“There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” (Thomas Merton)
"All beings are words of God, His music, His art." (Meister Eckhart)
In the month before we came to Canada this year, we moved Michael's elderly cousin to an Assisted Living Apartment, because of her increasing journey into Alzheimer's. It was a difficult and challenging time for all of us, and we could not have done it without the extraordinary efforts of extended family. Anyone who has dealt with Alzheimer's knows the frustrations and anxieties that come with the disease, both for the patient and for all who are involved in care. After the intense days and weeks of getting her settled, medicated, and dealing with the fall-out of her confusion and unhappiness, we left with a mixed feeling of relief and concern.
When we arrived in Canada, we met our newest neighbor - an 86 year old widow with a delightful laugh, an inquisitive manner and, very clearly, in the middle stages of Alzheimer's. Each time we speak, I get to see the delight in her eyes when I tell her I'm from New Orleans. Thus far, I've shown her three times how to operate her washing machine, and each time she tells me it's the first time she's washed clothes in this new machine. I hear the under-current of anxiety in her questions, as if she knows she's holding on and struggling to make connections. But she sets out on her long walks in the mornings and afternoons, and is always ready for a chat, where everything is new information which she greets with her quick, always-ready smile.
My friend, Bill, has a slow smile, and an easy manner suited to his 86 year old life experiences. After teaching my neighbor once more about her washing machine, I met Bill for lunch at one of his favorite restaurants yesterday. I love listening to his lazily paced conversation, his cadence a throw-back to his roots in the deep South. He tells me he wanted to be one of the Tuskegee Airmen of World War 2 fame, but found out he was color-blind on his test. And while he went on to serve his country as an engineer in the Army, he decided then and there that, as a black man seeing the world for the first time, he would hold onto that concept of being blind to color, and become a global citizen.
As we talk, I think of the wonderful novel I'm reading, The Help, a painful and poignantly funny book about race relations in 1962. This eloquent lovely black man has lived through all of the turmoil of the 60's, and raised his children and grandchildren to embrace his own color-blindness. Not so very long ago, a white woman and a black man would not have been sharing lunch and life so easily, if at all, and what a poorer world that would be.
At the end of the day, after the washing machine lessons with my beautiful new neighbor, and the gentle learning with Bill, when I most wanted to just be home and reading, I picked up another friend whose grandson-in-law is a First Nation Carver. His work was being featured in an art exhibition opening last night. We traveled the hour down Island to the little community of Ladysmith, where there was a gathering to honor the two brothers who carve together, and two artists from Ome, Japan, with whom they share a special bond. The night included an Eagle Dance in beautiful costume by the First Nation brothers, and an equally beautiful musical performance by Japanese women in the Ome group. Two cultures, literally world's apart, are joined now through the power of art and music, spreading yet a different 'color-blindness' to new generations.
As my friend and I made our way back home, the twilight hour and overcast skies cast a special spell over the coastline, veiling the waters of the Straits of Georgia, and the distant coastal mountains. Outlines of the islands off the coast were fading, the Master Artist gently erasing the images of the day, as the fading sun peeked under the cloud cover. By the time I got home, a pale snippet of rainbow hung in the Northern sky, and, tracing the arc, I found another to the South. In between, a patch of clouds reflected every color in the rainbow, as if it had just stretched out and laid down for the night. I watched in silent awe until all the colors of the evening sky, and the day, faded.
Sometimes when I'm up here without Michael, there is a loneliness that seeps in, a sense of disconnectedness to community. My relationships are singular: a friend from the neighborhood, a friend from the coffee shop, a friend from a spiritual relationship, a friend from the market. But I stand outside the circle of community. And then I wonder if that's not my 'job:' to stand on the outside and see the connections. I listen. I observe. I hear the common thread running through the lives and wounds and joys of each person that I do connect with, and they are all God's music and God's art, as Meister Eckhart says. I am enormously enriched and grateful.
We are never disconnected. We stand together in the drama of life, in the framed portrait of eternity. We are the lyrics sung by Divine chorus, each note profound, made more so by the rest between the notes. We are the color spectrum of a Divine palette, perfectly blended, in our best moments color blind, and "all walking around shining like the sun."
YAY GOD
"Surely, there is a window from heart to heart." (Rumi)
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