Survival

HOLDING THE LINE: WHERE THE LIGHT MEETS WITH DARKNESS ON THE HORIZON

I took this photograph at the tidelands of Morro Bay in October of 2019.shortly after my husband Bob had passed..I was struck by the striations of light and dark above and below the horizon. I beamed in my own foreground light. I visit this spo6 often as it is a place where past, present, and future meet for me. Photo Credit to KATHLEEN DANA HAINE

HOLDING THE LINE: WHERE THE LIGHT MEETS WITH THE DARKNESS ON THE HORIZON

It was a long winter to get to spring and Easter time again. I marvel at the movement of time. Sometimes it’s a blurry burst of weeks. Then again, one moment seems to hold a whole lifetime. Personally, I prefer the one elongated moment time slots where time disappears and there’s just peace.

Ever since I was a little girl, I couldn’t”t fathom how the ocean held up the sky or how Heaven kept the Earth secure on the water line.It seemed that the horizon had a much more difficult job than Atlas of mythology did. He only had to hold the world on his back as a geometrical solid. The horizon has to hold the line and pressure points flexibly steady, far beyond the apex of the Earth …..as well as the countering the internal push from the molten core below.

Sometimes, we humans are like that too. Tasks may seem impossible, unbearable, and singularly borne. However, the shift that changes the horizon marker is learning, accepting and finally knowing that virtually NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE or totally unbearable, but feels lighter than air when others assist or we change the burden into something else. This may involve asking for help. The something else is what I am concerned with today.

Since the last blog of mine, I have not only held the horizon but pushed it higher. I cannot accept the numbers on tests or labs, or any guidelines I get anymore; they are just guide–lines and indications of where I have been. They don’t define me NOW, and do not control my future. The light can greet the dark with unusual results as I recently learned on a trip to the local emergency room.

I found it interesting that when I was in the hospital getting hydration treatment and checking out the “damage” Covid had done in the last few weeks, my labs were the best scores I’d gotten in years for kidney function and other health issues. I was not only above end stage renal failure, but above a 20 GFR reading, comfortably into Stage Four.

This leads to point #1…..Things aren’t always logical. Other factors are involved.

The #2 point came to me concerning all the personal and collective losses, recent deaths, and dissolvements within the last four month season. Life doesn’t seem fair sometimes.

To that I would reply, when you only see from the linear viewpoint you’re holding, you can’t see what’s above or below. If you don’t have input from the other{s} involved, your reference point is askew. You’re on the horizon, and you can’t take in what’s above and below you all at the same time.The light and the dark meet… but if you’re on the line where it’s blended the aspects appears blurred.You have to see with the mind of the Omniscient…..and that’s a tall order.

This is when when I use FAITH, the “substance of things unseen” by my current eyes. It is the antidote for what feels like darkness yet a ways from the dawn. I can still know that the answer, the message, the lesson, the love, the light are there. I don’t have to fully understand it all.

I was going to continue with point #3 and possibly #4, but I realize the tides of time are encouraging me to finish at a future date. It’s time to rest for now.

I hope to greet you where we can meet on the shoreline of a not-so-distant horizon.

ANGELIC INTERVENTIONS: AMAZING GRACE IN ACTION

Coming down from Idyllwild, California,  late one afternoon, we saw this lovely shaft of light from the cloud. Bob got the photo before it disappeared.

ANGELIC INTERVENTIONS: AMAZING GRACE IN ACTION

I love angels, and angels love me. Actually, angels love everybody and are always available to help anyone. The key is to ask for their guidance, protection, and assistance. I would not be alive today if I hadn’t received angelic interventions.

When I was five years old, I was not in a very safe environment. Living in an isolated desert area seven miles out of  town with an abusive person in the family led to some frightening situations. Most of my memory has been wiped clean from that time period. I do recall some scenes and sounds of severe anger: Mom’s fresh baked peach pies being thrown to the ceiling, her dark sunglasses to hide the dark bruises underneath, the verbal fighting and breaking of glasses and dishes, long nights trying to sleep with the covers over my head for protection.

Cotton sheets are not enough for protection. That’s where the angels came in.

I did not have fancy, well-thought-out prayers when I was five. I don’t even remember what I prayed the afternoon my stepfather came to get me from my ballet lesson. We started to walk down the long, steep, narrow flight of stairs. That’s when I realized I had been pushed.

I began to roll down the cement steps, trying to grab something, anything, to stop the fall. I was halfway down the flight, when something, someone, scooped me up and broke the fall.

It was a man, a nondescript man in a brown suit and a brown hat. I remember having my eyes closed for just a moment and holding my aching head. When I opened them and looked around to thank the man for rescuing me, there was no one there. There was no evidence of anyone anywhere on the stairs except for my stepfather, who told me I had imagined my elusive helper.

I told my mother about it. I think she believed me. She also knew that I had not just fallen due to clumsiness. I had so many “accidents” in those days.

I have always wanted to thank the man in the brown suit for saving my life. I have seen him since in dreams I have had. I remember one in particular where there was an extremely large golden bridge going up into the clouds. He had the hand of a little boy and was walking him up the bridge. The bridge was very beautiful, but something told me it was not my time to cross that bridge. It was comforting to know I might get picked up and escorted when it is my time.

Sometimes I have tried to rationalize this childhood experience into something more realistic. In another angelic intervention when I was older, I could understand my experience without  trying to explain it. It happened when I was twenty-seven. I am reminded of The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel. The introduction states: “For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.” Angels fit into that category, too.

Back to my angelic intervention encounter, I was driving down Interstate 10 in pouring rain, wishing I hadn’t agreed to take my friend to Orange County to meet a deadline for an application. The deluge got worse and worse. Visiblity was highly impaired.

That’s when I realized it looked like an accident was happening right in front of me. But it wasn’t…. What I was seeing was something like a video screen of an accident. I could see the border around the screen and yet I could see the flow of regular traffic in front of me as well. I saw all the details of the accident, the make and model of the cars, who was passing whom, the spin out of the dark blue car. And I knew there was a fatality involved.

When I picked up my girlfriend I told her about my weird vision and suggested we go home and get out of the rainstorm. It was the deadline day for the application, so I finally agreed to drive on and be extra careful.

As my car approached the interchange for the 57 freeway, I saw the black truck pull in front of me. “It’s happening NOW,” I said and slowed down, while we watched the accident unfold. The dark blue car hydroplaned. The driver, probably without a seat belt on, flew out of the car. (I had not seen that part in the original vision.)

I pulled over and went to see if I could help. The woman was dead. She was like a beautiful, pale, red-haired china glass doll. I had never seen a dead person before. I marveled how she could still look so lovely.

A motorist who had witnessed the accident was a nurse. She said the woman had died instantly. I knew she was in no pain, but it bothered me to see the rain pouring into her pale blue eyes. I got the red plaid blanket from my V.W. van and covered her in it. I knew there was a reason I was there to be with her, so I prayed. Sometimes, that is all one can do.

My friend stayed in the car. I was drenched, my suede coat ruined. The police questioned me about the incident. Even though I had seen the accident twice, I could hardly talk. The officer said I was in shock, to drive slowly up to the Denny’s and call for someone to drive my car home.

My husband came for me, and my friend’s son drove her to safety. I realized what a great gift I had been given. If I had not known to slow down and get out of the way, I could have hit the water pocket, too. Instead, I lived to see other days and other miracles, not just of intervention, but of angelic inspiration, which will be a topic for another time.

 

 

 

Maya Angelou: This Bird Has Flown Home

Bob’s photo of the pelican captures the moment when the bird leaves Earth for some place higher. 

 

MAYA ANGELOU: THIS BIRD HAS FLOWN HOME 

When I read the news of Maya Angelou’s passing last week, I started to cry. Although I was sad, I hadn’t even cried at my own mother’s death. I began to analyze what touched me so much now. Was it words she might still have written? Was it the words she had left behind? Was it her grandmother-like embrace of the world that I felt was forever gone?

I reflected on my own maternal grandmother. There are no replacements for wise old grandmothers, at least not the ones that weave love into the discipline and disappointments that life gives them. My grandmother kept a family together during the challenges of the Great Depression, made my growing up more pleasant, and ignored her “terminal” cancer for almost forty years. Maya Angelou and my grandma, Ethel Lucille Potter, were two beyond-strong, super women.

The autobiography of Maya Angelou is beautifully expressed in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Her self-imposed silence lasting for years, following her childhood rape, was an unnecessary punishment for the murder of her violator. Silence in a social setting can be a slow form of suicide. It can also lead to an epiphany from the dark night of the soul.

Maya Angelou definitely had epiphanies throughout her difficult life. There were strong lessons of survival. But to transcend survival mode, a person needs to balance life’s blows with beauty and compassion to be found and fostered. She had a definite gift for that, which she willingly shared in her words and actions with others.

I said to a friend after Angelou’s death that the main reason I felt so sad was that there was a hole that no one could fill. My wise friend reminded me that there are many undiscovered or little known people like Maya Angelou all over the world. Perhaps they are even in their silent mode and are just waiting for the right time to speak.

I am hopeful my friend is correct. I like to think that our beloved grandmas leave a nest of words for our eggs … eggs that will hatch into fledglings, never to be in a cage, always to have something to sing.

 

 

Hello, It’s Me: Good Things Always Happen When It Rains

This photo of Bob’s is one of my favorites, because I love the green hills with the backdrop of the California coastline. My mother, who is the topic of this week’s blog, dearly loved greenery. She never got used to the fact that she lived in Southern California, not wet Washington. Tacoma was always in her heart, if not under her feet.

 

HELLO, IT’S ME: GOOD THINGS ALWAYS HAPPEN WHEN IT RAINS

 

Last Monday was Memorial Day. I did the usual honoring of the all the male members of my family who served in the wars. I also thought a lot about my mother, her private battles. She never got much recognition for the heroic efforts on her part to raise two children as a single mother after three marriages. She was already battle-scarred and wasn’t emotionally or economically prepared to raise my older brother and me on her own. Fortunately, her parents let us move into their home. I was six at the time.

The house had lots of idiosyncrasies. The electricity worked in strange ways. The plumbing had its own style and rhythm. I am sure the attic was haunted, if not by spirits, then by old dusty memories. I didn’t care. It was home. It was a relatively safe place to live. My mother must have thought so, too. She died in that house, in her favorite chair, during the early morning hours of October 2006.

Mom had lived in a few other places in Monrovia, but she came back home to take care of Grandpa when he was ill. She moved back in permanently to help Grandma, until my grandmother passed away at the age of 92. I would call Mom every day, several times a day. The conversation always began the same way: “Hello, it’s me.” It was a comfort for me to be able to say that without her ever wondering who “me” was. Her mind remained sharp until the day she died, a major blessing these days.

My mom was a lady (she liked that word) of contradictions. She always wore a dress, but deserved the name “mechanical mama” for times when she would try to fix things herself. I remember her crawling under the car on a desert road, banging away trying to fix “vapor lock”. I still don’t even know what that is. She was churchgoing, but believed in ideas that were definitely not mainstream.

She liked to tell me about the happiest time in her life, when she lived in a tent by a stream in a Washington forest. She was a little girl then during the Great Depression. Grandpa would fish every day. Sometimes, they ate fish for every meal. Nobody complained and Grandma would add something to change the flavors. Mom told me the best part was playing in the forest with the fairies. I think it was a great disappointment to her that I never saw them. My life is not over yet, and I still keep an open eye and mind.

Unlike others who live in Southern California, I am happiest when it is a gray day and raining. I inherited that from my mother. One of Mom’s favorite sayings was, “Good things always happen when it rains.” We walked for miles in the rain when I was young. I miss that. I could still do it, but I think about the mess of getting wet. I need to revive the part of me that could care less about being muddy. Mud washes off. The joys of rambling in the rain linger in the mind. Those joys are the “good things.”

 

 

 

FINDING BALANCE: SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO LET GO TO KNOW IT’S ALREADY GONE ANYWAY

The peaceful picture at the top of my blog was taken by the love of my life, Bob Haine. He shot it in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park last March while I was attending a Hay House convention where Doreen Virtue was the keynote speaker. The photo is a beautiful lead-in to my first public writing of my very private life. The green of the old oak and the green of the stream present the balance I look for in life. That is the theme of this blog.


FINDING BALANCE: SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO LET GO TO KNOW IT’S ALREADY GONE

I did something rather amazing this week. I changed my name. No, I did not make up a new one, or create a pen name, or even change my name that much. I decided to go back to using the name that I was born with: Kathleen. Not Kathy or Kathi, the names I had picked up along the way. But my real name, the name I was meant to be.

Why do this, one might ask? Simple. I realized why I had changed the name in the first place. It was an unconscious attempt to get rid of my past. Many people have a past they would like to forget. My mind was very accommodating in that regard. Except for a few, limited memories, I had pretty much forgotten the scenes of my childhood. This week, however, I started to remember. More importantly, I learned how to put it in its place, pick up the pieces, integrate it, dump out the garbage, and claim the parts that I still loved. Nothing was wasted in the experience.

I have two reasons for sharing this in text. I find it cathartic for me. But I think my main motivation is to help others who may have had similar situations in their life, or are going through it now, or who are really earnest about getting empowered to be the person that they were meant (and CHOOSE) to be. I realize that I am mainly writing for women, because my experience is from the female point of view. Yet, I speak to the needs of everyone, because giving and accepting love, being peaceful, having boundaries, and knowing we are powerful beings who are never alone, are things we all need.

If anyone is offended by what I have to write, let it roll off their backs like the rain and water someone else’s garden. The people who would be most upset or embarrassed by my words are dead and buried. I wish them nothing but love. Forgiveness costs nothing but the peace of mind is priceless.

I was given a “rose” of a life. Roses have thorns. One just needs to learn how to cultivate a rose while avoiding getting stuck. And every true gardener knows the oldest, thorniest roses have the very best fragrance.

Back to my title…finding balance. To live life completely NOW I have decided to put the past away, keep the lessons and love I got from it. I plan to restore harmony to my life in my way of seeing things, doing things, and being however I choose to be. I know that accepting who I am now is the first step toward becoming who I want to be. Others will benefit by the ripple effect of this change. Even if everyone else doesn’t notice I am different, I will know it. The inside relationship is what really matters.

Yesterday evening, I did a little ritual to finalize my departure from a previous life and entry into a new one. I burned some old photographs in a pretty abalone shell, I buried the ashes in the dirt, I said a few prayers, took a warm, salt bubble bath, and had peaceful dreams all night.

This is not a journey that ends here. Perhaps you would like to take it with me. I invite you to do so. I will be writing every week in the coming year. My birthday is next week. Writing is the present I give to myself. I will be sixty-two, a senior citizen. As far as I am concerned, I was just reborn and I am very, very young at heart.