Day: June 10, 2016

When Fate sees a chipmunk.

Can you  be close friends with someone you barely know, hardly ever see, know little about. I am learning that you can.

Eve Marko is a writer and social activist and Zen teacher, I met her a few years ago when she came to one of the first Bedlam Farm Open Houses, I was a fairly hot best-selling author at the time, on TV a lot, Jeff Bridges had just filmed a move in which he played me. Eve Marko is a friend of Bridges and a dog lover, she had read one of my books.

At the Open Houses, I rarely get to spend too much time with people, and more than 1,500 people came to that one from all over the country.  The crowds were kind of insane, and we had just gotten Simon. It seems like a long time ago, but wasn’t really very long ago at all. Maria and I had just gotten married.

I remember talking to Eve, but then she receded into the crowds and we exchanged e-mails from time to time. We kept talking about getting together, but of course, as is most often true, we never got around to it. Eve seemed intelligent and warm and interesting to me, but I think the Bridges connection made me uneasy. I am always uneasy around that celebrity thing, it has never seemed like me.

A couple of months ago, I got an e-mail from Eve that got my attention, her husband Bernie, a well-known Zen teacher also, had suffered a severe stroke, and Eve, a fiercely independent and free-spirited human, was thrust into strange and terrifying terrain, she was suddenly a caretaker whose life was subsumed by a loved one in great need.

I remember feeling badly for Maria after my open heart surgery, she had given up her beloved art, which she had struggled all of her life to do, to suddenly take care of me, who couldn’t dress or feed myself. I recovered quickly and  Maria took wonderful care of me, but we both were very relieved when Maria got her life back.

Eve is a writer and I sensed from her messages – I have this gift sometimes – that she was drowning, that she feared losing herself in this awful happening. Why don’t you write?, I suggested. I don’t have time, she said, I can’t afford to write right now. Something clicked inside of me, and I messaged her back – a surprisingly personal message given that we didn’t really know one another well – and I said you can’t afford not to write, you don’t have time not to write.

For some reason, Eve listened to me, she heard this message and began writing three times a week, every week. Bernie began to heal and so did Eve. There are still many struggles but this week, Eve wrote very powerfully about the meaning of writing her blog in her life, of the need to give something to the world. Eve wrote that she told a documentary filmmaker who asked her what people wanted most, “I said they wanted to live a life with meaning, not one that feels arbitrary, without coherence or significance.

Eve feared living a life without meaning, as she was drawn into the drama of caretaking. I could feel her fear of losing herself.  T.S. Eliot called it the life of the “hollow man.” Joseph Campbell called it the substitute life. Your life must have meaning he taught, you must tell your story.

Several weeks ago, Eve came up to see the farm and we spent a beautiful afternoon at Pompanuck, talking and walking and laughing and sharing our lives. It felt as if we had know one another all of our lives. I wondered at it. Maria talked with Eve as openly as I have ever seen her speak with anyone. Sometimes, I find myself at gatherings where people don’t speak to Maria, don’t even  ask her a question. This, I am told, happens often to women.

Maria is quiet, shy at times, and knows how to disappear in a gathering. Eve connected to Maria very quickly and very deeply, it felt like there were two sisters in the room. Maria opened up like an orchid. They knew one another.

Eve wrote on her blog something that I have always felt, always taught: the meaning of my life is my story. The meaning of your life is your story. It is your gift to the world, your coherence and meaning. My story is good and bad, up and down, meaningful and banal, success and failure, searching and  yearning, crisis and mystery.

My love with Maria is anchored by the fact that when we met, we had both lost our stories, lost our coherence, lost our meaning. We had no idea what our purpose was, we had given our bliss away to others.

We have found our stories, and we are telling them every day,  that is what we are about. People ask me all the time how we can bear to share our stories openly, but I fear the people who ask do not understand what Eve Marko now knows.

Our stories are the meaning of our lives. Maria and I are learning how to tell them, and in the process, we are giving something to the world that matters.

And Eve asks the right question: “Where would I be without it?” How curious, I ask that every day. “Where would I be without my story, without my blog to tell it?” No publisher would buy my story or publish it, but people come to read my story millions of times each year right here. How do I account for that?

So what is the moral of this all. Your story is important, your gift to the world, your meaning. I pray you should tell it, whether it is a story, a poem, a painting, a photograph, a sketch, a dog or a quilt or a sport you love.

And there is another lesson. You don’t  have to see somebody all of the time to be their friend, or talk to them every day, or share all of their dramas and adventures. I feel very close to Eve. I am learning how to make friends, and what friendship really means. This is new to me, and I have some very wonderful friends now.

Eve  gave me the gift of listening to me, and of respecting what I said.  The gift of trust. That is as good a friendship as I have had in my life.

The pond feels almost mystical, especially beautiful in the Spring, it feels like a secret garden.

The Old Stone Wall, sits way out in the deep woods, it would seem quite forgotten now, no more sheep or cows to contain, no boundary to mark. It is a beautiful thing in its own right, a work of art, tumbled together in a way that seems haphazard, but is not. It has stood for a long time where it is, and time and weather and seasons and nature and the foibles of human beings hold no interest for it. It just is.

The purpose of the soul entering this body is to display her powers and actions in this world, for she needs an instrument. By descending to this world, she increases the flow of her power to guide the human being through the world. Thereby she perfects herself above and below, attaining a higher state by being fulfilled in all dimensions. If she is not fulfilled both above and below, she is not complete.” –

The Purpose Of The Soul, The Kabbalah