I got a note from the Beloved today. Surprising, how He gets in touch with us. Actually, it came in two separate notes, but it was from Him. In the first note He threw the Book at me. You know, the “Good One.” He asked me to get out of the house and do things I loved to do. To quit my kvetching about what had gone wrong. He said that anger was great—that I was able to use it to great advantage in my writing. He just wanted the sniveling and the begging to stop.

Since Our Lord said it, I was not offended at all, but rather encouraged. That He would stoop down and touch someone on the shoulder and say, “Look, I need you to do something for me. Write Vicki a little note and tell her that I asked her to do one thing. Use her anger effectively and to quit going over the same old ground, which happens to be her own house. I’m just sayin’” (Thus spaketh the Lord.)

I read that note carefully and consciously. It laid down the law. The law of gratitude. I couldn’t argue with that. Although I am afraid and forsaken, I am grateful that I have known love on the deepest possible level. I don’t have to beg for it. That is His point. Then I got the second note from Him. He used someone else to write it, but it was too synchronistic not to notice.

“Hello Vicki 

Upon reading your note I heard Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” in my head. The message I am getting is put on Leonard Cohen and listen deeply to that song. As you listen create a vision that you love and make your goal to manifest that vision.”

I have been blessed by God to receive Notes from Him when the time is right. I know how to write, but it is time to give it up on a deeper and more powerful level. How this will happen I do not know. But the Man has weighed in. I would be foolish not to listen.

Someone whose first initial is J. said that she really liked it when I wrote raw. I thought I always did. The straight skinny is that I trust my writing a thousand per cent because it is intuitional in nature. I am being used and in a very easy way.

When Bob was dying, it was very hard. I lived in a state of emotional rollercoaster-ism for many years. But the writing about it was easy. I knew how to get the job done. Same thing with my way of intuiting things. I know instantly what works for me energetically and what doesn’t. But I haven’t always trusted this knowledge. The older I get, the more I do, though. It just makes sense to protect myself from lower vibrations.
Vernon Howard said so many wise things it is taking a lifetime to assimilate them all. He said, and I paraphrase, “You wouldn’t let someone come in your office and dump garbage on your desk!” And we knew exactly what he meant. So I know better than to let someone dump their emotional baggage on my doorstep. But I do it to myself all day long. “The foes shall be of thine own household.” Boy, howdy, is that ever true.

I am having a difficult time this year—yes, this whole frickin’ year. The gods are coming down hard on me and the writing is still easy. I cry buckets but I am also learning to live a bit larger. Today I was at Publix doing my weekly shopping. G., the guy who bags and puts my groceries in the trunk, and I struck up a conversation. He has told me that he doesn’t need the money. He just enjoys connecting with people. I feel the same way about my writing. I don’t need it; I just enjoy the spiritual connection it affords me.

“So, G.,” I said, “I am gonna give you big trouble from now on. I’m gonna let you have it. I need to practice being more authentic and I’ll start with you.” He and I kid around a lot. There’s another guy that works the Customer Service desk there and he always says, “It’s another beautiful day in Paradise.”

When my little girl was making her last visit to the hospital, I asked if she wanted to lie down in the back seat or sit up front with me. She said, “Up front. I want to see the sky and the trees.” And very soon after that she was in the angelic realms. I am sure she goes with me to and from the Mac, to and from the grocery store, to and from heaven and hell. At least I have an angel there making sure I don’t go too far in the downward direction. All I can do is hope.

Come take my hand,
There’s a cookie in it.
And in the other hand, my heart.
Both are underwhelming at first.
You might say that looks are
deceiving.
For what appears to be hard and
crispy on the outside
Is soft and melt away within.

Come, turn the pages of my heart.
There’s a story in it.
Shocking at first but alive with grace.
The cracks of sorrow have been filled with light.

I met a little imaginary swami
at some point on my journey….
a “Fig Newton” of my imagination,
you might say….

An iMaculate conception.
Come, take my hand and
meet my little guru in the kitchen
of my soul….

Vicki Woodyard
I am going to read this at a Poetry Evening soon
and share a bit of A Guru in the Guest Room. Would
love for you to order a copy.

I went to Tai Chi today and had lunch in the Cafe at Cancer Wellness afterwards. As I sat there with a small plate of healthy food, the young intern named Lauren came over to visit with me. I met her the day she began her internship there. “My late daughter’s name was Lauren,” I told her. And her eyes radiated compassion.

Today we talked about a wide range of subjects. She is a wonderful listener, with beautiful eyes and a quietness about her that belies her youth. An only child, she knows she is loved. She has worked with disabled children at a place where they can ride horseback. I told her that I had been working on the Tai Chi move, Parting the Wild Horse’s Mane. In class, she told us that she had actually tamed wild horses. Looking at her, you would disbelieve that, for she is very feminine. But she has an inner strength that is also very tender.

“I ordered both your books on amazon,” she said while I was finishing my lunch. “Sometimes my friends come in and pick up one of them….”

“That’s great,” I told her, “because neither one is selling right now.” True enough. But this evening, to my delight and encouragement, I saw that Life With A Hole In It had risen to 28,000 on amazon.com. It is very, very easy for an independent writer to get discouraged about sales.

My third book is on the back burner. It is already written but will have to go through the purifying fires of editing. This is what is wearying to me. I write effortlessly; editing is another animal altogether. I have to decide what goes and what stays, which order the essays go in, etc. I have to have a solid block of time in which I can begin to shape the manuscript into a book. But the reward is great.

Every time someone orders a copy of Life With A Hole In It, I feel a deep sense of satisfaction. Why? Because I know the product; I lived it, wrote it and published it. I am not sure about A Guru in the Guest Room’s future. Sad to say, it seems to have hit the wall on some mysterious level. Swami Z has nothing to say about this. Some of you may have noticed that he is nowhere to be seen. Probably has something to do with showing me which book is the most important in the overall scheme of things. “Now don’t go all ballistic on me, Swami. Your day will come….”

One day my books will go flyin’ off the shelves (a fervent prayer)….

Page after page after page. Essay upon essay. What else is there to do? Sometimes I forget that I have little or no free will. What happens in one’s Self stays in one’s Self. The joke is that everyone is the Self. There is only His Endlessness, as Gurdjieff put it.

I have long since learned the intellectual truth. A few grains of it have actually sunk into my heart. There is no loss without gain. There is no gain without loss. Make of that what you will. It gives me an eye on the prize, a simple movement into letting go. And the holding on will come right along with it. You gotta laugh at the paradisical perfection of the paradox. We are “screwed, blued and tattoed.” I don’t remember who said that, but the cosmic joke keeps being told.

I don’t know you but I know myself. I don’t know myself but I know you. We are mirrors for each other, like it or not. That is why I am buying stock in Windex. (Actually I buy generic.)

I am writing this while a load of laundry is being noisy. The fall sun is soft on the poplars outside my window. I am loathe to face the rest of the day. I am scooping up sorrow by the armloads and throwing it into the atmosphere. I know that it will be converted back into joy somewhere, somehow.

Sometimes miracles happen, don’t they? The latest one is my friend Patrice’s transition to the other side. I barely knew her socially; our link was deeper than that. I sat with her book on my lap last night, leafing through the pages and meditating on what she titled her book, Back To The Garden. And she comes through to a friend of mine, who says that I can find her among the flowers there.” And I weep. You see, Patrice was a mighty wind blowing through many lives. She will continue to send us messages; that I know.

Maybe my words are breaths of fresh air to some of you who recognize that you, too, are in thought-prison and that the gate is open wide. The gateless gate. Gate, gate, paragate. And we sit within our prisons waiting for a pardon that has already been given.

I am tired. I had to write this. The warden says he will deliver it to the right people. All I can do is sit at the still point.

My friend, Patrice Dickey, author of Back To The Garden, died this month. As I sat on the couch tonight, I lovingly thumbed through the book, stopping on different pages that beg to be reread. In one, she tells how she received a message from a late friend. It took the form of a sign on a beat up old VW that said, “Write with joy.”

That is how Patrice and I met, actually. My book, Life With A Hole In It, had just come out. I was introducing it to a women’s spirituality group I attended (Mary and Martha’s Place). After the meeting, she came up to me and said, “Hi, I’m from Memphis, too, and I have read all of your spiritual teacher’s books. She was speaking of Vernon Howard. “And, she added, “I am a writer, too! Maybe we can exchange books.” And that we did.

Soon after that, she called to say that she wanted to buy four of my books to give as Christmas presents. I was so happy. When she popped in for a visit to pick them up, she gifted me with a beautiful hummingbird wind chime. It hangs on the mantel on the fireplace in my bedroom.

Now Patrice herself is gone, having succumbed to metastatic breast cancer. According to a dear friend, she was ready for the next stage of the journey. She had attended The Monroe Institute and was familiar with how to leave the body. She died in her sleep several months after learning that the cancer had spread.

How did I learn about it? I got up in the morning and found myself writing a poem about hummingbirds. I carefully chose the image I wanted to use with it. I immediately posted it on Facebook and on my website. Then I had breakfast and began to read the paper. When I got to the obituary section, I saw Patrice’s face smiling up at me from its pages. “Oh, no,” I thought, “this can’t be true.” But it was. I called a good friend of hers, who told me that Patrice was ready to go. “I saw her in hospice and she was in no pain. She died in her sleep. She died conscious.”

And now as I type these words, I realize how inadequate they are. The message she received, “Write with joy,” is one to which I can relate. There is no sorrow now for Patrice, for she has “gone to glory,” as she would say. I have always seen writing, as did she, as a way to cultivate the garden of the soul. Now her spirit will be in her garden, and those who visit it will find her there. Below is the poem, which I now dedicate to her.

For Patrice

My heart is broken
hugely open
hummingbird sips nectar
directly from the lip.
 
My soul is shattered
into matter
backlit with a starry field.
 
My God is measured
in sips of nectar
hovering gently
as I yield.
~Vicki Woodyard

Cry Chi

I have been going to weekly Tai Chi classes for about two months now. A curious thing happens; I spend the next day crying. The other night at dinner I told my son, “I cried all morning after going to Tai Chi yesterday. Might as well call it ‘Cry Chi’.”

My favorite move is one where you bend your knees slightly and sway from side to side, waving hands like clouds. I like the rootedness of the legs in that pose. But apparently my tears bring my yin side into sharp focus, which is a good thing. For too many years I have felt the need to function effectively. Why? Because Bob Woodyard, once the root and ground of my being, is now on the other side. I have had to bring forth my inner masculine to get things done in the world. I am good at crossing every “i” and dotting every “t.” But that puts me into yang overload, as it were.

So I go to Tai Chi on Tuesdays and Cry Chi on Wednesdays. In other words, I let the waterworks happen. I cry until my whole face is wet. I cry until I can’t breathe through my nose. And I am none the worse for wear. Instead, once I am finished, I go about my business. But inevitably, another wave hits and I find myself in a state of saline saturation again.

No matter how bad it gets, I can write. I can slog through loss, illness, fear, worry, anxiety. I can capture the phases and put them into phrases. God says, “Write, Vicki, write. Someone out there will resonate with your honest confessions. Don’t worry who. Just keep pecking away.” And so I do.

Sometimes I go out on the deck and go through some movements. I can look up, up, up at the tall poplars and pines and into the great blue beyond. I feel so tall and natural, part of the vertical world as I stretch my arms to embrace the sky. I remember my friend Peter, who said this, “I am bigger than the sky.” Yes. And I start to cry again. Peter would be so proud of me.

Googling someone was illegal in the fifteenth century. It was death by Tumblr for those who got caught!~Vicki Woodyard

My heart is broken
hugely open
hummingbird sips nectar
directly from the lip.

My soul is shattered
into matter
backlit with a starry field.

My God is measured
in sips of nectar
hovering gently
as I yield.

Vicki Woodyard

Fellow Facebookians (or Website readers and listeners),

I write this epistle to you and say unto you, “Wake up, you dolts. The internet is putting everyone to sleep.” No, wait, that’s the epistle to the Yahoos. Whatever….

I just recorded an MP3 called God’s Honest Truth, a humble confession from my stubbornly uncontrite ego.

It is found on my Tumblr page because that is an easy way to make them available in the Land of Facebook.

I run the gamut from Notes to Recordings to Jokes. I go from naughty to nice. Who doesn’t?

Here is the link: http://www-vickiwoodyard.tumblr.com/

Enjoy.