New Year Thoughts

Year’s End 2009


2009 has been a year of heart-rending lows and highs – an invitation to leave behind all-consuming grief and build a new life, a passage through desperate terror and rediscovered adventure, and the gradual recalibration of an emotional, spiritual, and physical seismograph struck by a major life event. It has brought spiritual awakening, poetic activation, and a redefined self-perception. I’ve always thought of years as quantities of time. This year, however, rather resembled a near-death experience, a discovery of the tunnel of light leading to a different dimension. Tonight’s poems reflect year-end thoughts from different years, as the stroke of midnight approaches and we suddenly find ourselves transported across an invisible border to a new round of life.

Rosemary:


New Year’s Eve December 31 2008

I’m watching “Live from Lincoln Center”:

Interview with Loren Maazel – his last concert;

Maestro Maazel says, of his retirement:

“Life is all about Beginnings and Endings.”



This New Year’s eve marks the last hours

Of the last year we spent together on the earth.

And it signals a beginning –

The first moments

Of what I will become this next time “when I grow up”--

My graduation from your school of love,

My soul’s invitation to unfurl and soar.



Finding Joy December 31 2009

Stepping into mystic space, where all is shared,

I look upon this last year and the next

From up above, outside of time.

I see the light of bliss:

It emanates from spirit, not from body.

It glows when we unfold into the moment’s gifts –

A smile, a giggle, a contented sigh,

A loved one’s soul that beams through eyes

And lights up all around us.

I see how Joy suffuses every moment –

Always there – like sun behind the clouds;

Waiting till we shed the dust and clutter

Of our earth-bound selves.



Ellen: Alive at Christmas, After Cancer 1995

Light-sounds drench the world.

Cold winter’s warmth creeps through us.

Shimmering joy explodes.

Mirrors

Year’s End December 30 2009


Last time the winter solstice passed,

I’d foundered in a loss so

Catastrophic

That I wandered, whited out,

Through days and weeks and months,

Knowing moments only as they brushed my blinded face.



Losing from this life the Love who centered me,

Who brought me peace, who gave shape to my hours

Was a death unto itself.

It seems, however, that no one truly dies.

We move from one form to another,

Reconnoiter, Find our bearings,

Learn new ways of being,

Then go on with Spirit – loving, learning --

Changed and yet the same --

Transfigured.



Reflection:

Life is marked by passages, by times when we move definitively from one life to the next. Our birth was such a moment, as is the experience we call death. Other dramatic passages intervene between our entrance into the physical body, and our exit from it.

For me, becoming a mother in 1972 was such a moment. Everything changed, as did I. My body and my hormones were forever altered, as were my feelings and my awareness.

The day before I gave birth, I had been working in my darkroom, in the basement of our house in suburban St. Louis. I had studied to become a dedicated amateur photographer, and enjoyed making photos as esthetic statements of how I saw the world. My pictures often caught ironic juxtapositions, or sweet and unexpected moments. The subjects were often buildings and citiscapes without people, or moments when postures, faces, clothing, or colors presented a millisecond of surprise, without the person’s or animal’s collaboration in composing the image.

When my contractions became more rapid and regular, I was standing before the developer tray with my tongs, ready to extract the print that had been emerging, dip it into the rinse tray, and suspend it from the clothesline overhead to dry. I laid down the tongs and went to call the doctor, who said it was time to come in. I went to the hospital. Eight months later, I went back to the darkroom to extract the print from its tray, and knew that I would not have time to play with photography again, at least for a very long time.

The birth was difficult. The baby had been due a month earlier. I was so glad she was finally going to arrive!!! I was in the hospital in labor for 36 hours before they finally induced the birth with hormones. I had asked for anesthesia after the first 10 hours, so I was no longer conscious of what was happening. If I had been, I would have been scared witless for the welfare of the baby! Finally, she came – a beautiful girl, with the cord around her neck. She was wizened and shriveled as if she’d lost weight (she had, being post-mature), and had a full head of bright red hair. Her hands, amazingly, were shaped just like mine. I couldn’t stop looking at them. We had known the baby would be a girl, which was great. Ray always said that the baby’s hair would match my bright red “carrot top,” and, looking at the genetic background, I would just laugh. I had red hair, but no one else in my family did, and no one in his family did, either. But he was right!

Unfortunately, although the baby seemed fine, I started to hemorrhage after she was born. The only other time I’d had a hospital stay, for a tonsillectomy when I was 5, I had stayed in the hospital for two weeks also, because I had hemorrhaged uncontrollably, and they couldn’t stop the bleeding. My guess is that this history of hemorrhaging (which had also happened two or three times a year in lieu of menstrual periods) was one manifestation of malnutrition from celiac disease (gluten sensitivity).

They discharged the baby (fortunately my mother had come to help – she ended up being the main caregiver to a temporarily orphaned infant!), and kept me in the hospital for another week and a half while I bled incessantly. I can’t believe any sane doctor would have separated a mother and her newborn in that way!

They couldn’t decide whether to do surgery to stop the bleeding, but kept me fasting, except for water and occasional cups of clear broth, in case an emergency surgery became necessary. I ended up starved, weakened, and severely anemic by the time I was finally discharged home. It took till after the baby’s first birthday before I began to feel that my energy had somewhat recovered. Breast feeding at that time was routinely discouraged, and although the milk came in, I’ve always wondered if trying to pump milk and feed the baby would have depleted me even more than I already was. By the time I made it home, my daughter was well inculcated, in any case, into the routine of bottle feeding. Bonding was difficult, as the hormonal period when it is supposed to occur, within the first few days of the baby’s life, was well past.

The next traumatic life transition came when my daughter was six. In addition to being a mother, I had continued to teach French at the community college, as a full-time faculty member. I had achieved good success, being elected President of the National Association of Foreign Language Department chairs, and obtaining a major NEH grant for my research and writing. 

In 1978, the economics of foreign language courses in the Midwest, where at the time everyone spoke English and few had encountered another language, hit bottom. The college decided that no one really needed foreign language study, and that, in fact, all the humanities were likewise pretty useless. Foreign language and humanities faculty members were laid off, presumably permanently. I found myself out of a job and out of a profession. No other foreign language teaching jobs were available anywhere within commuting distance. It was a moment of despair. All that study and qualification was suddenly useless. In desperation, I started a business in Human Resource consulting, for which I had obtained some training with personality profiles. I figured that my time as an academic had drawn to a close.

In fact, I did end up being offered another teaching position days before the next semester began – teaching remedial reading at a different campus of the same community college. I liked getting regular paychecks. I took the position, for which I was technically qualified, with a doctorate in psycholinguistics, but about which I actually knew very little.

The year’s effort I had put into building the human resource consulting business as an alternative career to replace teaching had also paid off. I had recruited excellent and well qualified associates who continued to work as part of the company I had started. Now I had a full-time job that I was desperately trying to learn how to do, a fledgling business that demanded significant management and sales attention, an important National Endowment for the Humanities grant to do ethnographic and linguistic research and write two books, and a six year old daughter for whom I was trying to figure out how to be an excellent mother. I was stressed beyond imagining – “meeting myself coming and going.”

The year after being laid off and then rehired, I became severely ill, involuntarily losing close to 50 pounds in three months, and feeling only semi[-conscious most of the time, with chronic diarrhea, and eczema so severe that it restricted my fitful sleep to less than two hours a night, sometimes for weeks at a time. I was so weakened that I had to lie down between classes, surreptitiously, lest anyone discover me “flaking out.” I had also been hemorrhaging vaginally for six months or so. In addition, one day, as  I was trying to lift a heavy bird bath in the garden, my spine had fractured from osteoporosis, causing excruciating pain, hospitalization, and a year-long convalescence using a wheelchair or crutches. 

I had, previously, had premonitions of people’s impending deaths from accidents of various kinds, which had generally come to pass within a few hours of my psychic perceptions. At this point, I had a premonition of my own imminent death, which, needless to say, alarmed me. I immediately took action – that hour -- starting a gluten-free diet, and starting to research nutritional supplements, learning which ones I needed. I don’t know what pushed me toward those solutions, but they were correct. I had been trying to obtain medical treatment with no success during the months that preceded my premonition; obviously that was not working. I did see a different doctor, a gynecologist, to get hormonal treatment for the vaginal bleeding. Gradually, with the gluten-free diet, the supplements and the hormonal treatments, I started to recover from this low point.

Because of the hemorrhaging and the Progesterone treatment to arrest it, I basically underwent menopause at age 39. I found it distressing that I had had to figure out for myself how to restore my health – that medical doctors had not been able to diagnose what was going on or provide helpful guidance. I had been told by three different doctors that I wasn’t really sick, that I was overreacting. One of them had exacerbated matters dramatically by prescribing 20 bran tablets a day for diarrhea, and then, when I became even more desperately ill, accusing me of lying to him. He did do a blood test of my rheumatoid factor, which was through the roof – but he just brushed it off as a false reading; it was too unbelievably high. Of course, the underlying problem was gluten-sensitivity, which was, at the time, thought to be a myth, a hysterical “all in your head” illness.

This was the beginning of my study of alternative health maintenance. Over the next few years, I became an expert on the use of nutritional supplements to prevent disease and disability, and over the next three or four years, thanks to using what I was learning, I regained a reasonable state of health – feeling better than I ever had in my life.

Although I have not seen this described in the celiac literature, I have repeatedly observed, since beginning my practice as a classical homeopath, that a history of dramatic menstrual irregularities, infertility, difficult pregnancy or repeated miscarriage, and a very early menopause are fairly diagnostic for celiac disease in young women.

Although I appreciated that I was still employed, I actually hated teaching remedial reading and writing. In 1982, I took a year’s sabbatical, which I had earned, to further recover from my illness, to complete the book on French language and culture in Missouri, and to figure out whether I should continue teaching or should switch full-time to the consulting business. During that year, I also worked intensively and studied with a hypnotherapist, seeking to access the deepest levels of my being to answer my questions about my life direction.

The hypnotherapy was deeply healing, and helped me to achieve a very different, more spiritual perspective on what a lifetime means, and what mine, in particular, was about. It helped me to tune into a non-material level of thought and experience.

At the same time, I had found a homeopath in St. Louis who helped me further, using remedies. I had become acquainted with homeopathic medicine in France, where many people prefer it to allopathic medicine, and where most pharmacies offered both types of medications, homeopathic and allopathic. Certainly, this homeopathic treatment was much more helpful on my path to better health than the allopathic medicines had been.

When I returned to teaching, I had found a better perspective within which to do that work, and I was able to change the framework totally. I had once again been transformed, emerging from the crisis following a different path, living within in a different paradigm.



Lives December 30 2009

Sometimes we see our path

As in a fun-house mirror.

We’re sure that we know what is real and what is not,

What works for us, and what we want.

Then things happen that we didn’t plan.

We’re upended, spun around.

What we thought was fact –

The riches so enticing,

Success, the picture perfect house and family –

Suddenly, they flip into a mirror realm.

And things that held no interest,

That we didn’t think were real,

Become important.

We traverse our own road through the desert.

We are close to dying, then come back to life,

Having learned that worldly things we touch and taste and feel

Are fleeting,

And the manna -- white, unearthly, everybody’s –

And the Love from which it springs --

Are our true sustenance.

Pretenses

Rosemary: In and Out December 29 2009


All day, I’ve been flirting with an insight –

I think I get it, then it vanishes,

Then peeks out at me again,

Although I can’t hold on, can’t grab it,

Inspect it, pin it down to see up close --

As if it were a curiously colored beetle

That had leapt into my mind.

It brings a new perspective

About earthly life within a body

Yet awareness on a plane beyond,

About who I was for years with you, my Love,

And who I’ll now become,

And how it will feel to grow up some more,

And change my boundaries of awareness yet again.

In its good time this train of thought

Will stop its game of Hide and Seek, and

Stay with me.

Till then,childlike, I play and wonder.



Rosemary Reflection -- Lives Pretending:

By my third year in France, I felt stable and grown up. I had friends – good friendships with other women, straight and gay, and chaste, deep friendships with three Catholic seminarians, as well as casual connections with other choir members and students from the university. I finally had gotten to know and be accepted in the families of several friends, and felt anchored.

These families that adopted me were remarkably diverse and fascinating – two working class, traditional couples and their grown up children – one in the rural Vosges mountains and the other in a grimy, smoky, industrial city close the German Saar region; an Alsatian Jewish family who had survived the Holocaust by “passing” openly as French; a large, extended, very wealthy and famous family connected with a champagne fortune in Reims with a village near Geneva, Switzerland, where they collectively spent the summers filling all the houses; a wealthy urban widow and her two sons in the rarefied XVIe Arrondissement in Paris;  a retired school teacher in a tiny garret apartment in a working class Parisian neighborhood. Spending weekends and school vacations with these different families allowed me to observe and understand, in depth, some of the different class and economic environments within the seemingly united country called France.

I had become exceedingly well acculturated in France. I was perceived as a native speaker of French from a different region from wherever I was. I understood customs; I got the jokes; I was employed and on my way to earning my doctorate at a French university, leading to a career as a university professor. I was sharing an apartment with a roommate. We were good friends and enjoyed living together. We felt successful with a prestigious address on the elegant 18th century gem, Place de la Carriere, at the heart of Nancy.

But as the end of that third year approached, I felt obliged to decide if I would remain in France, or whether I should go back to the US. I knew that if I continued to evolve in a French context beyond where I was, I would not repatriate. I would have no reason to do so. I would have chosen to live in a non-native culture, as a foreigner.
I liked France much better than the US, and felt as though I fit in there, but an important part of me wanted the simplicity of being what I appeared. It would almost have been easier if I had retained undeniable American characteristics instead of morphing successfully into a pseudo-Frenchwoman. I didn’t want to have to explain, for the rest of my life, that I was not a native of France. I didn’t want to feel that my life was a stage role. Based on that desire to live in truth, I chose to accept the teaching assistantship from Indiana University and finish my studies in the US.

I was 24 years old, almost 25. I was acutely aware of the traditional French belief still prevalent at that time that a woman who turned 26 without having married became officially an “Old Maid.” My old fear of spending my life as a rejected spinster had survived. Social attitudes have changed so dramatically since the early 1960s, that my fear seems now to have been intolerably quaint. Now, single life is a viable alternative , with no aura of rejection and failure, and, of course, if I had grown up in the 2000s, I would have been aware of the fourth alternative, life as a lesbian.

However, I still hadn’t discovered that reality, and I knew that graduate school would probably be my last chance to mingle with a large pool of highly educated, age-appropriate single men with the hope of finding a husband. That was definitely as important a goal, as I arrived in Bloomington, as it was to finish my doctorate. Of course, I wasn’t unique in that goal. Of our group of friends who shared the cafeteria attached to the graduate dormitories at Indiana University, virtually everyone had married someone else from the group by the end of that first year.

I met Ray, my husband-to-be, the first night at dinner. We went to a movie together after the meal. We had a good time. We decided to buy season tickets and then discovered that two people would be admitted on each single ticket. Ever frugal, we split the cost, and were thus committed to a semester of Friday night dates watching foreign movies together and necking. For two shy people, it was a great way to date!

Ray and I got engaged that Christmas, and the following summer, we were married in my parents’ parish church in Rhode Island. My extended family turned out by the dozens. No one from Ray’s family came. My sisters directed seating in the church and told people to distribute themselves evenly on both sides so that it wouldn’t be so obvious that no one from the “groom’s side” was there.

We didn’t have any problems with his family. My family, as the bride’s relatives, had set the wedding up in Rhode Island, and his family had felt that since they’d see us a week after the wedding, they didn’t have to spend the large sums it would take to travel that distance and find somewhere to stay. It made sense.

Ray was forced to switch from the MFA program in the Art school to the Art Education program in the School of Education, and he worked there on his Master’s degree, doing practice teaching in Kokomo, Indiana the second semester of our first year together. We were living on my teaching assistantship, and had found a space to rent in a suburban tract house basement. It was livable, if damp and dark. We owned a 16 inch black and white television that we had purchased with cash from wedding gifts, and a beautiful yellow budgie named “Dix-huit” who delighted us with his antics and chirps and his resolute cheerfulness. The other furnishings and linens were cast-offs from the family that owned the house.

While Ray was off practice teaching, I worked on preparing for the Ph.D. written exams and taught my French classes. I had taken the classes for a Ph.D. in French linguistics, following on the graduate work I’d done in France in psychology and in linguistics.

Ray and I were also seeking a place where we both would have academic jobs together after he had obtained his degree and I had taken the Prelims, in 1966. Teaching jobs were becoming hard to find in the mid-60s. We ended up with two possible cities: St. Louis, MO, or Magnolia, AR. We’d never heard of Magnolia, and in those pre-Internet days all we could find out about it was it was “only 100 miles from Texarkana!” We’d never heard of Texarkana, either. St. Louis sounded more promising!

I had found a job that sparked my imagination. The job was at a small sectarian college near St. Louis. However, besides the drudgery of teaching beginning language classes, the job included working on an incredible project, to “program” the French language step by step, sound by sound, sentence by sentence, meme by meme, so that it could be taught as a spoken language using tape recorded lessons rather than a written textbook. My quasi-native command of French and my by then extensive training in linguistics and the art of teaching and learning foreign languages made me a perfect match for the job. I fell in love with my boss during the interview! It was a transcendent connection. Rand and I talked for 5 hours straight, about French and linguistics, and I have no idea what else. I was flying!   Ray obtained a job teaching art at a brand new campus of a brand new community college in the St. Louis suburbs. He retired from that job in 2008, after 41 years!

Rand and I worked together on the “programmed” French course from 1966 until 1972. We completed the whole analyzing, writing, and recording process, under contract with a well-known textbook publisher. Recording a couple of hundred hours of painstakingly detailed lessons all in French cemented forever in my brain the native French accent I’d acquired in France. The work was never published because of the economic downturn of the early 70s, and the fact that foreign languages at that point lost their strategic glitter as the US turned its war engines toward Asia and away from Europe.

By that time, I, too, was teaching for the community college, which paid dramatically better than the small Protestant college, and Rand had moved on to become Dean of a college in the Southwest, although we remained very close friends. At both the community college and St. Louis Unversity, I used the course, which really did succeed in teaching people to speak and understand French at a functional level with an excellent accent within the normal four semester sequence of college –level French I and II.

In 1972, my daughter with Ray was born, and Rand came from the Southwest to see her and visit me. That was to be the last time I saw him for 25 years, although we stayed in touch.

Ray and I focused on raising our daughter together, and of course we each continued our teaching careers. Ray taught during the day and I taught evening classes, so our daughter always had one of us with her. Of course, Ray and I were like ships passing – he would be dashing in as I would be dashing out to my first class. We functioned admirably as a disconnected team, and had little chance to communicate about our respective times with the baby. Work was the core of our lives, along with our separate times parenting alone.

                                              ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After her return from Switzerland in 1960, Ellen also went about finishing her educational goal while simultaneously seeking a partner. While in her first year as a resident at Memorial Sloan Kettering, she met a young doctor from Texas, who shared an oncology rotation with her. The young doctor, Jen, had graduated from Johns Hopkins Medical school, and had a successful career in hematology awaiting her. During their second year of residency, although Jen had gone on to another institution to complete her advanced training and prepare for Boards, she and Ellen moved in together. They shared a love of music , of travel, and of parties, and of course, they both understood the demands of a challenging medical career as a hospital attending and medical school faculty member. They both experienced weekends and nights on call, and the frequent need to rush to the hospital in emergency mode to help save a patient. They both understood crashing on the sofa after a 36 hour stint on duty at the hospital.

Ellen’s career developed at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital and Cornell Medical School in Manhattan, , and Jen’s at Montefiore Hospital and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. Ellen and Jen shared a Manhattan apartment and a house in Connecticut, which they loved, and where they spent weekends and whatever free time summers provided. The Connecticut house was the scene of many weekend parties, Guests from New York visited Ellen and Jen there most weekends – colleagues, neighbors, and social acquaintances. The house was at the top of a hill, in a forested area. In winter, their car could not get up the snowed in slope, and they kept snowshoes in the car so they could go back and forth to the house, carrying provisions and supplies.

Ellen and Jen totally remodeled the house, doubling its size. They did much of the work themselves. Together they hewed trees and cut the cedar shakes from which they would make the roof. Ellen was extremely proud of being able to do this with her one hand. Of course, it was one of the activities in which she overused that arm, wearing out the shoulder, leading to great pain and further disability in her seventies. She often commented in late life on how important it was for young people to realize that they could wear out their bodies through overachievement in physical activities.

She was especially aware of the importance of that awareness for people with physical disabilities, who were tempted to overuse other body parts in compensation. She chronicled for me the joint replacement surgeries suffered by her disabled friends who used crutches or wheelchairs, and emphasized how much better it was to use electric technologies than to wear out their shoulders, hips, or knees trying to be totally self-sufficient and not appear disabled. It was a desperate price to pay for the appearance of “being just like everyone else.”

Ellen and Jen finally sold the house in Connecticut and moved out of the rented apartment in Manhattan, buying a house in New Rochelle, which was close to Jen’s place of work. The apartment had been close to Ellen’s job at Sloan Kettering, but necessitated a commute for Jen.

Now it was Ellen who would commute, on the train. This represented a severe hardship. Ellen had taken driving lessons so that she would be able to drive a car, a necessity for suburban mobility. However, Jen, who had owned the car, was so critical of Ellen’s ability to steer safely with one hand -- screaming that Ellen was “going to kill somebody!” -- that Ellen was terrified to take the wheel, although she had passed the driver’s test with flying colors. Her license, which she renewed and maintained to the end of her life without ever driving once on her own, had a restriction, that because of her one-handedness, she was required to use a ball that clipped to the steering wheel, as a sort of handle. This had long since proven to be useless, and the balls were no longer manufactured; they became impossible to find. I had never seen one, although Ellen had told me about learning to drive using it.   I didn’t realize that Ellen had hung on to the one she had acquired when getting her driver’s license. When going through Ellen’s things after her death, I came across a strange round object attached to a clip, and for a long time could not figure out what it was. Finally it dawned on me – it was the steering wheel knob! Ellen had hoped almost until her death that she would at some point be able to get behind the wheel of a car and drive herself somewhere.  It never happened, although I had encouraged her to do it, or to take refresher lessons while we were living in Berkeley. That knob was a poignant symbol of a hope that never materialized. 

Ellen’s inability to get around in the suburban community highlighted a further humiliation that had been less disturbing while Ellen and Jen had lived in Manhattan, where Ellen could walk or take the bus or subway wherever she needed to go. Neither Ellen nor Jen had ever told their birth families – parents or siblings – that they were gay and were partners. They said they were “roommates,” fearing their families’ scorn if they were found out as lovers and partners. Their apartment and the house alike had two bedrooms with beds, one furnished as Jen’s and the other as Ellen’s. The friend who had stayed with them during that time had always been put up in “Jen’s room,” of course realizing that Jen never occupied that room but slept with Ellen. The friend told me “They called that room “Jen’s room” for their families, for when relatives came to visit.” At Christmas, Jen would go home to her family, but didn’t take Ellen with her, because Ellen was “only a roommate.” Ellen ended up spending Christmases in New Rochelle alone, imprisoned in the house, unable to get to the store or to any other destination on her own, because of her inability to drive. She felt desolate, isolated, and abandoned.

In New Rochelle, Ellen relied on asking neighbors to take her in their cars to the commuter station and then home in the evening, a necessity which she also found humiliating . However, it turned out that the commutes on the train provided an important opportunity for Ellen. She used the time to start writing a journal. After a few months, upon rereading some of what she had written, she realized that if she tweaked a word here or there, her writing would be classified as poetic. From then on, she wrote poetry, rather than creating a journal in prose. The solitary time on the train provided an opportunity for introspection that her busy life as a doctor, house remodeler, and social maven had not allowed. It was a major turning point in her self-awareness.



Ellen October 1984, on the train:






A Romantic


I never knew that I was such a romantic.

No one ever told me that

Others did not feel as I.

That they did not get lost in Brandenberg Concerti.

That the first sniff of a cork

Did not bring tears to their eyes.

That their passions did not take over their lives.

That they did not long to wander amidst the relics

Of feelings supposedly dead in 1918.



How could I know?



Romantics do not wear Brooks Brothers women's blazers,

Commute on Conrail and read "The New York Times"

With special attention to food, houses and "Hers".

They do not carry briefcases or stethoscopes,

Or wear long white coats as they practice their professions.

Nor do they understand the complexities of illness

And the arcane scientific symbols thereof.

They feel, and let their lives run on intuition,

On intensity, on outrageous sentiment.



As I have all the while,

Pretending.

French Friends

Navigating the Maze December 26 2009


When I turn a corner in the maze of life

And see a change approaching,

My first response is “I don’t think so!”

What if this and what if that?

What if it hurts? What if I don’t like it?

What if I change my mind?

I worry about saying “yes.”

What will I get into that will turn out wrong?

Will I find myself with no way out?

What will I regret?



But then I look the other way, comparing

Notes on saying “No,” rather than affirming “Yes.”

With “no,” I make no progress;.

I stay planted where I am, and stagnate – heavy, stuck.



It’s “Yes” that points the way to lightness, opens doors to joy,

And lets us smile as Love and Grace propel us gently on our way.

At each turn, if we pay attention, we can keep on saying “yes”--

Following our heart’s desire each moment,

As it shows the next place to turn, and then the next

Along the labyrinth’s path.



The help is there; it’s ours – but only if we will say “yes.”



Reflection

When I was in my teens, I thought I was choosing what I would be – for the rest of my life – when I would “grow up.” I believed that I would only have one chance, one choice. If I picked wrong, that was it – no u turns, no changes – no forgiveness. What a heavy burden that belief creates! Making a decision under those conditions seems virtually impossible.

In fact, belief creates reality. I did make decisions and learned fairly quickly that they weren’t infallible. Believing they should be or had to be made once and for all led to depression. My first choice had been to become a veterinarian. That desire was quickly shot down by well-meaning adults: “You can’t do that! You’re only a girl! They’ll never take you.” Naively, I believed them.

I then decided to enter the convent. The powerful women I had known, the ones that didn’t have to get permission for everything from a man, were nuns. I definitely wanted to be a powerful woman. I had been about seven when, as I watched my mother struggle under the heavy burden of trying to care for five young children – doing many loads of laundry in a wringer washer each week – I had sworn to myself, “I WILL NOT live my life as a housewife!” Going into the convent was the only practical alternative that seemed to exist.

I entered the Sisters of Mercy in September 1956, after graduating from high school in June. The first year, I loved the novelty of praying, meditating, living with other young women my age, attending college classes. The second year, the so-called “Canonical Year,” was designated as a time devoted solely to manual labor and prayer. I had never done manual labor very well. I hated it. My arms and hands were unusually weak (and still are), and I struggled to make anything come out correctly. And I also hated the restriction of not being able to look around and absorb learning about everything.

I became miserable, although I thought I was hiding it. I also became ill – my allergies escalated dramatically, and I spent a lot of time in the infirmary with horrible outbreaks of eczema accompanied by abdominal pain, feeling desperately ill, though with no plausible explanation. I was accused of being hysterical, neurotic, even “schizophrenic.” The one food that was yummy that the sisters made were homemade rolls and breads, and that’s what I was mostly eating. Of course, I now know that the increased emotional stress and increased consumption of bread were combining to exacerbate my gluten sensitivity symptoms.

I should have known, but didn’t, that ultimately the choice wasn’t up to me whether I stayed or not. I did not want to leave. I knew I didn’t want to get married (I had never had or wanted any boyfriends) and the only other option for potential life states that I knew of that was open to women was to be an “old maid” – a reject. Better to tough it out in the convent. I was told on the eve of taking first vows, that I would not be allowed to do so, and must leave that day, without saying anything to anyone. By that afternoon, my parents arrived to take me back home, – an abject failure, my hair hacked close to my skull as it needed to be under the veil I would no longer wear.

The convent had been a good solution to the fact that I did not want to stay at home with my family a moment longer than I had to. I didn’t want to go back home now, either. I was desolate, grieving the loss of my chosen life. I was deeply ashamed of my failure.

I found a job as a residential camp counselor for the summer, and was out of the house within a week. I’d never been to camp, other than a YWCA Day Camp for one season when I was 10, and which I had hated. But I told no one what had happened to me, and figured out as best I could, by observing and imitating others, how to be a camp counselor. One condition they required me to fulfill was to take lessons during the summer so that I could be certified as able to swim 100 feet. During each two week session that entire summer, I took swimming lessons with the “pollywogs” – the cutesie name the camp assigned the first graders. At the end of every two week session, the “pollywogs” all received certificates of completion; but each time I took the swimming test, they had to fish me out with a life preserver, one of those round white doughnut-shaped buoys on a rope, used along with a hook on a long handle. Embarrassing! I’ve taken swimming lessons and classes at least a half a dozen more times since then, and have never been able to swim – probably a result of my twisted back and weak arms.

I don’t remember anything else about that long, difficult summer. At least, I was able to start college as soon as the camp had ended. The sisters were kind to me in reinstating the four year scholarship I had given up to enter the convent, and I was able to live in the dorm by being a “house mother” (now called “resident assistant”) in one of the dormitories. To cover other expenses, I obtained a part-time job as an organist and choir director at my parents’ parish church, St. Martha’s. Among my college classmates were the newly professed nuns from my convent class, wearing their habits and black veils. Following directions, I never said a word to any of them. I felt a keen sense of disgrace. It was obvious that, at age 19, I’d already flubbed my chance to decide what I would be when I grew up!

I was able to finish my college credits and graduate in two years, in 1961. I was trained as a high school French teacher, but knew that I definitely didn’t want to be a teacher. I’d received a Fulbright scholarship to study in France, and left by ship from the Chelsea Piers in New York that September, at age 21, to study French literature at the University of Toulouse in southwestern France.

Ellen, then 28, had just completed her medical training in Lausanne, Switzerland, and returned to New York for her first year of internship at King’s County Hospital. I was about to embark on what became three years in France, the first two on Fulbright scholarships and the third as a teaching assistant and doctoral candidate in Applied Linguistics at the University of Nancy, in eastern France.

It was in France that I learned the benefits of accepting and saying “yes” to each moment’s opportunities – that if I did that, I would always be guided and provided for. As my first year was ending, I wrote to Indiana University to reactivate the university fellowship they had promised they would hold for me if I accepted the first Fulbright. Indiana wrote back, saying they had not held the fellowship, and that same day I received an offer from the Fulbright Commission offering me a second year scholarship in a different city, Nancy– something that was rarely offered. I was willing to stay longer in France, and my “Plan A” had just been withdrawn, so I wrote to the Fulbright Commission accepting the second year scholarship. Three days after I’d sent my acceptance to the Fulbright Commission, I received a second letter from Indiana, telling me that the first letter had been sent in error and that I did indeed still have access to the University Fellowship. I thought it over, and decided that I had been meant to stay longer in France. I negotiated with Indiana a teaching assistantship to remain available until I returned to the US to claim it, and let stand my acceptance of the second year Fulbright scholarship.

My first year in France had been my first opportunity to take stock of who I was and what direction I wished to pursue, after just barely holding things together in the wake of my rejection from the convent. I realized I was desolate and lonely, without friends in a foreign country and language. I was desperate to belong somewhere, to feel accepted somehow. Amazingly, I somehow found a sense of myself and then consciously figured out how to translate that self into French so that I could find friends who really understood me and weren’t just spending time with me because I was a fellow alien or because I was an American and they wanted to practice their English.

During the first three months of my year in Toulouse, I had become intensely ill with Hepatitis A. By the end of November, I was starting to recover physically, but had reached a psychotic level of despair. At that point, I realized I had to create a self and become integrated into a social group – it was urgent. By summer, I was ready to find friends, and moving to Nancy provided me the opportunity for a fresh start.

In Nancy, I joined a choir, which was to become a wonderful group of French friends for me. I changed majors, having decided that analyzing literature destroyed all possibility of enjoying it. I combined my interests in psychology, which I’d read but never had a chance to study, and language, and started a French doctorate in Applied Linguistics (teaching foreign languages). I enjoyed my advisor and his “lab” – his group of apprentices, of which I became one. I felt more integrated and accepted than I ever had before in my life.

My group of friends decided that they wanted to hike around Mont Blanc in the French Alps the following summer, and started a rigorous program of rock climbing and conditioning for the hike. I participated in all the sessions, but once again, as had happened with manual work in the convent and trying to learn to swim at summer camp, I was physically unable to acquire the strength needed to actually go on the expedition. My arms and hands, despite a whole year of attempted training, would not become strong enough to hold me as I clung to ledges. In experiences reminiscent of being rescued from the water with a buoy after failed swimming lessons, I had to be hauled up to safety over and over with the precautionary rope harness. A pattern was emerging. A doctor once wondered if I’d perhaps had polio as a child, and this history certainly suggests that possibility, although it was never diagnosed.

Like me in Nancy, Ellen had for the first time found her element while studying in Lausanne. She made friends and enjoyed her first serious relationship; she excelled in her studies and felt successful; she developed a close to native command of French language and Swiss culture and became integrated socially and in her work life as a student. She coped with physical disability, but nevertheless, for the first time in her life did not feel “other.” For both of us, our years as American students in French-speaking Europe provided the foundation for the rest of our lives, on all levels. Learning French as a second language to a quasi-native extent and becoming integrated into the surrounding French-speaking culture was formative for both of us.

Even though we met and joined together 35 or so years after our times separately in French speaking environments, that experience nevertheless provided a powerful shared basis for our thinking and our expression. I became aware after Ellen and I had been together for a while that both of us often transposed French semantics and thought structure into our English speaking. This allowed us to play with language together as we had never been able to do with anyone else. It delighted us both immensely. We had also thoroughly integrated French-based cultural and esthetic values that gave us a common ground transcending our radically different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Our joint francophone experience truly facilitated the development of a deep level of mutual understanding between us.

Christmas Carols

Carols on Christmas Night December 25 2009


After sharing love all day with friends and family,

I sit now before the fireplace.

Kiri Te Kanawa sings “Coventry Carol.”

The dog curls in her bed, content.

I’m savoring this scene –

It’s full, resonant, complete.

Each Present Moment, like a warming fire,

Casts a safe and golden circle.

Around its edge, my mundane worries lurk, as if coyotes prowling.

They can’t invade while I stay mindful,

Saying “Yes” to Now.



Reflection

This is a day for love, for belonging, for giving and receiving. I give thanks for the day I’ve had, for the gifts of loving friendship, meditation, beauty, children and grandchildren, comfort, fun and creativity. At the end of a year of sadness and searching, this day has been miraculous.

A year ago, we had just celebrated Ellen’s life – with the “Memorial New York Cocktail Party” she had requested in lieu of a service. Over a hundred friends and family members had come from across the country and across the street, to fill our house with their love for Ellen and their support for me. We had shared a very special day. Those friends and family members have continued to sustain me through this year, as I have sought to put myself and my life back together.

A year ago today, I experienced an intensely powerful dream that resonated with me all of Christmas and beyond, although then I didn’t understand its meaning. The fact that it included a nest full of fledgling birds was interesting, given my history of breeding and nurturing birds, small and large. In the dream, as I saw the flurry of birds about to take wing, I felt a wave of affection. Looking back now at the poem I wrote describing that dream, I see that it predicted writing the book and the poems – each one, in the language of the dream, a green budgie flying away to proclaim “the good word” -- each one a gift of love.


Christmas Spirit Present December 25 2008

I dreamed a Christmas service.

My favorite childhood priest was there.

He had always helped me, made me feel special;

In the dream, he made me think of Ellen.

He told me

To run up and ring the steeple bell.

Other bells were pealing forth across the city and

Our voice, too, was needed.

I ran up, as told, gripped the rope, and pulled.

Nothing.

I climbed higher. Twigs and grass fell from the bell.

But it wouldn’t ring.

Then I got really close, peered in, and

Saw inside the bell a nest of budgies –

Eager, bright green birds, about to fledge,

To spread the Word to many.

I helped them fly away. I was happy --

I did my job; I felt its meaning.

I had feared an agonizing Christmas as I mourned.

But the dream transformed my mood.


Instead, as in the Christmas story,

Joy peals forth;

The bell rings out.

The Word is Love, and I am blessed.

Christmas Eve

At a Christmas Eve Service December 24 2009


I sit with family, thinking of all those I’m fortunate to love.

Our stories braiding -- one common cord with many strands:

Our love, our losses, the tears that wet our cheeks,

The thrill of recognition as our gazes merge,

The unease that rises from the nervous little place down deep within,

Frustrations that we think unique but everybody shares.

Hearts open as we share these moments gathered by the creche.

We lift our hearts together as our voices blend –

And strands of harmonizing beauty

Weave us all together with a touch, a hug, a song, a smile --

And moments shared.


Reflection:

Christmas eve night somehow seems silent, deep, and holy. Even when the weather’s balmy and the ground is dry and clear – no snow -- I always have a sense that something sacred is happening. I’m sure it derives from the gift of life, the focus of the Christmas story. A life began, ages ago, and a variety of creatures representing all of us gave thanks. With them, we come together at Christmas, glorifying divine Love in collective appreciation that approaches sublimity. Indeed, sharing universal love with all creation is a good definition of Heaven -- of bliss. On this night each year, we are offered the gift of simply being, in the light – of sampling the joy of angels, joined with those we love, whether they are still embodied or have moved into spirit. It’s a very special moment.


Who Am I this Year?

The Christmas story that I’ve heard and loved for seven decades

Invites me, yearly: choose my role, decide who to play,

Join in the Christmas Pageant.

Will I be a wise soul, a traveler from afar,

Maybe an angel, or a shepherd – or perhaps a sheep or donkey?

Were there sheepdogs there, in those days?

Did any village children peek between the boards that walled the shed

And wonder at the light and warmth within?

Did the innkeep’s wife bring out a crock of soup to share,

To keep the strangers warm?

This year, I think that I'm a widow woman from the next town over,

Suddenly between homes, wandering around to find a place of comfort.

I see the light and love that pour forth from the stable,

And pause to ground my soul before going on the road again,

Strengthened and inspired, seeking my next place in life

And knowing that it must be built on love.

Always Ourselves

Cumulation December 22 2009


Our calendars and birthdays say we live time as a line, always moving forward.

But that’s not true at all.

Like trees, we carry with us all that ever was –

Every lesson that we’ve learned,

Every thought, from childhood on,

Every failure, loss, and triumph –

These, our rings, surround us always.

How mother treated us when we were two

And what we thought

Became the basis for a lifetime during which

We’ve lived anew the same reaction

With all our loved ones.

When we've lost a precious friend or prized position,

We relived, in depth, all earlier losses.


We harbor the illusions that each new person is the one before,

And that we haven’t changed since we were three.

We are cumulative.

As we were, we are,

Though growing over time in strength and depth, in knowing and in love.


Reflection

When Ellen and I first got together in 1999, we were older – retirement-aged. We thought of ourselves as “grown up,” “being able to take care of ourselves.” We’d long since left behind childish beliefs like Santa Claus. However, though we were serious women who had, to our detriment, long since forgotten how to play, pretend, and be totally aware of the present moment like children, we soon stumbled over our inner three-year-olds.

Ellen was acutely ashamed of her paralyzed arm and hand. She remembered feeling desperately mortified as a one-year old, because, with one arm, she hadn't been able to crawl or raise herself to a standing position. She knew her family were worried that she would be retarded, abnormal. When she did finally take her first steps, at around 20 months, she remembered vividly the embarrassment she had felt about their concerns when her aunt, who had been watching her while her mother was at work, announced with relief, on her mother Pauline’s return, “The baby walked.”

This may seem unusual at that age, but Ellen remembered graphically and understood everything that happened to her from the moment of her traumatic birth.

The earliest photo that Ellen had of herself was a studio portrait taken when she was about 2. Her right shoulder and arm were crudely blocked out by the photographer, who placed a paper or cardboard in front of that part of the negative when printing the picture. She kept the picture, but remembered feeling ashamed looking at it, even as a tiny child. The black space at the bottom of the photo, where her arm should have been visible, was a concrete expression of her family’s embarrassment about the way she was. I look at that photo now, and see a baby whose eyes show the depth and sorrow of an old person, hidden by a smile that presented a brave front.

Ellen Age 2 1934

I too had felt ashamed from a very young age. I just never managed to fit the profile of the quiet, compliant, healthy, neat, girlish child who loved dolls and playing house – the “perfect daughter” that my mother wished for, who would long for frilly dresses and little satin- trimmed, heart-shaped aprons. I remember realizing, at age 3, that my mother wasn't ever going to be pleased with me. 

I had terrible eczema and constant diarrhea. My skin was always rough, raw, cracked,  bleeding, weeping, intensely itchy. It had been that way when I was born. The recommended treatment for eczema at that time was to smear the erupted areas with stinky tar salve that indelibly stained black everything with which it came in contact. Following doctor’s orders, they stripped me twice a day, none too gently, and smeared 50% or more of my body and limbs – all the places broken out in eczema -- with that horrible, stinging salve. Understandably, they found the task repulsive, and I felt like a leper, loathsome and vile. (That salve also didn’t help the rash or the itching particularly.) At night I was tied to the bed like an animal to try to prevent me from scratching. In addition, I was always distracted, living in my own world, inevitably forgetful -- the stereotypical girl with ADD. My mother found me a constant source of frustration and embarrassment. I’m sure she also, like Ellen’s mother, worried lovingly about how I would turn out, but I didn’t see that part.

Rosemary Age 1 1940

As Ellen's and my relationship developed, we both became re-acquainted with how we had felt as small children.  Periodically, one or the other of us would say something innocent that would plunge the other into desperate feelings of abandonment, unworthiness, and vicious resentment. As each of us experienced her private Hell, we could no longer communicate with the other. Side by side, we’d sit in silence, in resentful emotional pain, not comprehending what had happened – feeling abandoned.


It took months of experiencing this despair over and over, and of talking with our respective therapists, then sharing with each other what we’d said to the therapists and what each therapist had said in response, before it slowly dawned on us what was happening.

Whatever slight remark had triggered our standoffs had reminded one of us of interactions with her mother during early childhood. As small children, we had both felt persecuted and misunderstood by our mothers. We had learned to expect that interacting with Mother would leave us feeling inadequate, defective, and unwelcome. It was as if a chute had opened beneath us and, powerless and uncomprending, we had suddenly found ourselves back in the suffering of early childhood. 


When we went back to that child-self, we always found, in climbing back out,  that whatever had caused our indignation resulted not from any hurtful intention of the other, but rather from our misinterpretation of the other’s efforts to be kind and sympathetic, or our misunderstanding of the origins and context of the other’s words or acts. We were from different cultures, and also, I suppose neither of us was used to someone else consistently treating us with consideration. We expected the worst and had hair-trigger reactions. Both of us trying so hard simultaneously led to many misunderstandings that would have been comic if they had not been so distressing.

Ellen always said that we are, simultaneously, “all the ages we’ve ever been. ” Our joys, our fears, and our sources of anger remain with us all our lives, and reappear, to be felt again, each time those emotions are summoned forth. 

She also said that each time we experience grief, we grieve again all the losses we’ve ever experienced. I see now, after this past year of grieving, how very insightful this observation was, as well.