Remembrance

Today is November 11. Remembrance Day when we honour the Veterans who gave their lives in a war.

Where I grew up, in London England, during the 50s, the city was still pock-marked by bombs that had been dropped there during the Blitz. Since I'd never before experienced bomb-sites, my seven-year old self was rather overwhelmed by them, and astonished by the untidiness of the destroyed home-sites.

It never occurred to me, then, that people probably died there, that another little girl and her brothers and sisters might have died, or might have lost their Mother and Father during that bombing raid.

With no personal reference to the horror or war, I was fascinated when neighbourhood friends showed me a way through those parentally forbidden bomb-sites, that would shorten my daily trek to school.  They showed me where to step to maintain a safe route, and warned that a child had been blown up by straying from it. 

As a girl, the havoc that an unexploded missile might wreak should I accidentally tread on one, didn't even enter my mind. Nor did I consider the homes that had been destroyed by those bombs, all those years before I'd even been born.

My worst nightmare was swallowing the tablespoonful of cod-liver oil my Mother forced upon me each morning. Yet, without the sacrifices represented by that forlorn bomb-site, I might not have had that cod-liver oil, nor a school to attend, nor even the freedom to attend it.

My generation takes freedom for granted, and rarely ever stops to consider who paid the piper on our behalf.  But War affects everyone, and many people, besides soldiers pay the price. As the saying goes:

"They also serve who stand and wait" 

What did you do in the war, Mum and Dad?

That was the question many children my age asked, but their parents were reluctant to answer.  As the eldest in my family, my parents had been a lot younger than many Fathers of my neighbouring friends. Their Fathers had been actively involved in "fighting the Hun" in France, or at the Battle of the Bulge. 

Both of my parents had still been teenagers, growing up in Bombay, India during WW2.  Had they been involved in the war only as a terrified spectators?  Not the way they tell it!

My Mother spent much of the year away from the city in her Himalayan private school.  But in 1940, and for every school "holiday" during wartime, Mom volunteered at the hospital where they treated the battlefield wounded, brought into the city for medical care.

Never squeamish, she so abhorred the waste of human flesh, through amputation, that she told her Father she wanted  to become a surgeon. "NO" said Grandfather. No daughter of his would be a surgeon. And since his word was LAW, Mom later studied to become a teacher instead.

My Father had completed secondary school by 1942, and although he was old enough to join the armed forces, was denied that experience because of his poor eyesight. Instead, thickly bespectacled Dad articled as an accounting clerk at the Bombay Docks in the latter days of World War 2, where he survived many air-raids, simply because his youthful legs could quickly carry him away from the carnage.  But he told me horror stories about those whose legs were not as swift.

From his dockside office, the 18 year old young man, who was to become my Father, got more than a glimpse of the effects that war can have on the average person. Many of the ships in the Bombay docks carried raw cotton, bound for England's mills before being shipped to other war zones, to replenish clothing, bedding and bandages.

Whenever a cotton ship was bombed, it exploded beyond violently, sending contorted white-hot sheets of metal flying in all directions.  Those working on the docks ran for their lives, the minute the air-raid siren sounded. 

But some were not speedy enough.  Dad reports seeing three men running from a white-hot, flying m-shaped curve of metal that cleared the heads of the two outer fellows, but decapitated the man in the middle. That poor man's legs kept running for a few seconds longer, till his headless, lifeless body dropped to the ground.

Both of this man's companions survived, but their glossy black hair turned white from the shock of witnessing their friend's gruesome sudden death. Then Dad explained that, as awful as those dockside explosions and their aftermath had been, battlefield experiences were more unspeakably violent and gory.

Today, I am remembering those in my own family who have been directly, and indirectly, involved in war. We are indebted to those who have sacrificed their lives through war, to maintain the freedoms of and for future generations. May the light of their courageous souls shine gratefully in our hearts forever.

• My English Grandfather fought in Crimea in 1917 during WW1, during the collapse of czarist Russia. He was demobbed in Bombay, where he met and married my Grandmother who later gave birth to my Dad. Grandfather was to suffer the after-effects of physical ailments and shell-shock for the rest of his life.
• My Father, excused duty for medical reasons, had lived through the continual bombing of Bombay Docks. He rarely talked about those experiences. Yet the war definitely affected his parenting ability and style. Out of necessity, Dad's freedoms had been curtailed during his teens. As a Father, he was unable to understand and unwilling to sanction my own teenage quest for "freedom". The strain of raising three such willful daughters was evidently too much for him, since Dad died shortly before my 16th birthday.
• My Generation had the luxury of peace and Greenpeace in which to protest war and warmongers. But we rarely thought about how that peace had been hard won - or by whom. Beyond that bombsite of my early days, and what came into our living room via the TV - or from the letters of my American pen-pal, war did not seem to, personally, affect me.
• Coming full circle, after 50 years of peace in the West, the next generation is now free to exhibit a love of war "games". By combing army surplus stores, my son kitted himself out and enjoyed many an afternoon of pitting his team against another team set both bent on mock annihilation on a wooded hillside in Langley, near Vancouver, BC.  I wonder if he realizes the irony of his recreational choice?

I hope my children, their friends - and our ruling elite - realize that our freedoms have been pre-purchased for us by real soldiers, airmen and sailors, young men and women who paid the ultimate price so that we can now live life as we see fit.  Regardless of how distasteful the concept may be, it is why western children can now safely "play" at "war games" instead of fighting a "war to end all wars".

I pray also that children who must fight every day, just to survive in our commercially obsessed world will soon enjoy the same Freedoms that our own offspring now take for granted.

Practising gratitude will open your own heart and the hearts of others

And open hearts have no need of war

Namaste

Transformation

Part 1: THE TEST:  SHINGLES!

The severity of the pain I've experienced lately (with facial shingles) has allowed glimpses of that eternal consciousness to which all energy streams lead. This state has happened unbidden and consciously, while I am in pain and awake, but also in dreamland.

It is hard to describe because so many of our descriptions are about the edges of "things" or "experiences" and not about their entirety, which encompasses energies beyond human consciousness. I experienced colours, sounds, aromas, tastes and textures (including my essence or being) as being mingled together. And in that blinding pain, I understood that our human need to categorize these different aspects of the ONE into separate experiences is odd since they are all ONE energy, continuously flowing through and around and beyond, timelessly and formlessly, until directed by Will.

The pain of shingles is something I would not wish on my worst enemy. And yet, when I was not ABLE to think coherently, I became very aware that there is no time or space, and everything that was, exists now and will always exist. Time itself was/is the illusion. So why did I feel the burn of this dread shingles virus for four solid months? Was my pain an illusion too?

I find it interesting that I chose to experience extreme physical pain WHILE realizing it is only our worldly perception that creates limitations of time and space. Knowing this Truth intuitively and learning it mentally and physically are obviously poles apart in experience. Just as being a part of that Truth consciously is poles apart from knowing it only intuitively.

Oliver Wendell Holmes said that "A mind once stretched by a new horizon never regains its original dimension"  To say my mind has been stretched is an understatement. After a 4 month course of steroids, to control the inflammation, my entire body is bloated and my skin stretched to accommodate it.  Mentally thought, it feels like it's been blasted into, around and through every minute fragment that ever existed in this universe! I'm well and truly pulverized now.

In my experience of the Eternal Now, I saw (and now see) my life and lives as streams of energy. In some I gained, and in some I lost. My current life was also there, glowing but dimly, much to my chagrin! But even as I viewed it, I noticed how my "thoughts/feelings/moods/ideas/experiences" that were all of ONE energy vibration actually did change, significantly, the quality of my current life.

When I returned to 'normal' everyday consciousness, I realized how easy it is to transform oneself, and yet how difficult we make it on ourselves. The quality of our thought is of prime importance. How we talk to ourselves, as well as others; how and why we make our decisions; how we think about our past; how we DECIDE TO SUFFER (the core of my lesson this time around), and how and when we decide to enjoy, without fear, the life we are creating.

If a new depth of wisdom accompanies my recent transformation, then I will surely be led down the path of sharing it, in workshops and through deeper mentoring of individuals. For now, my physical body is still in recovery, so my particular pathway has not yet become evident. But whatever it is, I consciously choose to meet my destiny joyfully and with a renewed sense of serenity.

Part 2:  THE REALIZATION!

I have a type-A personality which means that sitting still for long periods of time, doing nothing is almost impossible for me.  I need to be reading, learning, planning or creating something, because, without that "busy-ness" in my life, I feel impotent, useless and irritable. 

At least, that was all true, before I endured a painful outbreak of shingles.

The itchy, painful lesions primarily affected my scalp, forehead, right eyebrow and eyelid, with, thankfully, only minor involvement of my nose and ear. The swelling in my right eye grew as large as a hen's egg, closing of its own accord, preventing binocular vision.  And the pressure on the delicate tissues of my upper eyelid was immense.  Unable to read or watch TV without discomfort, I slept a great deal, for the first couple of weeks, till the swelling subsided.

A month later, when the lesions had fully healed, I unhappily noted that the former piercing eye and head-aches still continued to plague me. Whenever I tried to read, watch TV or even felt/thought/expressed myself too deeply about a subject, the familiar pain would re-surface causing me to reach for relief from my prescribed narcotic medication.  

Two months later, I have finally weaned from the narcotic medications, but still have to rely on non-addictive help to control the pain. Getting to this point has been a voyage of discovery - about myself, my pain threshold and the joy of being absolutely and gloriously without thought.

Strange though it may sound, being without thought is quite a pleasant experience.  Without the mind's constant chatter to interrupt us, we no longer simply take note of what is around us.  Instead we experience it more directly, more simply and more deeply.

From my living room chair, I am blessed with a postage stamp view of Lake Osoyoos and the sandstone mountain rising from it.   Being confined to my home, I slowly became more able to appreciate aspects of my limited view that I had formerly overlooked, or dismissed as being unimportant to my existence.  I couldn't have been more wrong.

For the first two weeks of this "shingles ordeal", while my eyes were closed, but I was awake, I became more keenly aware of my sound environment.  The world beyond my windows became my orchestra, and each separate sound an instrument that contributed to the concert to which I was treated, when I realized that I already had the "ears to hear". 

The wind painted large swaths of sound, swirling around the corners of nearby buildings, past parked cars, through fences and between trees, raising its pitch as it gained intensity, and then softening to a barely perceptible whisper as each gust died away.  The intermittent growl from the engines of passing vehicles and the cheerful chatter of my neighbours punctuated this soundscape. By mid-afternoon, I could follow the calls of quail as they cruised across our car park, looking for gravel to aid their digestion. 

Occasionally the wind would play a delicate flute-like melody as it danced through the autumn leaves of the tree next door. Sometimes it would furiously whip the lake into a frenzy, making the waves splash wildly against the shoreline, a sound that had not before been audible to me, since I live two blocks from the water.

And then, after one particularly stormy night, I noticed that the melody had changed. 

From the chirping of the few birds who had not yet migrated south for the winter, I knew that the morning had dawned bright and sunny.  So I imagined that the storm, which supplied our desert with much needed fresh water, had also coaxed, from their hidden recesses, the earthworms upon which those happy birds were now feasting.  And then suddenly I realized that, without being busy or manically creative, I was truly happy just to be able to hear all these wonderful sounds of nature.  Just listening was for me then - and has remained still - a treasured pastime.

Had shingles not denied me the easy use of my eyes, I might never have learned to appreciate the different dimensions of the place in which I live.  Even since I regained my sight, I  have been able to identify more sound textures in my ever changing soundscape. The sharp retorts of scolding squirrels punctuate the music like a snare drum, while the short, sharp bark of the dog next door is a discordant note in the symphony.

Even indoor sounds like doorbells and footsteps, speaking voices and running bath-water, crackling candles or mechanical sounds like a working dishwasher added depth to my sound environment.  And the more sounds I was able to identify, the happier I felt.  It was as if another world, that had always been there, had suddenly revealed its secrets to me. 

What did this new experience teach me?  In a word, gratitude.  I found myself being grateful for the ability to hear all these amazing sounds.  And beyond the sounds, I felt gratitude just to be living in this incredibly beautiful place.  It took a horrible, disfiguring condition like shingles to get me to notice it in the first place. But now that I have, I can't wait to hear what tomorrow brings!  Being forced to do nothing can truly a blessing in disguise.