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Showing posts from July, 2011

Memories of Thea Angeliki

The night I learned Thea Angeliki had died, I was on an annual retreat I take, and I had briefly interrupted the silence to spend a couple hours in a writing workshop about belonging. The facilitator asked us to list the people and places to whom we belonged, and then to choose two of them and write about them. For reasons that weren’t clear to me at the time, I wrote Thea Angeliki’s name down—and then decided to write about her. This is what I wrote. Two hours later, in my room, I was weeping because I had a message on my cell phone telling me Thea was gone. I’m sorry she never got to read this, but I wanted to post it here and to pass it on to others who loved her. ----- In my first memory of Thea Angeliki, she is standing at her kitchen counter talking to her cat, and my sister and I are looking at each other across the table and smiling. My mother was with us, as was my aunt Katina, and because my mother was well, I know I must have been younger than 10 (unless this trip happened i...

Transition

"Wanting to find a place where everything's okay is just what keeps us miserable. Always looking for a way to have pleasure and avoid pain is how we keep ourselves in samsura (the vicious cycle of suffering during our life journey). As long as we believe that there is something that will permanently satisfy our hunger for security, suffering is inevitable. The truth is that things are always in transition. 'Nothing to hold onto' is the root of happiness. If we allow ourselves to rest here, we find that it is a tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs. This is where the path of fearlessness lies." --Pema Chodron, Buddhist nun So many things right now are in transition, uncertain. I am in financial crisis again--the adoption assistance check didn't come on time (which happens every July, but this year, I forgot about this and didn't plan for it), the state government has shut down which will mean I am paying for more of Lisa's services (therapy...