Dear Honorable Reader of This Blog,
This afternoon, I was talking with a dear friend at the shores of the North Fork of the Yuba River. The weather was pleasant, the sun was warming and not too intense. We were considering how it was still much too cold in the season to even dip our toes in the water. Then a guy swims by, proving us wrong.
As my friend is also a writer and an international seminar leader, we talked about blogging. We talked about how we’d each separately been advised by experts on the subject of the people who choose to remain on our enewsletter lists, entrusting us with the sanctity of their emails – that, in a sense, they love us and want to learn from us. Not in the aw-isn’t-that-sweet kind of way but in the way that they are able to draw some inspiration from our writings and programs. We ruminated over how, for any teacher who does her best to be a channel, these people are a sacred responsibility.
For this reason, I’d like to ask you if there’s anything you’d like to see written up in a blog. Perhaps you’re dealing with certain difficulties in your life related to the topics of my book, From Bagels to Curry. This memoir addresses a variety of subjects concerning the preciousness of life: the loss of a loved one, the devastation of cancer, familial challenges, hospice connections, setting out on one’s own against family traditions, facing our mortality, and as the cover’s byline suggests – life, death, family, and triumph.
I’d like to recommend Bagels to the kind lady whose call I just answered, assuming, as her voicemail dictated, that she wanted to place an order for flower essences. I’d already decided to honor her request to extend our expired sale on Pear Essence, for restoring a sense of inner peace and for dealing with times of crisis and emergencies – both of which described her situation. She’d found herself basically not wanting to live any longer in this world. The meaning and purpose had left her life and left her feeling hollow. My first thought was, I’m neither prepared nor trained to deal with this situation. What could I offer by way of support to someone whose only reason for still hanging around, as she explained wryly, was her proclivity toward procrastination?
My second thought took a different turn. Of course you’re qualified to reach out to her, by virtue of the fact that you’re alive. And you care.
Since that first talk, we’ve connected again. She was doing much better at our second call. We talked about her garden, her interest in plants, her knowledge of all kinds of insects, and the great location of her rental being so near a historic herbal shop. I pondered the irony of her submersion in thoughts of suicide while my memoir, From Bagels to Curry, documents the life my father clung to and was loathe to relinquish to the pancreatic cancer that ultimately took his life nearly 10 years ago:
“An animated and energized Aaron pushes the shopping cart down the aisle at breakneck speed, his soul driving him in defiance of the disease that is dethroning him from the existence—perfectly trimmed into neat little pieces—that he so loves. There will be more than a few remaining shopping trips in his future. Some with his daughter, some with his sons. Dad savors the joy of each excursion, never quite knowing if it will be his last.”
In later pages of the book, I wrote:
“These tiny, magical moments sprinkle my soul in a garden of memories, especially knowing that so few of them remain.”
These are just a few thoughts I wanted to share with you, dear reader. I hope your own life is filled with many magical moments that give it color and meaning.
And I hope reading this blog has somehow helped you toward that goal. Please stay in touch.