Bigger Than the Sky

by Vicki Woodyard

  Although I have spent years studying the great masters, it is always interesting to read the personal account of someone struggling to live the teachings. These books are not readily available because they are written by people who are unfamiliar with the publishing world. After I wrote Life With A Hole In It, it was rejected a couple of times because I was unknown. So after much trepidation, I decided to self-publish. I will be lucky to break even, but if I wanted to get the book out there, it was the obvious choice.

  Why am I telling you this now? Because it is easy to be swamped with self-doubt about anything. During the years I was caring for my husband, the teachings seemed unfruitful to me. I was unable to follow them; rather, I was taken over by my personal anguish and all that it entailed. I felt myself to be a failure at the path and at the daunting job of being a caregiver.

  Looking back, I see that I was being forged in the furnace of affliction and that I had no choice in the matter. Bob seemed to bear up under it better than I did. But even he did not make a full surrender, fighting his death right up until the end. He did not even have morphine except for a few days when he had no idea that he was being given it. A nosebleed was the only sign he had that he might be losing the battle. But inside there was massive bleeding.

  I could not bear to be with him when he died; he knew that. And I was spared by the mercy of my sister arriving just in time to sit with him the last day of his life. I was at home in a state of shock and exhaustion. I managed to make it through the funeral, the ice storm that followed and Christmas Day as a new widow.

  I am still here learning my lessons. They are never-ending. But peace has descended amidst my struggles. It bids me rest and I often forget and get anxious and afraid again. And then I rest again. I am doing okay.

  Grace

  Peter says that there is nothing that you can do to obtain grace. It either happens or it doesn’t. That, too, is believable coming from his lips. It is as if he is saying, “Relax.”

  In a way, Peter is unfathomable. Perhaps you can feel his energy, too. It is an energy that twinkles as he speaks of a beloved cat with whom he hangs out. It is also an energy that simply tells the truth—about living with pain, about sitting in the sun, about being one with what is.

  Peter: At satsangs most folks seemed to me to be describing a sort of new age or Buddhist version of heaven—none of which seemed like my cup of tea. Who on earth would wish for perpetual bliss—yuck, what a prison! I don’t know—it just seems so much nicer (and a whole lot easier) to sit with a gentle cat friend.

  If she is not chasing “enlightenment” then surely it is not worth chasing. She seems to like sleeping in the sun more than anything—at last, a philosophical school that makes some sense! Truly, it seems to me that we look so hard for a solution that we leave no room for one to enter.

  Remembering Myself

  My calling is writing and also holding the still point as an energy practice. So I live a quiet life in order to be able to do that. And I am not noisy by nature, so it all works out. It’s not that I dislike people; I dislike socializing for any extended period of time. I would not be the person with whom to spend a weekend. I run out of words and meaning. I am happier when I get home to my inner work. And a calling cannot be denied without paying a price. When Bob was sick during that long five-year period, sometimes I would say to him, “I know I am being called. I am just not sure what I am supposed to do.” Of course I was called to just be. And that is how it goes.

  But he was outgoing and, as the hospital chaplain told me, “He gets energy from people.” So my life got considerably quieter after he died. And I was so exhausted that I took a couple of years to just learn how to sleep again.

  Now each day offers itself up to me and I write or walk or putter around the house. I am always in touch with spirit, always watching my ego at work. It never gives up. It wants me to do things I don’t want to do, like give a party or take a trip. Others do these things easily. Not me. But somehow it all works out. I write another essay, meditate for a while and get myself out the door for a walk. The spiritual path needs walkers, never mind how fast or slow they go. The pathless land can hold us all. If we remember ourselves, as Mr. Gurdjieff said, “Life is real.” If not, it is a sham and that’s a shame.

  A Grateful Amen

  It is important for all outer teachings to fall away. This cannot happen until it happens. Before that, there is effort, struggle and being thrown off-balance. I experienced that with Vernon Howard, a master teacher if there ever was one. To meet him was to meet your own inner darkness up close and personal.

  Oh, the frustration of setting out upon the true way. Oh, the dilemma of the civil war within. The skirmishes, the woundings and the battlefield stories told around the campfire. The enemy is everywhere but within. For what the teacher says is quickly forgotten as the battle rages. He did say that the foes are those of one’s own household, but the outer ones are so much more easily seen.

  But the true student perseveres. He keeps on keeping on though the battle rages. As Vernon said, darkness is always attacking light. The brighter the light, the greater the darkness. But the light shines on.

  He has been gone for twenty years and what he taught is nothing less than Self-realization. He did not use that term; he shied away from any spiritual buzz words. Instead he taught his students how much ego hated the light of awareness, and how it would spend its last emotional dime to wage the war against what could save it.

  Now I sit here at the keyboard knowing that the outer teachings arrive in any form they must and vanish when you least expect them to do so. What are you left with? A wordless experience, a shining forth, a blazing peace, a silent nod. A grateful amen.

  Hard Times

  I wrote jokes for Joan Rivers as my young daughter went through three years of surgery, chemo and radiation. She died. I continued to write. I wrote a book called, Laurie, One of the Lucky Ones. She died. I changed the title to Laurie, A Mother’s Story. I met a grief counselor who suggested that I write letters to her. That became Letters to Laurie. Fortunately I no longer have copies of those beginning books.

  Now I was not only writing comedy, I was walking the spiritual path. I had a teacher who breathed fire at his students. That didn’t bother me a great deal; it was nothing compared to the death of a child. I was learning to walk through the Children’s Department at Macy’s and not flinch too much as I saw the color pink. I threw myself into awakening like there was no tomorrow. I didn’t change much.

  Those first years without Laurie were hard ones indeed. I had to deal with my son’s unexpressed grief, my husband’s workaholic solution to mourning and my own increasing isolation from society. A saving grace for me was a Bichon Frise puppy that we got five weeks after our daughter died.

  We moved across town to a new house. That house is now 34 years old. The dog got hit by a car and we got a new puppy. She lived to be over 16. We had to have her put to sleep while Bob was dying of his cancer. During these years I put one foot in front of the other – that was how I coped. I left my teacher’s group when Bob was diagnosed. It was just too far to travel. My life was one big windshield and I was a tiny bug. Life being fair was out of the question. It was not even stormy. It was a tsunami in which I built a life raft out of the teachings and began writing essays as the waves pounded at it with fury.

  Then the great silence began. It is not always pleasant but it is genuine. I have won my freedom. Did it the hard way. Hung in there. Kept the faith. Learned to know myself. Learned to know that simplicity and grace are the same thing.

  I almost took a vacation and then realized that I am now on vacation every day. The waters are still. I have published two books. I am now what I would call a “real” writer. I know when to begin and when to end. Essays, that is. I have a GPS that shows me how to get to the blank screen and let my fingers do the talking. I hope that some of you are listening.

 
The Great Silence

  The great silence has happened gradually for me. I can’t say much about it because it is, after all—silence! At first it is the silence of the tomb. I have been through that twice. The death of a child is a great silence, as is the death of a mate.

  The ego fights mightily against the silence that could deliver it into wholeness. It is a great friction and a great fiction, the old ego, the old man or woman. Just look around at what you see in the media. The paparazzi are but one example. Everyone has a spin on things.

  But the silence of death leads to the silence of the Self. “Die before you die,” say the Sufis. The only way to this silence is through the constant practice of being the witness to all that the ego does.

  Writing opens up the silence for a great many people who read my essays. I don’t know how this works, but I just let the words flow until they stop. Very often someone will comment and say they felt a great relief after reading the essay. And I know that I was just a catcher for the words, a conduit for their own silence.

  Ho Ho!

  Peter is undergoing his own torment; his doctors suspect that he is having many small seizures every day. Yet he encourages me by talking of watching the wind in the trees and feeling it on his skin. I love him like a brother and we only know each other through the internet. I lean my face against the monitor as if to gather some of his wry wisdom. We shall both go on, filing reports from the front, embedded reporters in the war against pain. If our reports make people uncomfortable, perhaps they are in need of a good cry themselves. There is no going to commercial in such a report, however. Someone has paid the price for all of this and one day we will be free. Until then, we talk and write and witness.

  “I feel that little Alex does not know about duality or non-duality. Perhaps she finds such distinctions, umm, a tad unproductive? She does like to lie in the tall grass and play with insects, though. That makes real sense to her. The rest is just words, which in my experience she appears to care very little about. Ho ho!”

  The Blessedness of Letting Go

  I was listening to Peter, Paul and Mary singing “Weave Me the Sunshine.” It is one of my favorite songs and I think I know why. It is alluding to the highest kind of love of which the human heart is capable. Love that goes beyond the personal and reverberates throughout the cosmos. It is the “I am” set to music.

  You know how it is—you love a friend or partner and yet they aggravate you. Your love isn’t universal but particular. That is how we humans are wired. But once you lose a loved one, you are introduced to a wider and deeper kind of love, if you are lucky. When my husband died, at first I could only be glad that the suffering was over. I was kept busy dealing with the paperwork and chores connected with giving clothes away, reordering my life and all of that. I grieved but not totally, for in the beginning I sheltered myself against the storm of tears. I did this by remembering how he had aggravated me, how he had not lived up to his end of the bargain. I was going through all the stages of grief.

  Now it is a few years later. I love him with a universal love. I have transcended the pettiness of the normal human marriage and now belong to love itself, as does he. When I write I also feel this deep love that is not possible between people in a personal relationship. My writing reaches beyond the borders of time and space and I am grateful for that. In that way we enter the mystery of universal connectedness without egos getting in the way.

  No One Ever Goes Away

  Being a spiritual writer has its ups and downs. I live in both the spirit and the world, as do we all. Sometimes the world is dominant and vice versa. The trick is to ride out the storms without totally believing in them. Easier said than done. “It’s time to stop treatment,” is a hard storm. So is sleeping alone. But I am not alone in the higher sense.

  The blank slate of awareness is fleshed out with the ego’s business and shenanigans. The slate is forgotten time after time as we read what the ego writes on the slate. “More pie. Less budget. Gimme, gimme, gimme. I’m scared. Nobody loves me. I need a haircut. Pass the potatoes.” That is where we live, after all.

  I used to plug and unplug Bob’s IV when he was in the chemo room and had to get up and move around. I fixed him dinner when we got back home. I used to think “What will I do after he is gone?” Now I know what I will do. I will breathe and write on the slate. It is only when I wipe it clean that everything makes sense. Love is not a four-letter word. It is a sense of eternity filtered through time and space. It occupies the heavens and the tiniest corner of a human heart. I love you, my spirit says to Bob, and he answers in a multitude of ways. He looks at me from a photograph and touches my tears when they run down my face. He moves through my heart enlivening these words. No one ever goes away.

  God Has a Sense of Humor

  “Laughter is carbonated holiness.”

  Anne Lamott

  Peter: Just getting over a week of cluster migraines—a happy legacy of some seizures a few years ago. When they come I am so hypersensitive that I must wear dark glasses and ear plugs and pretty much lie down and try not to breathe too loudly. Ho ho. A good time is had by all.

  Vicki: I had a scare this week. Had to get a breast lump biopsied but it proved to be benign. Of course we were beside ourselves. Even suffering becomes old news, does it not?

  Peter: Yes, God certainly has an interesting sense of humor. She is just a bundle of laughs sometimes. I suspect She may have been a Las Vegas comedienne at one time. I am so pleased that the lump was benign. Ah, living on the edge... who can say what will come and what will not? At this end things are difficult. Such is suchness.…

  Alexandra loves to go and watch the water bubble by a little stream here. She and her brother Maple snuggle up together and watch the waters gurgle and froth. Most days after a hectic schedule of running and jumping between the stars, God stops by to sit with them... just soaking up the quiet peace of their presence. There by the stream, God and Alexandra and Maple. Love and nothing else.

  It is either this or suffer. The only solace I have ever found is there by the stream, or rather, said another way—here, before creation starts up. Not in this moment—which seems a silly catch word—but rather before this moment. Before anything. Just sitting by the stream and watching the toss and tumble of it all. Just an easy, natural quiet. In this, all the rest—everything else—seems just various flavors of hell. Ha! This body flops and falls sometimes and gives Alexandra a start as she runs off amongst the tall grasses to hug the wind. So I follow her example, and forget everything for the joy of running (or in my case, crawling, ho ho).

  Memory (whether of the past or of the future) is the presence of pain, is it not? But before memory happens, a spontaneous creation and quiet. Joy? Maybe. But that seems too complicated a term... just a lovely quiet. Oh heck, I don’t know... sounds so silly in words... it just seems to me that there is something wonderful and so sweet... a sweetness that makes the suffering become less interesting after a while. Even whilst the body and silly mind may be yelling in pain.

  I used to do stuff dealing with abstract mathematics. Now I cannot even count change in a store. If I hold to this loss, there is certainly suffering. But I do not need to count change when sitting with God and Alex and Maple by the stream, so what the heck. And since the stream is of course Everything, what the heck.…

  A Wide Wildness

  Peter: It is my own experience that most of the white-robed crowd, whether sanctimoniously trying to impress others in chat rooms online, or gathering in hushed wonder before the graven image of some beatific with big hair, have seen compassion or love from a great distance only. The blind cannot lead the blind. Associating with the mad seldom leads to sanity. They talk a great line, though, ho ho. And sound convincing. But there is a resonance between one heart and another that spins and dances only in the presence of the absence of two, or more precisely, of a “me.” Ha! Like a small child in love with the sky, who
knows she can fly. Like this—no logic is needed in the presence of life.

  Vicki: I have been writing to a woman who used to be with Satchitananda and left very disillusioned.

  Peter: In one’s own heart (just my opinion of course), God is patiently waiting to jump out and say “Boo!” But for many the show seems so much more interesting. Especially when that show contains apparent love and suffering. We cry when the movie is intense and forget to eat popcorn or throw tomatoes at the screen.

  Vicki: This woman appreciates what I have to say about the path in general and how isolating it turns out to be in the final analysis.

  Peter: It seems to me that we follow a path until we make our own. A lion makes its own path, an ant meekly follows the path of another ant. What a giggle it all is.

  Vicki: I told her that you have found the sweetness in life, whereas we have not. Now I ask you, Peter, is that fair!

  Peter: Well, well, it seems to me that we would all benefit greatly if we kissed more cats, or at least a llama or emu or hawk or rabbit or parrot or dog or any true innocent. I ask you, how can anyone not fall in love with those little faces? Ah, but we hold back from love, don’t we? And since love is what we are (yes!)—not in a silly intellectual way, but in actual fact—love here meaning ease and laughter and a quiet lightness—falling in love every time one can is such an easy tumble into oneself. I don’t know... we suffer and we laugh and we cry and we live. It all flows and it all goes.

  In the absence of a presence of a ‘me’ there is a wide wildness bigger than the sky. The brain is such a waste of space. The heart leaps and runs and hugs so freely. It takes the brain by the hand and leads it into wonder. Ho ho!