Bigger Than the Sky
Page 7
This seems right—we think and we think and we think we know and we think we don’t know and we think some more, all in a quite wonderful effort to avoid joy. Which, it seems to me, is what we truly are. Not in a big hoo-ha, new-agey way, ho ho, but rather in the quiet joy of listening to a bubbling stream in the sunlight, with a cat or two teasing the nose with furry hugs.
Of course apparent tragedy happens. We lose loved ones and we mourn. Or we are born with a genetic predisposition to depression. Or we are seriously ill. Or a loved one is ill. Or whatever. And yet, and yet, it seems to me that the availability of respite is always present. And that respite, I feel, is more likely to be found by making one’s own path.
I have a picture my wife took of some nearby mountains on my wall, and under it I have typed something Ramana Maharshi once said:
You are the Self now and can never be anything else. Throw your worries to the wind, turn within and find peace.
If we wait for grace, it may come. But now is so much more fun, don’t you feel? A small shift in attention, from the pain to its Source. Ho ho!
It is hard to get any clearer than Peter was. Through the maelstrom of my suffering he spoke to me. He listened to me. He manifested wisdom. How does one repay a friend like that? Perhaps to bow quietly in deference to his magnanimous nature. The friend who sat in the yard and played a toy flute while cats slept on his chest. Not to mention his bravery in the face of what the doctors told him: “Your prognosis is grim.”
Peter turned away from physicians in order to heal himself, with the help of his feline friends. He was not kidding when he said his little cat knew more about helping him than they did. He did not mince words on that score. At some point, one throws in the mental towel and plays in the field of Now.
That is the only place I can locate my friend Peter.
It was so effortless to communicate with Peter. Our correspondence went on for several years. This I know: Every time I read his words I come more alive. Although he is gone, the attar of awareness permeates the pages. He was the simplest of writers and the strongest.
When one is suffering, an ally in awareness is invaluable. Someone who can cut through the ropes of reality to reveal the light creating everything. I just watched Nic Wallenda cross the Grand Canyon on a high wire. Peter danced across the wire of his illness with the same surety. Oh, he fell with regularity, but he was just in his front yard....
Sometimes people say they like the simplicity of my words. I had the complexity knocked out of me, thank God. Now the bare bones remain. But dry bones dance… now hear the words of the Lord, as the old hymn says.
Peter, dear Peter. In your absence you have become presence.
The Illusion of Time
I woke up early this morning. Sliced a banana and ate it with a piece of coffee cake. As I sat at the table, I looked at the small travel alarm clock sitting there. It died, after a faithful run of probably thirty years. In a small black plastic case, it shows me that the time is now permanently 10:06. There are four hands on this little throwback of an analog clock. I tried putting new batteries in it, but they simply had no effect. Now, as I eat a meal, I can look over and see that it is still exactly 10:06. Proves that time, whether being accurately measured or not, is still an illusion!
It’s on the kitchen table simply because that is where I put it to try out the new batteries. Peter came to know the eternal. His clock, so to speak, was always showing the same time. That is why you can read his words again and again and they remain ever-fresh. When I listen to the recording of him playing the toy flute, it is always now.
Who knows what would happen if we truly returned to our natural state? In the mornings I revel in the silence. The sun filters through the trees in a primeval way. My thoughts lie dormant as I allow my fingers to unfold the words like fronds. The words are mere shadows playing upon the screen.
Peter and I linked arms, held hands and saw each other in the most basic possible way. We could communicate the eternal truth without the need of measurement. He had seen that everything is an illusion, including our ideas about God and love. What was left over was the loaves and fishes of the living moment. It continues to feed us all.
The Ultimate Luxury
Peter discovered the ultimate luxury—being himself. As he held my hand during Bob’s illness, that is all he did. His words, as evidenced in this emails, were merely evidence that he was present. There is a housecleaning that happens when ego goes. Even though Peter helped his wife take garbage to the dump, he had none of his own.
When I would tell him of my suffering, he would always accept it. By so doing, his validation helped removed it. Suppression is a worthless tool, after all. He knew suffering as being ever present. He just chose to let it move through him.
There is no way I cannot see the robins run on the grass. No way I cannot recognize the truth of my being. Some days I am able to grasp the connection between one life and another without the mind causing static. I rest in that deep knowing.
It is hard to be oneself because society imposes so many penalties against it. But Peter was suddenly jerked from society and therein lay his freedom. He had been a good student of the Way; now he became it.
So many nights I received comfort from this good man. I still do.
The Core of the Heart
I keep trying to wrap up this book with one grand essay. Peter would say ho ho or maybe even ho hum. He was just not into grand displays. It was the quiet moments that bore the sweetest fruit for him.
So many of my days and nights were filled with terror while Bob was dying. Exhaustion was something I lived with. Burnout was my middle name. At one point before resuming chemo, Bob had to have his gall bladder removed. I curled up in the fetal position, crying into the phone. On the line was the oncology social worker. She was a great solace to me. “I just can’t go,” I wailed. So I didn’t. And Bob fell down on a marble floor while walking into the Outpatient Surgery Unit. They had to stop and X-ray his knees before they would operate. As it was, the surgeon called me at midnight after the surgery saying, “We have to take him back in. He’s bleeding everywhere we touched him. He is a very sick man.” As if I didn’t know that.
My friends thought I was losing it because I could not get dressed and be at the hospital like a dutiful wife. One invited me to come stay at her house, after she had been informed by another friend about my fragility. I was insulted. And the last thing I needed was to be around happy helpful people. I was drowning and that didn’t feel like a rope.
So I would write Peter and he would talk about Alex and Maple and how he had fallen down again. It was so gentle, so healing for me. Just to block out the dire prophecies for a short period of time. There is nothing like the company of a friend who understands and doesn’t try to fix you. Peter knew the senselessness of that.
And so, Peter, I can only share your heart via this book now. Can hope that people grok what you lived so seamlessly. What is that? you might well ask. It is the heart of someone who had entered the Kingdom of Wholeness and found it to be nothing less than beautiful. Something to rest with, something to join hands with. The very core of the heart.
Touched by the Hand of Sorrow
This light is focused on myself. It wants to heal and hold me in its embrace. It doesn’t have human arms or words; it must steal into the brokenness and hold it. All I have to do is know I am fragile and strong at the same time. It has always been that way. We are all that way. No one has it made or can avoid the inevitable. Life is inevitable and so is death.
The tears cannot be kept back. Falling into my lap. Cascading from my fingertips. Washing over my silence. Tending the cracked earth of my emotional desert. What will bloom is because of death touching life and making it live on a higher level. No one wants to go there. No one wants to descend before they ascend and then return to descend again and again.
Life is hard. Death
is hard. Love is the gift. If you are touched by the hand of sorrow and draw back, you are just being human. Once you move forward and let it be yours, it lets go. It lets go.
The Hermit Leaves the Hut: A Little Story about Wholeness
One day the hermit left the hut. It was a time for shedding everything that weighed her down. The first thing she did was cry a million tears. Each tear cut a brighter scene of what was to come. As she stepped out the door, the heavens rejoiced. She heard hosannas and angels murmuring, “The hermit has left the hut. Rejoice!”
She did not look back lest she turn into a pillar of rice cakes and she had never liked those. She kept walking, sodden with tears and light. She did not look back lest she turn into a loaf of stale bread. She feared being nibbled to death by ducks.
The hermit rejoiced at her new-found freedom to speak the truth. She yelled at the sky in feigned madness, “Don’t mess with ME!”
She tried out her new voice as she walked along. “Don’t tell ME your troubles!” And no one did.
She realized that her sadness was falling off her spirit like wearing one of those microfiber raincoats. In its place was “Don’t mess with ME!” And her spirit began to grow.
But at the very end of the day, she shed another tear. This time it felt different. It turned her into an angel of compassion. It said, “You are whole now. You are whole.”
And the hermit never went back to the hut. She heard that they turned it into a Starbucks, but that was just hearsay.
Writing a book about the loss of two men dear to me has been hard. Peter entwined his heart with mine—no matter that it was breaking. As I read his words, it breaks again, but this time yielding up its treasure more easily.
I will always have him with me, as I always have Bob. My son and I live this life knowing that the heart is often too full for words. So we have a companionable silence, a sense that the other may be having a rough time. It has not always been this way. For years we kept the war going to keep the grief at bay.
But grief has its lessons to teach. It has made me a writer. Has made me deeper and wiser. I often wish the past could be undone. Don’t we all?
One day the director will make his final cut and all that will remain will be the silence.
Somehow I think Peter will be just fine with that.
The Everyday Entrance to Eternity
It is morning.
I am standing on
the map of eternity.
I am exactly at the
right place
at the right time.
Peter taught me the everyday entrance to eternity. That is, every moment we spend in pure awareness is eternal. The simplest movements made from awareness are love itself.
He played “’Tis the Gift to be Simple” on his little penny whistle as he sat outside in the sun. With his cats, he was the complete package of a happy man. He watched them like they were the best movie he had ever seen.
He wrote lots of people during the time he was confined by his strokes. He helped us all. He repeatedly pointed to simplicity as the great and final teacher for him.
Ultimately, we are led to truth by the tiny amount of it we have inside. If we are serious in our intentions, this investment grows. We, once complex mental creatures living by our wits, are now happy to just live without any expectations.
Our own lives become agents of change for others.
The Last Message
Such love does
the sky now pour,
that whenever I stand in a field,
I have to wring out the light,
When I get
home.
St. Francis of Assisi
I woke up this morning suffused with love, knowing that if I could express it, that would be a good thing. But it has already vanished, leaving me with just a memory of how good it felt all over my body. Yes, it was like foreplay with divinity. A touching, a reaching into the essence of love, on fire with healing light. I yearned into it, knowing that this love would take me when it saw fit and not a moment sooner. All I can do is wait.
I could not tell you when I received the last message from Peter. It was sometime after Bob had died. My life went on just as Peter said it would. No matter how deep my grief was, the sky was still blue and the grass still green. I had no idea that years later I would be collecting his words so that others could enjoy his experience of awakening.
When my friend David was painting the kitchen last year, I told him about Peter, since David often is in touch with spirits. “He’s right here,” David said. “He wants you to know that he valued your friendship as much as you valued his.” And I smiled.
This little book belongs, not to me or to Peter, but to anyone who feels the vibrancy hidden between the lines. Anyone who puts the book down in order to look up at the wild blue sky. Therein lies the answer to the secret of life.
Vicki
FOREWORD
Note to the Reader
Peter
How It Began
Where Do I Stand?
Who Are We Then?
A Conversation with Peter
Bare
Life Is a Ballet
The Great Physician
Love Between the Lines
My Place in the Inner World
An Invitation to Rest
Bigger than the Sky
Losing Interest in your Story
The Wind on Your Skin
An Awakened Man
Faltering Steps
A Message to Peter
Nothing to Cling to
Breaking
ICU
Peter and the Cat
Peter’s Birthday
This, Too, Shall Pass
Who Is the True Guru?
Peace Descends
Grace
Remembering Myself
A Grateful Amen
Hard Times
The Great Silence
Ho Ho!
The Blessedness of Letting Go
No One Ever Goes Away
God Has a Sense of Humor
A Wide Wildness
A Quiet Vibrancy
Consolation from Peter
Temporary Good News
Ease
Downhill Fast
The Show Must Go On
A Diamond Tear
Dreams of Love
Dwindling Down to Nothing
A Jeweled Net of Grace
Self-Kindness
Going With the Flow
Only Peace Lies Ahead
You Are What Bob Is
Keeping Busy
No Time or Space
A Gentle Simplicity
An Awake Heart
The Nub of a Wing
The Other Side—A Meditation
You Are the Self
The Illusion of Time
The Ultimate Luxury
The Core of the Heart
Touched by the Hand of Sorrow
The Hermit Leaves the Hut: A Little Story about Wholeness
The Everyday Entrance to Eternity
The Last Message