Sherry L Huckabee

Welcome to the Lyceum Gardens!

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Long ago when things were oh so different, and probably very much the same, Aristotle began a school of higher learning, a Lyceum.  In the mornings he would walk through the gardens with his senior students discussing life and philosophy.  This is my Lyceum Gardens, a place where I share my thoughts on life, mankind, self, and culture, and, hopefully, hear yours.  Comments are not only welcome, but deeply appreciated. 

Enjoy your stroll through the gardens. It is my hope that the pictures and stories carry you to far away lands, that the thoughts get you thinking, and that the feelings so openly shared touch your soul. 

Love and light,

Sherry

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(All writing and photos on this site are protected by copyright laws.  If you wish to use anything from this site, please contact me via the email link to the right.)

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New Year, New Experiences

Chanting has called my curiosity for awhile so when I saw the New Year’s Day group sun salutation hour followed by chanting at one of the yoga centers here, I decided to go. The Sun Salutation (or 'Surya Namaskar') is an old friend from many years of practicing yoga (and one I haven't visited nearly enough!). It is a flowing series of twelve individual postures, each movement coordinated with the breath, inhaling when extending or stretching, exhaling when contracting. In India it is practiced as a morning prayer; the twelve rounds of the twelve-posture salutation corresponding to the phases of the sun, reflecting the path of the sun across the sky and connecting practitioners with the cosmic flow of life. The postures themselves encourage strength and flexibility, stimulating the heart, lungs, blood flow, and organs and increasing physical vitality. The periods in my life when I have made time for a devoted morning practice have been, without exception, the most joyous and peaceful times of the last decade. It seemed the perfect beginning of the New Year to dedicate an hour to greeting the sun, the day, the year in salutation.

I had not done a group salutation practice before and found it incredibly stimulating. Rather than the traditional single mat practice, we crossed two mats, one on top of the other, to create a cross. We then did salutations in rotation, beginning at the top of the cross, completing the salutation, then stepping to the top of the mat to our right, then to the next. Four salutations clockwise, then four counter-clockwise. It was amazing, a dance that somehow invigorated rather than exhausted you. The music. The power of the group. The energy of a New Year. The instructor’s calm and light voice calling out the steps and directions so you didn’t have to think; you just immersed in the movement, the body, the flow. Good stuff.

There is a video demonstration of Surya Namaskar here and another article here if you would like to try it on your own, though I always recommend new practitioners find a studio where the wisdom of the instructor and energy of the group can help guide you.

There was a quick break and then a smaller class rejoined for the chanting. The instructor had chosen the Gayatri Mantra - considered the second most sacred of all mantras after Om. I have heard the Gayatri Mantra several times but had never learned the words to it. Most of the little exposure I have had to chanting has been thanks to Deva Premal. She has made a very successful singing career with her beautiful, angelic interpretations of Sanskrit mantras and now travels the world performing with her husband, Miten. I was fortunate to see them perform here in Dallas shortly after I arrived and would highly recommend catching a show if you ever have the chance. It is a soul-rendering experience. (www.devapremalmiten.com)

So we began. Sitting on mats, facing the window and the sun beyond, legs comfortably crossed, hands resting on knees. A rolled blanket to sit on will allow the knees and hips to open more fully and comfortably. We started with three 'Om's (pronounced more or less like 'home' but without the 'h'). 'Om' - is the sacred syllable of the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist religions, signifying all manifest and unmanifest aspects of God, all forms of time, past, present, and future, all that is abstract, all that is tangible, all that is, and all that isn’t. They say creation itself was set in motion by the vibration of 'Om'. If you have never “Om”ed, it is an experience worth having - especially in a group.

While it is most commonly written “OM,” the syllable is actually made up of three sounds A (as in ‘accounting’), which represents the waking state. U (as in ‘would’), which represents the dream state of consciousness that lies between waking and deep sleep. And finally M (as in “sum”), which represents deep sleep. Each “Om” is followed by silence which represents the fourth state known as “Turiya,” the state of perfect bliss when the individual self recognizes its identity with the supreme.

Some people incorporate the concept of Chakras into their Om practice. Beginning the sound deep in their pelvic floor, they mentally follow it up through the sacrum into the belly, up through the heart chakra, the throat, into the third eye, and out through the crown of the head to join the infinite. I’ve found the strength of the vibration actually changes as it passes through these areas and that I can “hear” when one area is more blocked than the others.

While people like Deva Premal can chant lovely sopranic Om’s, I find my truest expression to be a deep vibrational sound from near the bottom of my voice range. If you start at your highest pitch, holding one long sustained note, then descend down to your lowest range, then ascend again, you’ll note a place where the vibration of the voice is strongest. The vibration disappears at the upper and lower end of the voice range. Mine is actually about 2/3rds down my range. I presume it is different for everyone.

I remember the first time I 'Om'd outside a group that allowed me to hide my voice in the mix of others. I was cooking dinner with a wonderful spirit I had met in California and when we sat down to eat he asked if we could Om before eating. It is the Hindu/Buddhist equivalent of praying really, just less words. Of course being on a 'date,' I wanted my voice to be all pretty and soft so I tried to Om in perfect sopranic harmony. My voice cracked and wavered with more wind than wow to it. He smiled, very gently, as enlightened souls can, pressed his hand to my heart, and said simply "try it from here." I was shocked by the sound that came out of me - this deep, solid, vibrational power. I had no idea that sound was even in me. He smiled, nodding at me to try again. This time I sustained it and he joined in with his own. I realized then you can't "try" to Om in harmony. The Om seeks itself. That is the power I find in 'Om'ing with a group. It is as if I am following this powerful life-ness within me into one-ness with all.

Those of you who know me well, know I am very timid about my singing voice. It is one of my last un-faced fears to stand in front of an audience and sing. Those of you who know me well also know I'm not the least bit timid about my speaking, counseling, or debating voice. So it is an interesting contradiction for me this voice that is in so many ways me, my strength, my expression, my gift, my power and, at the same time, is a source of fear, of weakness, of inability. 'Om'ing takes me beyond both of these - the power is not a power of ego, as my speaking voice is, it is the power of all that can be, and the trembling is not a weakness of ego, or insecurity, but a reaching for that power. Somewhere in all that, I find the greatness within me and me within the greatness that surrounds me.

With the last vibration of Om settling in the room, the yogi began the Gayatri Mantra. "Om bhur bvah svah. Tat savitur vrenyam. Bhurgo devaysa dimahi. Dihyo yo nah pracodayat." (Audio links: Deva Premal’s interpretation; traditional chant.) We had cheat sheets if we needed or wanted them. Unfortunately too often, my need to be right is stronger than my need to experience, but there is something special about letting the words pick you up one by one rather than trying to pick them up.

Somewhere around twenty minutes we seemed to hit a groove. The words had settled in our souls. The room was filled with radiating energy. We knew where we had come from and where we were going and so were able to just sit in the fullness of where we were. Time began to hover. Students began to rock in time to the rhythm and at the same time disappear into the rhythm of the world. Oneness. Of voice, of mind, of spirit.

I decided that day I would undertake a mantra mediation practice. After all it is a New Year, what a great time for New Beginnings. I'll let you know how it goes. Namaste....

Best Friends

This is a must watch!!

Watch CBS Videos Online

New Year's Slideshow

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Memories of years past to honor the year to come.

New Year Wishes

A Purpose-full Christmas

Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday were a flurry of activity – shopping with my son, taking care of my granddad, writing Christmas cards, making fudge for my favorite Aunt Kay, sending packages to my dearest friends, putting together little gifts for the hard working folks at the lab.  It has been years since I “did” Christmas in the states and I thoroughly enjoyed getting wrapped up in the charged rush of it all.  The days culminated in a race to the airport to pick up my wonderful, silly, beautiful, amazingly grounded daughter, April.  She has been a joy to my heart since I met her little freckle face when she was eight.  Hard to believe at 26 she has called me “Mom” for the better part of twenty years now!  I watched her blossom from a little girl into a teenager, spiral through her challenged teenage years into a confused young adult and suddenly transform into a responsible, together young lady.  I could not be more proud of her. 

            Patrick arrived last week and it has been the best mother/son visit we’ve had in years.  We’ve struggled these last years as I’ve encouraged him on his path as an adult by firmly following my own.  We were so close when he was young.  It was necessary, though terribly painful for us both, to cut the apron strings that bound us.  To see us slowly making our way back to that bond as adults, able to give and receive advice to each other, to really hear one another, to play, and share, and support is the greatest Christmas gift I could have.  There have been many ‘thank you’ moments this week.  I loved the random “thanks Mom for letting me blast my music all hours of the night when I was a teenager” and the night he stopped in the middle of Guitar Hero and came to where I was just to give me a hug.  The best was driving down the street as he talked about the woman he is thinking of marrying and the children he wants to have.  “It scares me,” he said.  “Being a parent is so hard.  I only hope I will be as good a parent to them as you were to me.”  Wow….

            April and I raced back from the airport to pick up Patrick who was returning from his Christmas shopping trip with his Gommy (my Mom).  After a quick fashion show (damn the boy can dress!), we headed out on a wild-goose chase for Walmart.  We arrived after over an hour of chasing our tails, a faulty GPS, and traffic, to discover they did not close at 8pm like we thought but at 6pm!  This was made abundantly clear by the repeated messages every minute from 5:15 onward that they would be closing at 6pm PROMPTLY and to take all purchases to the front.  Like any repetition, the announcements created a frenzy; sad for a store that was just responsible for the trampling death of an employee.  It will be the last time I shop at Walmart.  We made the best of it though, as we always do.

            There were three little Christmas trees hanging in the nursery.  Sad little things with big bald spots and lopsided branches.  If Christmas trees have feelings, that little guy must have been so happy when we pointed to him and said we wanted to take him home.  Imagine your whole life, being seeded, growing, year after year, intended for one purpose, to bring a little Christmas joy to some home somewhere, and spending the last day of your “life” locked in a Walmart while the world celebrated around you and then tossed out the next day, your only purpose in life never fulfilled.  Maybe Christmas trees don’t think of such things, but I wonder how many people do as they face the final closing….

            We put our tree aside and frolicked toward the Christmas decorations, making jokes, playing with things, and basically being the crazy family we cornered the market on years ago.  The years the five of us were together (Patrick, April, Erika, Mike, and me) were some of the best years of my life. We made fun out of everything – clapping games and silly walks while standing in lines at the amusement parks, road games and singalongs on never-ending road trips, even chore-day was filled with laughter and games and playing.   There we were, goofing off in the aisles at Walmart while the world panicked around us, playing with Christmas decorations and play-fighting over which of the fancy “theme” lights to take home.  We threw compromise out the window and took the pinecones bells AND present boxes.  We ran to grab some last minute presents for Erika’s little girls and in twenty minutes were standing in line with decorations galore for our little $5 Charlie Brown tree.   

           

Dinner was next at our favorite restaurant as we walked down memory lane recalling celebrations there in the past; all giggling in the memory of Erika’s 13^th birthday there when we made her laugh so hard she spit Dr. Pepper out her nose!  Sparking the “dueling waterfalls” became the objective of all silly days.  Stuffed with Houston’s Hawaiian Steak (to die for!), we took the long way home to look at Christmas lights. 

On came the Christmas music when we got home and out came the wrapping paper.  It was such a simple little thing really, standing there with your kids wrapping presents, and yet so powerful in some way.  The fullness of the circle of life descended on me as we passed the tape and scissors back and forth.  Christmas day wasn’t something I “made” happen for them anymore, I didn’t have to tuck them in their rooms while I raced to create Christmas morning before they awoke. We were all adults now, working together to create the Christmas experience for the little ones who would arrive in the morning.  It was a strange and wonderful and welcome changing of the tides.

            We finished wrapping and attacked the tree.  Almost literally, poor thing.  When we realized the “shatter proof” ornaments were shatter proof because they were made of rubber, we decided to throw them into the branches instead of hanging them!  Our little tree may have been regretting its luck at coming home with this crazy little family.  THEN we discovered in our play-fighting over the theme lights we FORGOT to buy real lights!  All we had were a strand of bells, pinecones, and presents, none of which were long enough to circle the tree once!  We snaked them up and down the front, and then collapsed into fits of laughter – it was, without doubt, the silliest looking tree you have ever seen!  THEN we pulled out the star.  By this time all sanity had left the building.  April stuck the star on top, bending the tip so that the star actually pointed to the corner so that she could plug it in to the extension cord, leaving a hub of plugs suspended in the air as the most hideous blue grey light emanated from the star.  I don’t know about the kids, but I laughed so hard I almost peed my pants.  Really.  We decided perhaps it was best to unplug the ugly star, though the light of that laughter will shine forever.  We exchanged our presents to each other, chatted awhile, then gave our hugs goodnight and though for just a moment I missed propping the pens against their door that kept them from sneaking down in the night to peak at their presents, I couldn’t help but revel in the joy of sharing so much with them as adults. 

Erika, her husband Nick, and her girls, Angel (9) and Brianna (4), arrived in the morning.  Yes, for those of you who don’t know that makes me a grandmother in an adopted, ‘ex-step’ sort of way.  What joy to spend Christmas with little ones again!  Watching them rip off the paper together on the presents they shared and show each other the ones they got individually.  They are great sisters, helpful and loving to each other and terrific playmates, a testament to Erika’s skills as a mom.  She really is a great mom - laid back but fully involved, never too pushing but always present.  They struggle to make ends meet to keep her a stay at home mom and I must say she handles it with more grace and ease than any young lady I know, certainly more than I did.  She has three moms – her biological mom, me, and her dad’s current wife.  Somehow I think she took the best parts of all of us and mixed them together to become a better mom than any of us. 

The morning passed by quickly, with presents and laughter and reliving stories from our times together.  It was the first time the three kids shared Christmas morning since Mike and I divorced almost 13 years ago.  As I stood in the kitchen watching the three of them laughing across the dining room table while Nick put pigtails in his little girl’s hair in the living room and Angel played with the video-maker I gave them, life, for a moment, felt full and rich and good.  I’ve done many, many things in this short little life of mine but nothing has ever given me more joy or made me more proud than being a mom.  

What a wonderful feeling, the arms of those little girls in a tight hug around my neck when it was time to go, waving goodbye in the warm winter sun as “the troops” headed off to their dad’s.  A few hours later, as I ate dinner and exchanged presents with my own parents, my son passed the phone to Mike, my ex-husband.  I knew how much he wanted to cook for the kids and had insisted they spend Christmas dinner and the day there. Choking back tears, he thanked me for bringing them all together this Christmas and for all that I had ever done and been, as a mom to his girls, as a friend to him, as a person in this world.  I went home alone Christmas night, and while there is sorrow in an alone-ness I can never seem to escape, the echo of laughter rises from the night before and I know that I have lived and loved well.  As I sit here on the couch, typing before our little lopsided, half-lit Christmas tree it occurs to me that not only has it served its life’s purpose, but perhaps, in some small way, so have I. 

Merry Christmas to all, and may you not only find the blessings you long for but recognize the blessings you have. 

 

Merry Christmas 2008!

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Grace and Grit

The alarm pierces the silence, startling me.  It is hard to believe just 11 days ago, I jumped up in panic when three seconds passed without an alarm, certain my grandfather had flat lined.  It took me a moment to find my bearings and realize silence meant his heart was okay for those three seconds, it was all those other moments, the incessant beeps and squawks that said all is not fine.  Funny how frequency determines normalcy and bad can seem good when it is consistent.  

 

That was the day the doctor told us my grandfather was going to die.  Well, he tried to tell us.  We were standing by my grandfather’s bedside and my mother almost hit the little cocky SOB upside the head for trying to say that in front of my granddad. He was eager to tell us, like he’d gotten an A in Breaking-Down-Families 101 and wanted to prove how cool he could be when he told a family their loved one wasn’t going to make it.  We scuttled out into the hallway, insisting any conversation be carried on out there. 

 

I can’t say whether he wanted to prove to us that he didn’t do any wrong talking in front of the shriveled up dying skin of a man in the bed beside us or if he realized maybe he was out of line and wanted to prove his A in Bedside-Manner-second-term, but as we left the room he turned to address my granddad.  “I see you’re a Cowboys Fan, Mr. George”  (guess he gets points for noting the obvious since my granddad had his Cowboys hat firmly pulled over the wires and electrodes attached to his head).  “Well, we’re just gonna have to talk about that when you get to feeling better.  I’m a Giants fan myself.” 

 

What I would have given to have been  on the other side of the bed where I could see the expression on that doctor’s face when my granddad went to sit up and give the doc a piece of his mind!  Giants indeed!  Keep in mind, twelve hours earlier my granddad was dead on the table, code blue, brought back with the paddles.  He had been on what the nurses nicknamed the “milk of amnesia” for the intervening twelve hours, but death and drugs sure wouldn’t stop him from putting some cocky little shit in his place when necessary, especially if he was insulting the Cowboys! 

 

The doctor stepped out of the room, clearly flustered that my granddad was as with it as he obviously was.  He then continued to tell us what he had started to say before.  Granddad wasn’t going to make it.  Three hours later he went code blue again.  They rushed us all out of the room as half the hospital blue pants poured in.  We held each other outside the glass windows - at worst certain, at best fearful, that this was it.  And then, before a single paddle was touched, Granddad’s heart got itself under control. 

 

Two days later we took him off life support.  And a day later off the oxygen that had replaced it.  With no more tube down his throat, he got off the milk of amnesia.  They put in a temporary pacemaker while we waited and prayed for the fluid in his lungs to clear and the fever to go away.   By day 11 he was breathing on his own, sleeping through the nights, flirting with the nurses, and keeping everybody in stitches.  Monday they put in the pace maker. Tomorrow he will go to a rehabilitation to get his strength back in his legs.  He’ll be home in time for his 89^th birthday. I guess we showed that cocky little doctor a thing or two about good living and stubborn spirits!

 

My mother and I have kept a 24 hour vigil these last 17 days, passing the relay between us.  I would sit at my grandfather’s bedside for 24 hours while she got some sleep and worked at the office then she would take bedside duty while I did the same.  Hospital vigils can make you a bit crazy – they call it ICU psychosis.  Trying to keep together a struggling business that demands both of us 16 hours a day at the same time didn’t make it easier.  But what an amazing 17 days those were - seeing cousins I hadn’t seen in years, coming to know my grandfather in a way I never have before, standing by my mom, being a family. 

 

I never thought of us as that tight-nit of a family.  My grandparents were farmers and when my mother left their small town for the big city, she began a very different life from her brother who remained a good ol’ country boy.  I spent many holidays with my grandparents, fascinated by my cousins who roped cows and rode horses and worked the fields.  It was such a different life from anything I knew and I dare say a great deal of my solidness comes from that bit of country in my blood and soul. 

 

My cousins and I haven’t kept that close in touch – our worlds are, well, worlds apart.  We went on with our lives, raised our children most of whom have now had children of their own.  There are rifts in the family and issues that some picture in my mind of a “good family” didn’t include.  But boy I’ll tell you, when push came to shove, we were all there, standing by each other and the man who we all owe our lives to, literally.  One of the nurses stopped my mother in the hall one night and told her what a beautiful family we were.  “Unfortunately, we don’t see a lot of good families around here,” she said.  “I go home every night and say my prayers for Mr. George that he will get better and share many more years with you all.”  Well her prayers and ours must have found a voice in heaven. 

 

You know I would have never found the “time” in life to go spend two weeks with my Granddad.  Only a tragedy could slow any of us down enough to just sit with each other day after day.  And what a beautiful blessing that tragedy has been.  I had no idea my granddad was so witty.  He kept everybody in stitches all the time.  Watching him handle with such impeccable grace being hooked up to machines, poked and prodded, unable to move, depending on everyone for everything was an amazing thing to behold.  He taught me something about grit and grace that I will carry forever.  Seeing the sweet love between him and his girlfriend (my grandmother died 10 years ago just before their 60^th wedding anniversary) and her never wavering presence by his side is a testament to love that can bloom at any time in life.  Listening to his joy in life, even now as his sight is fading and life is running down to the end told me I have much to learn about what living is all about.  

 

We have stories from these weeks that we will tell and laugh about for years, long after my granddad has left us.   And I am left with an appreciation for what a “good family” is – a gathering of people with all their flaws and strengths standing by each other with grace and joy and gratitude for one another and life. 

 

Thank you Granddad, for living through such pain and giving us such joy. 

 

 

 

 

BitterSweet

Vanilla Sky is one of my top ten movies – well worth watching if you never have. One of my favorite lines is the sidekick friend who is always telling Cruise who has the “perfect” life -- “Because without the bitter, baby the sweet ain’t as sweet….”

It is true. This is the most bittersweet time of my life. Learning to open to my pain these last years, to my shadow and dark sides, has brought an experience of joy and gratitude I never could have foreseen. The nights are hard. I miss my baby, my life, my dreams for our love. But I can’t help but acknowledge with tremendous gratitude the blessings of the Universe around me through this time. The day that Hans emailed me he was going to move out of our home, Katy was already on a plane bound for Dallas. The night I was filled with anger and prayed to the heavens to take the anger from me so I could greet him with love when he arrived in Sighisoara for our goodbye, the song I had been unable to inscribe in a book I was leaving for him came on random on my walkman. In that moment, God gathered me in his hands and melted the anger away and it has never returned. The friendship I found with Andrea, Hans’ closest friend, over these last months and her sweet loving support as I dismantled the life I had thought was forever was amazing. Uncanny universal coincidences have brought me to new friends, guides, and coworkers just as incomprehensible timing has returned me to my mother’s home, the city where my oldest daughter and her girls and my best friend live, and the business I first worked for thirty years ago at a time it needed me as much as I needed it.

Mom can’t pay me for the work I’m doing, but she does pay for the groceries and Whole Foods is just around the corner. I haven’t been able to indulge my prosciutto/parmesan addiction since Italy! Avocados and berries are great luxuries and I am thoroughly enjoying the juicer she bought for us. Between yoga and all this financed healthy eating, I’ve lost 15 pounds since I’ve been here. Now that’s a blessing!

The work is challenging but good. I am enjoying it and particularly enjoying my mom’s surprise that I am so competent. Michelle, the young lady I’ve trained in Accounts Receivable is a God-send. Cute as a button, seven months pregnant, and sharp as a tack. I don’t know what I would have done without her and have thoroughly enjoyed working with her. I’ve moved now into Accounts Payable and looking forward to my work ahead with Traci, who is a delight as well. It is good work, fighting to save and strengthen a company that seventy people depend on for their livelihood, especially in these challenging times, and it helps me understand something of what has driven my mother all these years. I treasure the ways that I’ve influenced people through my travels and writing and friendships, but I must say there is a palpable joy to tangibly affecting lives, building the business that people depend on to put food on their tables.

I’ve returned to guides of old and found new ones to help my mind, body, heart, and spirit find the growth that these upside down places in life offer. There are five yoga studios in a three mile radius and I have memberships to three of them. I am thrilled to have a studio practice again and am excitedly looking for a teaching program. There are two Starbucks just five minutes away and I can actually use those Borders coupons I get every week now!  And, at last, I am writing again, much to my delight.

The bond I have found with my mother, living together again for the first time since I left home at 17 to get married, is amazing.  I cherish this time and closeness with her.  It is wonderful too being in the same city with my best friend of thirty years (though I can’t get her out nearly as much as I would like). Katy and my Aunt Kay are just an hour flight to the west, Patrick and April, Jill and all my Charlotte friends just two hours to the east. And with my new iphone. I can call any of them anytime I want! ;-)

The weekends have been packed. My friend from Romania, Florin, came for the weekend and we took my daughter, Erika, her husband, Nick, and their girls, Angelica and Brianna out to Six Flags. What a great day that was! Along with many tears, the weekend with Katy was also filled with smiles, getting up at the crack of dawn for the Plano Balloon Festival, a lovely lunch with my parents, and great wine and gelato! Don has been a good friend, supportive and understanding. My first weekend back from moving, he insisted on a "relaxing weekend" - riding in his plane or on the back of a Harley planes and relaxing at the beach. The tears still came but it was sure nicer crying them to the waves than the Dallas concrete! Not one trip, but two, to North Carolina for performances gave me several wonderful moments with my daughter April and her boyfriend Ben, as well as Jill and Scott. And of course nothing makes me happier than watching my boy on stage. I am so proud of him.

Yeah, the bitter is pretty bitter. The tears come less now, but they still come. The heaviness of loss still sits in my soul. But the sweet is pretty damned sweet. To be surrounded by love in the midst of pain, to know the universe and those who love you support you enough that you can break down in your own grief rather than hide it or avoid it or deny it – that’s pretty powerful stuff. To hurt this badly and feel this loved, not just by the people who love you, but by Creation itself, all at the same time is about the most amazing thing I have ever experienced. It leaves little room for fear, or regret, little room for anything but the very present experience of being alive – bitter and sweet, and beautiful….

Blessings

Oneness

I suspected it long ago. The oneness of all things. I saw the other children, raised in religion, with their unquestioning faith in God, in some higher being, in something that made sense and reason out of what often seemed a senseless and random world. I was so jealous of them, their faith, their belief, their reprieve from the search for meaning that haunted my every movement. I couldn’t get past my thoughts and analysis, my questioning and reasoning; I couldn’t take that “leap of faith” that took them to God’s side. John Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV resonated in my heart and head – how could God grant me reason and then hold it against me if I used it? That made no sense to me, the only way to God was to give up his greatest gift to us, why would God be an Indian Giver?!, thought my hyper-active 12 year old mind. Why would he want us to find him in blindness, that blind leap of faith, rather than in service of the reason and free will he so preciously gave us.

Little did I know then it was my very devotion to thought and analysis, logic and reasoning that over the course of thirty years would lead me to just such a state of faith; an open, yet wide-eyed wonder at the miracle of it all. I had the clues even as a 12 year old know-it-all arguing in Ms. Kuykendall’s class. We were reading the bible as part of English study and discussing why bad things happen in the world. I remember my query to the others – “What would you call a sunny day if every day were sunny?” To their blank faces, or made up words, I responded, quite obnoxiously – “You wouldn’t call it anything! If there was nothing to distinguish it from other days, there would be no need to name it.”

It would be twenty-five more years before I understood the import of that precocious argument. I was reading Ken Wilbur’s “No Boundaries” on a read walk (one of my favorite past-times) when I heard that soft click in the universe – the sound the world makes when something slides into place, when we recognize someone or something that we knew before this body, before this time. In discussing paradox, Wilber analogized the Universe to a sheet of paper, vast blank whiteness (or blackness depending on the piece of paper). Now, he wrote, imagine drawing a curved line across the middle of the page. You have not changed the fundamental nature of the paper; it is still a single, contiguous sheet of paper, with the same nature, the same essence. But now, he pointed out, you can talk about its opposites. There is a left side and a right side, a convex side and concave side. You can now position things on it and discuss their position relative to the line, closer or further, above or below. Depending which side of the line you are on you can think in terms of this side and that side, here and there, us and them. The truth is though, nothing about that paper really changed. One side is not in any real way different from the other side; the only difference is now we can communicate about what was before un-distinguishable and therefore un-discussable.

The thought stopped me in mid-step, cars rushing by on the road beside me in the midst of a world standing still as all my illusions of my opposing conceptions, and the good or bad judgments generally attached to them, began to unravel. It would be more years still before that intellectual understanding would find its way from my head into my heart. Therapy, study, yoga, meditation - these would dance together as I cried uncried tears, read quantum physics and philosophy and spirituality, shaped my body, quieted my mind and found the truth of that little 12 year old’s argument.

There are no opposites, really, only words we use to talk about things, to identify and then to judge on the path to learning to release the judgment we have learned to create. The macrocosm collapses into the microcosm which is a macrocosm to another microcosm, which itself is a macrocosm, and so on until the last possible microcosm collapses in on itself to become the macrocosm that began it all, the infinite Universe. So it is in space, as they have discovered that the cosmic bodies that disappear into black holes seem to be reappearing out of white holes. So it is in quantum physics as they have discovered that reality isn’t observed, but rather observation creates reality. So it is in mathematics as they discover in chaos there is order, and in order chaos. So it is, I believe, in our own path through life.

As babies we are born into the oneness – unaware of ourselves as beings separate from the world. It is not until five or six months of age that we begin to conceptualize things like here and not here, seen and not seen (we know this because a baby will begin to cry when its mother leaves or go to search for a ball that has rolled behind a chair). Before this there is only life, within and around us, oneness and within that oneness the physical sensations of pain and joy, fear and security. And then the separating begins. Parents, teachers, authority figures, friends, each play their role in shutting us down, domesticating us, reigning us in, teaching us how to survive in society. There was a time I saw this as a cruelty but I’ve come to believe it actually serves a great purpose. We are broken, I believe, so that we can return to oneness; not with blind faith, but with conscious awareness, in the exercise of that free will and logic God deemed his greatest gifts to us.

Somewhere in all my doubting and questioning, analyzing and arguing, I stumbled into a sweet, sweet soft spot in life and a faith in this world I would never have imagined I could know. It is all one, even in the joy, even in the pain. The gift is in the very experience of living, of being a breathing, conscious, feeling, and necessary part of creation. A thread in the tapestry of All, a masterpiece of life that would crumble if our little insignificant thread had never existed. We each play a vibrant chord in this amazing symphony, this choreography of coincidence that defies all comprehension.

The pain of these months as I have let go of my love, my home, my life as I knew it, and my sweet dreams for the life we were building has been crushing; crushing and yet beautifully countered in such perfect proportion by this universe - by the love and friendship of those who have comforted me in my sorrow, empathized with me in my anger, helped me in my search for understanding; by the precious bond my mother and I have found forty-two years after we severed our first connection through the cord that once gave me life; by the affirming changes in the business in the few weeks that I have focused my efforts and wisdom, skills and love to its development; by the inconceivable encounters that have brought me to the guides who will help me as I venture down a new path (like missing an 8am yoga class because I was reading the website of a practitioner and then walking into the 10am class and seeing his name on the list directly above mine). The moment I received the devastating email that Hans was moving out and giving up our home and life, Katy was in the air above Texas. What would that weekend have been without her sweet love and support and understanding? Day after day after day, in the midst of pain and loss and grief, of betrayal and abandonment, cruelty and cowardice, there was love, friendship, support, advice, care, guidance, loyalty, unyielding and unwavering strength and love.

It is not only love that can show us the path to God. So can grief. So can anger. So can hate. So can any emotion we allow to rip through us so completely that we see what is always there to be seen – that it is the feeling that makes us alive, not what we are feeling; that our categorizing it as good or bad is where we lose the richness that it is. Our feelings create a bridge between the visible world of separation and the invisible world of oneness.

Again and again, the universe has cradled me through this pain. It has not taken it away, but it has surrounded me with love and support. And in this I rejoice for my sorrow, for the experience of such cutting pain that the Universe has had this chance to show me such soothing love. Through grief I have found a pathway to rejoicing, in sorrow a path to joy, in separation a path to wholeness, and in pain a path to healing. And suddenly the distinctions and the judgments that go with them begin to fall away and I am left with a faith that all is as it is, as it should be and a peace with my place in all that is.

Did you know at a microcosmic level we are all made of stardust? Yes, you and I and those magnificent, amazing beacons of the night are microcosmically one in the same. Their beauty is ours, as is their fire, their light, their birth, their death, their state of existence no matter how desolate or populated, untamed or blissful. Microcosmically it really is all One, the separations are only visible through a certain lens. A lens we perhaps spend too much time focusing through. The slightest shift of perspective and the separation is gone. Pain becomes joy, joy becomes pain, each gives birth to the other and yet exists within the other, the microcosm collapsing in on itself until it becomes its own macrocosm.

God. The Universe. Oneness. The world is within me as I am within this world. And how very blessed we both are….

Sharp Curve Ahead

It would be nice if life had road signs. Road under construction, slow down. Scenic overlook to the right. Yield to oncoming traffic. Stop. Go. Watch for pedestrians. DEAD END.

My road must definitely be somewhere in the mountains because every other sign seems to read "Sharp Curve Ahead". I rarely even know it until the brakes are squealing and I am fighting to keep the car on the road. And so it is again. Life as I know it has changed.

One year ago today, I wrote the most intense and personal post I had ever written. It was about the journey that had brought me home, home to myself, written in the newness of building my home in Sighisoara, Romania.  Now, ironically enough exactly one year later to the day, I receive an email that my home in Sighisoara as I know it will no longer be as I know it. Hans, while not deciding whether he wishes to continue this relationship or not, has decided he wants to move out of our home (I have been in Dallas for six weeks helping my mother with a situation that is a serious threat to the company). It was a shock, and yet not. Have you ever untangled a huge mess of something – yarn or extension cords or Christmas lights? You lift and separate, unwrap, unwind, and at the very center find it was just one small knot that caused the entire mess? Like a single loose thread in a tapestry, the whole thing can go wrong from just one tiny thread, small but interwoven so firmly that without it, the entire tapestry disintegrates.

When the tapestry was your life, you are left with pieces on the floor, trying to figure out where you went wrong. Should you not have bought it? Was there a chance to mend that one loosened thread and you missed it? Did you choose the wrong tapestry? Should you have seen the loose thread in the first place, or, if you did, and I did, realized it would one day unravel the entire piece? Were you foolish to hope it would hold or could be mended? So many questions as you sit on the floor crying over a pile of bright tangled pieces of thread where a beautiful whole image once existed; letting go of all the dreams of homes you would one day hang it in, children you would pass it on to; facing the reality that the nights you could just sit in amazement at its beauty with a glass of wine after a long hard day had ended; realizing you would never, never ever, see it in its wholeness and beauty again. Never.

I am broken-hearted. Torn asunder. But not disillusioned. I married Hans in my heart when I went there. I gave up my life on the road for a life of stability I deeply wanted and was ready for. I poured my heart and self and time into the home I created for us, far from anything I knew in my own world. It was my deepest desire, my most fervent hope, my fiercely held belief that we would build a life and a home together, that we would find in each other’s arms and hearts the intimacy that we both longed for. His actions, or more accurately, inaction and disregard, have caused me deep, deep pain. And yet, I know it is in this space that we grow, that we learn, that we pull back into ourselves, down to center, deep into the recesses of feeling and emotion, and it is from these deep dark places that we emerge, if we choose, more whole, clearer, self-aware, stronger, and knowing just a little bit more about the tapestry of our lives, a little better prepared to recognize and mend the loose threads within them.

… I guess this is why there are no road signs in life. Because you don’t really know until you are further down the way whether you were in a sharp curve or a dead end. And the truth is, you get to choose.