Mother’s Day 2025

          

There are many kinds of mothers, many kinds of children and many kinds of families.  There are special folks who become very much like substitute mothers. And of course there are grandmothers!  Where would be without them? This is the day set aside for remembering them all.

My mother, pictured above, born in 1902 lived one month short of 100 years. As a man now 90 years on the path of life, I have had my share of experiences to which I can attach memories of the good times, the growing pains and the effort I put into my relationship with my mom. One thing I believe I understand is that for all the influence she had on my development, who I am is not her responsibility. To the extent that I have been open to learning from my life as her son, it has been possible to meet many of her hopes and expectations for whom I would become. In the final analysis, however, the choices have been mine to make for the better or the worse.

I honor my mom with unconditional love, appreciation for her efforts to provide the best base for living that she could and even forgiveness for any assumed faults I believe she may have had.

I hope you can find a special place in your heart to honor the best your mother had to offer you. For some that may be difficult. For real growth, however, it is important to recognize what we can gain from her that aids us along our path. “Love one another” was not for the simple relationships. It is for all relationships.

 

Folding Clothes and Taking Naps

It seems strange that it takes some of us eighty-seven years to understand more fully what is important in life.

So often my “great insights (?)” come as I am folding clothes after my regular Sunday morning wash, or perhaps just I am drifting into the twilight of my daily nap. Sometimes they come deep in the night dreams (that seem so prescient at the time) but which, upon waking too often are gone!

No matter. What is important is that those insights come at all. The point is made whether remembered later or not. Frustration that sometimes follows comes as one might think they are more important (for others to share) than is actually true. Perhaps they really are only for my benefit.

I am a most fortunate living person. I have reached a certain age and still have enough of my faculties to recognize the importance of being alive. Fleeting memories reassure me that I have “been there, done that” in so many ways. I am so grateful! I have blessings beyond any that I have a right to experience. I can only suppose that somewhere along the path I have done a few things in a manner that has resulted in more good than ill.

So, I will keep “Folding Clothes and Taking Naps!” I am so grateful!

--Originally posted on Facebook, February 6, 2022

 Some Thoughts for A Sunday in January

inosculation

noun

1        The union of two vessels of an animal body by openings into each other, so as to permit the passage of a fluid; anastomosis.

2        Hence Some analogous union or relation; a running together; junction: as, in botany, the inosculation of the veins of a leaf, or of a scion with the stock in grafting.

3        The junction or connection of vessels, channels, or passages, so that their contents pass from one to the other; union by mouths or ducts; anastomosis; intercommunication.

The Century Dictionary.

 This word, Inosculation, was new to me as my eyes came across it.  At least, I do not remember encountering it before.  The photograph that followed in the article[1] I was reading was so similar to one of my own, taken when my son and I were seriously trimming a greatly overgrown, out of control rhododendron in my yard. I had never seen a living connection like this between plants or trees.

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[1]  https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/01/16/elie-wiesel-brothers-keeper/?mc_cid=c94bb3bf5f&mc_eid=b032a5ca74

The article by one of my favorite writers/collectors of meaningful ideas, Maria Popova, shared some thoughts from Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Noble Peace Prize laureate.  He was discussing the importance of our interconnectedness, person to person and with the Universe as a whole.  One such thought:

“I believe if people talk, and they talk sincerely, with the same respect that one owes to a close friend or to God, something will come out of that, something good. I would call it presence.   […] I would like my students to be presence whenever people need a human presence. […]  If there is a governing precept in my life, it is that: If somebody needs me, I must be there.”

Ms. Popova frames it this way:

“Whenever we quiet the voices of so-called civilization — the voices of selfing and hard-edged individualism — that sense of the interconnectedness of life and of lives becomes audible.”

So much is conjured in my mind when thinking and feeling  presence.  Through the years I have felt in and out of presence often.  In times of meditation and teaching and writing about being here now it has been easier and more natural to feel connected with others.  When I have felt overwhelmed by the constant barrage of information, mostly about how bad things are, I drifted out of presence and into to hubbub of just making it to the next opportunity to regain peace of mind and the remembrance of the many friends who have always been there for me.  I begin to recapture the connectedness felt when I was truly able to be there for others.

Maria Popova points out that the greatest challenge facing us all, however, is how to be with each other’s suffering. In consonance with the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s insight that “when you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence,” 

To all who have been there for me, thank you!  For those whose life I may have touched with presence, I am so grateful to have been there and to remain there inosculated in sharing the Life Force of All That Is!

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[1]  https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/01/16/elie-wiesel-brothers-keeper/?mc_cid=c94bb3bf5f&mc_eid=b032a5ca74

 

Thoughts

I wish that I could write as I think I once did.  At least I believe I wrote moderately well. 

My heart has much to say, but the part of me that put words and phrases together, the brain, does not perform its task quite as fluently these days. 

For the most part, since it is my heart that desires to speak, it usually centers on some aspect of love.  That feels like an irony for me.  I have a very deep sense of love and caring, yet I realize that I often do not let it show by the way I act.  Indeed, I realize a selfishness in my love.  It is too often, somewhat unconsciously, directed toward my own interests.  How I care for others is not diminished, yet because my actions often fall short of adequate expression, I feel I am in fact leaving them alone and uncared for.

These thoughts tumbled from my heart just now as I was reading Maria Popova’s latest post in her newsletter, “Brain Pickings.” The article shared thoughts from poet/philosopher David Whyte about friendship, love and heartbreak. [1] While most of us tend to view these as separate feelings, he brings them together as one pathway in life. Heartbreak seems the most devastating of the three elements.  So much pain oozes from it for those immersed in it.

Ms. Popova introduces Whyte’s thoughts thusly:

“Stripped of the unnecessary negative judgments we impose upon it, heartbreak is simply a fathometer for the depth of our desire — for a person, for an accomplishment, for belonging to the world and its various strata of satisfaction. Whyte captures this elegantly:”

Realizing its inescapable nature, we can see heartbreak not as the end of the road or the cessation of hope but as the close embrace of the essence of what we have wanted or are about to lose.

[…]

Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something and someone that has been with us all along, asking us to be ready for the ultimate letting go.

It would seem that to love we are inviting heartbreak, this disappointment and frustration that comes when we feel unfulfilled, when we appear to lose what we once had.  How can we reconcile this apparent loss?  For me, my experience of loss is considering the “what ifs” of life.  What if I had only done this?  What if I had not acted this way? What if I had chosen differently? What if I loved regardless of eventual outcomes?

I have not yet answered the questions.  I am certain there are possible answers, solutions, ways to act.

What if I could write as I once did?

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[1] https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/04/29/david-whyte-consolations-words/?mc_cid=1047338dc7&mc_eid=b032a5ca74

Living Without Feeling

As I read an email newsletter centered on powerful writings by authors daring to deal with life's most complex issues, I could not help but think how important feelings are to being fully alive. [1]

Among several topics in the current article was one focused upon Elizabeth Gilbert writing about “Love, Loss, and How to Move Through Grief As Grief Moves Through You."  Who has not experienced grief at some point in their life?  Sometimes, many of us find ourselves re-experiencing moments of grief over a loss that occurred a long time ago.  This happened for me as I read along.  I first thought about my daughter, Jennifer, and her loss of her mother almost two years ago.  The pain still runs deep for her due to the closeness of their relationship.  My thoughts turned to the passing of my mother, an experience that is as clear to me in this moment as it was in 2002.

My mind found itself considering what life must be like for those who appear to have no feelings, people who seem to coast along living in the moment without regard to a history of connections or a future of discovery.  Several people I know, as far as I can tell, would fit this description.  They are not bad people because they do not seem to feel things as I do.  Yet I feel they have a different type of loss, a life not quite as colorful as it might be.  Understand, I am not saying that sadness is required for us to have color in our lives.  It is, however, important to realize the strengths and character that are built by our ability to face loss in such a way as to allow moving through it with grace and depth of meaning.  In short, if we are feeling loss it is because whatever, whoever has been “lost” was and is important to us.

In this article Joan Didion was quoted as saying, “Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be." Gilbert reflects on the death of her partner, Rayya Elias . . . the love of her life.

“Grief… happens upon you, it’s bigger than you. There is a humility that you have to step into, where you surrender to being moved through the landscape of grief by grief itself. And it has its own timeframe, it has its own itinerary with you, it has its own power over you, and it will come when it comes. And when it comes, it’s a bow-down. It’s a carve-out. And it comes when it wants to, and it carves you out — it comes in the middle of the night, comes in the middle of the day, comes in the middle of a meeting, comes in the middle of a meal. It arrives — it’s this tremendously forceful arrival and it cannot be resisted without you suffering more… The posture that you take is you hit your knees in absolute humility and you let it rock you until it is done with you. And it will be done with you, eventually. And when it is done, it will leave. But to stiffen, to resist, and to fight it is to hurt yourself.”

When my father passed in 1981 the news arrived by telephone while my son and daughter and I were having dinner with a friend in Denver.  Loss comes in its own time.  There really is no being ready for it.  Perhaps that reason above all is why it is so important that we allow ourselves to be feeling individuals.  Feeling allows us to be resilient and able to bend in the winds of stress and change.

Gilbert continues, 

“There’s this tremendous psychological and spiritual challenge to relax in the awesome power of it until it has gone through you. Grief is a full-body experience. It takes over your entire body — it’s not a disease of the mind. It’s something that impacts you at the physical level… I feel that it has a tremendous relationship to love: First of all, as they say, it’s the price you pay for love. But, secondly, in the moments of my life when I have fallen in love, I have just as little power over it as I do in grief. There are certain things that happen to you as a human being that you cannot control or command, that will come to you at really inconvenient times, and where you have to bow in the human humility to the fact that there’s something running through you that’s bigger than you.”

Finally, a thought about people who may consider it a weakness to express feelings.  Dads used to teach their sons, “Men don’t cry.”  Hopefully, that is not being taught any longer.  Our emotions are not always accompanied by tears, but when they are, it may be that extra step we allow ourselves that frees us to relax into a more satisfying understanding of the love that embraces what appears to be lost.  Living without feeling is not really living at all.

I am always glad to receive my Sunday digest of “Brain Pickings,” edited by Maria Popova.  Each week there is something to take me more deeply into my understanding of self.  Check it out after reading the footnoted post. [2]

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[1] https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/10/17/elizabeth-gilbert-ted-podcast-love-loss/?mc_cid=a95d120d89&mc_eid=b032a5ca74

[2] https://www.brainpickings.org