"So far away...."

"So far away...
doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?
It would be so fine to see your face at my door.
It doesn't help to know,
You're just time away...."

Besides the pure pleasure of seeing James Taylor and Carole King performing together in 1971, this recording of "So Far Away," was the perfect keynote for today.  A new friend asked, recently, if I could write a piece about "long distance relationships."  Boy oh boy, can I.

One, because I've experienced so many of them...with significant others, my mom, siblings, and even my children...and two, because I have grown to love them. 

Some of the most deepening (and telling) times in the development of a lasting relationship, have come during weeks, months, and years when we have not lived in the same place.

Letters, phone calls, long walks by myself where the only conversation I'm having is the one I have with God about my loved one, emails...all of these alternative models of communication have strengthened the "ties that bind"...or they've gently untied the ones that weren't meant to be tied tightly.

Mary Baker Eddy, in her work, Miscellaneous Writings 1883 - 1896, counsels:

"Space is no separator of hearts."

I believe this to be completely accurate.  A relationship that is dependent on proximity, may become a relationship that suffers with proximity.  A relationship that thrives...no matter the miles between you...is a relationship that can withstand the "too close for comfort" times when unemployment, retirement, or cramped quarters puts two people in constant contact.

Sometimes, a relationship that is best when "touch" is involved, can become a relationship where another's touch is annoying or intrusive.   There is nothing wrong with touch...I love touching, hugging, embracing...and being touched, but it is  having my hopes, my dreams, my thoughts cherished by a loved one, that reaches into the deepest place in my being, and leaves the most lasting, resonant impression on my life.

I have learned the most about myself as a wife, mother, and friend, during those times when my loved one was on another continent, in another state, or has passed on from this experience. 

My devotion to the life and dreams, hopes and ambitions of one dear friend, has been strengthened and edified since her passing.  I am in constant, almost daily, relationship with her through my ongoing commitment to what she loved and cherished most in this world.

My loyalty to a cause, a patient, a dream, a project, a child...had never been, even once, impacted by the distance between us.  My relationship to the camp that I love is immeasurably stronger than it was when I lived in the same state.  My relationship with my dearest of friends is unchanged, by whether she is in the next room, or on a different continent.  My love for my husband, children, mother, siblings has only strengthened by those times when we have needed to be in different parts of the world.

The time invested in writing letters, making phone calls, prayerfully supporting their dreams, their hopes, their travels has only galvanized the tenacity of our love for one another. Sometimes it is in those moments of "stepping back" that I have seen things in the other person...gifts of humility, compassion, patience, strength, their ability to nurture others...that were not as clear when I was standing so closely I that could touch their sleeve, or look in their eyes.

In reality, we all really, only dwell "in the secret place of the most High."  We dwell in the consciousness of Love, in the silent place of prayer, we dwell in the place where thought is persistently and assertively defining our experience.  If you think about it spacially, we are "away" from everyone all the time...and yet, in that "house of the Lord," in that spiritualMind-home of consciousness...we are never any farther away from eachother, than the thoughts we embrace about one another.

One of my favorite hymns, from the Christian Science Hymnal, starts with this line:

"Pilgrim on earth, home and heaven are within thee..."

There is something about this lyric, that gives me peace when thinking about my loved ones...far and near.  According to Webster, a "pilgrim" is "a person who journeys to a sacred place."  Every relationship is a sacred place, a home for the affections, and the only place where we unite with one another...in reality...is within.

Finding you there...
Kate
Kate Robertson, CS

"You can close your eyes...it's alright..."

"...Well, the sun is surely sinking down
And the moon is slowly rising
So, this old world must
still be spinnin' 'round
And I still love you..."
-James Taylor
"Close Your Eyes (video - JT and Carly Simon)

I was looking through my journal from last summer and found this entry:

"These have been long nights...they usually are at camp...but tonight, long after the last camper has found her way back to her bunkhouse and the only sounds outside are the little brook just beyond my window and the occasional howl of a lone coyote, I am sitting under the quilts on my bed - knees drawn to my chest - singing lullabies to a daughter half a world away.

Where she is, the sun...though shuttered by low hanging clouds...has been up for hours, and the breakfast dishes are long-since cleared from the table.  She has showered, dressed and is wrapped in a sweater to mitigate the damp chill of a winter's day in southern Africa.

If you were to look inside my heart though, you would see her sleeping in her bunk 500 yards away from me in South Pines East...the older girls' cabin...where, in the soft recesses of my dreaming, she and her bestfriend,  Casey, have dozed off in mid-sentence under a cloudless midnight blue Colorado nightsky.  I think of her there, because I must.  It is my way of remembering that there is no space between hearts.  It is my way of reminding myself that what we hold in consciousness is nearer to us than the air that we breathe deeply...closer than the warm summer breeze that brushes against my cheek, lifts my hair, and dries my tears.

When I close my eyes, all evidence that she is not with me completely disappears.  When I sing to her the lullabies of her childhood, here under a midsummer canopy of stars (while all other evidence screams that that she is really walking along the Indian Ocean 12,000 miles away) I am not alone in my cabin missing her. I am actually, in consciousness, holding her in my arms and can feel the rise and fall of her breathing against my chest...hear the soft mewing of her sleepy sighs as she dreams. 

These are not just a mother's memories cultivated by repeatedly watching videos of her sleeping, or shuffling through photographs of her as a toddler at play.  These images are what REALLY make up the body of my being...they are as much a part of my spiritual DNA, my mental molecular-mapping...as is joy or peace...patience or faith.  They are gifts from a Father-Mother God who loves our loving.   They are treasures preserved  accurately, and are alive in the realm of infinite Mind. They exist for His, God's, own rich pleasure.   I am but the abiding place...the photo album, the mental page on which God is storing these beautiful images of tenderness, serenity, and gratitude.

As I softly stroke her pale temples and smooth flaxen curls with fingers that stay folded in my lap 12,000 miles from where she is eating, studying, playing...fingers that do not need to touch to feel the silky threads of hair that curl around her small shell-shaped ears...I know what it means to be spiritual.  To live, and move, and have my being in the realm of consciousness, the kingdom of heavenly gifts where His beautiful images are given with generosity and mercy.

"So close your eyes, you can close your eyes...it's alright..." my Mother Love is telling me...Her own daughter.  "I will keep you both safely tucked in Mind's locket...your faces will not fade for one another, your voices will sing...like the wind in the aspens outside your cabin door...through eachother's hearts.

Yes, you can close your eyes, it's alright.  She will be here...in My safe arms and in your open, waiting heart... always.  She lives here...just as you live in her heart wherever she is."  

"A mother's affection cannot be weaned from her child,
because the mother-love includes purity and constancy,
both of which are immortal. Therefore maternal affection
lives on under whatever difficulties."
- Mary Baker Eddy

I trust this truth.  I rest the heaviness in my heart on its promise.  I try to find my way towards that space where we both dwell...in His kingdom...in Her arms.  And from the sanctuary of this "space" I sing to her the lullabies of her childhood under the canopy of a shared sky....in the kingdom of a shared God.

"So, close your eyes
You can close your eyes, it's alright
I don't know no love songs
And I can't sing the blues anymore
But I can sing this song
And you can sing this song
When I'm gone..."*

I love you my girl...
Kate

*if you didn't catch the link to the video of James Taylor and Carly Simon singing "You can Close Your Eyes" above, here it is again.

"I see the moon...."

"I see the moon
And the moon sees me
The moon sees somebody
I want to see
God bless the moon
And God bless me
And God bless the somebody
I want to see…"

My friend Maria reminded me of this lullaby the other day, and I can't seem to stop myself from singing it through my chores and into the middle of the night.  It has helped…a bit.  It has made the earth with it's wide oceans, far-off lands, and distant shores…seem somehow smaller and more circum-navigate-able. 

"…It seems to me
That God above
Created you
For me to love
He picked you out
Of all the rest
Because He knew
I'd love you the best…"

When our daughter was very little…I mean very, very little…even before she was born, I would sit in the rocking chair, looking out at the lake just beyond my window and sing this song to her.  I would imagine her from where I was on the shores of the Atlantic, and her nearly 8,000 miles away in South Africa, the moon reflecting as brilliantly on her face, as it was on the dark, still surface of Long Pond outside my window.  I was always astonished at how present it seemed.  It was almost as if the moon were actually floating on the water, instead of 238,855 miles away in orbit around the earth.  There was something so comforting about knowing that from where I sat in my little cottage near shore, I could easily see the moon, whose light was capable of touching both of us. 

I was thinking about this last night as I lay in the dark praying for our children.  Just as the moon is not the source of the light I see reflected off it's surface, I am not the source of the love that has nourished and tenderly cared for our children.  Just as the sun is the source of the moon's light, so is God the source of all the love that our children have experienced through our loving of them. 

The light that I saw reflected on the surface of the lake, was actually only the moon's reflection on the water, of the sun's reflection on the moon's surface.  All that lovely light was just on a never-ending journey of bouncing around touching everything in sight. And it's illumination was not diminished.  It shone just as brightly on the water's surface, as when I looked up at it from where I sat in my rocking chair in the dark.   It wasn't diminished by distance, or by how many surfaces it had bounced off of along the way…it still had enough light to send a path of incandescence along the surface of the water like a yellow brick road to the shoreline at my window's ledge.

Last night it struck me that even though our is in South Africa, every bit of love that I reflect in caring for her sisters…who were sleeping soundly beneath their quilts in their bedroom under the eaves...was reaching her.  It was like the moon's light.  My love doesn't have its source in me.  It originates in God and I am just one reflection in it's undiminished bouncing of light and affection as it finds its way to her heart. 

I could trust that as long as I was "shining" the light would reach her and would be just as brilliant when it arrived in her room, as it is when I tuck her sister's into their beds and sing them lullabies…my breath brushing the hairs at the nape of their necks with every verse…my fingers laced in theirs under the covers.

I could trust that my daughter could feel that same love last night…just as present as the moon's light felt on the surface of Long Pond from my rocker by the window on those nights, almost twenty years ago, when I sang to her from 10,000 miles away even before I had held her…in her bed near the Cape of Good Hope, under a Southern Cross sky.  

Love reflected knows no distance…it just bounces, and like a red rubber ball, picks up momentum and force with each surface it touches along the way…

"…I see the moon
And the moon sees me
God bless the moon
And God bless me
There's grace in the cabin
And grace in the hall
And the grace of God
Is over us all"
-     traditional folk lullaby
-     additional lyrics by Jean Ritchie

"He's got the whole world in His hands..."

He's Got the whole world in His hands,_
He's got the whole world in His hands,_
He's got the whole world in His hands,_
He's got the whole world in His hands,

He's got the wind and the rain in His hands,_
He's got the wind and the rain in His hands,_
He's got the wind and the rain in His hands,_
He's got the whole world in His hands,

He's got the tiny little babies in His hands,_
He's got the tiny little babies in His hands,_
He's got the tiny little babies in His hands,
He's got the whole world in His hands

He's got you and me brother in His hands,_
He's got you and me sister in His hands,_
He's got you and me children in His hands,_
He's got the whole world in His hands…"

He's got my little bitty baby…who is now a beautiful tall woman…in His hands.  I pray this prayer everyday. 

Having a child living overseas brings Myanmar, Nairobi, Darfur, and Zimbabwe as close to you as your own heart.  When you hear her voice, in your ear on the phone from 12,000 miles away and your entire being feels her presence as if she were sitting next to you, the world suddenly shrinks like a deflating balloon. 

Global crises that once seemed so far away, so insurmountably "distant" are as close as your child's laughter is to you everyday that you are living with eight time zones and a vast ocean between you.  The first time she calls and isn't feeling well you realize that time and space cannot dull the ache of not being where she is to sing her to sleep and make her bowls of Cream of Wheat "with lots of brown sugar." 

I thought about this yesterday as I watched a young professor, who was teaching here in the states, interviewed about his parents and siblings who were still in Myanmar.  You could see the heartache in his eyes, you could heart the concern in his voice.  This was not a man who was relieved to be here away from the devastation, this was a man who wanted to be with his family helping his brothers find shelter for their parents, helping his sister carry her young children to safety.  To that young professor, Myanmar is not a world away…it is as close as his heart.

As I've watched news footage from Myanmar following this most recent cyclone's sweep across a sea of humanity, or of felt sickened by the media's coverage of violent civil unrest in an African country north of where my daughter lives, I breathe a prayer of longing for my neighbor's peace. I am so grateful to know that, even though the crises feels to those with loved ones in the midst of distant devastation and unrest, God is even closer.  God, Love bridges the gap between father and son laboring to save a family.  God as Mind imbues each of them with ideas, solutions, and yes, prayers that heal and save.

God comforts the heart of the mother whose daughter is not feeling well continents and oceans away while at the very same instant soothes the daughter who is feeling so far away from her mommy.  His love floods both the mother's…and the daughter's… thought with memories of childhood healings and the words to a forgotten, but well-loved hymn that can still the storms of worry and sadness, bringing peace to each troubled breast.   Both mother and daughter can rest as children in God's very wide-reaching divine arms.  The arms of this divine Mother stretch, as Mary Baker Eddy says in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, "across continents and oceans to the globes remotest bounds" gathering us all to Her divine bosom.

Today my prayers for the mothers, fathers, grandparents, children, business owners, monks and emergency personnel in Myanmar are not for a nameless, faceless sea of humanity ten thousand miles away.  My prayers are for His sons and daughters, my brothers and sisters who are as close to me as the sound of my daughter's laughter…or tears…in my ear when she calls to "touch base"  at the end of her day.

We are all just "little bitty babies" in His hands.
Kate