Letting Love Discover Us
The moon last night glared into the room and blared through my dreams, and I awoke to hear an incessant yelping of coyotes. Clearly, there was something going on out there; they were emphatic about announcing it. And I don’t necessarily think these events are related, but in the morning, Monte watched a mountain lion skulking along the fence line. I caught only a glimpse of its tail as it leapt over the fence and into the brush along the creek, but I can confirm that a lion had visited. It feels like this place is pulling out all the stops lately, strutting its weird and wondrous stuff, whether to hang onto us or drive us out, I cannot say.
On July 17, I celebrated what would have been the 70th birthday of my dear sister Assunta Marlene, who died in January of the year 2000. I’ve written about her before, and I don’t want to dwell on the sadness and suffering, but I recently found a couple of cassette recordings she had made for me in the late 1980s, and I listened. I had forgotten how much the kidney disease stole from her over the years, how aware she was of the steady diminishing of her energy, her physical strength, and her voice--oh, her voice in particular, for she had been a gifted singer, and singing was her passion. But she sang me songs in these recordings, prefacing each with a warning that her voice was weak, touchingly proceeding nonetheless, and she always sounded beautiful to me. So on her 70th birthday, I played her songs into the hills and canyons of this place she never got to see, and I felt a sense of her spirit dancing.
My sister’s death is a very old sorrow for me, which long ago hollowed my soul into a habitat and nested there, and I know it will never depart. But the old familiar sorrow is still capable of erupting into a fierce squall of grief, with all the shock and sting of a sudden loss, and that’s what it did this week. I lost my sister all over again, contemplating the cruelty and unfairness of her struggles, heartbroken by the thought of the many years she never got to live. And with this, there came survivor guilt of course, the sleazy opportunist that always loiters near. I found there was comfort, though, in unleashing her voice, and in hearing her speak to me from the pulpit of yesterday about all the gifts that had been taken but all that still remained, and about never giving up. There was something invincible in her, which reminds me today not to squander the bounty I have been given.
I was lucky too in that I had two dear friends with me on her birthday, all of us impacted by painful loss--and who among us isn’t?--and we climbed up to a grassy overlook above the sea, looked out, and shared what life has taught us. Jan quoted John O’Donohue, “Be still and let love discover us.” And that is my credo now.
Oh, I’m not exactly still, that’s hard for me, but if I try to quell the anguish of my churned up thoughts and seek instead a pool of quiet observation, there is a better force that finds me.
I need this force more than ever now.