"All around, in every direction: Holy of Holies." (Ez 45:1)
Last week a friend was talking about his 100-year old mother, who passed years ago. This friend is now 87 years old, and is in that sacred state of reflection that is given to those who have survived, thrived, remained open and are now unwitting mentors for so many of us. He visits his wife daily in the Alzheimer's unit of a local skilled nursing facility, and he himself has just been diagnosed with lung cancer, a condition he was determined not to 'fight,' but to experience as his next life-challenge.
He said that his mother had given him a gift, a wonderful metaphor for looking at life. It's like a funnel as you get older, she told him. If you think of your early years as the large side, your vision narrows as you get older. But if you think of your earlier time as the narrow side, then your vision widens as you get older - you have the capacity to see things with the larger wisdom of your learning, and life gets more expansive. He said she 'lived life' until she died, and he wanted to do the same, even with his cancer.
Another widowed friend and neighbor, who has macular degeneration and is slowly losing more and more of her eyesight, has just torn the rotator cuff in her shoulder. She already depends on friends for many things; she invites us in with joy, not a sense of neediness, and remains active with her philosophy course, her daily walks, her unbridled inquisitiveness about the adventure of life. Whenever I ask her to do something (go for a ride for an ice cream cone, go to a drumming circle), her enthusiasm is infectious. She tells me she collapses into bed each night in a state of weary happiness with two words: "Thank you." She sees her vision problem as a huge blessing, because it has offered her a different way of seeing (no pun intended) the events and people in her life.
As I walked along the beach at the Tin Wis (Calm Water) resort near Tofino on the West side of the island, the rush of the ocean was a chorus for the lyrical reflections of the summer, for all of these souls that had been a part of its grace. They embody the adage that when we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change. Perhaps the same is true of hearing. Michael stood on the balcony of our room, and as I walked towards him, the urgency and intensity of the pounding surf shifted and became more muted. The individual waves became blended in a harmony that embraced the whole shoreline. I thought our prayers are like that: powerful in proximity to awakened Presence, and an undercurrent through our days thereafter. The waves, like the memories of the summer, rolled in, ran along the shore, escaped back to sea or evaporated. To the percussion of the surf, the thoughts ebbed and flowed, memories of the now-ending summer with its life passages of our son's wedding, the taking down of our precious house, and now the rebuilding of our new home.
We drove over the mountains in their bubble-bath of clouds back towards Qualicum, and a weekend of planning and packing for our drive home on Tuesday. I knew once he returned, Michael would be anxious to get on the road, and he is. It is always bittersweet for me; as much as I look forward to being with family and friends and our lives in Louisiana, I miss being up here with the cool clear air, the mountains available for a glance at any given moment, the tumultuous or breathlessly calm water, the friends and neighbors who have been so kind.
One day while Michael was back in Louisiana, I took the ferry over to Hornby Island for a walk in the park, because Hornby is one of those "merge" places for me, where the aboriginals tell us that nature, mankind and spirit dwell in balance. Each time we go, we drive past the cemetery on our way across the island. There is something about cemeteries, and the stories they tell, that intrigue me. Since Hornby has its own eccentricity - even the sign for the ferry landing is whimsical and unorthodox - the cemetery must have a story to tell. So I wandered through the gravesites, haphazard as they were, placed here and there with no order. There was an old rusted-out bike leaning against a tree with beads and a placard on it; there was driftwood for headstones, and seashells and shore rocks as markers. The Blessed Mother stood near the Buddha, and rocks were painted like lady-bugs on the burial sites of children. As I turned to walk out, I noticed one last epitaph that made me smile, the way Hornby always does. It was an elderly man by the name of Joe, and it read simply, "Gone to find out for myself."
That's what our travels and our lives are all about, really. We explore. We reflect. If we're fortunate, we survive, we thrive, we remain open and perhaps become one of those unwitting mentors, like my 87 year old friend. As we age, we look through that funnel and into the fullness of our lives. We realize that all around us, in every direction, we live in the Holy of Holies.
YAY GOD
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