’m reflecting, reflected like the marsh I photographed this morning. I stood there feeling how what’s reflected is simply that. It causes the water no pain.

Posted on May 26, 2019May 26, 2019 by Cathy Edgett

Day 43: The Lengthening Days

This morning my breath lengthens on the strength of the light. I feel fulfilled – full – filled.

Rain is predicted and birds are singing. Tears fill my eyes but they aren’t tears of sorrow. They are tears for the beauty that is here, the beauty of trees, clouds, sun, and rain.

It is a weekend of remembrance, and I remember my brother – so many memories and in this moment, I smile with the memories, grateful. My heart unravels its ball of pain and spreads light to welcome growth and response to lengthening days.

It’s been 43 days, six weeks today since he passed, and for me, there is healing in appreciating the time he was here as he transitions to what, for me, is unknown, yet stretches support in the marrow of my bones.

Posted on May 25, 2019 by Cathy Edgett

Day 42: Mount Everest

On this 42nd day since my brother’s passing, I’m with the deaths on Mount Everest and the photos of people lined up in a traffic jam to get to the top.

When I was in the area, twenty-five years ago, we bypassed Everest base camp because even then it was a garbage dump. My sense of my trip there, my four weeks in the mountains of Khumbu, was it was a spiritual journey, a quest to know myself and my direction. I’m stunned to see what it’s become.

In my book Airing Out the Fairy Tale, I write about Mount Everest. I say:

On May 6, 2015, Jan Morris published an article in the New Statesman that was reprinted in The New Republic May 16, 2015. Morris, a former male, now female, had welcomed Ed Hillary and Tenzing Norgay down from the first ascent of its summit on May 29, 1953.

In the article, Morris requested that Mount Everest, Chomolungma to the Sherpas, “Goddess Mother of the World,” be closed to climbing, violation,and greed, and honored as a World Heritage Site and as a “universally recognized Site of Holiness.” She suggested calling Mount Everest The Peak of Kindness.

Like Jan Morris, I knew Everest had something to teach. With distance, I’ve come to understand more of what Mount Everest represented for me. She was elusive, like the deeply complex, receptive feminine. She is sacred, and in her sacredness, brings us to our knees. What frightened or stunned me when I first saw her in person was that although she was part of a mountain range, she appeared to stand alone. She was center stage. I turned away and wanted to hide. I was struggling to claim my own life, my own center stage. She was too much for me, too dominant in her apparent ability to stand alone.

Everest represents strength and majesty. I claim that visibility now, that majestic mountain around which we all circle as we die, that mountain representing the central earth spine. I also claim my full power, male and female, as I balance strength and tenderness, wild and tame.

I suggest, like Jan Morris, that we honor our teacher, Mount Everest, and allow her to be a preserve, a place of respect—not something to conquer. Instead of placing flags representing division on her slopes, let’s leave her alone, untrampled. In allowing her to rest, we do the same for ourselves. We, too, stand, as peaks of kindness, havens, witnessed, witnessing, blessings, blessed.

The prayer flags that wave in Nepal and Tibet, often strung along Himalayan mountain ridges, are arranged in five colors. Blue symbolizes sky and space. White symbolizes air and wind. Red symbolizes fire. Green symbolizes water. Yellow symbolizes earth. Each of us is made of the five elements. To heal is to be made whole. My work now is to harmonize the elements within me as I breathe mindfully in and out, and in that, to live, exhilarate, and celebrate the joy in knowing enough. In my opinion, we don’t need to climb Everest to prove something to ourselves. We need to look within at the nature we are and climb into a deeper knowing of reverence for this earth we share.

I chose to put Ama Dablam on the cover of my book not Everest. Ama Dablam means Mother’s Necklace. Her grace invites me to step with care and look with awe from afar. Her slopes, like the slopes of Everest, are meant to uplift, not be the place of tragedy and death.

Posted on May 25, 2019May 25, 2019 by Cathy Edgett

Day 42: Honoring the Circle

It’s the 42nd day since my brother passed away. I wake aware of the directions, east, west, north, south, up, down, and how they come together to encompass and embrace a whole, a hole, a synergy expanding life and death.

For me, the three day Memorial weekend is a time to pause and reflect. I look out on stillness tapped with the chirping of birds.

Yesterday I listened to Jonathan Maberry’s speech at the Bram Stoker awards which inspired me to read Shirley Jackson’s story, The Haunting of Hill House which then led me to re-read her story The Lottery, written in 1948 after WWII.

I sit now with this balancing of in and out, of what my mind may create within the larger structure of which I’m part. How willing am I to break with the crowd?

Certainly this weekend asks us to examine what is worth fighting for, what is worth dying for. It asks us to open our hearts to what is true for us, to open to what enlivens and enhances the connections in our lives.

I am with the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Life goes headlong. Each of us is always to be found hurrying headlong in the chase of some fact, hunted by some fear or command behind us. Suddenly we meet a friend. We pause. Our hurry & embarrassment look ridiculous. Now pause, now possession is required, and the power to swell the moment from the resources of our own heart until it supersedes sun & moon & solar system in its expanding immensity. The moment is all, in all noble relations.

Walk with the weight of petals opening out to touch

Posted on May 24, 2019May 24, 2019 by Cathy Edgett · 2 Comments

Day 41: Less is More

Today I rise visualizing myself as an orchid flower, intricate within my petal spread.

I open the Buddhist magazine Lion’s Roar to its advertisements for books, one of my favorite things, and what comes is “less is more”. I look at the list of Democrats who are running for president, and I find myself leaning toward Marianne Williamson who has added herself to the flock, covey, herd, swarm, and bringing in fragrance, bouquet, of candidates running, and it does feel like running as we’re bombarded with who is best able to handle a tragic, complex, and tangled mess.

This quote is often attributed to Nelson Mandela but it’s hers.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us.

What if we listened to a candidate who presents a vision of love, as we honor our gifts, knowing there’s more than enough for all?

It’s been forty-one days since my brother passed. My head is beginning to clear and I’m moving into readiness to step back into this world I love and share.

Posted on May 23, 2019May 23, 2019 by Cathy Edgett · 2 Comments

Day 40: Balance

It’s day forty since my brother’s passing and I wake feeling refreshed. I notice I’m breathing fully. Perhaps it’s the nap I gave myself yesterday which was followed by bed at 8:30. I woke dreaming of my mother who passed away in February 2005 but she was alive and well in the dream. We were looking for a place where all of us could live.

Forty days is a spiritual number that comes up in many religions and practices. Our skin cells take, on average, forty days to renew.

I am with the words of Jelaluddin Rumi:

What nine months does for the embryo

Forty early mornings

Will do for your growing awareness

This morning when I woke I felt the reins of the horse loosening as though I didn’t need to hold on. I felt a new awareness of the consciousness we all share. I felt my cells expanding out, but that is for me, sister, not wife.

At 6:40 my brother’s wife calls. They were married thirty-three years and together longer than that. They were/are soul-mates. I can’t imagine what this is for her. Grief. How do we make it through? How do we offer support?

When my father died in an accident in 1969, I was 19 and my brother 15. My mother was 42. She said if it weren’t for us, she wouldn’t get out of bed. We all slept in the same room for a time, but the daughter of my brother and his wife is 24 with a life of her own, and, she, too, is grieving.

I sit with that now as the fog brings wisps of white to the blue sky. The coming of fog shimmers the trees, offers change – fog, saliva for air.

Recently I learned of the work of Professor Kathryn Geurts with the Anlo-Ewe speaking people in southeastern Ghana. She discovered that balance is a sense there, the primary sense, and is physical and psychological, literal and metaphorical.

They have a word seselelame which means “feel-feel-at-flesh-inside”. They are connected to the wisdom of intuition. In that, I touch into what another might need. I offer support, relationship, leaves to tree.

Posted on May 22, 2019 by Cathy Edgett

Day 39: There’s No Place like Home

I feel like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. It rained the whole time we were gone and I look out on vibrancy, growth, and green.

I return to a sympathy card that brings tears. I feel like today is the first day since my brother passed that I have a whole day to sit and cry. Yes, there is laundry and grocery procurement, and checking plants, but kitties are cuddled, and as I respond to emails, I look up and my feathered friend sits on a branch outside the window. She waits for me to get my camera and take a photo through the slats of the blind and another through the glass door. She sits with me, a comfort in the weight of grief.

I feel molted, tender before new growth and skin form. I feel fragile and tears continue to pour forth, harbingers seasoning what comes.

Outside my window – comfort through the slats

Posted on May 21, 2019May 21, 2019 by Cathy Edgett · 2 Comments

Day 38: Up and Down

I’m honoring the passing of my brother and what comes as I move up and down in space as NYC definitely requires stair, elevator, and escalator transport, and I’m up and down in mood. Showered and after coffee and a blueberry muffin, I invite myself more thoroughly into a new day.

I didn’t take a picture of the “bubbles” I saw the first night we were here, and when I went back yesterday, they were gone. Maybe I imagined them, or maybe they were an exhibit meant to show impermanence. My plan has been to post on grief for 49 days in honor of my brother’s passing/passage. 49 days is the time Buddhists believe it takes for one who has passed to more thoroughly move on. Today I wonder if 49 days will be enough for me to move on, and today is today.

Here is a poem by David Whyte.

The Well of Grief
David Whyte

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief,

turning down through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe,

will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,

nor find in the darkness glimmering,

the small round coins,
thrown by those who wished for something else.

Artwork outside Rockefeller Center
Listen; receive!

After I interpreted the above sculpture as hand to heart and listening, I read about the artwork currently displayed at Rockefeller Center. It is a
“raised fist that morphs into a gramophone”. Perhaps it says something about what I need to believe. Read about what’s represented in the sculptures here. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/arts/sculpture-frieze-new-york-.html

Posted on May 21, 2019May 21, 2019 by Cathy Edgett

Day 38: Down and Up

As Steve and I walk the streets of NYC, he points out the buildings my brother worked on. My brother is here as he is everywhere of course, and today is the first day to settle more deeply into my grief at his passing.

Yesterday we went to Top of the Rock to see the sunset. We, and a capacity load of people though I learn from Steve they are trying to figure out how to cram more people up there, had the same idea. We realize we are of a different generation as to our need for quiet and space. People in NYC are friendly as can be and yet I am on overload. I’m ready to go home, and we leave today.

On the other hand, the view from Top of the Rock is spectacular, and the energy of the people enjoying a warm evening outside is lovely and I’m missing home.

My friend Stefan is leading Sensory Awareness at a Zen retreat center in the Black Forest. He posts photos, one of a snail, another of of a flower, another of a bell and there is a gate. I settle there.

Yesterday was graduation day in NYC. We passed one group of women in purple graduation gowns and hats, and another group in blue. We saw huge bouquets of flowers carried in the hands of gratitude and joy. Picture taking was essential of course. It’s all beautiful and excitement fills the air, and we return to our room grateful for quiet and ease, knowing that wherever we go, there we are. Presence is a gift and there is no reason or need to escape from grateful beings living in interdependence and reciprocity. Joy is captured and spread in a multitude of forms. Creativity reigns and rains. Paused now on the island of Manhattan, I revel in the gift.