Mari’s Blog
Lady and The Iguana
I can’t believe “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” is over. I picked up an interest in the romantics about this time last year, and toward the beginning of this one started reading Lady C a few pages at a time as my computer boots up.
I walked out to the cabin under another heavy looking sky, colored a bit of light gray with that odd morning pink to it – not pleasant or unpleasant – and then quickly saw that I was in the midst of the final pages of Lady, which I hadn’t realized were coming. It must be an odd side-effect of having a book sit to the left of your computer and propping it open with a paperweight to read in a corner of light. You can see you’re nearing the end but not quite how close you are.
It’s funny to have this ending – which concludes nothing – follow what may be my third viewing in a year’s time of my favorite movie, “The Night of the Iguana.” Tennesse William’s ending (in the movie) confirms everything (I’ve never read the play). I was pondering how at the end Richard Burton, playing The Reverend Shannon, offers himself as a traveling companion to the New England spinster played by Deborah Kerr, and how she points him back to the nest he can have with his old friend the inn keeper, Ava Gardner, who loves him and is in need of a man. The good reverend wasn’t going to look straight on at what was perfect for him, but try again to follow “the good” he saw in the spinster. Always following the good.
I’d just come again across the line I’ve liked in one of Thomas Merton’s journals, him quoting…Octavio Paz I think it is…and maybe him quoting someone else, a desert father or something, saying “Thank God I am not good!” All the goodness was in Shannon, in the man as he was, not in “trying” to be good (or to be the good reverend), and I’m convinced that’s the way it is with all of us.
The last pages of Lady is a letter from Mellor’s to Connie, written from the farm where he’s “learning to farm” and waiting on the time when they can be together. He calls their love a Pentecost flame and says, “This is my fortieth winter. And I can’t help all the winters that have been. But this winter I’ll stick to my little Pentecost flame, and have some peace.” 312
Yet he feels frightened anyway and says, “I feel the devil in the air, and he’ll try to get us. Or not the devil, Mammon: which I think, after all, is only the mass-will of people, wanting money and hating life. Anyhow, I feel great grasping white hands in the air, wanting to get hold of the throat of anybody who tries to live, to live beyond money, and squeeze the life out.” But… “All the bad times that ever have been, haven’t been able to blow the crocus out: not even the love of women. So they won’t be able to blow out my wanting you, nor the little glow there is between you and me. … You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it. I believe in the little flame between us. For me now, it’s the only thing in the world…The old Pentecost isn’t quite right. Me and God is a bit uppish, somehow. But the little forked flame between me and you: there you are!” 311
Rather amazing really, when I think of it, Williams in his way and Lawrence in his coming to this sort of ending, one speaking of the love between people as a nest and the other a flame: What love can do between people, the feeling of home and of rest it can bring.
The love of place or the love of creativity can be somewhat the same way. They blend the love of God in with something else so it isn’t so “uppish”, and maybe that’s what the love between people is too. Anything blending the human and divine love together takes it out of the uppish atmosphere and secures it down below. Love of God doesn’t stay high and apart from you or from life.
With such an ending to “Lady” I guess it’s no wonder I didn’t remember it, (read when I was young – maybe as much as 40 years ago!) but it is satisfying now, almost more so than the ending of “Iguana.” Yet what’s brilliant about “Iguana” is still the ending and turning away from the “ideal” of goodness. The ideal of goodness turns you away from your own goodness somehow. It’s like an expectation you place in your brain and aim for with all the brain’s strength. It gets hardwired in there somewhere and is hard to turn off.
No matter. No matter, sitting here, earlier than I’ve been in a while, with a light almost lavender coming to the day at a little past seven o’clock. However things go from here …they will go. But I’m aware of a new feeling in me coming from these things.
It’s finally warming enough that I slip my coat off my shoulders, and the feeling is like that. Like a heavy weight lifted. Ms. Furnace is blowing though, and when she quits and it’s getting near time for her to start up again, I may have to drape the coat back around my shoulders, and I imagine that so it will go, like my ins and outs between the cabin and the house…changing with the snow and the cold and soon the coming of spring…but remaining somehow always the same…and always different.
The Elvis Cup
I’ve just returned from Miracles in the Mountains where I got The Elvis Cup.
Miracles in the Mountains was a conference that took place in Cañon City, Colorado. It was beautiful, lovely, convened with precision by Kathy Scott Perry and graced by the presence of one hundred plus attendees and a half dozen or so speakers and practitioners. I was very nervous about it.
Or maybe nervous isn’t the word. I wanted to really speak my truth…and there is a way you can go through conniptions about that. At least I can. I had this adrenaline or something running through me. Donny called it obsession. When I phoned him to tell him I got a standing ovation he said, “How could you help but to? You’ve been obsessed for months.” That is almost literally true.
I got called by a song: Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On.” The song wouldn’t let me go. I reviewed ACOL with the question of what’s going on leading the way. To me, the results were startling.
So I’m in a gas station somewhere in Colorado, tired of drinking bad coffee out of paper cups and decide to buy a mug. The mugs are all pretty garish: bright pink sparkly hearts, neon green confetti, that kind of thing. I spot one with musical symbols on it, and think – that’s the one. I was called by a song. I go up to the counter and the woman behind it says, “Great mug.” That’s when I realize it has Elvis on the other side of the simple black on white clefs.
It’s like a strange juxtaposition for the “after the conference” feelings that I’m having. Sort of at lose ends. Doing laundry, unpacking, checking emails. So glad to be home. Sure this is my place. Running out to the cabin before sunrise. No need to go anywhere else, do anything else. I’ve done it. I’ve spoken my piece.
I’ve said, “This Course is about leaving the ego behind…and not just talking about it, but actually doing it.” I reported on what I found as I reviewed ACOL with Marvin’s question at the forefront: that as the ego structure fails the systems and structures developed by the ego will fail. I outlined the world-wide failure of systems and structures and said, “As we become new, so too does the world.” I said “The only illusion is the ego’s world and we can embrace a sacred world again.”
I had to draw on some courage to do it because I truly didn’t know if I might be booed off the stage. The reception was so gracious it was overwhelming.
I got countless hugs from people who whispered in my ear… “That’s how I feel. I don’t believe the world is an illusion. I don’t believe we need to keep worrying over the ego.” There were tears and expressions of relief. I honestly felt as if many, many folks had just been waiting for it to be said. I don’t mean to break any confidences by reporting on this. It was the sweetest thing really. After the big to-do, quiet murmurings. Confidences. That’s exactly what they were. “I feel as you do. I’m glad you said something.”
It was something we couldn’t talk about. That’s why I had to say it.
I spoke of other things too. What’s coming: the Way of Mary (receptive) that is beginning and the Way of Jesus (active) that is ending, and called on the feminine qualities, so much closer to our new knowing, to be honored and respected. I spoke of the transformation in our way of knowing that comes over us, of A Course of Love being given outside of the ego’s framework … and how it takes us beyond it.
And now I’m home with my Elvis Cup, feeling as if I started something. My contentment with being home is true, and so is this other feeling of something having begun. Like a secret is out of the bag. Like a spell – a hypnosis – has been broken and a new beginning can take root.
Like you turn and see the other side of the mug and you laugh, and you don’t care if it gives an impression you might not want to give. You don’t have to look or act a certain way to be grounded in love or to trust in your own heart…you just have to know the love is there and that you’re not alone.
The great secret is out. I am very, very grateful to all the whisperers. We aren’t alone in feeling there are lots more essential things to be talking about than the ego and the illusion, or in our conviction that it is time to embrace and be the New.
Softening
Each time I’m invited to join a conference I review A Course of Love pretty thoroughly. Each time I’ve been amazed, and I am once again. I get amazed by what it is, what it says, and how it reveals such different things to me each time I return to it. There’s a way it lives in me and a way it has its own life, and as I review, these two ways meet up. They engulf me. I swear I feel as if it has a new pulse, like it beats to the pulse of the here and now.
ACOL’s publication, coming so soon after 9/11/2001 felt significant even then, and more so now. 9/11 split our consciousness into a before and after. I really see it now as the beginning of the old way ending, the old structures toppling, our heads coming out of the sand of denial and our hearts crying out. Another cycle immediately started with the powers that were at the time taking an attitude of “control and protect”, of fear and revenge, and yet in common people there was a new flavor of turning inward. “Cocooning” was what this inward turn was called at the time.
We’ve not recovered our assurance that life will get back to normal or that the systems that have perpetuated “life as normal” are trustworthy. We are not individually or collectively who we were.
I go back in the house from the cabin where I’m writing this, and I notice, passing a mirror, that I look softer than I once did, and I know that I feel softer inside. I feel as if there’s been a softening agent at work these many years and particularly in these last months, something that has relieved my tension, loosened my tightness. It’s Sunday morning and quieter than usual as I walk back to the cabin. I feel more restful, less agitated.
When I last wrote, I was experienced the angst of a change, a change that was affecting my ability to communicate. The timing, as usual, felt horrid. I’d been invited to speak at my first shared conference, to take part, for the first time, in a gathering of scribes (Miracles in the Mountains Conference). Jayem and Gary Renard would be among my colleagues. There was something odd-feeling about it, and I guess all these months later I can admit that what was so odd was being acknowledged in a more worldly way than ever before as being part of something. Belonging within a tradition that, though it goes way back, is also new.
I wasn’t even sure how I felt about this back then, and I’m still not “sure” of the implications. It’s not that this has even been on my mind, only that, now that the time grows near, I believe there may be some natural design into which this fits, some “the time is right” opening being presented.
Because when I “look back” as I do when I review ACOL, everything that I felt then (as I received it) comes back to me, and all that’s happened since then is revealed in a new way. It is clear to me that what happens is what is meant to be.
Those of you who’ve journeyed with me through much of this time may know that it has not always appeared to be so. I have questioned life’s twists and turns as much as any person of little faith ever has.
It sounds incompatible to say that despite questioning and worry, there was also in me, an underlying trust in the process, but I believe this to be true. I never turned my back on what came to me. I floundered like a fish out of water (too often and in too many ways to recount) but I was tenacious as well. I remained devoted precisely to the process, believing, somewhere underneath the surface level conniptions I went through, that there had to be divine reasons, that there was some mysterious alchemy occurring, and when I talk to friends lately, and we look back on the changes in our lives since the start of our spiritual journeying, we laugh and smile and say “What a journey!” “What a life!” We wouldn’t have it any other way.
I am with friends
A Course of Love, as I reminded my grieving friend Terry, is about our humanity as well as our divinity. Terry is grieving for our mutual friend Richard, who died on the 9th. His services are today.
Since I was in the midst of Katie’s services as I heard of Richard’s death, my attention was not with him right away. By the time it was, and I learned that his services are today, I felt that I could not make the trip and yet that I was neglecting something deeply meaningful and that I was failing to respond to Richard’s loss as I would like.
This morning I dedicated my meditation to him and heard, “I am with friends.”
I am with friends. That is how I felt when I met Richard and when through his friendship and love of A Course of Love, I was invited to Florida and was embraced by not only Richard, but Terry, Lee, and Carol.
But let me back up.
I first met Richard just after A Course of Love came out. He had ACOL and the Treatises but was seeking a copy of The Dialogues and writing me via email. Soon he decided to come to Minnesota to visit me. This was a significant first for me, the first time that I saw that A Course of Love would have such impact and that someone would associate that impact with me and want to meet me.
Later, when I met Terry, Lee, and Carol, they laughed and laughed with me over that visit…finding it hilarious that Donny had to come home from work to check out this man who “could be a kook for all we know”, and that Richard wanted to meditate in my cream-colored formal living room, where no one ever sat at the time, and that I wasn’t a meditator then, and that I was so incapable of resistance, so overpowered to have this man come into my home and just make himself at home and lead me by the hand into my own too formal to bother sitting in room. It was so “Richard.” That is why it was so funny, my new friends imagining me not knowing Richard as they did and encountering him in this way.
As sweet and funny as that visit was, and as meaningful as it was to me to have my first visitor of this kind, it was more of an impact in other ways that came of Richard’s nature. For one thing, I was a mess at the time. I can’t remember exactly what was going on now but I know I was in conflict with my co-presenter for one reason or another and that I told Richard all about it, and that I felt free to say the f word in his presence and that he might have come expecting some serene and wise person but if he did he never showed it. He accepted me exactly as I was and did not take my discombobulated state as evidence that I had nothing to offer. No, he invited me to come speak at his Unity Church a while later – the trip on which I met the others.
It was one of the most magical trips of my life, occasion of my first more formal dialogues, first time learning how to walk on the beach and falling in love with the ocean. The sequence of events has left me, but I know I visited Richard’s home, met his son Isaiah, his beloved dog (s) and was in every way that could happen in a short time “let in” to his life, and I suppose that was as true of me too when he came to see me, was in my home, met Donny, the cats and dog, came to the coffee shop where he likely would have met one or both of my daughters. At any rate it happened. That was it. We were “inside” each other’s lives.
He sat and talked to me in my hotel room as I ironed my clothes, which for some reason is one of my most intimate memories; took me to a bar where he told everyone about A Course of Love, fed me a dish I’d never had (crabs?), treated me to wine and even got me up to dance.
He didn’t have a pious bone in his body or have a bit of a problem “being real.” He didn’t know any other way and had no division between his work and his surfing and his spirituality. He was a guy’s guy in so many ways – ex Navy Seal, robust, full of life. He didn’t negate anything that I could see – being a family man, a tender man, a generous friend or a guy’s guy. He was totally willing to proclaim his loves – whatever they were – and A Course of Love was one of them and that was no problem in his energy field, being on the same level as everything else and yet somehow elevated too. It was all sublime.
Not that he was perfect or never had a problem. He called with a problem on occasion and counseled me through some. He even called once when he’d had too much to drink! We were that kind of friends. One bit of advice I always remember is him telling me to get out and walk. He could tell when I was stuck in my head and needed movement, but never, ever, did any amount of stuckness lessen me in his eyes. He’s one of the few people I ever met with whom I didn’t doubt myself in that way of feeling bad for saying the wrong thing, being in the wrong place, or just being myself.
I imagine that this was true for everyone – that once Richard loved you – you were “in” and he was totally with you and totally loyal.
I drove to Florida on my first visit, and as I left, I felt what I remember describing then as though I was attached to him and my other friends and the ocean and Florida, to that time and place and the connection we’d made, by a bunge cord. As if, were I to take my foot off the gas my car would bounce right back there. If my hands hesitated on the wheel, the car would turn itself around. I’d never felt anything like it. I’ve lived in Minnesota all my life with not a desire ever to live elsewhere and I was shaken by my desire to stay and the imaginings I had of another life that could be had there.
Terry and I have been friends ever since. Lee and I talked on the phone once a month for a long time afterwards. And Richard was our connector.
I am taking the message that “I am with friends” not only as a confirmation that Richard is held in an even wider embrace of friendship and love, but as a message to carry forward in my life. “I am with friends.” I can live everyday with that knowing, with that safe feeling, with all the enemies of the world (real or imagined, large or small) transformed into friends. I can let go any desire to see anything else, to feel slighted or undervalued or wronged or under attack. I can see that I am with friends everywhere, every day.
That is Richard’s gift to me and to many – a view of a friendly world – a universe where love is real, and where our humanity and our divinity are all of one piece and one peace.
His ashes will be spread today near the beach where we walked.
I had been going through my boxes of pictures and found a card from Richard before I heard of his death. I put it up on the top of my bookshelf without reading the inside. Today I did. I don’t think Richard would mind me sharing it. It says it all.
“I believe that Love is the Answer. Spread the word…I love you…” Richard
Katie time
I was late walking Sam this morning. Day was beginning to dawn when the school bus came around the corner. That was when I realized that it was an ordinary weekday; a Tuesday. I’d been on Katie time.
Katie is my mother-in-law and friend. She died early Saturday morning, was waked on Monday and her funeral was today. It might seem odd to some that I’m writing so soon after, but I feel the need to write.
Katie time is the kind of suspension of the everyday that you experience when a person you love dies. It is mundane: I won’t worry about the recycling now. I can do that later. And it is foggy: I start out to do one thing and do another and then walk around in a circle. Katie time has been gentle, sweet, sad, and busy in a totally non-ordinary way.
I don’t think I ate a sit-down meal from the time she went in the hospital on Wednesday until what is called, in our church, the “mercy meal.” I am told that 500 people were served. That is not an ordinary number.
I called a couple of my friends who knew Katie. One said outright, “Ohhh, that’s too bad. Katie liked me.” The other didn’t say “Katie liked me” right out, but that’s what she said. I decided that this was the key to Katie’s iconic stature in her church, neighborhood, and community. She didn’t just like people. She made them feel liked.
At one point in the day a couple of her friends were talking to me and I was looking around for Donny, totally accepting that each of my conversations would be brief as I passed through the crowd and shadowed my husband. Only later did I think of how Katie never did that. She’d have 15 minute conversations here, and 15 minute conversations there. She didn’t look around. We’d tease her that she’d hold up any line she was ever in. If she didn’t know you, she’d get to know you.
She was very like my dad that way, and I’ve thought of him a lot in these weeks when it seemed so clear that Katie was failing, and as we waited for the doctor appointment that would confirm what we could see and sense.
I fell in love with grief during the “Dad time” of his preparation to die and his death. I fell in love with the suspension of ordinary time, with the feeling of intensity and meaning that hung about each day, and with the hidden nature of the dying that slowly revealed itself. I lingered a long time with grief after Dad died.
Tomorrow life is supposed to start getting back to normal. I will take out the recycling. I’ll start to clean up all the messes I’ve left in my stupor or my haste. The ordinary conversations will start up again. And then, just when life’s texture seems to be returning to normal, I know that Katie time will rear up again. There will be different Katie conversations and the “business” of death to attend to. The effort to follow her wishes. All the transitions of the grieving, the adjustments to the change.
Katie has been my mother-in-law almost 25 years, and my elder care companion for the last two of those. Her living has been part of the fabric of my days. As my own mother talked of a recipe the other day, I found myself thinking, “Katie would like that.”
It was both a relief and a challenge to let her go into the hands of the medical professionals who assisted her last days. I’d grown accustomed to looking out for her.
The beauty of grief is the beauty of all of those things – like the weather – that are beyond effort, intention, or feeble attempts at control. It is a visitation with surrender that does its best to become total. Grief sweeps you up and deposits you on the other side of life’s door.
And you realize, once outside and beyond the threshold, that you can’t turn back. You stand somewhere new.
