Temptation in the Dance Club

A friend lured me higher up the mountainside.

Hesitantly

I said Yes; I can’t resist –

to hear a band from Vera Cruz!

So here I am.

I see

the air is freer here,

the movement light and fast.

First band, I hear

vibration faster than my own.

Can i

will i

set aside my sorrow

and give my whole into this joy

for just tonight?

Watching not yet feeling much

I let their music lightly touch my hair

and move my body

just a bit.

Searching for their rhythm

now I’d tap my feet if I could find the flow.

Rhythm not my own.

But you’re not here!

Or are you,

music lover, dancer,

Are you here?

Can I feel joy without you?

You, my life, my son,

somewhere far away.

~~~~~~

The second group of happy music makers –

irrisistable.

Harp, guitar, and gentle trumpet-

I feel a stronger pull.

“Get off that stool,” they sing

and so I do.

I stand and let the music move me round.

In awe

I see their speed of fingers, hands, and feet

that catch the unseen pulse –

enthusiasm for our world.

Is that from you?

Does what they catch and carry

come from where you are?

I let your unseen love

lift my heavy heart, I let the music move me

faster higher into pulse of joy.

For moments

I’m alone

and you’re completely gone.

I let myself “forget” you

and you are free,

and I am me.

Just me.

7/6/13

Death is not the end

MARTI MATTHEWS – ONE VIEW, , Oak Park Wednesday Journal, September 11, 2013 

I’ve buried two husbands, both my parents, and various dear friends, but it was the death of my son that led me beyond beliefs into experience of ourselves as spirit when our bodies stop functioning.

   I remember the unreality of death with my first husband who passed of a heart attack: One day we were walking though life with this intense togetherness of sex, problem-solving, 20 years of everyday issues, efforts, and discussions, and poof! He disappeared! I could feel the size of his body beside me. His presence was so real, but his personality was what was him. Where did he go? It felt like science fiction, like he’d been abducted while we walked down the street.

But taking care of my son as cancer ate his body was way beyond imagining. The sense of oneness plus responsibility that a parent feels toward her child was unbearable. Where did my son go? Was he all right? How could it be that he’s been yanked out of our story and I will never, ever see him again?

I had had various strange experiences after the deaths of each of my husbands — feeling their presence at their funeral/memorial services, then often in dreams I felt like I was not dreaming about them but had really been with them while my body and rational mind slept. I had been in spirit, where they were.

Years back, a friend asked me to stop at the Spiritualist camp in Clinton, Iowa, where I learned about the large 19th-century movement of exploring contact with those in spirit. Recently, I looked online and found the Church of the Spirit in Chicago where this denomination continues. Here I found a community of upbeat explorers in this natural part of life, viz. where we’re going after death.

Also through them I learned of the International Association of Near Death Experiences (IANDS), which monthly brings speakers to share their experiences of being out of their bodies after accidents or illness, going on in spirit only to be told they must go back to their failed bodies, recover, and finish a task or share their experience. For four years I’ve attended IANDS each month and heard amazingly similar accounts of being warmly met by a guide or family member, doing a life review (self-judgment), feeling they’re in a tunnel or atmosphere, surrounded by love, feeling pulled toward a greater loving light.

Here is where they usually get stopped and sent back. Their bodies are mangled, maybe already in the morgue, but there they are with the challenge to recover — and speak! Dr. Eben Alexander was one of these who spoke last summer, a neurosurgeon who contracted meningitis and was brain dead for 10 days. His book Proof of Heaven, a Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, tells his amazing experience of being out of his body in a real realm of life.

A year ago IANDS hosted a famous medium, Janet Nohavec. After telling her strange life story, including six years as a nun, she finally followed her unusual abilities to sense the presence of those in spirit. Then she offered to be a channel for spirit there with our group of 200 people. She sensed a young man recently passed, around the age of 40, and someone in the audience had held his hand as he died. No one else claimed this experience but me. Then she went on: “You cut a piece of his hair from the left side of his head.” Yes, I did! No one knew that except the four close people with me at his cremation. She guessed his name: “Tommy? Thomas?” She went on, telling fact after fact about him. (See my blog account, September 2012, martiandfriendsexploretheuniverse.blogspot.com.)

There were more experiences of my son to come, and I feel much restored in confidence that life is solid, appearances to the contrary. When our bodies are finished, our true selves continue on with more adventures. This is where my life experience has led me — after my education and beliefs had dead-ended.

HOSPITALITY AND THE STRANGER

August 4, 2013

     I’ve joined a discussion series in which we share our experiences on a different topic each week. This week we (10 of us) each shared on the theme “Hospitality and the Stranger.” I share here a few interesting and diverse stories.
 

   I, myself, was remembering learning about how this subject was viewed in ancient Greece: hospitality to the stranger was almost at the top of their moral code. Travel was so difficult and dangerous – there were no hotels and restaurants! If people had to travel any distance they had to rely on the goodwill of anyone they met. They would knock on the door of any residence and expect help and hospitality on their way.

       What a different social code the Greeks had compared to our attitude today where a young stranger – black in a white neighborhood – can be shot to death for just walking through the neighborhood! And the local law accepts this.
Sharings from our discussion:

Maureen: went to the New Jersey Shore recently with some organization to help with rebuilding since Hurricane Sandy which happened one year ago. She was so struck by the gratitude and fortitude of the people whose houses were totally destroyed and have still not been rebuilt. They’re surviving under the most difficult circumstances., and expressed such gratitude for any help they were given.

Willa: her parents were both from small homogenous towns in Iowa but somehow came out of that with great open hearts to all kinds of people. She herself was trained in a program to teach teachers how to teach their students to be more open to differences. The basic method they use is having the children tell their own true stories to each other. As people do this, they learn that others have feelings and experiences just like their own. And no one can argue with true experience. A teacher or adult can tell children they “ought” to respect each other as their equal but “oughts” are not as powerful as real sharing of life experience.

Willa’s family moved a lot when she was young, like every four years. She remembers feeling like a stranger each time she moved and feeling so grateful when other kids would make her feel welcomed.
    I remember learning about a program that The American Friends Service Committee used to have in the Chicago area where children from the inner city were bused out to spend a day with a family in the suburbs, and suburban children were bused into the innercity to stay with poor families in these areas. It was an education for all that no amount of teaching could have equaled.

M.J.   1) She has an aunt who has hosted the gigantic Christmas dinner for the extended family (easily 50 people) for over 50 years! She has a large farmhouse and so has the space, but it’s an enormous project. Only in recent times as an adult did M..J. perceive that the underlying reason the aunt does this is because she believes no one would come and visit her otherwise! She has such low self-esteem. M.J. and others have tried to remedy this by visiting her at other times, but the aunt seems so old and set in her self-deprecation that it’s hard to change this belief in her.

   2)  M.J.’s sister hosts an “orphans’ dinner” each Thanksgiving, inviting people who have no family to share dinner on this holiday. Once she invited three young couples from India and M.J. herself objected at first because they would bring Indian food rather than the traditional Thanksgiving food. But they were so delightful and the food so delicious that she decided to open her mind to the people over the traditions.
Bob: Was in the Peace Corp in the Philippines, and learned there to delight in people who were different. There, he was the one who was different – tall, fair skinned, but he found them entirely accepting of him. The life of the village where he lived and worked was incredibly different – no TV, no telephone, no cars, no movies, – nothing to do! Except relate to each other warmly and openly.

Aileen: (I don’t know what country Aileen is from. She’s been here 7 years, she says) In her town everyone’s doors were always open. Children and adults went in and out of each other’s houses freely. If one was busy when a neighbor came in, one stopped all and happily paid attention to the visitor. Efficiency was not important. When she moved here, she learned that for children to play together one had to plan “play dates” and formally take children here or there so they can be together. Likewise birthday parties here are formal: arrive at a certain time, only certain invited guests, do certain activities together in certain order, have children picked up then at a certain end time. Wherever she’s from, Aileen says birthday parties are just open doors, all day. People and children come and go and the party goes on and on and on.

    She has noted with enthusiasm the “block parties” that streets have in the cities. This has helped her neighborhood become a little more like back home. Now some parents on her block are freer with letting their children come and go between houses, and adults visit back and forth more.
Mary: She and her husband belong to an organization that coordinates hospitality for young businesspeople from other countries. They’ve done this for 30 years! Many Germans and Japanese have stayed in their home but also people from many other countries. Some they’ve visited in their own countries. Also her husband works for Argon laboratories and so they’ve often given hospitality to scientists from other countries.

Leslie: something about the story of Abraham and hospitality. I couldn’t hear her…

Then:  Her own home seems to her a place of privacy. But the family she married into has a tradition of openness that she’s gotten used to.

Janice: A humorous story about needing a large and inexpensive place for a memorial service for many out-of-towners. She found the Moose Lodge fit the bill, except one had to be a member to rent the hall, so she joined the Moose. They were definitely “foreign” to her, like out of another country and time! But she’s persisted and gotten a bit fond of them. Today is the Service! So we all hope her unusual efforts at hospitality will pay off.

__________

    I’ve experienced hospitality in stunning ways. When my second husband, Tom F., had a brain stem stroke at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, we ended up at the hospital in Santa Fe. The admittance form asked Tom’s religion so I put, of course, that he was Quaker. Soon a doctor visited us who was a member of the local Quaker meeting. Then two women came and said they were leaving for the week and they gave me the keys to their house and told me where it was. It was my house for the week, they told me, though they’d never met me before! Then the next morning someone came and told me he’d be with me until noon to do anything I needed; he’d be in the waiting room. “Did I want some coffee? Did I need my laundry done?” Then someone else came at noon and stayed until 4:00, followed by a third person who stayed until 8 at night and accompanied me “home”. If I needed to talk with someone for advice, they were there. If I wanted someone to pray with me, they were there. They’d gladly take me anywhere or go get anything I needed. They just sat in the waiting room, waiting to help me as needed. These people from the local Meeting came like this every day we were in Santa Fe! My situation was very scarey and shocking but their hospitality to me, a stranger, was – breathtaking! I’ve never seen anything like it. It touched me so deeply.

  
     When I was in college I went to Mexico for a summer to do some simple forms of social work. Six of us arrived at the village where we’d been told we’d live; we went to the parsonage where the local priest would connect us with families we each would stay with. There’d been some problem and there was no place for me, but the monsignor went out and asked an old woman in the parish to take me in. She wouldn’t have said no to him, of course, so this woman and her daughter, maybe 8 years older than myself, – very poor people themselves, spontaneously took me in for the summer with no complaint. They were wonderfully kind and generous. They were told that Americans are used to more protein than the Mexicans and so every day they made sure I had an egg; they couldn’t afford much meat but they bought me an egg every day. They gave me the largest room in their 3 room abode. It had a bed but I suspect it was for them a living room when I wasn’t there. They wouldn’t accept money from me, so I was at a loss as to how to adequately respond to their generosity when they had so little. I did take them for a vacation to Vera Cruz: we took the bus together and stayed 2 nights in a hotel and enjoyed the beaches and I paid for all. But still I knew I’d received so much more than I’d given to this village and it’s people when I left.

Other stories about Hospitality and the Stranger.

    When my son was in college, he picked up a hitchhiker as he drove home to Chicago from Indiana. It was storming out so he brought the man home for the night rather than drop him along the expressway. At this point of time my first husband was deceased so there was just my 16 year old daughter and my son and myself. I was uncomfortable with this bedraggled-looking stranger in our house for the night but I wasn’t about to put him out in the rain. So I thought carefully about where to bed him down, choosing a place that gave the maximum security to my daughter and what little we might have of value that could disappear. We went to sleep; I knew I’d done the best I could with the situation.
     All was well in the morning and my son dropped the man back at the expressway. We still heard from him occasionally, calling us stranded here or there across the country and asking if we’d wire him a little “help,” which I did once and that was enough.

    My son liked to help “strangers” and I never wanted to discourage that generous spirit. I’ve done the same over time and I never want to close my heart to helping needy people who come to my door. They do, just as hobos used to during the Depression. I live two blocks from the west side of Chicago and often have unemployed men knocking on my door all wanting to rake my leaves, shovel my snow. I’ve had to pick and choose to whom I will give this coveted work. I hate to turn down any person who wants to work but – there just aren’t enough leaves to go around! And some men have established themselves in my heart; I sense their integrity, feel inspired by their courage and humility and determination. One young man has worked for me for three years and is often inside my house – he washes my floors, among other things! But he and I also sit down and chat and he’s come to feel like a son to me. While another young man I’ve known for years would also like this work and would dearly like to think of me like a mother but I’ve distanced myself from him, not quite sensing the integrity of the first young man, not quite willing to welcome this one into my house.

      I’ve come to realize I cannot help everyone. Honestly, when I was younger it was in my heart that I wished I could take away all the suffering in the world. I hate learning about the horrible things people have had to experience here now in our world and throughout times past. Over time I’ve had to come to peace with that old endless question: Why do people have to suffer? I’ve learned to respect the learning we each can find through the challenges of our individual stories. In my book on this topic, Pain: The Challenge and the Gift, in one chapter I say that pain forms a cup of blessing. Our suffering forms the bowl which will hold a blessing when we respond to the challenge to heal our suffering.

Back to our topic: I’ve learned discernment about offering hospitality to the stranger. I have several times taken in people to live with me for short periods when their lives were low. Sometimes my hospitality was just what they needed to get on their feet. Sometimes our partings were harsh and sometimes they were blessed.
      If I did not enjoy their presence, I did not continue the hospitality. This has been another learning for me: that completely-unselfish giving is very seldom the right thing to do. If the giver gets nothing at all back, the giver must be fed from some other source to keep going in this form of giving. The best situation is when the giver feels gifted by the receiver in some way. Sometimes I feel inspired by the people I help, sometimes I enjoy their companionship, their liveliness or stories of their own life experiences. Sometimes it just makes me feel good, gives meaning to my life, when I see that I’ve made a difference and someone’s life is better because of me.

      And now as my years have moved forward and I seem to be on the “finish line” of my life, however long or short that may be, I find a new attitude inside me about hospitality and the stranger. Besides feeling more vulnerable as I live alone and am not so physically strong, besides that which causes me more caution, I do still enjoy company and especially of people with interesting experiences that I haven’t had. But I’m also more cautious about anything that takes my time – counseling, care giving – I do not give my time away so freely. I know I still have things inside me that want to be done before I leave this particular play that I’m in. I do not welcome just anyone into my time and space. There is an interior change of direction I’m taking. It includes the stranger that I cannot see – the departed loved ones who I know are around me, the Guide who I guess I’ll never “see” until I die but who always seems with me when I ask. These are strange relationships – those I cannot see – but I’m becoming more and more comfortable with these strangers. Soon they will be my community!
    One more very positive story about Hospitality and the Stranger. There is an organization that promotes peace and understanding among the peoples of the world through hospitality. SERVAS is more than 60 years old and connects people in more than 100 countries by coordinating overnight stays in homes. Both hosts and travelers are interviewed, to promote security for this interaction among strangers. Hosts are listed by country: the family situation is described, their hobbies, languages spoken, what kind of accommodations they offer, how much notice they need before a visit. Travelers in the program contact whichever hosts seem appropriate and make arrangements. Stays are for not more than three nights. After the traveler returns home, they’re expected to write a report of their visits and to return the address lists.

     I was going to Europe when I joined SERVAS but was traveling so spontaneously I wasn’t able to contact people far enough ahead. But in Brugge Belgium I contacted a man who said he would be a “day host” – he didn’t have space in his apartment to house anyone but would show them around the city. He did this for me: for three days he took me around Brugge, told me all the history, taught me how to drink Belgian beer carefully, and even met me early in the morning at my hotel when I left. He helped me with my baggage, took me to the train station and got me on the right train. It was a delightful gift!

      One last offering about this subject: What is it that defines the Stranger? The more someone/something looks or acts differently than us, the more foreign and strange this feels to us. I have a large photo of a Praying Mantis in my bedroom, to remind me that animals and plants feel “strange” and scarey to us because they are the extremes of looking and acting differently than us. The world of insects looks eerily like everything we imagine an alien from another planet would look like. Yet, they’re right here, among us, in our houses and yards! And we will kill them very quicklyif we find them in our homes! Welcoming the stranger could ultimately involve respecting the tiniest strangest life forms, and plants that have no eyes nor legs, animals that communicate telepathically instead of verbally. How do we know these Strangers are less worthy of our respect and hospitality than the two leggeds, our own species?

Morning Hope

In this morning
I begin again to weave my little life.
I take up various strands
from yesterday
and begin to pull and tug
on chosen threads,
with morning’s hope
that still they might
make something beautiful:
one day
the threads might fall together
– to my surprise! –
and make some sense.
Or usefulness.
And even if they don’t,
I feel creative
– in the morning! –
and continue effort
to build a life
from many, many tiny threads
– from “experience.”

Afternoon Despair

So many strands!
I grab one here
and pull it through
to find three more connected
but unseen.
Now more un-done
than done,
I need a nap.
I need my morning hope again.
My desk a mess!
Like roaches reappearing
against all effort,
projects pop up over empty space.
“Progress” seems illusion,
mirage that calls the traveler forward
across the hopeless landscape,
but only promise.
    Hunger.
Not for lunch, but joy.
Spirit-whipped
in such short time!
Music! Music give me back
My peace
And smile,
if not my hope.

Evening Reconciliation

O You, Great Power That breathes me,
To You I now give back my spirit for the night.
“As a weaned child on its mother’s lap”
I am quiet within me once again.
I fall asleep in your forgiving love.
I have played too much, naming play as “trouble,” “work;”
I tried too hard
Or not enough.
I chose, rejoiced, regretted.
You saw me through it all.
Please heal my mistakes,
Renew me for tomorrow,
Give me one more day.
You, in Whom I am a part –
O Source of my Existence-
Grant peaceful sleep
To this your small expression.

Seeing With the Heart

The Gift

February 26, 2013

There’s a true and funny story in my family history. My Swedish maternal great-grandfather had a farm near our small town in western Michigan (currently 700 people). Among his regular “acts of kindness”, he liked to greet the train when he knew that new immigrants were coming from Sweden.
One day sixteen year old Signe Peterson was expected to arrive and he couldn’t meet her, so he asked Bill Cook, the carpenter, to go in his place. Bill Cook was the only black man in town. As a carpenter, he worked for many Swedes and was known for speaking perfect Swedish.
So Bill Cook drove the wagon to the train, greeted the young lady in perfect Swedish, as the story goes, and helped her with her bags unto the seat to take her to her destination. Along the way, they chatted, in perfect Swedish, of course. Eventually she looked over at him, paused, and asked “Why are you so dark?”

Ah, alla Svenskar blir bruna nar de varit har ett tag!” explained Bill Cook.
(Oh, all the Swedes turn dark after they’ve been here for awhile!)

Well, whatever Signe’s surprise, she stayed and became the matriarch of the Peterson family; it’s they who’ve kept this delightful story alive.

***

    Of course this story is funny, but what it puts before us is a feeling of the confusion we might experience when we look at somone who seems just like us but looks very different from us. This has always been the challenge posed by the different races on earth, and genders as well. Whether it’s the shape of the eyes, the color of the skin, features unusual to us, clothes very different from ours, unexpected mannerisms – our eyes are startled. Wherever we live, we’re accustomed to seeing people who look and act predictably like us – we think. Actually, even within any culture, every face is unique! The predictable parts are what we focus on and feel comfortable with. Cultural media presents ideals with which the local citizens identify. When we encounter someone too far from our cultural ideal we’re confused.
Confusion offers an opening, a door to grow beyond the limitations of what we’ve learned thus far. The challenge in meeting someone who looks different from us is to make the jump into feelinga person, rather than just seeing them with the eyes. To feel any person – coworkers, neighbors, strangers – will make us safer in the world , as we will more accurately sense what people are really made of, who is truly a trustable ally and who is not. And learning to feel the inside of a person will make us richer as we find wonderful friends and allies we would have missed otherwise.
Being Caucasian in what has historically been a Caucasian-predominant country I can only talk about the racial and ethnic challenges objectively. Being female, I do at times experience the limiting judgements of gender stereotypes. I know it’s an enormous never-ending challenge for people of non-white races to deal with the unthinking surprise and reactions of some of us white folk. I offer this thought about the gift that people of color offer our closed white culture: to mature, for our own good! For safety. For accuracy in our dealings. For maturity as competent adult humans. And for the richness in friendships that’s available to us.
“It’s only with one’s heart that one can see clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

From The Little Prince, by Antoine De Saint-Exupery: (p.82)

Beach Poems

      Pentwater State Park, MI 8/13/12

A dull day at the beach.

Sprinkling on and off and now and then,

overcast with clouds and chill,

and still we came.

Evening and a-sudden

children, kites, and ice cream –

the rangers’ class was done.

Big folks ran with wee ones,

the sky and ground were full of yellow kites!

The sleeping flock of gulls awoke.

Fisherpeople walked the pier,

and I, to watch them cast.

Large swells rolled slowly toward us,

boats crept silent through the channel.

And then the break!

A glaring shiny circle on the waves.

Had an alien ship landed near our shores?

No, the clouds had deigned to let a little sun shine through.

Slowly oh so slowly, more light flowed out.

Then crowds appeared from nowhere.

Chatter, hush, excitement.

It was happ’ning quickly.

A hundred strangers found their seats together,

as if in church.

Children still were children in the sand,

gulls just circled for their food,

all not knowing what the grown-ups knew –

     we would see the sun set!

And those whose lives had tested them enough

would sit and soak in awe

a time of passing perfect peace,

a promise, glimpse,

that life is glorious.

               -marti matthews

                                  ************

         Pentwater State Park MI 8/14/12

I set my little tent

beneath the large old pine,

then crawled inside and tried to sleep.

The sweet cool breeze that brushed my cheeks

turned chill. My nose was cold.

Wrapped tight in twisty cloaks and folds

I tossed and turned and thought and pondered

on into a fitful sleep.

I woke,

aware that “Nature calls.” Oh no.

Must I rise and find my shoes

and shuffle off in dark to find relief?

A peek through netted windows

up through pine

revealed a star! “Aha!

For that I’ll rise in dark and cold,”

I said to self.

I fumbled for my shoes,

tumbled out the zippered door

and sitting on the ground looked up.

There across the quiet campround

just above the treeline

a crescent moon

was smiling at a brilliant planet!

The two so glad to look upon

the sleeping earth.

I rose and stumbled to the road.

All there! The tiny Little Sisters in the sky,

Cassiopea sitting upside down,

Orion almost set,

and a bridge of milky mist

gentling up the darkness

Here to There.

I found my way with care and quiet steps.

Relieved,

returned to sit and be

with Universe, always there,

Which shows itself when conscious mind takes rest.

        -marti matthews

                              
                                      ********************

           Pentwater State Park, MI 8/14/12

Oh, to always be with you!

A part of me is always here,

listening to your whisp’rings back and forth,

the farther shrieking call of gulls,

the rolling sound of waves

moving in and kneeling on the shore.

My body will remember warmth of sun,

and cold of water on my knees.

And soft of sand on feet,

and little bugs in other worlds

skipping over legs.

I and all the other unnamed friends on earth

who shared these dunes and sands today:

the boat-sailers,

   ball-players,

     dune climbers,

        sandcastle makers,

the sun soakers,

   wave riders,

     pretend fishermen,

       bike peddlers back and forth along the walks.

Little wispy children

spinning worlds from nowhere,

young men and women seeking mates,

old mates enjoying rest together.

But more than all,

A part of me will stay here on this dune ridge

with you, grandmother cottonwoods,

who knew me as a child.

Now I and you are so far on in years.

I say ’twill be myself goes first into return

to Source, but you are coming, too,

I see.   And when the dune has

gently buried you

I’ll be one to welcome you

to spirit, Source,

Who dreamed us all together

here this day.

                   -marti matthews