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.

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.

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.  

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 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.

Moving grace,

day unfolds

Origami in reverse,

Life patterns let go –

Wind chimes,

touch, touched.