Sylvia's Journal

Less than 3 years ago we attended a joyful event in Western Massachusetts when Axel’s cousin Erik and his wife Linda celebrated their daughter Ingrid’s graduation from Hampshire College.  A year later Erik, who was my age, died unexpectedly from a postoperative infection and yesterday we got news that Linda died of breast cancer after a fast and steep decline in her health over the last couple of months. I have been thinking much of Linda lately, and of her two children Todd and Ingrid, and how everything turned out so different in such a short time. The news left us both very sad last night. One day you are blissfully unaware of your own health and then suddenly everything changes. We were lucky to return from the edge and to be back, fully, in life and expecting many more years; for Linda and Erik and their kids things turned out so differently.

This morning, up early again, the first thing I did was break a glass as I was cleaning out the sink. I am not sure whether glass shards bring luck here but in Holland they supposedly do. I don’t need any shards to bring me luck because I already feel very lucky. The shards this morning did not make me feel lucky; in fact, they reminded me of the sharp pains that I know are being experienced in the community that is mourning Linda’s death.

I heard more stories like this, unexpected down turns, surprises, accidents, in the closing minutes of our Quaker meeting when Friends ask each other to hold so and so in the Light. And yet, in the silence that followed, I felt like a wave of bliss washed over me. I could have sat there for hours. It was as if I was in a tiny glass-encased Nirvana while grief and sadness was held at bay, within reach but separated by these glass walls, brittle and sturdy at the same time. And now this glass breaking…something about glass this morning, today…

I am learning much about the right and left brain’s effect on us by reading the story of Jill Taylor who documents her own stroke in a wonderful book called Stroke of Insight. I realize that some of those moments of bliss and feeling disconnected from the material world are when the right brain takes over and overrides the always chattering left brain that has us tied to the ground by a million little wires, like Gulliver. Unfortunately the moments are fleeting (when you don’t have a left hemisphere stroke like she did) and the left brain is never off duty for very long. Since there is much work to be done, this is probably a good thing, for now.