Saint Terror

When we arrived in Santa Fe from Vermont last July and walked into our newly leased home, the heavens celebrated with a hail shower that completely whitened the ground.  It was the first and last such shower during the eleven months New Mexico was our home together.  (Lissa already a thirty-year New Mexican; I the greenhorn from back east.)  

Recently, we left Santa Fe for a new residence on New York’s Hudson River, closer to Lissa’s one and only grandchild, a ten month-old mayor of Manhattan.  In the night after our first day driving east through Nebraska, a killer hail explosion erupted.  Next morning, our Subaru was adorned with dents.

I’m sure there’s a message here that will reveal itself in due course.  

For now, all I know is that those events sandwiched a period that has brought forth within me the most terror I’ve known in recent years, maybe ever.  And since nothing makes us afraid except how we define reality, this special trepidation elicits gratitude for the opportunity to free whatever reality I hold that triggers such vulnerability.

At the heart of it is, of course, the crazy belief that defines so many of us: that we are this perishable body living in this perishable world––rather than a soul that can never die, using every experience as school in which to shed whatever inhibits our conscious union with all of existence.  What some people call enlightenment.

Money in the bank, friendly neighbors, a clean house, a woman’s say over her own body, lack of illness, the respect of others, good coffee-–the list of impediments otherwise known as needs, desires, preferences, addictions and their various cousins can be enormous if not seemingly endless.  Giving up our attachment to them is the game of earthly life so far as I can tell.  Hence the adage: It takes a million incarnations to know God.  

Somewhere along the line we start to wise up and begin our active search for ways to improve our surrender—taking action without linking our sense of well-being to how things turn out.  Inevitably, the day comes when we go for broke and make that most dangerous of appeals: “Change no circumstance in my life; change me.”  

I guess you could say I’m reaping the rewards of that request.  There are times I feel like my every familiar is dead or dying—and at a rate and intensity that is only increasing.  

Moving three times in less than two years, two of the three cross-country––after more than a third of my life on a Vermont mountain.  The suicide of my beloved.  The death of our daughter.  Emergency surgery.  Re-homing my golden retrievers.  A friend I hadn’t spoken to in 40 years now my sweetheart.  Our plans related to relocating in New York a couple of weeks ago completely falling apart within a day of our arrival, thousands of dollars among the costs.  The two of us then taking on the unprecedented venture of opening a gallery featuring our combined artistic sweat and joy, rolling our financial dice in the process.  That and much more makes sticking my toe into year 80 come fall hardly worth mentioning.

And yet, and this is the point, none of that is the cause of my terror.  Those events may trigger reactions, but the difference between trigger and cause is monumental.  Outside circumstances are never the cause of anything I think or feel, or any action I take.  Nothing in my world is a challenge except how I define reality.  I’m the only problem I have.  Our ego points fingers at the world.  Our heart knows there is no world except our experience of it.  I’m sure there are harder lessons to learn than misery and happiness are self-created, but probably not many.

Simplicity, predictability, tremendous latitude in how I spend my time, solitude, quiet, financial stability, learning from the experience and perspective of illumined practitioners of healthful living, service to others through various modes of expression––these are some of the key external elements I’ve found not just valuable, but necessary.  

And finding them necessary is deadly.  

It says I need them, can’t do without them, that my contentment is dependent on blah-blah-blah.  And blah-blah-blah is anything other than attunement with the Divine Essence of Existence.

The death of my familiars, many with roots that span incarnations I’m sure, is both terrifying to my ego’s phony sense of security (if only blah-blah-blah I’d be happy), and gratifying to my heart’s passion to free everything that impedes living in the vibration of unconditional love.  

This is the playfulness of the universe.  Terror can be as much a sacred teacher as a saint.  It reminds us, sometimes ruthlessly, that our options are two: perpetually surrender our attachments to blah-blah-blah, or suffer.

When Dear said, by way of pointing out that her suicide would not be devastating to me, that I still had things to do in this incarnation that related to why I was born, and that her death would help me do them, I wonder if she foresaw the potential upheaval that is presently taking place, felt the energy of it if not the specifics, in the loving encouragement of surrendering my attachment to so much.  To consider the terror of it a gift, as I do, while still feeling the desire to escape it somehow, reminds me of Jesus before the events of his crucifixion, saying to God basically if it were possible to avoid this, I’ll welcome it, but if this is how it has to be then I’m all in.  And isn’t that at least one key lesson of Jesus’ reaction that can serve humankind in the face of any so-called adversity?  (And mine is definitely small potatoes compared to his.)  The stretch required to swim gracefully in the ocean of uncertainty is the blessing of this swan dive into the void.

Thank goodness it comes with kisses. 

On our first night in our Beacon, New York apartment, I was coming to bed in the dark when Lissa said look out the window.  Our bedroom is on the second floor, so looking out meant looking down on the lush, though pitch black, backyard.  There, for the first time in a year, as if welcoming me home, was a pageant of splendor never seen in Santa Fe.  Fireflies.

I’m sure there’s a message here that will reveal itself in due course.