I’m struggling to find words to share here this week. Life is FULL…but this week it is mostly full of sadness. I am in a large medical hospital in Houston, Texas, at the bedside of my younger brother Walker. He has made his home in Houston for the past 30+ years, making a living as a skilled carpenter. He began to struggle with his health over the summer, and tried to tough-it-out on his own…for far too long. So here we are. He is in a rough place, bedridden with advanced cancer for which he has agreed to receive chemotherapy. He has at last surrendered to his need for help, and he is very glad and relieved to be surrounded by family now.
We lost my dad just 4 months ago, and it’s all blurring together just a bit. Dynamics in my family are complex as in most families, but we are thankfully able to set aside our differences well enough to rally together lovingly in critical care situations such as these. My sister from Vermont was here for a week before I arrived, and will return again this weekend when I head back home to Florida. My sister from Alaska will come soon, too. Our 83-year-old mother is here for the long-haul, already feeling estranged from her usual life in Michigan. We have rented an airbnb apartment a mile from the hospital, and we take Uber rides back and forth every morning and evening. Today I took an extra trip back to our apartment mid-day, to show up for a live zoom interview, ironically on the topic of pain-free living. The apartment is blankly devoid of any warm charm or personality, but it’s close by, it’s safe, and it has laundry and a kitchen.
Those of you who know me well can imagine how challenging it is for me to spend long days in a row in a hospital setting where the protocols fly in the face of virtually everything natural-hygiene that I have learned and lived for the past 20+ years. I try to offer nuggets of my wisdom where I can, but it mostly just fades eerily into the ethers here. I did crack a bit of a smile when my brother vehemently rejected the bright orange jello he was fed, saying: “That is NOT food! Can I spit it out please?!”
The experience of witnessing two beloved family members rendered so utterly helpless and miserable in such a short span of time is hard to fathom, or integrate. My mother just lost her husband of 64 years a scarce few months ago, and now she must witness her son in a mighty battle for his life. And, there have been other serious family medical traumas for us as well in these short few months. 2024 has been quite a year for my family clan, and it is only May.
I think family members are feeling a bit like we are in some kind of otherworldly twilight zone….tragic and dangerous, and yet we simultaneously still go through the motions of normal life somehow, at least when we are not in a hospital. My very young grandson is so rambunctiously full of life and learning, bringing such innocent joy! My youngest daughter and her boyfriend have just moved into their first apartment together, and my son and his girlfriend are excitedly dreaming of a piece of land where they can create their own homestead. For me, the strange disorientation of this whole experience has caused me to reach ever deeper for a kind of grounding that is beyond the fragilities, the confusions, and even the temporary joys of the material world.
I have written here before about the idea of “open focus,” in which we are aware of the aliveness of the space around, and between everything - and feeling the aliveness deep within us at the same time that we are listening, waiting, observing, talking, feeling, or taking actions. As Eckart Tolle says, “A part of your attention or consciousness remains formless, and the rest is available to the outer world of form…Whenever you ‘inhabit’ your body in this way, it serves as an anchor for staying present in the Now. It prevents you from losing yourself in thinking, in emotions, or in external situations.”
I just took a break outside, in a small courtyard on the hospital grounds. I lay on a bench underneath the massive canopy of an old oak tree. Gazing up at the tree canopy, feeling the space between and around all the branches and leaves, I was flooded with a feeling of a deep peace and tranquility. I stopped thinking for a little bit, stopped feeling the emotions that are attached to stories and external events, and just drifted in a wave of peace with its own kind of aliveness. I felt MY aliveness, as I became immersed in the space of Now. I know well that the secret to navigating the dramas of the outer world is to be intentional about frequently experiencing these ‘gaps,’ or pauses in thinking. In this space, inhabiting my inner aliveness, I instantly feel my pure connection to it all - to the whole - without any need to explain or articulate it to myself with words or thought.
Eckart Tolle, again: “Reality is a unified whole, but thought cuts it up into fragments.
Every thought implies a perspective, and every perspective, by its very nature, implies limitation, which innately means it is not true, at least not absolutely. Only the whole is true, but the whole cannot be spoken or thought. Seen from beyond limitations of thinking and therefore incomprehensible to the human mind, everything is happening now. All that ever has been or will be is now, outside of time, which is a mental construct.”
Perhaps the biggest challenge for me with my dad’s and brother’s healing journeys, beyond losing them in the form I had known, is my feeling of helplessness. Without knowledge and a deep faith and confidence in an alternative healing path, in a life-threatening healing crisis most people will surrender fully to the ways of the medical system. It is their journey, in which they make choices commensurate with their life experience (not mine), and Spirit works in mysterious ways. Sometimes all I can offer that is able to be received is compassion, companionship, and basic physical assistance such as holding a water glass, or rearranging pillows under them. I am required to lay down my identity as a knowledgeable Natural Health Minister, and show up simply to hold a hand…even when I believe that their choices may be contributing to cause them great suffering, or even to lose their foothold on life. Sometimes this is what Love looks like.
FROM KATHY NATHAN
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