Today I found out that a close friend whom I’ve known for about 30 years has ovarian cancer.  Her partner called to tell me.  I was at work, in a meeting with my new boss and the phone number was one unfamiliar to me.  I normally don’t answer my cell phone at work but for some reason I felt I had to pick up the call.

Laura’s message really hit me.  These kind, wonderful, warm loving women kinda saved my life back in 1989 when the world as I knew was so abruptly ended that it threw me off my moorings for a long time.  I stayed with them on weekends.  They loved me back to life when I wasn’t sure that was possible.

How do you repay someone you feel saved your life?

One way is to walk through their scary spaces with them. 

I’m grateful for the opportunity to be of service, to directly return a kindness that was so huge.  But I wish I wasn’t getting the chance, really.

It was a lonely feeling - I got that call and work went on.  A kind friend at work had lunch with me.  But other than that I was left to my own devices to try to make sense of something that makes no sense to me.  I felt empty and hollow and kept wondering what Caryn felt like. Or Laura.  It felt surreal.

My friend Annie is in the hospital really sick and now my friend Caryn has cancer.  I have 3 other friends with cancer, and yes, I know I had the big girl birthday in February, but really I feel too young to have so many friends getting zapped.  It’s scary and I feel powerless.

I truly felt thrown off my horse.  So I came home and meditated and then did the only thing I knew to make it better (since a case of Guinness is no longer an option) - I went to the gym and listened to music from 30 years ago really really loud and pushed myself on both cardio and weights more than I think I ever have. 

I realized that, in its way, the version I have of the Grateful Dead doing the Rolling Stones song “Not Fade Away” could easily be my generation’s response to Dylan Thomas’s elegiac ode written as his father was dying “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”.  Yeah, he was a crazy alcoholic Irish poet, but he nailed it on that one “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” 

The pounding music has a similar “screw you” hit to it, but I like the positive spin better:  “love that’s real will not fade away….”

Caryn’s a fighter and if anyone can nail this, she can.  But it’s still scary and sad and lonely and weird.  My shorthand response to it all is:  “DON’T LIKE!”

But I also know that love that’s real will not fade away.  And that all the oceans of love I have been given are within me to give back. 

You know, I was picturing the Big Times in Which We Live as political revolution and the “dawning of the Age of Aquarius.”  This wasn’t what I had in mind, days like this with Annie going to ER and Laura calling to say Caryn has cancer.

But it’s the day I got.  And in the end, it’s all about life and love.  “I’m gonna love you night and day.  Love that’s real will not fade away.  Not fade away.”

Whoa - usually I feel like Joni Mitchell in “Same Situation”

“Still I send up my prayer
Wondering where it had to go
With heaven full of astronauts
& the Lord on death row”

Just wonder if God has me on call waiting, ya know?  But today the answers were coming faster and furiouser than I could keep up with - same answer over and over and over again from widely disparate sources.

Dad:  Find what makes you happy and do that. And quit worrying about the future - it never turns out the way you think it will and it just destroys your happiness now.

Rev. Tom at Unity Church of Crystal Lake:  “Find what makes you happy. Then do more of it (duh).” 

Song at church “love needs to love”.  Closing song at church “Peace will come, let it begin with me.”

On the way home from the gym, a rerun on Krista Tippet’s EXCELLENT NPR show “speaking of faith” (see http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/ ) - an interview with Thich Nhat Hanh and also with Cheri Maples a Madison, Wi cop who got Thay to speak to a group of police officers.  I’ve actually heard this show before but needed to hear again today that peace is within me and how much we all are looking for love. To BE love.  To BE peace.

My last reminder was non-verbal and it was about non-verbalness.  As someone with way too much of a left brain I can get lost in the craziness that is my own thinking.  My buddy’s prescription for my sorrow and malaise this morning was to get my ass to the gym.  So I did.

Heavy weights and loud Grateful Dead (”Not Fade Away/Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” from “American Beauty” to be specific) cure far more ills than one could ever imagine.

And all of that has led me to “the next right thing” as they say in the circle in which I travel.  More body.  More music. Less thinking.  Ha!  One of my mantras in my overly wild youth was “too much drinking, not enough thinking.”  While glad to have left the drink behind, perhaps over compensating on thinking has not been an improvement!

Time to meditate and then go out to Ravinia tonight for live music. 

Thanks, God.  Today you sent messages I could hear and understand.  I get it.

And thanks, Jen - your message to jump into the fire was also echoed when I turned from NPR to WXRT and heard some song whose refrain was “jump into the fire”.

Wow.

The liminal nature of my life continues apace.  As Paul McCartney says “Baby, I’m a lonely {wo}man in the middle of something that {s}he really doesn’t understand….”  Much flux and opportunities for growth in all arenas.  Old stories coming up for new looks.

I’m rather the seeker of symbol and meaning and myth.  So I’ve been noticing the seeming signs and signals in my path.  Skunks are all around me and my house - and while a bit off-putting in the real world, Ted Stevens book “Animal Speak” says that they remind us to respect ourselves and seek respect from others.  That’s been a helpful reminder as I ride the waves in both my personal and professional lives.

So last night I had a very vivid dream in which my friend Thea (a major Teacher on my path in real life and one whom I visited last night) appeared in a pickup truck on my porch telling me to plant 3 birch trees in my yard where the ash used to be.  So I looked up the meaning of the birch tree at this site:  http://www.whats-your-sign.com/celtic-meaning-birch-tree.html

Celtic Meaning
of the Birch Tree

“The Celtic meaning of the birch tree deals with:

• Growth
• Renewal
• Stability
• Initiation
• Adaptability

Listen closely and you will detect whispers of transformation and growth in the midst of the birch groves within your soul.

The birch is highly adaptive and able to sustain harsh conditions with casual indifference. Proof of this adaptability is seen in its easy and eager ability to repopulate areas damaged by forest fires or clearings. Bright and beautiful, the birch is a pioneer, courageously taking root and starting anew to revive the landscape where no other would before.

This is a powerful metaphor for our lives. The birch asks us to philosophically go where no other will go (voluntarily or otherwise). The birch asks us to take root in new soils and light our lives with the majesty of our very presence. The birch sings to us: “Shine, take hold, express your creative expanse, light the way so that others may follow.”

Paradoxically, while the birch is a brilliant symbol of renewal, it is also symbolic of stability and structure. The druids also held the birch as the keepers of long-honored traditions.

Associated with the sun, the birch is a solar emblem, and facilitates passion, energy, as well as growth. This solar association is paralleled when we learn the druids carried birch bark with them as kindling. Birch serves as a perfect igniter as it will start to burn even when damp. This makes it a prized fire starter over most other wood types.

Here again, this makes for a perfect analogy. The birch asks us to serve our fellow man with a fire in our hearts. In this respect, the birch reminds us that even if our spirits are dampened by the set backs in life, we can always catch fire from the spark of passions that drive us to divinity.”

I’m clearly, like Hecate, at the crossroads - that much is clear.  Awake enough to know that i’m getting a test drive now of events I expected to unfold later.  Who am I, now?  How shall I show up?  So the song that’s been showing up for me is Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide”:

“Oh, mirror in the sky
What is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above
Can I sail thru the changing ocean tides
Can I handle the seasons of my life

mm hmm

mm hmm

i don’t know…”

So I do what I know to do when the ground beneath my feet starts to shift.  I pray.  I connect with God and my departed Grandma, Mother and guardian angel.  I meditate and seek God’s input. I go for long drives on Country Club road.  I journal.  I wait.  And I’m encouraged by the refrigerator magnet my friend Marilyn has up at her house:  “it will all turn out alright in the end.  If it’s not alright, it only means it’s not the end.”

How about you?  What do YOU do when the terrain feels uncertain, when all you have known to do seems irrelevant?  What do you do when the calling you have received seems to be leading you straight into the fire? I’d really like to know how you sail through the changing ocean tides and handle the seasons of your life.  Cuz, mm hmm, mm hmm, I don’t know…

So, my questing continues.  Not much response to the Gregg Levoy questions so I won’t torture you all with the rest of them - though I found them thought-provoking and helpful.

Saturday I treated myself to an astrology reading with the incomparable Erin Sullivan (see www.erinsullivan.com )  When I first read one of her books - The Astrology of Midlife and Aging it knocked me on my ass. She’s a Jungian, steeped in mythology and the language of archetypes as well as having a very in-depth knowledge of classical as well as modern astrology. As an aside, she also has a huge vocabulary - as do I - so I was thrilled to learn several new words from her.  Two that I now use regularly are quotidian (daily activities, workday things) and liminal (on the threshold).

That last word has come in handy as I am in SUCH  a liminal time.  I know, I’ve told you this before.  But it feel noteworthy. And it feels a different kind of funny.  A “this could be the start of something good” funny. 

I’ve got two wonderful little boys in my life, whom I see every Thursday.  I can observe them getting ready to have a growth spurt, be it physical or developmental.  I can see how they get kind of weird and out of sorts and like they just don’t fit in their current shell right before the change happens. Kind of like how you can smell the rain, you know.

A poem I wrote in another liminal time, back in 2002 included these stanzas:

before it rains

the birds fly low

they twitter anxiously

perhaps warning one another

perhaps reassuring themselves

perhaps in ecstatic glee

change

change is coming

this will become that

we think we know this

we make dire predictions of that

or rosy ones, even

we think we know

I’m seeing how I move towards predictive tools in times of change.  Trying to get on solid ground.  Been singing some Joni Mitchell lyrics “he’s got me thinking about the future, and worrying about my past…” In both cases it’s a way really of stepping out of the present, which, of course, is where all the action occurs.

I think it’s natural when one is shedding old skins to feel discomfort.  To look around for some shelter, some familiarity, some solid ground.

Saturday was a big day for me - a lot happened internally and externally.  These inner rainbows and clouds that are moving so swiftly through me brought in big gusts of change.  On Sunday I found I needed to take to the roads, always thereapeutic for my Gemini-rising soul.  So I took a ride in the rain in McHenry county. I reported back to The Awakener that

My ‘refuge of the roads’ was helpful and wistful and evocative. Old barns in the rain, two cranes, “the flowers bloom like madness in the spring”, horses huddled together in a wee stall against the driving rain, the ineffable insistence of the life force driving us all to explode into creativity or seek shelter from the storm.  Life, life, life.

So what do you do when the winds of change are blowing inside of you?  Or, as they are for all of us now, outside of you as well?  How do you get grounded, centered, get closer to the truth? 

I’ve been meditating a lot too.  And listening to more music than I have in ages, reading poetry, finding myself rebelling rather than relishing structure and order.  My little cat is pleased at my indolence. 

I do “feel myself a cog in something turning” and it’s exciting and scary. 

Question 3 from Gregg Levoy’s workshop was “What is the most prominent affirmation you have up in your house?”  He said that he has noticed over the years that the kind of people who go to his workshops ALWAYS have affirmations of some sort displayed in their homes.  Maybe a refrigerator magnet, a plaque on the wall, post-it notes - something.

For me it is a calligraphy-like applique on my living room wall, the first thing I think one sees as one enters my house (unless like me you get distracted by the large Matisse nude which sits to the right of the doorway over which the applique is written).  It is done in blue script on my sage green wall.  I got it from www.wallwords.com .  And it says:

“Bidden or unbidden, God is present…. C.G. Jung”

How about you? What affirmations are in your house?

BTW, coming in in second place is the new plaque in my front bathroom which says “I completely trust the flow of life”.  The first one (Jung) I totally embrace - I”m working on the second, but it’s getting clearer.

The next question Gregg Levoy asked us is “What is the one problem I was born to solve?” 

So my answers to this one were a bit personal to share, but the answer you have could be grand or small - Einstein’s might have been to discover relativity or Gandhi’s to peacefully wrest India away from Britain - but ours can be as simple as to learn how to love or to be a good Mom or to practice our spiritual path while remaining in the world. 

This question was good for me as it helped to realize that the quest that sent me to the workshop was worthy of my attention and was one which, in differing ways, i have tussled with over time.  The song i had listned to on the way to the workshop was Jen Todd from the album “Happy as we Are” singing

“Gonna get it right this time

Gonna get it right this time

for the very first time

I’ll get it right this time….”

For me, I am not sure if it would be “for the very first time” — that’s not clear.  But in a “zen mind, beginner’s mind” kind of way, it’s about ‘begin at start’ and getting to see the world and life and my own dear self with new eyes.  being open to The Mystery (see earlier posts for how easy THAT journey is….)

And you?

I’m at a liminal place in my life.  Part of it is the Big Girl birthday. And part is unexpected beneficence.  Actually, all of life contains unexpected beneficence, truly, but a buddha has appeared, an awakener and it’s exhilirating and terrifying.

So I went to a workshop this weekend at my church given by Gregg Levoy who wrote a really really good book, Callings. 

The first two hours he asked us a couple of dozen deep questions.  so I thought it would be fun to share some of that with you (some, being the operative word - though it may seem that one as verbose and open as I doesn’t have a private thought in her head that is oh so far from true…).  But what would be MORE fun would be if YOU would reply with your thoughts on said questions.

Okay, here’s the first one.  the setup he gave us involved a movie and since I see one movie every 3 or 4 years whether i need it or not, i can’t recall what the movie was. but it involved a little girl who died. And the scene he talked about was the little girl walking towards the light with an angel who asked her “What did you like best about it?” (meaning, about life) to which she replied “pajamas” (hers must be better than mine - that’s not something I would ever answer).

So here’s your questions and select parts of my answer:

Q.  What did you like best about it?

A.  Children, love, laughter, family, feeling settled and competent, my thirties with Doreen, job competency, singing, drumming, dancing, poetry, good writing, being a writer, being outdoors, art (especially Matisse, O’Keefe, Van Gogh), travel (Ireland, Iona, the south of France), Madison, the Michigan Womyn’s music festival, and my longtime love, the winter night sky

Those are a few of my “what did you like best about it”s —- now over to you….

I think I figured out the whole thoughts-ideas-things continuum. That is, thoughts gather together and become ideas which are what the world is made out of (this is not a new thought - Plato preceded me in this understanding and Richard Bach, of all people, illustrated it engagingly in his novel “One”).  As an aside to this part of the prelude I DO wonder about the connection between brain-mind-consciousness and will explore that later (like I am fairly sure that the mind is not IN the brain - more that the brain may be one of it’s radio receivers. And I wonder about consciousness - does it exist after you’re dead? when you have Alzheimer’s? in newborns? Cats?).  But, as you know by now, I digress…

What’s on my mind now, is the purpose of emotions.  It has long  been my thought that they are navigational devices - go here! don’t go there!  come closer! no, that’s too close!  I’m pretty sure that’s at least part of their purpose.

But what I want to know is why the turn signals stay on decades after the turn was made.  Especially when it wasn’t ME driving that bus.  What is the purpose then?

My new friend and I were discussing snakes.  Not of the lizard variety but the human variety.  When we first met at a party I had relayed the story I had heard in a book we were studying at my church, which said “we can forgive people, understand why they behaved the way they did, even wish them well, but we don’t have to pet the rattlesnake.”

But what if the rattlesnake was just a gardenhose coiled on the ground?

What purpose then, our fear?  And if that fear keeps us continually away from said gardenhoses - well, what a sticky wicket if you want a garden.

I wonder about our animal nature and the nature of consciousness.  Are we programmed to react to certain stimuli with pat, predictable emotions (like my St. Pat’s post about wee grandniece Isla Rose crying predictably upon hearing Danny Boy - by the Muppets, no less! - is it genetically in our DNA for us Irish-Americans to weep at that song as though prodded like Pavlov’s dogs?). 

Not to digress too far down the path - but then I was thinking of Keats “Ode to a Grecian Urn” the last two lines of which state

And then what is the purpose of beauty?  IS it truth (or was Keats just a horny young MAN?). Is it a reliable indicator of anything? And what is the visceral response we (I?) have to beauty?  Does it serve a purpose?

Or as my young friend Elvin says, is it just that I think too much and should ENJOY life more?

But of all these questions mulling around in my head, I wonder the most about the purpose of emotions and particularly why some seem to be reflexive and trapped.

What do YOU think?  Why do we have emotions?  Are they reliable indicators of ANYTHING?  Are some of them more biological than psychological?  I think I have more to say on this, but I need to let it all percolate a bit.  Besides, I’d rather hear what YOU say first.  G’wan - speak your piece.

I’m a romantic at heart.  Your basic hearts and flowers gal.  And I romanticize ideas even more than lovers (which seems impossible, but I think it may be true).  I’m also a very spiritual being and have been, in my way since a small child. In fact my first transcendental mystical experience was at about age nine in a lovely little horseshoe of lilac bushes.

So the idea of “the mystery” and the mystical and the ineffable sounds so delicious to me. And I want to romance it - bring it the ideal-realm version of poetry and flowers.

But I’m reminded of when I left my corporate job back in 1996. I described that liminal time as akin to “walking blindfolded and backwards through the tundra.”

You know, that doesn’t FEEL very good. 

In other words - a lot of the mystery is about feeling LOST and ALONE and like a blipping idiot.  Not so romantic.

When I was young there was an anti-smoking poster that showed a woman with a horribly wrinkled face, kind of toothless as I recall, taking a big drag on a cigarette and it said “Smoking is glamorous.”

Well, I’m feeling that way about The Mystery.  Kind of like it’s one of those “this will be a great blipping story if I ever get out of here” moments.  Like God is duping me again, luring me in only for the big “gotcha!”

Made worse, of course because my spiritual advisors, all of ‘em, tell me almost literally quoting Pema Chodron, “embrace uncertainty.”

Pfoo!  That’s what I say.

And I say to God, somewhat regularly “Are you kidding me?  You think this is FUNNY?”  She doesn’t seem to laugh.  But then She’s SO SO SO not forthcoming.  But that’s women for you, mysterious.  Which makes me wonder why didn’t I get a boy God like everyone else?  But that’s another mystery and it’s late.

So I’ll take the advice of another of my mentors, though not, perhaps, on the spiritual realm, who said “the only thing {s}he knew how to do was to keep on keepin’ on.”  Thanks, Bob, I’m on it.  And for now that means g’nite.

One of the things i’ve always been irrationally proud of is being Irish. Well, half Irish in my case, and after my mother died we found out that the Glasgow part really WAS Scots-Irish as we always said and she so vehemently denied, so likely more like 25%.

So today, being St. Pat’s and all, I’m pondering what does ethnic identity really mean?  Why is it I care so passionately about being Irish and give a glancing nod to the Norwegian, Dutch and newly discovered Scottish parts of being me?

We were laughing at work today because my friend Mary posted a YouTube link to the Muppets doing Danny Boy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMy-5J0OHT4.  What’s funnier is that last year when I was visiting my sister, her husband surreptiously snuck his granddaughter to watch YouTube on his laptop (my niece Mary, Isla’s mother, forbids TV…) and Arthur was showing this very video to then 2 year old Isla.  When she burst into tears I said “See, it proves she’s Irish - she cries at “Danny Boy.”  Ya had to be there, but it WAS funny despite my grandniece’s sincere tears.

I do wonder, though - what is it in me that feels completely attuned to Irish music (way beyond Danny Boy) and felt I had TRULY come home when I first set foot in Ireland.  I recently read John O’Donoghue’s VERY Celtic spirituality book “Anam Cara” (means soul friend) and felt very attuned to his thoughts and way of expressing himself.  I wouldn’t leave the house without the Claddagh ring my sister bought me.  Like that - a sense of “me-ness” that feels very in tune.

When I went to Norway and the Netherlands it was more like seeing my father through new eyes (dad’s where the Norwegian/Dutch parts come in) - like, “oh yeah, these people are just like Dad….”.

I was thinking how much all of this has changed, thinking of my own family.  Dad told me that his parents got married his Norwegian grandparents disowned my Grandma for awhile because she’d married this Dutch guy. That seems so crazy to me - Norwegian & Dutch seem the same to me!  Or pretty darned close!

And now, with the next generation in my family my sister’s kids who themselves are “mutts” have married people with very different ethnic backgrounds.  When my niece Daniella who married a Filipino guy had her first daughter, my Dad was musing that the world we’re all moving into is one in which ethnicity is no longer relevant - the world is becoming so intermingled.  He thought that was a really good thing (which I think is surprising for a guy of his generation).

I want to think that’s a good thing and in many ways I’m sure it is.  Kind of like I want to be a vegetarian because it’s the right thing to do.

But on this one I think there’s another side of the story, particularly evident to me on this Irish feast day - that cultural traditions and stereotypes exist for a reason.  I really DO feel a soul-stirring when I hear the Chieftains or Enya or Wake the Dead (if you don’t know their music, you really should check out http://www.wakethedead.org/). 

I don’t know why that is - why parts of who we are seem so embedded in our very DNA.  My mom was so into being Irish that she totally dismissed our remarks that with a maiden name of Glasgow surely there was some Scottish in there somewhere.  I even put that in her eulogy but Dad made me take it out because he said she’d haunt us from the other side! 

So, I hope you’ll excuse me my Irish pride on this St. Patty’s Day.  Though my toast to “the world’s tallest elf” (as my mother called herself) will be a cup of tay, perhaps you’ll hoist a pint of Guinness to all the Irish from here to Innisfree.

And I’ll leave you with a spot of Yeats

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.