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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.
From the beginnings of recorded history, murderous invasions have crazed the global community from which relatively few have emerged unscathed. Yet from such mayhem, some, through meditation, have forged fresh paradigms of leadership.
Such has been the case in our time. Two stand apart: Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, and Desmond Tutu, the Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town, South Africa. The 1959 Chinese invasion of Tibet and the decades-long apartheid in South Africa scored these men with indescribable angst but did not vanquish them. With wisdom and compassion, both still shepherded their people: one toward the relocation of Tibetan Buddhism in India’s upper reaches of the Kangra Valley and the other toward the elimination of apartheid with the 1994 election of Nelson Mandela’s government.
In 2015, Desmond Tutu chose to honor the Dalai Lama’s eightieth birthday by visiting him in exile. In his company was Douglas Abrams, his literary agent. For five days, the octogenarians shared, their faces crinkled with mirth as they quipped, held hands, and opened their hearts to each other.
Fortunately for us, their dialogue fills the pages of The Book of Joy – Lasting Happiness in a Changing World (2016), a book to be savored, not read. Their lifelong practice of daily meditation, though coming from differing spiritual traditions, fills them with abounding joy. A final chapter includes such practices—A tonic for whatever troubles us.
Surrendering to the Stillness within empowers us to listen for direction and take action, thereby becoming spiritual warriors in a world sorely in need of truth.
Heart Whisperings 