The time is now. For a couple of reasons:

• We’ve just had our very middle aged birthday and
• We both have a thing for Jesus

Don’t get me wrong – our fascination comes not in a fundamentalist way, but rather, as an aesthetic sensibility and appreciation of religious iconography and the role of the teacher  in our midst.

I got a picture from her yesterday with the following request:

 I thought you should know that this is the picture I want on my funeral booklet. Thanks to Michael for unearthing it from who knows where, but I think it completely captures what I’m all about: irritating to Jesus who is ready to bonk me on the head because I talk too much; envious of other older women who can still pull handsome sailors and, of course, a lifelong, studious disregard for my own appearance.

With that request, and with that photo, I realised I loved her more than ever before. She’s clear, she’s unapologetic and she’s joyous (yay even unto death and men that sail the 7 seas).

Death is, funnily enough, on both our minds as we’re coming up to the anniversary of our dad’s death. He died over 20 years ago now, and so didn’t live to see his twin grandchildren turn 21, or my other sister’s Gab’s children reach their maturity. His anniversary this year will coincide  with a large family reunion we’ll be having with our cousins, and  as a catholic family we have scads of cousins – and of course we drink! Dad would surely endorse this dual celebration of life and death.

Cate and I both have a proclivity for dreaming as well, and often share notes – seeking help and insights from our shared family paradigm, culture and personal history.

My own significant dream this last week was, I believe,  portentous. It featured, as mine often do, totemic animals, often blue in colour, that talk or visit or leave me gifts. The message I took from this last one was a wake up call to check my health and in particular the health of my heart. I took it also as a direct message from my Dad who had died early from a heart attack. Of course, I did check only to find out my blood pressure was much higher than normal, with a consequent need to run a series of blood tests to find out what’s going on.

Cate’s dream this week was about being at the edge of an endless ocean, on fine white sand, more exquisite than she’d ever seen before. Her take on it was a view of the limitless, ego-less boundaries a sort of heaven on earth – when the spirit in action and the numinous in life are realised.  Cate reminded me that (as Gnostic Jesus says) ‘The kingdom of Heaven is at hand and men/women don’t see it.’

Clearly our shared preoccupation with Jesus, that grew out of a Catholic childhood, is also a pursuit of the perfect life. A life that was lived; that is – a life worth living, for however long. A life more about the journey than the destination. More about the process that the result. And of course one that can be shared (if you’re lucky enough) with someone you love.

I looked up the meaning of my latest blue (dream) totem – the cricket , to find out that it is the protector of hearth and home (hence my linking it to Dad). It’s also a totem best known for chirping and singing, which it does by rubbing its wings against a leaf. In my dream the cricket was sick and only when it started moving around did I put it back on a leaf (I guess to start singing again). Is this me, coming back to life after Bloke – getting ready to sing up a storm?

In any event, with the love of my life gone, and the other half of my heart on the other side of the world, it seems that life “just isn’t cricket” any more.  So what’s a girl to do?

Dust off the blues (and in my case working in a blue collar environment perhaps shed them altogether), get truly green, turn over a new leaf and sing aloud.. Here’s one for Jesus, One for Cate and one for me. Have I ever said it better?

I love you S.H

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I work with this person. She and I have similar interests and insights. We’ve read the same books and have similar approaches to the importance of spirit in our life.

She loves and teaches stories, she is a writer and an editor, a seeker, committed to relationship building and a Libran. She also has a Catholic background and recently lost her father whom she cared for deeply. 

Like me, she believes that the path of the heart is all encompassing and when all is said and done, it is love that resounds and remains at the end of life.   I believe, though that she is farther along the path than me and a little clearer on what that tenet actually means in day-to-day life.  She is courteous and gentle; a great listener and very thoughtful in her care of others.

When she told me yesterday that she followed a guru in her spiritual practice I had a puzzling and negative reaction. And that worries me.

Despite the fact that we shared so many other interests I didn’t want to hear that she had handed over personal power to another. I find the choice of a guru akin to deifying another and this has never sat well. As I’ve done in the past, I dismissed the path as a possible method to find meaning and enlightenment.

What worries me is that I have no realistic alternative and no real reason for rejecting the path she’s chosen other than fear and confusion. Don’t get me wrong, I want to reach enlightenment along with the next person. Her path however, is dependent on trust and love – and that scares me.

When I went to India 10 years ago I sought the spiritual home I thought I needed. I was on a quest to find meaning and resonance. I had dreamt of gurus, met practitioners, read books, prayed and received confirming indicators that indeed this place and its spiritual practices would provide a place of rich sustaining support. Alas it provided noise, dirt, stress and crowds. I couldn’t see past the smells and confusion. As for inner sight I was lucky to maintain my sanity keeping an eye out for fast moving traffic and bullocks in the middle of the road. I was deeply disappointed and decided I had no spiritual bone in my body.

Besides, I had my darling husband as an alternative ‘religion’. He was my path to the heart. He was my divine other. It was enough. It was real and trustworthy. But it ended. Now without him I am rudderless and back to square one. Still sightless and a little the worse for wear; love might be the thing that matters in life, but it gets stripped away in the surety of death.

The sustaining truth from all of this, though, is that change is the other great constant in life; change in death; change in jobs; change in friends. And that the harbingers of change in my life invariably arrive with a baton – passing on a new curriculum of learning just before its time to move. This new friend brings with her the next list of subjects I am to study. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. In this case with she comes with a lesson plan: advising me to attend to the moment, to stay awake and to remember that for a seeker, the path doesn’t end.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time, T S Eliot

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What we have here is doubtless a case of psychosomatic illness. As you change your thoughts it reflects in the body.  Your spleen gets damp when you have trouble digesting life, or is that your stomach that gets acidic when you have trouble with your partner? Was the asthma suffocation or was it that my sinusitis was veiled anger? Duh!

I discovered the joys of psychosomatic illness during the neurotic bent of my almost 30s.  I was unable to hold down a satisfying job, and I used the body rather than the CV to explore the boundaries of life.  All was fine in my ill world.  I sniffled my way across every new age book shelf, until at last I could go no farther. My waterloo was a book with the title, “Love your rectum back to health.” Arguably the finest title of all from the mother of all body  illness relativity, Louise Hay. An angel of hope to everyone that had a sneeze, rash or piles. But for me it signalled enough.

I’m happy to say that sort of navel-gazing and rectum loving is all behind me. But the sustaining message I took from the literature is one of personal responsiblity. I was “reared” as a Catholic, which often meant abrogating responsibility. Or at least handballing the lion’s share of it to something called sin, a fall from grace or dodgey advice from a guardian angel. Non- Catholics had no idea that we had a 24-hour 365 days a year counselling life-line (in the shape of a guardian angel.)

The guardian angel was supposed to be good. But there was one religious icon I recall from my early childhood that showed a bad angel talking into one of the saint’s ear, and good angel earbashing the other.  What a conundrum. The secret was to rely on your inbuilt conscience. Truly an elusive component – especially for little kids, who had their work cut out for them managing anything under this 24/7 surveillance.

Angels and colds are, I admit, hardly parallel realities. But, lately my thinking has been preoccupied with both. Perhaps it’s because I just finished a charming book, Miss Garnett’s Angel, by Salley Vickers. In any event, I’m head over heels back in love with the idea of visitations from winged dudes to help you over tricky times.  But then again, my thinking is cloudy with the infected cavities of my head and maybe illness is an essential criteria for seeing them.

My darling bloke saw angels coming out of the walls in our bedroom – as he lay dying. One of them had long hair with body paint, and he danced “between us”, Stephen told me. Those that know Stephen (aka bloke), would know such an image would be most unlikely if he were in good health.  Clearly another great mystery about transition.

Garnett’s book also included a reference to the bridge of separation, over which a soul must travel when they die, assisted of course by an angel. Stephen, in one of the morphia-ridden rambles that characterised those precious last days, also mentioned a bridge. He told me he “was building a bridge between heaven and earth”.

So, Holmes, Hays or Vickers - what next? Is the bridge accessible to me too? Can I get over it? Will I ever get over it? Apparantly that’s the task of those left behind. A chilling idea indeed. No wonder I’m sniffling.

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