Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Day 28: From the Well

I wake and feel myself sifted in layers like cremated ash.

I look out at my Japanese garden.  Two crows rest there.

Today the grief for my brother’s passing is spread throughout me like mulch.  I receive the transformed elements of grief, joy, memories, peace.

Yesterday was a volatile day.  I’m on edge, quick to react with not the bliss I intend.  Frustration is a knife cutting my day into fragments, and maybe that’s okay.  My friend Elaine points out that the well is deep and complex. I consider that as I stand below and look up at stones and moss. Maybe some days I can’t climb up to the light because of the slipperiness of wet moss.

I also say to Elaine that my son Jeff has been my knight in shining armor. She points out that a knight needs a damsel in distress. Ah, yes, and so I have been.

I’m with the cover of my book Airing Out the Fairy Tale which I’m gratified to learn that people love.  I believe it took two months to come up with the image for that cover. I would talk to Patrick and explain what the trip to Nepal meant to me, what it is to go through menopause and midlife crisis.  He, a male, reached to understand and created image after image. We both related to the ones with fire, but when it came to the cover we wanted the mountain, Ama Dablam, mother and son, a sister to Everest, and a woman on a suspension bridge with the wings of birds.

You can check out Patrick at: http://www.jpliphotography.com

You can order Airing Out the Fairy Tale: Trekking through Nepal & Midlife on Amazon or ask your local book store to order it for you. It is an offering to the celebration that is life. It also honors those who’ve passed circling around Mount Everest as they travel on. Life is rich with blessings, balanced on the cultivation of peace, trust, request, reception and ease.

A section of my garden
The image for the cover of the book before the words
Stones from the garden offer stillness and lift

Posted on by Cathy Edgett · 4 Comments

Day 27: Wabi-sabi

I wake this morning realizing I’ve felt nauseous ever since my brother passed.  I suppose it’s like that first three months of pregnancy, adjusting to a new way of being.  Of course, there we carry a little being, but maybe here we do too. I think we carry a part of their essence, carry and integrate all the ways we’ve been touched. We carry memories of ancestry.  My mother and father are here too. Somehow I feel them all gathered together as at a party looking down at me laughing as worry, anger, and fear must seem rather funny when one is released from the restrictions of a body, of emotion caught and shaken with intention to tame.  

My brother’s ashes are heavy.  We scattered half and I have half here, and I carry them around wondering at their weight, as he was so thin when he passed, though because of his height he was still 190 pounds, but I don’t think of ashes as having weight and yet these do.

No wonder all my cells feel as though they’re carrying little umbrellas to deal with the moistness pouring through.

On another note, the book, “Airing Out the Fairy Tale” is up on Amazon.  I haven’t yet seen a copy from that source, so now I’m wearing my worry hat, fearing it’s not quite right.  I already found one mistake I’d completely missed, and so it is. I believe in wabi-sabi, the philosophy that you sweep the walkway clean, and then shake the tree to drop some leaves.

It’s about the acceptance of transience and imperfection, and that acceptance is not one of my given traits, but I’m working with it, step by step, knowing there is no perfection, only how we meet what comes, and that coming is always changing as are we.  My intention for today is to be calm peace.

I’ll see how long that lasts.  

Blessings for all as I contemplate the frog, an amphibian. The word comes from the Greek and means “both lives”, as frogs are born in water and most live on land.  I’m feeling that now, feeling transition as I birth new legs and a deeper accommodation of voice which is the vibration we cultivate to share.

My mother gave me this frog years ago and still he greets all who enter our garden, says enter tranquillity and peace.
Posted on by Cathy Edgett · 2 Comments

Day 26: Surrender

I balance my wings as wind comes my way strong enough to hold me aloft, and yet perceived movement is slow, if not, stalled.  

I pause, heavy and sad. The lids on my eyes struggle to lift. There is grief and disbelief that my brother has passed, and yet, I feel him here. When I’m asked how I am when I’m out and about, I tell some and not others.  I give myself time to pause as I decide whether I have the energy to share my grief.

I realize the impulse to share comes through the eyes.  I look to see if there is a place to connect, if the eyes I’m meeting lay down a path on which to step, stop, speak.

I’m with Rumi this morning, a 13th century Persian poet. His poem “Birdwings” translated by Coleman Barks speaks to me, though I’m still looking for the “joyful face”.  I trust that face is here.

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror

up to where you’re bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,

here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.

If it were always a fist or always stretched open,

you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence

is in every small contracting and expanding,

the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated

as birdwings.

Do you see the purple flower?

Posted on by Cathy Edgett · 2 Comments

Day 25: Unwrapping the Cocoon

I wake feeling as though I’ve been wrapped and unwrapped in a series of skins. I molt and let go and wrap again but today I step back into tasks that anchor my life here.

It’s been twenty-five days since my brother passed.  I sit with that, with the melting ooze in my heart, syrup, as though I’m a Maple tree tapped for syrup in spring.  That’s what happens when you spend time in New England. You think of maple syrup and low walls of stone that have stood for hundreds of years.

My brother loved the manuscript of my book “Airing Out the Fairy Tale: Trekking through Nepal & Midlife” and was excited to help promote it.

I place some of his words here.

Finished. Loved it! Start to finish!  It is brilliant, Cath.

It is a book for everyone and my blurb will say that. Just the way you and the accountant connected there, so did I feel it worked for anyone searching for peace and answers.

It’s perfect.

I loved the descriptiveness of it, felt like I was there. And that’s actually all I’ve ever wanted to do with Everest and those other majestic mountains, is get close enough to see them with my own eyes. But I felt like I did. Loved the yetis. The people. The culture. Amazing.

You must be so proud of this great treasure. It is a gem. And, even though I hate writing blurbs, I assure you I will happily write one for this on Amazon or wherever.

And so on the twenty-fifth day of his passing I share some of his words, blessing his journey and my own.  

Buddha in his garden
Posted on by Cathy Edgett · 2 Comments

Day 24: Integration

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.  

Sunset guides the flight home
Posted on by Cathy Edgett · 4 Comments

Day 23: Unity

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.

Jeff!
Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Day 22: Love and Beauty

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.

Send and receive light
Honor the slant we climb, the island and waves, the passage we guide
Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Day 21: Morning Light

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 river flows

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Day 20: Raw

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.

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Day 19: In Flight

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.