June 26, Tuesday

One of my favorite things about this spring and summer has been my Wednesday lunches with a new friend. By now it has made itself into a little ritual. We arrive at the Thai restaurant at 12:30. At 3 o'clock our dishes have been removed and the restaurant is empty except for us. I urgently have to pee from all the water I have been drinking since our waiter has filled my glass continually for the last two and a half hours. My friend and I haven't even noticed the time. We just talk and listen. In fact we could probably go on talking non-stop for another couple of hours. Getting to know a new friend has some of the same feelings as falling in love. We enjoy hearing the details of each others lives past and present as well as the details of our plans and dreams. It's energizing and fun.

This Wednesday we talked at length about gardening which is a mutual passion, about her overbooked schedule and decisions about which activities she could drop and which were serving her well, about where to buy fresh blueberries, about our respective challenges in our spiritual lives. We talked and listened and exchanged our best thinking on the matters at hand. Then at one point we talked about someone we know (a good friend of hers and someone I barely know) who is leaving her two children, ages ten and fourteen, in the care of her ex-husband and his new wife. She is leaving them essentially for four years while she joins the Air Force to pursue her career. My friend seemed to think that this was a difficult decision but probably necessary. I thought it was totally absurd, wrong, an unthinkable sin against Motherhood, stupid, crazy and insane. In other words, I kind of had a strong reaction. As I talked animatedly I could see my friend question her own acceptance of the "difficult decision". I said, "She didn't have to leave her kids! She could have taken a job at UPS or at Burger King, for God's sake!" Shortly after my little outburst we parted with no hard feelings, I believe. But she may have been a bit perplexed about my intense reaction.

On my drive home, thinking about the whole gamut of our conversation, I started to do some self-reflection about my strong reaction. I don't even know these kids that I assume will be devastated by their mother's departure. I don't know the woman really. In other words, it's none of my business, I am not involved. Yet, I can't really describe how strongly I felt that this was wrong. Well, a little reflection is usually a good thing when your emotions come charging out in righteous indignation.

I thought about the whole "idea" of a mother leaving her children. Can you think of anything worse save abuse or murder? Well, I can't. Just maybe that's because my grandmother left her children. This was in fact about 100 years ago. My father's mom, Emma Rose, according to the stories I have heard, was fed up with her life married to Moses Absalom Beauregard, my grandfather. He was a riverboat gambler on the Mississippi. They lived in the north woods of Minnesota near the town of Thief River Falls. Think isolated and very cold and harsh, 100 years ago. Moses came home every few months and they got pregnant about as often as possible in those early years. Sometimes he brought money and they celebrated. Often he was broke and ate the food she was doling out carefully to last through the winter.

They had five children, the oldest Del was eight, the youngest Warren was a baby and my Dad, Walter was three when Emma decided to take her children to the Catholic orphanage in Duluth and put them up for adoption. I always wanted to believe that she had no other options. But my only cousin who is twenty years older than me and remembers our grandmother, tells me that she was offered a house and job by people in her community, that she was in fact a very selfish woman. It's hard to know the truth of her life. We do know that she had decided to accept an offer of marriage from a devoutly religious man who said he would take her and the baby but not the other kids. So she left the oldest four children at the orphanage and went on about her life.

My dad spent four years at the orphanage. When he was seven a childless farm couple came looking for farm workers. They took my dad and his brother and said they would keep the one who worked the hardest. Dad's nine year old brother Harvey ran away the next day and was on his own the rest of his life. My dad stayed and worked for this couple until he too ran away at the age of fourteen. He joined the Army stating his age as sixteen. After two years in the Army he again found his brother Harvey. Along with many others they rode the rails across the country many times, working at whatever job was available and sleeping where they found a place.

My dad and his brothers and sisters had a pretty hard childhood. Yet he was a great father to me, loving, kind and gentle. But his deep sadness was palpable in our family. This kind of sadness is an inheritance almost like a genetic code passed along from parent to child. It's part of my heart and bones and every cell in my body. My parents sadness is and always will be part of my life. It all reminds me of a quote from the Old Testament in Exodus 34: 6,7 when God directed Moses to go to the top of Mt Sinai alone:

And the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord, The God merciful and compassionate, long suffering and abundant in goodness and truth. Keeping mercy for thousands of generations, forgiving sins and transgressions, who by no means justifies the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and upon the children's children, to the third and fourth generation.

Far from describing a vengeful God, from my current viewpoint I get an understanding of what some may call the Law of Karma, "what comes around goes around" or natural consequences of our actions. Some of our actions have such long arms. At my age I can see the lives of five generations, two before me and two following me. Seeing how my grandmother's actions influenced my own reaction in a conversation with a friend over 100 years later is sobering indeed.

This may be one reason why elders are so important in a community. They keep the memory of events past that are shaping the reactions of the present. So much of that valuable memory is languishing today, unappreciated. Perhaps, and I say just perhaps, that is why a young woman is leaving her two children to further her career; or why most of us in the developed world continue to consume, mindlessly depleting the Earth's riches meant to be shared with future generations; or why our nation's military can drop bombs on villages thousands of miles away, killing innocent people while we sleep peacefully in our beds, leaving the effects of our actions to be "visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and upon the children's children to the third and fourth generation."

In the past I have always thought that this Bible verse portrayed a cruel and sadistic God punishing innocent children for the sins of their fore bearers. Now from the advantage of being able to see forward and back the five generations that have touched my life, what I see is not an external cruel God but rather that it is our innate connection with All which dictates that our actions positive or negative have long-reaching effect. We are not separate and our actions affect more than ourselves, more than we can even comprehend. This also happily means that our acts and words of love, compassion, creativity and wisdom have equally long reaching arms connecting us to generations to come and making our lives and actions bigger than we are.

I can't say what is really right for the young woman whose dilemma between career and family started my contemplation. But what is really valuable for me is to see my own strong reaction and where it might have come from. When I can do that, which is certainly not all the time, it helps me act and speak from awareness instead of ignorance. And that can't hurt.

June 18, Thursday - Thoughts on Giving

A World of Possibilities 1 - acrylic on canvas by Jim Rose-Foreman

A World of Possibilities 2 - acrylic on canvas by Jim Rose-Foreman


Quite a number of years ago, even twenty years ago, I was having tea at my house with a friend, kind of an ordinary event. But I remember that the energy in our conversation was electric. We were communicating deep feelings and passions about our lives, really listening and enjoying each other's company. At one point we were standing in the dining room and my friend commented on how much she liked the sweater I was wearing. It was a big, fluffy, hand knit, lamb's wool, traditional Icelandic sweater. Beautiful indeed. Suddenly I pulled off my sweater and slipped it over her head. Helping her into it I assured her that it was a gift. Just as quickly she removed her necklace of turquoise carved birds handmade by an old man she had come to know at the Zuni Pueblo where she made yearly trips to the sacred corn dance. She placed it around my neck. The necklace was beautiful and meaningful. We were both moved. This was the cleanest moment of gift giving I have ever experienced. No thinking, just pure heart. I still have the necklace though I have moved away and lost touch with my friend. That moment between us lives in me every time I see her gift.

Its funny how clearly I remember that moment. Surely there have been many other times when the gift and the moment were just perfect. Yet over the years I have noticed how messy giving can sometimes get. This is often most true when we give through a so called charity. The connection which was so vibrant between my friend and I is non-existent or blunted by the distance and facelessness of the encounter. And sometimes it is blunted because the gift is made out of obligation or guilt.

Recently I read an article in Christianity Today written by Richard Stern president of World Vision a Christian aide organization. In the article entitled, "We are not Commanded to be a Docent in the Art Museum, We are Commanded to Love the Poor", he takes members of the Christian churches to task for not responding seriously to the crisis of children in the world. This man is not a dummy when it comes to marketing. He has been a CEO of major corporations for 25 years and head of World Vision for 10 years. So one would expect that when he writes to an audience of prospective donors he would try to make them feel good about themselves, tell them touching stories of how their money is helping children far away in order to wheedle his way a bit deeper into their pocketbooks. He doesn't do that. He spends his time telling it like it is.

Twenty-six thousand children die of starvation or preventable disease every day. As he reminds us, this is like 100 airliners crashing every day. Our society gets very upset over even one airliner crash and goes to great lengths to retrieve the black box for clues to the cause and to assure all that the problem will be remedied. Yet we don't do much at all about the daily deaths of 26,000 children. He went on to seriously question the priorities of his Christian audience:

Our church bulletins read like the table of contents for Psychology Today: support groups for pornography addictions and eating disorders, Taekwondo, aerobics, and on and on. Our churches are increasingly meeting all of our needs but decreasingly going out to change the world.

The message is not that these are not good things to do, the message is, Hello! Wake Up! There are children dying! It seems kind of like ironing the table cloth while the house is burning down. It is not a bad thing to do, it is just not what is needed right now.

So I am wondering why we are not taking this global crisis seriously. These are some of the reasons I came up with:
1. It is too overwhelming to think about.
2. It is mostly far away and our national, corporate controlled media ignores it so we do too.
3. Many of us feel overburdened with what we are doing just to get through the day.
4. We may feel that this culling of the weakest is the way of nature or of God since there are already too many people on the Earth.

There seems to be some truth in all of these reasons for inaction. So I wonder then if there is any reason to act. I answered myself with another question. If even one of those 26,000 children was your child or grandchild, how would those reasons for hanging back sound to you? Looking over at the picture on my desk of that amazing beautiful, loving little boy who is my grandson, suddenly my heart bursts open with gratitude. I want to give to every child in the world, not our of guilt but out of gratitude for all the blessings of this life. I look around me and see this beautiful planet, my own clean water and healthy food, the flowers out my window, my loving partner, our healthy children and grandchildren. It reminds me of how I felt that day when I spontaneously gave away my sweater. It seems that true generosity pours forth spontaneously from a full heart.

Here I am again with a full heart for the plight of children half way around the world. What to do? Beyond giving the small amount of money that we are able to give and signing petitions on the Internet and of course holding these unknown children in my heart and prayers - all good and valid responses, I can't really think of any other response. It sounds kind of lame doesn't it?? My ego definitely wants it to be more flamboyant, for me to be special instead of just a worker ant. I want to be the queen bee of giving. Then of course I remember the key fact I tend to forget, I am not alone in all this. I am just one tiny drop in the ocean of love that is the Universe.

So our small monthly pledge to Oxfam and signing the petition to support a vitally needed bill The Senator Paul Simon Clean Water Act of 2009 will be my contribution today. This bill could be our national response to those 26,000 unnecessary childhood deaths every day. If it is passed by the US Senate, over 100 million people will get access to clean water for the first time ever. Clean water means vastly improved child health and survival. Eighty percent of preventable childhood deaths from disease are caused by dirty water. This would be a major step for our nation to take. Yet there is a real danger that the bill will die in committee for lack of co-sponsors. This is where we can help right now. There are five co-sponsors so far and at least twenty are needed before it will be taken seriously by the Senate. At the One site you can sign a petition that goes to your senators asking them to co-sponsor the bill. There are already have over 75,000 signatures. A personal letter to your senators is probably even more effective if you have the time.

From that long ago memory of the gift exchange with my friend Jeannie I understand the connection between gratitude and the gift. Gratefulness happens spontaneously when we are truly present to our life. It opens us up and allows whatever gift we have to come forth from us. I never thought of gratitude as being that important. I thought that changing the world came from hard work and tenacity. Those help of course. But gratitude is what makes everything flow. Perhaps those Christian churches that Richard Stern was talking about should be teaching and practicing gratitude. Perhaps if gratitude was returned to a place of importance in our culture, taught to our children and practiced by all, we would be able to respond naturally to the needs of children and families and our planet Earth. Br. David Steindl-Rast,OSB Benedictine monk and teacher, has known this secret of gratitude for a long time. He has a web site Gratefulness.org where the subject is explored extensively. There he writes, "Gratitude is thinking in tune with the cosmic intelligence that inspires us in grateful moments. It can change more than a mood; it can change a world."

Now I wonder if my friend Jeannie still has that Icelandic sweater and if she ever thinks of that day when we had tea. If she does, wonder where it leads her? I'd like to find her again and have that conversation.

June 13, Saturday

Kadyn and Grandma - 9 months


It's sometimes shocking for me to think that I have three grown children who are nearing middle age. In my heart of course they are still my children and I want to protect them from a world gone mad. Like every parent I want for them a world that is safe and supports them as they make their way through life. I also have a grandchild Kadyn who is 14 months old. Of course he is beautiful, smart, loving and full of joy and amazement. I want his life to be good, for there to be enough clean water and air and healthy food, loving people and opportunities to make a profound connection to this Earth and all her blessings. Like you, I want this inheritance for every child. I do not want their lives to be burdened with seemingly uncontrollable global calamities. Yet the reality is that the world we are passing to the next generations is in deep trouble. Most environmental leaders agree the planet will survive. But the survival of human life on Earth is tenuous. This is not what we want to hear. We don't even want to think about it. Yet if we are serious about our concern for the children, we need to look deeply at the human dilemma.

The unthinkable issue of the survival of human life on Earth does not seem as yet to have a name that we all recognize. There are many people talking about and working on smaller pieces of this problem, but only a few brave leaders are naming the beast and actually facing it. Two of these visionaries whose work I have studied, Marshall Vian Summers and Joanna Macy, approach the subject of the possible end of human life in very different ways. Their teachings are equally compelling and equally necessary. I am tempted to simplify things and call these approaches the Masculine and the Feminine even while acknowledging that is over simplification.

In his pending book Great Waves of Change, Marshall Vian Summers identifies 7 great waves of change which individually or collectively could inundate the human race and much of life on this planet. The waves he sees are: 1. Economic hardship and instability, 2. Peak oil and declining resources, 3. Climate change and catastrophic weather, 4. Escalating worldwide conflict, 5. Loss of arable land and fresh water, 6. Collapse of biodiversity and 7. Destruction of the natural environment.

Summers is a teacher who does not pull any punches. While I do not agree with everything he says, I do admire his ability to look right in the eye of the monster. Other social change leaders often use vague language when speaking of the challenges that face humanity at this time or concentrate on only one of the issues like global warming thus never addressing the absolute dire nature of our circumstances. Summers does not mince words when he speaks of the probable consequences of the collective effect of these "great waves of change". As he states in this book, economic collapse may lead to failed states, military take-overs of governments; declining resources of course may lead to all out world war and the ultimate destruction of life; weather change may lead to loss of millions of acres of land thus creating hundreds of thousands of refugees, famine, disease and again conflict. The list goes on. Each of these changes has terrifying consequences. We all know this in the back of our hearts somewhere but we don't often let that knowledge come out into the light.

There is an unwritten social rule especially in the US: don't talk about anything that brings up the fear, "no downers". I am not suggesting that we all get together and talk endlessly about how bad things are. I am suggesting that our addiction to keeping things pleasant is getting in the way of identifying the problems and working together to fight for our lives, or more accurately the lives of our children and grandchildren. Because there are so many things going on at once, no one person or group has "the" answer. Marshall Summers has devoted his life to a teaching that comes through him but is not from him by his own report. This teaching is aimed at helping people listen to their inner Wisdom specifically for the purpose of making the necessary contribution that only they can make toward the ultimate solution of the human dilemma. He says,

The first great challenge is to face the great challenge without insisting on solutions, without fighting against the truth of what you see, without blaming other people or expecting someone else to take care of the problem for you.

Yet from what I have observed most people are not able to take the news straight up and then get to work on the problem as he suggests.

This is where the work of Joanna Macy is absolutely brilliant. She also has devoted her life to helping people see how bad things are for us, to grieve the loss of the safe world we wanted, to accept the world that we have and then to roll up our sleeves and get to work on whatever piece of the solution we can see and manifest. In the book she wrote with Molly Young Brown, Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World, they put forward a map for transformation of our human culture, what she calls a "Great Turning.. an epochal shift from a self-destructive industrial growth society to a life-sustaining society." According to their map, the transformation of our world starts right in our own heart. The path leads from the broken heart to the joy of working together to first envisioning the world we want for our children and then working together to manifest that world.

This book is filled with tools to help us heal our hearts, find our own vision and skills, overcome our lethargy and pain and get down to work. Like Summers who uses the practices in Steps to Knowledge to get people ready to listen to their own inner inner knowing, Macy and her students use the practices in Coming Back to Life as preparation for the work of change. In Chapter 7 which is entitled "Despair Work: Owning and Honoring Our Pain for the World" they relate a short anecdote of the Zen poet and teacher Thich Nhat Hahn. He was asked,

What do we need to do to save our world? His questioners expected him to identify the best strategies to pursue in social and environmental action, but Thich Nhat Hahn's answer was this, " What we most need to do is to hear the Earth crying."

Macy's work helps us not only to hear the Earth's cries, but our own cries and screams of fear as well.

This book, which summarizes 20 years of work is filled with exercises and activities to bring up the fear and the pain and heal it. Whether one uses these practices or some other avenue for healing, it seems necessary to face the fear and heal the pain before you start to confront the beast. Otherwise the work is overwhelming and you may be lead by your fear rather than your inner knowing. Fear and pain unrecognized and unconscious is what got us into the situation we are in. It is time we faced the fear.

Personally I feel that Marshall Summer's teaching has a great danger of returning us to the fear. I am sure in the hands of a very adept student the fear can be transformed with his work. For me Joanna Macy's work is more suited to my nature. There are many paths to the door of inner knowing and fearlessness. Each of us must find our own and then join with others to do our work. It is imperative. As both of these visionary teachers tell us, this work is not just our challenge, it is our opportunity. But as we all have experienced, you can't even take advantage of an opportunity unless you are ready.

Somehow I can't just leave it here without talking about the mystery of it all. So far it all sounds cut and dried. Learn this and do this and then all is well. The fact is as I see it, we do not even know who we are or where we are going or why we are here. We may be seeing just a tiny grain of sand in the entire sand painting of life. We have to keep putting ourselves back in perspective. Poetry is always good for this. Many poems could help us here but for some reason I immediately thought of this poem by Ranier Maria Rilke. I want to share it with you.

The Man Watching

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

by Rainer Maria Rilke

One thing I want to do in July when I go to visit Kadyn and his parents is to introduce him to poetry. I think he's going to need it.

June 5, Friday

In the Greater Universe All Life is for Contribution,acrylic
by Jim Rose-Foreman, 2007

Yesterday for the first time in 20 years or so I sat down and really looked at our personal finances. This is on the list of things I want to do just below having a complete root canal. My budget plan has always been to live far enough below my income that I never have to keep track of what goes in or out. But now that both of us are retired that's getting harder to do. It's time to figure it all out. And of course I now have more time than money which is convenient.

At the same time that I'm looking at our family budget, I've decided to take a look at the world economic crisis. Now this is even farther down on my list, somewhere below being in the same room with Dick Chaney. But my dear friend Carolyn Bninski, a dedicated activist for peace and justice, has this way of making it seem almost appealing to look at the hard things in life like nuclear weapons, war, racism and corporate greed. I am starting off my quest of understanding the economic crisis with a book Carolyn recommended by David Korten entitled Agenda for a New Economy: from Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth. The book cover proclaims: "Why Wall Street Can't Be Fixed and How to Replace it."

Reading a book on economics is not as bad as you might think. In fact there is not one graph in the whole book which makes me feel better right away. Korten has a knack for explaining the problem and also communicating the vision of a better way using language that is understandable as well as deep, wide and inclusive reflecting thorough knowledge and understanding of the issue.

To summarize, Korten lays much of the blame for our current global economic crisis on Wall Street which has created what he calls "phantom wealth" or wealth created without production of anything of real value. He states:

It is easy to confuse money with the real wealth for which it can be exchanged - our labor, ideas, land, gold, health care, food and all other things with value in their own right. The illusions of phantom wealth are so convincing that most Wall Street Players believe the wealth they are creating is real."

Phantom wealth is everywhere in our economy creating the fortunes of the extremely wealthy while simultaneously deflating the value of real labor and goods. I am not the first to liken this scenario to the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. We are currently at the point where the curtain is falling down and the Wizards of Wall Street are pumping away trying desperately to keep their illusive world from collapse. It's over. They just don't know it yet. The sooner we understand this and start work to create a new, intentional, ethical, community based system, the better.

Korten outlines a 12 step process to begin this economic transformation. Step one is the umbrella for the other steps: "Redirect the focus of economic policy from growing phantom wealth to growing real wealth." To accomplish this he recommends a process he calls "liberating Main Street". Main Street is defined as small local businesses and even small corporations with strong ties to a local community. The goal is for local communities to achieve economic self-reliance by supplying local people with their needs and, through a system of fair trade, exchange surpluses with other communities. This is a human scale economics that even I can understand.

Barak Obama came to the US Presidency with a mandate for change. Certainly many things are different than in the past administration. Yet many things including the unquestioning faith in Wall Street and phantom wealth have not changed. Green technology, promoted by Obama, while needed, is after all just another technological fix. It is not fundamental change of the system. Anyone who looks deeply at the state of Planet Earth and human culture right now can see that a techno fix, a tweak, will not work. Korten in a statement on his web site says unequivocally: "We face a race against time between the awakening of the Earth Community consciousness and the spread of social and environmental collapse. Our window of opportunity could slam shut at any time with chilling finality." The last chapter of his book is entitled, "When the People Lead the Leaders Will follow". So there it is again, "we are the ones we have been waiting for" as the Hopi Elder's Prophecy tells us. We know this is true. It puts the economic crisis in context. "The Great Turning", this required change in human consciousness, involves a fundamental change in the trajectory of human cultural evolution - away from the trajectory of Empire to that of Community. Use your imagination if you will, to conjure up what that might mean in your own life.

That takes me back to my own family budget. My retirement fund, like those of many Americans, is in a mutual fund which invests in Wall Street. The fund like all others has taken a dive this year. I could wait to see if it goes back up and play the game with the Wizard for a while longer. Or I could take it out of that dying system altogether and invest in my community through municipal bonds or even a community bank. After all, that investment small as it is, represents a lot of hard work by both myself and my mom. We both earned our money serving people. What a crazy paradox to have that same money now serve the dark side of human endeavor. There is no Wizard behind the curtain, just a bunch of skinny guys in black suits sipping Starbucks for a little while longer. Its time to leave the Wizard to his ultimate demise, claim the lion's courage and make a change.

June 1, Monday

1952 Dad and me

Four months ago I retired from my job as a home health nurse. I had been nursing for 25 years ever since my youngest child started to school. Nursing was an amazing opportunity for service. At the same time, for me anyway, it was very stressful. It's only now after stopping for a while that I can see how stressed I was. One of the consequences of stressful work in the world is that significant inner work piles up unattended. Being a mom of three and working as a nurse made my life so full that there was no time to process much of anything. Now in the relative quiet of my life in the woods there is time to look deeply at those places where I had only peeked before.

So in the last few days I've decided to start out with one of the big ones and take a look at death. This was triggered by the fact that last Sunday was the 35th anniversary of my father's death. Every year I remember those last days of his life. He was 70. It was 1974 and I was 28 years old, a mother of two four year olds and a five year old. I lived with my husband and kids in a clapboard house in rural Mississippi with no laundry or even potable water. My husband taught at Tougaloo College and I volunteered to register rural voters for the Mississippi Freedom Democrats Party. I thought we were helping to save the world or something like that. It was all-consuming.

One day I got a call from my mom saying that Dad was very ill and in the hospital. She wanted me to come home right away. So I went. They had just moved from Minneapolis where I grew up to a small town in Northern Minnesota where Dad planned to fish for the rest of his life. He went to the hospital for a routine cardiac procedure. The admission chest x-ray showed a spot on his lung which they identified as cancer. On Dad's 70th birthday, May 21st they performed surgery to remove part of his lung but found massive caner through out his thorax and closed him up without removing anything. Ten days later he died on May 31st, 1974.

The ten days that Dad was in the hospital were crazy. Mostly I was crazy. I need to preface this part of the story by saying that, as an only child I was unusually close to my father. He was my source of absolute unconditional love. I thought he was all-powerful and all-knowing and all-wise. Kind of like the standard version of God. This adoration continued right up until my marriage. At 28 when I was called back home these feelings were barely below the surface.

I remember years earlier my grandfather died and our huge extended family sat in the hospital waiting room. I was 15, yet in front of my all my aunts and uncles and cousins I sat on my dad's lap and cried, "Don't ever leave me!" The fear of losing my father was deep. I quickly buried the fear and never looked at it again until he died. Even then I barely peeked at it; I was on the run.

At this point I've had quite a lot of experience with death as a nurse and EMT, even working in hospice for 3 years. I've read many books of the apparently required reading list on death and dying, taken a 5 day workshop with death guru Elizabeth Kubler Ross and nearly completed an MA in grief counseling. I know we all handle the death of our people differently, but when my dad was dying I was pretty much of a mess. In the hospital I sat with him day and night until they asked me to leave. I was hostile to the hospital staff, plainly they were not doing their job of making him better. I sat by his bed and cried which must have made him fell terrible since he never wanted to see me hurt. Even though I was not a religious person, I tried praying over him, saying the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm plaintively. I made pilgrimages to the hospital chapel to plead and bargain with God to save my dad. Nothing worked. When he finally died I remember feeling totally defeated. Mom and I stuffed his clothes into a paper sack and left the hospital in a daze.

Over the years the memories of my dad both living and dying have faded some. Mom and I had 30 more years together - time enough to evolve into friends before she died at age 88. I did better with her death. Again it happened quickly with eight days of vigil in the hospital. We had a hospice room. I played soft music, did as many of her personal cares as I could, talked with her gently and let her go. I could see that she was ready and at peace. We had done our work as much as possible.

As Jim and I age I realize we have a lot of work to do to get to the point of welcoming our own and each other's deaths - not in a morbid sense, but in a sense of being complete with this life. I'm not planning on either of us dying anytime soon but I also don't want to close the door to that possibility because closing the door to that possibility puts a big lid on the possibilities of living. Fear does that. The possibilities of death are all around; the possibilities of life are also everywhere and plenty, and they are related.

There is a song that keeps coming to me by the Arkansas Benedictine nun, Macrina Wiederkehr in her book Seven Sacred Pauses:

Put everything in order
as day begins to fade.
All things are passing,
moment to moment,
breath by breath.
All things are passing,
moment by moment,
birth to death.
Take off that cloak of fear,
the divine strength you seek is here,
and you know you are dying to live,
you know you are dying to live.
So put everything in order as day begins to fade.

The words in this song that really get to me are :"And know you are dying to live." Macrina must see these as important too because she repeats them, "...and you know you are dying to live."

I can see that I have made some progress over the years in my acceptance of death. But you know, it feels like there is a big piece that hasn't been looked at or faced. There is a significant Buddhist practice that I have so far managed to avoid. Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn gives us an explanation of this meditation:

The Buddhist Sutra of Mindfulness speaks about the meditation on the corpse: meditate on the decomposition of the body, how the body bloats and turns violet, how it is eaten by worms until only bits of blood and flesh still cling to the bones, meditate up to the point where only white bones remain, which in turn are slowly worn away and turn into dust. Meditate like that, knowing that your own body will undergo the same process. Meditate on the corpse until you are calm and at peace, until your mind and heart are light and tranquil and a smile appears on your face. Thus, by overcoming revulsion and fear, life will be seen as infinitely precious, every second of it worth living.

Granted at first or second glance this is not an appealing practice. I have to admit that I have avoided it for years. It always seemed too macabre. Of course the whole point is not to make yourself miserable but to release yourself from the fear, to let yourself finally live. And "you know you are dying to live."

God, or the Universe, if you prefer, has already helped me accept my death by giving me gradual loses to observe - the keenness of my eyesight, the sharpness of my memory, the swiftness of my gait have all gradually diminished. It's hard to deny, although we all try. What kindness! Helping me to see that this body, mind and personality are impermanent, easing me along. Perhaps now I am ready for the corpse meditation. I have hundreds of oak, hickory and walnut teachers and the perfect place to decay right here in the woods. Perhaps someday soon I will post a blog piece on the progress of my decay complete with photos.