Listen to the replay as Perla and I host author, Irene A. Cohen, MD. She has recently released her new book, Soul Journey to Love: 100 Days to Inner Peace
Thor – A Gentle Father
He has the kind of face that stops you in your tracks and the first time I saw the Colonel I thought the Norse God Thor was visiting from Asgard. He is a head higher than most people I would consider tall. His blonde hair, which is cut barely a few millimeters in length, frames an almost perfectly symmetrical face. He has distinct cheekbones and his angular jaw look as if it is molded from granite. His eyes are a vivid blue but sometimes they look as if a great body of water has softly melted into milky green hue, the perfect match for his army fatigues. If you get close enough you can see flecks of silver in his eyes. He appears to be in his mid-forties and everything about his body screams discipline.
But as handsome as he is, I always had a sense that his beauty was more than skin deep. Since he had been frequently deployed I didn’t run into him often, but the few times that I did I felt something odd, unusual, unexpected. Also there is an undercurrent of gentleness that seems out of place in his warrior body.
Right before Christmas I heard of his wife’s sudden death. I simply stood shaking my head in disbelief. Their daughter and my son are in the same class at school and just the week before, I sat with his wife, on a bench waiting for the last school bell to ring. I still feel a chill move through my body when I think of it. I didn’t know her well, yet I felt the impact deeply.
I now run into the Colonel in the school parking lot, in class meetings, at a band concerts, and at birthday parties. Wherever his daughter is, he is there too. I am on the outskirts of their lives watching as they travel through their grief. I know first hand that grief never ends, but it changes. It’s a passage not a place to stay; it’s not a sign of weakness, nor a lack of faith. Grief is the price of love. I’ve learned it’s not the weight of grief that breaks you down, it’s the way you carry it; and the Colonel carries his grief like Thor carries the weight of his hammer, with gentle dignity and grace. In doing so he doesn’t tell his daughter how to live – he shows her. Every day. Hard things shatter into a million pieces yet soft things don’t break. His greatest strength is his gentleness.
My grandmother used to tell me of the ancient Irish who had a mythic sense of how to weave the world back into fullness when the center failed to hold and all seemed to fall apart and be doomed into darkness. When disorientation became the common shape of life and the four directions seemed about to be blown to the wind, then the unifying fifth direction would have to be sought. This calming gentleness could only be found at the edges of the land in the darkest places and along the misty cliffs where the otherworld plays hide and seek with those of us on earth.
If people are willing to go to that place that seems darkest to them, each will find something of meaning and value. For as the darkness feels closer, the threads of existence move near as well. In facing the darkness one finds again the enlivening thread of gentle hope. If each then turns back again and pulls the thread of life toward the middle of things, then each automatically contributes to regenerating the unified center.
What the Colonel reminds me is that life is not always so certain; even straight roads have subtle curves in them. Perhaps the best thing one – anyone – can do is to listen more carefully to those hidden voices speaking from places beyond time and matter; places buried in the middle of the earth and the center, untouchable and gentle part of the soul.
(Please note: I’m not saying the Colonel is Thor, but come to think about it, I have never seen them in the same room together.)
To All The Broken Hearted
All the genuinely smart, talented, funny friends I know seem to be broken-hearted. You will notice it on Twitter more than Facebook, because Facebook is where you go to do your performance art. It’s where you pretend to be hip; the place where people have ridiculously perfect relationships; the obligatory trips to the moon and where all toddlers potty train themselves. It’s the place where you hide how really bat shit crazy you really are. Facebook is surface; Twitter is subtext, and judging by what I am seeing lately, there are a lot of people experiencing bone aching sadness.
I have attempted to find a common denominator for all these broken-hearted souls and the answers were varied. Anything from; she had a mole on her eyelid; he pronounced it “cold slaw,” and Venus is retrograde. All the excuses you can imagine and some you can’t. But no one has said, “I am three gallons of crazy in a two gallon bucket and no one can put up with a mess like me.”
I don’t have the answers. I don’t know some big truth that I can reveal to everyone. All I can do is hurt, and try to stop hurting, and try to help others stop hurting. Maybe we need to tribe up, find each other and put our arms around each other and say something like: I know you have lost someone and it hurts. Perhaps you began to lose pieces of them until one day, they had disappeared. I’m not going to tell you tomorrow is another day, the sun will go on shining, or there are plenty of fish in the sea. It is ok to hurt, and it won’t be better for a long, long time, but eventually it will. For now take all the time you need. Here is some chocolate.
And most of us have figured out that we have to do what’s in front of us and keep doing it. Go to work, return calls, answer emails, return library books, go to the store. And breathe. And some of us even pray. The horror felt is real, and so you do your laundry and you make it through another day. In the aftermath of a loss we do what we’ve always done, although we are changed. Perhaps that’s the point. People change for two reasons I think: their minds are open or their hearts have been broken.
I know it’s hard to believe people when they say, “I know how you feel”. But I actually know how you feel. I understand feeling as insignificant as humanly possible. And how it can actually ache in places you didn’t know you had inside you. And it doesn’t matter how many new haircuts you get, or gyms you join, or how many glasses of Malbec you drink with your girlfriends, you still go to bed every night going over every detail and wonder what you did wrong or how you could have misunderstood. And how in the hell for that brief moment you could think that you were that happy. And sometimes you can even convince yourself that he’ll see the light and show up at your door. And after all that, however long all that may be, you’ll discover that little pieces of your soul will finally come back. And you will realize where there is potential for love the heart keeps on going. It will love whom it loves even if you don’t want it to, even after relationships end. It will keep loving after that too.
“And you finally realize with all the bad stuff there always comes good. If our lives are like clay cups then pain carves the cup deeper as we endure more sorrow but only to make it hold more joy as we drink from the well that of the love that surrounds us everyday.”
J. August Luhrs
Love Bats Last
Love stories are as rare as a cold bottle of Dr. Pepper in Europe, even though Hollywood and its misguided unrealistic version of love would hope that we believe otherwise. I only know of two relationships that have gone the distance. My parents, who will celebrate 60 years this month and my friends Charles and Arne, who, against all odds, and for decades most of society, are celebrating 36 years together.
They met at a party in Manhattan, and through the smoke and over the mullets, they were taken with each other right from the start. One enchanted evening. Their own private cliché. They bought a loft in Tribeca in the late 1970’s, which then was the kind of place where drug deals on the corners were a common occurrence and there were just as many rats as people walking around at night. They had to haul up pipes, plumbing and floors. The Broadway play, “Rent,” – that was their life. The loft, like their love, has transformed over the years from something plain and acceptable to something rich and beautiful, a tapestry of memories they have made and the loves and tragedies they have shared. And like their life together, it is woven of dreams fulfilled and magical moments that still await their touch.
Charles and Arne are two parts that fit together: something that doesn’t happen often but, when it does, it’s the wildest experience to witness. I met them both a little over 20 years ago, and their love has come to be a sweet reflection of what is possible, it has stood to inspire me with a vision of hope and served as a benchmark for my relationships.
I have watched others lives intertwine and then unravel including my own, but theirs have harmoniously held together, like the perfect notes in a symphony, no matter what storm they are going through or crisis they are facing.
Charles understands that Arne, a world famous photographer, needs to be surrounded by dead animals. It looks like a taxidermy shop exploded in their Tribeca loft. You can’t go to the bathroom without dead animals watching you. Depending on Arne’s latest project, gallery-opening or photography book, the loft could be full 10 x 10 framed blow-ups of chewed up dog toys, the neighbors across the street, sock monkeys or the forensic heads of unsolved murdered victims, many who were the murdered girls of Juarez.
Arne understands that Charles, a creative director, and interior designer, needs to be surrounded by beauty, fine things and architecture books. He recognizes the need Charles has to go with me on zany spiritual adventures where we have bolted all over the world searching for mystical mysteries to solve. The only thing we lack is a van, some hip friends and a dog-named Scooby-Doo.
Like a car thrown in reverse, their relationship has had to move backward. These two men have already proven what traditional wedding vows can only hope, “in sickness and health, better or worse, richer or poorer.” They have comforted, honored, loved and cherished each other day in and day out for over 11,000 days.
Finally, Charles and Arne are planning a wedding and trying to decide what to do for the ceremony. I was thinking they should do something unconventional like Coney Island, or perhaps something simple at the justice of the peace’s office. While Charles and I were in Tibet, we met a nurse who informed us that she was married to the captain of a spaceship from the Pleiades star cluster. Obviously, she was on her own trip, but perhaps her husband could marry them. As a captain of a ship he would have the authority, which I think is a stellar idea. An interstellar idea.
But after everything they have been through, after all the prejudice they have faced and overcome, I have come to realize it is the spark of spirit within the individual soul that makes this sort of love possible at all. It is the inner uniqueness that makes life meaningful at each stage; that makes love a possibility at any moment, and that makes each moment susceptible and vulnerable. Love doesn’t answer to doctrine or dogmas, for there is no theory or system that can substitute for a life unlived, for a story undeveloped, for fate not faced, for a destiny not embraced, and for a love not known. For this reason, I hope that they marry at Yankee Stadium. Not only because of it’s significance to New York and New Yorkers, but because their relationship is just like baseball. When the bases are loaded, and it’s the bottom of the 9th the best player is brought out to bat one out of the park – just as the fans hold their breaths wondering if this feat can really happen. For their 36 years together, Charles and Arne are living proof of the miracle that love can be. Every time life has thrown them a curveball, they have managed to continually bat one out of the park, standing confidently together because, in the end, love is the victorious winner, because in the end, love always bats last.
Feng Shui For Love
Love is in the air!!
Whether you are looking for a new relationship or want to rev up your existing one, listen in as we discuss some favorite Feng Shui tips for romance.
By giving special attention to this area, you will foster long-lasting and harmonious relationships built on mutual trust and unconditional love.
Feng Shui for love relationship and marital harmony is one of the most popular applications of Feng Shui, just in time for Valentine’s Day!
When: Sunday, February 8, 2015
Time: 3pm PT, 4pm MT, 5pm CT, 6PM ET
Where: Blog Talk Radio
Can’t make the live show? Not to worry, you can download the show and listen to it anytime.
