"time after time..."

"if you're lost
and you look,
you will find me,
time after time..."

If this post had no other purpose than sharing my sister-in-law, Lisa Redfern's gorgeous recording of Cyndi Lauper's timeless "Time After Time," it would be enough. I hope you will listen to it in a quiet space -- when you want to feel something deeper than time.

I first heard Lisa share -- to say "perform," would cheapen what she gave us that day -- this beautiful ballad during a loved friend's celebration of life. I can't speak for anyone else who heard it, but for me, it was transcendent.

All sense of time and space receded. All that existed was our friend and her love for each of us -- and ours for her. I felt like only my skin itself was holding me in shape. For all that I knew, and all that I loved, was dancing in the air, like dust motes in the sunshine, with our friend and her friends -- and humanity itself.

Humanity felt like a verb, rather than a noun -- a collection of bodies with independent minds and stories. The dance was one of complete unity - and a dissolution of personal sense. There was not one being who had completed a "life cycle" and had passed on, and the rest of us still bumping around in skin-contained bodies -- we were all released from things of time and space. We were spiritual. And I felt it.

Later on in the celebration, we danced as a collective -- and the singing prayer, that we prayed as we danced, left me feeling cleansed, and healed, and full of childlike hope for each of us and the human mechanism we would each return to, when we folded ourselves back into skin, and clothes, and cars, and planes -- for the trip "back home."

Ram Dass once wrote:

“We are all
just walking
each other
home."
 

I've never felt the truth of that statement more clearly than during our Lisa's celebration of life and especially during Lisa Redfern's singing of "Time after Time."

I still feel it. Every day. The clock ticks, but it tells us nothing about the eternality of Life. The immortality of all beauty, and love, and grace.

We traverse space. We count steps. We measure the mass we take up. We drive miles and fly kilometers. We own acres, and build square footage. But do we? Is this all part of the distortion that says we are isolated, solitary ideas with stuff that we have accumulated -- and will one day leave behind?

Lisa's singing of "Time after Time," left me with a much different feeling. I glimpsed the substance of it all. All of those dust motes of consciousness that dance and swirl -- are simply gathering and coalescing in moments of purpose. We are not isolated solitary ideas with personal minds that control a limited number of those dust motes under a membrane of skin.

We are so much more -- and we are, "one with the earth and the sky" -- and each other. We are constantly shifting like water molecules that become visible as a cloud or rain -- but then invisible as steam and mist. One form no less - or more - substantive and real than another. We are not static, but ever-evolving. We are not born into a shape, defined by a mind that accumulates stories and stuff -- starting with a birth story and continuing with a false narrative of mistakes and accomplishments, successes, accidents, surprises, and failures. We are so much more, than what appears to be.

Through love, we are drawn into, and released from, limited and limiting forms -- existing only in shifting shapes of purpose. But we exist eternally as spiritual substance -- changeless, infinite in scope, as eternal as Love itself.  We are as irrevocable as a molecule of water's capacity to be drawn into purpose as steam, mist, rain, river, sea, breath for a fish, sacred for a Savior's last lesson, humble in falling, exalted as a prism for revealing a bow of promise.

I have, as a friend would say, "gone off the rails." I could write about what this feels like -- at the depth of my heart and soul --  for hours and hours.  Listening to Lisa singing again this morning brought it immediately into focus. But I will leave this here. If it's something you would love to ponder together -- give me a call. Or text. Or email. Or just sit quietly in a sunny corner, listen to it again -- we will hear it together. And we will dance, like dust motes in the gathering space.

Thank you Lisa.

offered with Love,

Kate

"I've looked at clouds…"

"I've looked at clouds
from both sides now,
from give and take..."
- Joni Mitchell

I live along a river valley that runs between two mountain ranges. Each morning I rise, fill the bird feeders, water the flowers and return to the kitchen where I make a pot of tea. Then I spend a few hours studying spiritual texts, taking calls, and staring.  Yes, staring.

I've always been fascinated by clouds. As a child I couldn't wait to finish my chores and retreat to read. If the weather was inclement, I would go to my room, climb into my bottom bunk and disappear into a story about horses, a Nancy Drew mystery, a biography about strong women, or a book of fantasy. If the weather allowed, I would grab a book and head for a grassy place to lie on my back and alternate between reading words and reading clouds.

I loved watching a cloud change shapes -- from a bunny, to a dragon, to a castle -- and so on. The first time I heard Joni Mitchell's,"Both Sides Now," I thought it was the most brilliant song ever penned.

These days, I don't have to lie in the grass to watch clouds. All I have to do is look out our floor to ceiling windows, where I have a stretch of sky that reaches about 50 miles along the valley -- from north to south. I can watch a single cloud shift shape dozens of time. I can watch her start out as a puffy little thing, and over the course of a few hours, turn into a pouty, storm-sodden promise full of rain.

One day, as I watched a cloud morph, over, and over again, I realized that "the cloud" I'd been watching -- and which I'd identified as "that cloud," -- was not the same cloud, at all. Fifth grade earth science had taught me that throughout the morning, the sun had caused water molecules to evaporate up from puddles, lakes, rivers, streams, and back into the atmosphere. From there, they'd then been gathered (or condensed) into clouds. But all the while, as each cloud gathered new molecules of water, other water molecules were being released back into the atmosphere. There was a constant, ongoing exchange of water molecules.

The cloud that I had been watching move from the north earlier that morning, was actually not the same cloud I saw later in the afternoon. Even though I thought I'd been monitoring its southbound progress -- and its ever-changing shape -- there were probably very few water molecules left of what had started out as "that cloud" earlier in the morning.

And for that matter, what constituted "that cloud" anyway?  How was it so different from the atmosphere it seemed to be traveling through. The same molecules that made up that beautiful blue sky, made up the cloud. All that was different, was density. What I thought of as an outlined shape, was actually, in a constant state of transformation -- continuously changing and shifting.

For me, this realization felt -- in ways that are hard to explain -- like I finally understood Life. I could see that the atmosphere which seemed so invisible, became more visible when gathered into a denser form -- not a different substance -- just a different density. The essential elements that made up the atmosphere -- and the cloud -- were interchangeable, and changeless.

I had to ask myself, "how is this different from what I think of as my body -- a body in which each cell is replaced every seven years?" Could this be what Mary Baker Eddy is referring to in her primary work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, when she says:

"Spirit, God, gathers unformed thoughts
into their proper channels
and unfolds these thoughts…
in order that their purpose may appear"  

and that:

"Metaphysics resolves things into thoughts
and replace the objects of material sense
with spiritual ideas." 

Gathering and resolving, gathering and resolving...

As Joni sings:

"something's lost,
and something's gained,
in living every day..." 

I couldn't help but think of God as the atmosphere -- invisible, but ever-present. And everything we experience -- bodies, trees, houses -- as clouds. Constantly gathering into forms that allow the atmosphere to express a new sense of purpose -- to provide shade, to move moisture from north to south -- or east to west, to sort sunlight into a rainbow of hues, to resolve into much-needed rain -- in short, to bless.

I could actually feel the give and take of being spiritual -- and yet, having form -- without the membrane of duality. To be as at-one with God, as the cloud is one with the atmosphere it travels through, and exists in.

There is so much more I am learning from clouds. But for tonight -- this begged sharing.

offered with Love,

Kate