92nd Birthday

Yesterday we celebrated my mother-in-law's 92nd birthday. 

What a wonderful surprise to see her name up on the sign in the sanctuary at church!

It is truly remarkable to think about how much everyday life has changed in her lifetime. Here are a few highlights from the year she was born:

•  First baseball game played at Yankee Stadium.
• The world's first portable radio is developed in the US.
•  First Le Mans 24 hour race run in France.
• Time Magazine is launched on March 3.
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Lon Chaney is released.
•  Women's One Piece swimming suits begin to be worn. 
• The Ten Commandments directed by Cecil B. DeMille.
• The explosion of recordings of African American musicians including the great Louis Armstrong.

Four-out-of -five of her sons, and three daughters-in-law, all enjoyed lunch out with her.

Left to right: Greg, Jerry, Mom, John, and Jim.

It is rather amazing to think about having been her daughter-in-law for almost fifty years. My life has changed a lot, too, in those years. One constant, however, is John's kindness, respect, and love for his mother. Here they are together at the restaurant: 

The joke is he butters her up so she will tell him where the money is buried. I am not sure about the money, but I can tell you where you find real value. 

You find it in the kindness, respect, and love over a lifetime. And that is true at any age….

You Are Everything

We live in an illusion and the appearance of things.

There is a reality. You are that reality.

When you understand this, you see that you are nothing,

and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.

~ Kalu Rinpoche

As a child I loved puzzles. As an adult I enjoy Buddhist teachings. I heard this quotation by Rinpoche at Emrich retreat center in Brighton, Michigan while there on a silent meditation retreat, the title of which was Be a Lamp Unto Yourself. Another puzzle or another teaching?

When I visited with a woman who is recovering from having three cancerous ribs removed, I was seeing clearly the truth of the teachings. She is understandably grieving, understandably in pain, and understandably angry that the doctor who removed her ribs did not take into account how difficult that would be for her given that she previously had her left leg amputated at the hip. 

Prior to having the ribs removed, she was remarkably independent and active—totally adept with the aid of a pair of crutches. Now, she is adapting to being in a wheelchair, often very uncomfortable as she sits on the stump causing nerves to fire. 

Her choice of words were very telling, "I am angry. That surgeon did not take the quality of my life into account. The only focus was to cut out the cancer." 

Often, frightened and overwhelmed by a medical condition, we can fail to be a lamp unto ourselves. I will not share my bias about the cruel slash and burn twin treatments of surgery and chemotherapy than can destroy lives in the guise of curing a disease, or my preference for whole-person health systems that actually assist the person coming into balance and provide opportunity for the body to heal itself. I would rather have you learn a powerful guided meditation to help us imagine a world of infinite possibilities I learned while sitting under a catalpa tree smelling the sweet blossoms falling all around us.

Imagine you are out on the ocean with many other boats. It is a beautiful day. The water is smooth. You put on your scuba equipment and dive down deep to the ocean floor. Everything is peaceful; the ground is solid beneath your feet; you move effortlessly.

As you surface from your dive, huge waves are rolling. The sea has become stormy! People on the boats nearby are yelling for help as they face being tossed overboard or the boats being capsized. The Coast Guard has been called. 

You determine the best help you can be is to go back to the depths where you are safe and calm with your feet securely on the stable ocean floor.  Once there, you imagine your arms stretching up to the surface of the water and you begin to help the people caught in the storm. 

You lift many people onto the Coast Guard vessel where they are safe. 

Next, my imagination had me lift a Saint Bernard, then an elephant, then an airplane before  I was shown hospitals where this same amazing process of helping people was happening. Later, when I shared what I had seen in the meditation, another person at the retreat shared resuscitating children from this deep place of calm. 

For quite some time, many of us have had a sense we have a way of being with difficult situations more constructively than focusing on what is unhelpful. Complaining (even about something we see as downright wrong) is disempowering. Even those who are unskillful or acting out of blatant greed or the ignorance of self-interest are better served by our compassionate wisdom than our anger.

I hope you will also find this vision powerful as you imagine situations in your life that can be more just, creative, and helpful. Clearly there was no "I" doing the lifting, rather it was about our sincerely intending to help all beings come to the end of suffering. It is about our being used by LOVE, as depicted in this poem by Teresa of Avila (1515–1582):

Christ Has No Body

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

Fortunately, we are everything!

* Posted this last night and went to Pilgrim Congregational Church this morning because my wonderful friend/colleague, Linda Beushausen was speaking. From the sermon title "Rowing Your Boat Gently and Merrily Even in a Storm, the cover of the bulletin (see image below), the scripture (Mark 4:35-41 about Jesus' calming the sea), to singing Row Row Row Your Boat and I've Got Peace Like a River, you have to agree we are all in the boat together! 

 

What People Remember

People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.

This has been a very nostalgic week. I received an email message from a woman I worked with some time ago. Her email message:

I don't know if you remember me or not. I was a patient in the early 2000's, and you helped bring me out of a dissociative stupor. 

I would love to see you again, to say thank you if nothing else. I will be in the your area in a few weeks.

If it's not possible, please know that I'm thinking of you every day with tremendous gratitude.

My heart was so touched, I was brought near tears. 

Maya Angelou said, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." 

I assured her, yes, I do remember her… 

After all of these years, I still keep the hand-made afghan from her in my car, and this lovely needlepoint she made sits by my massage table here at the house. 

Later in the week, my partner (co-developer of Subtle Communication Systems), Joel Bowman, and I met one of his former students as we walked through the WMU Engineering Campus. When she realized who he was, she said to him, "We had to do a presentation and I had been painfully introverted. I realized I had to overcome that to be what I wanted to be. Your class changed my life."

Not everyone we touch will come back into our lives to say thank you, but whether someone is in our life for a lifetime or for a season, there is always a reason!

My Mother

It turned out to be a beautiful day, even though it started out cloudy and sprinkled a bit at the end of the Memorial Day Parade. The sky is now ribbons of blue and pink. 

It has been a day of memories for me, for sure, as May 25, 2003, we had my mom's Celebration of Life ceremony. It was the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend that year. 

Most of us have heard the story about the woman who cut the end off the ham, put both pieces in the pan, and put the pan into the oven. When asked why she did that, she realized she did not know why, but she would ask her mother (who had done that). 

Three generations back, the truth comes forth—her grandmother's pan was too small for the ham to go into without cutting the end off! 

Socrates once stated: "The unexamined life is not worth living," and that certainly applies in this situation. Perhaps it applies to much more in our lives as well. 

Today I discovered an amazing woman. Her name is Meggan Watterson, and she has traveled the outer world of religions in search of the divine feminine before going within to find it. Here is a powerful excerpt from the Introduction of  her book, REVEAL: A Sacred Manual For Getting Spiritually Naked (Hay House Inc., 2013):

What I want the spiritual process revealed in this book to give you is what it gave to me: a sense of empowerment that allows you to shed any feeling of being a victim and own everything that has happened to you; a feeling of embodiment that allows you to let go of every notion about the body except that it’s sacred; an awareness of true love as a limitless source within you, not something or someone outside you; a feeling of self-worth that lets you accept that love is your birthright, not something you must prove yourself worthy of; the audacity and authority to know that you don’t need to keep your power hidden, that we all have a direct connection to the Divine; a belief in service and meaningful work in the world that doesn’t deplete you but rather demands that you receive as much as you give; an experience of the love and support of spiritual community to remind you again and again that you’re not alone—that women do the work of saving each other’s lives.

The readers of this blog who know my birth story have supported and nurtured me as I faced the inner pain of learning my mom discovered she had syphilis at the same time she learned she was pregnant with me. My dad had had an indiscretion. She and I spent my first trimester with her being treated at a syphilis sanatorium. She was understandably embarrassed, afraid, and angry. While this was not known by me until I was forty-something, her thoughts and emotions and beliefs about all of that affected me. 

I am so thankful she was able to share with me before she passed from this life. I remember telling her about the vague sense of womb trauma resulting in not feeling loved or wanted. The gift she gave me was worth more than fortunes: "I could not have not wanted you, I did not even know you. I have loved you since the moment I laid eyes on you."

Louise Hay (sometimes called the Queen of Affirmations) said, "You're the only thinker in your head." 

Yesterday, awash in many emotions, two wonderful women friends again held my tender heart and assured me I am loved and wanted. 

Yes, women do the work of saving each other’s lives. Today, as I remember my mom's passing from this life, I remember the gift of love she gave me and I vow to pass it on.