On the Edge- and Asking for Help

Visited a doctor today, many tests, trying to find the source of continuing pain and digestive issues. Coming closer to pancreatic infammation. Not going to get off easy on this whole interesting journey! But there has to be an end in sight and we’ll get there..

29 years ago today was one of our happiest days when our daughter, Lauren, made us grandparents for the first time. Gabrielle Celestine Marie was born in our big old three story home in Fair Oaks. In that grand old home we raised six children, two grandchildren were born there, two grandparents would die there and a Waldorf preschool thrived for many years. Community life held forth in abundance,

Lauren, after a brave labor, brought the baby into the world and what a sweetheart she was, with a head full of black hair. Grandpa was at the door ready to record the ‘exact time‘ the younger brother Colin, devotedly laid the latest stuffed animal he had made in Waldorf school as his precious gift in the baby’s basket, so beautiful with blue and pink ribbons and little rose buds. Gabrielle has a reputation in the family for being one of the prettiest babies ever! She is a lovely young woman, a college graduate working on her masters, currently has a career in marketing and loves running marathons. She is now at a big threshold in her life as the Saturn year is set to unfold!

I have told the first part of Chie’s story in a former chapter. But each time we are together our intertwined life stories deepen and with my recent journey we have been able to shed more spiritual light on the events in our lives and find greater spiritual meaning. I hope I can do justice to this part as it is so central to the themes of ‘Life’ and yet there is the great challenge of finding the words in our material existence for the ‘matters the most of all moments” we have on the threshold and in consciousness awakening events.

Chie, with her impeccable meditative discipline, was carrying me through all my surgery synchronizing it in real time, and in the days beyond the heart surgery when the crisis and ‘almost death’ occurred for me. She said I was in the soul world for two days, being very ill but warmly held there by the loving presence of many souls living on the other side. She saw I was still recovering from the deep soul suffering of our son’s death and struggling with the decision to go or stay. The spirit was ready to go home, the soul was willing to return if it could be of service here longer. The catch on the material plane being the issue of a body that could come through all this. This is exactly what played out in the drama of the ICU days.

In the three precious days Chie and I were together after I came home after more surgery and a month in the hospital, we were sharing deeply and discovering together more awareness about these deep turning points in human life. In Chie’s biography she goes through many doors, courageously moving from one event to another, to honor her parents, and always with a determination to mother her precious son with every ounce of her being. As I wrote before, her mother visited her in Los Angeles in the days when Chie’s baby and only child was first born. Then shockingly, her mother was murdered a week or so after returning to Japan. Chie went to Japan, weeping and nursing her baby and doing deep daily prayers. Her husband abandoned her. She spent hours inscribing large scrolls of ancient prayers in beautiful calligraphy. She supported the detective on the case and police officers in every way she could to help find the one who had done this terrible deed.

When baby Yasuhiro was nine months old, the murderer was caught and brought to justice, and Chie went to her parent’s graves, kneeling, weeping and telling them they now could rest, justice had been done. She felt at least some resolution that as their dutiful daughter, she had done all she could.

That very night when she returned, home Yasuhiro had his first convulsion and was hospitalized. Then the nightmare began. After some days of harsh and anxious waiting it was diagnosed that the boy had Tay Sach’s disease, an always fatal Eastern European Jewish hereditary disease, scarcely known in Japan. Shocked and bewildered Chie pondered the next step and with the doctors encouragement determined to fly to Los Angeles and the Cedar Sinai hospital where many such children are seen. She did have connections having lived there before as a teen ager. Her father was in the export business and she went to high school in Los Angeles a couple of years.

Chie prayed with all her being that the diagnosis was wrong. She fixed her hopes that somehow a cruel mistake had been made, She imagined and projected that the doctors would come out and tell her that it was really another disease and not a fatal one. She trembled on that razor’s edge. She was a single mother, her parents gone, essentially alone in the world, There was one sister who lived in a far distant city, and had always been equally distant in soul relationship to Chie.

She waited. The doctor came out to the waiting room and spoke the words she never wanted to hear, confirming that it was Tay Sach’s and Yasuhiro would die.. Such children rarely live beyond three.

This was the moment of cruel truth, There was no way out. She was alone on that windswept cliff, the abyss below, the mocking and endless darkness and no one to hear the depths of the anguish. Was there anyone, any being, any God that cares?

Chie’s moment is particularly telling as there is no religious background in her upbringing and no God to turn to. While the home values were strict and conservative Japanese cultural style, a token altar in the home, more as a fixture like many other homes there, there was no deity looked to in her family or pointed to in her schooling. They never went to religious services of any kind. While it was naturally in her soul to pray, there was no picture there of a God to answer.

Faced with the crisis of her life, with her Oriental sense of propriety, Chie felt one doesn’t suddenly cry out to Buddha or Christ, or Temple masters because one is desperate. How can one ask for help when one has never acknowledged these beings? she reasoned. Where would she turn?

I have told her of my abyss experiences, remembering them well, some alone on the the cold and wind swept cliff of despair cast in an eerie other world light, staring into the abyss. Or on a vast unending beach at the oceans edge, stretching gray, wet and glistening without end, no way to silence the mocking endless wash of rhythmic waves and feeling completely, virtually completely anilhated. I looked behind to see if I left footprints in the wet sand, ‘Did I exist?. “I’m no more than an apostrophe,” I once wrote, “have no value or worth, no more.....reduced and meaningless and looking desperately for one’s self...... it was like looking at a blank piece of white paper held in trembling hands, ‘Is there at least a tiny mark, the barest pen scratch?. a grasping for glasses and more light, to see if that faint scratch of ‘me’ actually existed? Or should exist? At this primal end point all is swept away leaving only the hollow question echoing into the cruel silence. “Am I?”

It is a cry from the the ends of the Universe.. the polar opposite of the place where we are known, embraced, included and connected. For at this end of the continuum live the despairing lost, isolated, disconnected to the point of extermination... Will there be the will, before in crushed silence living out that great ‘NO’ to life and all it means, to utter a cry for reunion.? What happens at this juncture of ultimate human despair makes all the difference. The acknowledgement of the powers so much higher and greater in the universe lie awaiting our consciousness and our call for reunion.

Can the “I” realize there is a universe, and it is peopled and angeled in this world and the next, with human souls, with angels and Arch angels, and spiritual beings, an eternal God, the Holy Sophia, Divine Feminine, and many holy deities, Nature beings? Central as the sun is to our life here, central the evolutionary power, present since earth’s beginning and united with all humanity, the Cosmic power of Love woven through all of The Christ’s deeds of resurrected, redeeming love? The power capable of restoring us from ‘Am I?’to our natural individuality of ‘I am” that can strive for and reflect the great universal I AM of transcendant Cosmic Love?

The ‘I am’ wills itself back into existence with sacred words. And Chie spoke them.

“HELP ME.”

This is the turning point at the edge.. And these are the first sacred words to open the first portal of return.

And when she spoke them, a voice comforted her, sounded around her with mantle of assurance and love. An arduous journey lay ahead, but in these sixteen years, she has never been without assurance of the ever present help of the spiritual world. Nor have I in journeys past and present.

May these thoughts we evolved together of the critical importance of asking for help, be of support for you andloved ones.