Praying with all my heart... and hearing an answer

Sometimes in the midst of everything falling apart, prayers can be answered. Prayers you never expected to see answered.

Someone you thought would be a part of your life forever and ever, and then one day, was gone...

Someone you imagined suddenly finding on your doorstep late one night, or seeing in your favourite cafe on a sunny afternoon...

Someone whose car you thought you saw at the market or the next lane over a few cars ahead on the freeway...

Someone whose name called out by a stranger in the mall made you stop and look, on the off chance it was him (or her)...

Someone you finally left in the past, after long nights of tears and countless futile bargains with G-d, or whatever you imagine the powers in the universe to be...

Sometimes, somehow, one day, you might be standing in the post office line or paying for groceries or answering e-mails in your office -- something ordinary and every day, and your phone rings. And instead of the almost-anybody-else-in-the-universe you thought it could possibly be, it's him. It's that voice you recognize from a single hello.

And you stand there, stunned, all the words you once imagined saying if you ever had the chance have suddenly vanished from your brain. And you feel like you're 10 years old and a grown-up expects you to do something that you just don't quite get. Like talk. So you squeeze out a squeeky hello, and then you wait...not having any idea what the next words should be.

You babble. And odds are they babble. They ask what's new. And even if you have a new job, new house and dozens of other new things in your life since they left, you say "nothing." Because for that instant, you are back where you were when they left and nothing really has changed.

And after only a few minutes, you hang up. Even if you used to talk for hours on end and have saved up years worth of things to say, you say good-bye. You promise to talk again. Soon. And you stand there.

Dazed.

Because the call you once prayed for every minute of every day came.

And you didn't know what to say.

Over the next day or two it sinks in...and then you start to wonder. What about the life I have now? Do I want to go back to who and what I was then? Haven't I changed and grown and learned since then. And you don't call back. And he does not call back.

And you look at the people you have in your life now, and you imagine leaving them behind. And you can't. Because they are the ones you choose to be with now. The ones who might have caught you as you fell, or met you when you arose, like the pheonix from that past sorrow...and they saw you soar for the first time as the new being you are now.

That call came on Tuesday, as I stood by my car, juggling mail to take into the post office. I almost didn't answer. It was not a good time. That it could have been him on the other end never occured to me. But in the end, I answered. I'm dealing with some legal issues left over from my now several years old divorce and thought it might be my attorney. The area code was right for it to be her. But it was not her. It was him.

And one hello was all I needed to hear to know that.

So the question is: now what? I am not who I was when we parted a year ago. I have changed. I have grown. I am stronger, sadder, happier, weaker, smarter, more confused, more contemplative, and more impulsive than I was then. I look different to myself when I look in the mirror. The sorrow has aged me, I think. But my eyes are more peaceful than I remember them looking when we were together.

For now, we are 1700 miles apart. And I cannot see that changing any time soon.


Tonight is a night for the beach. For quiet conversations about here and now and maybe even tomorrow. I think I've looked backwards long enough.

Midnight at the Beach

Silently, tears fell. The sadness for lost friends, lost love, lost dreams, lost years. For sitting in that beautiful spot all alone. For friends who never showed up. For things that had once seemed a certainty and now certainly will never be....

On Saturday night, I was supposed to meet a friend for tea. We haven't managed to get together since last September, and this was supposed to be a chance to sit down and talk and enjoy a cup of tea on a beautiful evening. He's asked at least a dozen times, but our schedules make get-togethers tough. About a year and half ago, he lost his beloved wife in a car accident, and he needs someone who will still listen to his happy memories of their time together. I listen on the phone, but it's not the same as sitting with someone who knows the story and understands. Finally, we had a night that worked for both of us.

We spoke on the phone at about 8:30. I told him it would be an hour or two until I could get there...I wanted to get my little one to bed, and take care of something for my teenaged daughter. No problem, he said. Just call me when you're on your way. A couple of minutes after 10, I left my apartment. I called his house. No answer. He's probably busy, on another line, away from his phone. I drove towards our meeting place. Fifteen minutes later, I was almost there. I called again. Still, no answer.

I decided to give him a few more minutes. I pulled into the parking lot. Called my daughter to check on her. Chatted for a few minutes. Still no call. I called a third time...no answer. Sent a text. No response. After a dozen requests to get together and at least three times that many calls asking me to come over, I had been stood up.

It was almost 11. I was only a few blocks from the beach. I started my car and headed for the water.

A few minutes and a few coins for the meter later, I was walking on the sand.

At the edge of the water, someone had left a chair...one of those white plastic chairs you see on porches and patios. I slipped off my shoes and headed for the water's edge and that chair. And there I sat, for the next hour. Just me, my thoughts and a chair on a beach.

I was far enough from the beachside restaurants and clubs that the music was reduced to a vague background noise. A few late night fishermen were at the water's edge further down the beach. A brightly lit cruise ship drifted across the horizon.

It was chilly, but I sat there and watched the waves. I thought about love and lost love and life and the future. The tide was coming in, and every once in awhile, the water came up the edge of my chair. I tried to figure out whether having friends who were "no-shows" said something about me or about the friends or maybe about about our society where RVSP's were often overlooked (a complaint I had heard from other moms at school, and two couples planning weddings last year.) It seemed to be happening a lot.

The tide came in a bit more, and the waves got bigger. The water came up to my chair almost every time now. I sat and thought about the fact that twenty minutes, less than a gallon of gas and four quarters for the meter got me a ringside seat at the ocean. I remembered cold nights in my Pennsylvania farm house when such a moment would have been a dream come true. A fantasy I hardly dared contemplate.

The wind picked up, and I curled up in my jacket, wishing I'd worn a sweatshirt instead of a t-shirt. I watched the curl of the waves as they came to shore. And although I was filled with gratitude for that moment, that place, that experience, I cried. Silently, tears fell. The sadness for lost friends, lost love, lost dreams, lost years. For sitting in the beautiful spot all alone. For friends who never showed up. For things that had once seemed a certainty and now certainly will never be.

So much that I keep inside came out there. With no one to explain to, in the blessed darkeness of midnight on the beach, I let the pain pour out until the tears ran dry.

We all keep so much inside. Pain, fear, loneliness. I know I do. I know my friend does. Sometimes, the tears just need to come.

I took a few deep breaths of the salty night air then headed back to my car, and drove home. Emptier. Lighter.

Maybe there is a reason both tears and the sea are made of salt water

It all started with two kittens....

I saw a post on Blogher by Birdie Jaworski about her mistake in guessing the genders of two flea market bunnies. More bunnies!! She asked for more stories of unintentional pets.

Unintentional pets...I like that term! And I've had them...OK, Birdie, here is my story.

For me, it started with two tiny kitten rescued from under a neighbor's wooden porch in rural Pennsylvania. It was early November and the nights were getting cold. My neighbor heard them, saw the mom cat climbing down through a hole on the far side of the porch, and decided that they would freeze to death if we did not rescue them.

As soon as we came into his yard, the mother cat took off. Armed with tuna and milk, we sat out there -- 3 adults, and every kid in the neighborhood. In our rural community, kittens were hardly novel, but still child had to take a turn trying to lure those tiny bundles of fur out from under the porch.

We finally got them all out, distributing them to neighbor families to take home. One family even adopted the mom cat. My kids and I took two...we guessed at genders and named one Maxine and one Max...and headed home to introduce our new family members to Black Cat, our aged somewhat battered cat rescued years before from an Alberston's parking lot in Salt Lake City.

We needed more cats anyhow, we reasoned. Our two acres and three buildings were home to more small fuzzy beasts than I cared to contemplate, and one aging feline just wasn't enough. I had already ruled out poisons, so cats were the only way to control the burgeoning rodent population. You live in the country, you need cats. Even a city girl like me could see that.

What a city girl did not know was the problem.

1. I cannot really tell the gender of kittens. I can only guess. Badly. Thus when we let "Max" sometimes go outside and kept "Maxine" inside, we actually sending an unspade girl kitty outside. (When we finally realized our mistake, it was too late...Max stayed Max despite our discovery, but Maxine became Maxim.) Thus the first batch of kittens arrived. We found homes for them. Money was tight so surgery was not an option yet.
   
   
2. Cats have no qualms about incest. Who knew? Certainly not me! Thus even after we discovered our error and kept both cats indoors, we acquired more "unintentional pets." Litter number two. We found homes for the kittens and made appointments for both cats to get fixed. Maxim kept his appointment.
   
   
3. Cats are escape artists. They can get out an attic vent or a slightly opened window you think is much too small for a mouse. Or any number of other openings one finds in a 227 year old farmhouse. We found Max 2 days later (how did she know about the appointment?) The vet informed us she was once again expecting. I cannot kill babies of any kind. Litter number three....
   

There were others. Cats who came from ours, and cats who joined us from other places. After awhile, you lose track of just how many kittens there were...

The budget was never there to fix most of the remaining cats. We found good homes for most of them on neighboring farms. And we loved the ones who remained with us..Yoda, Charlie, Nancy Drew, Iago, Shippo, to name a few. Unintentional pets to be sure but loved none the less.

Our property remained rodent free. The outdoor cats lived in the barn and grew fat, with beautiful shiny coats from their diet of Pennsylvania mice and voles. The indoor ones lived in luxury, sleeping with the children and feasting on Iams and Science Diet or napping with Misha, my Siberian Husky on chilly winter days. Black Cat lived to be almost 16, a wise uncle to the newer cats.

We lived in that farmhouse for almost a decade. When we left in April of 2006, we found homes for all of our indoor and outdoor cats. We cried when we left Maxim behind, our now giant orange cat, who was adopted by the house's new owners as the Bed and Breakfast's mascot.

Unintentional? Yes, though I prefer to say serediptious.... Unloved? Never!

Saying Goodbye to a Friend

There are many ways to lose a friend...

Sometimes one person moves far away, and despite promises to stay in touch and visit often, the days and weeks and miles come between. Conversations become shorter and the times between them longer. Then one day, without anyone realizing it's happening, the two go from "friends" to "someone I used to know."

Other times some one comes between the two, and loyalties are challenged. A new love interest, a new spouse, a new baby...and suddenly there is no time or energy for the way things used to be. We may be sad, but we understand that people change and that sometimes a friend for one season may not be the right friend for another.

Sometimes there is a parting of ways because of a betrayal, and try though they might, the chain of trust has been shattered. And friends become strangers or even enemies.

But the hardest to take is when one never really knows what happened. One day the person is part of your life. You talk, you visit, you make plans, you laugh. And then in what seems like an instant, the other is gone. Calls are refused. Visits cease. And in the online world, your IM's are rejected. You search your heart, trying to understand what you did, what you said. You talk to friends. You go over and over in you head, trying to imagine what went wrong. But still you have no answers. If you do see the person, your questions remain unanswered. You want to know if there is something you can do to make it right again. They don't want to talk. You have ceased to exist for them.

For one of my friends, I have ceased to exist. At some point in the past few weeks, he decided to end the relationship. To close the door. And I cannot understand. But I have to accept.

I wrote early on in this blog about my efforts at non-attachment. And my limited success. And so, in the spirit of learning that spiritual skill, I offer this post. Good bye my friend. I have learned much from you and I am grateful to have had you in my life for the time the universe allowed. The door will always remain open on my side, should you ever wish to walk back through it.

I wish you well in all that comes your way. May your path be one of love and happiness and peace.

The world I don't know

I'm reading a book called Guests of the Sheik by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea. It's a book written back in the 1960's about a village in Southern Iraq. The author and her husband lived in the village as active participants in the day to day life...the book is a description of her experiences, and the learning process as she moves from being an American outsider to a member of the community.

The book is wonderful, but what has attracted my attention even more is the realization that despite being an avid reader and a fan of PBS and BBC and the Travel Channel and despite having a group of friends that covers most of the globe, I know almost nothing about most of the world.

I know facts, I know statistics, I can identify languages and cultures and practices in an academic way. But I have spent my entire life in North America. I've been to all the states, most of the provinces of Canada and both coasts of Mexico. I've lived in the Northeastern US, in the Rockies and in the South. And yes, there are marked differences between people in Colorado and people in NYC. But the differences pale when I consider the far greater contrast between the person in Boulder, Colorado and the person in a village in China. Or between that New Yorker and a family in a coastal town in Egypt.

So why haven't I traveled more? Or at least, traveled off this continent? The reasons are many...as a child, we did 3 week family vacations to the states and provinces, visiting museums and historic homes and resorts. In college, I had the money and the time to travel further, but I was so focused on fun and the beach and road trips with my sorority sisters and classmates that I never got around to hoping on that plane to Europe or South America or Russia the way I planned to.

Then came marriage and babies, and now I'm a single working mom of three, two living with me, one with his dad, and the days rush by in a blur.

I thought of myself as fairly cosmopolitan until the life experiences of my more globally experienced friends and the contents of this book woke me up to the reality that I know almost nothing about what it feels like to live outside of my western world view.

Like most Americans, I'm afraid that I've believed, somewhere deep inside, that what was here was all I really needed to see. I am ashamed of this revelation. My paltry accomplishments in learning about other places are nothing -- they are mere academic exercises.

This summer, my girls will be away, staying with their dad from June through mid August. Perhaps it is finally time for me to break free from my narrow world and live some of the things I have only read.

A second job for a few weeks when they leave could be enough to buy my first exposure to the world I don't know. I cannot wait!!

Anam Cara

Anam Cara is a Gaelic word meaning “soul friend”. It symbolises a spiritual friendship that is not affected by time, distance, or separation. In the old Celtic tradition, the Anam Cara was someone you could share your innermost self, mind and heart. This soul friendship was an act of recognition and belonging helping us return to the heart of our spirit.
--- from the website of the Anam Cara Retreat Center in the Scottish Highlands

If we're very lucky, we have one or two of these special people in our lives. If we are blessed beyond measure, we have three or four. You know who they are. Weeks, months or even years can go by between meetings, but the moment you are together again, it's as though no time has passed. There is no feeling of strangeness...and if the truth be told, even the first time you met, the feeling of familiarity is instantaneous. We "know" one another from the start, recognizing some indescribable spark of familiarity.

They may have come from around the corner or around the world. You may meet them on the first day of kindergarten, on the biggest day of your life, or when divorce, financial challenges or one too many birthdays have left you feeling that the best of life has passed you by. And sometimes, we come to know an Anam Cara before we ever meet in person, sharing that spark across telephone lines or within the lines of letters and postcards and e-mails.

It doesn’t really matter where or how or when…there is that feeling of connection. A bond that forms instantly and feels as though it has always been there. You find it hard to remember a time before you knew them – how could you ever NOT have known them? You know you must have met them somewhere before --- in this life or perhaps somewhere (or some-when?) before. The feeling is too strong to be new.

You may agree on everything or almost nothing but somehow it doesn’t matter. You know you can trust them with the things you have in common and the things you see from opposite sides, and still not lose their friendship.

When you have an Anam Cara in your life, you know you are blessed. Your soul has found a friend. And that is far beyond friendships of the head or even the heart.

I have a few Anam Caras in my life…they stretch across the country from the northeast to the Rockies, to the deep south and to sunny Florida. They are each so different I have a hard time imagining them together in one room. An urban jewelry and clothing designer in Chicago, a Mormon mom of four in Southern Utah, an engineer from Syria, a retired firefighter from orginally New York, a woman seeking her path in life with a new start in Colorado. Each brings blessings into my life. Each is someone I know I could see tomorrow, regardless of how long it’s been since our last meeting, and feel as though no time has passed.

I came across the concept of an Anam Cara today while I was working on a Celtic catalog. How sweet to discover that I already had these wonderful people in my life...I just needed the word for them.

Knowing thy self

Last night, I helped a friend do an online personality profile as part of a job application. I was so intrigued by the process, that first thing this morning, I did the same test. Would the 200 plus questions tell me anything interesting about myself? Would they illuminate my present impasse in my life, and the sensation that I want to do more but cannot quite figure out how? So I took the test...and here are my results:

________________________________________________________
In Terms of Your Style & Strength of Various Motivations
You would be described as being motivated primarily by a genuine concern for the well-being and needs of others. People would see you as quite calm, steady, unhurried, predictable, stable and cooperative. Given an opportunity to focus your efforts on the achievement of some meaningful and perhaps demanding, long term 'people-oriented' goals, you could become a very loyal, dependable and dedicated member of the team delivering the product or service. Generally your motivational pattern will produce the greatest personal satisfaction and your best performance in positions requiring ongoing commitment to goals which you feel have real merit in alleviating the distress or adding to the quality of life of the people who receive the results of your efforts.

To see the rest of my profile, go to my To Be Continued blog...


I have to say, I am pretty astounded. In my opinion, the test pretty much describes me perfectly. It's kind of scary that a few minutes with an online test can so accurately pin down my motivation, my needs, and my weaknesses.

The question now is what will I do with this information? It does explain some of my discontent with my present job...it also explains why I love it.

Now I wonder how close the profile is to the way others who know me well see me. Is it an accurate description of the persona I project? Or is my external expression something entirely different?