There will be grief.

The list of those who died last night started to appear on my screen and for the first time in the 19 days I have self-isolated, I began to cry. I was crying for those who have lost a person of meaning in their lives. I could see the vision of a tree that is broken by a storm and the limbs that balanced it out are torn off, dead on the ground.

It is just the beginning. We are just beginning to see those who will be ripped out of our lives and the sense of loss is only now showing up.

My mind goes to my daughter who is in bed having difficulty breathing and my daughter in law who is immune system suppressed. And I know full well everyone alive has people who fill out their lives and make it more beautiful. Many are edgy and anxious.

What if? We are all asking that in our own minds.

I hate change. I hate challenge. I hate feeling as if something I wanted to make me feel safe is going to be taken from me.

In a time like these, we all discover who we are. It is like passing through an X-ray machine. How strong is your backbone? How strong is your spirit?
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Every day is unlike any day before or any day after and now we see that so very clearly. We see it sharply outlined because we are not living in a video game arcade of distraction, repetition, running up scores, proving to others that we are exactly that which fear most we are not.

Today I sat down and cried for a woman in New York who lost a life long friend and for a couple that had been together for 45 years and for the baby who died without its mother near.

We are all this same thing, this shared human experience. And there will be grief.

I can also go out into my yard for 5 days working physically to bring the spring alive. Someone walking by will see the tulips, the roses, the peonies and be comforted.

There are so many important ways to show love. And maybe that is the lesson we are learning.

A Contracting World

As the reality of the COVID-19 behavior becomes more and more clear to political leaders, to citizens and is shared with the world, it is interesting to see the lag time.

I knew in January we would be hit hard by this virus. I could see clearly in my mind that there would be death and economic failure.

In some ways, I think it is like the illusion of the presence of a star. At distances that we cannot in our ant like perception of life phathom at all, a light releases energy. By the time it travels to us, by the time we can see the energy signature, vast amounts of time and space have been covered.

We are seeing that lag time in perception so clearly now. In January the World Health Organization warned that a pandemic had begun. Very few listened. Very few understood. We began with the very tiniest first comprehension which was, of course, delivered only through that which we, personally, had experienced.

It is interesting to watch the process by which we lock ourselves into what has been experenced in our own personal narrative. We cannot conceive of scenarios we have not personally lived through. We create our sense of truth out of only that which has played out in our own, individual lives. Hence, when we are greeted by a sudden change we experience “shock.”

“Oh,” we said, “it is a flu. I know what a flu is. I had the flu and I got over it.”

And so fhe first clarity was not clarity at all.

Vaccines and careful scientific reactions to past pandemics have made us utterly blind and tone deaf to what a single virus can do to the world. The majority of us have not experinced bubonic plaque, or the black death. We have not experienced the writhing pain of death by small pox. We have never seen it or lost someone we know to that story.

Only a few people who read know what epidemics have unleashed in the world. Only a few people that lived through the polio epidemic understand that one day there is no problem then ten days later people you know are deformed, dead, or in an iron lung.

And so now we are watching a deeply internalized sense of what is the shared reality begin to shift.

We do not, like our ancestors did, move our dying into the living room and sit eating next to them so they have company. Children do not grow up seeing people in their family fall ill and pass away with the entire family gathered around them.

Now we sanitize and we isolate the dying. Death is said by sociologists to be the last great obscenity. We habitually move our loved ones to a “facility” and most children are spared the knowing of mortality that is inevitable to human beings.

But what precisely is free cialis sample in this herb that is commonly used to come up with products to increase sexual stimulus. It also offers effective treatment for viagra in uk shops sexual weakness. The doctors prescribe for the disease to take cialis discount canada . It is one framework around a lot levitra generika of people. So on so many levels we are starting to see the information coming at us with no filter. We are starting to see certain segments of society understand and adapt to the newly structured reality. And we see others who cling to the world they have created in their own lives, or the sense of the world they have moved through in the past. They are reluctant to adapt. Some world leaders are pushing hard against the need to change the way things are done, have always been done.

Dr. Aylward, the World Health Organization doctor who has attended the center of the hot spots for Ebola, Sars, Polio and now Covid-19 has said that viruses are reactive. When you change the climate of the world, you change all life forms. He links these newly formed pandemics to Global climate disruption.

How do we learn a lesson? Just in the same way a child learns. Something bigger and more powerful came into the room and takes our toys, rips our distractions out of our hands, put us in time out.

We cannot buy our way out of this lesson. We cannot more furiously play video games, hunt for a new purse, party the weekend away with other friends.

We ask, “What do we do now? What will happen? When will it end?” We see our child like self clearly.

Now it is “me and it.” Particularly if you live alone… you are sitting across from the economic disruption. You look directly at the realization that you are motal; the understanding that your health and well being depends on others taking care of their health and well being. What falls away is your sense that you are independent from your national government and don’t need them. What falls away is the sense that you don’t need anybody else.

It is in your face, this NOW.

And like looking in a mirror, we each see what drives us. We each see what we value most.

We are smack dab in the place of knowing our relationship with our own personality. There is nothing in the way.

We ask: “Who am I?” We ask: “Who am I meant to be?” We ask; “What needs to change so the world is a better place?”

These questions are ultimately the path to healing so much sickness. The world has our attention now.

 

What is in a day?

This morning I was up early and out to the Independent Store for the “seniors shopping” hour. I pushed out of the isolation capsule of my house without coffee, without makeup, without enthusiasm.

“Today, I told my constant companion, Noone, ” I will get more fresh greens for the great coming lock down in personal space”.

To give me further purpose, finally, my son and daughter in law had asked me to help them. This is a platinum rare event. So I had their list in hand and was hoping I could purchase the type or brand of items that they enjoyed. I held the peanut butter up while mentally asking it if it was the most satisfying smooth rendition possible.

As I walked through the stores, I watched my resistance. I felt as if I was surrendering. I felt as if the swat team had shown up at my house and used a bull horn to say,” Would all old people come out of the houses with your hands up.”

“I am not decrepit,” I said out loud to myself.

I continued on as I pushed my cart thinking about diminishment and when it begins. If I admit that I am somehow fragile, does my body start spinning off skills and strengths? Will I end up taking my false teeth out and sucking mashed potatoes from a spoon? When does the falling off of belonging begin?

As usual, my imagination took me down the entire spinning of a narrative.

There I am rocking back and forth in my wheelchair idiot mumbling to myself some song of senselessness.

But I have the list in my hand and for now, I am still functional enough to fulfil that goal.
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Just yesterday I remember thinking that the only survivors will be early adaptors, germaphobic introverts. Try running a world with that population personality.

I selected things for my son’s family and items for me but with only four hours sleep and no coffee, I just frustrated myself with my lack of organization. As I walked longer, I woke up enough to see I had once again forgotten my bags in the back of the car. They are like a neglected pet that I just drive around but rarely take out.

It is another habit I need to work on, I admonished myself.

The self is like a vast ranch with critter habits on it. There is so much to tend to so it doesn’t become derelict.

I took the groceries, some bright carnations, chocolate and strawberries to my son’s family and headed home.

What is my purpose? How do I use time? What am I creating of my vast ranch of self?

I see these as simultaneous script words scrolling constantly under my life. And I bring myself back to the adventure of not knowing. Every now is different.

As I put away groceries, I think about how the Independent Store at 7 a.m. is a place to find single senior men. They are unaccompanied, slow-moving and stopping to read all of the labels. If I wanted to pick one up I might ask, “Is that a good disher detergent?” I could try some come hither looks over my new glasses.

Every change holds an opportunity, I remind myself.

Honoring the Writer

I awoke and visualized myself writing lines as I lay coming up to consciousness in the bed. I remembered the lines that had appeared and held on to them tightly so as not to lose them.

I am starting to see the shape of a new book like a body curled under a tangle of thick blankets. When I put my hand out, I can make sense of its shape. It is about all the stoires of real things that happened to me, to others who passed me in the carnival of life and for that brief period of time that we intersected they explained what ride they had chosen to ride, why they had selected this particular apparatus to mount and to trust their bodies to.

A moment in time, a single anecdotal exchange can reveal everything about a person.

Since I gave myself permission to retrieve this collection of interchanges more and more appeared to me, these torn pages of others lives I still held in my memory. I had let the story fly past as if the person was on a merry go round riding a prancing tiger rhythmically undulated. I had asked, “Why the tiger?”

I had watched, turned my head in wonder and then walked away.

I am understanding, now, the next step is the step that I have been missing: A university professor said to me as a 20-year-old sitting in his classroom that the difference between a full-blooded, full-hearted writer and a whimsical will o the whisp was the act of honouring the writing.

“The notebook,” he said in a leather-bound gold foiled voice, “Is validation of our relationship to our own words, our own thoughts. Like a fish getting off of our line of dreams, we do not care enough to haul them in, so that we can edit, weight and measure them.”

He went on to explain that everything we do not think to honour in ourselves, that we do not help to grow in our lives results in a loss of confidence. The words, the images, the hidden code of who we are needs to be studied. We can break apart the words to see the very relationship we have with self. We alone can decipher the message.

It is in the deepening of the romance with words that the object of our desire becomes less shy. It disrobes for us and we see nakedly what words formed our thoughts. We see what truths about self we have overlooked.

We can say, “This person’s story does not interest me.”

And so by dismissing the words that ticker tape across the brain daily we refuse to be curious about the very nature of being alive. What is the scrolling translation of the foreign movie of our subconscious mind trying to say to us?

We fail to commit to the intense beauty of language. It becomes a casual if not abusive situation.

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We find out fluctuaring flirtation with the self to be deeply dissatisfying. Like a wife or husband who feels abandoned and lonely, our soul’s very power stays contained and weak.

We have no confidence in our music. We tell the ballerina of expression that she is too frail, she lacks technique, she is flawed and at best amateur. We have no time for her.

When the soul in its expressive power shows up, we ask, “What can you do for me? Can you heal my childhood? Can you be used for status or power?”

And so we train ourselves to be disloyal to our own psyche. The ferocious strength that keeps us alive when we are lost and the sky is obscured with only a gothic hiss of a sun above us is within. We are all muscle and sinew. We do not leave the field of battle but use our self talk to embolden us beyond despair.

A true writer trains like a warrior trains. The writer swears an oath upon the blade of language. A true oracle speaker knows that all visions are treasures. There are no greater or lesser lines of revelations.

Every word that appears to us is a word to be respected and kept in honor.

But to honor the words that scroll through the brain means to make a commitment to our own individual manner of making sense of the world. And as it is with every living thing, that which is observed with love, that which is nurtured thrives.

The words no longer appear to us quickly flitting like a gray squirrel running on a dead winter highway of stagnant branches. They are not so fast and so distant that we can’t make them out.

Like so many experiences in my life the message that the professor offered to me was not received when I was twenty.

Today I am 75 and I am full of stories. I collected them somewhere below my conscious knowing. I can see their shape obscured beneath a layer of inattention.

I feel full of excitement as I understand that I am being called to accept myself, my thoughts. I open my journal and write down the pictures I have seen. I respect the torn fragment of other’s revelations about their lived experiences and want to study them carefully.

I think I am ready now at last.

A Day is No Thing

The mind builds a monolith of disparities. The fear of losing our senses or using our senses drives us to shut ourselves down. The fragile fragments of reality are not something we can touch or hold in the hand. Like the image at the edge of the eye, we feel the greater appear peripheral, unclear.

There is a shifting of even the shifting to moments of utter quiet or unexpected chaos.

Breath is not one thing. Each intake is a new expierience. Air touches the body, the ribs unfold uniquely each time.

We awaken to the breath. It awakens us. We hold it. It is an embrace.

We are terrified of messy. We pick up the beige labeled folder. It is the office-like organization of everything we are taught in order to clutch and stuff the separating moments into a cardbiard cover. This thing is this thing. This hour is held in the rigidity of defined limitation.That time is shut between the covers flattened on purpose and closed away.

We have no language with which to open our minds. From our first steps into the world of words we are told our limits. The words change us, They limit us. They act as spells cast upon all that we see, touch, hear, feel. Instead of softening into the moment to moment shifts, we choose instead to look for the weighty hold of an objectification. If we can control what we experience, collapse it and fold it in, we will be safe. We are taught this.

Once in a while we understand the once in a while. These epiphanies appear even in the most mundane of lives.

I have taken a step into a dark sky, gray mind day.

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One time I was running the circle in the same habit wheel of the everyday. Around and around each day watching the familiar bars tread past. This time, I sat in the sunshine under the freshly hung laundry. I found stillness as I opened to the air.

My arms were unmoving on the arms of the chair. I was nowhere. A butterfly landed on my bare forearm and turned to look at me. I saw into its eyes as it grew as still as I was.

We looked into one another. There was no time, nor story. There was no reason or purpose.

I forgot myself and felt the opening.

A breath is no thing. An hour is no thing. A life is no thing. Just sitting quietly with the eyes of a butterfly watching me was the beginning.

 

Puzzle Pieces

At a time, historically, of very high anxiety it is important for me to observe myself. I turn my eyes inward or step way, way back to look at myself from a distance. I am an anthropologist making observations.

What am I thinking? Why am I thinking that? What triggered that thought? What is my body thinking? Yes, the body has thoughts, surging energies moving and settling, memories that I carry as an individual. It also holds the thoughts, experiences and memories of my ancestors.

The main advantage for me to mindfulness practice is that it gives me time.

When I attended the Yitang Buddhist Temple in Kelowna we had a practice of walking meditation. What that meant was that there was a choreographed pause during the winding stroll around the cushions. Step, Step, Step then touch the toe to the floor. The goal was to stay in touch with the ground, the earth, the source. Always the feet were in contact with support. Just in the same way, always the mind is in contact with the spirit source.

The pause was a pattern to break the pattern. It was a reminder to stop and ask, “Where am I going? What am I feeling? Am I balanced at this moment?”

Inevitably the habits of neurosis, as William James explains them, are carried in our brains. Our families, our ancestors, our society, our social cohorts deeply imprint upon the self.

Knowing that there are pieces to the self is a strong methodology of recovering the soul personality.
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I have pieces of myself that I abandoned through shutting them off because they held a memory of pain. I have pieces of myself that I have disavowed because I did not want to be flawed, human, cruel, angry. All of the elements that go into being a human being must ultimately be embraced and seen if we are to be whole.

The pieces of myself that I see in others also helps me to form a more complete image. When I see another being dismissive or arrogant, I pick up that piece and push it into place. I was taught to be arrogant and dismissive of others who did not inherit our familiy high IQ. We sat and shared stories of the “stupid others” as my family continued to self destruct and act in a manner that was angry and willingly embracing the joys of victimhood.

When I see another person who is reflecting back to me those parts of myself I refuse to see, I become irritated, critical. It is how I know that this is an area of my wounding I need to recognize and attend to.

When I see another person stand on a stage performing and my heart explodes with joy, it is the moment I know that I now have another piece of myself to put in place.

Mindfulness practice has allowed me time. The time between a thought or a quick chemical release of emotion grabs me and the time I make a choice about who I am becoming is the space where everything changes.

Each person who tells me their story teaches me about what it means to be human. Each character or protagonist that I follow in the construction of artful narrative gives me another clue about what it means to be born into a body and to walk the earth.

Mindfulness is about being open, curious and taking that pause. Balance. I check myself for balance. What am I learning from others about myself? I pick up the pieces and gently press them down into my puzzle. I find it fascinating.

Metis, East Indian spirit

Today was fascinating for me to pass through. I had deep, unexpected and very focused conversations. First a woman who is a guest in my airbnb talked about the education program she is running in the far north for First Nations’ youth.

She is Metis and explained that she felt called upon to establish a method forĀ  recovery from the injury inflicted by colonialism. The plan entailed a completed circle. The land being healed by First Nations youth learning farming in order to deeply connect to the earth and the youth being healed by showing love to the land is working, she explained.

She told me a story of a nurse who served at a residential school which was nearby where the children’s parents lived in the early days of white culture’s presence. The woman knew that when the government representatives came to “inspect” the children’s homes they were looking for an excuse to remove the children and separate them beyond recovery from their village culture.

Female Shaman Healing Ritual

And so she taught the women how to make bread. She helped the women understand the measures of proper child care as viewed through a white man’s eyes. She was a rebel who worked to thwart the over riding plan to move the children at a great distance from everything they had known. It was her intention to protect the families from colonialism’s abuse by introducing the skill of making bread. And it worked.

My guest went on to tell the story of a bread-making workshop that she ran on her own land. The women who held the ancestor’s memories of the ritual of bread making stood quietly. She could see that they were deeply moved by the reintroduction of the skills that had kept generations before them at home with their mothers.

She said, “The nurse was there when colonialism was beginning to inflict damage on the natives. And I am here now when the time has come for the ending colonialism and its effect.”

Years ago, It had suddenly come to her to develop a vision and she used her land, applied for a government grant and was handed a check personally from Stephen Harper.

“That is powerful magic”, I said, “From Stephen Harper.”

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The gift of seeing in a detached way, was one we both celebrated. We did not “belong” to any group and that gave each of us great freedom.

strong in the face of fear

After running a few errands, I ended up in a Starbucks. As I sipped the foamy stuff that gives me LatteĀ“ love, I overhead a conversation going on at my back.

Three men from India were discussing the turmoil that is playing out now in their home country. They shared the personal work they are doing to stay in a place of compassion. One discussed how grateful he was to read the texts of Buddhism, Hinduism, The Koran and other spiritual practices. I listened as they agreed that to not be manipulated into hatred or judgement took real effort.

I moved over to them and said that I was so very moved by their conversation and they asked me to sit with them.

We went on to discuss the benefits of mindfulness practice and staying out of fear.

The youngest of them shook my hand and said, “Thank you for sharing with us.”

I walked out the door thinking, “Wow. Wow. Wow.”