Sparta is a meditative sage, eyes almost always closed, literally feeling his way through life. He’s quasi-mystical, appearing in our laps as if by magic. We sometimes call him Samadhi, as he roams about at night in his stark white fur robe, demonstrating pure consciousness, extremely awake and aware. He occasionally opens a pale aquamarine eye at us, most often when wet food appears.

Katya is a petite but tough girl with an inquisitive gaze. Her crooked black and white face seems thoughtful and is pretty in a fierce, don’t mess with me way. Originally feral, she has mysteriously decided to become more loving in recent months. She cuddles up against her Daddy’s chest when he sits in his comfy chair, tucking her head under his chin. But beware of startling her, as she never learned how to retract her claws, leaving trails of blood and shredded fabric in her wake.

Bongo is the cool dude, big and orange and sleek, a huge but subtle presence. Calling for him by name echoes the meaning of his name, Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, said in staccato, at high volume. He appears, but on his own terms, and asks to go out the door at night to hunt and wander, like the hip guy he is.

We share the critters with our neighbors and visitors. They crawl onto laps, visit gardens and drink from fresh water bowls, sometimes offering themselves up for photos and humorous videos.

Everyone loves our cats.

But the baby, the ginger kitten, Thor, is Mine.

Orange and white creamy long-haired rescue kitty who climbed a hundred foot tall maple tree in Iowa, braved the freezing snow, and snuggled with me during my many months of chemotherapy.

He has the softest fur I’ve ever felt, a real fluff-ball, but all Cat, with a capital C. Whether chasing squirrels on rooftops (including climbing up a metal roof and sliding down it, topsy-turvy) and now, up every morning at dawn, pawing at the windows to go OUT; to catch fat gophers, tiny voles and the occasional, unfortunate, forest-dwelling bird.

His character is still in flux, so I’m very attentive to him and keep him close to us here in the canyon. He’s a bit overwhelmed with it all, new place, and new family, but is finding his way. We call him the Boss Cat, as he is very clear with the other four-leggeds who, exactly, is in charge.

When I step outside in my summer robe in the beautiful morning light and call out for him:

“Th—or, here kitty, Here kitty, kitty, kitty…”

I see him coming around the corner of the garden path.

And then he runs to me.

Golden fur glowing in sunlight, big paws loping across the deck, bright orange tail flying high like an ostrich plume. When he reaches me, he stretches down, then rolls over and offers up his soft white belly for a long, slow rub. Up and down, up and down, my hands move over his tiny ribs and down to his outspread legs.

He surrenders to my boundless affection, closing his eyes in bliss. Then, I know, in my bones, that I am loved.

He’s become quite famous, too. Beloved by neighbors and starring in his own show. Living his best life, as the young lady who found him on the highway wrote to me when she saw him strutting past a redwood tree.

With much gratitude I offer this film by Johnny Braz to all of us, who know that our love for pets is some of the best healing medicine we have.

Film by the gifted Johnny Braz

A Raven croaks overhead, I look up and see the wedge shape of her tail feathers as she sails above me, coasting towards a redwood tree. Below us, neighbors have acquired ducks and I hear their quacking, an incongruous sound beside the Raven’s call. Woodpeckers laugh together in the afternoon sunlight. Hummingbirds wind their springs, little gemlike music boxes in their emerald chests.

I pull on the tips of my returning hair, with its post-chemotherapy curls. I’m so pleased it’s there and wish it would grow faster. I remember the doll I had in childhood where you could pull out an entire ponytail from the top of her skull. Just push the button down and extract it. Push the button again and her hair slid back into her head, giving her a perfect blond bob again. Weird 1960’s doll, with sapphire eyes and coal black lashes. We would swing them around by their ponytails and fly them across the backyard lawns of our suburban neighborhood.

From time to time, when my inner process grows more challenging, I return to the Stoics.

These eccentric philosophers from Ancient Greece and Rome shaped the ideas of thinkers, leaders and artists in Europe’s history, and so, the Western culture we live in today.

A bunch of crazy guys (and one or two notable women, including Xanthippe, wife of Socrates, who dumped a chamber pot on him in public and to whom he credits as key to his Stoic development) they teach basic, essential truths. A few, like Socrates, Cicero, and Seneca, paid the ultimate price for speaking their truth.

Here’s a few refreshing ideas:

One: Adversity is training. And the goal of the training is to fulfill the only real purpose of Life, which is to grow in Virtue. This means developing qualities of compassion, generosity, honesty, loyalty, kindness, mercy, the ever-elusive equanimity, and the grace of surrender. Anyone who has read the Serenity Prayer will understand fundamental Stoicism.

As Shakespeare’s Hamlet muses, “There is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.” And so, Two: the Stoic concept of impressions and assent. We receive an impression from the world through sight, sound, taste, smell or touch, and then, we decide what this means to us.

Life will be what you make it. In the words of Seneca, “tis the mind, not the place, causeth tranquility, and gives good content.”

On the side of the dirt road where I now live, there is a silent parade of giant, rusted orange, abandoned 1940’s construction equipment with artfully cracked windows. There’s also a baby blue Chevrolet pickup truck, stuck sideways in the dirt, sprouting a beautiful fern from the cracks in the engine hood. An aesthetically-minded neighbor would like them removed, like, yesterday, while my sweetheart commented that this stable of salveagable treasures will deter the super wealthy from moving here anytime soon.

Three: Amor fati or, Love your Fate. This is perhaps the most key, and the most difficult path.

I think of the Stoic story of the dog tied to the cart. The dog can trot along behind the cart, wagging its tail and smiling, or it can be dragged, kicking and screaming, down the road. Either way, it’s going. So why not, as the parable (and the Grateful Dead lyric) goes, at least enjoy the ride?

This is the path I saw my late husband take, towards the end of his time here. A sturdy caregiver helped him into the oversized recliner in our living room and he rested there, his big body sprawled across the black leather. We listened to the devotional music of Bhagavan Das and Krishna Das for an hour or so on his beloved sound system.

Afterwards, I needed the caregiver’s help to transfer him out of the chair, as I couldn’t move him myself. When we roused him from his reverie and explained this, his face opened in understanding and he allowed himself to be maneuvered back to the bedroom, for the last time. Gracious in the face of adversity, gently accepting fate.

There are so many examples of this our lives. I went kicking and screaming when I injured myself recently, slipping and landing on my ribcage on a wooden staircase. Trying to get comfortable in bed, I wailed and cursed. Dog being dragged. Not as enjoyable.

Ah, how I love the Stoics. It’s all so simple and clear…

I learned more about these wild and woolly philosophers at the lovely Henry Miller Memorial Library, from Tom Hodgkinson’s book, How to Live Like a Stoic. Highly recommended!

A Raven croaks overhead, I look up and see the wedge shape of her tail feathers as she sails above me, coasting towards a redwood tree. Below us, neighbors have acquired ducks and I hear their quacking, an incongruous sound beside the Raven’s call. Woodpeckers laugh together in the afternoon sunlight. Hummingbirds wind their springs, little gemlike music boxes in their emerald chests.

I pull on the tips of my returning hair, with its post-chemotherapy curls. I’m so pleased it’s there and wish it would grow faster. I remember the doll I had in childhood where you could pull out an entire ponytail from the top of her skull. Just push the button down and extract it. Push the button again and her hair slid back into her head, giving her a perfect blond bob again. Weird 1960’s doll, with sapphire eyes and coal black lashes. We would swing them around by their ponytails and fly them across the backyard lawns of our suburban neighborhood.

From time to time, when my inner process grows more challenging, I return to the Stoics.

These eccentric philosophers from Ancient Greece and Rome shaped the ideas of thinkers, leaders and artists in Europe’s history, and so, the Western culture we live in today.

A bunch of crazy guys (and one or two notable women, including Xanthippe, wife of Socrates, who dumped a chamber pot on him in public and to whom he credits as key to his Stoic development) they teach basic, essential truths. A few, like Socrates, Cicero, and Seneca, paid the ultimate price for speaking their truth.

Here’s a few refreshing ideas:

One: Adversity is training. And the goal of the training is to fulfill the only real purpose of Life, which is to grow in Virtue. This means developing qualities of compassion, generosity, honesty, loyalty, kindness, mercy, the ever-elusive equanimity, and the grace of surrender. Anyone who has read the Serenity Prayer will understand fundamental Stoicism.

As Shakespeare’s Hamlet muses, “There is neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.” And so, Two: the Stoic concept of impressions and assent. We receive an impression from the world through sight, sound, taste, smell or touch, and then, we decide what this means to us. Life will be what you make it. In the words of Seneca, “tis the mind, not the place, causeth tranquility, and gives good content.”

On the side of the dirt road where I now live, there is a silent parade of giant, rusted orange, abandoned 1940’s construction equipment with artfully cracked windows. There’s also a baby blue Chevrolet pickup truck, stuck sideways in the dirt, sprouting a beautiful fern from the cracks in the engine hood. A fussbudget neighbor would like them removed, like, yesterday, while my sweetheart commented that this stable of salveagable treasures will deter the super wealthy from moving here anytime soon.

Three: Amor fati or, Love your Fate. This is perhaps the most key, and the most difficult path.

I think of the Stoic story of the dog tied to the cart. The dog can trot along behind the cart, wagging its tail and smiling, or it can be dragged, kicking and screaming, down the road. Either way, it’s going. So why not, as the parable (and the Grateful Dead lyric) goes, at least enjoy the ride?

This is the path I saw my late husband take, towards the end of his time here. A sturdy caregiver helped him into the oversized recliner in our living room and he rested there, his big body sprawled across the black leather. We listened to the devotional music of Bhagavan Das and Krishna Das for an hour or so on his beloved sound system.

Afterwards, I needed the caregiver’s help to transfer him out of the chair, as I couldn’t move him myself. When we roused him from his reverie and explained this, his face opened in understanding and he allowed himself to be maneuvered back to the bedroom, for the last time. Gracious in the face of adversity, gently accepting fate.

There are so many examples of this our lives. I went kicking and screaming when I injured myself recently, slipping and landing on my ribcage on a wooden staircase. Trying to get comfortable in bed, I wailed and cursed. Dog being dragged. Not as enjoyable.

Ah, how I love the Stoics. It’s all so simple and clear…

I learned more about these wild and woolly philosophers at the lovely Henry Miller Memorial Library, from Tom Hodgkinson’s book, How to Live Like a Stoic. Highly recommended!

“One for the road” they said, before they hit the vertigo-inspiring highway for the drive home. On a good night, Brock’s Dad would say, he would drive down the double line (which was a single line) on the road.

Driving inebriated on the cliffs was practically a tradition. Big Sur was still sparsely populated, and the famous bohemian watering hole shut down for winter, probably saving drivers’ lives.

Their family had unusual pets – a donkey, a monkey, a toucan, a parrot, sheep and chickens. The children tended a garden, growing an assortment of vegetables, lettuce, raspberries and fruit trees.

One afternoon Mom made a special soup for lunch, with leafy greens pulled up straight from the honest Big Sur dirt. It included earwigs, sowbugs and aphids, floating freely in the bowl. When you stirred it with a spoon they swirled around like noodles.

“Bug soup,” the children cried out, and ate their lunch with relish. A story for the family archives, titled “tough country kids eat whatever Mom feeds them.”

“In some parts of Africa,” Brock says, “grubs are a delicacy. Also, insects like crickets and mealworms are added to protein bars today. It’s called insect flour,” he adds.

“What??” I say, still reeling from the earwig that I’d just found in the garden artichoke he’d cooked up for our lunch. I was unable to eat a bite afterwards, and that’s unusual for me.

“My Mom raised me on bugs,” he said, and we cracked up together. I think I pounded the table I laughed so hard.

As Mother’s Day approaches, it’s a relief to remember that not all moms are supermoms. Each mother is as unique as a fingerprint, or a snowflake, and can be wonderfully imperfect, too.

My own mom was decidedly bitter about motherhood, but she gifted me with a love of reading and an amazing vocabulary from an early age. Instead of “Knock it off,” she’d say, “Cease and desist.” Instead of “Do your best,” she’d say, “With your shield or on it, kid.”

All these years later, I’m still laughing at that one, lifted straight from the mothers of Sparta, in ancient Greece. The story goes that when they sent their sons to battle, they told them to come home either victorious — or dead. A childhood and young adulthood that teaches resilience is not to be discounted. So, thanks Mom. Happy Mother’s Day to you and all the wonderfully quirky mothers we will always love.

She’d started off in the 1930’s, the fastest typist in her class, landing a job in the high school principal’s office in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, right after graduation. She was the first of her six siblings to complete high school, move off the farm, and have a white- collar job.

Gram was petite, with cornflower blue eyes, soft brown hair and startlingly pretty legs. She married rather late for her generation, 26, and declined to say that she would obey my grandfather in her wedding vows. “Love, honor, and obey,” went the tradition for the wife. Nope, not agreeing to that, she said, her eyes twinkling, decades later.

With my Gramma, I regularly traveled to a quiet land of comfort and peace. From the age of about 4 – 8, I would spend almost every weekend with her.

On warm afternoons we would walk to the ice cream parlor from her apartment in Sunnyvale, California, for mint chocolate chip ice cream cones. In the evenings, we’d eat space age TV dinners on a TV tray, unrolling the foil from each section of the plate. I can almost taste the small square of apple crisp in the corner.

Later, we’d watch Lawrence Welk with his big band on her black and white television. He’d blow bubbles, and soon the orchestra musicians were surrounded by hundreds of floating iridescent orbs. Then I’d have a bubble bath with Mr. Bubble soap, right before bed.

One afternoon we found a small grey tabby kitten in her garden. He’d clawed his way under her fence from the street, and was covered in clods of dirt. He became my very first cat, and she named him Riley when she saw him curled up in a basket in the sunshine. “He’s living the life of Riley,” she said.

I remember Christmas parties for NASA employees’ kids in the gigantic Moffett Field Hangar One. This historic structure was built in the 1930’s for dirigibles, the airships of the future. It covers 8 acres, forms its own weather inside, and is now a Silicon Valley landmark. Once, by accident, I let go of my pretty helium balloon in there. My heart hurt as I saw it gleefully escaping way, way up to the top of the hangar, two hundred feet into the air, but it looked to my child’s eyes like a mile. Gone for good.

There, my bright blue balloon bounced up and down against the ceiling with the other runaways. When I saw them up there, my distress eased and I felt a sense of solidarity with all the other kids who had also lost their festive party balloons.

Later on, when I expressed an interest in writing, Gram broke out a magical typewriter that printed in flowing cursive script. We wrote a story together (that for the life of me I can’t remember) and she put it in a small brown booklet for me. I was so happy and proud.

She lived in quiet places and practiced a kind of simplicity I can still feel. Not a person who joined clubs or made friends easily, Gram preferred her old friends, her daughters and grandchildren, people she trusted, to anyone new.

She lived in a simple apartment, and later, when we moved to a new town, a mobile home in a couple of towns away from us. This was when California was filled with orchards and dairy farms instead of office buildings, freeways, and shopping malls.

She was my first philosopher friend.

“Don’t kill that bug,” she’d cry when I spotted a spider on the windowsill. “Some other little bug loves that bug!” her gentle Midwestern soul shining forth. My late husband loved this story, and, I think, fell a little bit more in love with me when I shared it with him.

Gram wore muu-muu print dresses on the weekends and would do crossword puzzles in the Reader’s Digest magazine. She planted johnny jump ups, marigolds and pansies in her wooden garden boxes. She loved her hens and chickens succulents (we called them cactuses then) smiling at me as she pointed out the larger hens and the baby chickens, growing close together. Each Christmas, cookies would appear, pistachio thumbprints with jelly, gingerbread and chocolate chip, nothing too fancy and always offered with self-deprecation.

I would sleep beside Gram during those years of weekend visits, when she’d care for me so my parents could try to save their marriage. That project failed, but those years with my Gramma were a treasure, unforgettable travel to a different country, where I felt safe and loved.

Twenty odd years later, my boyfriend came home from a night of carousing. I was half-asleep as something sweet and oddly familiar wafted out of his pores. “Whatcha been up to, baby,” I murmured in his ear. “Drinking gin and tonics,” he mumbled. Ah, yes, Gram’s drink of choice.

Definitely what she and Grandpa drank during the Depression. Hardworking and long suffering, she deserved a cocktail on weekend nights when she took care of her firstborn granddaughter. Her name was Olive, after all!

Peaceful day…

Despite the uncomfortable feelings that flood my emotional body at times, I do my best to silence the unfriendly voices inside my head and move forward, counting my blessings. At the top of the list of course, is that my cancer is in remission. I have love in my life. I’m not in pain, can give love and share joy.

Structuring each day is key, setting small goals that lead me to exercise, write, meditate, tend the garden, hold my lover close, breathe in the warm fur of my cat. Always the question: am I living my best life?

I’m afraid that in recent years I whine when confronted with change, sometimes loudly. I leap before I look, a method that has worked well for much of my life. At my age though, this approach has reached its limit. It seems that when I want something desperately, and right away, it may not immediately be good for me!

Today, back home, I find myself battling my pain-body, scrubbing negative thoughts from my head and refraining from sharing those ideas with others. Or, if I do, I gently, circumspectly, relate my process in the spirit of inquiry. What do you think about my current circumstances? I ask, instead of, please, help me understand, think for me, comfort me.

Though I do ask for prayers for a sense of peace and gratitude.

Give myself grace. If I stumbled slightly in this last chapter, so what? I need to practice letting go and moving on, like the week-long course I took at Esalen Institute in Big Sur 35 years ago. Now that was taking a leap, too. Especially since I left my job and moved there to be part of the work scholar program shortly afterwards.

We did Kundalini meditations, danced energetically and sobbed extravagantly. We asked and answered intimate questions in small groups, and more. In the afternoon sunshine, we called out our names from the meeting room doorway and windows overlooking the sea: “Lindaaaaaa, time to come home.”

Ah, if only. But, in a sense, I did come home, as I ended up living in Big Sur for the next 30 years. A beautiful transition out of Esalen and into the local community, falling in love and marrying, then caretaking a 25-acre property. Sharing it with countless friends, neighbors and their children, at Easter egg hunts and gatherings of all kinds. Many joyous weddings and poignant memorials happened on that land, too.

Now that was a graceful transition into the unknown, my third big one, actually. Before was leaving California while at UC Berkeley to study in Madrid, Spain. Later, after my house burned down in an urban disaster, I left the Bay Area to live and work at Esalen, followed by living in Big Sur. All pretty smooth transitions, reflecting the joy and energy of youth, with all that endless optimism and trust.

Then, divorce and a small-town romance that led to my next marriage. Messier, for sure. Ten years later the owner sold the priceless property where we lived, and my second husband and I moved to a small town in the Midwest, the center for the Transcendental Meditation movement. A unique community in an agricultural state. What a ride that was! Another relatively graceful transition, with lots of work and pain. Now it feels like a dream.

As a homeowner, I experienced the seasons for the first time, and made lifelong friends, experiencing the sparkling, warm heart of a beautiful community. I planted trees and flowering plants, redbuds, a crabapple, peonies, lilacs, tulips, alliums. Removing the odd midwestern chain-link fencing that had been there for 50 years, we installed wooden privacy fencing. We expanded the deck, placing my birdbath, a buddha sculpture, and river stones in the garden beneath towering silver maple trees. We spent summer evenings watching fireflies and winter afternoons watching the snow fall.

Yet, in this last transition back to the Coast, I’ve had a taste of the final transition. Torrey showed me the way, gracefully letting go of his life, as he realized, as he said, that his body was broken, and knowing that his mind was in pretty bad shape too. What did he do that was so surprisingly wise and good in this time?

He was unafraid. He expressed few regrets, only that he’d wished that he’d “had his awakening” and longed to be in California when he gazed wistfully at the abalone shells beside the fireplace. When we watched the film Manhattan over those last Christmas holidays, he was sad that the glorious chapter of his life as young man in the Big Apple had ended as well.

He reviewed his time here even as his body and mind crashed. “Crashing’s part of racing,” he liked to say. In meditation for hours every day, he felt the vastness of his being and I saw that this gave him great peace. He broke free, and that was a joyous moment. I wanted to go with him, because whatever he saw and felt as he was leaving his body looked really, really good.

How to save oneself? How to heal and find freedom? Take a break from the relentless perspective of ego. The spiritual books in my downsized library all say, look within, but I know that community helps us grow, too. The only thing that has given me relief from my assorted griefs recently is to serve, to give and share: to make sure my lover takes his blood pressure meds, send gifts to my friends facing medical challenges, plant seeds, water plants, load and unload the dishwasher, make sure my dog eats well.

To offer a kind or wise word at the right moment means so much. I have been the beneficiary of loving, patient and thoughtful care, from people who owed me nothing. I want to be that person, the person who gets out of her own way, and gives to others freely, from her heart.

Today, January 15, marks the one year anniversary of my cancer diagnosis. There is no preparation possible for this moment. There’s a reason while they call it the Big C.

A vast avalanche cracked open above my head and suddenly I was scrambling barefoot on slipping stones. Is this what astronauts feel as the rockets behind them shudder, explode, and float away into space? I entered an unexpected and terrifying new reality.

I knew in my heart that the ultrasound would confirm what I’d felt and seen in my right breast: a cancerous tumor, less than one inch in size, but still. I will never forget walking to my car outside the hospital, (the same place I’d visited with my late husband to see his neurologist a year earlier) on that bright afternoon, the snow glistening on the asphalt.

One footstep after the other into a new world. The world of the seriously ill. Hopefully temporarily, but remission, not cure, is the official word at the end of cancer treatment.

I sat in my car and sank my head back into my soft sheepskin hood, then phoned my nurse friend. She very wisely advised me to change my insurance plan immediately – it was the last day I could do so.

Uncertain that the doctor would give me the results in the exam room, she had not come with me that day. I got the news alone. Crystalline, sharp, catching the light like a Viking shield, cold and hard.

Both doctor and nurse were compassionate and encouraging. I’d caught it early, they said, and early detection saves lives. Will I be OK? I asked. We can’t say, they honestly answered. Thanks to their demeanor, I felt it was not the end of the world. I thought to myself, now I’ll need a biopsy, and those were the next words the doctor said.

Such an impossible moment, yet somehow also prosaic. This is what we do now. And now.

This happened to me, and I dove deep and under and through it to the other side, to an awareness that hopefully equals greater freedom and more ease in the years I have left to live.

The month prior to my diagnosis I’d played with my Rider-Waite Tarot deck. I drew the Death card on two separate occasions, weeks apart. Transformation was on the way. I was irritated, as I’d become comfortable in my world. Really? I asked out loud in my empty house.

That biopsy? My poor breast hurt like a mother for weeks afterwards. Taking care of myself at last, the procedure took place the week after the ultrasound (on my late husband’s birthday.) This coincidence was especially powerful, since it was his voice I had heard when I first felt the strange hardness, like a little rock, as I undressed in our bedroom: “Well, that’s not good, darlin’.”

As someone who never did self-exams, I was filled with gratitude from the start. It could have been so much worse. Following the instructions I’d seen on the walls of women’s clinics since I was a teen, I lifted my arms up to see the altered symmetry of my previously perfect B cup. My breasts no longer matched.

After the biopsy came the horrible wait to determine what kind of cancer had created the 1.7 cm tumor in the anterior section of my right breast. There are varieties, all bad, but some can be considered slightly better. When I saw the option, Triple Negative Breast Cancer online (one of the first things I had to stop doing was looking at medical websites) I thought, well, that sounds awful. And naturally, Triple Negative was what it was.

So, weeks later as I walked from my office across the lawn to my car, phone in hand, listening to the nurse explain my cancer’s characteristics, I thought to myself, next she’s going to tell me I need chemotherapy. And then she did. What do you think my first question was? Even as I asked it, I knew how ridiculous it sounded. Will I lose my hair? Well, of course I would, every last follicle, everywhere.

After meeting with the surgeon and the oncologist, I underwent eight sessions of chemotherapy treatments over several months at the University of Iowa’s teaching hospital, in the IV infusion suite. If it’s a suite, I asked one of the lovely nurses, where’s my complimentary glass of champagne? Or at least a chocolate on my pillow?

How to describe chemotherapy? This strange experience that seems so benign at first: you sit in a large comfy chair and the nurse administers drugs, some by mouth (the anti-nausea pills) then the main course by intravenous injection. Second run with the IV dose I suddenly felt like an elephant stomped on my chest. My breathing became shallow, I saw sparkling diamonds, and a bright red rash covered my face and arms. I still don’t know what that was, except that they got very busy in the suite and gave me lots more IV medications to calm my system down. This happened each time afterward with these drugs, Taxotere and Cytoxan.

When the young lady nurse had to walk with me to the bathroom so I didn’t fall over, me trudging beside her with my IV pole, I felt I’d reached a flash point of understanding: I needed care. God bless nurses, such compassionate souls! She even reminded me to wash my hands.

After the first dose, at home I watched my fever climb and felt miserable over a few days. So, I drove myself to the emergency room (five minutes from my home.) They tested me for pneumonia via chest x-ray and determined I had the RSV virus, so off to the hospital I went for bone-marrow shots to amp up my white blood cells (which were at nil due to the chemo.)

After each treatment from that point on, I received a post-treatment shot at home the following day via a little dental floss-sized box stuck to my upper arm. This was added protection for my immune system. My chemo bill went from a few thousand a pop up into the tens of thousands, thanks to this device. I am now a poster child for the Affordable Care Act.

It was the days following chemo that were the most bizarre to an energy bunny like me. If the house was on fire, maybe I might have been able to get off the couch, but I doubt it. Thank goodness for friends delivering meals, long days looking out my bedroom window, Metamucil (which I’ll never touch again, so help me) and books. A few helpful works: After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, by Jack Kornfield, The Secret Commonwealth, by Phillip Pullman and the Bhagavad-Gita, by Yogi Ramacharaka (and Vishnu.)

Mid-treatments meant a lumpectomy, by a gifted lady surgeon. My California sweetheart, along with my angelic nurse friend, waited patiently for four and half hours in the PACU (Post Anesthesia Care Unit.)

Getting myself onto the operating table that morning required using a stool. As I stepped up, I was flooded with the feeling of being on the executioner’s scaffold. I trembled, and the petite nurse who was talking me through the process said, “This is when it gets real.”

“Do you want the relaxing juice now?” asked the lady anesthesiologist (yes, the whole team was female), “Yes please,” I replied. As I quickly went under, I felt my nurse’s hand holding mine, and so, I knew I was safe.

I really didn’t have time to worry about this surgery beforehand as I was so very happy that my sweetheart was coming. He cooked for me, held me and made me smile. He assured me my scar was minimal, and met many of my friends. We visited a beautiful, 100 year old farm and went out on the town to dinner and music at the local café. He also installed a much-needed new dishwasher in my kitchen, bless him.

Post-surgery I had yet more weeks of chemotherapy, because they’d found the cancer had moved into four lymph nodes in my upper arm. It was a different chemo cocktail this time, Adriamycin / Doxorubicin, from a cancer-killing bacteria originally found along the Adriatic Sea. Administered differently, the bright red medicine filled my veins, and as a vesiccant, made my veins harder to puncture. I lost my hair, again. This was followed by 20 radiation treatments.

Radiation felt like going for a daily ride in a 2001 A Space Odyssey capsule. Open the pod door, Hal, I’m floating in deep, cold space here. The staff, though, were the sweetest people, and as with the end of chemotherapy, I got to ring a bell when the treatments were over. A friend told me that ringing a bell cleans out dead energy and dispels demons, so I whacked that bell as hard as I could!

In short, it was a very long haul and I stayed grateful and active. I took long walks with friends, danced around my living room and worked reduced hours at my job with an outstanding Fairfield business, Amrita Aromatherapy.

Now, back in my luscious home state of California, where more advanced scans of breast cancer patients are a standard practice, my lady oncologist ordered a high tech test to confirm that I’m in remission.

Today I am officially on the other side of my breast cancer experience. Ongoing medical surveillance (and, presumably, clean living) will hopefully prevent any recurrence.

My (somewhat haphazard) meditation practice helped greatly this past year, especially with this latest test, a PET / CT, Positive Electron Tomography/ Computed Tomography scan.

After the radioactive sugar flowed through my veins out to the tips of my nipples and toes, I lay down on a narrow table, arms above my head, wrapped in warm hospital blankets. Next, I was rolled into a teeny, tiny tube for the imaging. Did I say teeny?

OK, we’re about to begin, said the nurse, and I silently longed for the added endearment, Hon, which the nurses in Iowa routinely used. I closed my eyes and began slow, deep breathing, as the machine rolled me in, then back out, then all the way in. Mysterious dance of lifesaving modern medicine, this two-step we do with technology and the Grim Reaper.

When I foolishly opened my eyes to peek down the tube at the opening, my claustrophobia spiked off the charts.

It was like being in a drawer at the morgue.

“Just 4 and half minutes more,” the cheery young nurse said. OK, I thought, and resumed imagining the view from my garden, the soft fur of my ginger kitten, my sweetheart’s kind smile.

The worst part was the end, when the disturbing thought came: Wait, it’s been more than four minutes! Sweet Jesus, did she forget me? Am I trapped here? Reminding myself that the doctor had said this was a “one-time baseline test,” I vowed to never, ever, do it again.

Words about grace and awareness danced through my head, from Anthony De Mello’s Way to Love. “Looking, observing, understanding…it is only nonjudgmental awareness that heals and changes and helps one grow.” I repeated this over and over. In those moments I was grateful for my capacity to trust Providence, and Science.

Breathing in and out, and avoiding the mortuary drawer, for now.

Iowa cloud photo by Teresa Diers ♥️

A friend asked me recently over lunch when I had last felt “settled” – the question startled me because I think my façade works, that I am settled, that I appear, at least, to be happy and content with my life. I answered her, well, humans are restless, it’s part of our thing – we struggle for that elusive feeling of peace, we are never fully content.

On the day that I am content, I wake up to rainbows scattered across my bedroom. My ginger cat sits on the windowsill and taps the crystals, making the rainbows dance. My sweetheart wraps his big, strong legs underneath mine and smiles at me, his sea-green eyes twinkling.

I get up to build the fire as he goes into the studio to make us cappuccinos. I make a little squaw fire in the stove and then take a nice, long hot shower. I listen to the rooster crow down in the garden.

I breathe. I unhook from my mind, which teeters between despair and rage when I think of the world. I hear the rooster again, Boris, and imitate his endless call. Happy rooster, with lots of lady chickens to keep him company. The sun floods the deck, the hummingbirds jockey for position around the bright red glass feeders. My other orange cat curls his tail around himself on the plush black blanket beside me on the couch.

This moment, these moments alone, offer contentment, give sanctuary. “Get out of your mind and into your heart,” said another dear friend. I’m trying. I try all the time.

Yet, with thoughts, and an open heart, the tears come. So much loss, so much that’s wrong, so much to fix that is, perhaps, unfixable, at least until the pendulum swings back to sanity. Our collective aches and sobs like a violated woman, shot on the road, smeared by the powerful.

Rage and despair must make a difference, yet these brief, blessed moments of contentment can give us a delicately spun web to rest in for a moment, a hammock to hold us, a way to go on.

The mists, gentle rain, pulsing winds and shining light of this corner of the world fill my heart’s cup. This is Middle Earth, with friendly hobbits, wizards and elves living in the timeless forest, freely offering sweet potions of wisdom and blessings to all.

As this new year begins, my resolutions swirl around my feet and float up above my shoulders, caressing me into feeling more faith in myself. Yes, I will (fill in the blank) and yes, I will (fill in the blank) etc. We’ll see how it goes.

A Sufi teaching says that gratitude is the key to will —and while I don’t yet understand that exactly, I am teasing out possible meanings. Steeping ourselves in gratitude - authentically counting our blessings: for life, for health, for shelter, for birdsong, clearly empowers us, if only to get up and out of bed in the morning!

To start the New Year, I like to reflect on passages from some of my favorite works. This year it’s Turgenev’s First Love, Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, and Muslim Sufi mystic Inayat Khan’s unique symphony of truths, Vadan:

“True love is without beginning or end…it is willing surrender. It is love that teaches us, Thou, not I.”

Following themes of love and renewal, my favorite Pablo Neruda poem, from Extravagaria, has swum to the surface of my consciousness, so I’ll share it here:

This is where we live

I am one of those that live
in the middle of the sea and close to the twilight
a little beyond those stones.

When I came
and saw what was happening
I decided on the spot.

The day had spread itself
and everything was light
and the sea was beating
like a salty lion,
many-handed.

All that deserted space was singing
and I, lost and awed,
looking toward the silence,
opened my mouth and said:
“Mother of the foam,
expansive solitude,
here I will begin my own rejoicing,
my particular poetry.”

From then on I was never
let down by a single wave.
I always found the flavour of the sky
in the water, in the earth,
and the wood and the sea burned together
through the lonely winters.

I am grateful to the earth
for having waited
for me
when sky and sea came together
like two lips touching;
for that’s no small thing, no? -
to have lived
through one solitude to arrive at another,
to feel oneself many things and recover wholeness.

I love all the things there are,
and of all fires
love is the only inexhaustible one;
and that’s why I go from life to life,
from guitar to guitar,
and I have no fear
of light or of shade
and almost being earth myself,
I spoon away at infinity.

So no one can ever fail
to find my doorless numberless house -
there between dark stones,
facing the flash
of the violent salt,
there we live, my lover and I,
there we take root,
Grant us help then.
Help us to be more of the earth each day!
Help us to be
more the sacred foam,
more the swish of the wave!

https://bigsur.photography/galleries/holiday-special/

“This is what you do,” replied a dear friend of many decades, reminding me of my life’s path so far, the cataclysms that have driven my personal evolution.

I’m sitting on my sheepskin beside the fire in the wood stove in a cabin built 150 years ago. I’m listening to Boris, the glorious Americana rooster sing his cock-a-doodle-doo. I’m watching Anna’s hummingbirds, one, two, four, five, seven and more, stream to the two feeders outside the window, their magenta head-dresses glowing in the muted light of this overcast day. The beams and shingles of the 19^th century cabin ceiling were crafted from hand-hewn redwood milled from this canyon long ago.

It wasn’t an easy process, leaving my four-bedroom home in a quiet neighborhood on the edge of endless corn and soybean farms in the middle of the continent. The neat widow’s nest I’d fluffed and sorted until it was just right, my late husband’s library organized by subject in the redwood bookshelves he’d built, my tribe of loving and creative friends, my well-appointed Little House on the Prairie. Four years of dramatic transition – and blessed support.

And now, back home.

The tender romance that blossomed before and during the months of my cancer treatment: beginning in a French bistro in Carmel, a cup of coffee and a hug, with the kind-hearted gentleman who’d asked me to sign his copy of my book, Romancing the Sur. In Spring he flew to Iowa to take care of me the week of my surgery. Then, this Fall, he road shotgun with me across the country in our journey home.

Feeling the blessing of my husband on the other side, who would want me to be cared for, loved and happy.

Now, feeling nostalgic for a place I wanted to leave for much of my time there. We human beings are such odd creatures. Perhaps it was the shock of all Big Sur’s easily forgotten details – cold bedrooms and hauling firewood, poison oak blooming on my arms and face from touching the pets, a dash of PTSD looking out at the wooded canyons all around this Little House in the Big Woods.

Small things, a small price to pay for the privilege of living in love, again.

The joys of touch, the warmth of hugs, of cuddling under the covers. A delightful man who brings me coffee in the morning, who kisses my feet and makes me laugh. Like, duh.

Such a decisive moment and when did this change begin? A query from my sweetheart’s spiritual daughter, a beekeeper and animal rescuer who visited us this week.

It began in the moments when I realized I might have only 5 years to live. Wouldn’t one last chapter be sweet? My gentle knight in shining armor consoled me, telling me over and over that I would be OK, and we agreed we wanted to spend this next chapter together. So here we are.

Now begins a time of forest bathing, star-gazing, and luminous healing in domestic bliss.

Even a spiritual warrior trembles on the brink. She wonders about choices and consequences, longs for what is past, then clarifies her priorities in order to move forward with a peaceful and courageous heart.

And away we go!

Iowans love their trees, and in Autumn you can see why. Suddenly, every street is a Klimt painting, with glowing golden, amber, chartreuse and scarlet leaves trembling on slender branches, getting ready to let go and fall to earth.

Last week, I planted (with the help of a big strong man) a crab-apple tree in my front yard. Awash with plump red berries, it’s in front of the house to the right of the front door. I can see it from where I sit on the couch beside the fire, looking out the window, there she is. Torrey’s tree.

I dashed home from work when I learned the digging had begun, arriving just in time. As Denny filled the bucket with water, I carried out a quarter cup of my husband’s ashes to the edge of the hole in the earth. On my knees, I scattered the bits of bone in a perfect circle, ready to receive the roots.

I went inside to get my camera, returning to the front door to see that the tree was in place. Staked on the sides, trunk circled with a white plastic tube, a metal cage around it as well, it is protected for the coming months as it goes into dormancy. Then, in Spring, it will burst into white blossoms.

Love and Death. How close they are, intense, mysterious, inevitable. To die for love is the romantic’s dream come true. Death makes life and love sweeter. The fact that life ends gives us purpose, and the drive to grow our souls. I now know, more than ever before, that Love is sacrifice, joyous, willing sacrifice. Sacrifice that is an honor, a privilege, a gift of grace.

Human cremains have a strange, powerful energy. Whether they sit quietly in a cardboard box in a closet for decades, rest in an expensive urn on a mantel, are scattered to the winds or tossed into the sea, they are more than just a symbol of a soul. They are, in a very real way, the last of an individual’s physical essence in this world.

And now, back to trees. The Wedding Tree is a California scrub oak perched above a canyon, one of the many mini-ridges of land in Big Sur, stretching like a finger down towards the highway, the cliffs, and the waves.

A picture-perfect place for rustic and romantic weddings, we hosted several unforgettable nuptials beneath this oak. One involved the bride arriving on a bejeweled white horse; another had rows of hay bales for seating down the hillside and saw the tree decorated in tiny bells and colorful streamers. All of these celebrations involved toasts, pledges, and heartfelt poetry.

It was on this mountain that Torrey and I said our private wedding vows one brisk and glorious Winter afternoon. It was a spontaneous, flirtatious-turned-serious moment. In an instant, our guardian angels took charge and we began the next chapter of our great adventure.

“With this orange I thee wed.” I said, feeding him a section of mandarin orange from the citrus tree beside my bedroom door. He took the orange tenderly from my hand, peeled off another section and fed me a small piece of the delicious, tangy fruit.

“With this orange I thee wed,” he said.

Then, Torrey lifted up the orange to the heavens and said,

“With this orange, we are wed.”

Next, we looked out over the shining blue ocean and sighed together, a nice big exhale. The simplest possible wedding ceremony, and all of it just for us.

A wind line from Pfeiffer point several miles to the north divided the calm ocean waters from the darker, wilder open sea.  

On another afternoon we stood watching the sunset beneath this same scrub oak. The neighbor’s giant white Turkish sheepdog appeared at our side. Kash was a mystical creature, intuitive, protective and playful.

“These big dogs are so special, “Torrey said, and I replied,

“Yes, but they don’t live as long as the little ones.”

His eyes twinkled and his smile was wise and kind.

“Well, darlin’, we can’t have everything we want in this life, that’s not why we’re here.”

We laughed, but today I understand this moment better. When we are blessed with a great love later in life, we can’t expect it to last for decades.

Last August I made a return pilgrimage to the Wedding Tree. Alone, I buried a small amount of Torrey’s bones in the earth beneath the oak. The day was gray and overcast, the ocean invisible. The little tree had grown a size or two larger, and was garlanded with heavy ropes of lace lichen, Ramalina, grazing the tops of the grasses beneath it. The light all around was muted and soft. The land was quiet as I whispered my prayers to the earth and sky.

I placed the fine white powder into a depression in the soil, covered it with a round river stone I’d found, then brushed handfuls of oak leaves onto the tiny sacred site. The wind blew, I looked north into the fog, and wept.

Love and Death, entwined on a magical tree above the sea.

Nephrostomy tube, catheter, stent, pacemaker, PICC line, cardioversion, the works. He got it all in the battle to keep him alive, although in a diminished state. Ultimately, that was not his destiny. He understood this, and escaped.

A magical life has a magical end; he departed on Lord Rama’s birthday, with thunder in the heavens, in his own bed, with his beloved wife and dog beside him.

When the doctor urged us to return to the hospital for that last time, we felt like combat veterans, compelled to return to war. We had to go back, it had become what we knew, and we were trying to get it right.

In some ways we did. Lovely young nurses sat with him because of his inclination to leave the ward, half-dressed in his street clothes, or, imperiously naked and yelling. Those were bad moments, but they were also pure, the authentic rebellion of a freedom-loving soul.

I came into the room and a willowy young brunette was sitting beside his bed. “Linda, this is Abby,” he said, his voice rich with warmth, “and she wants to go to Italy, too!”

On an earlier hospital stay, I watched a girl with a crooked face bring him his meal. Suddenly she was smiling at him shyly. I turned to see him beaming at her. Our nurse friend laughed when I told her this story. “Coping mechanisms,” she commented.

During our last hospitalization he was surrounded by caring and kind people, from the wonderfully present doctors to the male student nurse who watched women’s basketball games with us.

Everyone who had the time was interested in him. He recited the poetry of Hafez to the palliative care staff: “We all rise each morning to labor on the Earth’s field. No one does not lift a great pack.”

The grief I live with now is a gentle, perpetual ache in my soul. A grief that is a profound reminder of the great adventure that awaits us all.

I know he had to go on ahead, and I know he waits for me, just around the corner of the river, basking in a sea of consciousness and bliss.

Today, the leaves of the cottonwood and maple trees dance softly in the breeze. Sparrows, cardinals and chickadees chatter in the garden. The magenta spirea bush waits patiently for me to plant it in the dark, worm-filled Iowa dirt.

Does Death Really Exist? Like so many of Tor’s books, this odd little guide, by Swami Muktananda, fell off the shelf and into my hands. At last, I can really read these spiritual, intellectual works, opening them to find the perfect words for this moment.

How a person dies is the fruit of the way in which he has lived. It is said that if you want to attain anything in this life, attain a good death…O God, if You really want to give me something, give me a good death, a sweet death.

What is it like to meet your end with a vast library of Buddhist, Hindu, Christian and Ancient Egyptian teachings on the subject, yet no longer be able to read them? I suppose you rely on the accumulated wisdom of your many lifetimes, and your own personal awakenings.

This life is but one day in the life of the Soul. Tor taught me this, and it gives me great comfort. It’s what I told the caregivers when I shared that he hadn’t eaten in a few days, not really at the end of our hospital stay, and not when we came home, either.

That’s when they said it was time for Hospice to assess him.

Always a fast learner, Tor grabbed that opportunity. As pneumonia came on and his breathing became labored, he swallowed the morphine and raced into the afterlife. Whoosh! Like a kid on a slide.

Photo from Waag Family archives.

When we spoke with the young man who drove our rental truck two thousand miles from Big Sur to here, we asked him what his experience was driving large vehicles long distance. He told us his stories of expeditions to Burning Man.

Suitably impressed, we told him about Fairfield, the Maharishi Transcendental Meditation community, the Golden Domes of Pure Knowledge, the many ethnic restaurants, the farmer’s market, and the 16-mile loop trail that circles the town of about 10,000 souls.

“It’s like Burning Man,” we said, “but for old folks!” Which got a laugh, and is somewhat true. There is a thriving bunch of active retired folks here, but Fairfield also has lots of young families with little kids, university students, artists, farmers, professional people, a real small town demographic.  

“The sky is our ocean,” said a new friend. When we drive out of town, down the nearly empty highways, we see this sky-ocean, sometimes baby blue, sometimes steel gray, always changing. A huge palette in the sky, clouds painted in broad strokes by the ever-present winds.

Now, in May, the land is truly beautiful, with endless, patient crop fields not yet planted, abundant forests, gardens and hedgerows, and the expansive Skunk River, where I half-expect Huckleberry Finn to float by on a raft.

Still, sadness lingers, ebbs away and crashes back. Driving up to Iowa City, I asked my husband, “Where’s the edge? Where’s the edge?” There's no jumping off place, no escape. “There is no edge, sweetie,” he said, “we’re in the middle.”

The middle. Swaddled in miles and miles of Mother Earth. When we would look at Google earth before our move, we’d see the golds and greens of the continent up to the Pacific Northwest, the ochre and sepia of the western deserts and mountains, then the emerald tones of the Heartland. I told myself we were moving from the ragged coast to the soft, enfolding center of the continent.

On the coast Mother Earth dares us to maintain our balance, and keeps us on our tippy toes. Here, she holds us close, she seems more peaceful. She lulls us with endless storybook clouds, and the kind of landscape that must have inspired that childhood Rorschach – drawings of a house, a yard, a tree, the sun. Again and again, in village after village nestled between farms.

Iowa is dramatic land, too. It’s dramatic in its stillness, its endless vast flatness (and rolling hills), its timeless quality. And of course, snow, which is still a novelty for me. Then, there’s tornadoes. Wooooo boy. Our sweet realtors told us that Fairfield isn’t really part of “tornado alley,” which has occasioned a guffaw or two from folks we’ve met. Another part of the adventure.

Did tea-kettle topped grain silos inspire the Tin Man’s hat in the Wizard of Oz? A sensational amount of corn is grown here: approximately 13 million acres of it, yielding 128 billion pounds of “field corn” (used mostly for animal feed and ethanol production) each year. Iowa grows more maíz than Mexico. The rich seas of soil in this hardworking land bring an agrarian sensibility to the culture. You can see this from the front porch to the farmer’s market, from the county fairs to the monster silos beside the highways.

Perhaps because of the cold winters, social relating is a highly developed art form. I’ve found there are many storytellers here, with lots of quick, dry wit. Standing in line with my new pitchfork at the farm store, the older gent behind me said, “She’s either got some digging to do, or her husband’s in trouble!”

I loved learning from my neighbor that the delicate silver maple leaf pods that flutter to the ground like spinning butterflies, are known as “maple squirters.” When they’re green, kids squeeze them, and, as you guessed, the seeds pop out.

Another passionate pastime is birdwatching. On a cold morning right before Easter I trudged through the melting snow with several women of all ages and some adorable girl scouts, looking for newly arriving birds. It felt like an Easter egg hunt, as we searched for and spotted the beauties. We saw all kinds, from red-wing blackbirds, eastern phoebes and tufted titmice to dashing scarlet cardinals and the elusive white-breasted nuthatch.  Even a wood-duck emerged from its box in the lagoon.

When I asked the group leader, a much-loved retired teacher, what kind of bird she would be, she replied immediately, “A sparrow, for its subtle beauty.”

And I’d like to thank Bob Dylan, for (another) gem of wisdom. He’s chosen Tulsa, Oklahoma, as the home of his just-opened Bob Dylan Center in the Tulsa arts district. When asked, why Tulsa? he replied that, while the coasts have a certain energy, he prefers, “the casual hum of the Heartland.”  Thanks Bob! I'm starting to like that hum too.

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A friend suggested a site used by gig workers all over the world. 

As I tossed my bid into the ring, I thought, no one else is gonna want this job, giving me a better shot at it. Shortly afterwards, a gentleman from India hired me to write marketing copy for GetUrns. And so, I found myself, at 3am on hot summer nights, writing hundreds of words about cremation urns, at 8 cents apiece, for a woman-owned business in Texas.

After some preliminary research, I learned about the “Death Positive” movement. Awareness of death, your own and, perhaps worse, of those you love, makes life sweeter. It makes you more grateful for the blessing of each breath.

Coming from a long line of schoolteachers and librarians, I searched for magic words written to relieve suffering. Quotes from CS Lewis and Oscar Wilde to Emily Dickinson and Marilyn Monroe; from the English Book of Common Prayer, to Japanese mystic poetry and Cherokee proverbs.

Words that could soften loss, or offer crumbs of comfort when the great mystery of Death arrives. That final visitor that spirits away our beloved family members, friends, pets, and one day, each of us.

Most beautiful quote: Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali poet and winner of the 1913 Nobel prize in literature.

“Death is not extinguishing the light, it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.”

Most practical: Memento mori (remember you will die) as Socrates and the Stoics who came after him said. To quote the most famous of them, Marcus Aurelius, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”

So, I was ready. From cremation jewelry to large and small amphoras similar to what you’d find in an archeological dig.  Small keepsake urns with “just a pinch” of remains, tealight urns, abstract urns with space for glowing candles inside. From Italian fiore inlaid urns, to colorful paper cannisters, from ceramic and wood to aluminum and stainless steel and marble, urns were in. Urns were much of my writing life that summer.

Life being what it is, as I began exploring the marketing angle of death, my father, at 93, began his final decline. He was fortunate at the end to enter a state of grace and fearlessness, even humor. When I sang him a hymn, he commented I should keep my day job, and smiled.

He let go at 5pm on a Friday, quitting time, with my cousin holding his hand. I saw him as a young man, jumping off a moving train, and heading towards the sunset, or maybe, just across town and into the nearest pool hall. 

I was writing about walnut, cherry and oak urns the day before he died. “a time-honored wooden urn is a classic piece of funerary art. Trees sustain the planet; they shelter us in life, comfort us in death. They symbolize resurrection, sleeping in winter, to return restored in spring.”

Suddenly, I was a customer. The man from India was kind, though no one offered me a discount, and in simple Midwest style, I slipped my Dad’s cremains into the Mississippi River one fine morning last October.

The work went on.

I reached some new level of dark humor when I began to recommend buying your own urn early, like a burial plot. “Why not choose your own elegant marble urn today? In addition to relieving your family of this task, meditating on your own urn can be liberating!”

Full disclosure: I have a ceramic pot, painted with pink bamboo fronds, and tiny golden birds in flight. Right now, it holds ragged prayer flags and my last dog’s collar. Someday, it will hold my cremains. At least until someone can take my body, transformed by 1800 degree heat into bits of bone and powder, to the Pacific Ocean.

This later stage of life, when the monster is about to emerge from under the bed, is a good time for contemplation. As we age and ripen into fuller consciousness, memories come back, streaming into the cracks that let light into our minds.

Why do I remember this now? I wonder.

For all of us, some moments are preserved in amber.

I remember…When I was in my 20’s, I was in love with a nice boy, handsome and funny. One warm summer evening we went with his parents to see a comedy show at the Hungry Eye in San Francisco. 

At intermission as we walked down Columbus Avenue, a very disoriented lady of the evening wobbled past us in a torn tutu, and not much more.  She was talking to herself. 

Embarrassed, I said something about her to my friend’s dad. “Ah,” he responded gently, “Everyone is innocent.”

That is when I looked down and saw the row of numbers tattooed on his left forearm.

I knew that, as a little boy, my boyfriend’s father had been at Auschwitz. And yet, it was in this particular moment that I saw that tattoo.

I’ve puzzled over that story for years.

Now, I see it as an inspiring brush with profound transformation.

The Stoics also said, Memento vivere, remember to live. In order to live well, we need to transmute Life’s suffering;  of injustice, grief and loss; of aging, dying and death.  Within our brief lifespans, we can find the shimmering golden light of peace, and even, sometimes, joy.

Many, many words have been written about this process.

What works best for me is what American environmentalist Rachel Carson wrote:

“If I had influence with the good fairy who…presides… over…children, I would ask that she grant to each child a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life...”

And, for those of us who want the ULTIMATE wisdom, there is Theodore Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, who gave us these words to live by:

“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”