It’s winter and I’m sitting in my cozy chair with the footstool and saying to myself: “I own this house. Bob left me in charge and it’s been six years since he died.” I look up to the four long clerestory windows that let in the sunlight. I feel sad and try to figure out why, on this particular moment, sorrow has come wafting back into me once again.

Suddenly these thoughts materialize. “Did he feel a sadness as he was leaving the house in an ambulance that would take him to hospice? Did he realize it was the last time he would be there?” I felt the sorrow shroud me. We never had a real conversation about what his death would be like. He didn’t say many of the things I wish he had. Like the lines you hear in the movies. Instead he was silent, all his strength waning, all his words lying as dormant as his body was becoming.

Grief can never be fully put into words. Because love is not about the words. It’s about the music. There is a dirge in my heart as I allow myself to remember the devastation that I felt and still feel at times. We were deeply in love and yet we put distances between us to minimize the sorrow. I know that. We each built walls to keep the other’s walls from toppling over. I know he would have liked to reach out to me more than he did. I would be living without him. Soon his clothes would no longer hang in the closet and I would quickly fill up the space they used to take. That is a woman’s dream–to have enough closet space. I kept his robe for a while and would put my face against it and it would end up wiping my tears away.

Don’t let anyone tell you that you should get over your sorrow. Yes, it waxes and wanes, but the love inside is never deleted and thrown in the trash. I am getting older without him. There will be no more back rubs on a cold winter’s night or his pills to put in the little box or a certain look on his face that said it all. “I am leaving you now; I will always love you.” And then I had a dream visitation where he said, “Your prayers are written on the wall of my heart everyday.” Amen.

So how do I move beyond grief? If I try, I will be using mental effort, which is not a power. I move beyond it by being it in the moment. I go with it, loving myself for re-experiencing the loss of someone significant in my life.  Gone forever, not coming back, not here to fix things, to comfort me. I am not cast down but lifted up by love.

Love is holding me like a jewel in the palm of its hand. It is regarding me with infinite grace, encouraging me to bloom into my full soul beauty. It has been a rough and harrowing road, but there are also moments of sublimity. When I sit and write easily of both love and death. When I know that my path is unique to me and unfolding exactly as it should. If you are grieving or fearing loss, there is not a thought in the world that will heal you. That is the lesson in grief. Thought is for practical things; for the spirit, awareness is needed.

I move around my house empty of a husband. I fit it snugly these days. It’s cedar siding is full of bird holes and I fear the arrival of the pileated woodpecker that can do damage in minutes. I would not be so aware of the house if I still had a husband to be “in charge.” That was his job; the outside of the house, the car and yard maintenance. I was the cook and shopper, the bill payer. And we lived side by side in the mystery.

We balanced each other and now I must balance myself. My masculine side is called in when boards are damaged, when the car needs air in the tires. I am learning to live more practically. But because I am alone, I am more in tune with what God would have me do. I write more because I have more time. I share myself with readers in an intimate way. I am not here to teach anyone anything. I am here because the river flows and I am going with it, not against it. What does love have to teach but letting go and entering the flow?

Winnebago Woman

I watched Winnebago Man over the weekend and realized how alike we all are. You might as well call me Winnebago Woman, for my writing often serves as a confessional for me. In case you aren’t familiar with the Winnebago Man, he did an industrial film for Winnebago back in the eighties in which he cussed like a sailor. They were filming in Iowa and it was hot and there were flies and he was in way, way over his head. Someone found the outtakes of that film and passed them around the country because they were so funny. He was @!*!! all over the place.

And so it was with me when my husband was ill. One day a neighbor stopped me in the street to ask how I was doing. I used the F word the first time in my life. It felt good. It felt totally appropriate to where I was. I had no family in town but my son, my husband was dying, everything was going to hell in a hand basket and now someone wants to know how I am @*!! doing!

As the Winnebago Man said, and I quote: “@!*!!”  All the old patriarchs can just go take a flyin’ leap into the old pond and when they go splash, I will say, again like Winnebago Man, @!*!! it!

We all have low points in our lives. And guess what, when we are down, we don’t want to hear about how happy anyone else is. Man, that really sucks. I hope you are smiling at this point; part of the path is learning how to take your lumps and make lumpy gravy. Today I sit at my iMac early in the morning writing this drivel. I am in my robe and have a heat pack on my neck. It feels so @!*!! good. Write me if you can identify and if you’re good, maybe Santa will leave some @!*!! gifts under your tree.

The Winds of Spirit

A good goal for 2011 is to let myself be blown about by the winds of spirit. To be a leaf letting myself be carried. There may be stillpoints, eddies, hurricanes or floods. The leaf will rise to the occasion if powered by the wind.

I have written about the leaf that blew into Bob’s hospice room the day he died. My sister sat by his bed and the french doors flew open twice and the last time a beautiful leaf blew in and landed by his bed. She kept it and a dear friend took a photo of it. A reminder of a beautiful life called home by the spirit.

On the personal level I tend to be overly filled with my own way to God. I think I must exert effort. But all I can do is wait on the wind of the spirit to blow me about. The words I write are seeds scattered to the four corners. The scattering is not up to me.

I am grateful for

Readers that get me.

Readers that return time and again to read my wisdom/drivel/miscellany.

Readers that are invisible and those that are visible.

Readers that see their lives mirrored in mine.

Readers that stumble and fall into the arms of the One.

Readers that wear reindeer antlers and those that don’t.

Readers that laugh and or cry as they read my words.

Readers that love holidays and those that are heaving hearty “bahs.”

Readers that find the path more interesting than anything else.

Readers that lose their way and find food more exiting than just about anything.

We are all God’s children and some of us need pacifiers…and that’s OK, too.

God bless us, everyone.

It’s Christmas. Have You Got  The Balls For It?

Living as the truth is a full-time job; that is why we only work at it part-time! To be fully realized would be to have almost no ego left; only the bare minimum needed to stay here. Oh, most of us have long since realized that we are the Self, but to live it, something total is required.  And none of us are at that point. Christ was and even He suffered from living His Truth. He wanted to take a pass at the last moment, but asked that His Father’s Will be done. In our hearts we want it, too, but the flesh is still weak. We look back at loved ones who we fancy still need us here; we limp along making compromises and half-promises. Such is the nature of the path.

Christmas brings all of our failings into the clear light of winter. Stripped of excuses, we stand bare and shivering like the trees. We know that materialism does anyone no good and yet we succumb to the daily advertising onslaught. We strive for peace on earth and gesture at drivers who pass us on the right. It’s a never-ending cycle of good and evil.

What are we to do but know this? There is a certain quality of mercy in the person who is genuinely working on him or herself. It is extended first of all to the one working and is naturally given to the world. But it doesn’t work the other way. You cannot extend mercy to a single soul if you have not shown mercy to yourself first. All inner work begins within.

I make peppermint bark and Chex mix. Go to the mall because I get bored. Have memories to deal with and the weather to contend with. Who doesn’t? Spiritual teachers and students are human beings dealing with the cycle of the seasons and their own moods.  But at the core, divinity is ever present. Witnessing the miracle of self-change, silently doing its thing, which is to be love itself. Love everlasting. I, of course, remember my daughter and husband during this time of year. The holidays are hard to bear up under. It is far easier to enter the blank slate of January, which doesn’t demand false cheer. I have loved and lost. I have gone on and learned that bending is better than breaking. But I can’t do it without participating in the ritual of the every day. So I make fudge and cookies and sit with stillness as the evening comes upon me. Writing is the gateway to grace for me. Come in and sit awhile. Rest from your activities and be with yourself. It’s past time.

December, in the past , has left me with nothing left to give. Many of you know my story. My husband, Bob, died on Dec. 20 of 2004. His birthday was Dec. 12 and our anniversary was Dec. 28. We buried him on Dec. 23 and by then I had nothing left to give. I had been wrung dry and flung on the pyre of the past. And the future was looking none too good.

Although a woman named Mary at the Marriott Courtyard produced a miraculous Christmas Eve feast for us, Christmas Day found my son and sister and I flying back to Atlanta. We had gotten the last seats on the plane, and that in itself was a miracle. I didn’t mind having Christmas dinner out of an airport snack machine. I believe it was Lance cheese crackers washed down with Coke.

We arrived back at the house sandblasted with fatigue. Bob had been in hospice only four days and for that I was grateful. But now, rest—a long winter’s nap, was looking better and better, at least to my body. My soul was sorrowing and my psyche was still pretty numb. And then the tusunami struck on the other side of the world and I recognized the tsunami within my own spirit. I had been washed clean.

Nothingness is something we want nothing to do with, although we give it lip service. I myself am a control freak and a clinger; that is why I have chosen a hard path through this life. Vernon Howard said that the easy way becomes the hard way and the hard way becomes the easy way. On meeting him, I knew the hard way was going to be my route. I knew he wanted to break us from our wrong self-reliance; every word he said indicated that. Little did I know the sorrows that would be endured when I met him many years ago.

And now here I am, clean as a whistle. I have taken many baths in which the skin was scrubbed off my ego until I screamed. Cried for mercy, begged for clemency. All for nothing. Destiny speaks and at last you listen. And at some point you begin to be thankful. Mercy may be nothing more than that.

The Elegance of Nothing

There is an elegance to nothing. The old Zen patriarchs wore it well. Of course there were no Kmarts in those days, no big box shopping or etail to distract them. Maybe we, too, would have time to watch the old frog go plop into the pond without those distractions. Who knows?

Koans were a way of passing time because they didn’t have Monopoly or video games. They weren’t plugged in, nor did they suffer from ADD. But I bet they had their own version of ennui. I can just hear one of those guys saying to his buddy, “That old frog don’t got it goin’ on….”

Maybe they didn’t have money to jingle in their patch-robe pockets, but they probably had some pretty strong drink. Maybe they had hula hoops made of barrel staves and primitive advertisements that said “Got Mu?”

But I have veered from my subject, which is the elegance of nothing. Nothing is better than something when the “something” costs you an arm and a leg and looks like the Bejesus on you.

I can’t picture a Zen master saying, “Does this patched robe make my butt look big?”

There were no mani-pedis given to old patriarchs, although they undoubtedly needed them. They walked pretty much everywhere and spent an inordinate amount of time watching trees blossom. That was just their form of Netflix. Human nature is what it is. We have over exaggerated the purity of the patriarchs. I just know that some of them must have been holy terrors—as good as Gordon Ramsey on Hell’s Kitchen. “What do you mean, you burned the rice!!”

So I shall wind this up before I am sorry I brought the subject up. I know one thing. When a mother asked her monk son where he was going and he said “Out,” she believed him and when he said he was doing nothing, she believed that, too. Something hadn’t been invented  yet.

#4093 – Friday, December 3, 2010 – Editor: Jerry Katz

WINTER DONATION DRIVE

The Winter Donation Drive is underway. With the book publication expenses, I am hoping to get some donations from loyal readers and even from new ones. The new site has to be paid for as well, so a monthly donation would be very much appreciated. I understand that these are hard times, but often we can come up with some extra change if we really want to.

Also, let me know what you want to see on the new site. I have held back from uploading audios because my recorder has been acting up and I haven’t had the time or energy to figure out what is going on with it. I am also working on how to upload some of my classic material. It’s an adventure, that’s for sure. But I am following my bliss and that’s always a good thing.

Word on the book is that it is finding its way in the world. A few readers here and there and all enthusiastic so far. It has come from a very deep place in me, so I know it strikes a chord because of that. Spread the word to folks who might resonate with it.

A LETTER FROM SWAMI AND VICKI

Dear Devotees (slackers)

I am writing this to you (meatheads) from my warm and cozy (messy) kitchen. My guru (thorn in the flesh), Swami Z, is ensconced (sprawling) in his recliner watching me work (eat cookie dough).

The holidays (sugar coma) are fast approaching and we are anxious (dreading) for the merriment (upset stomachs and headaches) to begin (end.)

What better way to spend the season (eternity in hell) than with you, our loyal (undependable) readers of this enlightening (stupid) website.

We care so much (a teaspoon’s worth) about each of you striving for enlightenment (not).

Please keep in touch (wear latex gloves) and drop us a line (use punctuation, you ninnies.)

Blessed be,

Vicki and Swami

P. S. from Swami Z–Buy the danged book already. This so-called author is about to hit the big time (take a bath) and I need for her to sell a lot of books (remain solvent so she can keep me in the swami b’ness and support me in my old age (senility) Click on her book link and make my little student happy. I hear the book is actually good (wonders never cease).

Let us know if you order it (save our butts) and we’ll send you a thank you note (when she lets me out of the kitchen long enough.) The Winter Donation Drive is on (doing poorly) and we reach into our mailbox anxiously with our fingers poking out of our ragged little mittens (send a casserole and some firewood). The Donate Button is lonely (unused.)

Yours in fervent devotion (?) Swami the Rascal Guru

Someone wise told me the more I wrote about my sorrow the faster I would heal. So the writing continues so the healing can. I reach down into my tight little psyche to see what might need to see the light. It’s dark in here. The memories are sleeping. Why should I disturb them or bring a tear to my own eye?

It is December 23, 2004, and I am sitting in the family section of the funeral home. Across the room lies the body of my husband in his casket. The minister is telling us about Bob’s life (the things I told him, for he never met the deceased.) I am thinking that I must just get through the service; it is no time for a breakdown.  Everyone is beyond exhausted. My son and sister and I have flown in from Atlanta to bury him in Memphis, Tennessee. Christmas has been disrupted by this death, as has been my life, But I am soldiering on.

Before the service, an old college friend comes up to say something to me, “Your life has been so sad,” she says, shaking her head in disbelief. I am not really there; just going through the motions. The minister’s eulogy is going on and I hear sleet beginning to hit the roof; it is zinging like a choir of ice angels.

At the graveside, we are seated and someone gives us blankets for our knees. My son sits beside me and we say to each other how beautiful the cemetery looks. The sleet has painted everything silver and poinsettias stand brilliantly against the storm. Bob is lowered into the ground. I remain outside myself and know that I have been a trooper. I have finally faced the worst day of my life. It has been hanging, like the sword of Damocles, over my head for almost five years. Now the worst has happened.

Beloved boy, whom I knew when you were in the fourth grade with me, I give you back to the earth. You loved me so deeply and so truly. The thing I can do for you is to share my passion for writing with others, as you prayed I would do. You will always be right here over my shoulder, playing the keyboard like a piano, as someone said I did. That is how I write the best, not knowing what the next chord will be.

Sometimes I write humor and sometimes I write what is on my mind. What is deep within the heart is hard to excavate, but if it can help me to heal, so be it. Don’t forget to take out the garbage and put the garage door down before you come to bed. Oh, how I would like to say those words again one more time.

Conceptual awareness can’t help you make it through the night.  Yes, I said it. Loud and clear. Sometimes we are rocked with shocks intended to wake us up, but something else is needed. When Bob lay dying in hospice less than a week before Christmas in 2004, I sat in a stunned state in his crowded little room. My heart and soul were as weary as they had ever been. I had done my best and it wasn’t enough. He was on the way out and going within was not an option at the moment. I couldn’t access anything but numbness; the shock had already set in. His body was on the way out. His dear presence would soon be only a memory. And nothing, not even awareness, was going to spare me from the grief. (Let this cup pass from me comes to mind.)

At that moment, if a neoadvaitan had put his head into the room and told me that the story was unreal, I would have gobsmacked him. There is a time for the human being to weep and a time for him/her to dance. There was no dancing in that room. Bob had fought tooth and nail to stay alive. He had climbed out of the railed bed and been found on the floor. “I was going to the second floor,” was what he told the nurse when she found him.  There was no second floor. He flat out wanted to live. The path had become, for him, a fight to the finish. I was too tired to fight.

On Christmas Eve, 2004, we had just buried Bob. Instead of a principle, we received an actual person. Her name was, believe it or not, Mary Frances, and she worked at the Marriott Courtyard across from St. Francis  Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee—a nice symbolism. She didn’t talk to us of being no one. She instead busied herself with making a Christmas dinner in the lobby of the desert motel. We were iced in and forlorn. She changed that motel lobby into a living experience of truth and goodness. We ate and laughed together. She told my little family of four to promise her one thing—that we would not wait this long again to hold a family reunion.

There was no conceptual awareness spit out in intellectual phrases about entities and non-existence. I understood the existence of love as a given, as a healing and a promise. That has been enough for me.

This week was my birthday and Thanksgiving. Not being a lover of holidays, the stress level automatically rises. But there is a certain headiness in being free of family obligations. It has not always been that way, for I have served my time of putting up with the exhaustion of cooking dinner while the male contingency looked on. I was always aware that the female bore the brunt of all holidays.

So my son and I eat out on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. We are quiet souls who actually don’t mind being non-celebratory. Being inner driven is a grace not given to everyone. Even so, I allow twinges of self-pity to sneak in and rob me of awareness. My writing keeps me honest and not being tied down with relatives allows me to focus on the absolute. I have great compassion for those suffering illnesses and bereavements during the holidays for I have been there more than once.

This is my time and my season to celebrate the Self. That which is not dependent on ritual, obligation or commerce. I turn within and see the simplicity of being whole. It takes no lofty point of view to do this. It has been wrenched out of me, this particular brand of introspection. I have paid the price and now offer advice to all of those of you alone at this time. Perhaps it means you are ready to take yourself on, the self that has robbed you of peace and silence. Maybe it is time to sit back and let yourself by served by the One within us all.

Hello, Everyone,

This is your flight captain speaking to you from wherever they speak to you from! Trust me—the food on this leg of your trip will be lip-smackin’ good. The writer (that would be me), is capable of launching you into a new nondual experience. You will be aware of yourself in a new way, but this cannot be described. If I had to use one word, I would say “spontaneously rewarding,” for that is how I write. Off the cuff, straight from the hip, brass tacks and truth guaranteed. I calls ‘em like I sees’ em.

Perhaps you want to know what nonduality is. Ask yourself who you are, really, and you will get a taste of it. A conscious culinary pleasure.

I would like to get some input on how the flight is going for you. I have complimentary blankets, earphones and cornpone. Free coffee, tea or me, your captain. I have no idea what they call female pilots. I guess they call ‘em pilots.

I have been known to mix a mean Realitini….that would be a cocktail of wisdom, craziness and honesty. You won’t be disappointed. Each time I post a new piece, may you go along for the ride. This is nonduality up close and personal. Please take off your shoes and leave a comment before you depart the plane.

And thank you for flying Nonduality Air today. Book us again often. Frequent flier miles are available and the pilot has a new book out. The title is LIFE WITH A HOLE IN IT: That’s How The Light Gets In. You can get a copy by reaching over to the right side of your plane or overhead and click on the appropriate link. Word on the street is that it is a-mazing and that puts me on Cloud Nine.

“A person can have the temporary approval of his friends or he

can have his own life, but he cannot have both.”

Vernon Howard

After Bob died, I vowed to move as deeply as possible into my own life. He had been my mainstay and ballast. An honorable man, he sheltered me from many things, but nothing can shelter one from him or herself. Deep down, I always knew that.

My teacher had taught self-reliance as a core principle and now I returned to it full-time. I began to care for myself with respect and attention. What I discovered was mind-boggling. I had never needed to lean on Bob, as willing as he was. I just “thought” I did. My thoughts were neatly packaged into categories and Bob was one of them. “He can gas up the car; he can take care of the income tax, etc.” Now I am doing everything he did and the world hasn’t come to an end.

What he couldn’t take care of was my own emotional baggage. Now I felt like I was unpacking suitcase after suitcase of stuff that no longer belonged to me. It was all jumbled up, too; like your clothes after a week’s vacation. Everything just randomly pressed together and needing to be cleaned. I began to see things that no longer worked. It was like I had been going places and doing things that were of no interest to me. So I simplified my inner life. I spent lots of time just  looking into the window of my mind. And the more I looked, the less I saw. Emptiness began to matter more than fullness. I treasured my morning meditations. In the brown recliner I bought for myself shortly after he died, I would sit gently with myself. My breath was my  own, after all, as was my life.

His illness began to recede into the distance as I moved his clothes from the closet and began my new life. At first I was frugal to the point of being ridiculous. I didn’t know how money I would have. Then I realized it was the little things that I enjoyed. A box of bath powder, a scented candle, a book that made me laugh. And so the big things became about self-care. I was giving myself time to just live on this earth.

No was my favorite word for a long time. Grief requires a severe pruning back of activity so the soul can bloom again. I sought solace within and not from without. I wrote a lot and realized this was to be my path. Words piled up like snow on a winter night but they warmed me in a significant way. Now I wanted to warm others from the reflected light.

My new website is where the words will be read and hopefully another book will arise one page at a time. Bob is loving me from the only possible place he ever could—from within my heart. I was having my own life returned to me in the form of self-love and my husband will forever be a part of that. I was learning to have my own life.

Vicki Woodyard

Being a spiritual writer is my passion and delight. Why? Because it comes from something deeper than the ego. All I do is open to the flow and let my fingers do the talking. I especially love it when they are funny or when they go so deep I sigh. At this moment, I have no idea what is arising. So let us wander down the page together, you and I.

Yesterday at my Cancer Wellness writing group we wrote about thankfulness. The leaves were a marvel of reds and golds (our writing room is in a tall building and the walls are glassed in on three sides. For some reason I wrote this:

There were too few days on earth with Laurie (my daughter). On one Thanksgiving, she and  her brother, Rob, wore construction paper Pilgrim buckles on their shoes. My mother was here to visit and we gathered for the meal at our kitchen table. Such days went up in smoke. The smallest pilgrim died. So unfair. And I write of both big things and small. Construction paper buckles—what would they bring on eBay? What do they bring in a mother’s heart?

A sigh, a tenderness, a knowing how evanescent is this life. The littlest pilgrim always loved the black olives in the relish dish. Do I love less because she is gone—or more? Some days I don’t even remember I had such a child. But the heart never forgets. Her sly smile may be behind my writing. She sure hated for me to cry.

So the little writing group listened to each one’s writing in turn. There is always a choice as to whether you want to share or not.  We finished the session with some poetry-writing. Here is mine:

On Earth

Looking requires a soft alertness.

A wilting of the

mind,

A relaxing of the stance.

Being requires of you but one thing.

That one thing is itself the

answer to why you are here

on earth.

The missing link in the chain of spirituality is self-love. We come to this astonishing discovery only after we have tried desperately to change ourselves, fix ourselves, reinvent ourselves adnauseum. None of it worked because there was no self-love behind it. Charity begins within.

Self-love is something that all of the great spiritual masters lived. Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is within. He meant that it is within our own consciousness. Self-love cannot be bestowed by another. And the paradox is that we are all love. Love powers the universe.

When I lost my daughter to a childhood cancer at the age of seven, I was only 35 years old. I was in my early forties before I even began to heal. Grief for a child is different than for any other. You are facing not only the loss of the child, but their children’s children. The blank space not only opens up daily but also for generations. This loss set my feet firmly on the spiritual path. I began to read hundreds of books related to that subject. The Autobiography of a Yogi by Yogananda was given to me by my mother. It was my first taste of eastern spirituality. Yogananda loved the Christ as well as Krishna. He showed me that love is love is love….

Still I had years ahead of me to make the astonishing discovery that self-love is the linchpin of life. Without that, we are useless to others because we will project our self-loathing onto them. I certainly tried. I often made life miserable for my family in the years after my daughter died. My husband and I were left with an eleven-year-old son who had his own grieving to do. My husband tried to neatly solve the problem of grief by becoming a workaholic. His self-love was on the back burner just as mine was. Just as everyone’s is. For our culture teaches us to love our neighbor as ourself. What it doesn’t reveal is that we must love ourselves first. That is the right order.

There is a wonderful book called I Come As A Brother, by Mary Margaret Moore. That book had a sentence that leapt out at me and changed my consciousness forever. She said that WE need love ourselves. And in so many words, until that happens, we cannot give what we don’t have.

So I began the daily practice of sitting quietly in my chair first thing in the morning and saying: I choose to love myself. Five little words that took me in a different direction. The scriptures became living lessons for me now. Once I chose to love myself, I could love my neighbor, for you are your neighbor. There is no division in the world of love. Your own wholeness feeds the multitudes with baskets of loaves and fishes left over. Your own consciousness leads the way to your healing.

Joel Goldsmith of The Infinite Way and author of many books, was an extraordinary mystic. He discovered that he was the “I am that I am.” So are we all. But we must do as he did, sit in silence affirming this until it becomes second nature to us, until it clicks. You will feel your body shifting from mechanical energy to conscious energy, allowing your being to purr like a contented cat. For now, everything is in right order. You have faith that within you is the power to move mountains, within you is love itself.

So if you are serious about learning to love yourself, do this. Sit down first thing in the morning and say, “I choose to love myself. I am in God’s presence now.” That is it. All you have to do. Your energy, by law, will change for the better. Then get  up and go about your day. I like to put myself in a balloon of white light as well, asking that I  may send love to others without receiving any of their stress and tension. Try it. Change your life from a mechanical one to a conscious one. It is worth your time on earth to learn to live for eternity. And love is the building block…always.

Listen to Solomon Burke sing None of Us Are Free

Comments are open. Add yours.

I love my little book. Everything about it. Alan Larus took the cover shot and he lives in Norway, so the scene is from far away, but it is radiantly beautiful and just right to symbolize the title and subtitle.

This morning I drank a cup of tea and reread the book for the umpteenth time. Oh, yes, I love it that much. It speaks to me of love between the lines, between health and sickness, between tears and laughter. I lived much of it between the cracks, feeling stuff that was indecipherable in words.

My tall, strong husband (he was 6 ft. 4) became my child towards the end of his illness. I, who had been a southern belle of sorts, now became a preview of coming attractions, a steel magnolia in the making. I, who had been a diligent spiritual student, now became the path itself. No choice in any of this, I might add. It was a grueling, choiceless experience.

These days I am enjoying “having written.” Deep within my soul I am sprouting hope and joy, something I went without like a camel in the desert. These seeds will bear fruit in time. All I have to do is let the light shine. And between the rows of hope and I joy I wander down the page. I turn them one at a time, savoring the connection I have now made with readers. They know me like the back of their hand, because my story is theirs as well.

If you haven’t read it yet, perhaps you will want to read about how I went from sorrow to sunlight once again. It was an arduous journey, one made in heartache and futility. Letting go was not an option; it was written in the stars. Now they wink again with light. That is how it is and how it happened.