Debra Basham

Living and Loving

Tag: COVID-19

  • Hand-in-Hand

    With all that takes place in our lives,
    it can sometimes be easy to overlook the fact that
    we’re part of something greater than ourselves —
    a collective consciousness, the Universe, a greater cause.

    ~ Daily Om

    The March 2021 skies over Pine Island, near Ft. Myers, in Southwest Florida (winter home of this snowbird) demonstrate a very important fact: light is present within darkness.


    During the past few weeks of “the season,” instead of the usual blue skies, the horizon was often dotted with dark, billowy, ominous-looking bumps of clouds with amazing streams of light simultaneously peeking out. Some clear, some bright, some pinkish-orange enough to resemble remnants of a dwindling campfire…. Those glowing embers that you only see late, late—late enough that you think you should give up and go to bed. Despite the chill, you are drawn to sit where you are as a witness to what is dying.

    For the past three years I have been in a study group looking at the spiritual phenomena of light within the darkness.

    I am attending and helping Zoom host a meditation retreat this week.


    As I was doing walking meditation early, I saw a black stone on the sidewalk. I noticed it but did not pick it up. Continuing, about half a block up, also on the sidewalk, I found a white stone. Neither of these were located with anything similar nearby. Seeing the white stone, I looped back and also picked up the black one. Light in the darkness.


    ((Confession, this is an article scheduled for publication in May. But the time for me to share it with you is NOW.))

    Every religion, Western and Eastern philosophy, and each individual artistic world view provides commentary on this subject of light in the darkness.

      The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. John 1:5

      Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness. Anne Frank

      I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars. Og Mandino

      We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. Plato

      Don’t fight darkness – bring the light, and darkness will disappear. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

    In an audio presentation, Living and Dying, Ram Dass says about his work with people as they were dying: I watch some people who are able to open to the new stage and say, “Ah, so….” and those people don’t suffer. And then I watch somebody who looks at the shoes in the closet that they’ll never wear again and sits around feeling sorry because they can’t wear the shoes anymore. They’re holding onto the model of who they were a moment ago. A moment ago, they were somebody wearing those shoes, and now they are not wearing those shoes.

    I have been wondering about a similar phenomenon related to the pandemic. It is undeniable that the coronavirus has brough considerable darkness. (Another of our friends passed the day I was writing this article, in Florida, and then a 42-year-old relative, father-of-five, in Michigan.)

    Have you also been able to see the light this global pandemic has brought to you over this last year?

    My online search of “benefits of the pandemic” produced a lot of evidence of light within the darkness. Reduction of the carbon foot print made every list I read. Improved health and cost-savings from less eating out and more home-cooked meals was another. Parents spending more time with children; partners having more time together; time for reflection and opportunity to reevaluate your life. Within each of these is both light and darkness.

    It has been said about picking up a stick: you pick up both ends.

    What Buddhism calls wisdom mind is the recognition that only light has ultimate reality. Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, says you do not go into a room and look for a “dark” switch. The switch you are searching for is the “light” switch. Of course, with that switch you are either turning the light on or off….

    Ram Dass wrote of a friend’s passing.

    “Well, you know what I know. Probably I won’t see you again in this body, so, stay conscious.” And I left.

    Her husband called me the next morning at 7:30, and said she died during the night.

    And he said her dying was just like ink being poured into water. It was just expanding outward. He said, “I came away from her death with one of the deepest experiences of peace I’d ever had in my life.”

    We are a collective witness to the dark and the light, to what is being born and what is dying.

    Some individuals have hated working from home. Some students have been miserable with online schooling. Some of us have grown calmer, others catastrophically chaotic. Attitudes reflect the moment-by-moment position of the light switch.

    Less and less frequently do I hear people yearning for things to get back to normal, but often people express specifics of what they are eager to resume. I made up a set of rules for “distant dominoes” with good friends that live down the street from us in Michigan and also winter on the same street in Florida.

    While in Florida, the four of us drove across the state to receive our first (and second) vaccines. We expressed excitement to once again safely play dominoes by the original Basham house rules, sitting around a table touching the tiles. We agreed we will all likely needed a refresher….

    This snowbird gleefully anticipated being able to meet our great-grandson, Jackson (born December 28), on our trek north. I could almost smell his baby breath. Almost feel the weight of him. Almost hear his coo….

    *Note – It was exquisite!


    Awareness of the collective “benefit” of our collective glee, relief, appreciation, and joy almost takes my breath away….

    Just as those clouds on the Florida horizon revealed the truth of light within the darkness, we are a collective witness to the dying of what was and the collective welcoming of what is.

    We have no need to fret over an unworn pair of shoes.

    We can join together and blissfully walk barefoot hand-in-hand on the beach….

  • Muy agradecida. Muy agradecido.

    How can I wish for myself
    what I do not wish for everybody,
    including those I think of
    as my worst enemies?

    ~ Aaron

    Another drive across the state of Florida, this time for our second vaccine, and this time we know where we are going. We are going to an ALL Spanish-speaking pharmacy near Miami. (See: A Dios Mio )

    I have been transcribing Ram Dass speaking about Living and Dying.

    So, now once you want to be free—at first you want to hang out with people that keep you high—later, you want to confront the fires that catch you, you want to purify through those fires. You just find yourself drawn towards the things that are still catching you, so that you can get to the point where you can be in them but not lost in them. Where you can keep your space even when you’re in them.

    And dying is one of the big ones that sucks everybody in, and so part of the work is developing the ability to be with somebody that’s dying, or be dying yourself, and stay very clear and very present because those that are from religions that focus on the moment of death, which is most of the religions that have reincarnation in them, see life as a preparation for the moment of death

    Many people in this culture don’t want to talk about death. They resist aging. They want an easy way out of something that is inescapable. So, there is suffering….

    Our Canadian friends, Davey and Eli, had to leave Florida and go back to Canada or risk losing their medical coverage because he had been hospitalized with diverticulitis. The night before they left, we rang their doorbell, stepped back, and when Davey opened the door, John and I began to sing: Davey, Davey, give us your answer true, we’re half crazy, all for the love of you. Courtney’s won’t be a stylish marriage, without you there in your carriage, and we’ll be switched if she’ll be hitched without Davey and Eli there, too.

    His eyes met mine…. and he said softly, “The best part of your singing was getting to see your smile.”

    Davey has not seen me without a mask for over a year now.

    Dass says any time there is suffering, it’s a clue to where your mind is holding.

    My mind is holding to the question of how to see/be with my family (and meet our new great-grandson, Jackson) who are all in Tennessee. It is right on the way from Florida to Michigan. Visiting with them has always been what made leaving Florida something to be embraced. We saw Stacey and Doug and Adam and Brad and Christina briefly on the way down, but we have not seen our grand-daughter, Courtney, since November 2019. We have yet to meet the baby in person. We long for things to be normal again. To see smiling faces. To eat at the same table. To touch the same playing cards as I win 500 Rummy….

    We will do what we can to help us all be able to gather again without fear of getting or giving a virus that humans don’t yet have herd immunity toward. A virus that ended the life of our grand-daughter’s other grandpa. Paw Paw was in the hospital with the coronavirus and he did not get to meet Jackson.

    How can I wish for myself what I do not wish for everybody?

    Dass says when Mahatma Gandhi was dying he walked out into his yard, an assassin shot him three times. Our image of an assassin in America – we think of the Kennedy brothers, Martin Luther King, always there is horror and violence connected with it, and we imagine (if we can the imagine) that the moment someone is shot they are stunned or confused. Gandhi had just as much time as the others when he was shot, but when he was shot and falls over he just says, “Ram.” He goes out on the name of God.

    We, too, go out on the name of God. We will again drive to Florida’s East Coast.

    And for that we are very grateful….

    Muy agradecida. Muy agradecido.

  • A Dios Mio

    Imagine our surprise to realize we had arrived at an ALL (perhaps I should say ONLY) Spanish-speaking pharmacy for our first covid vaccine in Hialeah, Florida, on Monday….

    I would be lying if I said I was not nervous.

    Hell, I was nervous before we drove across the state of Florida.

    Seeing where we were was just the next step!

    I was tapping away on the side of my hand.



    Sheldon Kopp (29 March 1929 – 29 March 1999) was a psychotherapist and author, based in Washington, D.C. Very powerful hint to his person-hood that his month and day of birth is the same as his month and day of transition….

    What I most remember Sheldon for is “An Eschatological Laundry List: A Partial Register of the 927 (or was 928?) Eternal Truths. .” Specifically # 33.

      All important decisions must be made on the basis of insufficient data.

    We did not know the CVS pharmacy we had registered at for our vaccines was in a Cuban-American community.

    We did not know you could confuse Preparation H with tooth paste if you did not read Spanish.


    We did not know we would be treated with kindness and patience, but we were.

    In English “a dios mio” means “Oh, my goodness.” If the “D” is capitalized, it means, “Oh, God….”

    # 32 is probably worth noting as well. We must live with the ambiguity of partial freedom, partial power, and partial knowledge.

    Of course, things are more obvious now.

    I hope you will take time to read the whole laundry list from If you meet the Buddha on the Road kill him, by Sheldon Kopp. (Sheldon Press, London, 1974, pages 165-167)

    I don’t know if the typos are on purpose but # 43 reminds us to forgive ourselves again and again and again and again….

  • DO What YOU Can

    “I don’t know what your destiny will be,
    but one thing I do know:
    The ones among you who will be really happy
    are those who have sought and found how to serve.”
    ~ Albert Schweitzer

    Tapping with Scarlett Lewis of The Forgiveness Project during the World Tapping Summit, my heart opened deeply related to a stream of past energies. Scarlett’s 6-year-old son, Jesse, was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in the deadliest mass shooting at a school in U.S. history.

    Interestingly, soon after tapping in forgiveness with Scarlett I was gifted some precious stories demonstrating what happens when you do what YOU can do.

      Leaving work late, “K” had to use the maintenance door at the back of the building. The cement stairwell was packed with snow but there sat a fat toad! As she picked the toad up, he was very cold but his eyes fluttered open briefly.

      That toad rode home in her passenger seat. She “turned the heat off and the music down.” He was safely placed in her monarch cage before she searched how to care for toads in captivity. Following instructions, she added a pan of sand and a bowl of water. The next morning he had dug down in the sand and covered himself with leaves. “K” put him in a dark cool part of house and he remains in hibernation. If he wakes, she will feed him. She hopes to keep him until spring and release him.

    “K” did what she could do. She truly is a shaman. I sent her the toad totem meaning: Toads have always been ascribed supernatural powers and they are believed to have a special connection with invisible dark forces we people cannot understand.

      “BJ” is a CNA working in hospice care. Covid-19 has certainly had an impact on patients and those who care for them. Standing at the bedside (gowned, masked, and gloved), a dying patient looked into her eyes and said, “Can I please hold your hands?” She felt like she was being touched by an angel for those short moments the patient held her hands before thanking her, and afterwards found a quiet place to reflect.



    “BJ” just does what she can do. Every day she is present with patients, family members, co-workers and HERSELF, providing support and a safe space.

      “A” also does what she can do. “A” just turned one-year-old.

      Born at the beginning of the pandemic, she has spent her life without many of the things we had believed we needed to be happy.

      But, at just 12 months old, “A” can wave and say bye-bye.

      Her mother sent a video of her waving and saying bye-bye over and over! It was soooooo cute.

      And then her mother asked if she wanted to say be happy. “A” smiled her biggest world-winning smile right into the camera and said clearly, “BE HAPPY!”

    You can only imagine what gifts “A” will bring the world as she continues to grow…

    We are not expected to do it all.

    We are not expected to do it right.

    We are invited to seek and find ways to serve and to be happy.

    The surest way to do that is to just DO What YOU Can….

  • Repercussions and Moral Awareness

    We are all volunteers, come to awaken ourselves and all human beings. ~ Aaron

    A pithy line from the story of Joseph and his coat of many colors in the Hebrew Old Testament has been working on my heart. The story is familiar to many: Joseph, the youngest son and his father’s favorite, was given the special coat that had been (according to patriarchal tradition) owed to the eldest son. Joseph’s brothers were insulted, enraged, and vengeful. They sold Joseph into slavery and told their father Joseph had been killed.

    The karmic wheel is always turning.

    Joseph won favor with the Egyptian Pharaoh, and was put in charge of all of the stores of food. Years later, Joseph’s brothers came to Egypt desiring to buy food because of the famine. Imagine their shock to see the brother they had abused be the one in charge!

    Joseph could have justifiably responded in myriad ways, but Joseph responded from AWARENESS: As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. ~ Genesis 50:20

    In my awareness, Joseph’s story was related to yet another covid death. Two days after our granddaughter, Courtney Ross, gave birth to our great-grandson, Jackson, her other great-grandfather died from covid-related pneumonia. RIP: George Ross.

    The mask and safe-distancing polarization…. Knowing many in that family continue to gather without precautions. I saw those as the “You meant evil.” I could also see the perfection of the timing – just a couple of days after Jackson’s birth. Many ancient cultures recognize the perfection of the coming in and passing on which happens in families.

    I could also see a gift that—being so soon after Jackson’s birth—his mom would not go to be with the extended family and take him, possibly exposing herself or him to the virus. I have been easy to tears about everything.

    Joy without sorrow would be hollow: having without losing. ~ Aaron

    My friend, Patty, recently lost her mother to covid-related heart failure. Her brother (an anti-masker) exposed Alma. Yes, she was 97, and Courtney’s grandfather was 90 — but both were fully engaged in life, both vital at those ages. Patty’s pain continued as her family was split in how to celebrate their mother’s life. Patty and some of her siblings not seeing it as responsible, made the difficult choice not to attend a large public gathering insisted on by other siblings.

    The karmic wheel of action was different for each.

    “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” ~ Romans 8:28

    It is possible to see the good/gift/perfection without denying the responsibility of an unwholesome action, as spoken recently in the dharma teachings: That was the first time I recognized my choices had repercussions in the world: I had the power to do good or to do harm.

    A Buddhist articulation of life describes Sila, or moral awareness, as “right view” (Eight-Fold Path): the seeing of things just as they are.

    It is said that in Hindi India the idea, “Oh, the gods willed it,” holds a lot of devotion, but not much responsibility. Regardless of what else is there, you are responsible for your choices as each choice has repercussions….

    My choice is to not give or get the coronavirus, if I can help it. Their are repercussions to every choice, such as my friend missing her mom’s funeral.

    The shadow is no less an aspect of the divine than the light.

  • 2021 – A True Spiritual Path

    Deep Spring Center
    Thought for Today
    December 31, 2020

    So often beings have a
    limited view of spiritual life
    that creates a duality in themselves,
    so that they only see themselves
    as ‘being spiritual’
    when they’re being kind and loving.

    When painful emotions arise,
    then they think,
    ‘I am no longer being spiritual.
    I should fix or get rid of these emotions
    and come back to kindness and
    then I will be spiritual.’

    But this dualistic thinking only
    enhances the fragmentation of the self and
    enhances negativity and suffering.

    To open the heart to the self,
    just as it is in this moment,
    is the true spiritual path.

    ~ Aaron

    As we turn the page on our calendar to 2021 at midnight tonight where ever you are, hindsight will be 2020. New Years has held a nostalgic space in my heart and mind for as long as I can remember, but just as 2021 offers unlimited possibilities, tomorrow is also just another day.

    What will you remember most from the past year? High on my list is the consistent kindness and generosity of our friends, Linda and Larry, consistently doing our grocery shopping for us. First, using InstaCart, and then going to the grocery store, just so we could limit our exposure to the coronavirus.

    I will remember the blessing of Zoom bringing the meditation hall into my home.

    I will also feel the sting of not going to Tennessee to visit Stacey’s family on our way home in April. Or having to tell Melody I could not do an in-person ceremony for her mom, my friend and colleague, who contracted COVID-19 while in the hospital with acute pancreatitis. Bonnie passed without Melody or Dan, Bonnie’s husband, having opportunity to be with her.

    No service of celebration of life for Fred Gibby yet either. They say it will be an ultimate hug-fest when the time is right. and Fred loves that idea!

    It is otherworldly to not have gotten to Kalamazoo to see Joel and the kitties; and very hollow that I did not unpack the office when contents were moved to the beautiful new space at Lakeshore Acupuncture.

    Immense gratitude for Barbara Brodsky and John Orr and Aaron and Jeshua (and all who help me remember who I really am) seeps deeply into every day.

    The take-out dinners and dominoes by Zoom.

    And now, Jackson Taylor Yarber, born December 28, 2020, has joined our family, and I am loving my first great-grandchild fully from Southwest Florida as he is in Tennessee. Fingers crossed it will be safe to hold him and smell him on our way back home in the spring.


    In the spring — the spring of 2021!

    It feels otherworldly to say that…

    2020 is ending.

    2021 is beginning.

    Suddenly, I am hearing a song from the musical Godspell in my head: Where are you going? Where are you going? Can you take me with you?

    Last December I was fixated on accessing a Magic Eye Wall Calendar! When I found one, I decided to gift a bunch of folks! Janis and I have ritualized the turning of the page on the first day of each month, letting the image come into view, noticing how some are very easy and others quite challenging.

    Interestingly, there will not be a Magic Eye Wall Calendar for 2021, as announced on the website: Our calendar publisher has asked us to wait until next year to publish a Magic Eye 2022 wall calendar, as printing, shipping and distribution channels have all been disrupted by Covid-19. We will not be releasing a Magic Eye 2021 wall calendar. Wishing everyone a happy & safe year!

    Janis and I have agreed to go back through each month of the 2020 Magic Eye Wall Calendar, enjoying again in 2021 what we learned in 2020.

    The missing and longing, and seeing and being. It has all been here all along.

    Here’s to 2021, a true spiritual path. It, too, has been there all along….

    “If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.” ~ Joseph Campbell

  • LOVE Came Down at Christmas

    I am grateful John and I had a practice run at not being physically with Stacey and her family for Christmas in 2019.

    Last year we attended a Christmas Day potluck at Pine Island Cove with Michigan friends, Linda and Fred, who also winter here in Florida.

    This year, John and I share our day with all of you in our hearts.


    Our hearts are uplifted by the truth: “We isolate this year so that when we can meet again next year no one will be missing.”

    Today, our home-away-from-home may be empty of friends and family, but my heart is full of love for each of you!

    Our hearts are filled with memories!

    Our hearts are warmed by Christmases past.

    Our hearts are nourished with the true meaning of Christmas:

      That Mary and Joseph—Mary heavy with child—traveled through the countryside.

      She was at the time of giving birth to the child.

      They found shelter, simple shelter.

      And many beings experiencing, “The light has been born! Ah… The light is back!”

      It wasn’t me, it was more that my birth opened the doorway so that the Heavenly light—the Love, the remembrance of Love—could pour through.

      What was that star? Let us metaphorically call it an opening in the dark heavens where the remembrance of light and Love could pour through—pour through to where I lay as an infant, not to highlight me but to remind humans nothing is hopeless.

      Light IS.

      Love IS.

      And it is right here.

      And it was pointing at me, but it could be pointing at any of you.

      Here is the ground of love and light.

      And the earth sang, “Halleluiah!” not for my birth but for the remembrance: LIGHT IS, LOVE IS.*

    * Jeshua, channeled by Barbara Brodsky on Christmas Eve 2020, sharing some thoughts about what Christmas means to him and how we can carry the meaning of Christmas through to our times.

  • Two Wings of Mindfulness

    Deep Spring Center
    Thought for Today

    If one never were to experience this
    dark night of the soul,
    one’s compassion
    really would be limited.

    One may have a belief,
    ‘I can be compassionate
    with that which is light
    and beautiful and loving
    in myself and others’
    but one has never tested it
    to see if
    one can also extend that compassion,
    even to the utmost of darkness.

    ~ Aaron

    This morning I did something I rarely do. I followed a link and read an article after the headline caught my attention: Deadliest place in America: They shrugged off the pandemic, then their family and friends started dying.

    Dinkel says too many people are refusing to do their part to protect the elderly from COVID-19.

    “To sit there and say they are old that they will die of something,” she says, “Well, they wouldn’t have died of the flu. My dad wouldn’t have been in the hospital for a month if this was the flu.”

    Despite the efforts of local public health officials and experts, many residents aren’t taking the deadly pandemic seriously. Bearded farmers stride defiantly down Main Street past signs requiring them to wear masks. School is still in session and churches are open. Someone threatened to blow up the home of a pro-mask county commissioner.

    Nicholson, the ambulance worker, is also co-owner of a restaurant and brewery on Main Street, and she’s had customers swear they’ll never come back after she reminded them to wear a mask when picking up food. She doesn’t want to wade into the middle of a political dispute. She just wants her neighbors to live.

    But this post is not about COVID-19, even though four of our high-school classmates died of the coronavirus in just one week at home.

    This post is about how mindfulness is like a bird — both need two wings to fly. The two wings of mindfulness are wisdom (clear seeing) and compassion.

    Compassion is a result of seeing life’s experience clearly, therefore not everyone’s experience generates compassion. Life’s experiences reveal our world view.

    The people in the deadliest place in America justify not wearing masks by saying the people who are dying are old, and people die in God’s time. The kernel of truth in not only toxic, it is deadly.

    Sunday morning I went to the only grocery store here on the island. I had read “masks required” on the ad, and I checked out the website of the company to read the same thing. “Masks required” was also on the entry doors. However, customers were coming in and shopping and getting service without a mask.

    Numbers in this small community on the south end of the island are climbing, yet, the Ragged Ass Saloon still hosts live music and welcomes wall-to-wall (if you can use that term about a parking lot) patrons not wearing masks or maintaining safe distancing.

    As human beings, we all try our best to bring about a world based on kindness and compassion. What seems to go wrong, however, is that what I want, what I personally would like, becomes more important than the benefit of the whole community.

    Yes, death will come to each of us. That is not failure. The bloom is the bud’s undoing…

    We are capable of spreading our wings and soaring to the heights of wisdom and compassion.

    As the Buddha said, “If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it.”

  • “Keeping Quiet”

      Deep Spring Center
      Thought for Today

      When you stay in the relative reality box, you create the kind of fights with each other, ‘I’m right.’ ‘No, I’m right.’ ‘No, I’m right.’ You can’t hear each other. You become more and more polarized. And this of course is consonant with the lower stages of consciousness, the magical consciousness that believes that somehow it can prove to everybody that it’s always right. I think you all know that one! If you don’t remember it in your own experience, go and find a 2-year-old. It’s very much engrossed in the magical consciousness and very certain that it’s always right. Slowly you begin to open out, and as the stage of consciousness rises you move more into the openness that can view infinite possibilities. ~ Aaron

    From my journal this morning:

    D: I fully recognize the thought, “when I make a choice that is right for me, it is right for everyone,” as a relative reality thought. The thought holds a subtle distortion because of the separate self.

    What is whispering to me is awareness of the interconnection of everything. Like waves in an ocean.

    So how do I navigate?

    V: The awakened heart knows one person is planning a picnic — a big event serving lots of people. A “thank you” event to many, for great service to humanity. That heart also knows the farmers in the region need rain. The time is crucial. The seed has been planted but rain is needed to bring forth the sprout. Many will feed upon the bread made from the farmers’ wheat.

    What happens to support highest good for all beings?

    D: This is exactly what I am asking!

    V: In relative reality, a conflict-of-interest seems to exist. This is not real.

    Imagine an all-night, slow, steady rain. Imagine the rain nourishing the soil and causing the conditions that bring forth a healthy harvest. Now imagine the sun coming up, a light breeze blows over the face of the earth, drying up the surface moisture. The picnic takes place now on a ground that is well-watered.

    When you are drawn to notice a seeming “conflict-of-interest” simply greet the situation with an open heart, saying, “Hello, Teacher.”

    All of the elements: earth, air, fire, water, and energy — they all know how to collaborate. You are made of these elements. You do know what to do for the highest good of all beings, and harm to none.

    As Aaron says in the opening quotation, slowly, you begin to open out, and as the stage of consciousness rises you move more into the openness that can view infinite possibilities.

    From Neale Donald Walsch:

      On this day of your life I believe God wants you to know that most dramatic conflicts are perhaps those that take place not between men, but between a man and himself.

      What are you battling with right now? What unwanted habit? What undesirable behavior? What old pattern? Claim victory over these, and your entire life can change.

    Last evening I looked up and saw a soft pink haze in the western sky. I stepped out on the front porch and saw a rainbow out to the north. I grabbed my phone and took a photo, and as I turned around the western sky was ablaze with color.


    On May 11, 2020, the poem of the day was “Keeping Quiet” by Pablo Neruda. Please go to Duke Trinity College and read the entire poem. Pablo Neruda, a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. He transitioned from this earth plane in 1973, but “Keeping Quiet” is his perfect gift for us at this time. Sharing here the next to the last stanza:

    If we were not so single-minded
    about keeping our lives moving,
    and for once could do nothing,
    perhaps a huge silence
    might interrupt this sadness
    of never understanding ourselves
    and of threatening ourselves with death.
    Perhaps the earth can teach us
    as when everything seems dead
    and later proves to be alive.

    You will want to visit Duke Trinity College to read the entire poem.

    Michigan has gone back under stay-safe-at-home orders as the numbers of coronavirus cases from community contact skyrocket. This is happening across the globe as the second wave of the pandemic crests.

    Humanity is invited by this “teacher” to view infinite possibilities as we are keeping quiet….

  • Poetry – Brandon Leake’s Got Talent!

    Anyone who lives art knows that psychoanalysis has
    no monopoly on the power to heal.

    Art and poetry have always been altering our ways
    of sensing and feeling
    — that is to say,
    altering the human body.

    ~Norman O. Brown

    Reality TV, like everything else in this human incarnation, has its ups and down, strengths and weaknesses, benefits and costs. This year’s America’s Got Talent cost me a lot of tears.

    As a poet myself, I am no stranger to the experience of having words make me cry. And this year’s AGT winner, poet Brandon Leake, touched the world with words like “Pookie” and “generational healing” and “no more time left for fear” and “you are so much stronger than you think” and “as soon as Covid hit, everything changed.”

    Here is a link to a significant 14 minutes and 11 seconds: ALL of Brandon Leake’s Performances on Season 15 of AGT! on Youtube.

    Brandon Leake said it best, “As soon as Covid hit, everything changed.”

    Last evening I shared a meal at a table with someone other than John for the first time since March 15, 2020. Interestingly, I knew before I got the call inviting us that I would be doing that. Even so, it was not an easy decision when I learned that four households would be gathered!

    I sent a text message to my friend:

      Honest answer: Are you expecting/asking guests to arrive in masks for pre-dinner conversation; remove masks for eating (6 feet or more distance); and to put masks back on for any after-dinner conversation?

    She responded:

      Absolutely. And they all follow these guidelines all the time, the best I can know.

    I wrote back:

      We will see you there.

    I cried when I read her next message:

      I love you and appreciate your process in getting to this decision. ❤️🙏😷

    You see, this was not just four households selected willy-nilly because we are going stir-crazy. These were two of our dearest friends hosting two other families who had been touched by recent loss. We share deep connections through church and loss and Covid.

    Seated to my right is a mother and her beautiful adult daughter, who is currently living with her mom. Their husband and father died late May of a post-Covid complication: stroke. They were unable to be with him as he was moved from facility to facility, until the very last hours of his life in this body. After he passed, they were unable to gather with friends and family to celebrate his life.

    Across from John and me were our hosts. Her mother passed just weeks ago… and they, too, have been unable to gather with friends and family for a formal Celebration of Life.

    The fourth household is a woman seated alone. She just lost her husband to Alzheimer’s disease, after having kept him at home as long as humanly possible, evidenced by the fact that he lived only a very short time once moved to a facility. Everyone at his visitation and funeral were required to wear masks and social distance.

    The serving table stretched about 12 feet with concrete landscaping blocks strategically placed to hold down autumn-colored table cloths. Placed around the perimeter are seven TV trays; each adorned with a brightly colored place setting. Cloth napkins compliment the loving atmosphere. I hear the words from the communion liturgy inside my head telling me this table has been prepared for you.

    The warm autumn wind was blowing as “Eau de Cologne” of garlic wafted from the house.

    After a feast fit for royalty, it was already dark as we slowly rose from the table. It was awkward to not help clear the table, go into the house to help load the dishwasher and wash the pots and pans. We were obviously all grateful for what we were able to share but also profoundly aware how very difficult it was to say goodbye without hugs. The desire rose up in my chest and left a lump in my throat.

    Today I see this message from another friend, along with the photo:

      Here’s my two flightless friends — Rowdy, who can’t fly but ran five miles at 4 a.m. and this monarch who hatched on Monday with imperfect wings. So he hangs out in my office on fresh flowers during the week and here at home on weekends. I feed him sugar water 1-2x day. Rowdy is getting used to sharing his home with a monarch companion.


    Just as Rowdy is getting used to sharing his home with a strange companion, we are getting used to sharing our lives with this pandemic….