Her name was Laurie. She would have been 41 had she lived. I lost her when she was 7. St. Jude’s couldn’t save her. Chemo, surgery and radiation couldn’t save her. Love couldn’t save her. And she was love itself.

What has that loss done to my life? Let me put it this way. I have had a lifetime of learning to let go because I don’t come by it easily. You think it was easy to hold a dying child in your arms? (She had a loose tooth.) Or to walk into the house the first time without her? Or to know that you had a lifetime of loss ahead of you?

No one took this burden from me. I have carried it as best I can, given what I’ve got.

I told her we needed some help down here, her brother and I. Sometimes we get sad. Who wouldn’t? But we have learned that there is no way getting around sorrow. You have to make friends with it, use it, profit from it.

I took a walk tonight in the land of the opposites. I saw green, green grass and beautiful flowers. What I didn’t see was how love came to me in the grass and the sky and the moon and the stars. The mystery remains intact.

 

“Passion and purpose go hand in hand. When you discover your purpose, you will normally find it’s something you’re tremendously passionate about.”~Steve Pavlina, Blogger and Author

 My late husband, Bob, gave me a great gift. As he lay in his hospital bed back in 2000, having just been diagnosed with cancer, he asked my son and I to go buy him a tape recorder. We were glad to escape the hospital with all of its suffering. In a messy old store, we found a brand new Sony recorder and gave it to Bob when we got back to his room.

He could barely speak; we had to make him stop every 15 minutes to rest. He was telling “our story.” Telling how we met in fourth grade, met up again in high school, got engaged while he was at Georgia Tech. “I had gotten on my knees and prayed God to let me marry this woman,” he said.

In between speaking, the three of us would sit silently, buried under a mound of brand-new grief, tears slipping down each face. We put a “No Visitors sign” on the door. I told the nurse what was going on and she was moved. Who wouldn’t be? I had not planned to spend the summer in quite this way.  But Bob had been ill for over a year, the undiagnosed cancer breaking  his ribs and making the pounds melt away from his once-muscled body.

Now he was speaking again. “I want you to find your passion before I die,” he said. I said nothing, just waited for him to go on. I don’t even remember what he said next. He just kept talking about our lives together. He had some plan about hooking up our two home computers to do research on multiple myeloma. Eventually he finished the recording. I am still here typing, doing what he asked me to do before he died.

He did die, right before Christmas of 2005. During his illness I began my website to support him. I quickly knew I was called to write and that I would never stop. Two years ago I published Life With A Hole In It: That’s How The Light Gets In. It has touched the hearts of many people because Bob knew something that I didn’t know. That I needed a reason to go on living after he died.

The title of the book arose from an email in which I wrote something about widowhood. “It’s like living life with a hole in it,” I typed. And it is. But the subtitle is “That’s How The Light Gets In.” Bob must have known that.

I have now written countless words on my website, all arising from the fountain of love that is never ending. I used to think that I would do something bigger than just being at home behind the iMac 7 days a week writing. But actually, that is a very big kind of love, a very big kind of calling. I ask no more of life than to serve this passion I was asked to find by someone who loved me more than life itself.

If you want to know what he would say about what I just wrote, he probably would have just smiled. Sometimes that is the most powerful thing on earth.

If you would like to read more, please order Life With A Hole In It. That can be done from this site by clicking here. Or if you are so moved, donate a small amount to keep the site up and running.

Come back soon….

It’s June 6, 2012, and as usual I am happily hitting the mean streets of my Mac. I began this essay when the phrase “a voice for the heart” popped into my consciousness. Last night I had one of my dreams where the Higher Self speaks. At the end, I was washing the hands of my baby girl, a toddler. In the dream her hands were very, very tiny. I think that means that I see what I do as very insubstantial and undeveloped. Perhaps that is where I need to place my full attention.

I have been writing essays for a long time now. I have written under the banner of nonduality, but I come from the background of The Work as taught by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Some call it The Fourth Way. It is a teaching that will never die because it conveys a primal truth. We are the Self. As I continue online, I see more and more that nonduality is only a banner, an umbrella for a certain point of view. I am now ready to step out from any umbrella. Just me standing in the rain and sun. Puts me in mind of Leonard Cohen’s “A Thousand Kisses Deep.” Nonduality seems to lack the necessary heart, the requisite humility that one needs to take the final step into one’s Own.

I see my place online now as an important one, if a tiny one. I hold heart space here. Not the sentimental heart, but the One Heart beating in the One Self. The mind has its place, but it must be jettisoned at the beginning of the journey up the mountain of God. It has done its work. That is why I simply cannot participate in online parsing of the heart. The heart is wounded by such silliness. I no longer subscribe to group think, to gurus that pop newborn and begin to set up pulpits in the marketplace. I have my own work to do.

I delight in making people laugh, in making people feel themselves a bit softer and more open. Wisdom does not have to be organized, cut and dried. I write between the lines.

Vicki  Woodyard

Today I am cranky. Somebody by the name of Sharon Annable (God bless her) suggested I write about it and I would feel better. So…

I got in touch with createspace.com, who published A Guru in the Guest Room. Turns out they don’t carry it on amazon.com in Canada. I Googled this issue up and apparently, many authors do not have their books on amazon.ca. What a frustration. So I did what any chocolate-lovin’ crankypants would do. I ate a Butterfinger, not that there’s any chocolate in there, but it would do.

Then I drove to the Post Office and bought me some postage. I went postal! I pity the poor fools behind me, as Mr. T. would say. For I had to explain to the man behind the counter that I wanted him to weigh my book inside the padded mailer and then count me out postage times ten (to mail within the U.S.)

He began the seemingly arduous task of doing this complicated maneuver in a tiny post office that could have been located in outer Siberia. The Kroger grocery has moved, so it stands gutted and unoccupied. A few other stores have closed shop. This poor post office is doomed and the man figuring out the price of stamps for me knew it. He had an aura of futile pleasantness about him. So did I. We knew it was useless to rebel. The system had us where it wanted us. In this dinky little subsection of middle-class America.

Behind me stood the restless natives. Not many,—mainly senior citizens who have learned the high cost of vigorous rebellion. Some few have learned to sleep on their feet. Not me. I stood there watching this poor soul work his calculator and figure out how to separate stamps from each pane. What a pane!

Then just for fun, I decided I wanted to find out how much it would cost to mail copies of my book to Canada. That having been said, he drew in his breath quietly, as if he were thinking, “When Canada freezes over,” but that happens all the time, doesn’t it? I stood there aging rapidly, realizing that my brain cells were dying at an alarming rate. And all for what? To make sure I had the correct postage to mail signed copies of A Guru in the Guest Room. I would make more money robbing nuns at gun point. Futility, thy name is small-time spiritual writer. Ah, yes, I am a spiritual being, albeit a cranky one.

Finally, he delivered the goods, Two cellophane envelopes stuffed with different postage stamps. They go by the names “Navaho Jewelry,” “Wisdom,” “Wedding,” “Purple Heart” and “American Clock.”

I don’t know which stamps will be on your mailing envelope but the price for me to recover from that trip to the post office, come home and have a mini-breakdown and figure out which stamps go on which mailer to which state or country comes to $18 within the United States and $24 international. The thrill of reading A Guru in the Guest Room? All together now….Priceless!

*I will personally sign each and every copy sent to each and every address and yes….Canada is included under the international umbrella.)” O Canada

Vicki “Navaho Jewelry Wisdom Wedding Purple Heart American Clock” Woodyard
It doesn’t get any better than this.

A Guru in the Guest Room has been out for almost 3 months and it seems to be below everyone’s radar. I had such high hopes for this book. It was written during a time when Bob, my late husband, was trying to stay alive. His diagnosis, back in 2000, was Stage III, multiple myeloma, cancer of the bone marrow. He had been given less than 3 years to live.

I was stripped down to my original emotional carcass. Every layer was pealed from me and I screamed in protest. I hollered in rage. The God I knew was not the God I wanted to know. If he could do this to me twice in one lifetime, I didn’t think much of Him, the rat bastard. For Bob and I had 2 children and the girl had died at age 7 of a childhood cancer. She  had been given the same prognosis as Bob; it would take her life within 3 years.

The whole family was destroyed down to its base both times. Not only that, but all of the crutches we tried to use evaporated on us. As our daughter lay dying soon after her seventh birthday, my mother had been called home to care for her dying mother. The pediatric oncologist was in Egypt on a visit home and our minister had suddenly left the church.

The map of my emotions indicate a rough and rocky ground. Loaded with land mines, tricked out with traps and showing evidence of smoldering volcanoes. All this because “God never gives you more than you can handle.” Insert laugh. Ha ha.

You never heal from the death of a young child. I remember the clothes in her dresser drawers from that summer. I remember how mad she was when my mother visited and suggested we do some “fun painting” in her room. Her brown chest got updated to white, green and orange. She was incensed. She said she wanted it brown. Later on, we got her a used desk and I asked her what color she wanted it  painted. “Black and white” was her answer. Oh, dear God, just to write this paragraph stirs something deep within me. She was being herself to the core; for that was all she had left.

When Bob found out that he was dying, he asked me to find my passion. It became writing. He left the earth plane in 2004, right before the Asian tsunami hit at the end of the year. I was washed out to sea emotionally. No life raft but that request. “Find your passion.” And so over 7 years have passed since that good man left this earth. Now my writing is a life raft for strangers who read my essays. They say things like, “You made me cry.” Or “that was exactly what I needed to hear.”

Because I am tuned into the emotional zeitgeist, whatever the heck that means. I can relate to how it feels when everything is stacked against you. You have to pull the weeds of self-pity out by the roots. You have to know that love cannot be buried in a pink dress; that a marriage doesn’t end when one spouse dies. That you are worth saving.

Swami Z was created during Bob’s illness. He is an iMaculate conception born to see me through the tough times. I give him free reign to hold satsang in my sunroom. Actually, I had it built just for that purpose. Keep in mind that he is fictional; most people find themselves laughing any time I let him waltz through an essay that I post on Facebook. He is about keeping it real. He knows full well that my passion must be stoked with humor and grace in equal measure. I know that God is the fullness of my life and that emptiness is who I really am.

Yes, my life has been shot full of holes. If you held me up to the light, I would look like swiss cheese. Strangely, these holes produce each essay that I write. The child that I lost, the husband that I cherished, speak as if they were still here, loving me to the full extent. Miracles abound when I write. Loaves and fishes multiply. That is what Bob knew when he asked me to find my passion. Check out my 2 books. They were both written when Bob was dying, if death is even something to be noted. This I know; life is where the light gets in. Laurie and Bob, dear hearts in heaven, shine on. Shine on.

*If you would like to get an ebook of Life With A Hole In It or A Guru in the Guest Room, you can go to the Donate Page. I will email you either book for $5. Of course, if you feel like donating more, feel free. Every little bit helps keep the site up and running and pays for my publication expenses.

 

Such a strange morning. I woke after a bad dream. Had a bowl of cereal and some tea. Went back to bed to do some “long thinking.” That is when you take an idea and just allow yourself to spend some time with it. What I chose to think about was how we live in a prison of our own making. The cave that Plato speaks about is our living reality. One of Vernon Howard’s talks was “How To Escape the Prison of Illusion.”  A great title.

Today there is no lack of nondual folks speaking about awakening. Most of them are speaking to us from within the dream. Make no mistake about that. Just because they speak does not mean that they have made their final escape. It is more of a” one step forward, two steps back” experience.

I have read Irina Tweedie’s book, Daughter of Fire, many times. And it is a huge book, in both size and content. Her teacher, Bhai Sahib, forced her to face the darkness within. He allowed no shred of illusion to remain. Instead he ruthlessly ground her down. Day after day, she sat with him in extreme heat, their own respective health problems and the mere situation of “no escape.”

“You must be able to sleep in the street; why not? Is the street not also His?” (Bhai Sahib to Mrs. Tweedie in Daughter of Fire)

This is no different than our own lives. I have had to sit with years of caregiving and grief while studying my own desperation and lack of answers. When my own teacher died, I had no idea that soon my spouse would also be dying. It all seemed too much because it was. I bore such a burden that I only slept in brief fits and starts for many years.

What kept me going? What kept Irina Tweedie going? The fact that there was no escape. Pema Chodron has spoken about this in detail. The neoadvaitists would have you believe otherwise. But for one on the path of developing their essence, no escape is the law. Thankfully, there is a higher law and that is the law of love. When no escape is finally seen, the law of love kicks in. For Irina, it happened after the death of her teacher. With me, I am not sure it is anything but a tiny crack in the door.

“Not all things can be answered as to why and how,” he began softly. It is all a question of surrender…if you are surrendered, if you have faith, if you are surrendered to His will, His will becomes your will. And what needs to be done will be done.”

To be continued….

June 4, 2012

I have “moved house.” If this blog format looks new, it is because it is. After much travail, and with the help of Renaee Churches, God bless her, I am now here at vickiwoodyard.com. I won’t go into the “why’s” of the move, but I am sure they will prove to be good ones. Just change your bookmark if you like.

So here is what is going on with me. I recently got this lovely and inspiring comment:

An Open Letter to Ms. Vicki Woodyard

“You are a very special writer. A mesmerizing one. Somebody who can do a unique task on this planet. Your occasional moods of depression are also yours. There is nothing to be worried about it. The bait is there to know more. Don’t you see— the ocean also has many depressive depths? You have many friends.

As it is, the unseen world is more crowded than the seen one. Don’t worry about sale of prints and such tasks. ‘Let the dead bury the dead’. You please write. Write vehemently such things that you only can write and so unheard in the realm of worlds. Sure, one day you will come across the Final word . And that word will unravel all the words. Good luck.

Truly yours, R.”

That is such a beautiful couple of paragraphs, for I toil in the vineyards of verbiage long and hard. Yes, I would love for some of my readers to order Life With Hole In It and my second book,  A Guru in the Guest Room, but that cannot be forced on anyone.

They are wonderful books and will hopefully be discovered in due time. I have entered Life With A Hole In It in the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards for 2012. Cross your fingers on that.

As Renaee and I figure out what else needs doing on this new blog, make sure and check out the ordering links for the books and come back often. This site is here to enlighten, enliven and inspire. It is here to make you come to terms with the reality of the All. Not an easy task but a necessary one.

Love,

Vicki