I’m not big on chain letters. I never was. (Yes, we did have them before the World Wide Web came on the scene.) And so, for the most part, while the good intent and inspiration might move me to momentary reflection, I don’t often forward these on. I think it’s because the part of me who doesn’t like being told what to do is still alive and well.

Yesterday, though, I received an e-mail from a friend. Her letter and its accompanying image were both simple and breathtaking. Her words and the photo told of the custom of ringing a bell when a patient who’s being treated for cancer completes his or her rounds of chemo-therapy. I agree wholeheartedly with a relative’s replying comment: The photo and my friend are amazing. I went to sleep last night and awoke this morning with this report from the front lines of life still on my mind.

How could I not? The photo – and even the thought to share a piece of her journey with us – reveal an essence that many of us live and die without ever glimpsing. The picture and her words said, “Here I am.” They shone with simplicity and pureness. They spoke an invitation to join her and to embrace whatever the day brings with purpose and clarity and gratefulness. And out of an experience – that for many would be held with fear and anger – arises unexpected light, paid forward.

~

I’ve known this person for close to thirty years. And nearly thirty years ago I, too, was in hospital, although I was there to give birth to my firstborn child. For us, this was a scheduled procedure: a “C-section” for a baby who had not turned in womb and a woman whose hips were too narrow for normal birthing. In the words of our doctor, had it been one hundred years ago, we both likely would have died. I’m smiling now to remember this, since it hadn’t been much before my daughter’s birth that I had realized with some shock that there was no turning back, that this baby had to come out, one way or another. Perhaps each woman going forward with a pregnancy can relate. All I know is that I was stunned around seven months into the deal.

In a world where a terrible, tragic statistic shows that many women and their children still die during childbirth, we who have clear and easy access to doctors and surgeons, specialists and good hospital care are so fortunate.  Sadly, many of us take these services (either paid for by the state or through insurance plans) for granted. May the fortunate among us reflect in gratitude, even just for a moment.

As for me, I worked through to Friday end-of-day and arrived on a Monday for the scheduled surgery. Despite a wee delay, all went fairly well, and after recovery I was taken to my room on the maternity ward. My room was right next to the nursery. Full of morphine and still quite unseated, I remember coming to with the sound of a lone baby crying. I listened in amazement. It was a moment that seemed to stand alone and last forever for me, but soon another little voice joined in and then another and another, and quickly the whole nursery of newborns was in full song. I remember the words floating in atop the sound, written by that finger I’ve come to know as Divine, always written in caps: CHORUS OF ANGELS it said to me. CHORUS OF ANGELS.

I’d like to say that I stayed in that wonderment, that the gift lifted me to the level of philia love and enlightened being. It didn’t. I think I may have complained bitterly at some point that I couldn’t sleep because of the ruckus. Eventually I was moved – unceremoniously wheeled out in my bed – to another room, far down the ward to a quiet, lonely room. So be it. I needed to be there to deal with what by then was an emerging concern with my daughter’s health.

But the gifts we are given never leave us, despite what we may think to the contrary.

I wrote on my website this morning that “We are given a daily reprieve…” These are words – a type of ‘God-flashlight’ – given to many of us in recovery from alcoholism and other drug addiction. The complete sentence is, “We are given a daily reprieve based on the maintenance of our spiritual condition.” For me, this principle has come to mean many things. This morning, more than ever, though, it means that all the gifts and all the love and all the light are always with us. We – I – just need to remember they’re there, to clear away the clutter around them so they can shine. To drink deeply of their wellsprings and to always share.

~

Across the river from where I live, one of the year-round homes has a set of wind chimes. As wind chimes go, I think these must be the alto-saxophone variety. They’re gorgeous, long, husky, tubular things, giving off a deep, rich resonance when they sound.

I’ve learned that these chimes delight in the dusky night light and the early breaking dawn … that’s when their lover, the gentle winds of the day-start and day’s end, comes. They play then; caress then … and more and more frequently, that’s when the dog and I quietly go outside into that wondrous space, that’s when we wait and listen for all the gifts that reside there … all the chimes and bells and other choruses of angels.

They are there … they never leave.

May we each hear them today, in this moment, take them in and then send them out.

In love & light,

Always namaste,

Les

~

This morning I see the rivers spawned and some tales told by their currents, these ancient stories that come to live alongside us until we might notice.

There are windswept windows carved in this ice; I peer inside, see glimmering moments of you and me.

Time unlocks and falls away, all at once these reflections shine back through the low mists and weather. They rumble with one voice, a winter’s rippling and settling. Nothing to fear, figure out, fight or flee.

Grateful for this pen and the words that come. They hang like tattered, glorious streamers, between us, joined.

Pema Chodron introduced me to the Tonglen practice of the Lojong teachings – a breathing practice that for me sets all others on their ears.

Often I hear someone swearing by the practice of “breathing in faith and breathing out fear.” When this was mentioned to me some weeks ago, I wanted to gently question it, to ask, ‘This fear that you suggest we breathe out – where does it go, where does it settle?’ Is this fear that you rid yourself of, is it like secondhand smoke, choking and infecting others?

This is the thing: breathing in faith and breathing out fear seems to point to my comfort at the expense of yours.

Tonglen practice, on the other hand, instructs us to breathe in all the hot, dark, heavy things and then to sit with them with compassion, to allow the innate love “deep within every man, woman, and child” to work its transforming magic and then to breathe out the “cool, bright, light” qualities we are all hungry and thirsty for in this world and moment.

I have so very much to be grateful for, to smile about, to appreciate and to love. I am, though, still human (:-) and still learning and I awoke to this day filled with the hot, dark, heavy things that still visit at times.

And then a friend mentioned Pema Chodron … and all her smiling reminders and teachings came like a broom, eager to help … and then I came upon a poem shared with me some weeks ago by another friend, so exquisitely apropos of the Tonglen practice.

Thank you and thank you and thank you.

Wage Peace
by Judyth Hill

Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings
and flocks of redwing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children
and freshly mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen
and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
Wage peace with your listening:
hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools:
flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.
Make soup.
Play music, learn the word for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty
or the gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.
Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Don’t wait another minute.

It’s been warming up for a few days now, but today the eaves are thawing, spilling over with that steady drip, drip, drip as the snow covering the metal roof melts. Inside, the furnace is turned even further down and I’m comfortable inside the house wearing only one bulky sweater. Even a stray housefly has come to life, buzzing at the windowsill beside me as I type this. The daylight is growing longer. I’m smiling to think that spring is only a small journey ahead. There is the sure and warm hope of the cycle and seasons of life.

~

We’re back in from a morning walk, Max and I, the going a little slower with our steps through the drifts sinking down through softened snow. For Max there’s the bonus of extra scents and smells uncovering themselves in the thaw; fresh tracks of last night’s wildlife seem to be everywhere and he has his nose to the ground, fully alert and intent on following them.

Yesterday, he made a few of his own. Off the leash for a little game of catch (escape artist that he is), he bounded onto the (safely frozen) inlet next to this property and then bolted out onto the river, which still has open water in places.

All my calls to him to come were ignored and my anxiety ratcheted into full panic – I was sure he would step onto thin ice and be lost. Thankfully, new neighbours across the way shouted and shooed at him to “Go home!” and miraculously he obeyed.

This morning, I met the kindly persons who took action to help my dog to safety. A young woman and her two little children were standing on the swingbridge, trying to spot the muskrats that run along the shores. We chatted for a long time, the mom and I, while her little boys coaxed and played with this dog who lived another day to wag and lick and smile. I was, unexpectedly, given the opportunity to say, “Thank you for your help.”

Eventually, the dog and I continued on our Canal Road walk; it feels, if I think about it, that we must have logged hundreds of kilometres along the river banks over the last year and one half that we’ve lived here at this place called Faraway.

This morning, though, the terrain seemed a little different.

For my part, perhaps it’s that I’ve melted a little more after what seems to be days and weeks of shivering uncertainty and fear over where I’m going and what I’m doing. Today, though, has arrived right on time: nine years since my last drink to date and along with that anniversary a full abundance of gifts in people, places and things. Although I’m still very much a “changling,” today I’m especially grateful for the metamorphosis that takes an alcoholic like me from that place of seemingly hopeless condition of mind and body to one where I am eager (and mostly willing) to live life sober and free.

My steps, this morning then, seemed guided and buoyed by that openness that comes from acceptance, action, and growth. Thank you, each one (and there are many) who have helped and continue to help me along this path. I owe you my life.

My dog’s steps were different, too, as we walked. While he’s a hound, this morning he was Max on a mission with his keen nose to the ground. At one point, I looked out onto the frozen surface of the river and saw why.

All around, in about five or six places, the snow was covered with flecks and spatters of blood. It was clear from the pattern of tracks round about that something large had been chased down, with the snow, at intervals, showing that whatever it was had been circled and trapped, repeatedly, with five or six large, round swaths broken by single lines of tracks as the pursued and the pursuers ran further and further out toward the middle of the frozen river.

Finally, off in the distance I could see a crow sitting on what appeared to be the rib cage of what was left. Neat, nearly clean, with no evidence of legs or any other body parts of what by now I was sure was the remains of a deer.

We stood like that for some time, the dog and I, just taking in what was certainly a relatively fresh scene, and I was struck that in hours or days there will be no trace left to see of this passing. We walked on, down to the lock and the rushing dam, a man-made beauty, and turned around for our return home. No sooner had we turned than I heard the rumbling of a large pick-up truck slowing down and following us. Finally the truck drew alongside and its driver turned off the engine and he and his passenger started talking with me.

“Did you see the fresh kill?” the driver asked. “A deer,” he added.

Yes, I replied. Yes.

~

Sometimes I wonder why I wonder about the flow and synchronicity about every last thing in life. In fact, when I first got sober, there was such an awareness of the synchronicity of things that I used the very word when speaking with another sober alcoholic one day.

“You used the word synchronicity,” he said to me. “I like that word very much, because it describes life perfectly. Never forget.”

That’s the thing. We do forget. Or at least I do. I get busy, I get distracted. I get fearful and anxious, sure that I can never adequately figure this deal out on my own, certain that I am unworthy of being here. I forget that I am / here now / in this. I forget that I’m responsible for how I look at things, for my action or inaction, for my choice between reaction and response. I forget that I am not alone.

I forget that I am coming to know that for everything there is a season; that everything IS, and that on top of that, that everything that IS is a gift, whether I see it that way or not. You show me that, over and over.

~

One of the cascades of synchronicities for me today was that I wondered how an alert and fast animal like a deer can be hunted by (what I was sure was) a pack of coyotes … no sooner had I wondered than the truck appeared, and I got to ask my question.

“Five or six coyotes will give chase until the deer is too exhausted to run any longer,” was the answer I received. What I saw on the ice was the end part; no doubt the coyotes had given chase miles before on the other side of the road in the forests, systemically – instinctually – closing off avenues of escape until none remained. Nothing personal: hungry coyotes plus one sick or elderly, panicked deer, separated from its herd. Swift, efficient, no waste.

~

I’ve been encouraged to ask for help in “letting it happen,” as I prepare to move again. Admittedly I’ve done my share of crying around this move, as I’ve engaged in old behaviours and reactions and beaten myself for all sorts of imagined (and some real) wrongs and failures. I expect, though, it’s all been necessary, because it leads me to this place of surrender, of humility, of compassion, and of love, where through necessity I am opened once again to honesty and willingness. Opened to that place where I know I am not alone, where I experience the help that comes when I’m willing to ask for it, where energy is given instead of depleted, where love miraculousy burns away fear, where I get to daily “reconsider or die.”

It’s a rare thing, indeed, to know the time of our own passing, or by what means it will come. Understandably, this is a blessing, for nearly all of us with a measure of health would be unable to choose the appointment. This not knowing gives extra urgency to the counsel to ‘plan as if we were going to live forever and to live as if we were going to die today.’

There is an extra imperative for those of us who live with the progressive illness of alcoholism, however. Active or recovering, drinking or sobering up, we are cautioned that one of the features of alcoholism is its nature of being like a “rapacious creditor.” Like the coyotes under a nearly full moon last night, alcoholism is a ravenous predator; not bloodthirsty but just hungry for us to take a drink. Alcoholism, for the alcoholic of my type, is insatiable and always advocating for the solution it instinctually remembers – to pick up a drink. It’s not personal. Nor, for a lot of us, is it swift or clean in its killing.

~

For those of us working to remain sober one day at a time, may we each continue for another 24 hours, and to share fully in the miracles recovery bestows with every step.

Always, namaste,

Leslie

I suppose, in a mundane way, this quitting hasn’t changed the fact that television is an addiction, for me at least. I’ve wasted more than my share of precious time glued to the tube since then…at the homes of family and friends and even in front of my computer screen, courtesy broadcasters’ online streams.  Then there are movies on DVD (and even a few old VHS video tapes). And while my viewing and purchasing habits here might dismay the videophiles I know, I’ve grown fond of my little growing collection.

I’m moving, however, and I’ve been counselled more than once by persons I both care about and respect to let go. “Don’t be afraid to give away your belongings,” one of my more prominent teachers told me recently.

To my credit (and despite what Yoda says *), I have been, in my own way, trying to let go. “Everything I’ve let go of has claw marks all over it,” is a truism heard in the recovery rooms. I look at my shortish, unvarnished fingernails and conclude that surely can’t be true of me. Like my drinking (two-fisted), I hang on with sheer willfulness and determination, but “gently.” I’m smiling now, grateful for this ability (growing, too) in more ways than I can begin to express right now.

Suffice to say that over the last few days I’ve been filling the Goodwill box with DVDs looking for a new home. I’m resisting the impulse to list them out for friends, resisting the impulse to figure out who might like which ones, resisting the impulse to pull them out of the box and put them back on the shelf. Resisting, resisting and resisting. The resistance is exhausting and I fall back, and hear my prayers of complaint and demands as they prick and burn away at my gratitude and humility.

Yesterday, though, the last day of 2011, a tide turned.

You see, I’ve been watching some of the movies before they hit the giveaway box. And early yesterday I watched “The Pursuit of Happyness” with Will Smith (one of my heros), which tells the true story of Chris Gardner. And then another of Smith’s called “Seven Pounds.” Both of them seemed tailor-made for me in this moment. Not only did the movies remind me of the many qualities I love about the actor and highlight the positive side of determination, but they also left me the gifts of some great music.

One song in one of the movies is performed by The Glide Ensemble … a pivotal part of Gardner’s story. It’s called “Lord, Don’t Move That Mountain.” And thanks to today’s technology I was able to purchase the original version by the 103rd Street Gospel Choir. A marvellous “hymn of praise,” it travels across the miles and ages to me today, another reminder that I receive exactly what I need, exactly when I need it … regardless of any resistance or hanging on or protestations I might offer up. The song is an aspect of that spiritual axiom that when I surrender to this ego self–that so automatically sees the world as a hostile place, that so automatically comes from a poverty mentality instead of a heart of abundance, that so mindlessly “hangs on” when every indication is screaming or whispering “let go,”–when I surrender, the victory is mine.

My Beloved Rumi said it so well in his piece “Moving Water.” He writes “This giving up is not a repenting, it’s a deep honoring of yourself.” May it be so for each one of us.

A note on the lyrics I’m about to post here. Please support artists by citing credits where available, by respecting copyright, and by purchasing their works.

Namaste,

Les

* Do or do not, there is no try. ~ Yoda

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,100 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 35 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

STILL WITH US, JIMMY O’NEILL

They were the days when Kitchener was still Berlin; the days of population peopled with pioneers come to the Promised Land, where perfection was the progress. They were first homes and firstborns grown out of the Great War, the Roaring Twenties and the Dirty Thirties. Eighty, even ninety, years later, the chant can still be called to mind, as crisp and precise as chalk on slate in one-roomed schoolhouses:

OUR BEST INTENTIONS SOMETIMES PAVE THE ROAD TO HELL

My mother is an accomplished woman. Extremely bright and articulate, she’s a fine artist, a sharp bridge player, and, at 83 years-old, she maintains her own apartment, complete with a studio. She gardens, swims, passes her yearly driving test and still drives. She manages her own finances,entertains and leads an active social life more robust than some half her age.

I admire her. I respect her. And I wonder — in this western culture of ours, almost bereft of any teachings on how to “best” approach our daily mortality — about what it’s like to be 83.

There are inklings, though. I thank God for them. They are like crocuses pushing up through a long, icy winter’s crust. When we gently probe and slowly remove the dark leaves and dross from last year’s autumn, the world turns to exquisite sight, colour and wisdom.

TRUANT PEN

The words come slowly this morning. These thoughts, with me some 24 hours, demand release. They feel willful and surly until I blame myself for my own awkwardness, my own hesitation, and my own less-than good enough-ness. Somehow i think I’m different than the seasons, that there’s no need,  no room for process, for the way things emerge and recede, for the rhythm of ebb and flow.

I think of my mother’s memories and of how they may be mine to write in the end. They take on a timeless form, a universal commonality.

I put on my Goodwill coat that’s counting down the days to next garbage pickup, step outside to a March backyard and write.

MATH & OTHER WELLSPRINGS

She entertained yesterday, a small, polite tea for her landlords, a cherub-like couple, contemporaries. They are here with a son-in-law, my contemporary, and their translator of a language from yet another faraway land. Maybe I am here for the same reason.

A sunny hour and lots of smiles later, we are done. Salvatore takes my mother’s hand in both of his and speaks his parting words with a prediction (a benediction, really): “You live to one hundred!” he beams to my mother. She laughs with an unsure response. “Oh! Well,” she says, “maybe one or two more years…”

“Don’t say that!” comes the alarmed reply. Until this I was smiling, too, but swiftly start doing the math, ever mindful that our thoughts become our words, our words our actions. I come up with the tally that her mother lived to one month shy of her 86th birthday.

CROCUSES, NEWLY MET

Afterward, we chat as we tidy up. She’s tired today, her arthritis a constant energy drain.

“I remember my mother being so glad when I’d come to visit,” she tells me, “because then I could help her to have friends in for bridge. I used to wonder why she found it so hard to do things. Now I know.”

I think of myself, and how life in general seems so hard for me to do. I tell her this, and then I tell her, too, of how gratitude helps. This she knows already. She, I am learning, has practiced her own positive-thinking supplications long before I came to know and believe. We chat like new friends; friends who are unwilling to be timid, friends who are compelled to put on gloves and dig in the garden, knowing the crocuses are there.

And this is where I meet Jimmy.

~

“I don’t know, Mom,” I say, although I suspect I do. “Your mother was pretty anxious over entertaining. We come from a long line of perfectionists.”

The change is visible as it comes over her face, like that of a train traveller’s face reflected in a moving landscape’s window.

“I mean, from what you’ve told me about Carl, he was a pretty driven guy. His culture,  his background, everything had to be just so.”

“Carl, my father?” she asks.

Yes, I answer, quietly. Carl your father who died when you were 12, Carl my grandfather who I never met. It will be at least a day before I can think of another Carl in the family and stop wondering about the question.

“Yes,” she says and as she speaks her words are both quick and slow. They tumble from a mind that can tell you the price of milk but that can’t always remember where the pocketbook is to pay.

Nearly 75 years later, the emotion is still raw.

“It was never good enough,” she recalls nervously. She adds, “I’ve probably told you this a hundred times.”

My ears say no, you haven’t. My eyes say please tell me again.

“I’d come home with a ‘B’ and my father would say, “A ‘B’ is okay, but next time you bring home an ‘A’.” And next time I’d bring home an ‘A’, but this time I was tied with Jimmy O’Neill, and I’d show him my ‘A’ and he’d say, “That’s fine, but next time don’t be tied for your ‘A’.”

I want to cry at this but I see she already is — quietly, discreetly, like she’s not even worthy of her own tears. I want to gather her up and tell her how awesome she is — every last A and B and C.

Instead I wonder if Jimmy O’Neill is still living, and what comment his shared ‘A’ garnered.

I want to shake Carl, the father, until I hear her saying, like an echo, “There was no pleasing my father. I was never good enough.” I sit and absorb and wonder some more. I wonder how long and how far the echoes have been travelling down to this moment and place. Holding it, I wonder if the embrace is the end of Echo, contrary to Narcissus’ tale.

SIX DAYS FROM SPRING

The moon is on the wane as we head toward Spring Equinox. I have learned that both times are prime times for clearing clutter. This goes beyond the spring-cleaning, though.

I marvel at the index cards that get filed away in these marvellous brains of ours, rack upon rack and row upon row of old messages and tapes, of how readily we can retrieve them, of how virtually no one teaches us to challenge them or toss them out, of how we so desperately need hugs and acceptance, of how urgent it is that we find a new way to measure worth and to vale ourselves and each other.

I tell her that she’s not alone. I tell her that I can do 99 things right but that all I often end up focusing on is the ONE thing I did wrong.

The Japanese proverb runs through my mind again – a newer index card that can help hack our way to freedom, perhaps.

Fall down seven times. Get up eight.

FOR ALL MY TEACHERS

The book Alcoholics Anonymous tells us to trust God and clean house, in order to fit ourselves to be of service to God and others. Six days from Spring and my heart leaps to think of how we are given a share in such nobility.

It appears that we are kings and queens, each one. At every turn we are urged to ascend and in every moment given the opportunity to grow and to learn and to forgive and to love.

~~With deep appreciation for all my teachers, chief among them a woman named Gene.

or whatever you celebrate (or don’t)

&

New Year

Be

Full of Joy,

Love & Light