Stories about life, love, death, and what comes after.
“And then it was as if the roof was lifted off the chapel and there was a soft sort of whooshing, a feeling of expansion, and I instantly knew I wasn’t alone. I felt the expansion around me but also IN me. I heard a voice …”
We really are okay even when we don’t feel it. Grief doesn’t mean we’re broken or damaged. We can be healed AND sad, whole, shining, AND feeling alone. A little boy’s eyes reminded me of just how connected we always are, no matter how we may be feeling.
The Audubon guide said “I’ve never seen anything like it. Never. Not this close. Not this early. Not in these numbers. It’s unbelievable.” Only it’s not. Love landed three birds before us and they were a magnet for the rest. Our belief lands the gifts our people send us, and our acceptance is a magnet for more. Trust. Your. Self. Just do it.
I heard the last beat of her heart, my little dog. She was here, here, here. And then not. It seems impossible, the finality of that. And then she came back to me…
"The view of the human world I could see with my eyes had flattened, like a scene printed on a heavy theater curtain. And then the curtain parted just a fraction. Midtown Atlanta, the old buildings, the natural world, the flowers and messages, were inconsequential and felt unreal. They were two dimensional, like looking at a projection. What was real was what I could see through that split in the curtain and what I saw was a holy thing."
Twenty nine years ago, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, a young man I loved was found dead in a ditch in north Tulsa, shot three times in the back of the head.
My dead friend came to me after meditation the other morning. I’d posed a question to her and she showed up to answer.
“I was running around town this morning when I heard a siren and saw an ambulance with lights swirling in my rear view mirror. I pulled over to allow it passage and as I watched it speeding down Harvard, I burst into tears.”
The whales' performance told me that. My husband confirmed the message. The sunbeam in my hands was a promise that nothing has changed in the last year, despite everything changing. It's so hard sometimes to quiet the roar of earthly life, but when we do, it's all right there: comfort, assurance, certainty, unbreakable connection. Reason to relax and just be. Truly, all is so very, very well. We are safe, held in a love beyond what we can begin to comprehend in our humanness. Trust. Everything's okay, even when it doesn't always feel like it.
My brother in law died Sunday. It wasn’t unexpected. He’d been ill for years. But we also used to joke about his nine — or ninety — lives and how he seemed to escape death’s clutches over and over, so even in the last days there was some uncertainty.
An Unexpected Mystic 