Tag Archive | living with grief

Still Grieving After All These Years

Apr23
We’ve several times walked past the juniper where the squirrel was hiding the other day without sight nor sound of it, but I did want to show the context. I held the camera over the hollow where the dead snag comes forward out of the twisted trunk. Amazingly, this tree, hundreds of years old, is still alive.

I’m assured by the Worms that the apricot will probably survive the freeze. It never occurred to me that it would suffer in last weekend’s cold snap, because it was thoroughly leafed out. I called in to As the Worm Turns this evening, and learned that apricot trees all over the valley suffered the same fate. All the leaves are dead. Above, I noticed they were drooping the second day AF (after freeze); below, yesterday, beyond drooping they are drying up, along with the embryonic fruits. Lance and Lulu have never seen this before either. We all moved here roughly thirty years ago plus or minus. An orchardist called in right after I did, and reported that they lost everything, peaches, grapes, you name it. Everyone is optimistic, though, that the trees themselves will survive, and we’ll know more later if they’ll leaf out again this year.

It was time to strain the lilac blossoms from the sugar on Sunday, but they did not want to sieve. They must have been too damp when I mixed them in, and they weren’t pretty so I didn’t want to keep them in with the sugar, so… I brought my science mind in and dumped the whole jar into a pot with half as much water. The blossoms floated to the top, I skimmed them off, and boiled until…

Voila! Lilac syrup! It’s as thick as honey, I could have taken it off sooner, and it is just as sweet as honey, too.

My dear friend and teacher Cindy would have turned my age tomorrow had she not died almost two years ago. She left behind one bereft daughter, some precious friends, and many grateful and grieving students. As I usually do I sublimated my grief about her illness and death until it started to surface late last year. I find myself thinking of her more often, her insights, lessons, and example informing my work and life more consciously than I acknowledged at first. Everyone has their own way of grieving, and even my own is unique to each loss, but in general I tend to close down around it for awhile and then it seeps out over time. I do a lot better with it now than I did twenty years ago during my Decade of Loss during which my mother died.

It’s been 22 years since she lived her last spring. Really, time flies whether you’re having fun or not. Even before she was sick, I cherished this picture of her. It’s an old print that suffered water damage, which I scanned and optimized. She was younger then than I am now. She and her sister and their old high school friend Lucy (with husbands tagging along) had met for a long weekend reunion at some woodsy resort in West Virginia. Here she’s reclining on the bank of a creek with her cocktail, looking as happy and relaxed as I’ve ever seen her. I thought of her as I grieved Cindy this week, and felt compassion for her daughter who was so much younger than I when she lost her mother. All these feelings swirled up as I was reading this article that came in The Atlantic email yesterday, “On Losing a Daughter,” which brought to mind a dear friend whose daughter died just over a year ago, leaving three young children. I can’t imagine a worse grief for a parent, except I can and it’s one reason I chose not to have children. Just in case. Reading of this woman’s singular grief, thinking of my friend who lost her daughter, imagining Cindy’s daughter’s emotions as her mom’s birthday approaches, my own grief for my mother surged. All the grief of mothers and daughters swelled and swirled together in me. And the recognition that this little whirlpool of these particular mothers and daughters is a drop in the bucket of global grief, mothers and daughters just one current in the vast, bottomless ocean of human griefs.

Michael and me as Carmen y Miguel, c. 2000

Anniversaries can be hard, especially birthdays and death days. The grief cascade actually started last week when John’s birthday came around and I thought about him a lot, missing him, missing Boyz Lunch, and feeling for his surviving partner. And then the anniversary of Todd’s death just a year ago came a few days later, and my heart was with his surviving partner. And then out of nowhere came a wave of grief for Michael, who died that same horrible summer of 2020 when Raven, Ojo, Diane, and Auntie also died, and everyone’s world changed with the massive Covid casualties, especially those whose loved ones died of it.

And the grief this week just keeps coming. A dear friend had to euthanize her dear old big dog last week. He had lived a good long life but that is cold comfort in the moment when the utter absence shocks and wracks and keeps on shocking for days, weeks, months. In my awareness of and compassion for her grief, the loss of Stellar the Stardog rocked me again, in gentle waves, much calmer than the tempest that accompanied his passing.

Griefs can’t be compared. But they can crack our hearts open to empathy, compassion, and more love, with time. And they have no timeline other than their own mysterious meandering path, with steep hills of struggle, long lulling valleys, and all terrains in between. I still mourn the sweetest black cat Ojo, and have come to a revised demise: as Paul suggested last fall, it’s far more likely that he was killed by a great horned owl than by a mountain lion. I was reluctant to accept that hypothesis, but given all attendant conditions it does make more sense. It doesn’t help the grief quotient, though.

I worried this morning that I might have lost his sister Topaz. We’d started out the gate for a walk and she was right behind us. I didn’t look back for awhile but it’s not unusual for her to take a shortcut and catch up so I kept walking. Then I heard a shrieking screeching that stopped abruptly. Wren took off in a beeline back toward the house, and I followed with quick steps. She was nowhere to be seen. There was no evidence of foul play, but no sign of her. I stood by the gate and called in all directions, walked back toward the woods and called, nothing. If she were out there she’d have come. It was late in the morning for an owl but not necessarily too late; and there’s that little fox that’s been passing through frequently. The sound could have been a magpie screaming at a cat, a cat screaming at a magpie, a cat screaming at a fox, or a fox simply screaming. Or any number of other options. I was gonna be late for an appointment, so I had to keep moving. Maybe something had scared her and she’d run back to the house. I checked the front door, then the back. Whew! She was lying by the back door as if I were late for her. Whatever happened, it’s one of those rare circumstances where we actually won’t know more later.

There are some animals that trigger grief in me any time I see images of them: polar bears, penguins, elephants, and gorillas among them. This is Fatou, 69, the world’s oldest gorilla in captivity, in the Berlin Zoo, who showed up in The Atlantic’s photos of the week. I can only imagine what kind of grief she must experience. Probably solastalgia.

But really I think the grief train started while I was reading Against the Machine. It came up in conversation with a dear friend last night who was responding to my post about it. Paul Kingsnorth broke my world view, I told her. That book shattered the last of my illusions, pulled the scales from my eyes, as it were. I’ve been grieving the world I grew up in, and thought we could still maybe save. I’ve been swimming in the grief of solastalgia for weeks, months, years. Earth Day is a great occasion to mention it. Solastalgia is “the experience of chronic trauma, longing, or hopelessness due to negative or distressing changes to the home or ecosystem you are still in due to the impacts of climate change, weather events, fire, or other environmental factors…. With solastalgia, the home you are longing for can’t be returned to—it is there but not the same.” I’m grateful there’s a word for it, and grateful that this feeling is being addressed in Tricycle’s annual online Buddhism and Ecology Summit, which I’ve been participating in this week.

And, in the midst of awareness from within this sea of grief, I am bouyed by profound, uplifting gratitude for the number of people I can call my dear friends. And each day I’m noticing and savoring beauty, moments of joy and laughter, and the company of animals both wild and tame. The ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows: Can I be grateful for all of them? Next post, a story about a black bird…

Countless Connections

Dec12
Helpful little dog cleans up the ice cream box for me after lunch.

Tonight was Zoom Cooking with Amy, but we did a lot of prep ahead of time. We texted back and forth all day, first to decide what to cook and then to see how it was going. Since I had the tart shells already, she made some too, and we each blind-baked them. I lined mine with scrunched parchment paper and weighted them with dried kidney beans which will now be saved and labeled Pie Beans so I don’t try to cook them later. They baked for twenty minutes at 350℉, then I removed the paper and beans and baked them another five minutes, and let them rest on the counter.

Amy usually directs these endeavors, so she texted to tell me to mix the lemon zest with the sugar ahead of time and let it sit. The “Classic Lemon Curd Tart” recipe calls for zesting and juicing four large lemons, but I don’t think they’ve ever seen lemons this big. I zested three of them and got sloppy on the second one knowing I’d have more than enough. One and a half lemons exceeded the two-thirds cup of juice needed, but I juiced the rest and filled four silicone freezer molds with a third cup each. Then I set aside the lemon tart project to make the cracker dough.

Amy chose these Cheddar Cheese Shortbread Crackers which we mixed mostly according to instructions, but added fresh chopped chives from another recipe, and rolled the dough in seeds before chilling.

I rolled one log in poppy seeds and one in white sesame seeds. We decided later as we ate them that sprinkling a little kosher salt among the seeds would make the seasoning perfect. Then we chilled the dough until we were ready to zoom.

Between the mise en place and the actual cooking, I was grateful to zoom with a young friend I am just getting to know, though I’ve known about her for a long time. When she asked how I’ve been and what I’ve been doing, I chanced to mention my obsession with Great British Bake Off. Pema Chodron talks about the discipline of keeping your mind and heart open, always receptive to where you find yourself in the moment, in the world; and also about trusting that we “live in a rich world that’s never running out of messages.” I could have left out the mention of GBBO but it’s what feels alive for me right now so I said it. My friend said with some surprise, “Have we talked about this?”

“No,” I said. She then told me that she knows one of the contestants from this season, and went out with him just a couple of weeks ago when he was in New York. I was thrilled, and asked to hear everything he told her about being on the show. It was more stressful than he thought it would be, she said, the people were all fantastic and supportive, he made some great friends, and so on. If I hadn’t mentioned the show, we wouldn’t have had that moment of delightful connection, and I would never have seen this adorable picture of the two of them.

We also talked about grief: how there’s no wrong way or right way to grieve; the idea of titrating or pendulating, i.e., touching into the feelings and then stepping back into all the living going on, touching in then stepping back as one is able, thereby developing capacity and resilience; and, how grief can soften with time though it may never disappear. I was reminded of something beautiful that my cousin’s fiancée wrote to me recently, just over a year after he died so unexpectedly:

“For me, grief feels like it’s love turned inside out. Its heaviness gets lighter as I get stronger and time moves on…. As painful as it was to lose my love, it gives me comfort feeling that my heart is now strong enough to carry this beautiful soul within me, and I’m forever grateful.” 

Terri Mayer

Our conversation gave both of us the tender opportunity to feel closer for a moment to someone we grieve, to touch into the well of grief and maybe lift out a spoonful, or even just a drop. And then to go back into our day and our lives with a stronger link in the chain of interconnection. In no time at all I was zooming with Amy and we were whisking up lemon curd tartlets. So simple, so delicious!

While they cooked and then cooled, we sliced our cracker logs as thinly as we could, and while they baked we made a Ritini, my instantaneous variation on a martini, which used gin, elderflower liqueur, a tablespoon of leftover Meyer lemon juice (like I said, I’m gonna make the most of every bit), and a couple of raspberries.

We enjoyed a couple of sips of the cocktail before realizing that it didn’t really go with the cheesy crackers, so we poured a little red wine for the savory portion of our meal, and caught up on everything under the sun. We each baked one tray of crackers and also ate most of it they were so addictive. I’m glad there are leftover logs to slice and bake later, or even freeze for much later.

And then it was time to savor the sweetness that was days and miles and many hands in the making. I know who grew the lemons. Who grew and picked and packed and shipped the raspberries? Following back all the ingredients in the tart, all the elements in the simple setting: the plate, the glass, the gin, the liqueur, the flour, sugar, butter, eggs, the whipping cream and vanilla bean paste… I’m grateful for and to the countless connections, humans, and other beings who contributed to this perfect moment.

Wren’s Good Week

Nov19

After four years of practicing gratefulness, knowing at the time I began that it was in response to overwhelming grief, I’m beginning to understand how these two feelings dance together. 

Grief and gratitude are kindred souls, each pointing to the beauty of what is transient and given to us by grace.
Patricia Campbell Carlson

It’s been a tumultuous week. Some weeks are just like that. Equanimity was shaken, largely from inside, but I’ve gotten good practice in letting go and letting be, in beginning again. Exquisite autumn weather has enabled me to be outside a lot with the animals and the trees, which is always soul soothing. We visited the Ancient One a few times and sheltered in her embrace for some meditations.

A nice man came to plant a couple of free trees, a river birch and a Fremont cottonwood, and Wren was very helpful. Afterward she thanked him profusely. What a pleasure it’s been over the past year to see this little dog blossoming into a joyful outgoing creature, from the suspicious, frightened little rescue she was when she came here three years ago.

Despite my internal turmoil, Wren enjoyed a very good week. We had planned since spring to upgrade the patio area on the west side of the pond, and that work finally happened under her capable supervision.

The ‘trail mix’ gravel was spread, edged, and raked all in the nick of time before a good day’s rain left snow low in the mountains and frost on the pumpkin down here. Now this portion of the yarden will be safer for me and my aging friends to access, and more welcoming for mindfulness or purely social gatherings.

Wren also inspected the woodpile after a new addition. A friend was sad to have to cut down a dying aspen in her yarden, but happy to give me half of it, for which I’m very grateful. And I’m grateful that my little aspen thrives still, twenty years after hitchhiking here hidden in the soil of a potentilla shrub I transplanted from a friend’s garden.

The little blueberry bush which didn’t even bloom this year nevertheless grew under its protective netting, and then turned this stunning red. I’m grateful this week for nature’s beauty, bounty, and resilience, and for my own growing capacity to turn mistakes into lessons, to cultivate resilience, and to open my heart over and over. A phrase a friend quoted last week keeps coming back to me: “Your people are the ones who make your heart feel seen and your nervous system feel calm.” Intentionally connecting with ‘my people’, a profound acupuncture treatment, and allowing everyone to be my teacher have all helped restore balance. And this excerpt from a lesson by Sam Harris in the introductory course on his app Waking Up really shook some sense into me:

“The truth is, you know exactly what it’s like to feel overwhelming gratitude for your life. And if you have the freedom and the free attention to listen to this lesson right now, you are in an unusual situation. There are at least a billion people on Earth at this moment who would consider their prayers answered if they could trade places with you. There are at least a billion people who are suffering debilitating pain, or political oppression, or the acute stages of bereavement. To have your health, even just sort of; to have friends, even only a few; to have hobbies or interests and the freedom to pursue them; to have spent this day free from some terrifying encounter with chaos, is to be lucky. Just look around you and take a moment to feel how lucky you are. You get another day to live on this earth. Enjoy it.”

After another busy day delivering oxytocin to me and herding the sparrows, Wren finally rests. She is silently encouraging me to knit faster so she can show off her new sweater that matches her beautiful blue eye.

Resting in Uncertainty

Aug23
I’m grateful for the rains and the rainbows, and also that the ferocious lightning storm the other evening didn’t start any out of control wildfires.

I guess grief gives me writers’ block. This is what happened after the Summer of Loss in 2020. Not as many beloveds died this past summer… but enough for me to withdraw inward. I appreciate understanding this about how I grieve, and having learned to allow me to grieve in whatever way it shows up, whenever and however. My grief is a slow burn. I have always handled things pretty well in the moment, generally rising to the occasion to provide whatever is called for: presence, calm, comfort, strength, courage, bandages… and then collapsing into myself for awhile.

I’m grateful for Zoom Cooking with Amy last weekend. We made chicken cordon bleu. It was fun to make, but we were both a little disappointed for different reasons in our results. Next time, plain fried chicken! And then a chicken ranch cheese sandwich with the leftovers.

When I was a child, my father had a wood shop in the basement. Several kinds of electric saws, shelves of tools. He built things, including a lot of frames for my mother’s and my brother’s paintings; and a beautiful little pine coffin for Mittens, my cat who died of an early diagnosed case of feline leukemia when I was eleven. A couple of times he cut himself pretty badly. The first time, he came up the stairs and called into the living room where I was watching TV with mom, “Pooh, can you help me with something for a minute?” I was daddy’s little helper in so many ways. When he needed extra hands in the shop, when he shopped for groceries, when his glasses needed cleaning, when he needed another bourbon and water and didn’t want to get up from his recliner. So no one (i.e. mom) thought twice when he asked me to help him for a minute.

I followed him down the hall into the master bedroom and into the bathroom, where he asked me to get the bandaids and removed the wadded paper towels from his finger, sliced open and bleeding hard. I rose to that occasion, and helped staunch the bleeding with pressure, then doctored with tincture of benzoin and bandaged with gauze and adhesive tape. It was way too much for a bandaid. “Don’t tell your mother,” he said. After he was tidied up and settled down with his bourbon, I curled up in a still ball on the couch beside my mother, and never said a word. The second time either.

I’m grateful for coffee and biscotti by the pond on a sunny, cool morning, with all my little friends.

When people died in 2020 I was strong. When people died this summer I was strong for those closer to the dying. Strong enough afterward even to say that I was struggling. I’m done struggling now. I’ve settled into loss the way that I do, with a lot of curling up still and breathing. But maybe the curling up still and breathing is also the way I handle apprehension. Big change is coming to my little world next month with major surgery and months of recovery. Also, breathing is harder and my oxygen level is consistently considerably lower than optimal. More and more, I ponder the likelihood that I will have to leave my beloved home, the trees I so dearly love, and move to a lower elevation. All this is great practice in letting go of attachment: to people and to place.

I’m grateful the garden wasn’t a total bust by the grasshoppers. They did some damage to the pickling cukes, but I kept them covered long enough that when I opened them to pollinators the grasshoppers had mostly eaten their fill. I’m grateful that now, though there are still plague numbers, they are mostly mating and dying, and not eating so much.
Three cucumbers is no great success, but there’s still time…
Though they demolished the potato tops so that I’ll only be harvesting baby potatoes this year, this was the haul from one prematurely dead plant, and enough for two tasty meals. Seven more meager batches to harvest over the next month or two.
Boiled, with butter and salt: baby potatoes don’t get much better than this.
I’m grateful for the two giant tomatoes that keep on giving. Still got half of one left. This is ‘tomato toast,’ a thing I didn’t know had a name until Amy shared an instagram post suggesting to grate cheddar cheese into the mayonnaise for the “best tomato toast.” I mixed fromage fort with mayo. Yum. But plain mayo would have been just as good. Often, simpler is better.

So while I am curling up and breathing, I am also resting in uncertainty, in mortality, in gratitude for this precious human life that has offered me so much adventure and beauty, joy and love and opportunity to grow. I’m doing my best to allow myself to appreciate the full range of human experience, without wishing for anything beyond my control to be different than it is: practicing accepting life on its own terms, and death too. Right now that involves a lot of curling up still and breathing, simply being, when I’m not doing something else.

Living inside the kaleidoscope…

Cindy

Jun29

I am having trouble sitting down and writing about Cindy. I don’t know where to start, as the loss of her continues to deepen in layers. Her mortal remains were laid to rest today in a peaceful forest in Maryland.

As that was happening there, I was looking through notes and photos to compile a post. I ran across this dream I had just a year ago, which I shared with her at the time. I almost didn’t, but then I read it to her over the phone. She laughed her musical laugh, and said, “I wonder what that’s all about.” I felt like I knew, and was surprised that she didn’t.

We have been at an apartment, mine I think or yours, and left, and have forgotten a key, or have extra keys, one of us goes back for something.

We sit on a bench outside the Home like mischievous children, giggling.

We are suddenly somewhere else, on Independence Avenue downtown, mystified; strange things around us.

Then we are back on the bench, wondering what just happened, marveling at the oddness. Then we find ourselves somewhere like Tuscany, and begin to understand that we are experiencing some miraculous journey.

We are in the National Cathedral—is it on Independence Avenue?—among the stones and stained glass; and then we are somewhere different. Your Angel appears. He is a tall and burly, gentle man, with grey hair, wearing comfortable grey clothing.

Then we are on a curved balcony in a modern metal building, and a slender young Spanish man climbs the stairs to join us. I worry he’s an intruder but it turns out that he is my Guide. Your Angel is in charge; my Guide assists. We are standing on a sidewalk on a village street, dry and yellow.

All along you and I have been entirely together in this journey, sharing our wonder with looks and touches, inquiring. You turn into a medium-sized grey speckled dog, with the kind of big head that I love. I hug you close. You turn into a bird.

You are golden-feathered, in size and shape like a small pheasant. You fly up into my arms. Your Angel gathers us all, my Guide and I and you and the dog and the bird, into a mutual hug, and we are off.

We arrive at the opening of an underground temple. I must crawl through the gold-bricked opening alone, carrying you the golden bird. I come to stand in a round, ornate room, filled with soft golden light, glittering with small mirrors, jewels, and myriad beautiful symbols in all colors of all traditions. 

A gentle goddess, lady of light, instructs me. Of all these small wonders, I must choose the one which is you, and bring it out into the day.

Cindy in 1977, Best All-Around Girl, and the most beautiful in the class.

Cindy and I went to high school together. She was the kind of girl people would gawk at and forget what to say. Or at least I did. She was beautiful, kind, smart, and a tier or two above me in the social hierarchy. She was Homecoming Queen, assistant editor on the yearbook, and voted “Best All-Around Girl” in Senior Superlatives: I worked on the other side of the school as editor of the newspaper, and was voted “Most Intelligent.” We didn’t know each other well, but enjoyed a cordial, mutual respect, and both loved our AP English class.

Rita, editor-in-chief of The A-Blast and voted Most Intelligent.

We went our separate ways after high school, and the only thought I occasionally gave her was one of ironic envy. Her family had gotten the Australian exchange student Bronwyn instead of my family, because my brother had been a butt to the teacher in charge a couple of years previously. My mother and Bronwyn had a special relationship, and she took comfort in our home when her first placement wasn’t working out. I located Cindy again in 2010 after tracking down Bronwyn, once the internet made that kind of inquiry possible. Remember when it wasn’t? Sadly, we lost track of our friend down under, but we had found each other.

When I visited my father in his dementia for what turned out to be the last time, Cindy drove an hour to spend an hour with me. The memory remains vivid: It was a perfect October day in Northern Virginia, clear blue sky with a few clouds, ambient temperature just right for light sweaters, geese on the lake at the Home where the Colonel lived. Cindy and I strolled three times around the lake, to the delight of my dogs; ideas, experiences, and aspirations flew unrestrained between us, and by the time she had to leave, our common ground had become the solid foundation for a relationship in which she became so much more than a friend: a teacher, mentor, healer, employer, and collaborator. 

She did not like her picture taken, and so I don’t have many. But every time she visited, we made sure to take coffee or cocktails to the Black Canyon National Park just down the road.

The next fall, she invited herself to come do a (more or less) silent meditation retreat at my house. We spoke only a little at lunchtime, and from dinner into the evening. I did whatever during the day, and prepared meals for us, while she moved about the yard and through the woods stopping to meditate wherever she found a good spot. I walked her (in silence) down to the canyon the first time, and left her there. An hour later while I was washing dishes, she walked in and held up her phone to show me a picture: a large and perfect bear track in fresh mud. Without a word I dried my hands, and followed her back into the woods where it took her a minute to locate the track in a draw a way off from the designated trail. A moment of awed – and silent – delight. At our next meal we talked about it, how she had ended up off the trail, how she had found her way back, the thrill of wild unknowing when she saw the track, and how her heart beat all the way home.

Cindy sorts out the Ikea bench pieces that she bought for our first retreat here.

One thing led to another. She enjoyed her retreat so much that she suggested, “This would be a great place for teachers to come for retreat!” And so she returned annually for several years, and each time our dream came closer to fruition. We offered our first retreat in summer of 2019, and planned on four more the following summer. But then came Covid lockdown, and we knew it wouldn’t happen that summer. A few months later she was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma. As her obituary says:

“Those closest to Cynthia had the privilege of witnessing her graceful cancer journey, which she viewed not as a battle, but as an opportunity to live well and with full acceptance. Handed a diagnosis of a rare, Stage IV Cholangiocarcinoma with a dismal prognosis, she maintained an incredible perspective of acceptance of each stage, and deliberately chose optimism, peace, and perseverance. Upon diagnosis, she dove into research, becoming an expert and active participant in her treatment. She participated in clinical trials and tried new and non-standard treatments with success. She ate well, invited in spiritual guidance, and stayed present in whatever was happening in her body at any given time. Most importantly, she continued to live and love well throughout the past four years, spending treasured time with [her daughter], as well as close friends. She laughed a lot, pursued the work that she loved, and continued to teach and see clients, far outliving the initial prognosis.”

After a sudden decline, she slipped gracefully from her body on June 13, 2024, in the presence of beloved family and friends. She continued to teach us even in her dying, her death, and her after-death choices. In the Buddhist tradition, her body rested at home for three days where her life was honored and her spirit loved. She gave us all a sacred and intimate opportunity for goodbyes, and opted to surrender her corpse to aquamation rather than cremation, currently one of the most planet-friendly choices.

Resting during a morning walk on The Survivor tree, an ancient juniper alive for nearly a thousand years. It survived drought, lightning, toppling, and someone’s attempts to cut through its massive trunk. You can see the saw line just above Cindy’s knees, and green leaves of living growth in the top right corner.

What I’ve written doesn’t scratch the surface of who this remarkable woman was in life and the legacy she leaves. Her profound influence on my life is as immeasurable as her kindness and compassion. Cindy believed, “We are all here to love as well as we can…each other, all beings on the earth, the earth itself. We are here to evolve so that the barriers to loving fall away, so throughout our lives we love more boldly, with more clarity, with a deeper knowing that we are all one.”

She laughed when I referred in one of our early discussions to “my cold, black heart.” I cannot imagine who I might be or what purpose my life would have now, had she not come back into it when she did, with her boundless and unconditional love, her inspiration and enthusiasm. Above all, she believed in me: in my innate goodness and in my capacity to thaw and open what she perceived as “your tender, broken heart.” My gratitude for Cindy is as boundless as her love. I am only beginning to comprehend the magnitude of her absence; even though her presence will live on in the work and lives of hundreds of students around the world, and in the hearts of all who had the good fortune to love and be loved by her.

Having Known…

Jun7

I’m grateful for having known these two beautiful beings in my fleeting life. Stellar left us a few years ago, and my dear friend, teacher, and mentor is on her way out of this worldly realm this week. I’m grateful for all she has taught me and the ways she continues to inspire me. It’s been a rough couple of weeks as she’s been preparing to transition from this body into the realm of pure consciousness. I’m grateful she has had friends and family to support her and keep her comfortable through her sudden decline. Goodbye, dear friend. My gratitude for your influence in my life knows no bounds.

Remembering to Live

Jun2
The little blueberry bush is overcoming its cold transplant: the leaves which turned burgundy after planting are fading and vibrant new growth is mainly green as the weather and soil both warm up.
I’m grateful these past few difficult days for remembering to live: to find beauty, joy, and meaning in the smallest quotidian things, and to be grateful for each breath I am granted, holding life in one hand even as I hold grief in the other.
The first week of aiming for twenty fruits and vegetables, or rather thirty different plant foods in a week, has been interesting. No time to tally tonight, but I did have fun sticking arugula into anything I could. Like this cheese sandwich.
Where’s Wren? Under the covers, lying on my belly.