It was a shining day; shift from the cold and rainy weather wherein I made my slippery and onerous move. It felt like a gift and I embraced it to me. I feel looked after; cared for. Somewhere, in the folded dimensions of space and time where angels linger and flash into existence, someone's looking after me. I've felt it for months now. I talk to god and somehow the nature and form of this being is less relevant than the I AM spoken to Moses. We set the metrics for identity but god is unconstrained by our three-dimensional space and one-directional time. He may linger with us in our plodding path but out of compassion, not necessity. I ask I AM to look after Sjors, but god says he's got it, and I believe god.
"Please," I begin. "I want...more than anything...please..." Not able to finish, the longing in my heart: the memory of bright beautiful eyes and trembling hands, the quick mind and the love. The person I keep in tact and whole in my heart.
"I know," god says."I know."
God loves him too.
I met J for coffee this morning. He didn't make the original appointment, so I called him, drove to his neighborhood. I wanted to see him before I left. It felt important. He hadn't shaved or showered. He pulled out business cards of astronauts and company presidents and plopped them on the table casually as he sorted through his wallet. He wanted me to see. But I don't care anymore. At one time I may have had ambition for its own sake, but I doubt it. Everything I've wanted and fought for, I've lost. I listened to him talk. He talked about being good at anger and letting it go. This is what I've had to do, as well.
Eve and I went to lunch. I picked her up at the office that used to be mine. I have no connection to the place anymore, only gratitude that they've accepted Eve so readily. We ate and chatted, and I drove her back.
I went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum then. So many years here and I haven't gone in although I've bicycled past hundreds of times. I felt I could bear it today. And I needed to see. I needed to know. I understand more now than I did before. It hurts more now than it did before, knowing we are like that. The destruction of ideas, the bullying and threats, and the thousands of people who followed orders to torture and kill: physicians who murdered 70,000 disabled and mentally ill people in the first years of the war, the expulsion of "unwanted" people, the ghettos, the ship of refugees turned away from America's shores only to die in camps, the industrialized wholesale killing of people; the individual cruelties and complicity of average people; Allies unwilling or un-ready to go to Poland's aid, unwilling to bomb the gas chambers in Auschwitz. When I was younger I saw the videos and pictures and they seemed unreal to me. Today, I saw my friends and family and myself. Starving, tortured, murdered. Its far too real now. I've seen complicity and cowardice from people in my life. How many steps are we removed from such a thing happening today?
I walked to the Botanical gardens then, felt the vegetable, leafy coolness of the place. Rubbed the leaves of the mint and lemon verbena plants and breathed in their fragrances. I sat on a bench and listened to the sounds of water and rustling leaves. Outside, I meditated in the setting sun.
Eve, Shelly, Joy and I met for dinner tonight. I looked at them each in turn and they looked back with such love and sorrow. They love me and I love them. I've had pain in my life but feel the soothing knowledge that I'm loved and so fortunate in my friendships. The love of friends has saved me when I was at my saddest. The love of friends and family and my love of them has carried me through difficult times. That love carries me now. Strangely, my love for Sjors also carries me.
There was a poem by William Wordsworth that struck me decades ago: called Michael. It was about a shepherd who lost his son. Wordsworth wrote: "There is a comfort in the strength of love; 'Twill make a thing endurable which else would overset the brain, or break the heart."
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