Some Days Are Diamonds...

"Some days are diamonds...some days are stones."

~ Dick Feller

Some days it's difficult for me to tell which are which. That's what clinical depression does. It screws with your head so much that you don't know when you're having a good day. I can't recall when I had a really good day, one where I've looked back and said, " More, please." Usually it's the other way around, " No more, please."

Last Friday was one of those " No more, please" days. It began well enough with laundry and house keeping with a little niche cut out for writing, and then time for catching up on social media. I was about to sign off when a message from a close friend in North Carolina popped up. I am always happy to see something from Laurel, who is bright and fun and insightful. Her note to me began," Please hold Arthur in the light..." Which was normal enough, because we are always keeping close this way, if not in those exact words. What came next was unexpected, one of those things that speed by, side swipe you and leave you feeling slightly light headed. Laurels words were:" He died in his sleep."

The Angel of Death and I have become old friends over the years. We greet one another with a respectful nod of the head when I walk into hospital rooms or the homes of the terminally ill. We give one others' black outfits a cursory once-over, and I am always envious of his robes, which fall into neat folds. " Hello, Mal'ak." I greet him by his Semitic name because it seems more cordial. He is usually quick and goes about his work quietly, and I mine. The personification I have of him is tall, sleek and graceful, with a somber expression, deep-set dark eyes and long black hair. At times the hood of his robe is drawn up to shield his face, and at others he appears with huge, black wings. For all that is dark about him, it he is oddly radiant.

I don't know if Arthur knew he was coming, but I'm sure he leveled knowing gaze at Mal'ak when they were finally eye to eye. Arthur may have Allowed Mal'ak to free him from his mortal body, but he hung back just at the edge of our realm to wait until we knew he had left us...and then he boarded the golden crescent boat that would take him to misty Avalon,to the Isle of Apples, to walk among the Sunflowers forever. Mal'ak stood on the shore watching with the rest of us as Charon poled across the silvery waters. He stayed just long enough for the news to be spread through our circle of friends, then he, too, disappeared.

Arthur was one of those people who could fill  a space with his presence, and that presence was always welcoming,gracious and most kind. Our friend Paige pointed out that when Arthur told a joke he was capable of " looking blandly innocent and elegantly unrepentant all at once". He had a wicked sense of humor and was master of the pun. He was so well-read that he could authentically converse on nearly any subject brought up in conversation, and if it happened to be something he was unfamiliar with (a rarity), he would find out as much as he could.

When I lived in Raleigh we spent many Sunday afternoons together; we went out for coffee and conversation, then to the place I lived to comb through my library and listen to music. We shared a love of books, music, theater and art. We found that because we'd both spent our formative years in the Episcopal we shared numerous mutual friends. At different times in our lives we'd each explored Buddhism and still kept Buddhist principles. We wrote and performed liturgy together, infusing it with male/female polarity, but without the sexual baggage.

In the space of a breath, it was all gone.

It's not always true that we don't know what we have until it's gone. I know what I had in Arthur. We were always careful to say goodbye, and in hindsight,maybe that was because we somehow knew we wouldn't have one another for very long in this incarnation. Or maybe it was because we sense how long that goodbye was going to have to last before we saw each other again.

.

You Get Bigger As You Go

Logging onto Facebook on Saturday evening, I found that someone who'd been a huge influence in my life had died unexpectedly during the previous night. The announcement came in the form of a video posted by another friend with a brief comment. Time seems to not only stand still but expand in moments like these, and I found myself inside a bubble that insulated me from the blaring TV and chatter in the background. Joe was dead, and suddenly I was encapsulated in a place where everything was suspended while I searched my feelings about his passing. I have written and re-written this post for the last week because I wanted it to say everything I felt about him. I have stopped now, because I realize that words are inadequate and will never be enough-and so I will allow these words to stand as they are.

Strangely, there were no tears. I didn't even have the urge to cry.Perhaps it's because of my personal understanding of the death of the body simply being a continuation of the life of the soul in spirit. I did find myself missing our friendship and thinking about all that had transpired during the many years since we'd met. Literally, a lifetime has gone by. We'd both moved around the country teaching or serving new congregations, and our personal spiritual practices had changed from the one we shared in the beginning of our relationship. Our paths cross-crossed from time to time: there were a lot of near misses when we could have sat down for a meaningful conversation, but we just nodded and smiled knowingly instead.

Now Joe was gone, and the flood of memories began. I want to remember everything we did together, every little nuance, because in the back of mind I know this is it for our earthly relationship. I tend to compartmentalize events in my life (I think we all do), and so for me reviewing a relationship it always seems like I've taken out a VHS tape with the person's name on it and punched the "play" button.

And so the my personal version of "Life With Joe" flickered across the movie screen in my mind: Our first lunch in a very hip bistro; the exhilaration and exasperation of me teaching school for the first time and bouncing ideas off one another for graduate school; fussing over the minute details of worship services and the idiosyncrasies of older colleagues in the clergy we deemed
politically less aware than we were-and therefore, less cool ( Ah youth, the time when you're pretty sure you know everything!);
being frustrated when our personal differences and viewpoints collided and we couldn't change the other ones mind no matter how we tried; and finally,the things we both did that the other couldn't quite understand but accepted out of unconditional love.

Joe came along when I was in my early 20's and I still felt very much like a little flat dot with nothing to distinguish who I was yet. As a member of the Chad Mitchell Trio, he had quite literally been one of the people I watched on TV and listened to on the radio who sang the politically infused folk music I grew up on, and I was thrilled to be able to expand on those ideas during our conversations in person. Joe had been there marching on Selma for equality and during all the demonstrations concerning the Vietnam War, and later speaking out on fair housing and women's issues a generation before mine, and I idolized him because he not only taught me so much about the injustices in the world he inspired me to figure out real solutions in order to be of service to others.

He also taught me how to honor the irreverence and humor within me. In a particularly inspired moment one Christmas Eve, I whipped up a feline-sized cope and miter on my sewing machine for his cat Cardinal Fang ( his moniker came from Monty Python, all the rage then) to wear during one of Joe's infamous parties. Fang, I'm sure, was unimpressed, but everyone else reveled in my divine madness, and much to his chagrin, he made numerous appearances at parties to bless the masses with milk and Friskies and raised paw. It was during one of these Bacchanalian fests that I smoked some very fine-quality hash for the first time and discovered after a marathon session of barfing in the backyard that my future in the fine art of toking would be non-existent. Thereafter I would be forced to retreat to the kitchen where I was safely out of reach of the plumes of Demon Weed. I honed my skills at pot scrubbing while everyone else mellowed out.

It wasn't all politics, religion, and socially pretentious parties-we had our quiet moments, too...The day Joe returned from officiating at a funeral and nonchalantly dropped the most exquisitely perfect red rose bud that I had ever laid eyes on into my hands."Thought you'd like this," he announced cavalierly," Don't get gooey about it". I still have that rose carefully wrapped in a tissue and pressed in a Bible. Joe was demonstrative and lavish with his friends; my treasure trove of birthday gifts included a copy of a Byzantine cross from the Met Gift Shop, a vial of pure attar of roses from a trip to Romania, and a wonderful silver Lookenbooth brooch. The material things, as special as they are, simply underscored the depth of our mutual affection at that time; what I find most endearing was the thought that was behind the selection of those things. It was more important to make the other smile than to try to be impressive or pretentious. And the greatest gift of all: he rescued me from a life of abuse and set me on the path to a courageous (and not entirely misspent) life of adventure. Thank You, Dearest Joseph.

The open letter that Joe wrote when he left us included the lyrics from a Bruce Cockburn song, "...You get bigger as you go, no one told me...I just know." And so it is: we live and learn and grow-up and grow old. Our consciousness and understanding of social justice, our spirituality and our journey all expand and get bigger as we travel along life's highways and paths less taken. Because of this and through it all, we, too, get bigger...bigger than our limitations, our dreams and our plans. Bigger, because we expand with the Universal Source. Bigger, until we expand beyond our temporary mortal shells and once again become the dust of our earth and the stars.

Shine On

First and foremost, life is a fragile. We forget this because of our tendency to rush head-long from one thing to the other, to fall down and get right back up, ignore the bruises, because it's what's expected of us by society. We create a membrane of steel around ourselves,that will deflect the bad things. Mostly we just carry on.

Life is an exciting, wonderful adventure full of Mystery. We never really know what's going to happen next, but we never expect it to be more than we can handle. We don't look too closely or make eye contact. It's better that way. We're less likely to get hurt by Life.

A few hours ago, I found out someone in my congregation died. She was a physically and spiritually beautiful soul who possessed a spirit open to whatever the world would bring. She was tragically killed in a traffic accident. We have questions about the circumstances, for which we may never have answers. Today would have been her 27th birthday.

We believe with our hearts that this life will go on forever, even when we know in our heads that it won't. Dying is the natural cycle of things; we are born and we die. What we do between those points is called living, and we burn with a light from a flame within. Some of us achieve great accomplishments the span of a lifetime; others only burn brightly for a few short years, but the people their light shines on are left feeling warm and good.

Shine on, Sister. Shine on.