the sun rises there

on their cold stones

and in me –

we are the same.

The train whistle blows me awake.

I walk up the stairs in my slippers,

the stones speaking through my feet.

Something is different.

This is how simple it is –

walking up the stairs

in the sun

in slippers.

I don’t need to know. “Love well,” the wise man says in closing the retreat. “If I didn’t get to your questions then just remember this: ‘Love well.’”

~~~~

I just saw a little of My Best Friend’s Wedding today, and this is my favorite part:

Michael O’Neill to Jules: (in bright sunlight as boat floats down Lake Michigan)

You and I didn’t … in our relationships with others … we didn’t use the word “love” a lot.

Kimmy says if you love someone you say it, you say it right then, out loud. Otherwise the moment just…

(Boat slides under an overpass, a shadow sweeps over their faces.)

Jules: passes you by…

Michael: passes you by…

~-~-

So say it…say it loud and clear. This is what Life is teaching us. Our beloveds are showing us.

So say it today to your beloved ones: “I love you. I love you with all my heart.”

Yesterday it was warm.

And now, under what seemed so solid, so real,
Appears something else altogether.

The wind blows. The trees shake, the sky is pink.

Between white walls and wind lies the truth:

Nothing changed at all. Love is still — and was always — there.

Moon, a misty blur, rising like a flashlight under a blanket.
Dogs all howling.

It feels like Spring.

You are the love that you are looking for outside of yourself. You are already home.

You ask what to do to create the life you want, to become what you are supposed to be. This is a question from the mind for the mind only…not for you. What you are…you are regardless of what you are doing, what you create in this world, or the role you play. What makes you happy? Watching TV shows all day? Then do that and do it with all of your spirit, with all of your intention to be in pleasure and joy as you are watching. There is nothing in the world wrong with this – just this: notice the effect the information there has on your spirit, in your heart. Look to that. Do you feel happy as you watch? Do you feel calm and at peace as you watch? Does the watching bring you joy? Look deeply into this.

It’s become my pastime; it’s really all that I do, that and the computer.

No problem at all with that, so look at what you believe to be a problem about that. Is there one?

Yes, I’m not being creative; I’m not creating which gives me great pleasure and joy.

Can you find a way to make a space for this creativity? And if so, what would it be?

Painting, drawing, maybe writing.

Can you make a space for it?

I feel I still need the TV on to do it and then it distracts me.

Ahhh, look deeply there. This is it. The TV is the distraction – it gets your attention over your own creativity. Is that correct?

I hate the damn TV. And I love it. I hate the damn distraction and I love it. It is one and the same maybe.

So feel into that place. How does it feel?

It makes me so sad.

What does?

That I allow – no that I actually choose for something to distract me from my own creativity, from my own joy, my own life.

Is it your choice then?

Yes. I see that it is.

Can you make another choice?

Yes, I can.

I was at work, Sung was in his office, and had just seen him at 4, and Sung said his breathing was shallow. After 5 weeks of “hospice care” and giving him constant loving comfort and care, he took his last breath when neither one of us was there.

Our brave little boy

Sunday night, we moved everything in next to him and watched the Super Bowl together. Then we put him in our bed, and during the night, this cat, who hadn’t been able to walk for over a week, somehow wriggled all the way over to Sung’s side and was reaching out for him and putting his head on his chest. And I had hugging time too, I held him next to me and he raised his head back and leaned right into me so we could touch noses. I rubbed his throat. He purred very quietly, and I could hear inside my head my own fear of dying, but in Johnny’s head maybe it was just a blissful happiness.

Monday morning, Sung said John’s eyes were very alert and happy and his energy was high. Sung said it felt clear that the night with us had given him a boost in his spirit.

It was just the boost he needed, b/c I really did not want the vet to come as we had scheduled for Tuesday morning. I did not feel that it was respectful of Johnny, b/c of the particular way he had been creating his passage. And so it was all in his power, and he is the one who made the call. And we are so grateful.

We are grateful for the honor of knowing this cat who was generous and kind, with a self-confident genial way about him, the kind of guy who, like my husband says, would be the one buying drinks and listening to everyone’s tale of woe at the bar, in spite of his own. That was Johnny. And we thank him for his precious life and for his brave and fearless death; we are grateful for sharing our lives and our love with him; and we are grateful for each and every one of you.

You are in my life for one reason, and one reason only, and Johnny’s acceptance and reverence for life and death has shown me this so clearly: you are in my life so that I can tell you how much I love you.

And I do. I love you with all my heart. Thank you for being with me in this life we share together.

… and I need a hug!

My dear, dear friend Johnny is in hospice care—unable to speak—but we are together each morning, and in that time, I look deeply into his blue eyes. I stop my thoughts and just look. And in his eyes, in that deep silence, this morning a deeper opening occurred. The images of childhood arose: deep feelings of sadness, grief, friendliness, hopelessness, loneliness; but mostly feelings of anger, a deep welling up of rage; rage suppressed for a life time, buried for 65 years.

My recent prayer has been to allow my feelings of anger to arise, to feel the sensation of anger in my body; to practice saying “no” and see how it feels; to set a boundary. And so life began showing me what I was asking to see.

First it was pain in my body, which arises as an extreme discomfort in the right side of my hip/groin/knee area and prevents me from walking, climbing stairs, or exercising. On my husband’s advice, I started looking up help for this, and I came upon Dr. John Sarno and TMS therapy. One of his main tenants is that our body’s pain actually arises from unrecognized, unrealized anger and that this pain can be totally alleviated by working with the thoughts in the mind, and the repressed anger. I’ve been practicing feeling the pain in the ways he suggests, and have found relief.

Yesterday I read in my Enneagram book about myself: I’m a number Nine. Nines, among other things according to the authors, must stop “numbing out” and “disassociating” from asserting themselves against others and not feeling their own anger.

Then it was three movies I watched: “True Grit,” “Secretariat,” and “I Am Love,” all stories with female characters who did not put caring for others’ feelings above caring for their own. They honored a deep commitment to love themselves first. They honored their own truth first, and in watching each story, I saw the places where they took a stand in a place that I would feel totally fearful and terrified to stand in my truth. I realized how often I do not stand up for myself; the places where I “cave” because if I don’t “act nice” I am frightened that someone else will get angry with me, and …. “and then what?” “Then what?” That was the question I needed to see: What was I so afraid of?

So today I finally saw this question more clearly. And as I stepped into it, I opened to my anger; I opened to the fear of my own anger.

As I sat with Johnny, I felt an extreme rage. It was a rage that arose from recent events and as I flipped back through time, I saw it had arisen in infancy … I saw the imprinting when, as a baby, I needed to know for certain that I was loved by someone else.

I watched through time as this person – first my mother – then one “symbolic mother” after another changed and was not the “perfect lover.” I saw each time how I felt betrayed, unloved, and angry. I saw how I have covered this up – this fact that I did not feel loved. And because I covered it up with trying to make others feel OK when I was really angry, this old feeling kept coming back again and again, but I kept repressing it.

As I see it now, life kept presenting this “What Is” to me so that I could fully open to it, to fully engage and feel it. So each time I felt betrayed by not being loved, I was enraged, but I covered it up by running around and making sure everyone else did not feel my anger and wasn’t upset. I wanted to be sure that somehow the anger I was feeling was not leaking out.

And today, as I just opened to it looking into Johnny’s eyes, I felt how much rage was there. I thought “how can I feel so much rage with you, John, you are dying, I should be in a good mood for you.” He just looked – no words, no thoughts, just those eyes of deep blue silence. And in that, I saw it was OK for me to feel this extreme discomfort and fear of anger, of rage. And as I looked deeper, through the years, I recognized that the loss of love that I was feeling was not from others, but from me. The love I am missing is my own love for myself.

This takes all the victim/judge/blame out of it. And it’s not like I haven’t seen this before, or ‘known’ it on a mental level. My mind knows this story about anger, self-hatred, self-love. But today was different.

Today I felt the discomfort, the fear, of feeling my own anger, and with no thought at all, with no discourse, no doctrine at all – life just opened a door and I experienced a deep truth which has shifted my life.

I pray for the strength to feel every sensation in my body, including and embracing the anger. I promise that I will be present, as John showed me today with so much love and grace, to just be with What Is. To open to What Is. To stop trying to be anything at all, but just the emptiness that is Everything.

A picture of Johnny is attached.

Johnny Angel

Sketching their brown-black shapes

On snowy lawn.

Heads down,

concentrating,

like children with charcoal and

sheets of white paper.