Visitors/Friends

Last day of the year 2012. A lot of flourishing; three deaths. The first photo is the aftermath of last week’s cactus blossoms used to honour Helen Gee. Hopefully, seen as appropriate for signaling the ending of one phase and the potential that lies within the New Year.

Along with the abundance of goodness over the past twelve months, this year did see the deaths of three friends and my attendance at two of their funerals. Watching the bereaved partners of these three women, and wanting to speak to something within all of us, I have chosen the following poem to both mark the closing of 2012 and, perhaps, usher in the beginning of a New Year that helps hold the past in an embrace of the physical with the spiritual.

The Friendship Inside Us

Why the mouth? Why is it the mouth we put to mouth
at the final moments? Why not the famous groin?
Because the groin is far away.
The mouth is close up against the spirit.
We couple desperately all night before setting out
for years in prison. But that is the body’s goodbye.
We kiss the person we love last thing before
the coffin is shut, because it is our being
touching the unknown. A kiss is the frontier in us.
It is where the courting becomes the courtship,
where the dancing ends and the dance begins.
The mouth is our chief access to the intimacy
in which she may reside. Her mouth is the porch
of the brain. The forecourt of the heart.
The way to the mystery enthroned. Where we meet
momentarily amid the seraphim and the powers.

Jack Gilbert

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This past week I sat most days on the Drop Stone bench overlooking Roaring Beach and watched the National Youth Surf Competition run through its paces over seven days. A loud speaker would blare out the ongoing details of each heat as the “under 14’s” and “under 18’s” progressed up the ladder to the finals on Saturday. These were held under a calm and beautifully blue sky with the temperature reaching a tropical 90 degrees.

I doubt any of the two hundred young surfers could see me sitting up here. Even as I could not “see” the man who sat looking down at me half a century ago.

For five years my father would sit, usually alone, in the chlorinated humidity of the swimming pool’s bleachers and wait patiently for myself and a couple other young hopefuls to finish practice in order to chauffeur us back home. For a night’s rest. In order to repeat the routine the next day.

Me, the adolescent boy with red eyes wearing a baggy Speedo, was totally indifferent to this faithful act of parental love. It has taken years of personal journeying through life to give me the understanding that love comes in many forms.

I can’t reach back and change the silence between my father and myself, or even say “thank you” to this long dead immigrant, a peasant at birth in 1905, who, with long hours of self sacrifice allowed his young boy a chance for gold.

I can, however, as mentioned in last week’s blog, reach forward and show a kindness to others who might happen upon Windgrove.

When the guest arrives, expected or not, we just might venture down the path to the Drop Stone bench by the seaside, sit down for a minute or two and talk about the challenges and pleasures of life, of love, of fear, of hope. Of compassion for all creatures great and small.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

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“If you work on yourself or trouble in the world, you are slowly led to the conclusion that negativity and aggression are as central to human nature as love. You begin to think that the spirit, or whatever you call the origin of life, is more than opposing forces; it is the process of movement between the polarities.”

“There are many belief systems that see the spirit as a diverse energy with many colors and actions. I am reminded of the spirit Shiva, seen by the people of India as both creator and destroyer. The spirit or energy of nature seems to make trouble and all kinds of havoc, in part to clear the ground for something new.”

Arnold Mindell, Sitting in the Fire (both quotes)

The native tomato plant was in bloom this past week and its drooping whiteness mimicked the globes and plates set up for the incoming guests that I hosted over the weekend at Windgrove for a workshop on “Wild Mindfulness” facilitated by Jill Nolan and Astrid Miller; two very qualified eco-spiritual psychotherapists in “Transpersonal Counselling”.

The table was set for nine, but in the end ten people shared their first evening meal together before embarking on an intense process oriented workshop. Yes, the house looked immaculate; it’s fung shui of orderly calm helping to open people to the work at hand.

If we as a society are to create a more socially just, spiritually fulfilling and environmentally thriving world, there is much work that has to be done in parallel on ourselves and on our cultural paradigms. This is work that is never easy. Tears flow; anger wells up in grief. It is not all “bouncing off the light” of positive affirmations. This is real, grounded work.

There are courageous people on the path. To them I give my utmost thanks.

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I stand by this communal bench made up of 45 individual blocks of wood. I sit down, look around, and take in the vastness of this round blue planet with its unfathomable mysteries and ask myself: “Is there ever the possibility that a departed friend might choose to visit and watch with me these never ending waves come to greet us?”

This is a question I have pondered all this week over hearing the news of the suicides of two young people: one person I had met briefly when she visited Windgrove several years ago; the other was the nephew of a friend living nearby whom I did not know.

I have been reflecting for days now on this troubling subject of youth suicide, but cannot come up with any coherent approach with which to write about it. Let me, therefore, just jot down some of the several thoughts and feelings that have coursed through me and let you, the reader, glean out of it what you will.

• Karen’s* death is troubling because during her time at Windgrove she seemed confident, in charge of her life and committed to using her talents of singer/song writer and yoga teacher to help bring about social and environmental change. An empowered spiritual feminine warrior. These people are too precious to lose. An extra tragic waste, if you will.

• By coincidence, this past week I have been reading a biography of poet William Stafford written by his son Kim. One chapter — “The Lost Child” — has Kim writing about the suicide of his brother Bret, son of William:

My brother Bret was… a sensitive man, but with a crippling habit of self-sacrifice. His sweet liability surfaced early, when in junior high he announced that in lieu of any Christmas presents he would prefer that friends and family donate money to the United Nations. In high school, he served as Special Projects Chair for his class, and arranged a heroic volunteer effort that resulted in the planting of a mile of flowering cherry trees along the road between town and school — trees now tall, about twenty feet apart, with the full blossoming bounty of spring.
Riding along that road as a child in blossom time, my daughter once asked me, “Did the world thank Uncle Bret for all those trees?”
“No, little friend,” I said, “I don’t believe it did.”

A few pages later:

“By [my father’s] lead, we rarely spoke directly about what had happened. I wonder now at a family that lets this happen: we suffer a tragedy that shows us there is great need for more talk, clarity, and honesty about hard things. Might more talk have saved Bret — even awkward, difficult talk? Even with that question hanging in the air, we maintained a continuing habit of silence, all the same. It felt strange, but I know it is often so with families.”

“…..how about the boy who always
granted others their way to live,
and he gave away his whole life
till at last nothing was left for him?
Don’t tell that one.”

from “Story Time”, by William Stafford

• Does peace ultimately prevail?

A friend wrote from California: “Dear Peter, re the young woman lost… We do what we can for those in pain and pray that our love can seep through the protective chinks in their armor of fear and sad experience.  That is all we can do. I have, like you, lost so many to the darkness. I wonder if there is another world for tender souls who could not hold on any more.” 

• Maybe we need to push through the chinks of each other’s armor and insist on a conversation that begins with, “How are you really feeling. Let’s talk.”

Maybe we need to find more courage on our part to break the habit of silence around gnarly questions and reach out — especially to those young activists engaging in global issues guaranteed to cause feelings of grief. Whomever we touch touches us.

• On the phone, when first hearing about Karen’s body being found after she had gone missing, but not yet being told how or why she died, my mind flashed to the concurrent media news that was talking of a young woman, possibly abducted, possibly raped, possibly murdered. Was this Karen? My whole body started trembling with an empathic panic as I felt how, yet again, some unfortunate woman’s last minutes were filled with extreme terror at the hands of some deranged male. Maintaining breath those first few seconds on the phone was an effort.

When I heard that Karen was not murdered, but had taken her own life, I felt — strange as it seems — relief. Relief that, as painful as her tormented inner pain was to her in the moment of her jump to her death, there would not have been a crushing terror pulsing through her body resulting in an unwanted, un-chosen death.

• To Karen I pray: Somewhere over the rainbow way up high your heart rests in peace. It knows the goodness you achieved will never die.

• Jesus, according to the Bible, said that he was not his brother’s or sister’s keeper, meaning I suppose that ultimately we are all responsible, through free will, for our own actions.

Maybe, but I also hold to the belief that our present culture is inflicting abuse of such magnitude upon our young people that the more tender, caring, fragile souls among them can collapse more violently under this extra despair.

The added burden this generation carries because of a world under siege by the rapaciousness of environmental destruction, population growth and resource depletion has to increase the level of despair. A despair that, before globalization, was rarely encountered. (An exception would be the aboriginal tribes around the world that have been stripped of their connection to their lands. Are they healthy now?)

In the end, it is all about knowing how to nurture and love one’s sense of self whilst weaving and re-weaving connections between family and friends in real life and on FaceBook. This will enable each of us, and especially our younger activists, to stay alive with vibrancy and to stay the course as our global home undergoes massive changes.

Love

Fragile as a spider’s web
hanging in space
between tall grasses
it is torn again and again.
A passing dog
or simply the wind can do it.
Several times a day
I gather myself together
and spin it again.

Spiders are patient weavers.
They never give up.
And who knows
what keeps them at it?
Hunger no doubt
and hope.

May Sarton

* To respect the privacy of the relatives of the deceased, I have changed the name of the person I write about.