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 fear enters in, carry balloons and smile – the bridge is there even when a vision is needed to build.
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.
The reservoir along 280
Still water and trees
Plugas Water Temple Grateful for water and Ohlone land
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.
This morning I’m with the words of Rumi: Love is not an emotion. It is your very existence.
Last night I lay in bed unable to sleep because I felt the truth of Rumi’s words. All is Love. It’s my very existence.
My mother used to say. “All is love”, and my father, “All is play.”
I’m with that now balancing grief and my to-do list on love and play.
When I went through my Rosen training, Frank Ottiwell, an Alexander Technique teacher, came to lead and teach. People in the Rosen community have been reminiscing about him. I remember watching him lengthen his fingers. He allowed and gave space between the bones.
An Alexander imagery technique is to imagine your sacrum has lungs and let your sacrum breathe. I do that now as I look at my list of things to do and honor the privilege of doing them one by one.
In doing so, I’m with the words of Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor. He writes of one way he survived a concentration camp. Obviously I’m not comparing my life to his, but sometimes grief can be a heavy load to lift. We need a fulcrum; we need tools.
Viktor Frankl: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.
We were at work in a trench. The dawn was grey around us; grey was the sky above; grey the snow in the pale light of dawn; grey the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces. I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. “Et lux in tenebris lucet” — and the light shineth in the darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong: she was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me.
I feel support knowing my brother is here, in the light, the birds, the sky, the trees.
I woke this morning thinking of the power of hugs, deep, meaningful, heart-to-heart hugs. Yesterday my Sensory Awareness group met at Fort Mason. I received hugs that moved through me, and reverberate now.
As we gathered and sensed, I began to cough and cough. Since I couldn’t stop, I left the room to get some water and when I returned I still coughed. I couldn’t stop and because I knew I didn’t have a cold, I could feel how my throat had tightened to “stuff down” my feelings of grief. Though I’d cried buckets and received hugs, still there was something coming up from my heart that was caught by a clasp at the throat. Slowly, my throat began to release which is not to say there isn’t still a clamp but it’s softer now, more accepting. Shaking pours tenderness through pain and grief.
I was sitting with all this at seven this morning when my sister-in-law, my brother’s wife, called. She wanted to share that she’d received a message from a high school best friend of my brother, Bill Belt. He and my brother had spoken in December and Gar made no mention of his illness. Therefore, Bill was in shock to learn of his death. Gar was best man at Bill’s wedding and still he protected his friend from what he was going through. My brother was clear to the end that he was not a whiner and didn’t want people to feel sorry for him. I honor and respect that and I honor and respect that I was raised in the same way, and …
What is it now I wish to say?
We no longer live in tribes where men come together to hunt mastodons and women gather berries. We can share our vulnerability, transition, and fear.
My brother lived a good life and knew it. He had come to accept his death. He also knew the pain we, our mother, brother and I, endured when our father died in a motorcycle accident in 1969. My brother’s concern was for those of us still here, and so he and his wife have planned a lovely memorial where we will gather together and comfort each other in the circle of love he leaves behind.
When my sister-in-law called this morning, she sobbed, “Everyone says I am so strong.” And she is strong and she can honor her softness too. We can be tender with ourselves. It is okay.
In the book I’m bringing forth I look at the stoicism with which I was raised and which I’ve worked hard to poke a few holes in so more energy and support can pour through.
I’m grateful I have a place to feel the clamp on my throat that is unconscious but is still there, a clamp of protection so I don’t appear weak, but I know now I am both strong and weak, and weak, what a word, no, I am tender. Tenderly, I allow the fullness of feeling both joy and sorrow at one time, the tender place in the heart where both come together to hug and comfort as they meet.
Like a fern frond uncoiling, a snail shell moving, cell by cell, my throat releases and becomes a fountain flowing.
Fern frond unfolding
Vision of Hildegard of Bingen
Yesterday, my beloved friend Anna spoke of and demonstrated what she calls “celestial gravity”. She allowed her arms to rise over her head, in a prayer of reception, connection, openness, and grace.
This morning these words of David Whyte come my way.
I’m also with a little book my dear friend Sandy gave me last week How to Love by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh. He suggests using hugs as meditation.
He writes, “When we hug, our hearts connect and we know that we are not separate beings.” He continues, “Hugging is a deep practice: you need to be totally present to do it correctly. When I drink a glass of water, I invest one hundred percent of myself in drinking it. You can train yourself to live every moment of your daily life like that.”
“Before hugging, stand facing each other as you follow your breathing and establish your true presence. Then open your arms and hug your loved one. During the first in-breath and out-breath, become aware that you and your beloved are both alive; with the second in-breath and out-breath, think of where you will both three three-hundred years from now, and with the third in-breath and out-breath be aware of how precious it is that you are both still alive.”
Yesterday I sat by the water of the bay and a gull sat with me. Well, he stood and stayed. I asked if I could take his or her picture, and clearly he/she said yes.
I wake to the sound of wind chimes. They sound like church bells but I don’t live near a church. I open the door to the outside. They still sound like church bells. I don’t recall hearing them sound like that before. My brother passed away two weeks ago on this day, Sunday. I received the call at five AM. It’s not yet 5 and I hear bells.
I go back to bed and lie there, listening, feeling my eyes adjust inside my head. My brother had better than 20/20 vision. Near-sighted, I wonder if I’m being called to a wider vision, a different tuning within my ability to see and hear, live and be.
I consider the buck who used to stand below a windchime in our lower yard and use his antlers to play a tune. Perhaps he was simply scratching his head but it looked intentional, seemed a conscious awareness of working with, playing with metal bars to make notes pleasing to a deer’s ears. I felt empowered when I watched him responding to and enhancing the environment we shared.
I wonder what bars my brother plays with now. What is this passage for him as it reverberates in me?
What is the strength of my being as I move through air? How am I changed?
A shelf has been placed in my heart on which I contain the pain of his passing, but perhaps I can view it as a step, a threshold over which I peer to more clearly swing air through my own windchimes. Perhaps I can more clearly tune my moment to moment passing before that passage that seems final but is only change.
The sky begins to light, the softest gray comes, and with it, a bird chirps and chirps from a branch of a tree outside my window.
Is he or she opening leaves in spring, fertilizing them with sound?
Opening responds in me. I unfurl, unfold, and play windchimes with the air of my song. It’s fifteen days since he passed; it’s time. Lips lift and smile.
I’m opened like the morning sky. I walk out on the deck and fog and sun are in a dance of light. I feel the same. I have nothing that “needs” doing today, no place I have to be. My speech for the memorial is written. I’ll offer it in a week but this day nests and rests.
My brother is with me, ancestry. I’m a dance. I’ve never felt like this before. Well, of course, I’ve never felt like this before. Moments don’t repeat. Each moment unfolds, evolves new ways to receive.
I’m lovingly informed I’m held in tenderness, I feel held, newly born, held in the support of a nest I’ve built over years, perhaps lifetimes. I am a dance, a river, an ocean, a pond. I am vibration rising up and down, in and out, held in love and trust.
Years ago I wrote a poem, Origami in Reverse. I do that now. Gently, tenderly, open what folds to birth.
Where I live, birds have hatched and are in the process of testing their wings and leaving the nest. I consider the work and play of making a nest, the gathering of materials, twigs, hair, fur, and then, the laying of eggs, perhaps a full nest, crowded even, and then testing leading to flight, and the nest is empty perhaps to be used again or maybe to fall apart.
Each of us is given an opportunity to be the twig gathered, the fur, the hair, the coming together to make a nest, the couple, the egg, the hatching, the flight, and then, a a space, a place for something new to come.
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