There is Love, All Around


This is another "catch-up" entry. I wrote this in January, but my iBlog software wasn't working then. So I post it today.

I am writing this to honor the occasion of the wedding of my F/friends, Carmel and Richard, which took place New Year’s Day.

That occasion marked another point at which the poetry of my life became evident once again, one more point of convergence on the spiral of renewing spirit.

For their gift, I gave them a framed copy of my swans photograph, the one I gave to another F/friend back in 1983.



I took that photo during my visit to Philadelphia in October that year to attend the Women In Communications national conference – my first visit to the Northeast, a region that has since become my home, though I had no idea then that I would end up here and happily so.

I stayed part of the time with my F/friend Ellie, a woman who had spoken beautifully during my wedding in the Claremont Meeting to my then husband, Bob M. (who, by the way, is happily remarried to now his fourth wife – I was his second – and living in retirement in Bend, Ore.). I had already left Bob, and Ellie was preparing herself to tell her husband that she wanted a divorce. She took me to Winterthur Gardens in Delaware for a long walk, where I took many other photographs as well.

Carmel and I share a birthday, something I discovered only when I called her a few days before my own this year, sad because I had no one to celebrate my birthday with. Well of course we had lunch on our birthday.

Carmel has been my dearest F/friend here in Rochester. She has been a spiritual guide as well as a practical supporter – even in terms of cold, hard cash – during some of the most difficult times in my life. Carmel’s love in many ways has helped me to heal, and in the process has enabled me to give more love, which then, of course, comes back to me multiplied many times over.

Carmel figured importantly in the story of my relationship with P.M. But not in the way I originally imagined.

I was on the verge of breaking up with P.M. a year ago October when we attended a fundraiser for the local AIDS hospice. P.M. and I took seats, and then I saw someone else I knew, who was emcee for the program, and I went to talk with her. When I returned, I found Carmel and Richard sitting directly behind the seats P.M. and I had chosen. Because Carmel had appeared in my life at other crucial moments, I saw this as a sign that I needed to look deeper into my relationship with P.M.. I did not break up with him as I had planned. Instead I achieved – or rather, thought I had achieved – the commitment from him that had been lacking before.

It turned out to be an illusion.

It is a very long story that involves yet another Quaker appearing, one whom I did not know before. Someday I will write that out. It is very complicated.

Suffice it to say that this all gave me pause to wonder about the patterns in which I had placed so much faith – whether it was appropriate to do so; whether instead all I was doing was setting myself up for a terrible fall. Perhaps these wonderful convergences were nothing more than mere coincidence and I should not invest so much meaning in them.

Still, I found that I got over P.M. very quickly – a testament to how much I had grown, how much self-respect I had gained, how strong I had become in my sense of who I am and how I deserve to be treated.

I know now that it’s not the patterns that steer me wrong, but my interpretive powers. When I see only what I want to see – ignoring all the red flags telling me something is very wrong – well, I make very bad decisions. But when I listen well without ego-involvement, I come out right in the end. I even come out right in the end when I make bad decisions. It just takes longer.

Now I see Carmel & Richard’s presence in that particular place at that crucial moment as more about offering a model for the kind of relationship I want (and deserve), against which I can measure all the wrong ones. And the one with P.M. was decidedly very, very wrong. Not because of who I am, but who he is.

Carmel’s and Richard’s wedding is testament to the possibility of true love, no matter how distant it might seem. Carmel is 75, and has been a widow for many years. Richard has also long been a widower.

She and Richard love the swans, and have mounted the picture in a place of honor in their “meditation” room.

There’s another story I want to tell, one I spoke in Meeting in the Fall.

There was a moment, in the spring of 1998, when I sat in my car in the parking lot at Genesee Valley Park – a large urban park centered around the Genesee River, which runs through the center of Rochester. It was late at night. I had gathered all my prescription pills – enough to make me drowsy at least, if not to kill. My plan was to take them all and at the moment I became drowsy, to slip into the river. I knew that if I just went into the river without the pills, survival instinct would kick in and I would swim.

For many years I had held back on the suicidal impulse with thoughts of my daughter and what were by then my two grandchildren, Kyle and Rya. But at that particular moment, even the thought of how much they would be hurt by what I was about to do was not enough to help me push the thought out of my mind. The pain of my life by then was just far too much to bear. I felt utterly helpless and hopeless.

I sat there for a very long time, though, paralyzed. And then suddenly I saw not one, not two, but three falling stars.

I cannot explain it. But somehow after that, I could not imagine doing what I had planned. So I went home.

Years later I could give voice to what I understood in that moment.

I am not presumptuous enough to think that those three falling stars came down for my benefit. I do not believe God works in that way. I don’t believe in a divine plan. God works not in the events that happen but in the meaning we give to them — to the extent that we hear the spirit deep within. For certainly I could have just as easily interpreted falling stars to mean it was time for my death.

Years later I can understand those falling stars as indicating there were many more wonderful things for me to see and do, many new people for me to love and be loved by, and many people already in my life for me to love more deeply, including what are now my four biological and three step grandchildren.

And that surely has happened.

Today (January 15) I felt moved to speak again. There were many messages about love from others, so this seemed to be particularly fitting.

For several weeks in advance of the wedding I had practiced a song I wanted to sing for Carmel and Richard. I do not normally sing in public, and when I do it is only when there are many other voices singing to drown out my own. While there are times when my singing can be quite mellifluous, I never know in advance whether I will be able to hit the right notes — sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, and that can all happen in the same stanza!

When it came time I did speak, but I could not find the courage to sing — there were too many strangers in the room! So I held off — and perhaps it was best, because the message today was more fully formed.

I did not sing today either, but I did speak the last lines:
There was love all around
But I never heard it singing,
No I never heard it at all,
Till there was you.

There are many possible meanings to the words of that song. It can be a message between lovers. Or a message between F/friends.

As most people in the Meeting are aware, for many years I struggled with a profound clinical depression. Now that I am past that (and I believe the recovery is permanent), I can say that what most defines that depression is the inability to see and hear and feel the love that is all around — God’s love, and the love that comes from people who are God’s instruments. And of course, now that I am able to see and hear and feel that love, I am much more able to give it.

In the women’s movement there is a saying that “the personal is political.” I believe that the same can be said for spirituality — that what is true for the individual spirit is also true of the spirit of the world. In this ailing world of ours what seems to be most lacking is the inability to see and hear and feel that love, and as a consequence, the inability to give it.


Posted: Fri - March 25, 2005 at 09:06 AM          

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