Monthly Archives: July 2007

Every Death Is A Precious Visitation

There’s been a death in my family. The house has stood silent for two days now, empty, a tomb of what was once a glorious presence, a visitation of sorts of the numinous in nature. Though life goes on as normal, nothing soothes my heartache. How can it be normal when such a presence has been lost?

My brother-in-law made me a blue bird house for Christmas. I put it up in my yard, delighted with thoughts those beautiful creatures might one day bless my solitude. In Spring, I was indeed visited with two blue angels, blue winged creatures that take your breath away. I feasted on their comings and goings, on every shift of blue and color that lit up my yard. A nest was built, with baby blue birds soon evident within those cradled walls. I worried how babies with no practice with those lovely wings might make it to safety with no nearby limb apparent. Stories of baby birds dropping onto the grass nearby until they find their wings clouded my excitement. I waited.

I came home from work one day and saw outside my window my feral cat playing in the grass. It looked as if she caught another chipmunk and was tormenting it, truly unto death. I took a deep breath. The blue bird house seemed suddenly silent, no longer the busy terminal it was the day before. Had the babies made it out to safety? Was it, indeed, a chipmunk? Surely I would know if something more sinister had taken place. I tried to move on, still distracted and soulfully torn.

Some time later, my lovely apparitions returned, once more making my yard a carnival of color and activity. More straw flown in, more babies in the making. Enchantment filled my life again. I placed a pole in my yard, nearby, in front of my small friends’ house. Surely the babies can make it to the pole, I thought. Surely they will be safe, and free.

For the last few days, mother bird has sat on that pole in my yard for what seemed hours, looking at her castle, flying in and out on spontaneous whims. I imagined her checking on her little ones. I felt the time was near when she would call her babies out into the world of nature and instruct them in the art of flying. It was the Fourth of July, Independence Day, and I was home all day, rooted by the window and filled with awe.

Nothing happened. I guessed it wouldn’t be today, as it was dinner time. I didn’t think the hour was right to teach baby birds how to master life outside the walls. I turned on the news and ate my dinner near the window.

From what seemed like nowhere, squealing sounds arrested me. My blue apparitions, my blue bird angels, were diving and squealing in frantic torpedo-like drops toward my feral cat, who from my window perch, looked slyly guilty. I ran outside, squealing and yelling and throwing up my arms in frantic movements, “No, no, no!” I chased the cat with two distraught blue birds close behind me, squealing, relentless, terror stricken. The cat ran, no longer within our range. I ran into the woods behind her, yelling, crying, praying. She was gone. The blue birds could not contain their horror.

Tiny, tiny feathers lay in the grass, too small to be anything but what I feared the most. My tears could not console my blue birds, nor myself. They finally flew away, emotions I can only half imagine. The feral cat I adopted from her birth, fed and had “fixed” so no more kittens could wander our streets, had just broken my heart and didn’t have a clue.

Two days have passed. I’ve tried to take the longer view, to see this tiny death as part of nature’s web, as part of the coming and going of each of us, from birth to death and to whatever the universe holds out for us then. I know we can only intervene when and where we can, where we are invited in, and sometimes can’t even then. I’ve learned to do all I can, to do the right thing — the only thing I can control — then to let go of the outcome. I know we have no real control of this thing we call life. I know both the agony and the serenity of letting go. And I know my present sadness will smooth out into a greater understanding of what I am here on this earth to learn. But I am sad nonetheless.

I created the perfect storm in my own back yard and I feel helpless to alter nature’s way. My feral cat does what a cat does when it’s a hunter. Wild as she is, I cannot catch her to put her inside when baby blue birds seem close to flight. I still feed her every day, though I have tried to tell her each time I see her that she broke my heart. I can only hope she eats so much she gets fat and sluggish and loses interest in every little thing that moves in my back yard.

My blue bird house still stands in my yard, empty, silent, a tomb of what was once a golden palace. I’ve left it there to weep with me when I reach back for those winged visitations. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. I can only stay with today for now. The joy and awe that were mine only days ago teach me that life is worth the trudging on.

Each Age Has Its Own Vantage Point

Each age has its own vantage point.

I read recently that Robert Frost, at 63, reflected that young people have flashes of insight, but “it is later in the dark of life that you see forms, patterns, constellation. And it is the constellations that are philosophy.” That is what I, at 65, want to share here on my blog — constellations, patterns I have noted on my personal journey. I have experienced both the dark and the light of life, and, as a psychotherapist, that has made all the difference in my ability to sit with those who have lost sight of the “long story” or larger view of how and why we are here on this earth.

At 65, I feel like an eagle born in a local canyon that has circled out in ever wider circles and have now experienced things only a full bodied life can teach. In my youth, I dreamed of how high I could fly, what all I would see — out there — far away from the canyon of my birth. I wanted to know what lay on the other side, where the veil becomes more transparent and permeable. I’ve circled now, enough, flown the distance of the horizon made available to me, had adventures I carry in my heart, quiet memories only I digest. My wings, less restless now, feel more my own than ever.

Things I want to talk about, share my own experience of, cover multitudes: how everything in life contains its opposite, how loss comes with its own gladness, how connectedness or an awareness of our oneness banishes aloneness, the importance of solitude in our busy lifestyle, discovering someone or something to hold us. So many things to explore together — learnings from the road taken.

Plato said that when we are conceived, we know everything we need to know to make it through life, to have a full life, but that, as we come through the birth canal, we forget everything we know. We have to learn it all over again, through the particular circumstances of our life, while we are living our life. I believe this is true. We each have an intuitive, inner knowing that guides us through good times and bad.

This allows us to discern what is the more right or more healthy choice to make in the challenges we face in daily life. “I am not helpless in this situation. I have within me, or I can access/get the resource I need to help me through this.” It is all there within me, but sometimes I need the help of someone else to remind me of what I already know (but have forgotten). Or I need their expertise to show me how to deal with a situation I have not faced before. This knowing we can get whatever we need in any situation, whether from within or from without, gives us a feeling of competence.

Age also opens up this knowing within, contributes to our feeling of competence. It’s like that old saying, “If I knew then what I know now. . . .” If I could have been as “alive” in my twenties or thirties as I am today in my sixties, I would have lived a more vital, creative life. “I know who I am and no one can take that away from me.” But, alas, what is all this living for if not to teach us when the time or circumstance is ready.

Everything is a teaching, everything — something that allows us to re-member, to reconnect, to reestablish the connection we have to that divine inner knowing placed in us at our conception (but that we forgot as we were introduced to this world). Whatever it is I am faced with at this moment is something the other end of which is “in my Father’s hands” in a religious sense, or “something from which I can learn a deeper truth, grow” in a spiritual sense. This reinforces in us the belief that “I can get through this and learn what it is I have been brought to this place in my life to learn.” Getting to this point in our life, this conscious place of awareness, brings a peace and a confidence that would be revered by kings.

I believe this re-membering, this reconnecting with the sacred within, happens at what I call our “center,” an archetypal image I use to describe what happens at the core of us when the sacred or divine energy of us intersects with the human or spiritual energy of us. Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, once said we are acting from our center when what we are doing flows freely and generously from the best in us. We call this being centered, and we all know it when it happens in us.

These core beliefs, these insights, some I have known intuitively and some I have learned from the circumstances and experiences of my life, sustain me. I wish to write about these, and more, and invite you to come along.