Places Spirit runs deepest

Didn't I just write about roller coasters last post? Well, here I am on one again. I want off.

After my hopes for a job were dashed last week, I received an e-mail this week saying I qualified for the final round of a rather robust grant. BIG news, yet also BIG work. And, I have a BIG weekend with two major kids' arts events that I lead.

Did I mention my back is also acting up?

You know, I did get a day off, Thursday, in a strange, unplanned and not-necessarily welcomed manner. I got to catch up with old friends. Friends from my first working days as a full-fledged reporter fresh from college. Friends who knew me when and care for me no matter what.

Only easy-to-find photo of my early newspaper days [with Tad]

Ronda and I bonded easily when I arrived in the newsroom. She worked for another paper in the chain and traveled between offices. She was always easy, generous and funny. Her laugh, infectious. She showed me the ins and outs of local bars around Dayton, especially her favorite, The White Rabbit. It was just a strip-mall bar, but with Ronda there, it seemed magical.

She was nearing her first-year anniversary and making vacation plans. I told her I'd love to go to Florida, but I wasn't due for another few months. She waited.

Ronda, me, Jean and Mary at a newspaper reunion

We took one of our grey Chevettes, though I don't remember which one. Maybe mine. Black vinyl and no AC. That's what was affordable to a moneyless, new graduate. And it got us to Daytona Beach. Our first stop was somewhere in the mountains of Virginia. I am not sure. I wasn't much of a navigator back then, but Ronda taught me all about reading maps. Before being hired as a reporter/photographer, she took baby pictures at department stores. She knew how to get around and ask for what she needed. We pulled into a small motel and, after settling in, discovered our TV didn't work. Ronda went to the manager and sweet talked him into bringing us his from his house! I learned a ton on that trip, such as:
– Betting on a dog called flea-bite because we were so chewed, winning and taking ourselves to a posh dinner in a French restaurant owned by Hugo of Marseilles.
– Learning to make hobo stew of hamburger and vegetables in foil cooked over a grill on the beach.
– Throwing caution to the wind and heading to the world's fair on the way home sans a reservation and sleeping in the back of the Chevette in a camp ground. One of our air mattresses went flat in the night.
– Lucking into buying someone's ticket stubs to get into the fair in Knoxville, TN. Still not sure why it was there.

We have so many memories of weekends, other trips, meeting between her home in Toronto and mine in Cincinnati with our spouses and kids.

The reason I was able to see Ronda this week is because her father died. There's no way I wouldn't go to the funeral, north of Dayton. I arrived at the visitation in enough time to use the restroom and, when I returned, another reporter friend (one I have known since college, who also happened to work with me and Ronda) had just arrived. Ronda couldn't believe we had both come to attend the service.

Because Jean only lives a half-hour away, we are in touch more frequently. When my mother was recovering in rehab after an extensive heart surgery, she visited numerous times to give her healing-touch therapy. That's just the kind of soul Jean is.

We agreed to go to the cemetery, then the reception. I was the last in the car assemblage and lost my way to the American Legion. Somehow, I thought I heard VFW and, when Siri directed me there, found an empty parking lot. Even the funeral home couldn't tell me where to go. Fortunately, I had Jean's cell in my contacts.

I was grateful to find a full parking lot this time, entered and noticed a gathering around the bar. There was Ronda's husband, the lovable Canadian for whom she had left us and the States. He offered to buy me a beer, then we laughed at how cheap, $1.25, it was. "Heck this would be $5 at home." As we shared some conversation, Jean called to see where I was. "On the other side having a beer with Bub." She led me to the reception and a nice spread.

It was really good to touch based with these wonderful, longtime friends, even in their grief. I loved reconnecting with Ronda's family and her high school friends, who also felt like family. These are wonderful, good, honest people. Just like Ronda's dad. Nothing fancy, but real and full of tremendous love for his wife and three daughters. That was so apparent in their tears and grief. Ronda's mother has never lived alone, so the girls quickly drew up a plan where she lives with each of the three for several months the first year before she has to make any decisions.

For several minutes during the visitation, I held a three-month old. Good as gold though she was teething. She's the granddaughter of one of Ronda's longtime school friends. It was so healing to hold this sweet creature in the shadow of death and the open casket. I was stirred at the cemetery, before the skies opened with more tears, as the lone Marine trumpeter wailed taps through his instrument.

I was out all day, living an honest, hard truth among friends and grief. My prayers and blessings are with this family as they move forward without their beloved father and husband and I am grateful to have witnessed such love, grief and grounding. These are genuine people who don't stumble over what matters most in life.

• When do I feel life is a roller coaster?
• How do I get off?
• When was a time it happened serendipitously?
• Who teaches me about love and being grounded?
• What lessons are there in grief?


reeling from
ridiculous
self-made
complications

I was called
away, out

to real
living

the stuff
that matters:
life, death,
love, grief,
family
and friendship

the places
Spirit
runs deepest

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Something I never needed

Last session, I told my shamanic counselor that I wanted off the roller coaster. He responded that I had been on one all the time, 17 years, that he had known me. That's because you didn't know me before kids or fibromyalgia, I replied.

Well, I got lurched again last week by a job rejection that I cared about more than I had realized. Everything sounded so perfect and it would have tied up so many loose ends. I want a simpler, more abundant life and this seemed like the ticket.

I am also smarting from a friend's offer to put in a good word for me that never materialized; it may have made a difference.

I want to know why God didn't want me to have that job. How did I miss the mark? Was I aiming too low? This was a mid-level position at the salary I started at 20 years ago. Less stress, I hoped. Would I have had the flexibility to manage my fibromyalgia? Would I have come home as exhausted as I had after three hours from the second interview? My spiritual director says to look where the energy is. There was none when I left that interview.

Fortunately, two days after I received the voice mail saying they were going with "another finalist," I had planned an overnight college-visit and trip with my 17-year-old. "Maybe they just liked someone else better," she had said after the bad news. On the drive, she probed deeper, asking why I wanted that job. "Is that what you really want to do?"

"Well, no," I confided. "I really want to be a successful writer, do workshops and creative nurture," I continued. But that's hardly possible my inner critic shouted.

I had gotten that far in another round of interviews for a job I knew wasn't right, when the interviewer said: "You're a good writer. A really good writer."

I seem to need that external affirmation. I am tired of working in isolation, though writing really isn't a team sport. The response to my daughter's question is one of the few times  I have verbally articulated my dream. Is this where Spirit is pushing?

Both my mother, sister-in-law, husband and close spiritual friend were more upset than I at the non job offer. It did feel like the world's rejection for awhile. I used to always get the job ... from newspaper ads to which hundreds responded. What's different now?

Of course all of this was transpiring during Lent and the Easter Season, the time of death and resurrection. I read a Max Lucado meditation on Silent Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter, when all of the action happens. Deep things happen in the silence, he'd written, between death and resurrection.

Sitting in worship Sunday, I wondered what I was dying from. I had listened to a snippet of NPR's Fresh Air on the way over and an author was talking about Jewish pessimism, passed on by his parents, products of the Holocaust and Depression. Worry prepares you not to be disappointed, he'd said he learned, then unlearned. I remember reading that worry is a prayer for disaster. Can I let the negativity and worry in my life die, I wondered.

I opened the bulletin to the Centering Down section and was struck with the first passage

... the seed you sow does not come to life unless it has first died; and what you sow is not the body that shall be, but a bare grain, of wheat perhaps or something else; and God gives it the body of his choice, each seed its own particular body ... So it is with the resurrection of the dead: what is sown as a perishable thing is raised imperishable. Sown in humiliation, it is raised in glory, sown in weakness, it is raised in power; sown as a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body." 1 Corinthians 15:35

Falling/pastel on paper

Sown in humiliation, sown in weakness ... that sounds like my current condition. I let all of that sink in and meandered to the place where I was about to die, where I was about to let go, when I was jolted back by the thoughts of leaving things unfinished. I do think something died there on Easter Sunday in that worship.

Pretty soon, a Friend rose and talked about how the Egyptians had measured the weight of a dead person's heart to see how much remorse there had been and how, with Jesus, God taught that the physical body didn't matter in resurrection. She said a lot of other smart things, but what I really remember is her booming voice bellowing "all God want us to know is that he loves us. I love you." I heard God in her speaking to me. Broken and disappointed and struggling, God loves me. I so needed to hear that, really hear it from human lips.

Our minister ended her message quoting the Gnostic Gospel of Philip: "You must resurrect while in this life."

I do feel as if I am resurrecting, that something died and something else is birthing. That, perhaps, I can leave the worldly world and its lure of office jobs behind and move more into the spiritual world of trusting Spirit. My prayer is to trust in that process. To trust Spirit as my guide.

• When does my life seem like a roller coaster?
• How do I examine its cause?
• What spiritual practices support me?
• How do I move more into the spiritual realm?
• Can I resurrect while in this life?


sinking in
is so
satisfying

letting the
layers melt
and remembering

remembering
who I am
my origin

my source

and then I drift
almost as if
asleep

yet awake
deep
down inside

I sink

the lines blur
and I am falling
into release
death

until I shudder
and return

renewed and
missing
something

I never 
needed

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