In the Meantime

Here is a test

to find if your mission on Earth is finished:

if you’re alive, it isn’t.

~Richard Bach, Illusions

Statistics are out:  “10 out of 10 people will die!”  So said the random card I found on the ground by my gas pump.  Like a splash of cold water to the face, it lifted me right out of my head where I had been stuck worrying about something that I had little control over.  It’s easy to ignore the inevitable when we’re healthy and young and living our dreams, or just caught up in the mechanics of life. But we all have an appointment with death sooner or later, which begs the question:  What happens when we die?  

I am drawn to this issue—life after life—because I can’t wrap my head around the idea that when we die we are finished.  Sure, our bodies return to the earth, entombed or scattered as ashes as we’re reminded of the universal law that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it simply changes form.  Our loved ones will gather around our caskets and mourn our passing, comforting each other with comments like, “She looks so peaceful,” or “They sure did a good job with him,” staring at the body as if we were in there somewhere.  Yet if ever there’s proof that we’re more than our bodies, it’s in these moments.

When my grandfather passed a few years ago, I had the honor of being with him in his final days.  He was concerned for my grandmother, and asked that we take good care of her, but otherwise, he was ready to go.  He wasn’t afraid.  And as he moved in and out of consciousness, through labored breath, he shared his final thoughts, “We are born with a framework for society . . . or so we think . . . but it’s an illusion . . . there’s the body and the soul . . . but only the soul lives forever.”  It was my greatest spiritual experience, witnessing the soul of a man leave his body in the wake of his words. 

For the better part of a year, I had intense dreams of my grandfather. Not the man who suffered congestive heart failure and passed in his hospice bed, but the vibrant young man he had been when I was a little girl.  At first I would wake up startled when he appeared, and I could never return to my dream.  But in time, I willed myself to talk to him and he revealed some fascinating truths about his life in spirit form.  I’ve often wondered what informed those dreams.

In his book Life After Death:  The Burden of Proof, Deepak Chopra points to talking to the dead and near death experiences (NDEs) as two of six lines of evidence that the soul is real and eternal.  He studied many cases of NDEs, where the person had been pronounced dead and was brought back to life, and he interviewed those patients about their experience.  Intriguing to me was the discovery that across the board, people experienced what they believed.  Christians reported seeing angels and white light and Jesus.  Muslims reported meeting Allah and scenes of Islam.  Those who believed that they had wronged others, or that they had been “bad,” reported an experience of torture and hell.  Those who believed in nothing reported an experience of nothingness.  And so on, weaving the thread between life and death.

  

I know a guy I like to refer to as a “Militant Agnostic.”  “I don’t know and you don’t either” is his motto.  I never understood this thinking.  Sure, evidence based science has its place, but not in the realm of faith.  If there exists even a possibility that there is an afterlife, why not reach for that hope? Why not believe? What do we lose by being open?  Maybe, just maybe, we would be more peaceful and relaxed and far kinder to every living person and thing around us.  Perhaps we would not fear death as we do.

It’s your life.  What will you do in the meantime?

It's All the Rage

Anybody can become angry—that is easy,

but to be angry with the right person

and to the right degree

and at the right time

and for the right purpose,

and in the right way—

that is not within everybody’s power

and is not easy.

~ Aristotle

Laughing Men, Vancouver, B.C.

Picture it:  You’re stopped at a red light waiting for it to turn.  Green. You barely have time to lift your foot from the brake when the car behind you starts blaring the horn.  Maybe she’s trying to tell me something, you think.  Is something wrong with my car?  Stunned, you haven’t moved through the light yet when the driver in the car behind you approaches.  You roll down the window.  She starts screaming at you then punches you in the face.  In self-defense, you cover your face with your hands, but then she grabs your wrist and bites off your middle finger—at the knuckle, through the bone—before fleeing the scene.

Sounds crazy but it’s a true story that happened in my aunt’s Northern Virginia neighborhood.  Aside from the obvious questions, like what allows a person to bite through skin and bone and blood vessels to remove part of a finger?  And once bitten, what do you do with it?  Spit it out?  Throw it in the owner’s car?  Leave it in the street?  I have to ask:  Why are we so angry?

You’re better than that.

You’re not an angry person, not the fighting kind.  You’re a volunteer, your son’s baseball coach, a Sunday school teacher at church.  Just last month, you attended a community fundraising event and donated money to support a local homeless shelter.

And yet you have these moments where anger gets the better of you—where ugliness turns you inside out and the worst parts of your nature are revealed; moments when your frustration builds to a fury and explodes in ridiculous ways as you burn those around you with your annoyance. 

Like yesterday when you got stuck in the wrong line at Whole Foods.  You stopped on your way from work, in a hurry to get home and make dinner.  You only needed three things, which should have taken five minutes from door to door.  Instead, the woman from Minnesota in front of you decides to write a check for her groceries.  Slowly. And of course, the cashier couldn’t figure out how to enter an out of state check into the system, which led to multiple cries for help on the P.A. system that went unanswered, followed by more failed attempts to process the check.  You’re ashamed to admit it, but you were huffing and puffing and on the verge of throwing your money at the cashier and storming out with your groceries.

Then, as you’re headed home, there’s a guy driving slow in the pass lane, blocking the free flow of traffic.  As you try to pass him on the right, you see that he’s talking on his cell phone and completely oblivious to the fact that there are other people on the road.  You make a point to give him your best stink eye with your face just inches from your window, and nearly rear-end the car in front of you because you’re so blinded by your rage.  Now you’re laying on your horn, screaming some shameful obscenity that your offender can’t even hear and, which, in any other moment you wouldn’t dare speak.  What's wrong with you?  One look in the mirror and you would see the reflection of a crazy person.

The scary thing is—you’re not alone.  There are a lot of “you” out there.

Take a look around.  We’re all losing it over something or another.  Our anger boils over in our politics and religions, in our music and social networking, in our schools and sporting events, in our jobs.  We rage over inconveniences.  We shake our fists with righteous indignation when others don’t do what we want.  Why? 

Have we become a culture so entitled to comfort and ease that we steamroll anyone or anything that gets in our way?  Are we simply scared of not getting what we want, afraid that we can’t handle it if things don’t go our way?  Perhaps we’re so accustomed to expressing our feelings and anger that we can’t keep it in check anymore.  Or maybe we’re suffering from a spiritual starvation that demands to be fed yet we don’t even realize what we’re hungry for? 

Its not an easy question to answer.  For starters, there just aren’t any clear-cut ways to judge how pissed off people really are, and why.  Perhaps we can ponder this the next time we’re recovering from a meltdown.  I dare you.  It’s all the rage. 

LOOK WHERE YOU WANT TO GO

Why would you give your precious life energy . . .

to something you [don’t] want?

~Dr. Wayne Dyer

The Road Less Traveled
Connemara Region, Ireland © 2013 MHopkins

While learning to ride her motorcycle, my mother decided to practice in their neighborhood.  Having made the loop, she topped the hill and came to a stop, preparing to make a left turn.  That’s when she saw it—the neighbor’s mailbox just across the way—and though she tried not to look at the mailbox and, instead, focus on the road before her, as she turned left, eyes still on the mailbox, she veered off course and crashed…into the neighbor’s mailbox; the very thing she wanted to avoid.

There is a golden rule of motorcycle riding that says “look where you want to go.”  Though she knew it in theory, my mother learned this the hard way.  There are many long and complicated theoretical reasons why this rule of riding might be true, but none that make any real sense except the idea of target fixation, which says, in essence, that what you focus on expands. 

And so it is in our every day lives.  How often do we repeat some aspect of the past or dwell on the negative parts of our situation and then find ourselves faced with more of what we don’t want, instead of giving attention to what we would most like to create and then taking small steps each day to make that vision our reality?  Maybe we’re unhappy in our relationship or we dislike our job or we don’t like the extra weight we’re carrying around like a spare tire, yet instead of creating a positive plan of how to get from here to there we focus in on what we don’t like, complaining or feeling sorry for ourselves, repeating the same bad habits, or avoiding the discomfort of change, and so we keep driving our proverbial motorcycles around and crashing into the same mailboxes. 

It is impossible to be angry and laugh at the same time.

Anger and laughter are mutually exclusive

and you have the power to choose either.

~Wayne Dyer

Choice is the essence of our free will, and it is through our choices that we direct the course of our lives.  While we may disagree with the actions of others and even dislike our own circumstances, we have the right, power and opportunity to make choices every day—the attitude we adopt, how we respond to the world around us, where we place our attention, the thoughts we entertain, what we take responsibility for, the meaning we give to the events of our lives, and what or to whom we give our power.  It’s all energy, and the lightness or heaviness of that energy determines much about our physical, mental and spiritual health. 

Take another look down the road you're traveling.  Do you really want to go there?

Don't Forget the Whiskey Whore

I had an inheritance from my [grand]father,

It was the moon and the sun.

And though I roam all over the world,

the spending of it is never done. 

~Ernest Hemmingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

(Artwork by A.L. Childress - year of creation unknown)

My friend Tim took one look at her hanging on my wall and said in his most dramatic, southern drawl, “Well she’s nothing but a whiskey whore…” summing up the scantily clad woman reclined against the sofa with a half-empty bottle of booze on the floor in front of her; and so she became known around our house.  But to my grandfather, she was an erotic gem; painted on a canvas torn from an old World War II military jeep and hidden beneath a bland landscape painted in gray, given to my grandfather as collateral for a $2 loan he made to the artist after the war. 

For years the Whiskey Whore had been concealed beneath that drab landscape, stashed in the basement of my grandfather’s house.  Then one day as we discussed art, I confided that many pieces in my personal collection were erotically inspired from cultures around the world.  He couldn’t resist the temptation to share his secret.  “There’s an erotic painting under there…” he whispered, pointing to the dull gray landscape.  I was certain that I had misunderstood. 

But I hadn’t.  Eager to share his treasure, my grandfather had placed the framed painting face down on the table and removed the back with a screwdriver, gently pulling the layers of canvas apart to reveal the vibrant Whiskey Whore underneath what appeared to be so dull and lifeless.  That’s when he told me the story of how he had won her by default for an unpaid debt.

He gave me the painting that day; he made me carry it out the back door, up the hill and round the house to my car so that my grandmother wouldn’t see.  But she had been looking out the kitchen window as I schlepped through the yard with the painting tucked under my arm and she knew straight away what I was hiding.  A bit of drama followed:  “Why Karl Mason!  What kind of grandfather gives a painting like that to his granddaughter?  I’ve never heard of such!”  Grandpa calmed her down as only he could while I quietly placed the painting in my car.  We never discussed it again.

Yet this controversial work of art has become so much more to me than paint on canvas.  It reminds me of the many layers of life waiting to be revealed—the vibrant colors of the soul—and the gentle wisdom my grandfather shared with me so freely in the time we spent together.  And though I’ve traveled the world and discovered my own great fortunes, this simple painting on tattered canvas hangs above our fireplace as a gentle reminder of the depth and breadth that is life.

It has also become a metaphor for remembering what matters most—is it the painting or the story behind the painting?  As my sweetheart reminds me from time-to-time when I get caught up in the chaos of life:  Don’t forget the Whiskey Whore!

Monkey See, Monkey Do

“What you see and what you hear

depends a great deal on where you are standing.

It also depends on what sort of person you are.”

~C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

I saw him standing by the big window, his face fixed in concentration and disbelief.  “Get over here, love.  You’ve got to see this!” 

Certain that he had spotted one of our four-legged friends, I joined him at the window with that sort of stealthy gliding motion I have developed after years of quietly watching, sometimes following, wildlife in this mountain paradise.  I scanned the yard, the creek bank, the massive trees; the space between.

“What is it?” I squinted to sharpen my view.

“There! You see it?” He pointed with his fingertip on the glass.  “I don’t know…it looks like…a dog?  No, it’s not a dog.  What’s it doing?”

I could see it there by the water’s edge.  “What the heck...is that a…oh my, is that it’s tail?  Look at that…it’s standing on its hind legs!”

“It looks...like...a...monkey!  Look at that! Shoot! It's a monkey! Sweetie, get the camera!” He could hardly contain his excitement.

It didn’t make sense!  When have there ever been reports of monkeys in our mountain community?  We knew this, yet there we were having this random conversation while watching a couple of monkeys walking around on their hind legs down by the creek in our back yard.

Just as we had convinced ourselves that we were witnessing something truly amazing, the monkeys cleared the trees.  Our vision no longer obscured, we realized they weren’t monkeys at all.  They were our neighbors!   

Sure they were out of their territory and, true, one need only look at a diagram illustrating the evolution of man to see the resemblance of humans to monkeys and understand our mistake, but how could we have thought for even one second that we had monkeys in our back yard!?!  We laughed so hard I nearly peed in my pants.

That’s the funny thing about perception:  the way we organize, identify and interpret information to understand and make sense of our environment!  When you get right down to it, we’re all walking around on our proverbial hind legs seeing monkeys of some sort.  Sometimes our reality coincides with another’s and we have a shared experience.  Other times, not so much. 

Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch

with reality and he is not, but should instead say,

His reality is so different from ours

that he can’t explain his to us,

and we can’t explain ours to him.

~Philip K. Dick

Maybe we’re all just living in unique worlds, different from each other.  No one else has access to the private world we each carry in our heads, no one else can see or feel what we feel, or understand what we think we understand, unless we attempt to communicate our experience to others, which, even then, may not be understood.  Yet if reality differs from person to person (or at least our perception of it), then how can we really claim any singular form of reality?  Might we speak instead of parallel realities?  

Consider a person with multiple personality disorder.  His reality may be quite different from mine, yet as I learn of the disturbing, even nightmarish, events of his life, I know that his experience is as real to him as my perception of the monkeys in the back yard seemed real to me (however strange and fleeting).  Kind of makes it hard to say “he’s crazy” or “she’s right” or “they’re wrong” when you consider that we’re all just doing the best we can to make sense of the world we live in.

Each of us was once a dream and now we are the dreamers.  In one instance the world is one way.  The next moment, it’s entirely different.  The longer I live the more I understand:  Most of our experience of the world and the people in it  takes place in our minds.