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“Hey, while you were napping it happened—just like we told you,” said the bronzed counselor, standing in the screened doorway of the log cabin, his toothy smile, still taut with braces. We turned over on our damp mats, then rubbed sleep from our eyes, then stood up. He waited as we put away the smelly mats, then followed everyone outside. This was Camp Sebago, 1941, long since, a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri.
In front of us grew The Magic Tree that seemed to increase its height and girth, from one day to the next, especially noticeable on Mondays, our return to camp. Some wanted to spend the night at its base and watch it happen. If you stood beneath it, it was impossible to glimpse the sky; it just went up and up. No other tree was like it in the world.
For weeks, we’d been reminded that if we continued being good, the Magic Tree would give us a surprise.
Dusty T-shirts and shorts and sandals formed concentric circles around our talisman as excitement mounted like flashing fountains reaching for the skies.
Then, the Magic Tree’s treat slowly unfolded as counselors put together the story: they, alone, were privy as to how it all happened. While we were sleeping, the Magic Tree gave birth to the watermelon secured to that upper limb lest it fall. So, that was it! We marveled. Everyone gasped as other counselors lowered it with ropes, then began cutting into the sweet meat. In no time, my chubby hands, juiced with my slice, engulfed it whole and wanted more.
In later years theologians superimposed the Tree of Life upon the Magic Tree; the Messianic Banquet, upon the watermelon. From whatever angle I view this experience, it was all gift from Precious God. In many ways, I’m still that hungry child who wants more…
News of her transition on February 17, 2022, grieved me. A ninety-year-old college graduate, mother, grandmother, widow, teacher, concert-trained pianist, seamstress, and volunteer, she fully tasted the joys and hardships of life.
Years of her daughter’s stories endeared me to her, especially when needing help to their rustic cabin, summers, spent at Donner Lake at Truckee, California. There, as cheerful matriarch and widow, she greeted relatives and friends, even the brown bears that wandered nearby.
After her daughter had tended the final needs of her father, the focus shifted to her mother who soldiered on, still volunteering at her church and the Chappaqua Library in New York. Her passion for books, her deep interest in people, her indomitable will fired her spirit and attracted others to her wisdom and humor. Only dementia and a cancer diagnosis slowed her down, until her Spirit-filled release last week.
So, when the mother did pass, all legal and medical and burial plans were in order, thanks to her daughter’s daily phone contacts and timely visits, often with her husband; these occurred over the years. Her selflessness to expend energy and resources, despite chronic illness, still moves me.
Her mother’s name was Marge. She will be missed.
At 7:20 A.M., I awoke with this healing dream:
It is evening. I’m walking outdoors, anxious. My tooth aches and my dentist’s office is closed for the day. Out of the blue, another dentist sees my distress and offers his treatment: laughing gas. Despite its unfamiliarity, I agree. After injecting my body with the tiniest of pinpricks, the tooth pain is gone, and we resume walking.
The dream’s time, evening, suggests my waning energies, all the more depleted by my terminal illness. My toothache, a disorder that pains me, suggests my inability to chew deeply through experiences, to avoid matters that command my attention, even hold anything in place—an irritant that sours my mood and plunges me into self-pity: nothing matters other than the diseased tooth.
The toothache also suggests weeks of being out of sorts, soured by my new symptoms and side effects of a new drug.
The dentist, unknown from reality, suggests “a power greater than myself that can restore me to sanity,” or in other words, the Sacred disguised beneath the practitioner who knows my distress and offers specific help, laughing gas. The numerous pinpricks, barely felt, suggest cues toward deeper practice of the Twelve Steps and the rediscovery of the joy of living.
My healing astounds me and together, we walk into the evening, enjoying dusk’s sky-colors through bare branches of trees.
(Sir Humphrey Davy, early nineteenth century English chemist and inventor, colloquialized nitrous oxide into laughing gas, a reaction caused by inhaling it.)
Heart Whisperings 