So I get to work Monday and the first thing that happens is, this long-time adjunct quits. I'm thinking, bad news, since finding someone to teach one class per term in the middle of nowhere (no, we don't pay mileage) is always a royal pain.
Next thing that happens is-- I forget. It wasn't as bad as the next thing but it was better than the first.
Then within minutes we get this incoherent, scary phone call from a faculty member who's been in poor health for years. She's making not much sense but it sounds like we need to get over to her house pronto, which we do and then spend about an hour and a half convincing her we should call 911. The paramedics had been called out to her house a couple nights earlier but she'd waved them imperiously away. So finally we call them again and then they come and also try to convince her she should go to the hospital and finally away she goes. It's lunchtime.
Instead of punching the wall and wailing "Why? Why? Why?" in rhythm with the futile blows (what I feel like doing), I keep saying to Kali, "I love You. You're here with me. You live in my heart. Help me to live as Your child." This has become surprisingly easy over the years-- even remembering, in the midst of confusion or fear, there was a God used to take immense effort if I could do it at all. Often it's hard still.
I'm trying to live in my heart chakra: breathe my lust or the taste of chocolate cake or my fear or the blue sky and spring flowers into the anahata, or just trying to focus my consciousness there, that place where compass and square, Shiva and Shakti, meet. I've lived the other way, in that grim parallel universe centered upon myself, and I have to say this is better... a lot better.
* * *
Sophia asks me if I'm not nostalgic for the pre-kids, pre-married life, the one where I lived five minutes from work and could sit around infinitely long savoring exquisite liqeurs and fingering my astrolabe, and I have to say I don't think about it for one minute. It isn't that I think life in the suburbs with kids is the Superior Way, but it's the way for me, weirdly enough, a way I'd never have considered for a nanosecond had it not been for that Guardian Angel of mine... Who never pushes or tells me what to, but Who just urges me to be present for my life and to listen to my true will in the fulness of Now.
It is scary to let yourself into the house of your friend with whom you tried to talk on the phone 30 minutes ago and who couldn't make herself understood, not knowing what you'll find and not knowing much else except you don't know what to do... but it is far scarier, for some reason, to be in the present moment, to loose the banners of one's fancy and self-concept and just be here. It's scary in some way or other to sit here at the kitchen counter on this day of leave without pay (my school is really broke), minding the kids, who are on spring break, but thinking about how I have no marketable skills whatsoever and how my 10-years-ago prophecy of the death of higher education really does seem 10 years closer to fulfillment (I know of more than one university with colleges of "hotel, restaurant, and tourism management" -- not just a major stuck somewhere in the business school, but a college of such stuff... and despite last November's glorious election, my state is still a bastion of GOP anti-all-education-except-home-schoolin'-ism...)
All this is scary and the shaky world out there beyond the ivy walls and the suburbs is infinitely more scary and that parallel universe where I'm God is scariest of all... but I have an Angel Whose white hands dispel the fear, Whose holy Word is a word of unity, a Word that rings out the impossibility of separation from God. Your Angel, too, beckons you to the temple of the mystery, your own heart.
* * *
The kids have not fought all day! Except once, sort of. James has barely even mentioned his new DS (he's grounded). Molly has been energetically cleaning her room. There is a God! But I knew that... but I'll always be learning it...
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