Category: love

Do you know the story?

 

At first glance, what do you see?

I would not have noticed but for my daughter.  She was driving me to the Portland Union Train Station to catch a train to Seattle.  Going up Burnside, she suddenly stopped in the middle of the street and her hand reached across my face, angling back a tiny bit, to take a photo.  My first reaction was to look behind me to see if her stopping in the street was interrupting traffic or might possibly cause an accident.  And then, feeling a tiny bit irritated that my space had been violated with her hand thrust in front of my face, I asked, “What are you doing?”

She said, “There’s a person in that pile of garbage.”  My response was, “Nooo.  No there isn’t.”

By then she had driven on. She handed me her phone and said, “Blow it up.”   When I increased the size of the photo, indeed, there was a person sleeping in that pile of garbage.   Oh, my.  Oh, my! In that moment, questions flashed past me. Is she (or he) alive? Had those been her possessions and her place to  sleep the night before, and had the city officials torn it down, like they did repeatedly, and shoved it to the side of the road to be picked up by the garbage collector?  Or had that simply been where, in desperation and exhaustion — or in a drug-addicted haze — she found a moment of rest?   I even had the horrifying imagining of a backhoe or Bobcat scooping up this pile of trash and throwing it into a dumpster.  Oh, my.

When I first saw this picture on my daughter’s phone, the writing was not yeet on the wall.  But let it be on your wall.

 DO NOT THROW ME AWAY!

I don’t know the story of this person buried in a garbage heap.  Nor the stories of the thousands of other homeless folks who sleep on the streets across America, a country whose richest could provide food, housing, medical care, and mental health care for every individual in this country. But I know in my heart that that person did not choose to be in this heap of trash.  But they’re there, and they’re suffering. And my daughter sees them.  She sees them when they’re invisible to others.

Do you know her story, this person buried in that trash heap?  Of course you don’t. Have you passed judgment?  Possibly. Could it be that maybe she’s only 15 years old, and she finally fled the nightly rapes by her stepfather, only to find herself on the streets of Portland, homeless, with no resources. Or was she so desperate to escape constant emotional or physical abuse that living on the streets was preferable?

Or did he have chronic pain from an injury or congenital defect for which a doctor prescribed him Oxycontin?  And then his doctor’s license was yanked or he himself couldn’t get relief from the prescribed dose, so he turned to street heroin which took him down.

Does she have a severe mental illness, no fault of her own, just the run-of-the-mill chemical imbalance in the brain that exasperated her parents and school personnel to the point that her parents kick her out for her obstreperous behavior? Did she suffer from severe clinical depression?

Was she simply experimenting with drugs, never thinking she’d become an addict?

The list of scenarios is endless for how this person ended up in a trash heap.

Should the story that left them homeless matter?  Does it matter if it’s a boy or a girl, a old man or a middle-aged mother?  I don’t think so. What matters is they are there on our streets.  That’s the current chapter of their story that you can see. And it is a symbol of the state of our society.

But possibly a more important question is what is your story?  How we perceive things alters what we see. How did you end up blinded and unable to see society’s pain?  How did you lose your compassion, your empathy? How did you come to hold your possessions and riches so close to your heart and give them more value than this young person’s life?   How did you come to be afraid to look at society’s discards?

Are you aware of where your beliefs and prejudices came from? Are you aware of the historiological slant to information provided to you? Are you aware of the agreements you unconsciously made from birth to think the way you do? How many of your beliefs are based on assumptions?  Or centuries-old myths?  At what point did you start to lose sight of your feelings, your empathy, your compassion?

I don’t know the story of that person in the trash heap. I do know how and why my daughter saw this person and why she notices those who have been overlooked, why she notices the ones who are invisible to others. She notices the ones who are dope sick and the ones who are clean and sober but mentally unstable. She doesn’t discriminate.  She notices the pain in our society when too many of us look the other way.

She notices because she used to be a drug addict living on the streets of Portland. As the chemical cocktails rearranged her brain chemistry, she began to hear voices (which she continues to struggle with today), she says, that told her, “Don’t stick that needle in your arm.”  She is one of too few who got clean and sober, by a miracle or through grace and a few caring people who gave her a kind word and emotional support.

From that experience, she started a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Mudblosm Connections (https://mudblosmconnections.org/) to help the homeless and those financially distressed in the Portland area. She collects donations of clothes and food and distributes them regularly, sometimes person to person, tent to tent, sometimes in organized events in downtown Portland parks.

She finally convinced just one local grocery store to let her pick up their expired and almost expired food instead of throwing it in the dumpster.  Every day, seven days a week, she picks it up and drives it to seven different organizations including a senior housing project, several nonprofit organizations providing transitional housing and counseling, and organizations providing a cooked meal to the needy.  Last year alone, she collected and distributed 100,000 pounds of food just from that one store that would otherwise have thrown it away!  As an example, her first-ever pickup included 102 gallons of milk, four cases of frozen meats, boxes of bakery goods and piles of plastic food trays of various fruits and cut vegetables.

It costs her $600 a month for gas and car insurance to do this selfless job which is paid for by small monthly contributions from caring folks and from recycling cans and bottles.  Still a fledgling organization, no one is paid a salary. They hope to eventually receive grant money to expand and to pay for the selfless labor involved in saving good food from the landfills and providing that same food to those in need.  Mr. Bezos?  Mr. Musk?  Mr. Gates?  Anybody want to help?

I’ve accompanied my daughter on a wet winter day, handing out socks, food, and jackets to the homeless huddled in their tents under the bridges, the racket of cars thrumping overhead and the echo of cars traversing the darkened streets below those bridges.  I’ve been with her when she’s noticed a young couple huddled on a curb, shivering in the damp Portland winter.  She took the time to stop and talk to them.  She reached into her trunk and gave them jackets, and then before leaving, she took off her own boots and gave them to the girl who was wearing thin, wet canvas sneakers.

I know the stories of the richest of the rich by observing how they live in mansions large enough to house a small town; that they have their private jets and yachts and limousines in which to travel in luxury.  That they have closets bigger than the room I rent in a four-bedroom house, because I can’t afford my own house.  That they eat the finest foods only at the finest restaurants and drink $1,000 bottles of wine.  I know they don’t pay their fair share of taxes.

I know that our federal government spent $916 billion in 2023 to fight wars in other countries or to provide military assets to countries to attack other countries and render their lands unlivable.  I know that finally in January of 2024, $3.16 billion was allotted to programs to help the homeless, of which the state of Oregon received approximately $60 million. I know that too much of that money will be spent on more studies.

I know the largest contributor to homelessness is affordable housing.  I know that corporations are buying up properties to bolster their bottom line, and I know homeowners are choosing to rent their second homes as Air BnBs. I know poverty is the number one cause of homelessness.  I know that the largest number of homeless are African Americans. Thirty percent of the homeless are families with children. I know these facts.

I understand the circumstances that can un-house a person and how it is so very difficult to get into a new apartment: one needs a first, a last, and a cleaning deposit, coming to as little as (or as much as) needing $5,000, depending upon where you live.  When a person’s total income after taxes might be no more than $2300 a month, if that, and now with a history of eviction, it becomes insurmountable to get into a new apartment. I know 30% of the homeless are families.

I know there’s a sense of hopelessness, not only in our country but around the world, heightened by climate change and war.

What I don’t know is why humans treat others the way they do.  Other than I know that historiologically, the dissemination of human history continues to promulgate fear, hatred, and otherness.  The self-destruct button is hit with each iteration. Drugs, wars, gangs, homelessness. Bad actors in multiple countries around the world are murdering and subjugating their citizens or, like Netanyahu and Putin, are trying to wipe their neighbors off the face of the earth. None of it’s new to human history.  Wars and murder and subjugation are what constitute history. It is the human legacy, precipitated by greed, hatred, and delusion. We seem to be an evolutionary species gone haywire and heading to extinction.

Generosity, loving kindness, and wisdom are not measurable attributes to be found in a government study, but I believe they are the cure, already present within the human heart. It requires each of us to notice the invisible. It requires each of us to love our neighbor who is, like me, a spiritual being having a human experience. Within my human experience, I can choose to experience the joy of loving kindness, generosity, empathy and compassion.

This photo is a symbol of what is extant in our society. To the drumbeat of certain politicians, we are separated by fear. We are separated by greed. Stories for millennia have supported this scenario. Our Constitution was written by and for white landowners, those with money, to protect what they declared to be theirs alone.  To this day, its interpretation is supported by the same biased group of individuals to protect the interests of predominantly white and monied citizens, but not the poor, the colored, the disenfranchised.  Those who want power and live in fear, defend their right to possess firearms, an amendment enacted to protect the rights of slave owners to subdue a rebellion.  They defend the Electoral College, again, an archaic amendment that gave greater voting power to slave owners. To this day, the Equal Rights Amendment has never been ratified to give women equal rights, and now, those in power are stripping away even more rights of women.

We suffer under these laws to the point of being numb to the egregiousness of their perpetuity and frustrated against the power of those in control. Maybe for our own sanity, we stop listening to the news depicting the murder and destruction of people by stronger, greedier, more evil country leaders.  Maybe we turn away from the garbage heaps on the side of the road because … because why? Because you fear or hate what you see?  Or because you feel there’s nothing that can be done?  Because you’re waiting for a government (controlled still by the wealthy and white) to take action?  Maybe you wonder why you should even care?

I believe you should care because this young person hidden in this garbage heap on the side of a downtown city street is a symbol of the state of our society. It’s a symbol of a collapsed society. Maybe that knowledge produces too much fear and helplessness to look at it straight on, so we drive on by. Oh, my.

I believe when we shift our perceptions and beliefs to be inclusive, to be nonjudgmental, to be compassionate and caring, that only then can we find the path to heal the suffering of others and ourselves. It’s within each of us to heal the ills of our society by healing ourselves.

My daughter took this picture. She printed it. And she wrote across the top of it:  DO NOT THROW ME AWAY

I also plea:  Do not throw away your ability to feel compassion and empathy and generosity and loving kindness.  Do not throw away your ability to question authority.  Do not throw away the ever-present need to investigate where your prejudices and beliefs have come from, especially when they diminish or discard another’s rights to enjoy basic human rights. Do not throw away your ability to discern good and bad. Do not discard or diminish the will, courage, and heart to change those beliefs and to right perceived wrongs.

 

 

Do societies idealize romantic love

Do our societies idealize romantic love at the expense of other forms of love?

Responding to a prompt offered up in a workshop I’m participating in (The Dharma of Relationships, Paramis in Action), as is my nature, this question has flipped on the switch of a huge spotlight to explore what lies behind the myths we live by, most particularly “romantic love.”

My first, on-the-surface response, is that yes, they (societies) do. Then I think I would have to narrow it down to which societies do because I’m unsure whether the Leavers, as Daniel Quinn called those who live(d) in harmony with the “wild world,” do or did. It’s definitely a myth that has morphed with the separation of man from living in harmony with nature, living in that deep respect for the interconnectedness of all that exists from the tiniest cosmic particle to the humpback whale.

I view this question to be asked in a very active tense as if it is a conscious objective of “societies,” which I don’t believe it is. Has it in fact been a conscious idealization by “societies,” or, instead, has it been a very unconscious metamorphosis that began with religion, with a “God” “out there,” and that “God giving its only son to man” so that mankind can go to that better heavenly place after death, again separate from “heaven on earth.” It began with power and greed usurping the individual’s path, most particularly through dogmatic religions, I feel, wherein grasping greed has slimed its way into all aspects of one’s life with the proposed end result being that an individual’s goal is to obtain more — more wealth, more possessions, more status, more love (as if love is an object to obtain/attain).

For some reason, I reject that societies, in the active tense, idealize romantic love. Instead, as with all the delusions humankind has wrapped itself in, from the first agreements we unconsciously make with our parents from birth, with the communities we’re raised in, we unconsciously create myths and adopt these beliefs, as part of the circle of Dependent Origination. And we suffer because of it, just as we suffer from all of our clinging and grasping, whether it be dogma, possessions, love, or life itself.

Many societies did, and some still do, have arranged marriages. Romantic love did not enter into the world of accepted myths, according to Joseph Campbell, until it began to appear in stories like Iseult and Tristan. Dennis Patrick Slattery says, “Myths are living symbols. They serve each of us individually and collectively as guides to aid us in harmonizing our interior world with the surrounding landscape we inhabit. They serve us on a personal level as ordering and organizing principles whose aim is to offer our lives a sense of coherence, not perfection. Joseph Campbell believes that myths reveal the movement of psyche, indeed ‘of the whole nature of man and his destiny.'” So romantic love is a myth that has evolved but I don’t believe it is or was actively idealizing love; just laying on another veil of delusion, unconsciously shoring up delusions without serving a higher self.

Unless we were raised in a Buddhist environment, I think adopting and creating myths we live by is something we do individually from our point of separation from our mother’s body and with the induction of agreements we received from our parents and from our communities. Again, I don’t believe society itself has done anything consciously. I don’t even think that the individuals who continue to grasp for power do it consciously. It’s an individual human dilemma encapsulated in Dependent Origination, through which the Buddha’s teachings shine a light on the path out of the mythical dream. It might have begun with the instinct of all living things on this earth to continue, to procreate, allowing the loins of humankind to lead the way in that deception in order to continue. Or it might have started when mankind separated from living in a harmonic oneness with nature, moving into me/it, mine/its, mine/yours, which process, of course, always left a burning yearning in the heart that something was missing.

Some species mate for life, some don’t. In order to continue the human race, until the last century, the human myth was that marriage of a man and a woman is the only permitted form of marriage (and some are attempting to continue that myth). But marriage is an institution that came out of survival, and now, in our day and age, we do not need to marry, nor remain in partnership to survive — physically — nor should we continue to procreate as, clearly, 8 billion people is straining the threads that bind us together.

But clearly, we need love to survive, as Harry Harlow proved with his wire-monkey experiments in the ’50s, as social scientists repeatedly affirm when trying to heal the injured people rising up through our societies around the world where parents — unconscious and injured themselves and in their quest for more possessions or just more basics for survival — can’t find, don’t make, or lose the time to love their children, their fellow humans, themselves.

Because of the cause-and-effect path of my life, I’ve never quite lived within the bounds of what society projects on the cinder-block walls it’s built to surround and separate itself. Yes, I’ve stuck my toe into romantic love several times throughout my life. It always burned me. Or maybe I didn’t follow the rules or know how to do it. But whether it was my path, whether it was the deep burns suffered, or whether I instinctively knew that romantic love was not to be idealized,  I’ve chosen to explore the myths I’ve lived by. Saying society actively did something feels like it once again removes the individual from seeking the truths behind the myths we live by.

Since I’ve found the Buddhist path, I’ve peered behind the veils slip down. I’ve discovered a deeper loving kindness to be the fertile ground that sustains all and from which all springs. Loving kindness is an ever-present moment.  Romantic love is an ever-changing delusion, and at least for me, at 73, a distant past.

Earth Day Earth Way

I add my name
To those with more fame
Who point out the blame
Of those who inflame
The senses of the earth
And all those who gave birth.
And I add my name to the cries of dearth
Who others claim to have no worth.

Seldom sustained in political discussion
While ignoring earth’s pending destruction,
I watch their words flow like butter
Into the cracks and into the gutter.
But from all thoughts that I hold dear,
And discarding both fear and spear,
I embrace all hearts who are tuned to hear
The only course we must now steer.

So, turning from the glare
Of that deepening despair
We must rise up from the chair
And daily live the prayer
To wear love on our sleeve
From which force we shall cleave
From the fabric we weave
A strength no one may thieve.

A fear to overcome

MY FEAR OF LOSING MYSELF

If there flowed a river, I would swim it
If there stood a mountain, I would climb it
If there were a meadow, I would dance in it
If there grew a flower, I would smell it
If there sang a bird, I would rejoice in it
And these things — and I — would remain the same.

But

If there were a man in whom all these things existed,
I fear I would need run from him….

For if I entered into the strength of his mountain
Or swam and danced and sang with his soul,
Within the flowing scent of this new quivering song,
Surely I would change — then who would I be?

On the wings of that siren’s song
I return to the mountain,
To the beauty of the meadow and flowers,
To the rapture of the bird,
I return to me.

Haiku for Uvalde

No comprehension
In these life’s ragged moments
Empty in the void

Hear the mother hen
Squawking distress heartbreak grief
Skunk’s hunger sated

Loud rolling thunder
Image fading too slowly
Empty weeping arms

Handcuff mothers’ fear
Protecting children dying
More guns men laughing

Peace found within fields
Memory of loving days
Mountain heart endures

Back from Bedlam

Apropos, I suppose, I woke up this morning with James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” running through my head. The song appeared on his first album Back to Bedlam (named after a famous psychiatric hospital in England). Of course “bedlam” is descriptive of my anguished frustration and confusion as to “how can this keep happening” — these senseless murders of young children. With the tune playing through my mind as I came out of sleep, I was also well aware of the counterpoise necessary to rebalance myself after giving permission for that one voice to blow off some steam and heed the call to get loud.

I reflect that thirty-plus years ago, when I was 40, I started training in kung fu. At first it was simply a disciplined way to get exercise, but as I moved into the art, it became one of my deepest psychological journeys.

Early in my training, I was tasked with learning a series of moves: a straight punch to the face, an elbow to the chin, and knee to the groin (all with full control because that, in essence, was what we were training to have:  control). I performed the move — quite well, I thought — with hardness. “Look at my warrior strength!!” my ego beamed.

My sifu stopped me and said, “Good, but now I want you to do it slowly and softly.” I looked at him, and I said, “Well, I can’t do that. That’s not who I am,” so ingrained in this persona that who “I was” was hard and strong and direct. But he was not going to argue with me; he gave me the choice to do it slowly and softly or to get on the ground and do 50 full-body pushups with my partner kicking me in the stomach on each plank. I kid you not, but without hesitation I dropped to the ground to do that instead of having to be soft.

My sifu, not expecting that to be my choice, stopped me. In essence, the choice changed to “do it soft and slow or end your training.” Because I felt “it” happening, I wanted to argue that I could not do “soft,” and I told to him, “I will cry if I have to do that.” He said, “That’s okay.” I replied, “No, it’s never okay to cry, especially in kung fu.” He chuckled and said, “It’s always okay to cry.”

A higher, wiser Self stepped up beside me (I now recognize it as the Spirt side of Mind/Body/Spirit) and “held” me while I went through that controlled move. And I cried. “Again,” my sifu said. Again, I did it softly and slowly, and I cried more deeply. “Again,” he said.  And I sobbed as I touched feeling so scared and vulnerable in allowing myself to be soft. Through the following seven years of training in kung fu, my challenge was to learn to “yield,” to honor my yin energy, to find the balance between the yin and the yang. I achieved Brown Belt rank before arthritic issues at age 47 (probably the physical manifestation of years of hardness) ended my physical training.

Though most people move through life disguised and dressed in one persona (mine at that time was a hardened, closed-off warrior superwoman), if we become aware, we recognize we all have different voices, or selves, within us, each of which needs to be recognized and honored in order to free ourselves. It was during those years of training in kung fu, in my search to rebalance myself, I was privileged to be introduced to  a wise woman and practitioner of Voice Dialogue, a process through which a person learns to identify and become aware of these different voices or selves in order to become a more balanced individual.  Though far from practiced in the process myself, I recognized its importance in helping me achieve an emotional equipoise in my life.

Back in those days of kung fu, I had to learn to listen to this young, weak child that was never allowed to cry and that had to wear armor to get through life. Not only had that armor ceased to serve me, it had become destructive. Through kung fu — and Voice Dialogue and shamanic work, and eventually meditation — I got in touch with my world of archetypical energies that all serve me when in balance, but also can be destructive or hindering when one outshouts the other.

The Lover’s voice in James Blunt wrote and sang those beautiful songs. “You’re Beautiful” is an incredibly sad song about unrequited love, expressing the intense emotions of James Blunt when he saw his girlfriend with another man and he didn’t do anything about it (in the official video he jumps endlessly off a wall, down, down, down to …?).

Yesterday my Warrior ranted and played the bagpipes and banged on the drums of frustration. This morning, my Priest sat in silent meditation. In the bedlam of our “modern world,” I continue to listen for and await the voice of wisdom and spirit to illuminate the way.

May peace and love find us all and be the loudest voice and the brightest light to show the path forward in the bedlam of our world.

Old Journals – Old Memories

I found an old journal from 1996 that I haven’t looked at probably since I stowed it away. Old memories. One of the first entries reads: “No one can play the strings of your song. I realize that now. I realize what I keep playing is your laughter. What I keep playing is your love. It’s you I play, not me.” Though I allowed it to be a painful time, I’m glad I recorded its journey where I had allowed myself to “fall in love” with the most unavailable — and truly the most gorgeous — man on the planet.

How did I deal with my pain? Exactly as I always have: I jumped on a plane and flew away, this time to Florida, by myself. These are the thoughts that I recorded in a brand-new journal.

Wind on the mountain
Freedom pushing
Strength resisting
Isolation
Solitude of the eagle,
Of the hawk.
Everything trying to merge and
Everything trying to separate
Wholeness held in one hand
Loneliness wrapped in love
Love not knowing its own face
Love not seeing, remaining
Undiscovered and unseen.

(I only write poetry when wounded by love.)

A mockingbird sings, looking for love to touch its soul too. I wait for the sunset in Key West. Still thinking of that man. Can’t get into him. Never will. Can’t get away from him. …But I will. The broad arm of a mahogany leans across the second story patio of Mallory Square, giving shade, but my skin is fried by too much sun.  I can’t feel its cool brush. There’s a gentle clatter of ceiling fans in an effort to move air that’s too tired to move.

At the Italian Fisherman, another day, I sit on a patio at the water’s edge. I watch garfish and cat fish being circled by one small barracuda while shadows of pelicans pass over. At the table next to me are two fat women who are bitching about work in Minnesota: that they’re not allowed to wear perfume. The light breeze brings to me a strong odor of overpoured perfume clinging to their clothes as if telling their boss, “Fuck you. Smell me now.”

Later, traveling across the Everglades, heading to Clearwater, I notice a man following me in a gold Subaru. When the highway becomes four-lane, he hovers next to me, turning constantly to stare at me. It creeps me out. My imagination runs wild, as I imagine him taking down my license plate, and though it’s a rental, somehow he will find out who rented it, telling the agency some story to get them to give them my address. Damn my imagination. I slow way down, visibly taking out a pencil and paper while I drive, letting him know to beware that I am now taking down HIS license. He finally drives on ahead.

There are Native Americans in the Everglades that still live in — or at least build — thatched huts of bundled cattails — like the one I built for myself in New Zealand — but they put tar paper across the peak. A canal that borders Highway 41 is dotted with fishermen. The shacks might be their fishing shacks. In the distance a charcoal cloud, heavy with rain, hangs above the swamp that extends to the horizon. I learned later that a jet crashed into the Everglades — not within my vision or point in time — but 109 people died. The nose of the plane, the plane itself, was buried 30 feet deep in the muck. If anyone had survived the crash, the alligators were waiting. Salvage was not discussed.

Farther west, I met the green fabric of fields woven into the blue fabric of sky from which (for whatever reason), I weave in a quote by Annie Proulx: “We face up to the awful things because we can’t go around them.” That man — that man that I came to Florida to escape — is with me again, like a needle stuck in an old record. I must face why I am attracted to the emotionally unavailable. I already know why I get on planes and fly away when my heart is hurt.

I’m airport watching now on my way back to the Northwest, leaving behind plastic-fantastic. Key West is a fascinating amusement, but overall I dislike Florida. Sitting at Delta Gate 54A, a 25-year-old, hidden behind sunglasses, tells me: “…I was 17 then. A long time ago. I was a day late. Didn’t matter if I was a dollar short or a day late, my parents would take care of it.” He takes off his glasses to clean them on his shirt and puts them back on. “But now,” he says, “it’s the real world.” Yes, it is, I think.

I glance away and see an old man, with trembling hands, eating a nacho with jalapenos. He drinks water,  it shaking in his hand, but suddenly he stands up and moves away from a young woman who’s drinking a beer, changing tables. Then he changes tables again. He’s moving yet again when a long-haired man with a beeper, looking at each beep, distracts me.

Another man, older, without a chin, is standing nearby. He keeps pulling up his overly baggy pants in a way that accentuates his penis and balls. He looks like a child molester. Two indiscreet Native Americans walk by, carrying ceremonial drums. For some reason, the man I’m trying to erase from my heart and mind re-enters, a constant thrump, like the river flowing over rocks and boulders on its way to the sea. Conversations distract me. “Where’s she going to stay?” a man asks. “In the States,” she answers, jutting out her jaw. I didn’t hear the rest as the conversation blurred into a man talking about back surgery to the stranger next to him.

Yes, there are windows opening constantly in the pulse of time. I take it in, like a grouper’s mouth sucking in the unsuspecting dinner. I notice an elegantly dressed woman in colors that accentuate her aged tan and silvered hair. She sits alone, watching also, her hand lazily drooped over the arm of the chair, while mine is scribbling in my journal.

And then she rises, as do I, when boarding is announced.

A Clear-Flowing River — all the rest is just window dressing

First thing each morning, I put on my clothes — no, that’s not true.  First, after I jump out of bed, I scurry quickly five feet down to turn on my little heater in my van in which I live, and as that heat quickly changes the temperature from 39 to a passable 64, then I put on my clothes, often the same ones I wore the day before, but-for clean underwear and socks. I put on a saucepan of water to boil for my coffee while I grind my half cup of beans and put them in the French press, and then, a never-fail ritual, I turn on my laptop and check my emails.

I have five email addresses created for different reasons. They’re like different clothes I put on, or different hats worn for different occasions.

The first email I opened was a weekly post on CaringBridge, updating a friend’s journey with cancer. This week, five weeks after her treatment began, she is completely bald. She posed in the window of the camera lens in her baldness and in a colorful head wrap, trying on her new looks that she’ll wear for awhile.

She also shared a picture of her granddaughter’s sixth birthday, the Great Unicorn Gathering. With sparkles in her eyes and a smile, she, her granddaughter, was standing by a table of colorful cakes and cupcakes, also dressed in their own headdresses of white-“haired” frosted chocolate cupcakes, drizzled with something looking like strawberry syrup, and a round single-layer cake mounded with fresh raspberries and sliced almonds.

In her CaringBridge entry, my friend writes about the joy of her granddaughter’s little party. Also, she makes a comment about a “challenging” nurse she’d had to contend with during her last chemo appointment. Something that’s so special about my friend is her compassion and understanding of others.  This is often reflected, I think, in her filter and her ability to think before she speaks, making her the go-to school counselor for hundreds of children, and a dear person who has shouldered maybe too many of her friends’ secrets and woes. I too have taken my problems to her, where she’s listened deeply, and then asked those questions of me wherein the answers rested. A miracle worker, she is, revealing the one constant of life: the beauty of love and caring.

These are the thoughts I have as I look at these images she’s shared reflected in these window frames: her bald pate, her colorful head wrap. She emanates a beauty from within that overshadows any of the guises of clothes and hairdos she’s worn over the years.

She also wrote of the tears she cried as a friend shaved off the last tufts of hair that had clung to her head like flood-torn branches on a river’s edge, life’s river. But her current still runs strong and clear, and if obstacles appear, she is held safely by her husband and surrounded with the closest and most loving friends to help her remove those rocks and boulders or to portage her around, over, or through them. The love she’s given is returning thousandfold.

She is and always has been the most beautiful woman I’ve had the privilege to share my life with. Just as I get used to my thinning hair that’s come with aging, just as she watched her husband’s hair turn from dark to white (both of which were slow processes that slipped in through the cracks of time, while hers came upon her so quickly), she will get used to not having hair for a while. It’s just a different guise — or disguise — she’s trying on, while her beauty shines even brighter.

Right now, she’s the beauty of an acorn without its top hat, shiny and smooth. We already know — all of us who love her — that within that shiny, beautiful seed is a great, strong tree, burgeoning with life, strength, and love which is, after all, the beauty that always has and always will shine forth.

She is the clear-flowing river.  All the rest is just window dressing.

You know who you are, and I love you.