Port in a Storm

In which pain, a floating couch, and a true adventure lead to teachings of spirit

     I've been living with a lot of pain recently, as well as some pretty vivid dreams. Maybe they're connected, maybe not. It's all been a mystery, including the source of the pain, although "they" are working on that. I've been learning a lot, walking beside pain. It has taught me about living within what the day is offering me - the morning, this very moment. Feel how warm the deck has become, radiating sun-heat into my back when I lie on it. Look at the oriole on the orange – isn't she dark for a female? Smell the grape Kool-aid scent of my purple irises. Hear the sounds of Bob in the garage, using his bandsaw to rough out a project.

     And when the pain's usual ache rises in intensity like the tide, I move swiftly to take more Tylenol, and if laying on the floor with my feet on a chair doesn't help, I wind up on my bed, curled up, living only in each hellish moment, enduring, knowing it will subside eventually.

     Bob somehow knows to come check on me. He lays down beside me and holds me as I curl into him. I'm safe, even as I'm overcome.

     The last time this happened, he left me gently after the pain tide had gone back out, and I fell into a deep sleep. The dream I had involved a floating sofa, paddling it to shore, strangers offering free tomatoes and lentils – you know, the stuff of dreams. Except I recognized it as a direct allegory of an event I had lived through, and it wanted to show me something. 

     When I was in my late teens or possibly early twenties (my sister Pam and I can't quite place it), the two of us set out for  a three day/two-night canoe trip on the Diamond-Wakimika-Obabika circuit, a somewhat famous and well-traveled route through beautiful deepwater lakes on the rugged pine-encrusted bedrock of the Canadian north. Convenient to our family's remote island cabins on Lake Temagami, it was an obvious choice. Pam and I both knew the route from attending a canoe tripping camp nearby. We were experienced. The only drawback is that we were just one canoe; there would be no help if we capsized. But there was no whitewater, and we knew when conditions on a lake were too dangerous to go out in. We'd be ok.

     And we were. We paddled and portaged, a naturally slow form of travel. It's always a relief when you leave a lake busy with motor boats and with effort carry your transportation, food and shelter over an ancient rocky path to a quiet lake, pristine and fresh to your eyes. The water is so clean, cool and deep it's drinkable. We had tin cups tied on long strings to the gunwales. I can't remember if we fished. We likely found handfuls of little blueberry flavor bombs.

     On our third and last day, we crossed the easy portage from Obabika Lake back into Temagami. We had to paddle east across Devil's Bay and follow the long steep-cliffed curve of the shore as it bent north into the main channel. Once heading fully north, it was an easy eleven miles to our island. The wind was increasing out of the south. Crossing Devil's Bay would be a bouncy slog broadside to the waves. We had to stay away from the cliffs because in this wind, the waves would hit the cliffs and bounce back, creating dangerous conditions for a small boat.

     Weight distribution in a canoe is key. A load needs to be balanced, neither bow nor stern heavy. The paddlers need to sit high enough to reach, power and pivot the boat. In conditions like Pam and I were in, we needed to lower our weight so the boat was less tippy; we dropped onto our knees, leaning against the seats.

     It took skill, strength and luck, and we had all three. We made the crossing, got past the cliffs, and in our last and trickiest maneuver, paddled our canoe around the end of Devil's Bay, fighting wind-driven waves that were pushing against our stern trying to hold us broadside.

     Northbound at last, it was a straight shot home and would not take much more than a couple of easy hours with the wind finally supporting us. When the view to the north opened up, however, we saw a darkening sky way up there. Dang. With continuous effort, we might make it back before a storm. Or maybe it would continue to move east and miss us altogether. Or not. No lunch or pee break. We dug our paddles into the water and pushed.

     The raindrops hit when we were about halfway there. Thunder growled. It was moving in fast and we needed to get off the water. This part of Lake Temagami has beautiful steep shorelines topped with elegant tall red pines. It is grand and ancient, and had captured my soul when I first traveled past it in our 1960s motor boat at age seven. In this situation though, the steepness made it difficult to get ashore. We finally spied a rocky nose that angled down to water level with a few trees for shelter, and aimed for that.

     By the time the storm crashed its full force on us, we were up on the nose, unloaded, and had the canoe turned over with our gear stowed beneath. Thunder, lightning and pelting rain engulfed us. We had on our cheap but formerly sufficient raingear. Pam and I huddled by the canoe; we might even have crawled under it. The storm was taking its bloody sweet time. But finally the wind subsided, the thunder faded off in the distance, and the water drew calm. Dead calm. We were soaked, but with the passing of the storm and renewal of our paddling, we would warm up. Our island was just an hour away.

     A riffle picked up on the water, from the north now. The wind had switched 180-degrees. Oh well, maybe it would take an hour-and-a-half – two hours at the most – to get back. But as the riffle turned to waves, and the waves developed into whitecaps, Pam and I began to feel alarmed – not just because of the wind, but because the temperature was also dropping fast. The sun had not yet shown itself; in fact it was still drizzling. We did not know how long this would last: twenty more minutes, two hours, or all night.

     The rocky nose we were on was no campsite. It was narrow, sloped and small. There was no soil to pitch a tent. There was no access to the forest above. We considered starting a fire but the limited supply of twigs and branches were soaked. We were stuck and in danger of becoming hypothermic.

     Impending emergency created an urgent clarity. Pam and I discussed what to do. Wait and see? We'd likely get colder. Pull out our sleeping bags and get in them under the canoe? But there was no soil, water was still flowing over the rock, and it would be difficult for us both to fit and keep our bags dry. The final option was the one we chose. It was risky, but there was no option that wasn't. We bet on our skills.

     We carried our boat down to the waterline trying to keep it in whatever lee there was. One held it while trying not to slip on that wet sloped rock, while the other dragged the two heavy Duluth packs down and rolled them into the bottom of the canoe, mid-thwarts. We put on our life jackets. Pam got in the bow and as agreed, sat on the very bottom of the canoe. I climbed in the stern, did the same, and pushed us off.

     To the south of our rocky nose was a large island we had passed on our furious sprint north just two hours before. It was owned by “family friends”: my grandparents had introduced another couple from Ohio to this paradise decades before, and they soon acquired their own island. I didn't really know them except from grown-up cocktails, but I did know that their boat dock was in a little cove at the north end. All Pam and I had to do was drift with the wind and fierce waves back south, and with a little steering from the stern, edge our canoe over and into that sheltered haven. Whether they were there or not didn't matter. We could go ashore safely, find shelter, and plan our next step.

     It worked, and Pam and I are both alive to tell the story. Fortuitously the Grieses were there and quite surprised to see us at their cabin door. An hour later, dried by the fire and warm from hot chocolate, we were bundled into their motor boat and returned north under brisk clearing skies to our own island and anxious parents.

     This memory returned to me via the floating sofa dream as an echo. I had found safe harbor from my pain in the warm and comforting arms of my husband, my closest and most intimate refuge. He is my life companion. And I had found safe harbor decades before from the threat of real danger... where? Literally in a safe harbor. But as I considered the vividness of my dream and its originating memory, I thought there was more to it . When we are threatened or in danger, where do we turn? How do we make our way to refuge? Who do I look to for safety? Prompted by my dream, I looked at the canoe trip story and my current cancer story, as different as they are, for answers. These four stepped forward from the haze of unexamined memory and primal instinct into a conscious comprehension – a gift.

     Sources of safety:

1. My companions, like my sister on that trip, and my women's circles today.
2. The kindness of almost-strangers, like the Grieses who took us in and took us home, and the prayer blankets I receive from people who I don't even know but are connected to my family.
3. The steady support from people who love me, like my younger but capable sister in the bow of the canoe, Bob, and family and friends who in these past months have given us food, continuous gentle texts, calls, driveway visits, healing circles, and held us in their daily prayers and meditations.

There's one last source of strength and refuge in a storm:

4. My self, my inner spirit, my knowing. We are born with it. It is nurtured by the people who love us. It grows from the events and possibilities in our lives and how we meet them. Spirit is not confined to a body; it flows like water feeding our identity and intuition, and also flows between us as love and as understanding. Shapeless but powerful like the wind, it flows into us from the earth, sky and all living things. We are never alone, never sufficient unto ourselves, and must never yield our selves/souls/spirit to others. We are interconnected, and we are whole.

     On the lake that day I drew from all those sources; I looked to the compass of my intuition, trusted my companion, sought help from strangers, and made it home. We worked with wind and water, and they carried us to safety.

To see the maps in a larger view, click on the image.

True self

     It is so easy to live separated from spirit, or as some say from our “true self”. What does this mean, our true self? It feels like one of those code phrases that people who know what it means nod sagely about. The rest of us either nod sagely with no idea what it means but wishing we did, or dismiss it. 

     Here's my take on what the true self means, and why it's worth pursuing.

     From the vantage point of where I now stand with a cancer diagnosis, all of my “self” that is my physical presence in this world is under threat. Already surgery has removed invasive tumors and my reproductive organs with them. I am not who I was. Chemo will continue to change me physically, a price for the hope of blockading further activity of the primary tumor making itself at home in my body.

I may not look the same if I lose some hair; I may lose feeling to a lesser or greater extent in my fingers and toes; my energy may decrease; I may lose other parts of my anatomy to surgery, or scar them from radiation; or the cancer may take my body altogether. Or not; I may survive all this and remain a physical being walking on the earth beside my beloved husband and family. The point is my physical self is not an assured thing. The body is finite. And so if that is what defines us, if we think of our body as our “true” self, then we spend our energies trying to preserve it and we measure our success against other bodies we encounter in our daily lives.

     Logically, this attachment to our physical self extends to our hopes for what our bodies will be doing and living in the future. Plans to travel, change jobs, publish a book, or get old beside a beloved and watch grandchildren take their first steps are all dependent on the successful persistence of the body. I have these hopes. My body is the vehicle for my spirit to be able to do these things. This sense of self is a hybrid of physical and spiritual, the full package we are born with.

It allows us to experience creativity, sensory wonder, intimacy with other creatures, emotions, thought, failure and achievement, service to others, and hope. There are many more aspects of being human, of being a physical entity animated and differentiated by a unique life-force-energy, that are only possible because of this merger. I'm thinking that most of us understand our true selves this way: a unique blend of genes and personality.

     So how important is our spirit or soul, our life-force-energy, to the sense of self? I have read about people who have lost the use of some or almost all of their body – Stephen Hawking for example, or Charles Krauthammer. If the true self is a hybrid of body and spirit, have they lost their true selves? I think that in fact nearly all they have is their true selves, and they are - or were - vitally alive. It is the force of their spirit that comes shining through regardless of physical manifestation, regardless of the loss of many of their first dreams, their control over their appearance, their strength, and their ability to walk on this beautiful earth.

     I still have my incredible body. What is gone is my assumption that it will function and age the way most people's bodies do. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. But I feel more alive, more my true self now than I ever have. The little snarky judge that sat on my shoulder monitoring everything from my performance at the gym to the clothes I put on to my worthiness as a Reiki teacher or children's book author or, for crying out loud, as a mother – that little beast is gone, dismissed, seen for the purveyor of false self that it was.

And I've discovered my true self is no stranger; it is the quintessential me that was a seed at the beginning and grew along with those other layers of self I added through childhood, adolescence, college, relationships, career, parenting. All along there was this me, sometimes guiding, sometimes ignored, sometimes sending tendrils of longing forward to my more conscious mind. As I began to acknowledge the longing and reach in to my soul bit by bit, feeding it with readings and retreats, letting it out to play in its wildness when no one was looking, practicing some of the teachings of wisdom traditions that rang in the same key as the song of my spirit, I began to peel away those other layers of self to at least glimpse my true self. Practice would have brought me closer and closer, like peeling away the layers of an onion towards the center. It's just that cancer shucked the remaining layers off all at once.

     If my snarky little judge was still on my shoulder right now, it would say “you must feel naked and vulnerable, exposed for everyone to see.” The amazing thing is that I feel just the opposite. I am clear. I know what I know. I know who I am. I am content with being exposed because I am at home in my self. I don't care one whit what the snarky little guy says that other people might think about me.

     I understand that love is a powerful energy, one of the foundational sources of life. It is profoundly more than I ever understood it to be. Love is so simple and easy to give and accept when there are no layers of onion trying to filter, analyze or apportion it according to worth. Residing in my true self I am not vulnerable – I am powerful. It is the soft, deep, grounded power that rises through me. It is love. I cannot push or force from this power. I can only give.

     We naturally protect ourselves from living as spiritual beings in a world that overwhelmingly values physicality, products, achievement, gain. Snarky judges and the pain they inflict abound, and it seems easier to follow the cultural rules. I think that is why we stay separated: to begin to peel those rules away and simultaneously seek and nurture your true self can be unsettling at first, with a foot in the body-world and a foot in the soulful-world.

But it's worth it. Keep going. Be who you sense you really are. You won't lose yourself, or your hopes; they will become clearer. Your path to get to them will become increasingly unimpeded by that snarky little judge. Your life-force-energy will swim in the companionship of what you find beautiful and your gratitude for that. The depth of your well to give happiness to others will become bottomless. You will be you. 

     That is my experience, and it is my deep sense that it is possible for anyone. There are many paths to help peel the layers back, most residing in the world's religious and wisdom traditions. I am deeply and humbly grateful that I know this – I am this – now. I would have preferred another means besides cancer to teach me, but since I have no control over that, I can only accept what I have now: me.

Dawn Prayer II

This was written during a visit to family in southern Arizona, far from my home habitat in Maine. 

     Morning in the Sonoran Desert brings different qualities to my senses. In the dimness preceding a November dawn, I've heard an owl hooting, coyotes yipping, but mostly silence - until the insistent questioning of a Curve-billed Thrasher begins. The air is chilly, the sky huge and empty. In my morning practice yesterday, I reached down to touch the earth, choosing a smooth rock embedded in the stony and hard-packed ground to put my hands on so I didn't inadvertently get a little spine in my skin. 

I reached down through the rock in gratitude and said, 

"Thank you Mother." 

She pulled me down deeper and said,  

"These are my children, all these rocks, across the surface here and across this desert that you see, and those mountains there before you. These are all my children, these rocks." 

It was as if she pulled me in and let me see through her eyes.

And I said,  

"I see them now. I have not always seen them. I connect more with the living things, but I see the rocks now, how they are your children, how they've been raised up high in the mountains, how they're deep, deep in the earth, how some are shiny and sleek and others are rough, and how they all slowly, slowly give of themselves to become soil, how some are in streams and rivers with water flowing over them, how some are open to the wind, polished by sand blowing over them. I see them now." 

I closed my eyes and could feel the energy of the many -- the many rocks and stones that are the foundation and the offspring of the earth. 

With a stone in my pocket I carry this teaching with me, gratitude for a gift received in my dawn prayer.
 

Living in color

     There is a phrase I've heard often enough that it is at risk of becoming an eye-roller, but actually it smacks of truth to me: "We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a physical experience." Certainly the first part of my life was about the physical: growing up, falling in love, experiencing sexuality, having babies, nurturing life in our own children. 
An awakening to my spiritual self wove through all that, beginning I think with my longest canoe trip when I was 16, thirty-five days deep in the North Woods. I became adept at reading the inclinations of the water and sky, and the repetitive physical motion of paddling long lakes was a gateway to a contemplative mind, as I drifted in both self-awareness and selfless-awareness.
     Perhaps this is why the water-sky horizon is a magnet for my soul. Not the actual horizon - the line where my eye tells me the two meet - but the times when they merge. I find the merging profoundly beautiful and mysterious.

     My eye wants to find a boundary and interpret it as finite, even as I know a horizon is never a finite thing. But to not have the comfort of this trompe l'oeil - the line of separation - delights me because it whisks the rug out from under my mind and jumps me into the perceptivity of my soul. This is how I get closest to the experience of beauty. 
     For me, when I'm in the presence of profound beauty there is a longing to merge. It's like my body is the perceived horizon, the line between, the boundary of separation. My eyes are both the pathway towards beauty and the guard at the door: "look at that view!", "have you ever seen such colors!" - approach, admire, but don't enter. I remember standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon for the first time. It was sunrise. It took my breath away. It was truly overwhelming, too much for my eyes to take in, beyond comprehension. I almost had to turn away. My mind wanted to file it under "disbelief". And echoing in these words - comprehension, disbelief - is the nugget: for me, my eyes lead a well-trod path to the mind, not the soul. So I need to either trick my mind or close my eyes if I want to get beyond the horizon. 
     I could just stay on this side and appreciate beauty, be a physical being having a soulful experience. But that doesn't seem to be the fabric I'm cut from. Some of my deepest moments of joy have been when I've closed my eyes and let my other physical senses do the experiencing. It cuts out the middleman of my mind. I don't just appreciate beauty, I swim with it.

Horizon photos from an old National Geographic.

     Those of us with beloved partners know this.
     And then there is music.
      What can I say: I love jam bands. When music is predictable, repeatable, it certainly can be beautiful and beloved in the way a familiar recipe or hiking trail can be enjoyed over and over. But it's the improvisational journey into unknown territory that certain musicians can lead me through that runs right over the horizon line of appreciating a piece of music and takes me to a place beyond where I can merge with it. These are extraordinary - "extra-ordinary" - experiences, and I'm so grateful that I've had them. They've taught me that there is something on the other side of the horizon. They've taught me that my physical being can support my spiritual joy. The whirling dervishes of the Sufi mystics know this; the Tibetan Buddhist monks chanting "om" for hours know this; whenever we get in a "flow state", as they call it, we glimpse this. Paddling for hours on a northern lake began to show me this.
     When I go to hear certain bands with gifted lead guitarists who plunge into improvisational jams all the time, I'm in heaven (which begs the question what is heaven? but that is another conversation). I close my eyes and turn my body over to listening and moving. In this way I entwine with the music like a lover. I can "see" the shape of the music; it has colors; it arcs and travels and rises and falls. My hands involuntarily follow the shapes like a bird soaring on air currents. My body moves in motion to the rhythm, the earth to the music's flight. It is as close to merging with beauty as I can get. It is glorious.

Walter Baxter / A murmuration of starlings at Gretna / CC BY-SA 2.0

     And so as I travel the cancer path, I somehow feel the separation between me and beauty - and love - is a thinner boundary. I weave back and forth across it all the time. Sunrise happens every day, and I'm usually there. An embrace, a kiss, a clear view of the Milky Way, the heartbreaking beauty of Jerry Garcia's jams on the Europe '72 "Morning Dew", a Mary Oliver poem read aloud before drifting off to sleep at night - these are all a hand extended and an invitation to merge, to not just be physical beings, to live in color.

The Impulse of Love

This is one of a set of posts about my season of cancer. It began with "A new journey."

     The other night, I attended a large function that privately I was calling "my coming out party". It was Maine Conservation Voters' "Evening for the Environment" which is always jam-packed with the people who tirelessly and with some inexplicably bottomless optimism keep trying to protect Maine's natural resources and fend off climate change. These are my people. I know and value a lot of them. A lot. And I had not yet emerged into a public venue since my cancer diagnosis became widely known.

    This is not about the tremendous love I got -- and gave -- there, though in some way it does all tie in. This is about a story that the speaker, Richard Louv, told us. Richard Louv is a hero. His 2005 book Last Child in the Woods named an insidious fear many of us sensed was rising in young people alongside the ascending infatuation with "smart" technology: a disconnection with the natural world he called "nature deficit disorder". He had data. He tied it to physical and mental illnesses. By naming this, he created a cultural pivot point and started a movement getting children back outside.  
I will bet that everyone in that room could point to a time or place where they had a transformational experience in nature, whether standing in the dawn light at the top of a building in Manhattan, floating in a lake at Girl Scout Camp, or watching whales rise on a whale watching boat tour. Connection with the profound otherness of the wild is like a turbo-boost of life-force energy. Now doctors are literally prescribing time in nature for their young patients. We gathered to listen to what else Richard Louv had to say*.
     He told this story: One morning a young mother walked into her dining room where her six-year old was lying on the carpet alongside their family dog, Jack. He was stroking the dog's fur. It was a peaceful scene. Then the boy spoke. "Mommy, I don't have a heart anymore". The mother was startled. Then he said, "My heart is in Jack". 
     The impulse to love is native in us.
     With my cancer diagnosis has come great clarity. There is no reason to be shy or protective about loving. And there is no reason to deflect love when it comes to you.
     I am a great lover. I was blessed to be raised with safe love, and with constant access to nature. And I married the most amazing man who not only loved me but let me love him with the full energy of my love. That second part is huge: the impulse to love needs outlet. We all need to give love, open the faucet, not hold back.
     Now I am on the receiving end of that. Love is flowing in to me in voluminous quantity. It's astounding, humbling, and invigorating. I do not want to be in the cancer seat, but now that I am here I must say out loud that the impulses of love coming from everyone is a real, felt thing.
     It's like I'm at the center of a wheel, and all these spokes of energy coming from every direction are literally holding me and filling me with unbounded joy. How can this be? -- I have cancer! My answer: I don't know. Perhaps it is that I am not my body, I am my spirit. The love coming in generates joy, delight -- and gratitude. Gratitude, I've learned, is entwined with the impulse to love.
     I stood in the predawn dark/light again this morning, awed at the sharp silhouettes of the pines against the glow on the horizon - rose-cantaloupe is my name for that color. One step further from the house and the crescent moon slid from behind the roofline. I gasped at its unexpectedness. Bob came out. "Look. Look!" I said. We stood together in silence. And then I blurted "How can anyone not be in love when you see this?"
     The impulse of love. It doesn't have to be manifest as a gift, a hug, a dinner, a card, flowers, a wedding vow. The energy of love itself is real. I feel it strongly now, coming in. I feel it flowing out of me as joy. It is connection. It is gratitude. It most certainly is beautiful. It is natural, native to us. It is life-force energy. It is who we are. It is little. It is big. It is between a boy and a dog; it flows through a room of five hundred people on an October evening.
     I am grateful. I accept. And I give you my love.

*Richard Louv's new book Our Wild Calling will be in book stores in November.

Making room

     We had a Nor'easter last week. I awoke at 4am to the sound of wind stampeding up from the fields like loose angry bulls, sometimes wrecking through the forest behind the house, sometimes slamming the house itself. Rain spattered across our metal roof. I lay in bed, a baby pillow pulled up to relieve pressure along my incision line of 28 staples, and listened to the outrage outside.
     We lost power for two-and-a-half days. At first it's quiet. The storm pulls away pretty suddenly, and there is no sound of a refrigerator humming, the furnace turning on, no radio or dishwasher. Just -- silence. It's a reminder of what living can be, at its truest core, what it sounds like when things stop and all that's left is the structure of the house over my husband, the dogs and me. 
     I learned something yesterday from the trees. I asked them about the violence of the storm. Most years we get these big blows in autumn that strip the leaves from the trees, or if it's early and the trees aren't ready yet, the wind shreds the leaves leaving parts hanging and parts in shards on the ground. I wanted to know about the energy of autumn. We call it "fall", and it has always seemed like a passive season to me. Words like "transition", "release", "yielding" describe what I've always thought of as the final stage in the loss of summer.

     But the trees told me something different. Fall is not about loss. Fall has power: "We don't yield our leaves; we push them off ". You can see it more clearly in the pines, firs and cedars: a layer of needles turns yellow while the ones closest to the light remain green. "We push off our needles and leaves to make room, to build capacity, to clean ourselves". Autumn is not about an ending or giving up. It is an active preparation for renewal.
     Wow. There is so much energy here: blazing trees, crashing storms, clearing out -- all to make room in the silent pause of winter for possibility to incubate. No longer will I perceive fall as meek. As I walk to the meadow's edge to greet the dawn this morning, knowing that storms are about to rampage through my own body to clear it of the cancer, I will ask for help from the trees. I may lose part of me. Will I be passive or active, release or push? What can happen in the silence after the storm?
     My favorite poem walks into my mind. I memorized it in high school.

I dwell in Possibility--
A fairer House than Prose--
More numerous of Windows--
Superior--for Doors—

Of Chambers as the Cedars--
Impregnable of Eye--
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky--

Of Visitors--the fairest--
For Occupation--This--
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise-- 

~ Emily Dickinson

Dawn Prayer 1

     Every morning when I reach down to touch the earth and connect with her deep strength, some prayer comes spontaneously to my lips. The very act of squatting or bending over is humbling, and reminds me of kneeling in a church. Except this is not rote. There is no "should" here, no prescription - just desire for connection, desire for repeated contact, desire for a small ritual that opens me to something fuller*. Touching the earth every day is the beginning; what comes next is spontaneous. This dawn prayer is close to what I spoke yesterday morning. The sense I had of riding the spinning earth towards light stayed with me all day, and I try to recapture it here. The last two lines are often how I end.

Mother, somehow I feel you turn toward the sun.
Hold me, as I hold on to you,
As you hold all of us who ride on you.
In my roots I feel the nestling of earthworms, voles and acorns.
As I stand, I feel a brush of breeze on my cheek
And wish I could hold your touch there,
Just for a moment, loved.
Instead I press my hands into your wet meadow grass --
Good morning Goldfinch! Good morning Blue Jay! Good morning crickets! --
And wait
Together
Feeling the rise of gratitude 
With the oncoming light.
May the work I do in the world today be the work of spirit;
May the energy of the earth pass through me to all beings today.


*Maybe church liturgies did start this way; this is something to ponder.

Approaching the blaze

This is one of a set of posts about my season of cancer. It began with "A new journey".

    October 15

     I'm trying to imagine being a tree.

     In some people's minds, I'm already there. I've been told I'm like a tree, and in all honesty, that didn't always sit well with me. Something about the solidness and immobility of the trunk of a tree, gray or brown, echoed in an unfortunate way the self-image I carried of the tall, "big-boned" adolescent in an 8th-grade class of blonde gymnasts. At least I think they were all gymnasts. 
     But I kept veering in the direction of trees as life pulled me along. Camp and canoe tripping in the North Woods first woke me to pine trees - to this day, the regal red pines that stand wild on the shorelines of rock-rimmed Ontario lakes are my absolute favorite trees. Then came forestry school for my Masters degree: I thought I was there for rare plants and ecosystem management, but I graduated with a silviculture orientation - growing trees. Returning to my home in Ohio with my fiancé, I saw the broad-leaf hardwoods growing in the rich soils of my back yard as something close to miraculous: here were cherries and beeches bigger than I could reach around with soaring canopies that I'd never noticed growing up! 
Once married, I settled in Maine where the white pines kept my heart alive in winter, soft-needled and green against the deep blue sky, the colors of earth and life. 

     I'm falling in love again just writing this.

     Autumn was a real problem though. The trees changed. They didn't seem real in the blazing reds and yellows and even maroons (some ash trees) that everyone else oggled at. I felt betrayed, I think. Green soothed my soul. These colors were gaudy. And they were also tied to two things that put pits in my stomach: back-to-school (the blonde gymnasts), and the coming of winter. I also lived in northern Ohio where winter meant slush, five solid months of lake-effect gloomy gray overcast skies, and bare gray tree twigs without one single pine or fir intervening. No green, no blue. Those fiery autumn trees could not be trusted: I knew what they meant, and I closed my heart to them.
      Living in Maine for over thirty years has gently shown me that autumn and winter have their own beauty. I will always swoon at the slow greening of spring, and revel in the warmth and aliveness of summer. But my heart has softened - a bit - to autumn and winter.

     Now I find myself living in the moment, a bearer of a cancer as yet unidentified. In my dawn prayers this morning, an answer came to a question unasked: The trees are your teachers. I blinked. I looked at the trees: reddening, golding, some still green. They are changing, and right in this moment they have stepped out of their chlorophyll kinship to be seen as individuals, unique. You are my teachers. I am changing. I am no longer in my summer. What does it mean - what does it feel like - to blaze? Does it take courage? Or is it thrust upon us like it or not? I know where this is going, in some sense: I will be stripped bare - more like released perhaps (the gentler energy of letting go) - and I will stand naked, still rooted, still reaching upward in prayer, through the dormant, raw, incubating time until spring comes. 
     But that is not now. Now is my time to walk in the forests of color, among my fellow trees, and shift from observing to sensing, separateness to belonging. Keep teaching me. Keep me alive without fear. Take me deep into what you know. 

When the corral breaks open

This is one of a set of posts about my season of cancer. It began with "A new journey."

 September 28

     I believe that Spirit infuses all things. ALL things.
     And let's just get this out of the way: if you don't believe in Spirit - aka life-force-energy, Something Other, divine impulse, God, etc. - I respect your belief. But please know that it is a belief. There is no scientific proof that there isn't (or is) Spirit.
     Spirit is the word I've settled on for the quality that is both within me and infinitely beyond me. It defines me as me, the animating essence that gives my DNA-derived structure a unique persona. It is the connective tissue between me, other people, all of nature including the winds and deepest aquifers, and the endlessness of what we can only lamely call "space".
     This is my experience. It is real to me. What is gratitude if not an upwelling of desire to respond to such connection? And what is love if not a soul-level connection to another being? And for that matter, what is soul? To me it feels like soul is the word chosen to somehow corral the sense of spirit unique to a person. A person in love - with her spouse or partner, her child, her dog or horse - is a person in whom the corral has burst open in the direction of that being.
     I know great love: I love, and am loved deeply, by my husband. That we chose each other after living years of individual lives makes this, in some ways, a miracle. No formula can predict or create such a love. Intuition, soul connection, risk and trust were present when we made the decision to marry. And I suppose they are all still there, though the balances have changed with the years.
     I know great love for my children, love that is soul connection from conception. It has different qualities than my love for Bob. It's the love of nurture and release, like carefully laying a strong and well-supported fire in the fire-ring in the field, and as the time approaches, setting a match to it, watching it slowly and surely burn until it gains strength on its own and finally releases sparks skyward on a still solstice night.
     I know great love for the Earth. I talk to the Earth. Usually my prayer is an unbidden and unrestrained "Mother - thank you." This morning on my walk with the dogs I talked to all the zillions of monarchs in the air and on the few remaining flowers in the September meadow. It was an exclamation of amazement: "Hello! Oh my gosh! Good luck everyone!" I even offered advice: "Fly together you guys!" I stood there counting them for a moment, realizing it was pointless but just being so happy about how many there were.
     This urge to communicate I believe is my way of offering connection - extending my soul - within the limits of my human body. Maybe those monarchs don't have a clue that I'm wishing them luck powered by my love. Maybe the spirits of the seven directions that I greeted with spoken prayer at dawn this morning have no clue that I even exist. But it doesn't matter to me. Because my formless, barely (if even) corralled spirit expands outward at times when the connection between "me" and "other" is thin, and by releasing it in my limited human way of speech, I am acknowledging its existence in me and nurturing it. When I began to sense the urge for more intimacy with Earth's creatures, committing to a soul connection held elements of intuition, risk and trust. Who, after all, talks to monarchs? Sometimes I greet every plant I see on my walks by name, out loud. What, in fact, is crazy? And, really, do I care?
     There's another pitfall: expecting something in return. The Buddha told us that attachment is one of the primary sources of suffering. Expectations of reciprocity with a god aren't uncommon: "if I'm good enough...", or "if I pray hard enough..." are subtle temptations. When I sink my feet and consciousness deep into the earth, behind the upwelling of gratitude that pours out is often a prayer: help me. Usually it is "help me be the pass-through of Spirit into the world today." All I want, all I can be, is the vessel, the tube, the culvert for Spirit to flow. Lately I have been asking for help with my cancer: "Stay with me Mother, let me feel your infinite strength and nurturing every day, especially when things are rough," or "help me feel the enduring presence of all life and beauty around me," and "help me heal". But my attachment to a "sure Libby, I got this" is low. There is no bargaining. 
     And so what comes from my prayer? There is a response, though I do not feel it directed to me particularly. It is the sense of rising strength and love, my senses opened even wider in aperture to the massiveness and eternalness and beauty of Spirit present in the dawn light, the night's fading stars, the lone catbird song in the willow thicket. It's not just for me, but I am included, one among all beings, held, animated, filled with love. 

Now it has a name

This is one of a set of posts about my season of cancer. It began with "A new journey".

 September 27

     I have been waking before dawn these September mornings, something that has never been part of my make-up. Tired of sleeping, my swollen belly no longer finding comfort by rolling to the other side, I ease out of bed to let Bob sleep another hour. We have neared and passed the Equinox.

It makes less of a difference to me now that I have stood in the wet grass by the barn above the meadow and watched the sky transform. It's like a secret, this act of dawning. A few remaining birds sing; if there's a mist on the meadow it dissipates quietly. But the colors in the sky, held by the dark, sharp silhouettes of maples and oaks at the far end of the field, are so silent. The colors are silent, and it feels like there should be a great celebration of harmonies announcing this astounding beauty that precedes the rising of the sun. Instead, it is a secret shared by all of us who wait at the edge of the field - crow, catbird, perhaps the barred owl who has just stopped hooting and is watching too.
     Today my life is drastically different than yesterday at this time. And yet not: it is only my awareness that has changed, accompanied by a plan. The mass still occupies a bulging space in my belly. But now it has a name: cancer. The gynecologic oncologist said he's 99% certain, but he won't know until they open me up and take it out. There is that other small mass in my lymph node up near my spleen, indicating the cancer has spread. He'll try to take that out too, and with it the spleen. Somewhere around my fourth week of recovery, I will begin chemo.
     We began to tell my family yesterday. Miraculously I reached all three kids by phone, Mom and Dad, and my sister. There has been a sense of calm in me that has carried through to them, and I'm profoundly grateful for it. Maybe it's the love you've been sending me this past week, I told them. Keep sending me that. It's real. Our connection has nothing to do with distance.
     The other thing I told them is that I feel very grounded, and I am continually grounding. "Like your reminder on your phone to touch the earth every day?" one said. Yes, like that.
     My connection with the earth has been changing. Going back as far as I can remember, I always played outside. I spent summers in the North Woods. As a teenager I sought refuge in the maple-beech-cherry forests beyond the borders of my yard in Ohio. There, in those high-canopied forests, I learned the names of every wildflower I found, making lists, nearly memorizing my Peterson's guide. When you know the names of your companions, the relationship changes; no longer an observer, you become familiar. I was beginning to become less separate.
     A short career in forest ecology found me measuring and counting - and re-measuring and re-counting - the salamanders and juniper berries and insect frass along permanent transect lines, year after year, at a research forest in midcoast Maine. I think I got the job there despite being overqualified because I wanted to get to know a forest on an intimate level. I had no plans to use the position to leap into a more prestigious job at the University in a year or two. I would stay.
     And I did. For six years I spent up to seven hours a day crawling along the forest floor counting Canada Mayflower berries. I learned to call birds closer to me by pishing them. I caught flying mosquitoes - scourge of a saltmarsh-bounded forest - and threw them into spider webs, curiously watching the spider race out to secure it. I reached my arms around hundreds of trees, hugging them with a measuring tape to record their diameter at breast height. I ate lunch sitting on a ridge in the forest to catch the only breeze on a hot August day, and in January I walked out on snow shoes to check animal tracks.
     Twenty years and three grown children after I left that job, I met a new forest. I went on retreat to an island off Mount Desert. The gift of this retreat was a full day of silent, solo wandering wherever your feet and heart took you, in search of whatever insights might come. The woods were so much different than my rich Ohio woods, so different from the mixed pine-oak woods of my midcoast research forest. These were the old undisturbed grandmother and grandfather spruces and firs of the harsher coast, a blanket of moss overlaying the forest floor belying near constant presence of fog's moisture.
     I did not wander too far. I let the forest pull me in, and I slowed. I visited the shoreline, a narrow edge along that great forest. I listened. I re-entered the forest with gifts. I lay in the moss, grounding. I let the idea of ceremony arise in me, and during that quiet immersive day I made the Ceremony of Union with the Earth.
     I don't remember the details now, but I know it changed me. In a way it was a commitment ceremony, like a marriage: a pledge of my soul to honor and deepen our relationship beyond the limits of mind and convenience.
     To be clear, I do not worship the Earth as deity. My background as scientist affirms what my spirit has glimpsed and approached all along. I as human beast am dependent upon the abundance of life that springs from and is harbored by the earth - food, water, timber for my home and warmth - and I can only respond with awe, love, and the desire to give back. A love-infused relationship naturally inspires reciprocity: how can I give to the earth, the source of beauty and a deeper, almost mystical, sense of heartbeat that pulses in me and all creatures?
     The answer is humbling: all I have to give is gratitude. And so every day I reach down, put a hand or two on the earth, close my eyes and quiet myself, and reach my intuitive consciousness down, down to the profound hugeness and solidness that is the source of so much, to the spirit that infuses earth and all that live, the spirit that is greater even than all that, that moves among and within us all like the fog in that ancient forest watering our souls - and all I can say, and I do say it squatting there, is "thank you." And I ask that Spirit to keep flowing through me today so that I may serve it by serving others. May I be the "pass-through." May my huge but inadequate gratitude be the life-force within me as I walk the steps of this day.
     This will not change as I walk through the upcoming days with the knowledge that I harbor a growing cancer. It will get rough for my body. Who knows how it will resolve? But that is not what I think about now. I am beginning to prepare. This morning I stood in the pre-dawn light, my bare feet sinking into the wet chilly grass, and I closed my eyes, sinking down, spreading wide into that silent symphony of color, and whispered my prayer of gratitude.

Finding my spiritual way

This is one of a set of posts about my season of cancer. It began with "A new journey".

September 25

     Three months until Christmas. Just noticing.
     Today I would have been leaving for a Buddhist retreat center called Wonderwell Mountain Refuge. A five day program called Green Dharma: A Residential Retreat for EcoSattvas had caught my eye, and I signed up. I was calling this fall my "Continuing Education" time, finding myself hungrily signing up for a couple of retreats in which I could learn more about healing in the face of climate stress and anxiety. 
     This is my life's work, now. There has been a dawning

Black Elk among other teachers

awareness that I have the resources to help others with this: Reiki, my studies of Buddhism, Hinduism, shamanism, Sioux spirituality, Christianity - though none of them in depth or immersive except the Christian component. Perhaps a catalyst for this hunger was listening to Penobscot water keeper, activist, lawyer and teacher Sherri Mitchell speak for a day this summer.
     All morning we had listened to her talk about the relationship between her people and the land, how that was constantly under assault by colonializing cultures. She spoke non-linearly, almost like a story teller. She had been at Standing Rock; she was battling the State of Maine for the life of the Penobscot River; she was working on a second book; she had speaking engagements around the world.
     During the lunch break, I waited quietly for a moment to speak with her privately. When it was my turn, I told her I had been given a sacred pipe, and...
     Sherri's face changed slightly as she listened to me. I could sense her displeasure. My humbleness and reverence meant nothing. My stumbling question was: should I use the pipe or was this wrong? When she spoke, she said "Pray with the pipe for yourself. But these are not your ways or traditions, so don't use them ceremonially, and certainly never when money is involved." I flushed; I knew that much. But I was embarrassed deeper down at having offended her. In her eyes I was not so much an individual as one more wound-maker in the cloud of white colonists stealing the spirituality of her People.
     She was right. I knew it. But I had hoped she would say something else, something like "you must be special; I will find you a Wabanaki teacher." It was that slim hope, as well as a desire to settle this question in my heart, that had propelled my courage to ask her face to face.
     I thanked her and went to eat an egg salad sandwich.
     But here is the lesson:
     After lunch, when we had all regathered and Sherri had settled in on the chair up front, she opened by recounting our conversation in general terms, saying she wanted to discuss cultural appropriation. My ears felt warm; they were probably red. Playing Indian was not ok. I looked at the woman sitting on the floor in front of me, her blond hair tied in braids with a leather thong, soft moccasins on her feet, her body that had been leaning forward eagerly hanging on Sherri's words starting to shrink back a bit. Internally I had scoffed at her when I first sat down, but really, how am I any different?
     Acknowledging that those who "play Indian" do so because the customs and spirituality that attract them feed something missing from their own spirituality, she charged us with staying in our own inherited cultural traditions and finding what we need there.
     Christianity. I blanched. I grew up in a Christian household, had practiced actively, took my own young family to church and taught Sunday School, even led the charge to awaken my parish and Diocese to what we called "stewardship of Creation." As my nagging awareness that I didn't buy some key aspects of Christian theology and creed deepened, I threw myself into deeper study of it in a four-year course for lay people. But eventually I just drifted away from the Church, realizing that I did not need a mediator with the Divine, that for me a Savior, a sacrificial Son, was not an icon I could find meaning in.
     So what was I to do?
     Sherri's charge to stop appropriating and stick-with-what-you-got stuck in my craw. The second part at least; I understood the part about not appropriating.
     All summer I mulled this. I knew I couldn't go back to Christianity, though in my many studies and experiences with other wisdom traditions I had come to see and even appreciate the qualities of Christianity that were mystical and profound. It was one of many, many pathways to the Divine, the Creative Spirit that is at once within and without, inhabiting, connecting, encompassing.

     And this is where I have finally settled, thanks to Sherri's uncomfortable message: go back to what is yours. Mine is without label, a direct connection with Spirit, informed and supported by the arrows found in all traditions pointing to it. My spirituality is self-referential, as my Reiki Master teacher would say. I inquire within, where Spirit resides in me. I have my own daily practices, and they shift and deepen in a dynamic flow of my own ongoing awakening. For me, the most profound gateways to Spirit is the Earth itself, her depths, her beauty, her renewal, her seasons, her marriage to air and sky and cosmos, her constant pregnancy and nurturing and release of the creatures that come from her. And I am also Earth, and of the Earth, and we are only small manifestations of Something More that I cannot really comprehend.
     Stepping into the authenticity of my own spirituality, I believe I can help others who, like me, are suffering as the world moves towards drastic change at a frightening speed because of an overload of carbon and methane into the atmosphere. I can offer my wisdom and practices, and I can offer teachings and practices from other traditions that are freely shared.
     That is why I was signed up to go to the Green Dharma retreat: to learn directly from Buddhist teachers about this very problem of climate change suffering.
     Except I have a growth in my abdomen. And I have been scheduled to see a gynecological oncologist on what would have been the second day of my retreat.