Marcia's Musings: The Long Goodbye (Kiss)
/ GL AdminsMy fingers knead clumps of warm dirt, the loamy fragrance of the earth, the worms, and the flowers and vegetables plants already rooted rising up to greet my appreciative nostrils. The attachment of my hands to the soil grounds me pretty well. During a lifetime of lusting for nature, I discovered that gardening tops the list – or nearly so depending on the situation – of tools, strategies, and practices to stay focused on the present moment, where I greatly love to live.
While the earth does its best to keep me focused on planting another bunch of seedlings, so small and tender yet surprisingly strong, too, my mind wanders despite my commitment to keep it connected to my physical body and the task before me. Ignoring me, it takes flight, as a mind will do, and drifts to the image of a dear friend of 30 years, lying in a hospice facility only a few miles from my home. Hot tears immediately and profusely drip onto my shirt and the sweet seedlings, and I think, “Salt water isn’t good for them.” Interesting where the mind goes and what it thinks.
By focusing on my breath, I turned my attention back to the garden and quickly completed the remaining work. I realized that I now wished to turn my full awareness to visiting Kris. Garden tools returned to their shelves in the garage, I jumped into the shower, into my clothes, and then into my car for the short drive to the care facility. I try to visit her every other day and to share stories and long gazes into her eyes if she is awake. The only way communication happens with her now is through her eyes: rapid eye blinks for yes and tightly shut eyes for no. Though diagnosed with Parkinson’s seven years ago, medical professionals say that people don’t die from it – they pass with it. Her voice’s volume barely had registered above a whisper for the last year or so; the seizures she recently experienced stilled it entirely.
Her senses remain sharp, particularly those of sight and hearing. When I read her the Biblical story of Naomi and Ruth much beloved by her – Kris made it part of her life’s work to stand up for women and their rights - she grasped every word. When I told her that our friendship reminded me of Ruth and Naomi, her sharp ears picked up every word. Her eyes leaked tears, and I wiped them from her beautiful thin face, smooth as a baby’s now. Ever the psychologist that was her life’s work “before”, she processes emotions unabashedly, letting them be absorbed by her body as feelings with her full attention on them so they release. During our visits, I remind her of our rich shared memories: miles and miles and miles of walks and intimate talks; the joys and challenges of raising two rambunctious and kind sons who became close friends in childhood and who had to navigate the pressure and sometimes toxicity of the culture; how blessed we feel at having daughters, too; the joys and drags of long marriages; the loss of our parents, and robust discussions of spirituality and psychology.
In her cheerful, quiet room, I sit as close to Kris’ hospital bed as possible, my hand on her bony shoulder, and turn my full attention to her. Even as she sleeps, I resist the phone, really a microcomputer now that my work email and work telephone app link to it. I ignore them and the incessant and insistent calendar feature on it that continually seeks to add more meetings, more events, more social engagements. To be fully conscious and attentive to her in those series of present moments soothes us both. This experience makes me ever-more aware of the difference between a well-lived life and one that is overpacked, over committed, and over wrought.
Leaving her one afternoon, I stepped to the foot of her bed to give her sister, whom I have had the privilege of knowing for years, an embrace. Turning back to face Kris, whose eyes were fixed on me, I spontaneously raised my right fingers to my lips, opened my palm, and blew her a kiss. To our great surprise given that she had not been able to move at all for a few days, she slowly withdrew her long, thin, and now-bony fingers to her own lips in a slow-motion and ethereal movement reminiscent of ET. By return breath, she sent her kiss airborne to me.
How great the gift of friendship is. How sweet the human connection can be if only we allow it. How precious it is to be in the present moment.
Earlier this month, I led a training in Yoga Nidra. My heart cracked open. Emotions and feelings flowed. What a gift for us all, students and teachers alike. In sharing our inner life and our hearts’ deepest longings, we find equality.
Hey, God, are you there? It’s me, Marcia. Usually, as I sit on my cushion, I listen for and to you. As you know, sometimes, I call you God, other times Universe. Other times, Goddess. In a long life with you, I learned you hear and answer to many names. I know you’re there.
Today, I pay tribute to a man who learned to live in “the world of and”, who embraced change, a meaningful space in the philosophy of yoga, particularly in the therapeutic approach of Yoga Nidra, and in Buddhist psychology.
At this time of the year, we often feel tender: tender toward other people, tender toward the natural world and all its creatures, tender toward life itself, tender perhaps even toward ourselves. Images both sweet, like a dog and cat sleeping together, and horrifying, like the pain and suffering borne by innocent civilians on both sides of a war, elicit tender thoughts.
The headline for this soul-baring sounds faintly geopolitical and sinister. It’s as though Hercule Poirot stands on deck to solve a great mystery. This situation requires no famous investigator, however. What is unfolding is the normal flow of the sweet river of life and a happy, joyous bend in it. I can’t wait to tell you this long-held secret.
This thought plagues me in a time of impersonality. We sit in offices in our private homes, alone or on endless Zoom meetings that I overhear from my home’s lower level when my children or friends stay over. Oh, yes, they see faces. The sharing, though, is all business…
When the hammer fell, or more accurately the surgeon’s scalpel, and a non-life-threatening complication ensued along with an extended rest at-home, legs-elevated time, I faced down this question: As I age, how will I fill my time and engage my mind and body?
With Barbie, there emerged a more complicated relationship. She didn’t look like anything I witnessed in the strong flesh-and-blood women around me, and it’s only by some miracle that I didn’t start to body-shame myself. I know many others did in the years before we talked about concepts like the male gaze and how it distorts the way women view themselves. This sets impossible standards that maim and warp and cause real illnesses in both men and women and their relationships, however they come together. Especially in the first decade of Barbie’s existence, her white, white world left out everyone else, which matched reality, until the great movements of the late ‘60s and ‘70s caused Mattel, Barbie’s corporate owner, to succumb to the pressure to “show dolls more like me and my daughter”. I’ll get back to that in a minute.
I want to be as truthful with you as I am able. Acknowledging my anger, exploring its roots, and deciding where and when to act feels good…
I’m happy. Right now, I can’t believe how often I am happy. The best news? I no longer wonder how long this joy will last or how to extend it. I’ve come to see that when I’m happy, I can just be in that happy place for however long it lasts.
The lingering effects of this concussion force the Energizer Bunny to slow down and remind me of my True Self which aways craved quiet and stillness. I nap, listen to books, and more deeply embrace internal practices that support my healing.
I walked out the front door of my Florida home, stepping into a sky-blue-bright day blazing with heat, only to find a chicken turtle clinging to the edge of my paver-patterned driveway. As I approached, thinking how much it looked like a painted turtle our children once raised, it appeared more lethargic than frightened.
Of all the paired human emotions, love and loss cause the most challenge for me. As an only child raised and nurtured in the embrace of two warm and closely knit families, I dreaded the passage of time with its inevitable march toward separation caused by death….
Inner wars and conflicts never pass without struggle. Whether the focus is on love, relationship, food, exercise, money, or anything else, once the inner struggle begins, we easily bog down, mired in the mud of indecision and inaction. Ask me: I’m expert on this one.
Trusting your heart demands not only deep listening but also deep feeling. You cannot think your way to discovering your heart’s deepest longing. You must hear and feel it and then give it voice, clearly and compassionately….
I started to examine how the repetitive, mundane tasks of life – whether working on the farm with all it entailed or, later, attending to my own home with its demands for care and payments – felt in my body. The more I focused on the chore, the more aware I became of the emotions and sensations emerging.
This is a song of life. Like most songs, and all stories of life, it contains both joy and sadness, and it begins like this.
The yoga Vedic teaching to speak the sweet truth – Satyaṃ brūyāt priyaṃ brūyāt in Sanskrit – invites us to use exquisite subtlety in communicating the truth which virtually demands that we pause before speaking. The teaching goes on:
Floating when depleted proves to be a strong Rx, a natural one, too. You don’t need to be on an ocean- or river-bound ship to do it, either. Floating, I’ve come to realize, comes in many versions and leads to a more- restive state of mind…
In her cheerful, quiet room, I sit as close to her hospital bed as possible, my hand on her bony shoulder, and turn my full attention to her. Even as she sleeps, I resist the phone….
All day long, I’d roamed the combative realm of divided attention: sneaking in an answer to a text or two while in Zoom meetings; answering phone calls from colleagues and friends while writing emails or editing articles, and cramming some non-descript food into my hungry body while reading business documents. I felt depleted and alienated. Split attention takes a toll on us as we now well know, giving lie to decades of training people how to multi-task.
There comes the time when we take deep stock of our lives. If we’re living a life grounded in the present and in the body, we will have taken stock frequently throughout the entire arc of our lives. What does it mean to take deep stock? When do we know it’s time to do so? How do we do it?
Sweating often communicates the state of our emotional well-being. How many times has a friend, partner, child, spouse said to you, “I broke out into a cold sweat”? How many times have you experienced the cold sweats yourself?
The feeling of happiness moved throughout my body like liquid gold, starting at my heart center. I understood what happiness feels like for me. Because I stayed present the thought was no longer just a thought – it morphed into a physical sensation….
When grief comes calling, it rarely arrives alone. Sometimes guilt accompanies it. It’s complicated and many-layered. Sometimes relief does – the innate gratitude that the loved one no longer suffers – and inadvertently triggers more guilt….
It wasn’t always easy to recognize positive outcomes in the age of the pandemic, given the brain’s preference for negative thinking. Especially in the darkest days our community faced together, all I focused on was absorbing the shock of the “unseen enemy” and its relentless assault…
My mother’s younger brother died a few weeks ago at age 88. One minute he sat chatting from his chair with his daughter, seeing her on Facetime, and the next he slumped over quietly. He left this world on the long, last exhale in an instant without noticeable stress or pain. In what certainly stands as a sign of these times, my cousin virtually witnessed her father passing, his energy moving from one dimension to the next in full digital view.
Grief arrives for many reasons. We often identify the death of a partner, spouse, friend, child, parent, or colleague as the deepest form of grief – and rightfully so. We’ve witnessed the pain of this kind of grief etched on survivors’ faces.