Dear Charlotte,
I woke up speaking to you this morning on the filmy edge between sleeping and being awake… Perhaps you were speaking to me too. This edge where you have spent so much time with so many of us….infiltrating into our consciousness with new possibilities for really waking up. I was not sure that I wanted to speak during this time of the memorial to you…but when I woke up with you this morning it was clear that I did.
After I got up, I went up into the hills for a run. It was a warm morning with a gentle sun, the light shimmering on the water and the fog rolling in from the ocean below the hilltops. I always feel like I am in a painting from the orient when I am in the hills running above the fog. I looked out towards Muir Beach and thought of you. As I ran, I let the planning meeting we held yesterday to organize this service run through me. We were surrounded by the wonderful photographs of your many lives from infancy to this last year of your life. And you were held in deep and great love by each of us in my living room, Norman, Fu, Wendy, Len, Sara and I. It was a lovely meeting, feeling how to honor you and greet you and celebrate you.
Many thoughts and memories swirled gently through me as I was running. I had been running for about thirty minutes….and I was thinking of the conversation in our memorial planning meeting about whether or not to have fire and flame in the beginning of the ceremony. Apparently the tradition is to light a flame, see it burn and then to put it out as a symbol of the ending or completion of a life. Norman said he didn’t think that was appropriate because neither you, nor any of us want the flame to go out. I joked that we should buy one of those trick birthday candles that when you try to blow it out it keeps relighting itself.
I was chuckling to myself about this and about your flame not going out, when in the next second… ZAP a consuming force knocked into me and swept me off my feet, flat onto the ground… full body prostration, full body blow. And I knew it was you.
I was on a completely flat part of the trail where I run regularly. I have never particularly believed in ghosts or really thought about them. I do believe in you. I could feel you. The communion was exquisitely clear. In my stunned state I acknowledged your presence and said “Whoa, I know there is something you really want me to hear. I’ll be with you in a minute…” I felt breathing return… I lay flat on the ground, still recovering, shaken, bleeding, scraped and bruised… little by little gathering somehow back into my self… Gradually, I stood… still stunned but no significant injuries.
When I was ready, I stood there and opened to hear what it was that you clearly needed to tell me… and I heard you. You slugged me and jolted me through and through. I could feel you, in all of your silent and potent fierceness saying, “Don’t you dare!!! Don’t you dare make light of what it will take to keep this flame lit… of what it will take for you to keep it lit… of what it will take for each person to keep it lit!!!
There is no trick candle that will relight! The only way that this flame will relight is with what each of you do. This is the heart of my life and work and this is not something to joke about! You had better take it seriously.
So bleeding, scraped, bruised, shaken and somewhat stunned – I began running back to my car, feeling ridiculously grateful for your visit and for the exceedingly clear invitation that you slammed me with. And I knew that this is what I needed to talk about here today.
And all through the week as I was healing and stinging and hurting, I would glance at one of my injuries and hear your message again and I would take it in some new way and I could hear you and feel you going “Mmhmm.” “mmhmmm” as you would so often do when you would see people discovering something.
I understand that every moment counts. And nothing less than being fully penetrated by the truth of this will do. You wanted to get into the marrow of being, the juiciest parts of us in the simplest and most direct of ways. You had so much spark and lightness and humor and immediacy…And yet you were so fierce, (AND STILL ARE)…you were always afraid that people would not take this work seriously and would only stay on the surface and look for fluff…And yet you to you it was everything….the very real moments of our life in which to be awake and to give our best to it.
And so I vow again to you Charlotte that I will give my best to keeping this flame lit through the truth of my own living from one moment to the next…understanding once again, with this new refresher course, that from one second to another our lives change…from chuckling with enjoyment to being flat on our faces, we never know what the next moment brings…but this moment counts and asks the best of us…
Our response ability… our responsibility
So I hope each of us here makes our own vow to keeping the flame of your life lit with our own living…and finding how to be penetrated more and more thoroughly by what you have touched and awakened in each of us.
I hope that wherever you are on the other side of the door you were trying so hard to find, that you can feel us with you and rest in your own light…
And I trust that in your own inestimable way you will continue to knock on our doors.
