"just call me, and I'll always be there...."

"You with the sad eyes,
don't be discouraged;
though I realize
it's hard to take courage
in a world full of people
you can lose sight of it all;

and the darkness inside,
can make you feel so small..."

Endless Summer's cover of Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors," is kind. And yes, a performance of a song can be kind. This is.

I love the message of this song. A lot. Today, as I was hiking back up a steep (for me) hill. I felt a sliver of darkness trying to creep in and make me feel small. I know that feeling of smallness. There have been times in my life when this smallness has felt like the only thing present.

I am not a perfect human. In the past, I have let fear and doubt bully me into behaviors that I am not proud of. For such a long time, those mistakes felt like the only milestones that peppered my timeline. I couldn't remember a single positive period in my life, without the gremlin of mistake poking its head in and saying, "don't bother smiling about that moment -- it was so small in light of all the mistakes you have made."

This verse from True Colors always touches me deeply:

"Show me a smile then
don't be unhappy.
I can't remember when
I last saw you laughing.

This world makes you crazy
taking all that you can bear.

Just call me up,
'cause I'll always be there...."

Every where I looked, I had reasons for self-doubt and regret. I had always wanted to be - only good. To be loved, liked, accepted -- to belong. That hunger for belonging was ravenous. If you have ever been truly hungry, you know that it is not a feeling you can just ignore. It twists and aches in you. Those who have known real hunger will tell you that there comes a point where you will eat the unthinkable, just to make it stop.

I have known that kind of social and spiritual hunger. And I would have done anything to make it stop. In some instances I did whatever it took to alleviate the ache of loneliness and the feeling of being detached from Love.

So what changed. I found someone. Someone who had realized that their life's purpose was being the one who saw the true spectrum of each person's "true colors" through the lens of Christian Science practice. And I knew from our very first conversation that no matter what horror story I told them about my "past," they would never - ever - believe it.

It was like re-telling a nightmare to your mom. She loves you, she listens, she assures you that it never happened (or would ever happen) and then she reminds you to eat your breakfast and not forget your homework.

There was never a sharp intake of breath, never a sigh of "oh my gosh," or a moving away from me -- only love. Always love. Always there. Even when I couldn't see my own worth. They did. And through their eyes, I began to understand that what was true about me, was not in contrast with what was false, -- it was all.

In their eyes, I felt seen. Through the lens of their heart I felt known -- and beautiful.  I felt like a child of God.

And in their eyes, I wasn't just the bright light of my good moments, or the darkness of my bad choices. I was also the soft blues of gentleness, the fervent reds of fierce hope, the rich greens of a verdant faith, the deep purples of earnest devotion, the brown sackcloth of self-immolation and surrender, the sunflower yellows and September golds of harvested experiences. Each one, pointing to the presence of light itself -- with its wholeness of spectrum, tone, saturation, hue.

In their eyes, I saw the fullness of my heart's deepest desire -- to be good. And it was that desire that turned even the darkest day feel like an opportunity to discover the beauty of slate blue, charcoal gray, sea green, and bleached wheat.

I am so grateful. When someone truly sees you, they don't just stand on the other side of the chasm, and tell you to cross over.  But they hold out their hand, pull in beside you, and offer to walk you forward -- that is love. Pure and simple. It is love.

offered with Love,

Cate

"don't cry out loud..."

"don't cry out loud,
just keep it inside,
and learn how to
hide your feelings.."

Sadness is not an emotion that I wrestle with very often, but when it hits, I can hear Melissa Manchester's  "Don't Cry Out Loud"  playing in my head. A 1978 classic, it was my soundtrack during many battles with hopelessness and depression. I can think of very few songs that elicit such a feeling of complete sorrow for me.

I used to think that sadness was circumstantial. When, in my late teens and early twenties, my life was falling apart -- I thought my circumstances warranted feelings of hopelessness and depression. It was all so personal.

But of late, I have realized that sadness is an impersonal invitation. A suggestion. It comes to most of us as a wave of feeling. We begin to search for a reason for that feeling. A memory from the past or a near-time incident steps into the void and is more than willing to take credit for the feeling. It sinks its hook, and pulls us under.

That happened to me very recently. I woke with a feeling of gray sorrow. It was like all the edges of a bright blue sky, or the sound of laughter, were faded and mournful. I couldn't seem to shake off a feeling of heavy dread. I prayed, and my prayers were clear and confident, but if I turned too quickly -- the gray was hovering in the periphery.

I found myself looking for a cause. Was it a conversation I'd had with a loved one? A looming decision? Some unexpected expenses? A regret from the past? The deeper I dug for a reason, the darker the pit became.

I knew that I needed to turn around and follow the light, but now I was tired. Couldn't I just rest here in the tunnel for a while? Close my eyes, and pray? That would help, wouldn't it? I knew I had been in this very cave before. Too many times in fact. And I knew that resting in the darkness would only lead to a sleepy sense of self-pity.

Then I remembered two simple lines from the Bible, and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy:

"The light of ever-present Love
illumines the universe."

"O send out Thy light
and Thy truth,
let them lead me;
for the Lord my God
will enlighten my darkness..."

I knew that the name for God as "Lord," is directly translated to "Love," in Science and Health.   Rather than curling up in self-despair, I needed to turn around in that pit and start climbing towards the light. And that light, was Love. I might not be able to fix the problems, or improve my circumstances, but I could love. I could find someone, and be kind. I could pray a prayer of appreciation and blessing for someone. I could behold [see, and call attention to] the good in something -- anything.

Sadness, sorrow, depression are not personal. They are like wandering ghosts without a home. They have no entity, no substance -- that is why they invite themselves into the space of our consciousness. Then they dig around in our mental drawers and photo albums looking for a reason for it to make sense that they are there. They invite us to sit in a darkened room and ruminate over faded images and crumpled moments.

For just a moment, imagine yourself jumping up from that dusty old chintz covered sofa and throwing open the curtains. Grabbing the photo album and putting it back where it belongs and telling those insidiously dark thoughts to: "please leave -- now." Then grabbing your jacket, locking the door behind, you and walking out into the sunshine -- and a thousand opportunities to be kind, share a smile, do something good for someone else.

I know it sounds simplistic. But, perhaps it is simple. Saying "no" when the first wave of sadness crashes over us. Digging our toes into the sand and finding bedrock in our right to love. To live outside the pit of self.

I only know, that the longer I stay curled in the pit with my eyes closed, the deeper it pulls me into its darkness. But the sooner I find someone to love, and care for -- the happier I feel.

offered with Love,

Kate

"beloved, it is time for you to rise..."

"Beloved, it is time
for you to rise..."

This morning as the sun crested Sleeping Indian, I couldn't help but think about another Easter weekend. It was over a decade ago, but the memories are as fresh as this morning's dew.

David Wilcox's "Rise," brings it all back. And along with the memories, tears of gratitude.

I wrote about the experience in 2006 when it was still quite fresh.  Revisiting that post, this afternoon, was profoundly moving for me. Here is an excerpt:

"Depression which had only been a far-off land - visited by other people - became my prison. Escape seemed to come only with dreaming, and sleep was the vehicle for getting to this place of reprieve. I lived in limbo between the waking reality of my sadness, and the hypnotic invitation to escape from that sadness, through sleep.

"Depression -- and the constant invitation by pharmaceutical companies to join the club of millions who suffer from countless symptoms that only their drug can relieve -- invites its victim to let go, and sink deeper. To give in to the weight of its pull, like a tired swimmer in an endless whirlpool of overwhelming emotions.

Wilcox's "Rise" was a life preserver thrown to me when I was most exhausted from that downward spiral..."  

Today, that depression seems like a bad dream that I simply woke up from. But at the time, I couldn't even imagine rousing myself, much less breaking free.

Recently, someone suggested that depression was something  a mutual friend just needed to "snap out of." I tried to explain that -- when you were in the midst of it -- it wasn't as easy as that.  It felt very ominous and real.  Depression felt like a living thing.

I remember the feeling of being caught under a heavy cloud of darkness. And at the time, I found myself thinking about that feeling a lot.  What did it mean, when did it start, how had it changed?  But it was the feeling of heaviness which gave me my first clue that -- perhaps -- there was a way out. 

I realized that I could only be aware of the heaviness,  because I had experienced something else - something lighter. I was aware of the difference.  That meant that the lightness was still part of my consciousness. And somehow, I knew that lightness and joy were better - more natural - than the heavy darkness.

This realization was like the sun breaking through. In fact, I remember one day in particular when a shaft of sunlight coming through the bedroom window was like an invitation. I engaged with it. I let it call me out from under the bedcovers and onto the back deck where I delighted in the dance of a pair of mourning doves. 

As I watched them, it occurred to me that I actually cared about them. I wanted to get up and fill the bird feeder. Love for these gentle beings was giving me a sense of purpose, and it was bringing me such pure joy. I held on to the fact that I could actually feel and experience that simple joy -- for many days.

Someone once asked me if I had forgotten how to pray during that time. No. Actually, I prayed without ceasing. In fact, I think I learned something very beautiful about prayer during those dark days. Prayer was not something I did.  It was not my thinking. Prayer was/is, as Mary Baker Eddy says on the first page of her primary work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:

"God's gracious means..."  

Because I didn't trust my own thinking, I stopped thinking -- and started listening more humbly, attentively, hungrily for the voice of my Father-Mother God. The inspirations that came were not "of me," -- that was clear.  They were so pure and lovely that they often brought me to my knees in abject gratitude.

Depression was my tomb. Depression was the lonely place where I began to strip away the false sense of human endeavor, and accomplishment. I really didn't trust "my mind," but I trusted the Mind that held the stars in order, that called the leaflet to the sun, that poured inspiration into my waiting heart.

I was sad, but I was alive. I was sad, but I wanted happiness and goodness for my daughters. I was sad, but I was able to get up and make breakfast for my family. Yes, I was sad, but that was just a feeling -- and feelings weren't necessarily facts. They didn't define me. I was sad, but I could love.  This defined me -- even to myself. 

These small moments of love lived, were like a kind stranger calling a frightened kitten out from beneath a dumpster. Before long, I was drinking the milk of the Word from the hand of the Divine.

As I ponder the Easter story tonight, I can't help but think of how many small resurrections we each face. For some of us, these resurrections come in the form of a renewed sense of wonder. For others it may come in the form of new love. For many, it appears as healing in a relationship that held no hope. And for others, it is the stone of sadness being rolled away from the where we have "buried our fondest earthly, [and heavenly] hopes" -- as Eddy suggests.

Jesus' resurrection was an event of unprecedented import and opened an entire new world of spiritual expectancy for the human race. Life triumphed over death, love over hate, and hope over despair. For each of us, this event -- which took place over 2,000 years ago -- offers the promise of freedom from the depressing thought that we are mortals subject to laws of heredity, history, and psycho-social theories of chance and unpredictability. 

 In her, First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, Mary Baker Eddy writes:

"A great sanity,
a mighty something buried
in the depths of the unseen,
has wrought a resurrection among you,
and has leaped into living love. "  

This "great sanity" of being -- is living love. This is the sanity that lays waste to depression. This resurrection - this mighty something - may seem buried within the depths of the unseen, but it is there. It is the kingdom of God within each of us.  And it leaps into action at the call of love.

May your heart feel the joy of this Easter promise. May you feel the peace of this mighty something -- and may it work a resurrection among you, and yours, and all -- leaping, and singing, and living love.


offered with Love,

Kate

"Low, sad and sweet…"

"O'er waiting harpstrings
of the mind
there sweeps a strain
low, sad, and sweet,
whose measures bind
the power of pain..."

I love music. I love songs that evoke deep feelings. I love that they break me open, shatter my fragile shell of self-comportment, and leave me borne again in a new, softer form.

One such song is James Taylor's version of "In the Bleak Midwinter." It stops me in my tracks and takes me apart. It's like a good cry -- I am better for having felt that deeply.

The other day someone asked me if I thought it was okay to be sad. I didn't have to think very long. Eddy's lyric (quoted above) came to me instantly. "Yes," I said, without hesitation. But I really didn't have anything very inspiring to say after that. I just knew it was true.

I thought about the woman who wrote that poem. I considered the depth of her own sadness. Widowed as a young pregnant bride, separated from her young son by her father and second husband, betrayed by loved ones, rejected, sued by trusted friends and family members, crucified in the press, maligned by those she'd helped and healed, and then widowed again.

One account shares, that following the passing of her third, and beloved husband, Asa, she went into isolation and wasn't sure she would be able to return to her work -- work that was drawing people to her writings by the thousands.  Work that left her held in such high esteem that she would eventually be recognized as one of the most famous women of her time.

So, when this woman says that measured strains of sad, sweet music bind the power of pain, I trust that she is speaking from experience.  And the next line from that same poem:

"and wake a white-winged angel throng
of thoughts illumined by faith
and breathed in raptured song…"  

is such a holy promise. I have rested my hopes upon its encouragement countless times.

Some years ago I was navigating a heart-breaking life-chapter. I'd decided that I would do it with joy. Whatever sadness I felt I would "just not feel it."  I would not let myself descend into the depths of despair that loomed like a vast dark hole. I would not walk towards the edge of that abyss, and fall into a sea of tears.

I was doing pretty good. I was proud of my resolve. Then one afternoon I was sitting in a local coffeehouse when James Taylor's "In the Bleak Midwinter" came floating through the air on a cloud of freshly roasted coffee beans.

It wasn't the words that did it. It was the music itself - the sound of his voice, the poignancy of his interpretation. At first I refused to "give in." That was, until I heard the lines:

"what then can I give Him,
empty as I am,
if I were a shepherd,
I would bring a lamb.

If I were a wise man,
I would know my part.

What then can I give Him,
I must give my heart..."  

It was too much to bear.  Suddenly there was the realization that my emptiness was a legitimate spiritual feeling that I needed to fully experience. And more importantly, that my very, very empty heart was a gift -- and I was holding it back from Him -- well, it broke something wide open in me. I wasn't giving Him my honest feelings.

I'd been so sure that joy was the only reasonable gift of devotion and worship. But that song sent the first fissures of honest emotions through my fragile resolve.  And in the shattering, I gave myself permission to actually feel my sadness. I allowed myself to "go there," and to weep.

And through the lens of my tears I began to see that I wasn't actually empty at all. I was full of hope. I overflowing with deep feelings of love. The sorrow I'd been feeling wasn't because I was empty, but because I was full of yearning, longing to be understood, and accepted.

A white-winged angel throng of thoughts were released from where I'd held them prisoner behind a bulwark of pretense. My tears had melted those walls.

Sometimes, those measures "sad and sweet," can dissolve the very walls that would deprive us of seeing beyond a painful experience. Our tears provide a lens in which we discover something yet unseen about the experience itself. Perhaps through it, we have grown in humility, compassion, grace. Often we can find that we are less judgmental, or we realize that we have loved and been loved very deeply.

So, is it okay to be sad? I can only speak for myself. I welcome anything that reminds me that I have a heart, that I care, and that I feel deeply. I embrace those measures -- low, sad, and sweet -- that bind the power of pain and wake within me, a throng of angels to comfort, instruct, guide, and lead me home.

offered with Love,

Kate

"Are you out there somewhere..."

"Sometimes I think about you.
And I wonder if you're out there, 
somewhere,
thinking about me.

And would you even recognize
the woman that your little girl
has grown up to be..."

I fell in love with Kellie Pickler during her tenure on ABC's Dancing with the Stars. I'd never listened to her music.  But after watching her breath-taking performance -- with partner Derrick Hogue -- I couldn't help wanting to understand the woman behind the feelings she shared so nakedly.

When I finally came across her heart-breaking "I Wonder," it was almost too much to bear.

It reached deep inside of me, and touched a place I thought I'd long-since silenced, and buried alive. So much so that I'd almost forgotten what it felt like to be the "me," that I thought she was singing about. Almost...

I am writing this post, not to resurrect sadness and pain, but to encourage others who may be feeling helpless and alone.

Here's my story:

I was four the year that my birthfather disappeared from my life. The details of how that happened -- and why -- are not pertinent to this post. When I turned eighteen I saw him for the first time in over 14 years.  We had a brief visit at a park. And afterwards, he evaporated. Then at 36, just after the birth of my first child, I found him again. And again, he chose to disappear after an emotionally draining reunion.

I grew up with a stepfather who provided for all eight of the children he shared with my mother. Six of us were his own biological children.  My sister and I were from our mother's first marriage. Nevertheless, resources were shared equally and I never knew hunger, homelessness, or grave illness. For this, I will always be grateful.

But I also grew up knowing that I was not his "real" daughter.  I knew that somewhere - out there - I had a father. I had fleeting memories of being held in his arms, pushed on a swing -- loved. I dreamed that if only he knew where I was, he would come find me and love me.

In the end - after our first awkward reunion - I would have to be the one to find him. And each time, he would tearfully tell me that he loved me.  He would say how much he wished he would have been there for my childhood -- to see me grow into the woman I'd become. He'd stir up girlhood hopes and sorrows and then disappear on a cloud of promises -- never to be heard from again -- until the next time.

A year ago my sister sent me an email. She'd discovered that our father had passed away 16 months earlier. I was devastated.  Feelings of devastation that I could have never anticipated.  All hopes of him caring about me, showing interest in my children, pride in my accomplishments -- were gone.

I grew up in an instant. I was no longer a little girl secretly dreaming that her own father would someday - finally - wake up, and discover that he missed her. I was a woman who'd worked very hard to be a good person in hopes that one day he would notice -- he never did.

For fifty years I'd secretly never given up hope.  Suddenly, I felt bereft. And it wasn't just about me and what I had missed out on. I was sad for him. I knew I wasn't "all that," but I had been a good girl, a hard-working student, a loyal daughter, and a good mom. He'd missed it all.

I didn't know what to do with those feelings. On the outside -- and in those first few layers of patted down emotions just below the surface -- I was fine. But deep inside I was a waif. I was a woman-child who'd never been cherished by her father, and now it was too late.  It was too much to bear.

Sorrow, anger, and confusion bounced off the walls of my heart and echoed through the empty chambers of all I'd lost. I could no longer push it down without experiencing unbearable pain. I knew I had to find a way to process it spiritually, or it would take me down.

Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures was my constant companion in the darkness. One night I revisited a long-loved statement:

"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." 

I've often thought about how this statement empowers both mother and child. If a mother's affection cannot be weaned from her child, then a child's affection cannot be weaned from her mother. Eddy promises that this truth lives on under whatever difficulties -- immortally, eternally, forever. Lives on beyond the false limitations of death. Beyond whatever difficulties.

My right to love my father -- to want him to know his beautiful daughters, to feel part of a family, to know himself as a good father -- was something he couldn't take from me.  It was mine.  My affection for the office of father wasn't going to be defined by his behavior. My love for my own sweet, innocent daughterhood couldn't be undermined by neglect -- or apathy.

The blighted buddings of hope in me started to blossom again. My right to be a good daughter was as changeless as God's appointment of me to that office. I could pray for my father's heart. I could include him in a spiritual expectation of good, as Eddy counsels us to pray in the second line of her "Daily Prayer," which reads:

"And may Thy Word
enrich the affections of all mankind,
and govern them." 

My father's affections were under the immortal influence of God's Word. They were constantly evolving -- higher and higher -- from a boundless basis. Death could not interrupt his spiritual self-discovery.  Nothing could deprive him of all  the blessings that fatherhood promised -- not even death. And likewise, death could not undermine my childlike hope, innocence, trust.

This clear message of love from my divine Parent - for His perfect daughter - began to heal my heart and empower me.  Nothing could stop me from exercising the right to honor my own affections -- for my father, my stepfather, all fathers.  Not because of their deserving, but because of my own right to be true to myself.

I now know that there is never a lost opportunity to love.

shared with a daughter's affection,

Kate

"...a river so long..."

"It's coming on Christmas,
they're cuttin' down trees
They're puttin' up reindeer
and singing songs of joy and peace.
I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

"Oh, I wish I had a river so long
I could teach my feet to fly
Oh, I wish I had a river,
I could skate away on…"
-     Joni Mitchell

I linked to Joni's version of "River" in a post about a Christmas spent far from home and family, called, "I Wish I had a river..." on this blog in 2007, but it is this recording of "River" by James Taylor, that has a gentle, but firm, grasp on my heart tonight.

Sitting in my office at 4 in the morning I'm going back, I've skated away from the "things" of 2009, and am gliding backwards...with my face forward in hopes that going back to gather the story will help someone in their own darkness...to a winter some years ago.  I'd been struggling with a gathering pall of depression for months, and this winter day it lowered cold and dark, screeching through my bones like a bitter wind threatening to make my heart so brittle that it would shatter at the slightest touch of human warmth.

I was sad and cold and felt a dead silence inside that not even the sweetest strains of Christmas music could penetrate.   It didn't make sense.  I should have been happy. But I couldn't shake the dull edge of depression's cold knife cutting me off from all I loved and cared about.  It was a feeling of being so disconnected from myself that I wondered at times if I'd actually passed on and was observing myself from a space outside my body, however close it seemed to be.

Nothing mattered...and everything hurt. 

I'd been praying for so long,  just to feel something...anything...that my hopelessness in finding help, was turning to helplessness that I would ever find even a glimmer of hope again.

Depression is a strange hollowness.  It holds nothing.  Whatever is given, seeps through through the black emptiness and is lost in the void.   I remember loved ones urging me to "just be happy", "recall all the things you have to be grateful for", and eventually, to "snap out of it".  I couldn't.  I prayed, studied, made gratitude lists, sang hymns, carols, lullabies, songs.  It was as if I was doing it all under water.  I could hear the words, I could pray the prayers, sing each hymn and make notes in margins about inspiring "revelations", but I couldn't actually feel anything.  It wasn't that I just couldn't feel  joy...I couldn't feel anything. 

But this song, "River" seemed to have an odd effect on me.  When I heard it...even just the sound of it, I somehow knew that Joni understood what I was feeling.  She was stretching a mittened hand out to me where I sat on a log at the edge of the frozen Raritan River calling me to skate with her, whispering: "yes, you can do it...just a little further.".  To take her hands, close my eyes, glide out onto the ice, and let my heart, my mind, my spirit feel the silence of a frozen river, hear only the scratching sound of my skate blades coursing through the rippled ice, feel the bitter cold bite at my cheeks, and listen to the crackle of leafless branches as the wind rocked trees back and forth like keening mourners in blackened shrouds.

Day after day I would play "River". Day after day I would let her take my hands in hers.  And I began to feel.  At first the feelings were grief and cold and loneliness...but they were also the warmth of a mittened hand in mine, the sweet lowing of my friend humming a song about "wishing" and being "weak in the knees" with love.  And I began to feel the tingle of fingers coming back to life in front of a bonfire, and the burning in my throat as hot chocolate from the stainless steel cup on my old plaid thermos, warmed me to the core.

Skating with Joni, knowing that she understood, and that through her music she was taking my hand and skating me forward into feeling alive again...into Spring, and the thawing of my heart, saved my life that winter.

By April, Mind and Soul...the Sources of knowing and feeling...were synonymous again to me.  What I knew, or could think of...intellectually, I could now actually feel in my heart. 

For some reason I had to start where I was...on the edge of a frozen river, cold, sad, and numb...and have her mittened hand, quietly lead me out onto the ice, before I could begin feeling my way forward...pushing off on Love-angled blades, one against the other, indirect reminders that sliced through  my icy heart and poured in the warmth of remembering that I could feel something, anything right in that moment.  In fact, I was feeling...it may have started out as a bone-numbing cold, that turned into a painful tingling as I slowly woke to the full warmth of living love....but I was feeling.  And it was enough.

Enough to keep me coming back to the river's edge each day for the tender warmth of her now-husky voice, the soft angora of her mittened hand reaching out to take my life in her own and gently pull me forward. 

There is an old song from our hymnbook that says,

"Sometimes a light surprises
The Christian while he sings..."

And sometimes what surprises me is the way a song can come "with healing in its wings" to pour its balm of understanding on a cold heart and warm it back to life.

Or as Mary Baker Eddy promises in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:

"Whatever inspires with wisdom, Truth, or Love
— be it song, sermon, or Science —
blesses the human family with crumbs of comfort from Christ's table,
feeding the hungry and giving living waters to the thirsty."

By Spring I was feeling again...and what I was feeling was joy...genuine, palpable, break-into-song, dance-in-the-streets, do backflips in the park, laugh-like-a-child, sleep-like-a-baby joy. 

And as the trees began to bud and bloom, and the river languorously carried apple blossoms from our yard, past the old mill down river, under the covered bridge, around the bend, through the state park and eventually out to sea, I was singing "songs of joy and peace"  I'd found a river I could skate away, and back again, on. And it was "the river of His pleasures"...calm, constant, fresh, and new each day...flowing in my own heart.

Thanks Joni...I love you...
Kate
Kate Robertson, CS

"War is over...if you want it"

"...And so this is Christmas
War is over
And what have we done
If you want it
Another year over
War is over
And a new one just begun
If you want it
And so this is Christmas
War is over
For black and for white
If you want it
For yellow and red ones
War is over
Let's stop all the fight
If you want it
A very merry Christmas
War is over
And a happy New year
If you want it
Let's hope it's a good one
War is over
Without any fear
Now..."
- John Lennon & Yoko Ono

December, 1971...I was standing at the counter of the Spinning Wheel Diner watching snow gently falling outside the large plate glass windows beyond the red vinyl booths and small juke boxes at the end of each table.  The counter was empty, the coffee was fresh and I was lost in thought.  John Lennon's "Happy Christmas...War is Over" was playing for the umpteenth time on the speakers from each jukebox, as a pale blue convertible VW bug slid into one of the parking spaces closest to the stairs leading to the front entry. 

The sleigh bells hanging from the front door handle jangled, announcing the arrival of a new customer and I straightened my pink polyester apron neatly over my crisp white uniform and readied a smile.  It would be good to have someone to wait on during the storm.  He walked through the door and I would have noticed his limp even without the richly burnished, hand-carved cane at his side.  He wore an olive green army jacket, worn blue jeans, a black turtleneck sweater.  His limp made the sound of his heavy boots on the black and white linoleum floor sound like steel brushes on a snare drum.  But is was the sadness in his eyes that I noticed first. 

He looked like a broken G.I. Joe doll...handsome, cold, and somehow disjointed and out of place in his own skin.  He took a seat on one of the red vinyl and chrome stools at the far end of the counter and when I asked him if I could bring him a cup of coffee he nodded without saying more than a perfunctory "thank you, yes." 

He seemed lost in his own thoughts and I left him staring into the quilted chrome behind the counter and went about my busy work of filling salt and pepper shakers at each booth while the storm picked up its intensity outside. 

After his eighth cup of coffee and a piece of cherry pie, I asked him if he lived nearby, or was he just passing through.  The diner was on a busy highway and we had a lot of travelers at that time of year who stopped in for coffee to stay awake during long drives.  He told me that he had just been discharged from the army after a stay at Walter Reed army hospital following a severe injury that had gotten him airlifted out of a Vietnamese jungle in the middle of the night.  It had left him "shaken and crippled...maimed for life."  He explained that he had grown up and gone to high school in the area, but that while he was in Viet Nam his parents had moved to Florida.  He didn't know anyone in Florida, so he came "home" to the last place he knew before the war.  But all of his friends had moved on and he wasn't sure where he belonged.

We talked until well after my shift ended at midnight and then he offered to drive me home.  I explained that my dad would be coming to pick me up as soon as I called him, but, "thank you anyway."  He got up from the stool and made his way slowly out to the now completely snow-encrusted little car, backing out of the parking space before inching his way onto the highway.  I watched until his taillights disappeared in the heavily falling snow and wondered what he had seen during those months-turned-into-years in Viet Nam that had made his eyes seem ancient and sad.

I would learn over the next few weeks all about the horrors of war as his visits to the diner became nightly, and his visits to our already crowded home coincided with my nights off.  My mother plied him with questions and meatloaf and my dad grew to enjoy his quiet company...or at least I think he did...he never kicked him out, and smiled when he played Fur Elise and Clair de Lune on our old piano by the front door...that said alot.

One Sunday afternoon he asked if I would like to drive into "the City" and see the Christmas decorations and windows on Park Avenue.  Since I had voluntarily missed my school's Christmas dance that weekend so that my younger sister could go and wear the one and only dressy dress we owned between us, my parents said that I could if we took the train instead of driving and he agreed.  Walking through Times Square, Central Park, and down Fifth Avenue was magical until we came across a billboard that said, "War is over...if you want it - Happy Christmas from John & Yoko."  My friend gripped my arm and we stood perfectly still in the middle of the sidewalk.  An electric surge of hope pulsed through us both.  And for a moment I thought I saw the sadness and pain leave his eyes. 



This is the moment I relive each time I hear this song.  My friend and I remained close until one day he decided...quite out of the blue and without discussion or emotional justification...that I should marry him, move to the Maine woods, build a cabin, carve wooden animals and make toys in order to escape the material trappings of American capitalism.  I was still young, eager to make a difference through the promise of politics and "one man, one vote," had an education to pursue and dreams to fulfill. 

He would marry someone else a few months later and move to Maine. 

I wonder how he feels 27 years later about Christmas, war, politics and America. I wonder what he thinks of each time he hears this song.  

I still think about a boy with ancient, sad eyes and a burnished cane who came out of the snow one winter's evening and changed the way I looked at the world...and the way I listened to a song.

"And so this is Christmas
And what have you done..."

This year...I think we've done something...and we may just see the promised "War is over...if you want it" fulfilled...I think we've made it clear that we "want it....now".

with hope for "peace on earth, goodwill to men,"
Kate

"You're still you..."

"Time changes everything
One truth always stays the same
You're still you
After all
You're still you…"
- Josh Groban

My dad was a mystery to me.  A farm boy from a large immigrant Irish family of very humble means, his formal education was curtailed by the demands of agricultural seasons and crop schedules. By the time he was 30, he and mom had 6 children under the age of 10.  At 31 he was introduced to Christian Science and his desire to understand words he was reading about God, and the world around him, launched him on a personal quest for knowledge and wisdom. 

As the oldest child in my family, my dad and I were often (in those days as he took up his self-education where he had once left off) studying the same things.  Our reading levels advanced concurrently and I would often find him picking up my science or history textbooks when they were laying on the table during long homework sessions…and reading them.   His tools for self-instruction were as diverse as his interests.  I was neither surprised to see him with his nose in a volume of our World Book Encyclopedia (reading it through - page after page - like a novel) or a Nancy Drew mystery I had finished.

What always surprised me was his humility in letting us see him struggle with words that were new or foreign to him, and ask for help…or the dictionary…in order to self-solve the mysteries of language-usage or meaning.

When I was in high school I went through a very rough patch of self-doubt and loneliness.  I had always been a small child, girl, pre-teen, but with the onset of womanhood my body seemed to betray me.  All my new body parts seemed to appear over the course of one summer.  Unfortunately, it happened while I was away from all the kids I had only just met when we moved into the district just before the end of the previous school year.  In their eyes I went from being a skinny little kid to a young woman overnight…or at least over the summer. 

When I arrived back in school that September I was soft and round and I don't think there was an angular feature left on my once rather gangly body. Before I knew it rumors were swirling.  No one knew me well enough to deny the rumors as lies…in my defense, or to come to me and ask whether they were true…for themselves.

As a new kid I was a blank canvas for painting a titillating picture on…and my new rounder, softer body provided the paint for doing just that.  Of course, it all added up to a fantabulous story in which my parents must have moved our family away from wherever we had lived to this small farming community, because I was in the early stages of pregnancy.   Over the summer I must have had the baby, and I was still padded with post-baby fullness.  It didn't help that my mother had just given birth to twins (yes, numbers 7 and 8) and they didn't look anything alike.  One of them must have been mine…right?  Wrong!

When I finally became aware of what was being said, I was devastated.   I remember coming home after school that day and wanting to quit school and never go back.  I went to my bed and picked up the "autograph dog" I had sewn together from two panels of pale blue gingham printed with the front and back images of a floppy eared puppy and stuffed with poly-fill.  These were popular at my former school and everyone would bring them in to have their friends autograph.  I had made one for myself over the summer, but the only autographs I had on it were from my parents and my two sisters who were old enough o write in cursive.

I hugged it to my chest and tried to pray.  But nothing really helped.  At one point, I looked at my dog and there, written in my dad's pretty horrible handwriting, were the words "She walks in beauty and grace like the night - Dad."  Something about his writing of those words made me feel braver about everything.  I felt like I could walk with my head held high knowing that what was being said about me wasn't true.  I felt an inner elegance and dignity that looking in the mirror, and seeing the all too obvious reason for the rumors, didn't give me.

I went back to school the next day...and the next.  The rumor blew over with some help from my parents, and I ended up loving my school year and the friends I eventually made.  

The blue gingham dog moved through my young adulthood with me from room to apartment to house.  The ink from my parents' and sisters' autographs faded.  I never let another person sign that dog and if I close my eyes, still today, I can see that exact shade of turquoise-y blue gingham with those four autographs in faded black ball-point pen as if I were holding it in my hands. 

It was years before I discovered that my dad had quoted Lord Byron (adding the word grace) in his autograph.  When I did, it made me cry.  I never knew he had read, and loved, Byron well enough to quote him.  It was such a new and different view of my dad.  His addition of the word "grace" is still a gift.  He was not an emotionally expressive kind of guy...and we had our issues and differences, but to think that he chose such a word in thinking of me, and that he'd had the audacity to insert it into a quote by a famous poet makes me smile. He must have trusted a Voice that told him that his own inspiration and ideas were as valid and immutable as Byron's.  His use of the word "grace" still gives me courage when navigating through rough waters and facing down my own demons. 

I would like to think that no matter what mistakes we make, or misunderstandings we face…whatever rumors may swirl or fears may poke at soft places in our hearts where we feel vulnerable or fragile, we all have a Father who is constantly writing His message of Love on our hearts telling us that, in His eyes, no matter what, "You're still you…after all, you're still you."

with Love,
Kate

"You are not alone..."

"…you are not alone
For I am here with you
Though we're far apart
You're always in my heart
you are not alone…"
- Jackson

Someone asked me the other day why I write these posts twice every week.  Was I trying to teach readers something new about spirituality…no, the Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy...as well as countless other inspirational books, magazine articles, blogs and websites are lovingly dedicated to this kind of pedagogy.  Was I trying to get my writing seen by blog surfing publishers….no.  Did I have an irrepressible urge to write…yes, but this is not the reason I blog.  I have been writing and journaling (at least two hours a day) daily for many, many years…I write a lot.  I didn't need another focus for my writing life.  So, as I sat in front of this computer screen pondering that question: "Why do you blog?" the AOL icon at the bottom of my screen started bouncing to alert me that a new message was in my mailbox.  I shook myself from the deep reverie of self-examination to check the message in case there was an urgent need for attention.

This is the email that greeted me (shared with permission…all personal and identifying information deleted):

Dear Kate,

I had a difficult day and then read your web-log ("Sunrise, sunset") and nearly burst into tears. Of all the many things I have wanted to ask you is how you bear this very thing … this changing and growing and going. I feel it as sadness and loss. I can't seem to find joy there. My little girl, the world's very best baby, is turning (age deleted). I love to see what she is becoming, but I miss the girl she was even last year.

I have more birthday preparations and it's late. I want to thank you again for your writing and the healings on your website. I turn to it so frequently during the day.

Love...

In reading her message I remembered with such clarity why I post on this blog each Tuesday and Thursday…it is not to share my insights or inspirations, it is not to see my words self-published on the internet, it is not to receive notes of praise…it is for one reason…and for me, there is just one message:

"You are not alone."

Just before I sit down at my computer,  to write a piece for posting, I try to become very quiet and listen for a silent cry that speaks to my heart….I am listening for the tears of those who feel -  that in the darkness of their own private sadness or confusion – they are alone.  That somehow, they are the only ones who have every felt this frightened, angry, hungry for compassion or kindness.  And then I listen for my own heart.  What in me is reaching out from the position of "experience" that might bring them honest comfort and be a beacon of faint light in that darkness.  What can I share that will assure them that someone else has been there and that there is a way out.  I am, in each posting,  trying to say…"I will sing loudly so that you can know that you are not alone in the darkness and to remind you that God is there…right there in your own heart… impelling you forward.

"...Just the other night
I thought I heard you cry
Asking me to come
And hold you in my arms
I can hear your prayers
Your burdens I will bear
But first I need your hand..."

To know that we are not alone...that God is there at every juncture to take our hand and lead us into our own light...is a message so powerful to me.  To know also that God has appointed angels of kindness in our lives...friends, sisters, mothers, brothers...to be the hand we feel, the song we listen for...this makes me weep with gratitude.

Here is my reply to my friend's email (with some minor editing):

Dear...

I burst into tears sometimes too when I later read the raw nakedness of what I have felt about something and posted to the blog.  These issues of motherhood and of journeying towards evolving as a spiritual  woman in a world that is constantly inviting us to want, want, want...more, more, more...are such powerful catalysts for my own spiritual development (de-envelop-ment).  They strip me clean day after day of all pride and ambition and leave me childlike in my need for a divine Parent's embrace and care.

I often find that the ideas I have shared are so new to me when I finally read them. It is almost as if I wrote them without even thinking of them...as if they poured out of my fingertips without passing through the medium of this false mind that would like to call itself sovereign in my life….memory, speculation, imagination.  That they come from a more silent space – the heart.

But as for your question - I am realizing that the best thing I can give my daughters is HONESTY about the journey.  Allowing them to think that I have it even one bit more "figured out" than I really do, is cruel and sets them up for failure by comparison.  So...I am staying focused on integrity in parenting my children...integrity of heart, mind, spirit, actions, words...emotions.

It is sometimes very messy and organic...but it is true...and I like truth...alot...

love,
Kate

This is my truth.  I don't write from a longing to be heard, I don't write from a need to say something profound or pithy....but I do write from the deep desire answer the call of  someone crying in the dark, to let them know that they are not alone.

"I speak from experience."
- Mary Baker Eddy

"A silver tear appearing..."

“Hope…comes through our tears, as the soft summer rain,
To beautify, bless, and make joyful again.”
- Mary Baker Eddy

Dear Maria, in a recent comment, you gently asked if I would post something on “tears”…  Hmmm…. I can’t think of a subject I feel more experienced in addressing. 

If James Taylor songs, like song "Carolina in My Mind," it have been the soundtrack of my life…tears have been the environmental constant.  I must thrive, spiritually, in salt-water.  I have become so accustomed to the feeling of tears filling my eyes, running down my cheeks, pooling in my ears, and falling on my shirt that I have long, long, long since abandoned wearing mascara, buying silk shirts that show tell-tale salt stains or thinking that I could fool anyone into thinking that it was “just something in my eye”.

That said, I have also had a very special journey in making peace with my tears.  When I was younger I thought that my tears were a sign of weakness.  I thought that they made me appear fragile, vulnerable or emotionally out of control.  I tried to staunch them with inner grit and with a spiritual resolve to “not let anything get to me”…but, to little or no avail.  I cried when I was happy, sad, moved, hurt…I cried at movies, family reunions, arguments, Hallmark commercials and angry words.  I cried when I felt overwhelmed by life and I cried when life was good.  I cried when I needed rest and just wanted to exhaust my thoughts from spinning out of control.  I cried whenever I thought about those things that made me humbly grateful for the abundance of divine mercy, grace, wisdom or inspiration I was experiencing.  But still my tears somehow made me feel weak and vulnerable.

That was until one morning when my eldest daughter was about eighteen months old.  She had been up all night with a raging fever that would abate briefly…I would feel some modicum of peace, fall into an exhausted sleep, only to awaken suddenly to her disoriented thrashing or a listless incoherence. 

By morning I was on the verge of mother-madness.  I felt helpless and powerless to bring any sense of deep inner poise to bear on the moment, and hopelessness was seeping in around the edges of my spiritual fortress. 

As I sat there on the edge of my daughter’s little bed with my Bible in my lap, my tears welled up and spilled onto the page I had been reading from.  I was desperately grasping for something that would ground my prayers.  At one point I wiped my eyes and looked back to the page that was open in front of me.  I was stunned to see that the print was, quite literally, magnified by a large teardrop that had fallen onto the page and was still pooled on the paper.  These words, from 1st John:

“There is no fear in love…”

were larger because of my tears.  The teardrop had acted as a magnifying glass to emphasize the power of this statement.  I was stopped in my tracks in more ways than one. .  I knew...I was sure...no, I was absolutely certain about how much I loved my daughter…in fact up until that very moment, I thought that I was afraid because I loved my daughter.  But what the Word (the Bible) was saying, from underneath that teardrop, was that because I loved my daughter I was not afraid.  These two things were mutually exclusive.  I could not have both.  I could not love and be afraid…anymore than I could have light and darkness at the same time. 

My tears were NOT tears of fear at all…they were tears of great love.  I could reclaim them for God and recast my feelings in the light of that love…that all powerful, divinely bestowed affection that I could never have created myself, even in my most inspired moment. 

I was certain of what was true…I loved her…therefore I had to be certain that I wasn’t afraid…I had just misread the feeling.  I could correctly claim that feeling as one of humble gratitude for God’s presence in my life revealing itself as tenderness, loyalty, affection, and joy….immediately.  And I did. 

Hannah’s healing, like many others throughout her childhood came without incidence when I realized that the feelings that I had misinterpreted as fear…were really love…deep, humbling, unsettling, knee-buckling, trusting, heart-expanding love…the presence of God in my life.

This was also the end of my disquiet about my tears…or anyone else’s for that matter. 

I love my tears. I love to be moved.  I love to weep, to cry, to let the tears of feeling flow through and around and over me.  Washing away the cobwebs of intellectualism, letting the salt left in their wake, dry up the undefined uncertainties of “what if”, and magnify the power of “the Word” in my life with the experiential certainty of not having just known, but actually felt God move my heart to surrender all that it had left to give, in order to wash His feet in gratitude.

“Saw ye my Savior ?
Heard  ye the glad sound?
Felt ye the power of the Word?”
-Mary Baker Eddy

Mary Baker Eddy has taught me to associate my tears with the presence of God, with the presence of hope and faith…the “triune” of love.

K (and J)

"Rise up...with a sudden sense of wonder..."

Often the most surprising (and frequent) source for life-transforming inspiration and comfort comes to me through song lyrics.  Anyone who knows me knows that this has always been a theme in my life.  I can chronicle my entire 52 years in songs.  Its almost as if I am taking this spiritual journey in a '69 Jeep with a radio playing all the time.   I think this may be why hymns, traditional spirituals, Hebrew and African worship or contemporary Christian gospel, praise -- and yes, pop/folk--music resonates with my deepest longings for a more visceral sense of my relationship to God.   I do find my day-to-day grounding from Bible-based research and study, but there are those moments when something in me shifts to an inner landscape where the heart lies open and naked ready to be clothed anew.

Sometimes this shift occurs when inspiring and evocative songs create a catalytic charge that triggers an avalanche-like dislodging of all that is not inherently good and pure.  This crumbling away makes silent space for other songs of inspiration that allow a reforestation of this inner landscape with tender seedlings of hope...in the rich soil of humility and grace.  The following song by singer/songwriter David Wilcox is just one of those songs.  "Rise" (lyrics below) came into my life on the heels of a period when I was stripped of all pretense and self-preservation.

Finding the courage to take divinely inspired steps into uncharted territory had left me drowning in a deep pool of sorrow for all that had been hoped for, but would never be.   The cleared path that followed my own life-transforming avalanche now looked like empty loneliness and confusion.  Depression which had only been a far-off land visited by others now became my prison.  Escape seemed to come only with dreaming, and sleep was the vehicle for getting to this place of reprieve.   I lived in limbo between the waking reality of my sadness and the dreamy invitation to escape from that sadness, through sleep. 

Depression, and the constant invitation by pharmaceutical companies to join the club of millions who suffer from countless symptoms that only their drug can relieve, invites its victim to let go and sink deeper into the weight of its pull like a tired swimmer in an endless whirlpool of overwhelming emotions.

Wilcox's "Rise" was a life preserver thrown to me when I was most exhausted from the downward spiral I was in.  I would listen to this song in the car as I carried out the details of my day. Details which required that I get dressed and leave the hypnotic cocoon of sleep and dreaming for school hallways, coffeehouses, and church-baed responsibilities.  One morning after the children had left for school I climbed back into bed begging God for just one more hour of dreaming.  But without even asking for it (in fact I was actually begging for its opposite), the heaviness in my head, eyes, and limbs lifted like the fog off a New England lake early on a summer morning, and I could feel the sun on the side of my face.

My familiarity with the lyrics to "Rise" swept over my heart like the wings of angels...."The sun itself is in the room beside you...With a message of how good your life can be..." In that moment I would remember that the sun which came through the window and sat in the room beside me was a reminder of how good my life could be.  And because "what blesses one, blesses all" I could know that everyone who shared that room with me was touched by the light, warmed by its touch, and illumined by its wisdom.  The words of comfort and encouragement I found in this song were divine messages on the wings of angels for me.   Over and over these angel messages swept their wings over my heart until all the dust and cobwebs of depression were gone.  And I rose....

Wilcox, in the liner notes for this CD titled Into the Mystery shares, "I have fallen in love with music again.  I feel like my first ten recordings were practice, and now I'm ready to begin.  These songs are able to say what I never could find words for.  Enjoy!  Thank you for listening." No, David...thank you for not stopping after recording number nine, thank you for continuing to let your heart stay open to the raw beauty of honesty and for sharing your inner journey with others.  Thank you for letting me hear your words and thank you for trusting all of us, your faithful listeners,  with your truth.  Thank you for sending your words on angels wings to save me from despair and to plant a seedling of hope in my heart.  I am tending it with love and patience.  Thank you.

Sometime "a song is just a song"....or is it?

Rise
"I see you dreaming by the ocean window
I hear you breathing like the waves upon the shore
The tide is turning on this time of sorrow
You will never be so lonesome any more

The breezes whisper as the curtain dances
Your dreams are deeper than the mystery of the sea
The sun itself is in the room beside you
With a message of how good your life can be

I know that a heart can just get buried
Stone by stone, crushing hope until it dies
Far away, but the message somehow carries
Beloved, it is time for you to rise.

Time for you to RISE UP...
With a sudden sense of wonder
RISE UP
As the joy comes to your eyes
RISE UP
From the burden you've been under
Beloved, it is time for you to rise.

There's nothing wrong with taking time for sleeping
Your eyes are weary with the things that you have seen
A deeper promise is what your soul is keeping
Right in time for this appointment in your dream

Angels whisper so as not to wake you
There's nothing else in this whole world for you to do
But follow on to where your dream may take you
To see your footsteps from an eagle's point of view

Now I know that a heart can just get buried
Stone by stone, crushing hope until it dies
Far away, but the message somehow carries
Beloved, it is time for you to rise.

Time for you to
RISE UP
Though the promise goes unspoken
RISE UP
When the joy comes to your eyes
RISE UP
For your soul was never broken
Beloved it is time for you to rise
Time for you rise."

- David Wilcox

K