Letter from Peaks Island: After a rough year
Dear friends,
Am not in Greece. Beginning of January and am on Peaks Island in Maine. The sunlight cleans the landscape — all clarity — nothing can hide from it. The cold (barely 9 degrees this morning) stings. This is not the August sun of Greece that lulled me into complacency. Nor the Greek sun that makes ugliness disappear in its glow.
It has been a rough lumpy time since July when a bad fracture of my wrist required surgery and all kinds of screws and metal plates. Then a horrific flu in spite of the flu shot and I finished December with pneumonia.
All events probably expected as part of life as I age. What I did not expect was the sense of fragility and dislocation: a new transition into aging that I had to try to understand, accept and internalize. I have long-time accepted mortality. Accepting that I could break would now become my Buddhist practice.
With breaking, we need help.The arrogance of self sufficiency must give way to the acceptance of support. The hard part is the change in what I can do. I must find, not a better or worse way to do things, but a different way. No comparisons to the past. In the reality of my new now, how can I do what I need to do? I want to continue to live alone. And as I find new ways, always trying to be aware to ask for help with gratitude.
How does that bring me to Maine in January, rather than the Caribbean? I have come here because here I have three important people in my life with whom I can explore questions of Being: yes, Being, not Doing.
My friend, my soul-mate and support, the writer Eleanor Morse (see her book, “White Dog Fell from the Sky”). I sit in her warm living room looking out on the water and feel the calm of being cared about and encouraged.
In Portland, just a 10-minute ferry ride from Peaks Island, there lives my Buddhist teacher Dosho Port and Tetsugan Zummach, both of Great Tides Zen (on Google). With them, I explore how to live in this difficult world with full connection and awareness — no matter how painful. And to still be open to all that is kind, awesome and ephemeral.
Gertrude Stein on her death bed asked Alice B. Toklas, “What is the answer?” And Gertrude (perhaps not exactly true but worthy of repetition and as the Italians say, “si non e vera e ben trovato” — if not true still a good find), having silence as her reply from Alice, said, “In that case, what is the question?”
I feel in good company asking my questions — unoriginal, that have been asked forever. But now for me, urgent. I will be 84 this summer. How do I want to live these last years, since I want them to be full of the passion for life? How shall I be sure that I accept all that I see, that I do, that I experience — with love or with trepidation or with anger — but always with mindfulness. Embracing each moment each day with the passion fueled by the awareness that all is ephemeral, transitory, fleeting, changing, there and then gone. The things that give us momentary relief or fun or pleasure are truly momentary.
To know that I am part of my community, my loving friends, the neighbors that check up on me, my children’s morning phone calls, my dog Max close to my heels aging with me, even the bear that visits my bird feeders and the singing coyotes at night — all this is my self, my true self. Walt Whitman said he contained multitudes. The Buddha said we are all that is our world and our action in it. And I say how magical is the cold in Maine that it can freeze my cheek and open my heart.
As I shared Greece with you, I am now sharing my Maine sojourn — a time for introspection, renewal and hot tea. Please join me.
Letter from Peaks Island: After a rough year was first published in The Lakeville Journal Company newspapers, Tricorner News
