The Flagpole

'The Titcomb Farm' illustrated by Paul R. Sherburne

“Summers in the 50s, my sister and I went to North Newport, Maine for a week with our grandparents. I remember my happy relief at the first view of the barn and farmhouse after riding for eight hours. Then my father turned off the country road onto the gravel driveway at the mailbox with L.W. Titcomb on the post. Slowly the Plymouth drove by the flagpole and the bed with red and blue flowers in rows, and then stopped at the barn doors and, impatiently, we were out.”*

This is how A Flower for God begins. I am nine. With the sun barely rising, I carried the flag to the pole, snapped hooks through grommets, and carefully pulled on the rope, keeping the flag off the ground.

Through my forties my emotions swung from ones I enjoyed to ones I didn’t, without my knowing how to control those. The day I saw, in an inner view, a flagpole and a flag above my head, I had the insight I needed. I was a flag influenced by others’ views of me and needed instead to become the flagpole—a small, positive beginning rooted in a fond childhood memory.

One day the flagpole had a light on top, not at all realistic, but two weeks later, in astonishment I said, “It’s a lighthouse!” I immediately understood a lighthouse didn’t move out to ships in the night but simply blinked its helpful warning. Nor did it budge for hurricane waves. It weathered them.

In My Grandfather’s Blessings, Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D. writes, “Symbolism is the language of the unconscious mind, the deep wisdom that is part of how we are made. Sometimes the unconscious talks to itself and occasionally shares its wisdom aloud in the form of symbols.”

In future spiritual learning, I would read that the world is neutral and what I see is a projection of my thoughts and feelings reflected back. But in the beginning, a simple image worked best.

My realization is, “Awareness comes in a spiral pattern where we repeatedly pass through a situation until we are ready for the opportunity of change.

*A Flower for God to be published in 2015

Fearless Part of Fear Part 9

Seclusion Hill

In my early training, my spiritual teacher, David, told me that as a witch I’d been thrown off a cliff many times. Whether standing well-behind my partner who peered over the rim of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico or back from my husband’s and my 4th floor apartment’s balcony railing in Washington D.C., I was resisting, only partially successfully, my body’s rising feeling of disappearing below (and including) my knees. In Arizona, once driving high, sinuous roads edging deep chasms with my younger daughter, I imagined my legs extending through the car, deep beneath the asphalt, dragging against the car’s slow speed.

On a Sunday morning I returned to climb Seclusion Hill behind Meherazad, where Meher Baba’s one remaining mandali, disciple, lived. I had done this climb seventeen years before on my first pilgrimage to Meherabad and only once since. I wrote about that climb in “Craggy Steps,” describing my feeling at seventy-one as “unsure” then “empowered” and “gingerly sitting within a meter of the top,” until with my bottom firmly on rock I could “relax” and “enjoy” the surrounding agricultural valley.

Needing photos for that story, I made a second trip and this time my confidence was high. My feet eagerly and competently followed the path to reach the narrow width on top, an arm of rock extending beyond where I’d first sat, the hill dropping steeply away on both sides. To my amazement, I walked within a body’s length of the end, for the first time in my life feeling—fearless.

My realization is, “We live with experiences over which we appear to have no control, yet by guidance beyond rational explanation, we may change through that interrelationship and our intent and effort.”

Leaving

In the garden
the moving van’s dust
butterflies gather

Each time I revisited, many years later, a home that I’d loved, I felt upset and sad because of the changes from what I remembered. Gone was the copper beech I climbed. Gone was my grandparents’ attic of dusty, plain boards where I secretly played. Gone were our back steps leading to a grassy, gravel drive and an old, single car garage—charming in its leaning. Gone was the screened porch of the beach cottage with a high faucet out back to shower under pines after dark.

My discovery of spiritual views began in my late forties when I joined A Course in Miracles, and by my fifties, I had written a simple lullaby, “I live in the heart of God …” New spiritual thoughts that created the song were loosening my grip on the familiar and loved aspects of my different homes. Gradually I accepted that a few memories and a few photos were—just enough.

When younger, my teenage grandson, on my visit to America, asked me where my home was. I lived in Florida but I answered here, explaining that each home I went to became my home. While it left me pausing at night to remember on which side of the bed to get off to go to the bathroom, it developed my ability to adjust while I held within me that I am my own home and my true home is—in God.

My realization is, “Facing change, we have an opportunity to draw from and integrate the worldly and the spiritual—taking from each what strengthens, supports, and comforts.”