I am a current resident at Kendal, a senior living facility. I am a recent widow, a spiritual seeker, a writer, poet, mother, living with secondary progressive multiple sclerosis. I was a dancer, singer/songwriter, psychotherapist, interfaith minister, and home steader for many years.
This Poem is Not a Poem
BY JUDI BACHRACH
This poem outside my window
is the shad tree that is not a shad tree
exuberant in white lace for spring
an unidentified shrub
reminding me of the tree that bloomed
for twenty-five years
outside my old bedroom window
This poem is the husband
who is the not the living husband
holding me
my empty bed
remembering
our love of almost fifty years
now a vast horizon
where the sun stunningly
dips down behind the ocean
This poem is a deadly pandemic
freezing in place
chaotic days and nights
that are not our days and nights
sheltering nostalgia for what was
compelling history
searching for
the right use
of our time
our actions
our hearts
This poem unmasks
a world of sighs and sorrows
a fierce skin-to-skin embrace
of love and beauty
in every hope and fear
a shimmering possibility
sweet breath by breath
creating what is
and what will be
This poem arose in me during our last Quaker meeting.
The more
I hold myself together
The more
I forget I am already held
Let the pieces fall where they may
Here
I am
The following song was written and performed by my dear friend Jason and is offered as a gift of gratitude for those who struggle on our behalf. Please listen and help it reach those who need to hear and know that we are never alone.
As the writer Arundhati Roy observed in a beautiful essay (click on beautiful essay to read it) in The Financial Times last week, “historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”
“We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
Diary 4/21/20
Headlines for The Fiftieth Earth Day
Judi Bachrach
Canals Clearing in Venice!
Smog Lifting in Cities Around the World!
Seismic Activity on the Earth’s Upper Crust Quiet as Christmas Day!
If it were not a pause due
to tragically manhandling nature
we would be cheering at last
Help me to believe
fifty years from now
my grandson will congratulate
the successful generation before him
handing off the healing baton
to those coming up behind
Sustainable life on earth overcoming short term politics and financial gains!
A dear friend’s birthday today. I sent her an ecard– poor substitute for last year’s flight to New York and in person hugs and kisses and chatting with her friends and family– but so it is in these times. Love is boundless as we know, as is time, though that last bit is harder to believe. What we know on an everyday stage is that time flows from the past through the present into the future. Mostly, we spend a great deal of time going backwards or projecting forwards from where we are right now. To stay in the right now takes practice, and even after fifty years of meditation, I find it challenging to stay still in silence.
I am profoundly grateful that sometimes Silence blissfully rises up as an almost impenetrable barrier to accessing the non- stop flow of brain processing. But every sit is a different one and sitting with open expectation is forever spacious and non-specific. Now I go to zoom my Buddhist meditation group. Today I just hit the potential of deep quiet when the hour was up. So it goes. I heard the rain splattered against my window in this windy weather. So my thoughts splattered against that momentary ceiling of quiet. Passing and gone.
Thoughts “good” or “bad” slide on by. One thought I had was that all living things share the movement of oxygen and carbon dioxide in and out of their bodies. Whether it is in the air, within and on the land, or in the sea, this is true for ALL living things. The simple act of paying attention to every breath is our binding connection to life on earth. Breath itself is neutral, and the movement of that bodily exchange is going on sleeping or waking, for as long as we live. The last gasp is literally the end of our sojourn on the planet. Inside that thought I felt that I was being breathed, which is a familiar sensation/realization and always comforting to experience. To know that in this moment all I need to do is pay attention to each breath becomes such a refuge. I will make that phone call, read that article, connect with this or that person, eat my lunch- but not now. Now I am only focusing on that inbreath, that exhale, and the next and the next. Simple difficult work but with such rich rewards.
I wrote to another friend that anchoring in Love is what I work at every day. I am anchoring in my heart so that I am not drowned in statistics but can stay open to acknowledge the loss of the thousands of humans who have departed en masse from our world due to this virus. I felt seen and so moved by a poem sent to me by another friend doing the same work we all are while we safely find our groceries, cook, clean, use our computers, stay physically fit, and keep breathing every day.
Snowy rain fell all morning, melting within minutes of contact on grass or road. A chilly dreary spring day after brilliant sunshine yesterday. Then I gazed at a thousand bees in the flowering tree. Today streaks of sunshine are embodied by goldfinches at my bird feeder. Sweet greedy little creatures fussing at the larger sparrows and the other males for their grip on a perch. I am awaiting to tune into the Buddhist meditation group by zoom, my new daily ritual during the week. I am so glad to share this hour with others in silence.
The above image is waves on a Kendal pond by my friend, Rebecca Cardozo
The following poem came about as I noticed how closely all three religions of Abraham’s descendants were celebrating their holy days of Passover, Easter, and Ramadan. It moved me to include the very Buddhist metta invocations beginning with “May all beings…” as well. Each verse includes specific references to the individual holy day.s
I send two photos- one of me visiting with a Kendal resident (from the larger community beyond the Care Center) who took the photo from outside my window standing six feet away. The other is what a proud Daddy sheltering at home helped his 4 month-old son, my grandson Max, to do, what with having time on their hands….
“The equanimity to face all of this cannot be rooted in denial. Rather, it must be rooted in an acknowledgement of how it all is. But to look head-on at the horrible beauty of the universe as is, without hiding behind fantasy or denial and selective perception, takes guts. To look Shiva in the eye, to acknowledge the violent as well as the gentle, the ugliness as well as the beauty, the greed and selfishness as well as the compassion and mercy, the sickness, death, and decay as well as health and life – and to all of it – ALL of IT – say “YES!” – that is the ground on which true equanimity rests.
“We protect our hearts because of the fear that they will break. Yes, they will break. But out of the pieces will be forged a new heart, a strong and fearless heart, a compassionate heart, a heart that is invulnerable. That is what is required. Nothing less!”
~ RAM DASS
I awoke to this quote my friend sent to me. Ram Dass was an early teacher for me way back in the 60’s and 70’s. As college students living in Boston, my husband and I were able to attend lectures by him, sing Kirtan with Krishna Dass, another devotee of Neem Karoli Baba, their guru, and always read all that he wrote. He remained an Elder and guide for many more years until his death last year.
The above quote touches me directly with the essence of what it is I ask my heart to do. How do I open to the sorrow of tragedy by death affecting thousands, and still hold to the conviction that this crisis presents an opportunity for change, for waking up to “horrible beauty “of the universe as it is? Each of us probably has had a straight arrow aimed at the heart as this crisis continues.
Was it the story of the woman giving birth to her first child who cannot have her husband attend her in the hospital? Was it the death of a parent that could not be shared with their loved ones? Was it the loss of a home that a young family can no longer afford because they lost their non-essential jobs?
I was struck last night when my friend, who has lived in Italy for the past two years, sent me an email. She left Italy for a workshop she was going to lead in the States, just four days before they locked the country down. Fortunately, a client loaned her a summer home to stay in as, of course, the workshop was subsequently cancelled. My friend told me of photographs that a photographer from her village had taken, of army convoy trucks arriving in the small city of Bergamo to cart away the three hundred bodies of those who had perished in one day.
When I think of thousands dying all around the world, people get reduced to statistics in my mind. Three hundred souls I can imagine more easily- too easily. It would account for a majority of the residents in my current community of Kendal. I wept for Bergamo, for Italy, for America, Manhattan, my own county in Ohio and those three hundred deaths and countless stories of loss, multiplied over and over again. We are learning to say, Yes! to our broken hearts, making space for active compassion to take root. Laughter for what the soul has found is yet to arise for me today.
“Around the world, seismologists are observing a lot less ambient seismic noise — meaning, the vibrations generated by cars, trains, buses and people going about their daily lives. And in the absence of that noise, Earth’s upper crust is moving just a little less.” Harmeet Kaur CNN reporter
Think about it- only on Christmas Day does the earth get a similar break from all of our noisy activities. How can we deny that the results of our human lives affect the planet? “The earth’s upper crust is moving just a little less.” I had no idea. It makes perfect sense, but it is astounding information to me. I had no idea that our impact on the planet is connected on so many more levels than I even understood.
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