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Thank you for your gift. this music has rebirthed my youth and my faith. it has woven the spirit and the sacred back into my heart, and unearthed memories and belief i had covered with pain and fear, and forgotten. there are a handful of hymns i cherish from the LDS hymnbook, and i was given my two most precious on this cd--"Abide with Me" and "Be Still My Soul." The memories of this music and these songs are too great and many to recount, but they have again filled my heart this afternoon. These songs once taught me God, taught me faith, taught me presence and stillness, and invited my heart into the mystery and the joys i have still only tasted. i grew up singing. constantly. in every choir and group i could join. i sang with my friends. I sang with my father and grandfather. i sang at church in musical number after musical number. i sang on my mission, and played the piano, and sacred music became my only voice and my constant solace. i sang for scott's departure on his mission. The song was "Abide with Me." i sang with a trio when i was first married, singing our own remakes of sacred music. i have lived in europe for a sum couple of years of my life, and it was especially pivotal the first time, when i was a 9-year-old. i heard sacred music at cathedrals. i sang sacred music at my Catholic school. i grew up with a humanities professor for a father. my house was always filled with booming classical and chorale music. Christmas was not complete without a night in darkness listening to Handel's "Messiah." this health crisis has also been an existential crisis, i realize more and more. this music, this afternoon, reintroduced the feelings of faith, the feelings of being enormously loved and supported, and the feelings of life and spirit beyond my simple sight and listening that were Gifted to me as a child and young person. i am no clearer about concepts. i am no closer to explaining any of this. but i feel held by both god and by my own history, by my own heart and my childish, feverish love for the divine. a love that has before this illness supported me through many hurts and fears. and now here it is again--gracious and glorious, and spreading itself out here in my living room. and it becomes so large that my body and my heart feel so expansive as to burst from it. i wept as i sang along, full voice (both loud and thick with emotion) the hymns, repeating the cd many times. i have heard many truths since i became ill and asked for people's help. i have assimilated easily and quickly many of those truths. but some were not mine--and were never meant to be. and i have too subtly and effortlessly dropped many of my own. my truths. my own story. my own dear history. as far as i know, the fuel for these ever-burning fires and questions started with Mathausen, the concentration camp. i was 9 years, and it was my formal introduction by Creation to suffering, to pain, to cruelty, to ugliness. i cried at 11 years old when a man was being put to death in the electric chair. i was in my room, and could not be comforted. i huddled next to my stereo, playing some mournful yet bracing R.E.M. tune. i have always felt people's pain before they even knew how to speak it. i could feel their joy, too. it was all there for me to grapple with, even when very young. and yet i could feel alive and feel joy like few people i had met. i did it as if it were my job, or my calling. i assumed i was here on the planet to help relieve its suffering. i passed through my mission with a lot of doubt and pain. and equal amounts of joy and freedom. and a larger sense of god and liberation than i had ever felt before. i trusted my heart to the unknown, and the unknown answered. i developed a relationship with suffering as something "done" to me, something i endured with god's help, and something i was delivered from. and now, for the past several years, i have been too weak to sing. an illness of 5 years has changed so many of my former assumptions--i have hardly been able to even recognize myself. i have been swept up by the philosophies of personal power and creation in an attempt to manage what i felt was possibly going to finish me. i could not stand feeling like a Victim any longer. i was suffocated by my own despair and misery and feelings of powerlessness. so instead i decided i was a Creator, responsible for my situation, and thus able to free myself of it. and i felt anger and hurt and loss and self-loathing when it never worked that easily. when by my own strength i could not "overcome." and i have spent years yo-yo-ing between the two. and many others. and so started my attempts at opening myself to others' belief: submit and let go. intend and create. trust and believe. work hard to get yourself well. believe this man has something to offer, and that he can help you get over this. believe no one can help you but yourself. believe what she said about you creating this illness to gain knowlede to help other people. believe that hurtful things just happen on this planet. believe her when she says that it will be just a couple more weeks, and you'll be well. believe her when she says that it's only god that heals. believe him when he says that my case is confusing and complicated. believe her when she says that i have no viruses or bacteria, no disease or health problems, just symptoms surfacing from a lack of fire. believe him when he says i just need to find the reason for my being here, and my body will heal. it's all in my stories--what stories am i telling myself? the power is in my intention--if i believe it and ask for it, it will happen. if i just let go--"celeste, you're trying too hard!"--my body will heal. i must've done all this as a form of self-hatred and suicide--i'm not willing to deal with my deep trauma issues, so therefore i'm killing myself quietly, in the only way i know how to. "You're too much in your head about all this--you're reading too much." and on and on and on. and on. five years of mostly well-meaning interpretations of why i got ill, how i will get better, what i'm doing on the planet, what i'm doing wrong, etc. Interpretations of who's in charge. "Suffering is optional," he wears on his t-shirt. So many people. So many loving, healing people who have insisted to me that i have created everything, i'm living out my previous intentions, and that everything is very very simple once you realize who's in charge: you. i have bounced off their strong philosophies and suggestions, sometimes feeling extremely comforted and empowered, and at other times feeling very sure that their assumptions and injuctions are hurting people. even me. i have felt judged and misunderstood, as i have run into again and again the reality that not all of my life and my body is under my control. i have instead felt like i was apprenticing myself to another entity. That instead of buying the plane tickets to Vienna to show my faith and assurety that i would soon be well (like she insists i do each time i see her), i have given that authority back to my body. i will be well when i have done and felt what i needed to, and it will heal when it is ready to. I took this "voice" from my body many years ago, and demanded again and again its perfect compliance. It was what I could control, when all else seemed chaos. And now, i have felt strongly, despite all their insistence and judgment, that there is something yet to Submission. There is something yet to be learned by an admission of not having control or say over everything. That there are powers and presences beyond me. Including the "soft animal" that is my body. (thanks, Mary Oliver) And so i begin, tentatively, a balancing act between their extreme enthusiasm about the power of choice and intention and creation, and the hurtful, darker place i have felt as a victim of this insane, cruel world--suffering things i SHOULD NOT have suffered. that i didn't DESERVE. i was drawn to their pole perhaps because of my family and my LDS upbringing--where there is a sense (perhaps unwitting) that we are here to be tossed on this great and terrible ocean, to look to god, and to somehow make the best of it. Or, even more desparing and poignant, that life is shitty and awful and meant to be endured. Not enjoyed. That it is "trial" and "suffering." I knew in my heart this was not completely so, as i have always felt such radiance and joy from music, art, poetry, nature, overwhelmingly bright and good people, and my own dear breath and body. So this is most likely why i was drawn to those whose cry is that Heaven is here on earth, that this is Paradise, and that joy is our birthright. However, these same people seemed to express a lack of tolerance and compassion. I felt that lack even in conversations they had with me, let alone potential conversations about Irish pain and fear and bombing and the IRA, for example. "Do not feel sorry for anyone, celeste. They have created this for themselves." "Whoa...", I felt more than thought. And the greatest trigger of my suspicion came when someone told me that people who are raped were rapists in their past life. This is their karma, playing itself out. And I shuddered, and was surprised she didn't notice--a skilled healer with hands on my body. Wow. To simplify cause and effect in that way. To dumb-down the ancient understanding of karma so that everything ugly or uncomfortable or outright horrific in our world is neatly packaged up and taken care of. And this done just as powerfully as any old religious tradition, justifiying things because of god's will. And now, for these people of this New Age, horror is justified because of our will. So despite the brilliant help i've been given, and the invitation i've received to really take responsibility for my life, my thoughts, my intentions, my actions, I have felt there were crucial components missing when one is dealing with (theoretically or practically) human joy, human suffering, human choice, and human outcomes. Much more. this music tonight, without effort or argument, reintroduced to me the concepts and truths and feelings i had almost forgotten, as i was so caught up in the fever of "Personal Transformation!". i am reminded of my love of faith, in whatever form. All the native belief systems. All the powers/energies/beauties of this earth and sky. I am reminded of wings that have borne me up--wings that are not my own. I am reminded of interconnectedness and spirit and prayer. I am reminded of the absolute beauty that is oftimes conjured by difficulty. I am reminded of my mother's longsuffering, and of the power of compassion--of shedding tears with another human being. tonight i feel a largeness developing, slow and sure, and wide enough to receive and nimbly hold all of it. i do not feel buried by the despair of the Holocaust--and the many holocausts. tonight i do not feel ONLY the rape of the earth, the poverty of children, the spread of disease, the cruelty of slavery; but i do not feel unaware of it, either; i do not feel that happiness is but an absence of these things. i also feel the pull of the changing colors of the sky, the delicious taste of human courage, the picture of children's absolutely clear faces, the wonder and heaven of a cathedral filled with streams of angel's voices, and the miracle that is love and devotion. and my prayer, tonight, is to continue to have the presence to enlarge my ability to care for myself and others, and the grace to accept the Grace that is offered me. May i have back my child's eyes, wide with belief and wonder. May I respect what comes to me. May I enter a conversation with all the angels come to teach me. Even illness. And may I feel the strength and competence of my own growing, burgeoning soul. May I know, in every case and in every sense, that i am in GOOD HANDS. i am not clear about all this. but i do feel birthed into a new time of my life. and a clarity and peace and assurance beyond words seem to have flown back down and in, and found their nest waiting, empty and expectant, in my deepest heart. Celeste abide with me, ck [2007-06-21]
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