|
|
Car Thoughts
I drove to Kansas and back in five days. Driving long distances can be a Zen experience. I think of the road as a series of points rather than as a continuous line. Then each moment, each inch of the road, is separated from all the rest. It is complete and final in and of itself. If I get a cramp in my neck or too much heat on my feet I don’t think that it will just continue to be like that. I think, “This is the discomfort of this moment. That’s all it is.” I don’t assume it will be the same in five hours. In fact, I erase the notion of five hours. The trip becomes a kind of eternal present. “Des Moines, 195 miles” means nothing to me. The sign could just as well say, “Des Moines, 195 years.” It’s very exciting. The same goes for the scenery; each tree or shrub or curve of the horizon is different from the last; it is uniquely itself, unlike any other sight. In this way, the hours disappear. There is no time. Suddenly it is dark and we stop to sleep.
Out on the highway I think how much I trust the road. Even if I can’t see for miles ahead, I believe the road will continue to be there. At night this is especially important. I also trust the people who paint the white dotted lines and the yellow stripes down the middle, trusting their work ethic to connect them to other people and make them see the importance of doing the job correctly. (I thought of a college classmate from California who boasted that he and a juvenile delinquent friend had repainted the lines on the roads high in the mountains so that drivers who trusted the road too much would veer off course and fall down the cliff. I hoped he was just trying to shock us.) Then, I think how much I trust my car, the people who made it in 1982, and mechanic who maintains it. I realize how much I trust myself and my health and my eyes and reflexes and so on—even when I was falling asleep and pouring water over myself and singing (really high and operatic) at the top of my lungs to stay awake. And although there is occasional evidence that trust in other drivers is ill founded, by and large everyone behind the wheel knows it is in their own best interest to follow the rules. Last but not least, I trust the kindness of strangers.
The first time I drove all the way to Kansas and back by myself, one of my tires blew up as my youngest daughter and I were flying down the interstate. Very surprisingly, right where it exploded there was a huge, flat, paved area, about to become a new road, off to the right. We stopped easily in that space. Immediately, a white pickup screeched to a halt in the proverbial cloud of dust. A guy jumped out and had changed the tire before I could even locate my jack. I couldn’t believe it. And with a tip of his hat, he was gone. My friend Joan said the almost same identical thing happened to her once. She didn’t even have a chance to say “Thank you.” Who are these guys?
You don’t have to be far from home to receive the kindness of strangers. Last spring I was driving to a choir rehearsal, running late as usual. I was in the center lane at the corner of Lyndale and Franklin when my car absolutely killed. It was plum out of gas. How could I be so careless? I put on the flashing red light and just sat there. Pretty soon a guy appeared. “Need some help?” “Looks like it.” He stopped traffic in the side lane and pushed my little car to the curb while I steered it. There’s a gas station about a block from that corner and for some reason I had cash with me. I was so frazzled about being late and trying to figure out how I had forgotten to put gas in my car, I’m not sure I thanked the guy. I hope so. I meant to.
In general I don’t like the idea of owning and operating a vehicle, it seems so wasteful for a solitary person to roll around in two tons of steel using up precious resources. Every year I say I’m going to ditch my car. But I’m too scared to ride a bike. So, a better plan might be to walk everywhere or take buses.
I’ve given a lot of thought to a “walking everywhere” wardrobe. It would require a certain investment. For below 20 degree weather I’d need warm, comfortable boots, warm socks, probably a full body snowsuit like the little kids wear, wool knit gloves to wear inside of wool knit mittens, a ski mask (that would mean no makeup and certainly no hairdos) and a hat or scarf. I’d need a backpack for all times of year stocked with drinking water and pick-me-up snacks. The whole rig would be a lot cheaper than a car but I doubt that people who live outside all year around, the people who really need it, are even able to afford a proper “walking everywhere” wardrobe.
Even more difficult than getting the gear together would be to create a new rhythm to my life, allowing an hour or two per day for getting places. Well, it certainly would solve the problem of when to pray. I had the brilliant idea about a year ago to make time for prayer—sending out loving kindness in an intentional way, listening for insight, creating a reservoir of patience (good for warding off road rage) and receiving love—every time I hit a red light. But a half hour walk would be a lot longer than all the red lights put together. And that’s not even very long considering how much prayer it actually takes to hold up the world.
Reading the Newspaper
in Kansas
Readers who responded so positively to “The Spirituality of Money Matters” (July 2002) would like to know about a church featured in the Wichita Eagle, the major central Kansas newspaper. An anonymous donor gave 50 envelopes with $50 in each one to an Indianapolis church called The Garden. Parishioners were instructed to take the envelopes and look for something good to do with the $50. The pastor, Linda McCoy, called it “sowing seeds of love.” The short article cited two ways the money was used: a home economist started a garden to grow produce for a food shelf and a farmer got matching funds to bring a group of inner city kids to her farm for a fresh air day. The uses of the money were perhaps not so remarkable but the idea was very poetic and expansive, suggesting endless possibilities. It gave each person who took an envelope a sense of th eir own power and got them thinking both in an abstract creative way as well as a concrete creative way. It got them thinking about what other people might be suffering. Or thinking of good ways to take care of themselves.
Miracle in California
After a day at home, I flew to San Francisco to visit Marie, a friend of mine from grade school. The trip came about like this: In June when I decided to write about the spirituality of money, Marie was the perfect person to interview for the story since she had worked as a financial advisor and financial/spiritual counselor for many years, helping people to decide what they WANT and how that plays out in their financial plans.
Every time I called, no one answered, so I started to worry that she was in the hospital with a flare up of lupus, which she has miraculously survived since 1974. One day my phone rang and it was Marie. She had been trying to reach me too and hadn’t left messages either. Wow. What a coincidence. We both had something on our minds. I insisted she go first.
She dropped the bomb. Years ago her doctor told her that the life saving medications she needed to control her lupus would very likely cause cancer someday. In May of 2002 she was diagnosed with lymphoma. She had a tumor the size of a tennis ball under her collarbone and seven other smaller tumors in her chest. “The bill has come due,” she said.
We talked for three hours that day. She said she had spent a month grieving for herself, screaming and raging, and now she was focused on helping everyone else, especially her partner and her children, get through the process of losing her. She was more than happy to help me, letting me interview her for my column—leaving her legacy.
Ruminating on our conversation, I realized she had laughed as much as she always had. And her voice rang with the same Kansas twang.
It was impossible to imagine what she was facing. She didn’t feel strong enough to get through chemotherapy. She had been through so much forever and ever and it seemed so unfair that she should be faced with yet another horrible hurdle. She had struggled so hard to find a measure of happiness and health. Why couldn’t she just have that?
In 1981 when she was emerging from an 18-year loveless marriage and I had just returned to the U.S. from living in Spain for 12 years we renewed our friendship. I had heard through the grapevine that she was a well-known speaker, accomplished writer and award winning foster parent and I had heard about her total remission from lupus. And although we shared a lot of personal things I still had no idea of what she had been through.
In 1993 she was the director of a shelter for homeless women and children in San Francisco. That was the year that an abusive boyfriend shot and killed a woman at the shelter. When I learned that Marie had run out to confront the boyfriend as he was still shooting I realized I needed to know what her story really was and that I should write something about her before it was too late. We’ve been working on her life story since then.
She elaborated on what her suffering had been when we were pals in the sixth and seventh grades. It was shocking: her childhood years of physical, sexual and emotional abuse as well as simple neglect—untreated strep infections and no dental care. We lived in a town and a time when things like that were dark secrets. She survived polio and rheumatic fever as a child, and later bacterial endocarditis (a heart infection) and lupus.
Her history of miracles is as astonishing as her suffering is shocking. A knee, a leg, an eye, you name it. Everything heals, often inexplicably—except colds. Marie says the problem has to be life threatening or at least very grave in order for a miracle to occur.
So I shouldn’t be surprised that although Marie hadn’t started chemo yet, a CAT scan at the end of July showed that the tennis ball sized tumor had diminished to the size of a walnut and the other tumors had also diminished substantially. Then, a CAT scan the day after I left California showed the tumors had all disappeared completely. Marie’s doctor told her there is a type of lymphoma that comes and goes but hers isn’t of that type. He is amazed. And the nurses who had worked there for over 20 years had never seen anything like it.
The Aftermath
of a Miracle
In the sense that I believe everything good comes from God, I believe her healing comes from God. Where else would something good come from? But why Marie and not everyone? Is there some scientific explanation for the particular way her mind, spirit and body work together? Does she get healed because she loves medicine so much (although she never got to be a doctor as she dreamed) and studies the Physician’s Desk Reference assiduously? Is it her extreme positive ability to “take a few crumbs and make a loaf” as she did from the little bits of kindness shown her by people in the community as a child?
Is it that she lives in a spirit world, sending out loving kindness in an intentional way, listening for insight, creating a reservoir of patience and receiving love?
Maybe she was just born with unusual intelligence and an exceptionally strong constitution?
More interesting than why miracles happen—whether the miracle is the “kindness of strangers” or healing from a major disease—is the recipient’s response.
Marie takes a scientific approach and wants to understand the phenomenon. She also celebrates unabashedly, allowing herself to be transformed by the gifts, great or small, she is given.
I tend to take good things for granted: It is to be expected that a lone ranger will appear to fix my tire... It is to be expected that my friends will not die. I assume these things so much that sometimes I feel immune to celebrating miracles. Sometimes I remind myself of that guy who was healed in “Simon of the Desert,” the first film by Luis Buńuel I ever saw—Simon of the Desert is an ascetic saint who lives on top of a tower in the desert for years at a time, eating one lettuce leaf per day. As a known healer, people make pilgrimages to see him. One day a man with no hands makes the trek with his wife and a passel of kids. The whole family arrives, bickering and crabbing at each other. The man is healed and goes away with two hands but the contentious interaction in the family doesn’t change a bit. It’s one of those sobering comic moments that draws you up short and makes you realize how dumb humans can be in our dumber moments. |
|
.gif)
