The laughing gulls are back in town. Lined up on every available boat they didn’t know whether to be afraid or stay put as I silently paddled by at Magen’s Bay this morning, welcoming them home and delighting in their convivial jostling and raucous disturbing of the peace. According to a reliable source, they show up in time for Carnival and leave at Halloween- reverse snow birds who arrive in April, the month of taxes and now of the devastating explosions at the Boston Marathon.
Walt Whitman mourned the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in a poem that I remember my father reciting when I was a child:
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d
And the great star early drooped in the Western sky,
I mourned and yet shall mourn with ever returning spring
TS Eliot, tipping his hat to his poetic ancestor, begins his signature modernist poem The Wasteland with a section called The Burial of the Dead:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. –
It all happens at once – the lilacs (or here the lilies), the laughing gulls, spring –– sweet smelling, happy sounding, natural events that return no matter what like the planets in their orbits – oblivious to whether we are celebrating or beating our breasts.
I chant when I paddle and this morning the words were especially poignant:
O Peace Deep and Divine, enter this heart mine.
O Peace sweet and sublime, enter this heart of thine.
Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti, (Peace Peace Peace)
As I sang, images of the wounded, the bloody sidewalks, the ambulances and the crowds flashed before me and I felt powerless – flooded by fear, anger, anguish, hatred, revenge, by lives changed forever in an instant, hopes dashed, families torn apart and marathons taking on new meaning from here on in. I recalled a story that a friend posted on FB a while back and it gave me something to focus on and perhaps it will do the same for you.
There was a car accident on the freeway – a major commuter route and in the accident a woman was critically injured. She had to be removed from her crumpled car by the jaws of life and taken by helicpoter to a major medical center in critical condition. Traffic was backed up for miles and the radio reported an injury accident and warned of delays. People were aggravated. Eager to get home after a long day at work, they grumbled as they called spouses and day car centers to say they’d be late. There was lots of complaining and moaning and groaning and impatience mounted.
One woman (and maybe there were more) in a car not far away closed her eyes and sent healing love and light to the injured woman though she didn’t know that it was a woman or if she was alive or dead. She just automatically sunk down into her heart and tapped into a stream of golden light that she let it flow from her heart to the injured passenger. According to the story, the woman survived her injuries and eventually made a fully recovery.
In a newspaper interview she said that while she was lying there in a near death state she was aware that there was someone who was sending her light and that she truly believed that that light had kept her alive.
I’d like to add that the two met, that the injured woman had the chance to share her experience and to say thank you and that the streamer of light got to behold the results of her love and light but I would be making that up….
What I do know is that while I was paddling that’s what I decided to do. I pictured my heart opening and steady stream of golden light making its way to the hospital rooms where the injured lie, to the homes where families are crying and grieving and runners are still shaking in gratitude and in fear. I sent it into the hearts and minds of everyone who is angry and afraid and full of hatred, including the perpetrator. I pictured a hose as thick and as sturdy as a fire hose but larger and more powerful and, as I sang my peace chant, I directed that hose far and wide with the sound of the gulls laughing raucously in the background as they swooped and dove into a sea, turquoise and alive with fish.
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