following the death of the wife of a friend

Yesterday I received a note informing of the death of the wife of a colleague who I know via a group which has met twice yearly for now 27 years.  I was stilled for 24 hours, only able to allow the welling of sadness which had accumulated over the several years of the wife’s failing health.  But then I felt impelled to write two notes, one to the group and one to the bereaved colleague. I am enclosing the note to the group of colleagues here as it conveys the image of the bond of friendship which binds us and has done so increasingly,  As I wrote the note I thought of the web of roots which support the mammoth redwoods of northern California, webs from the intertwining roots of many trees which allow them to stand for perhaps 1000 years.  It felt to me as I wrote this note that this web of friendship might last that long.

“Dear all, Upon reading B’s message, yesterday, I seemed to need to just allow the welling of sadness, in silence for awhile, before I could even write this note.  Each of us of course has our own experience, our own emotions to embrace for J and for the loss of S (his wife).  I will convey some thoughts to J, but here I wanted to share my deep appreciation for the bonds within our group, both amongst our group as a whole and with each of its members over time.  How special it is to have this web of relationship, which may become more apparent at these times of grief.  Thanks to everyone for this.  “

The web of friendship which allows deepening personal emotion and experience for everyone.

   

A waking dream

Awakening in the middle of the night, not sure what I was feeling disturbed about, I began to read for a paper I am writing in RL, a paper on ‘ enslaved states of mind.’ Reading about Abraham Lincoln’s likely personal views toward the soon-to-be-freed slaves just before his Emancipation Proclamation during the midst of the American Civil War in the early 1860s, I found that my previous idealizations of Lincoln were loosening; like leaves of a tightly bound book being loosened there was room to breathe among the various pages as possibilites about the man rather than my up-to-now tightly bound idealization, which in itself is a kind of prejudice or conviction. Via the image of leaves in a book loosening I could more fully grasp the value of the PaB work which indeed is loosening previously held assumptions.  And then to become aware that these tightly held assumptions/convictions/prejudices in themselves are enslaved states of mind, I felt I had the outline of my paper rather fully in mind.  An example of a kind of waking dream, I thought, stirred by being disturbed, occuring during wakefulness, but invoked by the PaB experience and practice.

a chaotic dream

This morning awoke with a dream which as I traced it I could see the theme of chaos and tumbling imagery, the thread of intending to do x being obstructed y seemed to then become the chosen path, all viewed through a familiar but not altogether reliable lens…my thoughts went to the current interface between the familiar external life and the less familiar evolving internal life that comes via the PaB experience.  Chaos may be the turbulence inevitable when streams flow together from different but confluent streams or rivers.  Interesting that previously I have generally trusted the messages from the dream space, but now I may be exposed to viewing the dream as the turbulence itself, not an untrustworthy messenger, just delivering a different message, one of process rather than content.