I write for those who know there is no way out. I don’t write for optimists or pessimists but for those that want to surrender but can’t.

Surrender is the highest place we can sink.

Sinking is not an acceptable thing to do in our culture.

Oh, we make noises about it. Celebrities sink over and over and endlessly apologize for it.

But to really sink into a lifetime of loss takes that whole lifetime.

My friend Peter knew there was no way out for him.

There is no way out for me.

I am okay with this.

What I am not okay with is people that snipe at me about not being more positive.

They can find reams of positive statements spewed all over the internet. Will it change them?

You tell me.

I am in Act III, right there with Leonard Cohen. He, God bless him, sings the truth and thousands upon thousands of people respond to his heart.

He knows.

I would say the “H” word but I will leave that to him.

I am an apple, a pear and a tree.
I am spit polish, a rag and a bee.
I am tornado and I am light rain.
I come to you begging again and again.

I am a X-ray and also your bones.
I am a menu and I am hard stones.
I am with fever and I am with child.
I am tsunami now going wild.

I am forever and also a day.
I am a horse and also its hay.
I am so endless and always so true.
I am the deathless one and I am you.

Vicki Woodyard

In the dream my front yard
was full of blue eggs and then
they had hatched and were empty.

Stepping down into the subconscious
cellar where I hastily drop my
mysterious thoughts, I turn the
flashlight on the dream interpretation
book. (It is alive.)

“The dream of blue eggs is not to be
taken lightly for soon you will be
hatching physical manifestations
of your joy in sharing what you have
earned through the school of hard
knocks.”

And so I climbed back up the stairs,
being grateful for a yard full of
fledged grace.

Vicki Woodyard

I remembered part of a dream I had last night. I was talking on the phone to my friend Lyn and was having trouble figuring out some bit of technology I held in my hand. I kept telling her I didn’t know what would help. Maybe if I lifted the antenna? This conversation went on and then we were together. She said something like, “This part of you that doesn’t know…it’s the part of you that keeps you open and innocent.” And I got what she was saying and everything fit.

For I have been fearful since birth. As a child my father stormed at me because in junior high he could not easily teach me how to work a combination lock. My mother said I was such a dreamy child she had to help me get dressed in the morning. “Put on your sock. Put on your shoe.” She grew exasperated. I couldn’t tell my right hand from my left. Luckily I had a birthmark on my right little finger. “That is your right hand,” she said. And that was a great help to me.

Understand, I have a high IQ. It’s just that visually and spatially, things don’t always add up for me. Bob drove me on the freeway because I have such poor spatial judgement and I can’t make much sense of maps and I can’t measure things with a yardstick or ruler.

Now Lyn was saying to me, “This is your innocence!” Could it be possible that everything in my world is perfectly okay even when I can barely navigate through life as most people do so easily?” You see, I substituted a strong sense of shame at not being “competent, productive, normally social,” etc. The dream teacher was healing me.

She might as well have well have taken an X-acto knife and cut me from the caul I had been wrapped in since birth. These are a few of my thoughts as I lay there.

“Every day I get sad because I don’t understand how Bob was here one minute and gone the next. That’s not like being unable to read a map, but it evokes the same feeling of failure in me. A tear forms and runs down onto the pillow. And I remember what Lyn said, “This not knowing is your innocence.”

And suddenly my relationship with Peter all added up. He said that after his strokes, he couldn’t make change. As a young mother, I offered to help sell books at a school function. It was then I realized I couldn’t make change. I got so panicked I pled sudden illness and someone took over my place at the book table. I was deeply ashamed.
So I have carried this shame my whole life. And now Lyn is saying my inability to know is my innocence. And I think of Peter and him saying, “For what it’s worth I hold your hand in this.”

My God. Could it be that simple? I think it is. Our inability to be perfect allows us to remain in our innocence, unbroken by our brokenness. So this morning is truly a new day for me. I feel sad; I woke up crying. And in that sorrow and not knowing how to fix it, someone is always holding my hand.

I have failed at letting people know how hard my life feels on a daily basis. On the rare occasions that I succeed, I become more approachable. You see, I have made a life that “looks normal but isn’t.” It is a life filled with pain and I know the gift in it is meant to be shared. I had a reading with the late Betty Bethards and she said, “You could walk through a mud puddle and come out untouched. You make it look so easy.”

But I am covered in mud and have scales on my eyes and it hurts like hell. And God wants me to keep writing about the fact that I have nothing to go on but honesty and even that hurts. I am in love with the mystery of life. But I still cry about why the good die young and people like me keep on keeping on. But I am choiceless. I look really neat and clean because it keeps me safe. This safety deadens me. So Lyn was saying, “Your innocence, your unknowing, makes you who you are.” That is a very powerful thought.

I hope you like this essay. The sun is not up and I have not had breakfast. I am on my own down here on a planet that isn’t working very well. I want to hide from life but I haven’t succeeded once at doing so. It has come and picked me up by the scruff of the neck and carried me where I need to go. And apparently I look remarkably okay.



Vicki Woodyard

Just watch yourself living your life. Notice your restlessness and that brings a degree of awareness that only you can bring.

No one can borrow another person’s awareness.

No one can steal energy from you when your mental sentry is on guard.

It may seem unfriendly but you know who and what depletes you.

If you find yourself staying too long at the fair, walk away. It could be Facebook, TV or negative thoughts.

Love is looking for you. Let it find you. You don’t have to look for it.

Some would say you are love itself and that, too, is true. But sometimes little lambs of attention escape and the good shepherd in you must bring them gently back.

“So when they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my lambs.”
John 21:15

For example, you never told me that I looked pretty
or that you liked a certain color on me,
I asked you to drive me around town
like you were my chauffeur
and I often nagged you about the smallest things.

And certainly your love was big enough
for both of us
and my desire to please was extraordinary
as witness my compulsive neatness,
but having to have the last word
was a given for me.

If you were here now—just supposing, I might
come right out and say, “Tell me
how beautiful you think I am,”
and you might feel free enough to say,
“No, I am not going to drive you to the mall.
Let’s stay home and go back to bed.”

And suppose it was all one big setup
for a life that went crashing into
a heap of loss, the rubble of pain
and the eternal verity called for
want of a better word, “love.”

Beyond the walls of life and death
there grows a rose that never dies.
The thorns ripped open all the lies,
now nothing’s left to do but rise.

Yesterday morning I was watching a YouTube video that a friend made. She was talking about tao, telling us to pay attention to flow, when suddenly I heard a huge thump, like a limb might have hit the roof. I looked out onto the back deck and two black vultures had swooped down onto it. They were fighting, their wingspan huge as they jumped up and down, their wings in a display. I was horrified. I called Rob to come look but in less than a minute they were gone.

I felt like it was a bad thing to see vultures fighting. But here is something I read online:

Native Americans also deemed the vulture as a symbol of renewal and linked it with renewal themes seen in the rising of a new sun every day. The Mayans had their ideas about bird symbolism. To the Mayan mind the vulture was observed as a death eater.

As a consumer of death, the Mayan felt the vulture could also convert death to life. So, the vulture was considered a symbol of cleansing , renewal and transformation. It’s also associated with water and the vulture controls the rain.

This connects that theme of spinning the revolving wheel of life. In their region, droughts were death and water meant life. Vultures were viewed as fearless of death – they stared it in the face and ate death for breakfast (literally).

So this morning I woke up suddenly. I had been having a wonderful dream. In it, a group of women were being treated to makeovers by a lovely tall young woman that I knew. The first thing she did was cut my hair and pronounce it beautiful. She was working on us quickly in a piecemeal way. Blocking in makeup but not blending it yet. Telling us to pick out a purse we liked. Indicating we could choose something beautiful to take home.

She told us we would select a stick and then speak, which is an American Indian thing.

Upstairs there were men working on hairdos. I asked if they knew if the building we were in had a name but they didn’t know. Out in the backyard, I looked up at the house where we were, it was a gold stucco finish and it was adjoined with an old brick shopping center.

The mood of the dream was total joy. The woman was love itself. Her sister and others were helping to remake us. I got a mani-pedi lying down and then got my teeth cleaned. When I got up, I felt a bit dizzy and they almost sent me home but I said, “I’m fine; it’s just a postural thing.”

Then suddenly I woke up wishing that the dream had finished. But this I know, it was a gift. Now I think the vultures preceded the makeover. Isn’t that cool?

Vicki Woodyard

A Call to the Unconscious Angels

This is a call to the unconscious angels
lying dazed in the gutters of thought,
haloes askew, adrip in dew.

Wake up, you hearty winged ones
and be about your proper work.
You may not sleep; you may not shirk.

I’m talking about the angels inside of
me, the ones that snore so loudly
I can’t hear. Your wings are frosty
and you need a bellyful of stew.
Wake up so I’ll be new.

The littlest angel needs her morning
cup of cocoa. Are you loco?
Arouse yourselves and line up
two by two and I’ll bestow a kiss
on you.

Vicki Woodyard

Cohen and Cash sing
songs that wring both
love and loss from
listening ears.

Musical chairs
we sit in both
life and death
as the coin is tossed.

Up then down,
Smile then frown.
The merry-go-round
often breaks down.

To sit with one is to
move to the other,
Both Our Father
and Our Mother.

1/20/13

If I was looking for a spiritual teacher, I would want one with a stern and steely eye on the ego at all times. One who would swat you with his energy if you began to deviate from your proper inner stance.

I would also want one who embodies compassion. I had such a teacher. His name was Vernon Howard and he never made deals with the devil. He thundered at us to sit up straight and pay attention. He liked to say that we begin on the physical level, then on to the mental and spiritual ones.

He spent equal time on darkness and light because each is within us. He kept us in paradox up to our eyeballs. One minute he would say we were hopeless and the next that we were in the right place. Truth cannot be doled out to the indifferent. That is a really important point. It’s the reason why churches don’t work.

There is an old saying in the Work, “Take what you want and pay for it.” During the years that I spent studying his talks and books, I gave it everything I had because I wanted it so badly. So many tunnels to crawl through on your belly. So many prayers rising to heaven, “God help me. I can’t help myself.”

And grace was always there. Always is here right now. If you pay attention….

Woke up early having dreamt that my father had died. I was grieving. I lay in bed listening to a howling wind and I began to cry. I sent up prayers to heaven for him. I talked to him. I got up and blew my nose hard. And now here I am. These tears are proving to be fertile ground for my work. My father would be proud. He was a good writer himself and had to leave school in the eighth grade. His mother abandoned him and his family when he was two. Once she called when he was a small boy and said she would meet him at the park. He went and sat on the bench and she never came.

Everyone is playing hurt and doing remarkable things. He grew up to start the first independent pharmaceutical company in Memphis. He gave us all we needed, everything he never had. He would put rocks in his lunch pail to make the kids think he had something to eat. That, my friends, is a tough life. He was haunted by his mother’s loss so he never spoke of it. I learned those things from my mother.

I feel better now. I am grateful for learning the one great lesson. Love is a survivor. It can’t be abandoned and it can’t go hungry. For it is food. “I am the bread of life,” says the Christ consciousness. “I will never leave you or forsake you.” Amen.

Vicki Woodyard
Author of Life With A Hole In It