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Two weeks ago at the end of Super Bowl Sunday, I found myself sitting in a small city airport, expecting to see lots of people dressed in Seahawks paraphernalia even though we weren’t contenders. Sadly, I was the only person decked in my gear. I had just enjoyed four days in Spokane with MY HERO, MY SISTER, Melissa.

We had left each other at the departures curb after a long good-bye and big hugs. During the afternoon we had watched the second half of the game at a wine bar overlooking the river and the slight, though sparkling, Spokane skyline. A fun bluegrass band played when we entered the bar. The game was projected on the giant screen in front of us but there was no commentary to be heard. That was just fine with me.

Melissa’s husband, my brother-in-law, died four months ago. He played college football and refereed high school ball. When we found out almost two years ago that he had pancreatic cancer, I called to ask, “Hey Monte, you can’t leave yet. I don’t know nearly enough about sports. Can I text you and ask for details about professional football or any sport for that matter?” He laughed and replied, “Penny, you can ask me anything you want about sports, but not about cancer. I know sports, not cancer.” So this lovely relationship began through texting about gruesome football of all things. Actually it continued and deepened.

Wow, there sure is a lot of culture around American football, including my own personal cultural memories. For instance, I remember my football-loving grandmother who lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She had a college degree—not a given in her era—with a major in PE. On holidays, I’d watch Washington Redskins games with her. I remember the slow motion television replays that made even tackles look like ballet. She called her beloved players “n—–“ thus creating a complicated, early memory for me. While I remember those games as generally fun times with Grandmom, that racist slur definitely tainted the warmth. Now her favorite team’s mascot has changed and they’re the Washington Nationals. Times have changed (or more fairly, are changing).

We began revisiting football when my nephew played for the nearby high school team. They’d lost forever until the freak streak when Elliot was a wide receiver….and my daughter Carolina was a teddy bear mascot. Now that’s a fun memory on all counts.

Then my father—an elementary school principal/English major who was decidedly too skinny to ever show much interest in playing football, found himself seriously aging at 92. That’s when the Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson from Richmond, Virginia (same hometown as my Dad and me) started leading his team (AND OURS!) to a Super Bowl championship. Fantastic! By that time my Dad had given up tennis, then ping pong. He’d shifted from riding a bicycle to a tricycle. Even when it finally came down to someone following his trike around the block with an oxygen tank, he could still watch and celebrate pro-ball 100%. He even dressed up as Russell Wilson for his retirement community’s Halloween party. And NO, he did not use black-face.

Next was Monte, my rules instructor. We texted back-and-forth for 13 months during Seahawks games. Me with the questions; Monte with the answers. I even texted him unknowingly during his last breath to let him know I’d be home soon and turning on the game. Now, I’ve transferred this text banter to his wonderful son, my nephew Andy. Every now and then I pull a “Haha” from him.

Back to that recent Super Bowl night though…

I wondered how I could enjoy this game I think is so bloody extreme? I hate the hurt it causes. Such a hot testosterone mess! And yet…I love the culture. The community. The conversations. I miss Monte and it seems like a good way to continue connecting as a family.

It was certainly perfect to be in Spokane for that particular weekend with my gorgeous sister who is doing it! She’s managing all the gargantuan shifts in her life—financial, emotional, etc.

I am fricking amazed at how many people she knows. I loved the wonderful bright green-and-blue Seahawks pants she wore for our evening together. I treasure the stories she told me, about Monte’s last minutes, about the first night he was on the other side, about the softest times.

I’m happy to say I could downplay those glasses of wine at the Alaska Air and TSA check-ins. I even talked them out of charging me $30 for the extra bag. Maybe it was my Seahawks Rashad Penny shirt? Didn’t even have to pull my own cancer card to get that. But I will pull up that trick Melissa taught me if/when needed.

Yes, I have learned A LOT from Melissa, my favorite coach. She’s living through every wife’s nightmare with decorum that is transparent and inspiring. I think she is becoming more beautiful all the time. The new coaching job suits her.

 

*Photo was taken last April when Monte and Melissa stayed in Seattle for extended experimental treatment. They lived in an apartment on Capitol Hill near Virginia Mason for the duration, thanks to the largesse of our friends, Randy and Eliza. While we walked that first evening after dinner, we spotted Seahawks coach Pete Carroll out for a stroll too. I think there was also a rainbow in the sky that night.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How I would love to reread what my friends wrote at our creativity circle (aka Jewels) recently. Would I dare ask them to type their pieces or perhaps send photos of them? The most I can bring myself to do is peck out mine.

So hum

Yahweh

Yo soy

Je suis

That in itself is amazing. Four languages sprang forth in two seconds. Each expression means “I am.” Some have said it is God’s name or the sound of God’s breathing. Only one ends with a consonant. And that one—hum—may even be synonym-like across languages.

Remembering Kelly who is quieter, sparkling and radiant. She led another group in a discussion about darkness, earlier in the week. Feeling responsible for the sad stillness in the room because I was the one who had chosen the reading prompt. Resisting a whimsical comment that would lighten things up, for God’s sake, the way I might have done….before Rob’s surgery, that is. Resisting, resisting. Knowing somehow I was at least willing to experiment when I had chosen the serious essay about suffering. Recognizing Kelly knew the dazzle of darkness so would keep us safe.

But, at the close, I felt disappointed. This was not the peace of resolution I had experienced at the end of the other group theological reflections. And of course, silly me, I did wonder if the others were disappointed too? And even crazier—so me, so human—I wondered if I was responsible for their melancholy? As if I, in my omnipotence (LOL), could make anyone feel a certain way.

And then rather nonchalantly, when I whispered to Kelly afterwards how hard it was for me not to try changing the mood, she said, “I love darkness. To me, as we sat there sharing a thought, an idea here and there, I could just hear the hum.” And she even said that nonchalantly (as I said), the opposite of how I had felt.

All this to say, that same word came up again two days later when we Jewels meditated together, “So hum, so hum.” My God, in Sanskrit it means “I am.” Sweet Jesus! I had thought words that end with vowels naturally reflect breath more than others because they continue into the air making them better sacred words for contemplation. Like Yahweh, for example.

“Mmmmmm,” a consonant, clearly also does this. And now I see it. The English version, “I am,” ends with an “m” too. How perfect! Silly, crazy, vibrating human me.

Vibrating

Singing

Moving

Humming

Writing

Scribbling

Breathing

My body does not ever stop completely. I am never still.

When I am very quiet, I can feel myself moving inside.

When I am listening, watching, listening, imagining, hearing, I can feel others moving, including the air.

Sometimes the vibration is so slight. Sometimes the earth itself moves enough for me to feel it gallivanting.

I’m glad I waited patiently and long enough to find this word, vibrating (with the “ing”), to use as my word for the year…serving me and all creatures great and small in this year of clear seeing.

Yesterday I visited a friend whose beloved had unexpected brain surgery and spent ten days in the ICU. Another friend’s husband was hospitalized after a stroke and is recovering his balance given rehab and PT. Our choir-mate can finally show his face again in crowds after a blood cancer diagnosis and stiff round of chemo. All these near-70-somethings have new understandings of their vulnerability. Their women, like me, are grappling, trying to love and care for these men we treasure, learning our “new normals.” Rob’s (and mine) is no longer the saddest, most recent, story of loss and change. I find I can be present in a new way.

I am grateful these tears can fall. That I feel soft. And prayerful. Still sad, confused, profoundly empty at times but, like the short days and long nights, the balance of my cup of feelings seems to have shifted, almost precisely in step with the sun. Most mornings now I wake and, as consciousness dawns, I wonder and check. I feel more settled and content than not. I startle myself more often with belly-aching laughter. Also I welcome the rippling tears, no matter how painful. Do I dare say I cherish them?

At one point in early fall, a doctor asked how I was sleeping. Blessedly, sleep/dreams/resting has not been a problem for me. Others have scolded me for turning down her Xanax prescription. Still I have wondered if my characteristic lightness of being would ever return.

I am definitely a fuller and more compassionate human being due to the intensity of Rob’s diagnosis, surgery and recovery. What I contemplate now about mortality and great love, is, how-to-say-this?, more grown-up? The earlier insults—depression in college when I was scared and trying to control (and of course failing to control) a bevy of freshman beauties as their RA, desperation again when my near-perfect family fell apart after learning about my sister’s sexual abuse at the camp I loved, grief following the long demise of my dear father before he died at 94, etc.—don’t compare. After all, Rob is close, practically flesh of my flesh; we became one, in sacred vernacular.

Frankly, I am impressed with the profundity of this latest journey with Rob—what it has opened up for me/us, the pain and fortitude I have witnessed, the miracle of healing anyway, recognizing none of us ultimately gets out of this alive, the place in my heart that would expect nothing less. Even though it hurts, I don’t want to swallow or ignore it.

Over the past decade I have assembled spiral notebooks full of good writing and artwork by others. I have never chosen a particular theme until, at the risk of dualism and pitting Light against Dark, I decided to create a notebook devoted to Darkness. This fall, when my brother-in-law died and the anger-sadness-bewilderment of Grief threatened to sink me, I noticed I gravitated toward poetry about heavy-ness, as in not-lightness. It helped to collect these gifts into one notebook, giving a nod to the newer deeper understanding and feelings I respected. Now, I appreciate myself too much, on this side of the worst of it, to go back to immature unknowing.

I found the collection’s cover art too, a piece by my cousin Paula Fong. In mid-October I visited her studio and found wonderful illustrations of bees, flowers, animals, trees all in their natural habitats. Yet, I was drawn to the one of a scorched forest. It had a magnetic-like hold on me and serves as the cover of my latest notebook. Fortunately there is a stream running through this scene. And sunlight peeks from behind a cloud. I recognize the gorgeousness of this depiction and its place in my own circle of life. I have lived with this heat, flaming to the point of almost burning me and my joy up. A fire like this one creates deep fertile loam. Rich nourishing ground of this sort eventually allows transformation and resurrection. I know this. I believe this with all my heart—for all of creation, myself included.

Thus I am grateful. I know transformation is coming. The water does flow. The sun does shine. I am standing in the middle of it and am better off for all of it. I am. It helps to have my notebook nearby to remind me.

(Artwork by Paula Fong)

 

My actual birthdate bordered on overwhelming, given the outpouring of love. Many know I have been through the fire and seen Glory, over and over again MCE (aka My Current Era, post Rob’s surgery).

Fortunately this 19^th (four months MCE) included quietly reading one of my favorite picture books about angels—The High Rise Glorious Skittle-Skat Roarious Sky Pie Angel Food Cake by Nancy Williard—to a 6-year-old while we cuddled together on a comfortable sofa. Before that I facilitated a discussion about a more adult favorite—Wild Mercy by Mirabai Starr—with a group of dear friends, most of whom thought her book was a bit chaotic and just too wild. Does this sound like me and the Divine I know?

The next day, when I was 64 all day long, I welcomed friends to my blue room so we could pray and write and create together. The gentle advice my friend read, this time from a Buddhist mystic Danna Faulds, felt like a free gift—“When loss rips off the doors of the heart, or sadness veils your vision with despair, practice becomes simply bearing the truth. In the choice to let go of your known way of being, the whole world is revealed to your new eyes.” My response as the illustrated poem (above) was easily-created and freely-given. Now it is yours too.

What I want to point out most of all is the starlit sky at the top of my painting as well as the waves that are holding me. In this piece, they represent the net I found recently at the beginning of the last third of my life. They are painted in the final hues of the rainbow. The first two thirds of my life suggested some form of a net was there, initially with glitters represented now by my jewelry, then shifting to words that are less dense but still possible to solidify in books. Please bear with me. So much of my life has been consumed as a school psychologist that the phenomena of Show-and-Tell seems the best way to explain.

I am reminded of Ken Wilbur’s idea that we are all evolving into spirit anyway, both individually and collectively. The notion that these jewels then the words all eventually transforming, through liquid air, into an energetic net, makes sense to me. As I evolve into spirit, the rainbow tracks my progress to date.

So this pale lavender net I speak of is a safety net, not unlike a fisherman’s net. I had heard others speak of being lifted by prayers. Before, I have seen a net of fond thoughts collect, for instance around my sister Melissa and her husband via his Caring Bridge site as he struggled with pancreatic cancer.

For the first time though, during my husband Rob’s recent surgery, I allowed myself to feel that lift, rock in the faint grip of it, wave-like and steady. At one point in Overlake Hospital’s chapel, I extended my palm to push on the resistance that held me. I reflected on how we are all connected, invisibly and non-scientifically perhaps, but connected nonetheless. For ten weeks, I have rested in this tangible net, a net made of meals, flowers, cards and a shower of electronic messages from around the world. Quite extraordinary. I remember the metaphysical hints of the net’s existence that God has given me at other times in the past.

Some background about this man of mine first. I met Rob forty years ago in the mountains in an REI climbing class. He is my partner, my bright yellow sun, my solar plexus. We lived together in the heart of the city on a houseboat for ten years before our two children came. Time for lots of traveling, hiking, romance and no church to speak of. Still I marvel that when we created our wedding ceremony, we invited a clergyman to marry us and sang a favorite hymn for our recessional, “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.” [Show bracelet.] This gift from Rob—a multi-colored bracelet—represents the variety of memories we share.

The orange stripe is always pulsating. I remember my 20-something self being in a circle with others at Haven in the Canadian San Juan Islands. A vested priest is leading us as we come forward into the center where my younger sister Susan waits for our blessings and anointings with oil. She has Stage 4 lymphoma. At the beginning of our week together, Susan was folded up into a little ball squeezing her knees to her chest and peeking out at us. After a week of acupuncture, psychodrama, various forms of body work, we are all watching her heal.

Until Susan’s illness, my perspective on life was undisturbed, for the most part, pure innocence—happy family, good grades, all was well enough. But a significant part of her healing was unearthing memories of being sexually abused as a cult priestess at camp. My first published essay, “Embracing Gray,” was about the black mark of Susan’s memories, how they crushed my unblemished childhood illusion and simultaneously offered great value in shaking up my sense of reality.

I attended several courses at Haven and remember the first time I used my palm to touch energy; it was radiating from another person. I started sensitizing my hands then so that they could identify the web of prayers forty years later. This fiery stripe of capital-H Healing is best represented by my silver bell. [Show necklace.] I usually wear one side, the one with the cross, turned in and closest to my heart. The other side has a circle, symbolizing the more expansive humanistic interpretation of faith I found at Haven.

Eventually after this catatonic shift in my understanding of, well, everything, I began seeing multi-colored sparkles everywhere, nothing was ever just white or just black again. But first, what was this camp? Who was this Christ?

The red, my root, is my spiritual foundation. My native faith language is of Christianity. I was fortunate to spend summers unleashed with my sisters at a church camp where my parents worked as nurse and assistant director. Vespers among the trees every evening. Afternoons swimming and boating in the lake. Mosquitoes. Camp fires. Tetherball. During the school year we returned to the city. There I participated in traditional Sunday School, choir and youth group as well as many activities hosted by the nearby Presbyterian School of Christian Education—folk-dancing, clogging, ski-trips.

My father was a public school principal. In his quietly-activist way, Dad helped implement desegregation in the South. No white flight for our family. Instead I was bussed across town as a 12-year-old becoming part of my school’s 2% white minority. By high school, I had adapted but I was definitely in a new environment for those dark years of junior high, scared and lonely most of the time. I never thought to touch God’s net then, but it was holding me. This stretch, living with my family of origin, is represented by a simple wooden cross, made at camp. [Show necklace.]

To describe the middle lusciously green belt, I use the religious word, “Ministry.” Of course the associated chakra is my heart, my center. In the linear story of my life, it started 30-plus years ago when my son was a baby and Rob and I realized it was time to find a church home. Our families were far away in Virginia and Michigan and we knew this business of parenting was too important to do alone. From our houseboat, St. Mark’s was our closest parish and Thank God it had a giant organ and relaxed choir and band (for him) plus a family service complete with puppets for our toddler (and me too).

God spoke to me during our church search when we attended Compline (for the first and only time together). I came through the doors of the nave and saw it chocked full with another completely different group of people. God told me then, “This is it, Penny. Welcome home.” I use two items to represent this spiritual stretch—my heart necklace and The Wisdom Jesus by Cynthia Bourgeaut. [Show necklace and book.] Early on, I volunteered in Sunday School and on the education committee which led me to seven years of governance on our vestry and then the diocesan Standing Committee.

This middle band is characterized by both a piece of jewelry and a book because this is when I changed to being less literal, less linear, less defined by any religious form. I found the mystics. At first, I was mad as hell. These Christian men and women had always been there. Why hadn’t anyone told me?! I had been seeking these wise ones all my life; this middle way of contemplation and action fits for me. I agree with the words of James Finley, “When we seek what is truest in our own tradition, we discover we are one with those who seek what is truest in their tradition.”

I find the aqua swathe the hardest to explain. The best word I can come up with is “bridging.” Overall it stands in for four decades of my work in the world. Over the years I have been the transition specialist, the connector—making programs work for disabled children, traveling with a youth mission to Mexico the summer before college, lifeguarding at an inner-city pool where I was almost the only white person, trying to make sense of benefits for families living in poverty.

When I was working in a school district where more than 30% of the families spoke Spanish, my boss encouraged me to write about learning Spanish in middle age. [Show my book.] I had been traveling back-and-forth to Nicaragua, initially under the cathedral’s auspices “to learn how most of the world lives.” While I had published essays for religious purposes and overseen lots of technical writing, Bridging represents the first time I wrote, with God’s help, for both audiences—the church and the general public. Blue is also the color associated with the throat chakra. I see this period of my life as a time of opening my throat and freeing my voice.

I was led eventually to this rich indigo third eye period of my life. Writers, I’m told, should develop a web presence first. But my blog—alwaysbriging.com [Show business card.]—came after my book. After 30+ years of working on behalf of children and families, this website accompanied me on the long glide slope to my recent retirement. Three years ago, I committed to posting an essay with an illustration at least monthly. I am grateful to have a way to share my stories, for instance about volunteering with the nearby bilingual mission church, about my inadvertent racist remarks, about living with a Jehovah Witness family in Costa Rica and a Mormon family in Ecuador, etc.

Most recently I posted an essay called “Colorful Caregiver Meds,” the closest I’ve come to describing the net and the violet of the crown chakra. My guru Jesus the Christ together as God and Spirit, has made the net that holds me…and all of us…clear, clear and even palpable. For this, I am grateful.

Amen.

 

*EFM Spiritual Autobiography for 2019. Prompt was “colors.”