Teri's Blog

          CBC’s interest in the “Hopeful Now” blog  and Oriah Mountain Dreamer and Myrna Kostash’s insightful comments below have made me think more about this whole issue of hope. I am sure all of you are familiar with Oriah’s wonderful work (Oriah’s Website), but for those of you in far flung parts of the world who might not know Myrna, she is an award-winning Canadian author and radio documentary producer who has just finished writing a book on Saint Demetrius and how researching his life lead to an exploration of her own her Eastern Orthodox heritage.  It’s being published by University of Alberta Press and I’ll let you know when it’s out! In the meantime, here’s some further thought that has been spurred by all this interest:
          In the column I wrote on hope in the latest issue of The Feminine Fire Newsletter (Click here)  I take on Tolle’s belief that you can’t be hopeful and be in the “now”. In the column I go into more detail than I do in the blog below, and I talk about the intense feeling I experience when I am filled with hope and how it is very similar to being filled with the profound bliss that is known as ānanda in the yogic tradition – and how that seems to be a very “now” type experience!  As I thought about it later I realized that I think the difference between what Tolle is talking about and what I am describing is that I think the kind of hope he is talking about is head-centered. It is a kind of hope that is based on thinking – especially the kind of compulsive, running-in-circles thinking that is filled with “Maybe if this happens, that will happen, and then maybe this situation will be better, and then maybe that problem will get fixed…and on and on…”
          Right when I was thinking about this difference between a “feeling hope” and a “thinking hope” I was reading through Emily Dickinson’s poem again and was absolutely blown away by the third line:
Hope is a thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the song without the words…
That’s it! It’s the “song without the words”! That’s exactly the state of being filled with hope that I have been trying to express. It’s a wordless, non-thinking, non-expecting state of joy-filled being in which all good things seem not just possible but as if they already exist. 

I have had a really wonderful response to my last blog. The CBC radio show Tapestry contacted me and had me come in and read the blog so that they could put it on the air. It will be on a show they are doing on the whole topic of hope which will probably air on their opening season show onSeptember 12th.

I just have to shake my head when I read my last blog – the one I wrote over a month ago – with its passionate commitment to post blogs frequently and respond to your comments quickly. But it seems life, and now death, have continued to throw up road blocks on the path paved with my good intentions…
            If you know me personally, you know that my dear friend David lost his battle with pancreatic cancer on April 6th – just two months after his diagnosis and far short of the six to nine months we originally thought was the worst case scenario.
            In the midst of those two fraught, agonizing months, I wrote a column on the topic of hope for what was to be the “winter” issue of my newsletter – the one I have just sent out on this beautiful spring day.  As I mention in the column, I’d gotten the idea for writing a piece on hope over a year ago when I was listening to a song sung by the choir from Taizé. The lyrics focus on St. Paul’s famous verse in 1Corinthians about “hope, faith, and love” and how they are the only things in all the world that abide forever. In traditional Catholicism, they have even come to be thought of as the three great virtues (sort of opposed, I guess, to the seven deadly sins). My original idea had been to explore why, in the Christian tradition at least, we hear so much about faith and love and almost nothing about hope. First, I was fascinated with the idea that by simply having hope we could be doing something virtuous, and second, with the fact that thinking about hope in this context seems to have gotten lost. This idea stayed with me for a long time – and I still think it is one worth exploring – but then David became ill and “hope” took on a whole new level of personal significance in my life. It became a big part of what was keeping me, along with David’s other loved ones – and David, for sure – going. And then I came up against Eckhart Tolle’s comment “Hope is what keeps you going, but hope keeps you focused on the future, and this continued focus perpetuates your denial of the Now and therefore your unhappiness.” Although it probably seems pretty audacious of me to take on an individual as esteemed as Tolle is, I don’t think he’s got this one quite right! And I tackle his comment in my newsletter column. Since you can click here for a copy of it, I won’t go into my comments here.
            But I do want to say that I left the column the way it was when I wrote it — with David still alive at the time – because that fact colored what I was writing to such a great extent. But doing this left unexplored the question of what – now that the outcome I was hoping for did not occur – my thoughts on hope are and how I think hope relates to the “now”:
            At any given point in those two months David’s “now” was: “I have advanced stage 4 pancreatic cancer.” At virtually every given moment, David sought to change that particular “now” – and he wouldn’t have done that if he hadn’t hoped he could. To do this, he accepted with great faith, thanks, and reverence the thousands of prayers that were being made for his full recovery. He believed deeply in teachings by men like Emmet Fox who said, “There is no disease that enough love cannot cure.” He meditated for hours a day using a creative visualization technique in which he saw the cancerous cells being replaced by healthy ones and vanishing into “white holes” – a concept he said, laughing, that he invented so that the cancerous cells could “come back as something good”.
            But David died – and he died much sooner than anyone predicted. Does it mean our hope failed? No. Absolutely not. But how can I say this in face of the fact that the outcome we so passionately hoped and prayed for did not happen?
            I just don’t know. But I do know, for one thing, that I do not believe – as many new agers do – that if David had just been able “to change his thinking” or “to be positive enough” or “to learn the lesson he was supposed to learn from his illness”, he would have been cured. I think how long we live and how we die is way more complex than that. And I also know that I have not lost my faith in hope or, for that matter, in the power of love. And I am amazed how these three “virtues” of St. Paul’s fit together and, indeed, abide in my heart. In fact, my heart is, at this very moment, this now, filled and flooded with hope – the kind of hope that Emily Dickinson calls “that thing with feathers that perches in the soul”. And I do not think this takes me out of the now.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chilliest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

                        Emily Dickinson

Just over a month ago, I started blogging with great enthusiasm. I was committed to this! I was going to blog religiously every week! I would respond to every comment the minute it was posted! No slipshod, slacking-off blogging for me. And I knew I could do it. For the first time, after a year and a half of dealing with serious illness and three major surgeries, I was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I was back on track – getting healthier by the day and raring to go…

And then, to pinch an old joke, I realized the track I was on was a railway and that light at end of the tunnel was, in fact, a train….

 And, tragically, this train looked like it was barreling down on someone I love much faster than it was barreling down on me: A few weeks ago one of my closest friends was – completely out of the blue – diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And, worse, it had already metastasized. Because my friend recently moved to a town in Ontario where he would be closer to his long-time, long-distance love in Detroit, he no longer had a home in Toronto. Since Toronto is where he needs to be for his treatment, he’s moved in with my family – and into a house that was already bursting at the seams…  

This has been a time of huge adjustment for all of us. For him, of course, in ways most of us can’t even begin to imagine. But for all those who care about him, too. Right now our attitude is very positive. The statistics on pancreatic cancer, especially at this stage, are terrible – 96 to 98% succumb. But doesn’t that mean a few people out of every hundred do beat the odds? And is there any reason he can’t be one of them?

But thinking this way leaves us in a balancing act between staying positive and upbeat – believing in the power of prayer, meditation, and creative visualization – and facing the facts. What’s the difference, I ask myself, between absolute faith and complete denial?

And I find myself not thinking about him but about me. He is the person who has always been there for me. Last year, on days when my husband wasn’t available, he was the person who hauled me to doctors’ appointments and to the hospital for 6:00 am surgeries. He was the one who was there when I came out of anesthetic. He was the one whose car I barfed all over! I’ve know him for thirty-four years, and our lives are entwined in ways too numerous to mention….. But he isn’t just my friend. He is my techno-support. He is my webmaster. Without him, you wouldn’t be looking at this blog, my newsletter would never go out, my website would be a disaster….

What in the world would I do with out him?

And just how selfish and self-centered am I to be thinking about me when he is facing the greatest crisis of his life? Is this, I ask myself, also a matter of balance? A dance between thinking about “self” in a healthy way – really considering in necessary detail the difference between how our lives look and how they might look – and a blast of selfishness and self-obsession? All this also makes me wonder: What is being “negative” and what is being realistic? What is delusion? What is hope?

These are important questions. And even though they aren’t specifically related to the stated topics of this blog — like kundalini, consciousness, and the divine feminine – they are questions about life, so I invite you to respond to them.  And, more importantly, I ask you to put the name David McMaster, 54, Toronto, on every prayer, meditation, chanting, white light hot-line you know…. And I thank you for it.