It felt good to miss the most recent cold snap in upstate New York—I spent that time in Florida with my sister.
Missing a cold snap lifted my spirits, but surviving one might have been better for my soul.
It’s not that I want to suffer, but I know from past experience that when skies are sunny and everything is going my way, I tend to float downstream in a bubble, oblivious.
Only when something or someone is taken away from me, do I learn to appreciate what I had.
When I was young and poor, living in LA with my first husband, we sometimes had to scrape together a few dollars to put food on the table. Bills went unpaid, debts piled up, and in desperation, I finally left.
Back in New Jersey living with my parents I found a job right away and slowly began to pay off the debts, then to buy a used Volkswagen beetle, and finally to rent an apartment of my own. I remember feeling such joy at simply being able to pay my bills on time.
The last years of my husband Adrian’s life were beyond difficult for both of us. He fought against his increasing physical and mental disabilities. I fought against my unwanted caregiving role, feeling lonely and overwhelmed without my best friend to help me through it.
This struggle is what brought me initially to attend meditation Sunday mornings at the Foundation of Light. I knew I needed help, and hoped I could remake myself into a more patient, compassionate person.
Remaking oneself into a better person is not what meditation is all about. But it did help me see the patterns of my behavior and the workings of my mind. It left me a little more space. And helped me begin a practice that I now follow in a more disciplined way.
There were times during that last most difficult year that I wished Adrian would die and then immediately felt guilty that I had. But when the actual moment of his death came, it felt unbearable. I hugged his lifeless body and cried, but it wasn’t until the shock of relief wore off that I began to grasp the reality that his death was final.
I had to lose Adrian in order to really know what it was I had lost.
I’m a little better now at appreciating the people I love in the moments they are actually with me.
Me standing next to environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy's stone cairn, or "the egg" at Sapsucker Woods bird sanctuary in Ithaca earlier this winter.
