Jackpot City Five Years Later

It’s been five years since my beloved surrendered her being to God in the wake of an extended illness that led her to say, “I know I love you. I know I love our children, our grandchildren, and so many people in our lives. I know we live in great beauty. I know we exist in the love of God. But I don’t feel any of it. I feel nothing. I am empty. And I cannot live without God’s presence. I must go. I must go. I’m done.”

This from lips that were almost always lit with an open door smile born of attunement to the divinity of creation. One of our children said, “If this can happen to Dear, none of us is safe.” The precipitating event was a form of protracted insomnia where the suicide rate is substantial. As the person Dear considered her closest friend, I knew what many others could not: that the easy inference of suicide as an act of despair and escape, some sort of mistake, didn’t apply. Dear gave to God all she had left to give: her physical shell—an example of integrity I hold with reverence. Recently, I was reminded why her death has never been a cause of grief for me, even while it has been a catalyst of some of the most intense spiritual challenges of this incarnation—for which I am grateful well beyond my ability to articulate. But I’ll try.

Just about my oldest friend, Susan, a few weeks ago pointed out something about my drawings that I’d never before realized in the 20-plus years of bringing to visibility some two thousand of them. In fact, her remark shed new light on my fundamental orientation to life. “You never rip up a drawing that isn’t going well,” she said. “And because you draw with a black ink pen, you don’t give yourself the possibility of erasing or painting over. No matter how it’s going, you stick with a drawing until you feel it is complete in its own right.”

While that truth may not have registered until Susan pointed it out, in a flash I recognized my reason for that approach: I don’t feel I am the creator of anything. We don’t create; we discover. How we discover (based on how we define reality) determines what we discover.

My take on how the universe works is that everything is a gift to help us grow our capacity to love, and the business of life is discovering how come. When it comes to my drawings, every idea or statement I’m helping to become visible already exists in the ether, what you might call the universal consciousness. I’m just the delivery boy, attempting to live in what I feel is the spirit of the universe: playful, loving, deep. My romance with the drawing pad is a form of meditation: opening myself to an expression whose time has come and allow it to pass through me and my pen to paper. If I make a mark that I find cringe-worthy in the moment—such as occurs when I nod-off while drawing and my pen scratches the pad in an unexpected manner—I know my task: discover how that so-called accident is meant to work in the larger scheme of things. And in that knowing is among the most important practices in growing our ability to respond in a life-affirming way to whatever presents itself: the practice of taking whatever is in front of us and doing our best to create beauty. You could say that’s my life’s operating principle.

This orientation is why I don’t grieve Dear’s death, because fundamentally she is just as much a part of my existence today as she has always been—even before we met and I was waiting for her arrival that I knew was inevitable. And when she appeared 50 years ago I somehow immediately recognized who she was—though it may have taken an additional 10 seconds to fall in love.

My soul knows that all of life is nothing but God. As Vivekananda writes, “There is only one Power manifesting as evil or good. God and the Devil are the same river with the water flowing in opposite directions.” Some things may be undesirable—an event we might not have chosen if given the option, or an action we wouldn’t have taken if we’d had more wisdom at the time—but to dislike them, to dislike anything, is especially harmful. Among the leading manifestations of human ignorance, dislike limits our ability to respond to what’s in front of us as a sacred teacher serving our soul’s awakening in conscious union with God. Fortunately, ignorance is curable. As Paramahansa Yogananda teaches, “All paths are paths to God, because, ultimately, there is no other place for the soul to go.”

Living this, of course, takes lifetimes, at least for me.

Among Dear’s last words to me were, “You still have things to accomplish in this life, and my death is going to help you do them.”

Her wisdom was easy to accept as always. More difficult as been the hand grenade of meaning beneath them. Though I’m not sure why. I have a lifetime of evidence to suggest that before I was born I asked for the most intense life I could get that would draw me closer to God—and my guardian angels hooted with delight singing, “Have we got some treats for you, amigo!”

My immediate bumper-sticker regarding these five years since Dear departed is: “Balanced Intensity: Terror & Joy.” The terror springs from my ego facing the loss of so much worldly-world security. By that I mean so many of the forms of security I have created for myself over the course of my life—particularly related to money and all it provides, perhaps especially a nest of solitude where I can be Mister Hermit to my last breath. That it’s conceivable that I could find myself the equivalent of homeless is among the universe’s gifts in response to my request for that most intense life drawing me to God. That’s because, underneath that terror is the joy of liberation emerging as I attempt to go to whatever lengths I must to free my attachments to whatever worldly-world dancing monkeys of delusion distract me from my life’s purpose: God alone.

Ironically, that end is also being served by the recognition of the many forms of expression I’ve been privileged to be the delivery boy of over the decades: hundreds of essays; thousands of journal entries; thousands of drawings; oodles of stone sculptures built and photographed on my Vermont mountainside; a novel; a portfolio of professional communication—so much of it, to my mind, a manifestation of the playful, loving, deep spirit of the universe. And as such, of potential value to fellow travelers on our shared journey to Oneness With All of Existence.

The privilege of being of service to others, however that might shake out, coupled with my own adventure of freeing the ego nonsense that mires us all in the delusion that there is something more to existence than God alone, is what has landed in my lap like a frisky Golden Retriever licking and squirming to say, “Let’s go, dad!”

Dear once gave me a t-shirt with the statement “Jackpot City” printed on it. She said it represented our life together. The landscape of that life has changed dramatically in the past five years—both terror and joy being ever-more robust. And yet the message of that shirt has never altered in representing our sacred partnership.

I don’t recall ever crying before Dear died. I presume I did, but I don’t carry the memory of it. Now, unexpectedly, beginning within days of her death, a piece of music or some other form of majestic eternal beauty will trigger a session of sobbing that I feel blessed to experience. I was surprised to realize that it has nothing to do with sorrow or loss, but is a consequence of tapping into a profoundly deep level of life’s richness—a reminder, you might say, of the core of not just my romance of 45 years with Dear, but also with all of life itself.