"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.
Gifts from spirit are everywhere when we open our hearts and minds.
“Instead of shooting through the front windshield to crush my skull against that house-sized hunk of metal, I crawled out of that car with only a burn on my neck from the seatbelt. I remember leaving Frank's Little Hut in Montrose as I'd done a dozen unbelted nights before. I remember pulling that seatbelt around me; doing it and wondering why at the same time. Guided. Always.”
