A Miracle is a Change of Perception

I have this thing I have been doing lately I call them holy holidays. I just take a day off from life, whatever it is that I fill up my days with that I call life and I go to a place that is considered sacred. Perhaps it is an outdoor labyrinth, or a mid week healing service at a Catholic church where many come to reflect on a deceased holy man queues up in Rome for Canonization.

These holy holidays are not typical Sabbath Sunday practices.  They are excursions taken to tend to the weedy landscape of my mind and soul. Now in retirement my life is formless and aimless. Often I am a lost pilgrim seeking refuge and connection.

These events have been a solace for me.

 I do not schedule them but intuit when my soul is in need of replenishment.

When hungry I go seeking.

On a golden Wednesday autumn day I went the friars chapel. It was full up of congregants.

I could tell by the stir of my agitated heart that tears were waiting a spill. The music had not even begun and already this nameless sorrow wants to reconcile itself with my heart.

 I have not yet become wise. Wise woman always have tissue at the ready. Wise woman accommodate for tears by being prepared.  Eternally in denial or just a bad girl scout I have nothing on which to blow my nose.

Crying is hard. Crying and not blowing is the worst.

At least I have evolved into the knowing ”It’s okay to cry.”

There are lots of little old ladies at this place. I may be demographically one of them, but these are the sweet types whose bag matches their shoes and they put a rinse on their white hair so that it looks like they have snow halos. These are women who are prepared to cry. They have cried much and come prepared.

(Tears are like tooth fairies and Christmas; it is all about the surprise.)

Just adown the pew from me sits a lady whose erect posture tells me she is all about form, I am certain she has a tissue.

I bend past our seatmate a very elderly man that seems her partner. (In the rulebook of my mind men do not carry tissues but have hankies, used hankies).

I whisper. Church whispers always seem louder somehow. She roots in her purse and pulls me out a perfect little Kleenex.  A comradeship, a women with Kleenex in her purse understand a woman who needs to cry.

I chat some pleasantries.

“Shush!” says her husband as he glares at me. I have violated some sanctimonious code of church ethics.

(Maybe this is why I church shop on weekdays and can never quite figure out which box to check under religion. I have been shushed away from to many homes, hearts, and altars.)

Sitting there in the pew I next to the crotchety old man who chastised me I go to my safe heaven of my clangy armor of character defects. I begin to judge him. I am thinking ill thoughts about him, wishing him ill will.

 The organist begins to play the familiar refrains of hymn.

Tears take hold and they spill themselves. The dark heart is not heavy.

The shusher man talks out loudly many times during the service, “What did he say?”

It seems he cannot hear. I notice his hearing aid protruding like a growth from his hairy ear. He did not wish to silence me, but he lives forever in a place where all sound is noise. My chatting just reminds him of the cloister of his silence.

Softened by this knowledge, I sing the refrains of the Mary hymns loudly, in worship. Glad for the freedoms, of spilled tears, and the miracle of my change in perception regarding my seat mate and my unburdened heart. I settle in hoping the service alters the desert landscape that drew me hear on a fall afternoon.

The brothers in their brown robes mingle giving the microphone to the congregants so that they can claim their miracles, express their gratitude or ask for divine intervention of some looming disease or life trauma.

The church glows more golden in the autumn light. All have born witness and they ask us to close with the Lord’s Prayer.

“Our Father …”

Now I am slightly agitated, in a quandary should I hold the hand of my seatmate or not? I am no longer angry but how much can a heart expand in one day?

I swallow hard my pride. I take his hand. Or does he take mine?

 It is spent, his flesh worn from time but lifeblood’s pulse warms his palm. We are palm to palm. Intimate with some unspoken thing. His hold is firm and fast.

The prayer proceeds.

I have said the words of the Our Father so often that they can be perfunctory, redundant. This day though as we come to the words “ forgive us our trespasses,”

he talks to me. Not in words but in his grip of my hand. A radiant heat courses from his palm to mine. He asks me to forgive him.  I can feel this even though he does not speak. Forgive me the shush, my need to exert little controls in a world in which I has so little power. Forgive my envy of your hearing, and jealousy that my wife speaks to you but I no longer can hear her sweet voice.

The prayer ends, “As we forgive those who trespass against us…” And a same fire flees through my flesh to his, my flaws, judgments, the ways I fall away from love, turn away are redeemed now. And that day I understand while holding hands with an old guy in the church the refrain of the prayer that says, “for thine is the kingdom the power and I have an instant glimmer of God’s glory. Amen

Wonders Never Cease

Mother’s day looms with expectation, pressure. Once upon a time though here in this faded suburb of a city my son made magic happen. No lukewarm brunch, no potted geranium, no cliché momma gift for me, nope I got a treasure hunt. On little scraps of paper, in his grown up scrawl I was to follow each clue until I came to the next.

Santa and God always disappointed making me suspect of surprise events. But on this perfect May Sunday, a day so fertile with spring ‘s burst I felt like a believer again. “ Go down to the end of the driveway and find an a winged creature.” Under the garden statue of my deceased mothers porch angel ornament was another clue. “Walk in the direction of the sunset.” On went the puzzle. I followed each clue, clueless as to where I was going or what I would find.

Perhaps this was not a treasure hunt; perhaps my prankster son was just sending me on a wild goose chase. The directions required that the dog accompany me. We came to the muddy hill that led up to the railroad tracks. I frequented this path on walkabouts with my dog on our regular walks.

 The wild far away feel of the tracks, always made my itchy feet long for adventure. The hill to the tracks steeper each week for my aging dog, but the whiff of freedom associated with trains spurred us on.

There at the top of the hill was a hand written wooden posted sign with a figurine of a boy and his pup glued up top.  This roads sign designated the name of the path. It read, “The JoelWalk dedicated to Collette and Avery.”  Joel Walkowski, my son named a path after himself and dedicated it to his momma and her dog, his dog, Avery.

I sat in the scratchy grasses next to the track gazing on the hand done sign.  One thousand heart beats of momma memories and magic. Being a mom took me down uncharted paths, round turns, up hills and often to my knees. But in this parched landscape, looking at the sign I was transported to the land of redemption, where all is love.

I wept a bit, snapped some photos. Went home, thanked the son and filed the days event under good memories.

Good memories that were rekindled whenever the dog and I hiked that same hill.

It was always a surprise to see the sign sitting in the middle of the urban landscape like an art instillation with no audience. I always expected some vandal to steal the dollar store statue, or someone to make away with the sign. But it remained, through season upon season. It remained till the season of death. On that hot summers end day, when there was no one, the son the living far away, I had to tend to the dogs ashes.

 No more walk abouts. I carried her ashes up the hill and at our signpost I spilled her cremains at the foot of our sign. In a life with few anchors I was home in the weedy world of our “walk”.  I held her memory at our memorialized spot, on the JoelWalk, less alone in my grief.

Always looking for signs. My whole life I have been looking for signs. Shooting stars in the sky, a death a birth. The untimely toll of church bells. The robin’s song a hello from the heavens, mom is around.

Monthly, me who never visit a gravesite with a floral memorial blanket went up the muddy path to visit the dog’s grave. Really I was on walk but choose a route that allowed me to see the sign. I missed my dog and my children less there on the rocky side of the Amtrak route.

Did passengers gaze out the speeding window and wonder about the sign randomly peeking through cornflowers?

A year, four seasons came and left. The sign weathered more than a few storms, the son became more man than boy.

The little statue went missing The JoelWalk sign remained. And the ashes sat in a clump at the base, defying the biblical adage “remember man that you are dust…”

 When the boy/son had troubles in grade school the dog took to his bed intuiting his sorrow. When I intervened thinking dogs do not belong in beds the always-docile dog snarled at me. Do not become between my boy and me.

When the boy went off to college and I moved to a house fenceless yard the dog who had tended to take frequent walk about never ran from the yard. She stood steadfast at my side, walking me through my valley of sorrow.

Now her ashes remained through all elements, seeming once again not wanting to be far from the boy or his mom. Even her ashes were a constant.

Two springs later the sign was gone, and they ashes were covered by over grown brush. Mom’s adages’ ever a litany in my head, “life goes on.”  I had ben working on attachment and a shrine to dog and a moment of time though a magic one lived in my heart, it was time to let go.

Still I walked that railroad walk. It made the cityscape go away. I was a kid who might jump a rail car.

Late when summer light was leaving on stroll I made my way home through the short cut and by chance found the sign in some weeds.

I brought it home and put it in the garden. Another lesson in attachment’s. Another circle gone round again.

I did not wane philosophically. I was just glad for the sign and the memory.

Faith is a gift; seekers have their own gift. In dark nights kings follow stars to find a prophet. I am not a fan of surprises but life’s mysteries enchant me.

Life senseless and am always trying to make sense of it. Just like I did with all moms’ adages that left me baffled and her bemused.

“Can I go, Can I go? “ I would implore. “Why take a ham sandwich to a banquet?” she would retort.

There are folks who believe that there are spiritual epicenters on the planet, Sedona, Lourdes, Manchu Pichu. Some of us make alters in our home. Some us wear talismans or blessed relics to remind us of the sacred. Streets corners have makeshift shrines where life has been aborted by trauma or violence.

 I had a sanctuary next to the railroad tracks, a place where I reflected and prayed and cried. Though littered and scented with diesel oil it was my own holy landscape.

I am left only with walking. No sign, no dog. Son far away, dancing the Sufi dance of youth taunting life and death.

I do not pray, I just always have a holy heart that fiercely longs for something bigger than I to tend to my children.  Saints, angels, Allah, Buddha, my mother heart so tender I call on all practices and deities.

Children have that thing, of bringing us to our knees to our God.

On my return from a visit to New York to see my cubs I noted that mom’s angel statue had been knocked sideways.

Her wings were intact. This soothed me.

Off my mark and weary I walked, and walked. So far, so long that I needed the short cut.

 In summers dusk peeking out from the brush, just where the dog’s ashes had become earth was a garden gnome standing on a tree trunk. He was holding a lantern as if to illumine the way. In the exact same spot where the JoelWalk sign had stood and the dog was laid to rest was this elfin figurine holding up a lantern to the darkness.

Life just gets amended sometime. I was taken from my musings on whatever junk and fear had spurred me on to the walk.

The garden gnome seemed a wise sage, not unlike a Garden of Gethsemane image where the dark is illumined by an apostle lifting a lantern to guide the way. Gnomes are earth dwellers who guard treasures. The males of the species are guardians of animals. They travel the forest and farms to find wounded animals and guide them on their way. I live the lore.  A middle-aged mom, living in the middle kingdom of life, prodding along encumbered at times. But somehow lighter, the holy place was sacred again, revered by a stranger who placed a garden gnome.  A Random act of extreme love, angels as always abound, no wings broken, hearts do mend.

  

  

Angel from the Realm of the Dark

  “ My heart is broken.” I replied when the clerk at the health food store asked,  “How are you? “

Certainly this girl of the two colored, two extremely different lengths of hair could not care about the health of my heart, and there were no herbal supplements to tend to such things.

  I had already confessed to her that I was a thief and had stolen handfuls of macadamia nuts. I would have purchased some but they tasted so splendid that I feared I would consume them all. So I allowed fate to temper my appetites.

  Fate though had not tempered my appetite for my cello player, the one who accidently broke my heart. The relationship had an element of the divine, or the obsessed. On that humid Sunday when I saw him sitting in church all reverential, he was bookended between his gangly orphan sons. While my mind should have been on God his overgrown curly hair and eyes that seemed downcast from the size of them distracted me.

I announced to the seatmate soprano,  “I shall date him”. (Sopranos carry the melody line so really they have little work to do in a choir therefore they may extol the charms of the praying congregants.) “Crazy”, she replied”, crazy he has two boys to raise.”

  Now I am not only enchanted but the gauntlet is laid,

I would be crazy.

Indeed I was, but not just by my own design. Odd things, the fates were would thrust us together, the tinkling bell on the bike path was him coming upon me as I labored uphill, the tickets I won to the symphony where he played the cello were all celestial interventions of God’s design for my life. I could hear the call.

 His lips, post symphony all dressed in a tuxedo were my first to kiss me post divorce. Surely it was designed by God that this man and I be together. Sometimes like song lyric he creeped into my sleep via a dream, like an apparition would seek me after months of quiet would phone and just want to pop by.

  The problem was God was speaking to me alone. Or lust was speaking to me, or loneliness. Perhaps it was resounding empty, or the fact that he quoted to me in Italian the first lines of Dante’s Divine Comedies. I was besotted.

 Yet God was silent to my cello player. Or at least God was sending him a different message than he was giving me. Or God only spoke to him on my regard rarely, only on long summer nights when the breezes urged us to stay alert. Every now and then my cello players would tell his boys he was going to fuel up his tank and once out he would call me. We would drink beer and stoke fires in the pit, and circle around truth and dabble in our chemistry and then push aside.

  We would speak of the Catholic mystics, God, and children. One day he forget fear, he kissed me all carnal. Before he had a chance to repent I inquired, “ Do you come to see me to remember or to forget? “

“To remember”, he says. As he drove away I knew that the prince had awoken the princess, and the princess had awoken the prince. I knew that on that night under the fade of urban stars, my prince would go poof.

The fairy tale ends with the kiss and happily ever after. If one has ever had a kiss, a mythic kiss, the ever after is the sweet memory.

  To be the first women to be kissed by him after his wife’s passing, or me with my first post divorce kiss coming from a troubadour had an element of the divine.

It is a soul balm to have a holy kiss.

 Yet on that spring Saturday when I heard tell of his tuxedoed self-playing at a function with his date I got all churned up. His date was much discussed in the voyeuristic way that women have of looking at loves allure, hoping for contagion. Hearing of his date a dowager “friends of the symphony” sorts (my mind movie) I was troubled that after so long I was jealous. I put the radio on scan needing a sound track to help me spill my tears.

  I wanted to hear Capriccio Espagnol, the song that I he was performing when I won the symphony tickets. I wanted to grieve that which I never had, but longed for.

  Instead only noise, tears stuck, I stopped in the grocer’s. Jackleen, the clerk, (her badge stealing her anonymity) when I tell of my broken heart asks if I have told him of my love.

By her sweet question she is now captive to my narrative. She hears of the late night love letter extolling his virtues, the kiss by the post it note we where I had inscribed his name reminding me to pray that my obsessions be lifted. The glow from the stained glass window enveloped his frame. Of how his wife had once been a soprano, sat in the same choir seat as I and had been eulogized from the seam incandescent sanctuary.

 Sweet Jackleen, herself a musician gave me her listening heart, a greater gift than any soundtrack on my cheap car stereo.

Emboldened by my naked love she tells me of her love for a musician who is now in Nashville. How only he understood the art of her heart. Jaclyn the harp-strumming vocalist who spends her life in pursuit of celestial song is besotted by this far away love.

Have you told your love, your crush of your heart’s longings?” I ask. We are in communion this young girl and I, sisters of the heart.

 Give him a poem.

 I rustle my goods into my plastic bag, discard my receipt. My footing if off. As the door swing open she calls in goodbye” My life is forever changed because of you”. I had not anticipated that my own longing heart but boldness in love might be some one else’s angel.

Collette Cullen 2012

Tool Booth Preacher

“No I do not have a park pass”, my reply gives invitation to his purpose. He explains all the lovely parks and perks that such a sticker will give me entrée to. “Sold!” He dips his head into the car, his khaki ranger uniform giving him stature as he queries my Nubian female passenger. (I am expecting, ‘’Can I see your passport?”) Instead he asks her, “Are you single?’’ She beams and blushes a shine like mahogany. The flirt is on and we get chatted up. Really though he is a witness to love. The lake shimmers as a backdrop as he tells us the story of his love life. It is indeed a life of love. He is local boy, from the farm thumb of Michigan. All that water had him seeking; there must be great lake freighter sailor somewhere in his bloodline. He worked as a park ranger in the mountains of North Carolina. Marriage seemed not in the cards. He is handsome and affable, but perhaps he had too good of an eye for beauty. On a visit home to the thumb he met a widow who had raised eight children and fostered dozens. This was his much-anticipated soul mate. His eyes twinkle like the lakes water when he speaks of her. He still surprised somehow of this love and his yes to it. He sparkles still, even when he tells of her death of breast cancer. She beat it by five years. She wrote a list of all her dreams and this itchy-footed man took this woman who had never left the thumb of Michigan on a dream road trip. She witnessed the splendor of the national parks and tracked down foster children who she longed to hug. Though succumbing to cancer it was a good ending. He does not say why he returns to live in the thumb. Perhaps he wanted to smell the air and feel the wind of this pastured, watery haven, to remember in his homecoming the place and scent of his beloved. The thumb had the smell of her, the light of her. All this we learn while he is making change for our twenty.

He places the sticker in the window, preaches a bit about love and it being our purpose, the booth his pulpit. He tells us he is now “seeing”  (this is a better word than dating, a man who sees a woman) Dawn. She was his real estate agent. Upon meeting him she tells him “ I have slept in your room. “  A widowed man he with still much fire he is intrigued by this comment, “I have slept in your room.” When his family sold the farm years before, her family had bought it. Seems two young souls, lay gazing out the window into the night skies all speckled with stars dreaming of love, praying for love. And now years later through it’s circuitous route they have found it again and each other.

And we are held for a few moments in witness to the word, and we are believers in his gospel of love. And as we walk the pier and gaze into the lake we pray with greater faith.

Through Angel Eyes

When starting a blog about angels one anticipates that they will bear witness to all sorts of magical moments. This may be true. But just now I think I got some angel energy or JuJu working on me, trying to alter my interior.

Always in a hurry more by nature than necessity I was aware of the elder man as he meandering toward the library. He was ambling through rows of parked cars as if they were a scenic garden.

He is headed just next to my car and his gait seems timed so that he will obstruct my exit from car. If I am not hasty I will have to wait an extra twenty seconds for him to pass, Hot, hurried I create a sporting event. I will beat him. I will stop him in his path. In my mind I will win the ring from the Bowl Game if I succeed in getting out and blocking him before he gets next to my car..

He wins. He wins like a Nobel peace prizewinner. Noticing me and my intention of exiting, he defers to me. He stands there all gentlemanly like he is my date ready to help me out of the car and waits to shut the door behind me. He smiles.

Derailed, I stop and thank him for his chivalrous ways. He tells me that this is how his mother raised him. Long ago, near eighty years ago this man still recalls his momma’s voice and how it extolled to be him of the virtuous and polite.

He tells me that he likes to read mysteries and is here at the library to replenish his supply. Just an ordinary day yet…

He is my mystery angel of the day, putting me on point. You cannot seek angels if you do not act like one.

Others Pearls of Wisdom

"Look further than where your eyes can 

take you''. Marsha B.