Keepsakes

I almost cried this morning when I thought how long it has been since I posted a blog—ten days! It has been a very busy time, working with/for Johnny on the Spot Window Cleaning Service. 

It would be very easy to be in resistance, both to the pace and the tasks. It is so much more my preference to be leisured, and to be doing what I think of as healing work. My spiritual practice is to remember that the key is live from a soul awareness and to recognize when I have been in an illusion (time, money, energy, etc.). 

I do appreciate when I can notice the connections to the folks who are calling about windows. Johnny's tag line is to see clearly. Well, that is a worthy goal for all of us. 

Today my heart is filled with compassion for those who have been affected by the tornadoes in Oklahoma. 

Today, I also remember my friend, Evelynn Lewis, who was originally from Oklahoma. In some ways, she is the reason I learned Healing Touch™ and am where I am today missing the business of healing work as I am in the busy-ness of window cleaning. Evelynn and her husband Gene, are both in spirit now, along with those children who were in school when the tornado hit. 

How do you see clearly when you are looking at what appears to be destruction and death? Today I am reminding myself to breathe and remember the truth.

Energy can be neither created nor destroyed and everything is energy...

Keepsakes of Carol's beloved Lizzie...

My Husband's Other Wife

"Timing is of the essence..." 

"Timing is everything..."

"It is all about the timing..."

So many phrases in our lives have to do with timing. I certainly experienced that yesterday. Since before lunch, I had been intending to get to the grocery store. One phone call after another kept delaying my departure. At one point, I had my shoes on, my purse over my shoulder, and my keys in my hand just as one of the window cleaning crews pulled in, blocking my vehicle in the garage. I slipped my shoes off, set my purse and keys down, and said to myself, "Oh, well, they have been working so hard, and they will not be there long. I can wait." 

Imagine my surprise and delight to see one of my dearest friends who was just arriving in town after a three-day drive back to Michigan from Florida! Had I been at the store any of the other times I planned, I would have missed seeing her and welcoming her home.

The timing was perfect, because this woman is not just any friend. We have shared a lot over the years, but a very special bond was forged between the three of us when she was by our side last fall when I discovered I had a very aggressive mass growing in my abdomen. She accompanied us to the hospital the day of my surgery. In pre-op, I was told I needed to remove my wedding band. It would not fit safely on any of his fingers, but it slipped right on her finger. When the doctors and nurses came in, I introduced her as, "My husband's other wife."

She is the one who sat with him, awaiting news of my fate. She is the one who drove me to my post-surgical visit. She was holding the workings of our trembling hearts in her hand, and just as she was keeping my wedding ring safe, our hearts were safe with her. 

Something of the raw stuff of all of  that came flooding back to me this morning when I read what (for me) was a very emotional article titled "My Husband's Other Wife." It touched me deeply, and it might touch you, too. The author's husband had been married briefly to a woman who died from breast cancer not long after they were married. The cancer and treatments made it impossible for them to have a child. These tender thoughts are at the heart of the story: 

When our daughter was 8 she found the same box of photos that I had seen that day I moved in. She brought them downstairs to our bedroom and said she wanted to look at the old pictures of Daddy. She asked about the pretty, dark-haired woman always standing next to him. My husband told her that was Robin. 

After a few more minutes she looked up and said, "There are so many pictures of her."

"Dad loved her," I said.

"If you loved her so much, why didn't you marry her?" she asked her father.

He looked at me, and I nodded.

"I did," he replied.

Our daughter looked at the picture she was holding in her hand, her eyes widening, then at me. It was like one of those moments in Dickens when a foundling discovers her true origins.

"It's like I have two mothers," she said in a kind of astonishment.

What an innocent view of love. And what amazing wisdom to create a safe enough space for that innocence to be expressed freely. 

As I sit at my computer writing, I am watching three pair of rose-breasted grosbeaks outside my window. A few moments ago, one male flew straight to my window, fluttered back and forth in front of me, then landed on the pavement below my window looking up at me. This about grosbeak from Animal Speak, by Ted Andrews:

This totem [grosbeak] can help teach us to heal all the old wounds and hurts of family origin...A grosbeak has a beautiful melodious voice. This is significant. A melody is formed by a relationship between notes. A single note does not make a melody. The grosbeak can help us to see our family relationships as a true melody—each note separate but part of a larger whole. They can help us to see how our family has affected our life patterns...It can help you in seeing family patterns that you have brought over into your present life, along with your present family members.

In ways too complex and maybe even too intimate for this post, it feels as though my heart is healing so completely from those ancient wounds and that you now are being allowed to view love and life through the eyes of that innocence again. What wonderful timing for Mother's Day!

Water Reflects

I began, like so many of us, in a household where

it was somehow my job to be the lightening rod for the family's tensions

of unexpressed emotions.

~ The Book of Awakening:

Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have

by Mark Nepo

I have come to believe that one of the causes of mental illness is having universal experience and thinking it is somehow worse for you or unique for you. Perhaps we are looking more at spiritual disease than mental illness, but without a doubt, it is a source of deep distress.

Mark Nepo is describing the reality of being born into a human family. Infants are lightening rods for the emotional experiences around them. This was not just a report of his personal life, it is a fact of each of ours.

 

Previously (including in my book Falling Together in Love: Stories From My Heart for and about YOU), I have written about the emotional climate I was born into around my mother's having discovered she was pregnant for me at the same time she was told she had gotten syphilis from my father. It is quite easy to imagine the emotions I was a lightening rod for in those first weeks and months in the womb....

Brent Haskell, in Journey Beyond Words, says it like this "The past is the creator of judgment. Without a past, and without your judgment, all people are equal." This is probably true about our experiences, too. Without a past and without our judgment, we are free to just experience life.

I have been working on an up-coming tip for well-being around the importance of the practice of meditation. The benefits are being proven by science more and more every day. For the tip, I have developed a core line, "You must be present to win." We must develop the ability to be present to our own emotions, including those we took on from our family of origin, to win at the game of life. What you win is inner peace and stability and the joy of living. 

As Emily Dickinson put it:
To be alive is power, 
Existing in itself, 
Without a further function, 

Omnipotence enough. 

 Like clouds moving in water, problems make me forget I am clear... The Book of Awakening, May 5

Water reflects everything it encounters. 

This is so commonplace that we think water is blue, when, in fact, it has no color. 

Amazingly, while soft and flowing, water—as ocean or lake or even as the smallest puddle of rain—takes on the image of the entire world without ever losing its essential clearness. 

~ Mark Nepo