The Puzzle

May I forgive myself for mistakes made and things left undone.

"Encountering Grief: A 10-Minute Guided Meditation"

with Zen Abbot, Joan Halifax

When I was on Pine Island last winter, I purchased a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle that featured the area. It had been produced by the Chamber of Commerce, and was sold in the featured businesses. Just a couple of days before I arrived, an arsonist set a fire that totally destroyed the offices of the Chamber, and the inventory of the puzzles. The ones that were already in stores were the only copies of the puzzle, so when I saw one for sale at a favorite shop (Earth and Spirit Garden Gallery), I purchased mine. 

The puzzle when home with me unopened, and returned back to Pine Island with me still in the box. Given that I am still recovering from surgery in November, I decided having the puzzle to work on would be a good recovery tool. I was not prepared for the lessons that working toward completion on a 1,000 piece puzzle might present, but I am certainly thankful.

The title of this blog might have been, “All I Really Needed to Know I Learned Putting Together the Pine Island Puzzle.” 

I learned that it is good to have a very big table if you are working on a puzzle that is 2 feet wide and 30 inches tall. When I first laid out all the pieces, the entire dining table was covered. Our meals were eaten at the breakfast bar in the kitchen or on TV trays in the screen room. In some ways, this reminded me of how much of my life was affected by my recent healing journey. The process leading up to the surgery, the surgery itself, the post-surgical complications, the recovery…. Any single aspect could have had a significant impact on my schedule, and with all the pieces spread out, it feels a bit like November and December 2012 did not exist for me. But, like the Pine Island puzzle, you can only take one step at a time. 

Separate all the straight-edged pieces so you can assemble the border. Think about doing this process with 1,000 pieces. Some days this is what life feels like. It can be a bit overwhelming, even when you are clear that you can only do what you can do at any given moment. 

After the border was assembled, I decided to work on the next layer inward. There was lots of detail in that, so it was easier to see what went where. Sometimes our choices are so obvious, they are sometimes called “a no-brainer.” I was surprised how obsessed I became working on the puzzle. It was as though it was my job to finish it, and I guess that is true since I was the only one working on it. 

Once in a while I would get stumped and give John the “job” of helping me find a certain piece in the image on the box. After a few days of that, he went to the flea market and bought me a set of magnifying glasses…. 

I discovered that the daytime light was best, but it seemed such a waste of sunny weather to be in the house putting together a puzzle. We do sometimes find ourselves stuck somewhere in our minds rather than enjoying the experiences of our lives. To remedy this, I would use some time in the morning when the light was good and John was still sleeping to sort for finer distinctions. 

General colors would go together. Then within that color I would put the shorter and taller and fatter and thinner “H” shaped pieces in an area for each according to color and size. Once John was up and had coffee and breakfast, we would go for our bike ride. As the puzzle was coming together, my healing seemed to be doing the same. I am thrilled at how much stronger I am in just one week! 

After the outer and inner borders were in place, I would put focused attention on an area where several pieces came together. Most of the task was visual, but it demanded paying attention to details. I have noticed that amplified awareness about what I eat or what I think or how I sit or breathe. It is really a gift to allow everything in life to be welcomed as spiritual practice. 

For example, I notice how I think about trash I see around the island. Rather than be critical about who was careless or even malicious, I notice what a sense of honor I have at cleaning it up (even though I know I was not the one who left the mess). Regardless of the specific situation, and even if we are talking about emotional messes, this can be done without a sense of obligation (been shouldin’ on myself for too long).You can bring beauty where you are. You can contribute to the world. You can leave things better than you found them.

As I worked on the Pine Island puzzle, teachings I have heard seeped into my bones. I was putting the pieces of my own heart and mind and body together! The puzzle became for me a living metaphor, and I allowed images of my jigsaw belly to come together along with the images of the jigsaw puzzle.

As the last pieces were coming together, I was sharing via text with my sister, Janis. We were taking about the way our lives really are getting easier. For us, the joy of the natural world is a big part of the healing. Her cat is Dusana. I have wonderful cats in my life in Michigan, too, and here on the island I visit two cats. I visit Sonny at the auto shop, and Hector at the ice cream parlor. I go see these cats just because I love petting kitties and these two kitties love the attention. Sonny forgets to swallow and slobbers! Hector is very at home with himself and sleeps soundly even with crowds of customers around him. It is very sweet and loving them just feels purrfect, if you know what I mean….

When I had only twelve pieces left (who is counting?) to completion, John came in to help. I could have been resentful thinking about how overwhelming it was when there were 1,000 pieces to sort, but I was aware of him choosing to share the joy with me. It turned into a bit of a coaching session, with my sharing aloud how I use the visual strategy to spot the piece to go into the section I am working on. “It will be taller, or shorter, fatter or thinner….” I felt myself slide into the ease you experience when you know you do not have to do it all yourself. I enjoyed having him enjoy being able to see what would go where. It was a surprise and a pleasure, and rather Zen. 

He gave me the privilege of putting in the last piece, which was quite special as it was a piece that had been searched for over and over and over, seemingly without success. The missing piece was right in the middle, right at the top, of the puzzle. This was a very obvious piece, one that was within the "inner" border. When I was down to only seven pieces, I counted the open section to see if there was one for up there. You never know for sure if a piece is missing.

The mystery of the last piece of the puzzle is still with my heart and soul this evening. My own inner journey of healing is not complete just because the Pine Island puzzle is finished. 

Completion is a state of constant process. You are always complete and yet always evolving. As Abraham-Hicks has said, “You can’t get it wrong, because you can’t get it done.” I am very thankful for this truth. It lets you go to bed at night and sleep and dream well. Life will have another puzzle for us to live tomorrow. Life is not a puzzle where there is a last piece to be put in place. Life's puzzle is itself a living matrix.

Hiding in Plain View

My sister, Janis, has been working with some wonderful old photos of our family. This comes, in part, by the recent awareness we have that our paternal grandmother is of Native American decent. My sister has been very drawn to that spiritual path, and, of course, I have been blessed to enjoy it as part of my own interfaith journey. The interesting news of our grandmother comes from an older cousin who reported that she was “found” as a child, and raised by a family. He said that while everyone knew she was “an Indian” no one ever said a word about it or about where she came from.

My paternal grandmother, Mary Smith, with her husband, Dove, and four of their children.

As I was pondering hiding in plain view as part of our family history, Mark Nepo’s sharing of a quotation by Angeles Arrien touched me to my core:

My grandmother told me, “Never hide your green hair—They can see it anyway.”

I started thinking about all the things that have been hidden. My mom had been married before she was married to my dad, but I did not know of that until after I was already married myself. My mom and my mother-in-law were sitting at the table having a cup of coffee when my mother-in-law casually said, “Cathryn, I know Howard was married before and had a daughter by that marriage, but were you married previously?” Imagine my surprise to hear my mom respond that she had been married once, briefly, but that marriage had been annulled. 

As I sit and witness my belly continuing to heal from the surgery to remove a 21 cm tumor that had formed on my left ovary, it makes me curious how much other stuff is hiding in plain view and what freedom can be experienced when we move beyond the fears that come from (and might just possibly cause) hiding. 

Mark Nepo (The Book of Awakening, January 5) hits the nail on the head when he writes that blackmail is only possible if we believe we have something to hide. In my life, much of the guilt and hiding has been around sexuality. The most obvious of this was having become pregnant before my sixteenth birthday. As the years unfolded, that event resulted in the birth of our wonderful daughter (the mother of my amazing grandchildren). It has all been a blessing in my life, but at the time there was much pain around the experience given the influence of patriarchy in our world.

I lived with the shame of “having to get married” and then the shame of being a high-school dropout because married females were not allowed to attend school. Married males were… but a married woman was sexually active and would be a bad influence on the other girls.

Times have changed since 1966, but I wonder how much we have changed, and more importantly, I wonder how much I have changed. 

Mark’s closing words in that writing: “The inner corollary of this is that worthless feelings arise when we believe, however briefly, that who we are is not enough.” 

 

It is my sincere intention that I have allowed my body to be free from the burden of having hidden sexual guilt. As I prepared for my surgery, I knew you can have other “stuff” removed. My own life, my mother’s life, and my paternal grandmother’s lives had been full of secrets. I was fully aware my own healing was able to reach back in time and make all the adjustments to allow for moving forward free from all of that.

(Here is an article about female sexuality on a global scale, as it relates to patriarchy.)

Happy New Year 2013

This is a day I was not sure I would experience. That may sound strange to some, but it has a very deep core of meaning for me. In October of 1999, I was at a workshop where one of the exercises was to look ahead in time and see the end of your timeline. When I did that, mine ended in 2012. The guy who was leading that workshop was a bit shocked, since I would only be 62 years old at that time, and he suggested I “go in and change the date.”

I am not at all sure what I was thinking about freedom of choice and the nature of life as being malleable, but I refused to change things, saying I would live out my destiny.

From time to time, I admit that I have thought about that, but in early October when I discovered a mass in my abdomen, I began to experience pretty intense stress around all of that. I did not feel ready to die and I even told a good friend I was not organized enough for my life to end!

This morning, looking at my journal entry for Sunday, November 11, 2012, the day before I had the CT scan showing that the mass was on the left ovary, I read this note from Mark Nepo's The Book of Awakening: crises reveals the raw surface of the mind.

Later that morning I saw Leah. I am so thankful to have a skilled acupuncturist who is also a Chinese medicine doctor. After a complete evaluation, she said, “No cancer.” She did find a blockage in the urethra area, as well as in the intestine. She felt it was good that I was having the CT scan so I would have more information.

In the afternoon, Nancy and I went to the peace path that is co-sponsored by our Saint Joseph Sangha and is at St. Anthony’s. What a wonderful, soulful place. I was touched by the commitment of those souls to justice and peace. What legacy they brought to our world, such as Aung San Suu Kyl, a Buddhist woman who has worked tirelessly to bring democracy to Burma, or Sophia Magdalena Scholl, who was executed for her anti-Nazi efforts.

On Monday, November 12, 2012, I made a note from Neale Donald Walsh’s thought for the day: The bad news does not have to get you down. It can actually get you going. Now may be a wonderful time to get back to basics, like board games with your children, quiet talks with your friends, a moment of gentleness with your spouse.

I also made mention that I observed in my body that the pain of emotionally grasping at/for love and connection feels just like the pain of fear and rejection! This insight seemed very significant, and as I had the thought I also heard a rapping that my sister Janis first referred to as a “Ceiling Walker”!

Mark Nepo’s words from the reading for that day were sharp as an arrow: “The world as we know it must be broken so that we can be born anew.  Almost dying was another shell I had to break." 

Mary Jo suggested I look back 10 years ago to see what I was dealing with at the soul level.  In my journal entry from November 13, 2002, I was writing about clearing my death wish!

I hade been noticing the relevance at those times when the voice-to-text function would not catch things the way I had spoken them. My pet name for the happenings is to call it a Sirism, for Siri, the technical name for the iPhone function. I wrote down this one:

SIRISM
I can appreciate anything
I can create anything

Nepo again seems to be written along the trajectory of my own healing journey: “When we marry our humanness to our spirit, we create a life that is doubly strong in the world.... Means staying committed to your inner path.”

The cystoscopy showed a healthy bladder with a huge growth pushing into it. I went right from Dr. Stockton’s office in Saint Joseph to South Bend to see Dr. Michael Method. On the way I sent a text to my sister, Janis. She knew of Dr. Method, spoke very highly of him, and even told me she had a coworker who had a 9 pound benign tumor removed!

We went to a favorite oriental restaurant with Nancy before driving home. The fortune in my cookie: Your future is whatever you make of it, so make it a good one. It was certainly not smooth sailing. I wrote in my journal: Heart is racing now. Feet cold. Wondering if it was foolish to wait.

Asking what is real about the timing, I drew Tree of Life: Seek a greater understanding of his or her karmic circumstances and conditions. Careful consideration and observations give you the chance to set your karmic record straight. I make my decisions from a place of hope and faith. Reading from Louise Hay on tumor: I lovingly release the past and turn my attention to this new day. All is well.

An entry on Wednesday, November 14, 2012, speaks to the way the unconscious mind is playing out at the soul level:

Yesterday when I was on the table waiting for the cystoscopy, I had the sense of my dad’s spirit coming to me to apologize for his role in my having to go through this. It was about him having brought syphilis to me at the time of my conception. Later that day John said he saw my dad in me a couple of times. One of the times was at the restaurant with Nancy after we left Dr. Method's office. I asked John to share those observations rather than wait for me to ask.My nephew took this photo of my dad years ago....

It was interesting that the key word for that day (Day 10 of the Deepak Chopra meditation) was on Karma. I made this note from Chopra's writing: Today I make great choices because they are made with full awareness.

It is a new year. I am alive. In a note to Betty Lue earlier this morning, I shared that during the night last night I was very aware of the two voices: Inner coach or inner critic. Those voices create the world we live in! The thinker thinks, and the prover proves. I was with Betty Lue the first time I became aware of that inner critic. I had spilled a glass on her white carpeting in their condo at Parkview Hills. I heard a sarcastic tone inside say, "Grace." I remember turning around inside my mind and challenging that voice by saying that even graceful people can have an accident and spill something and I would not tolerate being spoken to that way. Freedom, for each of us, begins with the smallest of steps away from anything that would keep us bound.

The wall hanging in Stacey's bathroom has a great quotation on it about how life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away. So today as I wish you a Happy New Year, it almost takes my breath away simply that I am in body and I am able to share this time with you here on planet earth.