Category: Day by day (Page 1 of 3)

A Moment’s Inattention

August 10, 2022 / Margaret Bendet

It’s been said that we’re most likely to be in an auto accident when we’re close to home. We’re less attentive. One day recently, I’d just gotten back to Whidbey after a medical appointment on what some people call “the other side.” I was listening to an audio book as I maneuvered my car through Langley’s block-long business district to pick up my mail before going home. As I pulled into a place in the Post Office parking lot, I noticed that a police car, lit up like a Christmas tree, was coming to a stop right behind me. Something must have just happened! I opened my car door, swung my feet around, and heard a commanding male voice roar—he seemed to be yelling!—“Do not get out of your car!” My goodness! Was this about me?

Yes, it was.

I sat back on the seat, my legs still sticking out the open door while a red-faced policeman strode toward me. “Are you aware that you just ran two stop signs?” he asked me.

I looked at him blankly. Could I have done that?

“You didn’t even look around,” he said. “I was standing right there, waving at you to stop, and you didn’t even see me!”

No, indeed. I had not seen him. I didn’t argue with the man. What I told him is that almost three years ago one of my closest friends, Yvonne Palka, was killed when she was hit by a car while crossing a street—not in Langley, but it could have been. It could have happened anywhere. A moment’s inattention, that’s all it takes.

That very evening, I attended a presentation at the Unitarian Church by Johnny Palka, Yvonne’s bereaved husband, and their two daughters, Rachel and Tanya, both of whom have children of their own. Shortly after Yvonne’s death, the three of them were approached by the public prosecutor in Minneapolis, where this tragic accident happened, and asked if they wanted it to be treated as a crime. In other words, did they want the driver to be tried in a court of law on a charge of vehicular homicide.

“We said no,” Johnny explained that night at the church. “It was already a tragedy that one person’s life was ended, and it would be an even greater tragedy for still another person’s life to be ended—or ruined—as well.” Then he added, “It is not what Yvonne would have wanted.”

What happened instead is that this family and the driver to whom they were now linked embarked on a process known as Restorative Justice—a structured and counselor-led series of lengthy discussions, explorations, and contemplations to ascertain the harm that had been caused, any ways this harm could be repaired, and how the repair might be put into place. This is why the process is called “restorative.” What we usually do in our courts comes under the word “punitive”; we think of it as retribution. As a Restorative Justice pamphlet says of the US court system, “We look at what has been done, who did it, and what punishment they deserve.”

“I think what made a big difference to me,” one of Yvonne’s daughters, Tanya Thomas, said, “is when I realized that the driver of this car was nineteen or twenty—the same age as one of my own children.”

“And she took total responsibility for what happened,” her sister, Rachel Lochtefeld, added. “There was never any hint that she felt this was anything but her fault.”

The driver was a part of the church presentation, participating by Zoom from Minneapolis with two Restorative Justice counselors. There was, as well, a video on the process the whole group went through. So, the accident took place almost three years ago, the video was recorded about a year and a half ago, and this presentation was held in the last couple of weeks. The reason I’m being precise about the timing is that I was gob smacked by the change I perceived in the driver—from the shy, restrained individual interviewed for the video to the radiant young woman I saw on Zoom. Someone speaking straight from the heart. Someone so open and tender that she moved a roomful of complete strangers fifteen hundred miles away, many of us to tears.

“Of course, I never knew Yvonne,” she said, “but I feel I know so much about her from her family…. The first time I met them, afterward my friend and I couldn’t stop talking about how close they were. I’ve never seen a family that was so together.”

Participating in programs like this one is part of the service this young woman is offering—making the point that inattention behind the wheel of a vehicle can bring heartbreaking loss of life.

It certainly came across to me. After that presentation and the policeman’s personal message in the Langley Post Office parking lot—delivered in his booming voice and punctuated by the pulsing lights of his official car—I have been driving with the care and consciousness that driving truly deserves.

I just keep reminding myself that I could have been the one to kill Yvonne. It could have been me. As someone shared near the end of the program at the Unitarian Church, “It could have been any one of us.”

For anyone on Whidbey Island who would like to further explore Restorative Justice locally, you can contact the man who was host of church presentation: Tom Ewell, at

[email protected].

Reciprocity

May 20, 2021 / Margaret Bendet

At the height of the pandemic, I was adopted by a cat—a blue-eyed, probably part-Siamese female who had been left with my next-door neighbor. The cat’s name was Marie, but this didn’t seem to suit her, so I began calling her Mira—which is close in sound but quite different in association. Mira is the name of one of India’s poet-saints, a sixteenth-century Rajasthani princess who left her husband to join the company of other devotees. That’s the way I see what our Mira did. I’m not sure how she sees it. She and another cat, a male named Roy, were parked at my neighbor’s house last summer by one of his ex-wives, who told him she was going on a two-month vacation to Hawaii.

Shortly thereafter, one day in July I was sitting, just as I am right now, on my couch writing, with my laptop propped in my lap. The front door was open but with one of those magnetic, semi-cloth screens that discourage flies from coming in but not cats. A cat with artful markings in silver, black, and gold crept in from under the screen, walked quickly and stealthily past me, through the living room and into the kitchen… and just as stealthily back through the living room and into the bedroom and bathroom… and then she ran out the front door.

It was odd. Anyway, I thought it was odd. This whole time—maybe a minute in total—I was trying to encourage the cat to come to me on the couch so I could pet her. But it was as if she were on a mission. The next day, the cat came back, and this time she approached me directly; she was happy to be petted—a bit. Once again, she didn’t stay long. But I realized then that the first day had, indeed, been a mission, a reconnaissance mission. She’d been checking out the whole area, making sure there were no nasty surprises in store—a dog or another cat hiding somewhere, ready to ambush her.

Before very long, Mira took to staying the day with me. When my neighbor returned home after work, she’d go to his place for dinner—and then come back to me again to sleep. I got some cat treats for her, but that was it. She ate with him and lived with me. I hadn’t been ready to take on another animal. Having lost a beloved pet a few years back, I didn’t want to make another commitment. But this was just for two months, right? So, in this way, Mira snuck up on me.

When autumn came, I surmised that the person who’d dropped Mira off was not coming back to get her. By this time, the bond was forged, and there was no going back. I started feeding her, my landlord put in a cat door, a friend installed a ramp on the deck, and I got one of those multi-level cat environments, which now has pride of place in my living room. I became a cat lady.

It would have been hard to go through the isolation of the pandemic without Mira curled up and sleeping in a ball in various places throughout my home, leaping to the top of my bookshelf, sitting in my lap when I chant, looking over at me with her enigmatic blue eyes, making those deep-throated cat sounds that I cannot replicate even though I try.

A few months ago, I got a hint that Mira’s moving in was, in part, a way for her to escape from some form of domestic abuse next door. Late one night I heard her making distress sounds in her penthouse suite. I got up and walked over to her. Mira was sitting erect in the dark, staring out through the sliding glass door to the deck outside. I couldn’t see anything in the dark, but I turned on the deck light—and there he was: a stocky male cat looking up at Mira. “Roy!” I thought. I stood next to the window and tapped on it, close to him. Roy hissed at me, and then he turned and ran off the deck.

That night Mira slept in bed with me, rolled into a tight ball, pressed against my heart. So, perhaps I did something good for her as well. Which is as it should be.

The Non Sequitur

March 30, 2021 / Margaret Bendet

A few weeks ago yet another big man was being accused of sexual harassment, and I was talking this over with some old friends—“old” in two ways: women I’ve known a while and also women, like me, of a certain age.

“What he did was nothing,” one of these women said. “Anybody our age who has ever had a job has dealt with things like this.”

“Actually,” another put in, “in some contexts it would be considered a compliment to have a man come on to you. It’s what we used to call flirting.”

Flirting? The anger that came up in me was utterly disproportionate to the company, to the topic, to what was called for in the moment. Still, I was mad, and I jumped into this conversation with both feet. In an I-am-not-kidding voice, I observed that kissing a woman twenty-five years younger than you on the mouth at a party is not flirting—and is especially not flirting when she neither expects nor wants that kiss.

“And an older man asking a young woman how she feels about having an affair with an older man?” I said, “That’s just creepy!”

Well, perhaps it is, but why was I so angry about it? Where did that reaction come from?

It’s not that I’ve been the recipient of so very many salacious moves in my life. I’m tall, bespectacled, flat-chested, and I have what someone once described to me as a Modigliani face. I’m not the sort of woman who inspires such advances—yet they frighten me. I think that’s because I’m also not the sort of woman who handles them well. As the child of alcoholics, I’m grateful for attention. Yet having grown up with the double standards of the 1950s—men can do anything; women have to handle whatever comes at them—and a certain kind of attention scares me.

And when the man throwing out loaded compliments to women isn’t some movie producer or sports star or blowhard talk show host, when he’s a state governor and a liberal politician, when he sponsors egalitarian legislation and says all the right things from a podium, when he’s the kind of person you want to trust—it’s all the more horrible.

I don’t have a really pithy and incisive wrap-up for this. The other day I was in the Costco parking lot, trying to figure out what exit to take so I would end up traveling north on the road my GPS had identified as the route home, when I stopped in front of some workmen who were obviously taking a break. I rolled down my window, and asked, “Can you tell me which of these roads is ____ (whatever the name was)?”

“Hi!” one of the men called out. “Nice hair!”

It was a bit of a non sequitur. “Thanks,” I said. I asked again about the road, but the compliment wedged in me. There’s no other word for it. Getting my directions, I drove away, thinking, Nice hair. Well, good. The fifteen minutes that morning with a hair dryer and brush had been worth it. I turned onto the right road. Nice hair. I patted it… and then I groaned. What was wrong with me! How could it matter—at all!—that some guy in a Costco parking lot had approved of my hairstyle. Miles on and minutes later, I was still thinking, Nice hair! By then I had to laugh.

It’s one of the things I like the very least about myself. I am so hungry for praise that the odd compliment, a little personal attention, is like manna for me—especially when it comes from a man. When I was growing up, it was a man’s attention that mattered.

I remember the first time I ever received male approval. I was fifteen. I was at a football game with some girlfriends. I had just gotten contact lenses and that day I was wearing a padded bra. A group of boys from the rival school walked past our little clutch, and I heard one of them say, “Tall one, mmm,” and I knew he meant me.

I also knew that the impression I’d made was artifice and that if we’d had even a ten-minute conversation, his interest would probably dissipate. Still, the feeling of receiving that superficial approval was so sweet that I remember it even now, sixty years later.

Last week in my Zoom hatha yoga class, the teacher spoke about what a challenging time this year—and perhaps especially this winter—has been for so many people. “We’re not at our best,” she said, “any of us.”

Then she added, “You know that wonderful feeling you get when someone accepts you just as you are? Wouldn’t it be liberating for us to give that kind of acceptance to ourselves! We could feel that kind of security all the time.”

I’ve been playing with that suggestion, considering that radical self-acceptance might be the only solution to my feeling of vulnerability. What would that even look like? Maybe a first step would be to look in the mirror once in a while and tell myself, “Nice hair!”

Why not! It couldn’t hurt.

Cross the Line

February 26, 2021 / Margaret Bendet

It’s been a hard month. I’m not entirely sure why. A few weeks into it, snow fell, and I let that cold white blanket covering the ground keep me in my house for maybe four days. I had heat. I had food. I had work and entertainment. But I felt as if I were allowing myself to succumb, to lie down in the face of life.

Then mid-month, on Valentine’s Day, two people came to my door and left wrapped treats for me. It was like two hands reaching out—one of them holding homemade chocolate chip cookies and the other gaily wrapped chocolates. Have I ever mentioned my love for chocolate? At one point, when I was living in the ashram, my spiritual teacher observed that I came to the facility where she lived only when I thought I would be given chocolate. It’s not the way I would have put it, and what she said has always given me food for thought.

This Valentine’s Day, each of the wrapped chocolates had a legend inside. I’m a suggestible sort, but I usually rise above the maxims that come with candy. Somehow this was different. Twice I opened chocolates that were wrapped in the words, “Cross the line.” Even the first time I saw these words, they galvanized me. “Cross the line” could mean lots of things, but immediately upon seeing these words, I took a specific meaning from them. To me it was about stepping up to a challenge. So often I will do the needful, the necessary, but I won’t do it with the verve, the commitment, the passion that it takes to break a boundary. I won’t truly cross the line.

And then I looked around my house—was I stepping up to the challenge offered me now? There were piles of papers on my dining room table—all the paperwork from the taxes I hadn’t finished yet. The coffee table was messy as well—ashes from the last few days of incense, the coasters askew. The rug needed vacuuming. I hadn’t exercised that morning. I hadn’t been using the Water Pik at night; the extra five minutes it took to truly clean my mouth seemed too much to do. And I didn’t have food for breakfast the next morning. I’d been planning to make muffins, but I hadn’t done it yet.

What was it going to take to inspire me to support my own life with enthusiasm? To cross the line. I don’t know who said this phrase or what they had in mind with it, but for me, in the dark of this winter, it became a clarion cry to inspire me out of my sloth.

“Cross the line,” I told myself. So, I did. I finished my taxes. I vacuumed the living room. I made some muffins… and then, when friends stopped by with an extra helping of dinner or some dal a neighbor had brought them that they’d found they couldn’t eat, I had something to hand to give to them in return: homemade blueberry muffins. It’s a tiny thing, two muffins, but I could tell that, just like the wrapped chocolates and homemade cookies had made a difference for me, these muffins made a difference for two other people. So, it matters when we cross the line.

It led me to think about a time that was much, much worse for me than this month, a time when I truly felt like I wasn’t crossing any beneficial line. Let me tell you that story because it came up recently in a way that surprised me.

It was 1976, and I had been following my first teacher for a year and a half. It was my birthday, and I had, the previous year, come to the understanding that, as an ashram tradition, on your birthday you think in terms of what you can give to others and not what they can give to you. I was on a very pared back budget, saving so that I had enough to make the trip to India in five months, and I decided that the one thing I would do for my birthday was to make an offering to my teacher. I happened to be in town, and I stumbled onto a knitting shop, where there was some glorious yellow mohair yarn and knitting needles on sale. People made hats for my teacher, and, though I’d never successfully knitted anything in my life, I decided that this was within my budget and that I should do this.

This was something like two days before my birthday, and the night before, I was working on this stupid hat. It really was a stupid hat. Why had I thought that I should make him a hat. I had never made a hat before in my life. And this one was not working. Not at all working. I was going to stay up all night making this stupid hat…

And then suddenly I was exhausted. There was nothing more appealing to me than the thought of bed. I wasn’t going to be able to make the hat. It wasn’t even the right color. Yellow. My teacher wore orange or red. He didn’t even wear yellow.

So, I went to bed. I did not stay up all night knitting a hat—something extremely difficult for me to do; something I wasn’t even sure I could do—as a way of demonstrating my love for someone who had transformed my life in so many ways. But not in this way, obviously, and not in this moment.

The next day I woke up feeling terrible. At one point in the day, I was about to cross the street, and I saw that there were cars coming, one from each direction. “Let’s just see what fate has in store for me,” I said to myself. I stepped into the road, and I crossed it without looking again in either direction. Obviously I didn’t die. I didn’t get hit either.

That evening my teacher walked into the meditation hall resplendent in pale yellow. He was dressed in yellow from head to foot—exactly the same color and shade as the mohair yarn that was still sitting in my room. Had I been willing to cross the line, the hat would have been a triumph.

I got in the line for darshan, and as I moved closer to him, I kept seeing myself stepping into the road. I understood then that this particular form of crossing the line—crossing the road in that fateful moment—had been wrong, wrong, wrong. It was the act of a petulant child who was unwilling to live with what life was giving her.

When I got up to my teacher’s chair, I knew he would give me hat. He gave hats—the knitted hats given to him—to people who were celebrating their birthday. I could have not told him it was birthday, but I knew in that moment that I needed to offer myself. I bowed. I looked up. I saw the stack of hats on the table beside his chair, and as my eyes moved up them, the embarrassing thought formed in my mind, “Anything but the brown and orange one.”

The swami’s hand went for it, unerringly—the brown and orange one, the acrylic machine-made hat—and then it was on my head, pulled down over my forehead.

I wore the hat quite a bit that summer, going through some difficult moments. Having to scrimp for everything. Writing an article about meeting my teacher that was blissful to put together but was not well received. Being told by a poetry professor from Brooklyn College that this article was the worst writing he had ever read in his life (words that will be with me for the rest of mine). Being told in person by the glamorous Gloria Steinem that Ms Magazine did not want to publish my article…

But I did get to India, and the hat—machine-made acrylic that it is—has survived these forty-five years since. I think of it as the kind of garment that can last for five hundred years in a landfill. No self-respecting moth would touch it. But a year ago, at the beginning of the current pandemic, when I was feeling a need for extra support, I pulled out that little hat and I started wearing it to bed every night. The other day, shortly after I got up, my foot brushed something that was soft and radiated love. I could feel the love coming into my foot. I looked down. It was the hat. It had come off in the night and was on the floor.

Me, in my hat, 45 years later.

This led me to think that sometimes we don’t know what “cross the line” actually is. Sometimes when it feels like life is hard, just hanging in there is crossing the line.

The Dark and the Light

January 19, 2021 / Margaret Bendet

Last week, I was receiving strong glimpses of my mind in vivid shutter frames.

A man is sprawled out on a chair in front of what I am told is U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk, his feet resting on her papers, his face set in bemused contempt.

I think, “Kill him!”

An older woman shows up in this TV footage: a well upholstered body, a self-satisfied face. She looks like a grandmother, except that, in this moment, she is so clearly pleased with herself. She has done something. She has made a statement. She has shown up for a cause she cares about. She is doing her part to storm the U.S. Capital and stop these radical Democrats from stealing the 2020 presidential election.

I want to slap that silly, deluded smile right off her face. This is my first reaction every time I see this woman on my computer screen. She comes up in the news reports again and again and again.

And then there is a man who has painted his face in the colors of the U.S. flag—red, white, and blue—and wrapped himself in what looks like wolf fur with ram horns stuck atop his head. Seeing this image, my mind freezes. This man has demeaned not just a national election and congressional building but also pure, innocent forms of nature—animals incapable of mispresenting truth, animals that know no malice and have no agendas. This makes these beasts better than the both of us, this man and me.

I understand that my rage puts me on precisely the same level as that which I am raging against. We are operating at the same frequency, these sneering insurrectionists and I, the contemptuous political observer. I suppose the one difference might be that in sensing this parallel, I reach for something else.

I take a deep breath and remind myself that there is another way. There is Goddess Sarasvati.

In the spiritual traditions of India, Shri Sarasvati is known as the goddess of learning and speech, of creativity and the arts, of knowledge and wisdom. We are now approaching spring, which in India is the time of Vasant Panchami, a holiday dedicated to the worship of Goddess Sarasvati. This year it will fall on February 16. I think of Sarasvati as my ishta devata, my main god. Besides my spiritual teacher, Goddess Sarasvati is my primary focus of worship.

What should I tell you about Sarasvati? I have never seen her subtle form in my mind’s eye, but the various representations of Goddess Sarasvati that I have on pujas in my home show her as she has appeared to others in meditation. The goddess wears white, for purity. Like many Indian deities she has four arms—so much to do!—and in her hands she holds not weapons but implements of study and creative endeavor. A book, representing holy scriptures. A vina, a classical stringed instrument that makes heavenly music. A container of water for worship and to fill the most basic of human needs. A japa mala, a string of beads to aid in keeping track of the repetition of sacred mantras. Sarasvati’s gemstone is the pearl, which is a sea creature’s creative response to irritation.

There aren’t many stories about this goddess in the scriptures of India. The thought is that the scriptures themselves are expressions of Goddess Sarasvati, and she is not the sort to make a big deal of herself. There is one scripture, the Yoga Vasishtha, that contains an epic tale in which Goddess Sarasvati guides a supplicant, Queen Lila, through multiple levels of existence to the understanding that what she thinks of as her own life is nothing more than a flicker of thought taking place in one corner of sage’s dream. From this profoundly humbling revelation, Queen Lila experiences the ultimate truth of existence and, by the grace of the goddess, becomes Self-realized. As far as celestial adventures go, “The Story of Queen Lila” is quite extraordinary—like Shri Sarasvati herself.

The names of Indian deities are always highly significant. The name Sarasvati is in two parts: the word saras comes from sa rasa, which means “with essence,” and vati is “the one who embodies.” So, Sarasvati is the one who embodies the very essence—the sound in music, the flavor in food, the feeling conveyed in a dramatic presentation, the heart of life itself. Rasa has another meaning as well—”the life waters,” such as the sap of a tree. Those who remember Sarasvati with love experience the flowing beneficence of her inspiration and blessings, which are themselves experienced as love.

The most important thing to remember about Indian deities is that they each represent powers of the human mind. Goddess Sarasvati is within each one of us, and we can call on this divine power, cultivate this power, manifest this power in our own lives—as we wish.

When I think of Sarasvati, the word that comes to mind is numinous. It means “with awe and reverence.” After invoking the goddess’s presence, as I’ve done by describing her, it is this—a sense of the numinous—that I would now wish for our insurrectionists. I cannot think of them by any other name. It was, after all, my vote they wanted to throw out. But it isn’t just that they opposed me; it is the way they did it. In the film clips I could see that they lacked reverence, they lacked awe, they lacked humility. And this I would like for them to have.

You might notice that I’m not specifically saying they shouldn’t also experience pain. Some pain comes inevitably as a result of an indulgence in thoughtless and violent behavior. But I am not now wishing these people pain because I want to hurt them. It’s because they need to go through the consequences of their actions, they need to learn from what they have done. We would all benefit by their being in a more exalted frame of mind.

More importantly, I am benefitting from being in a more exalted frame of mind. I am no longer thinking, “Kill him.” The life-giving waters of love are flowing through my veins once again. I know Sarasvati, and I am at peace.

Whatever means works to bring you to this state, I implore you to discover it and to apply it as we move forward at this extremely difficult juncture.

Christmas

December 22, 2020 / Margaret Bendet

I do like Christmastime, and I hate to admit it, but I think part of the reason has to do with the lights, the sparkle, the surfeit of cookies and candy, and all those wrapped presents. My favorite image from Christmas is the tree with presents around it.

My experience has almost always been that the gifts themselves are bittersweet—not quite right, if you know what I mean. I don’t think I’ve ever unwrapped a Christmas gift and been utterly thrilled by it—but I am happy to see presents in their paper and ribbons, and I love to wrap the gifts I give other people. It’s an art form, which at the least half the time I create with paper and ribbons salvaged from earlier gifts. Something happens in the wrapping of a gift. A simple expression of one’s affection becomes… a mystery, a sparkling symbol of the season, a sign that this person is loved.

My mother had a real thing about having a lot of gifts under the Christmas tree. Money was always tight in our house, but Christmas had to be big. My senior year of high school, when we were shopping for school clothes in September, I absolutely loved a particular jacket called a car coat. It was stylish and cool… the coat that everyone at school would be wearing. My mother said, “I’ll buy it for you, but it has to be a Christmas gift.”

“Can’t you let me have it now?” I asked her. “You’re paying for it now.”

“No,” she said, “because then, when Christmas comes, you’ll forget. The car coat will be old then. You’ll have been wearing for months. And you’ll feel badly that you aren’t getting enough for Christmas.”

So, for four months the car coat sat in my mother’s closet. It was then duly wrapped and put under the Christmas tree, and I wore it to school in January—when that very car coat was on sale for a fraction of what it had cost in September and when, truthfully, at school it was no longer considered “in.”

With a history like that, you’d think I’d despise Christmas gifts, but no. Perhaps I’ve become my mother. I like wrapping the gifts, having the wrapped gifts sitting out.

My brother was the same way. After Mom died, I spent a few Christmases with Geoff and his family, and one year, I realized that he and his wife had wrapped underwear—not special underwear, just underwear that they were going to get for themselves anyway—and put it under the tree with their names on it. “It’s nice to have a lot of presents under the tree,” Geoff said. He wasn’t even embarrassed. Why would he be? He was raised by the same mother I was.

I will say that my focus long ago shifted. Almost nobody is coming into my house in this year of social distancing, so the presents I’ve wrapped and have sitting around my tree are not for show. And they’re certainly not presents for me. Truly, I no longer think of Christmas as time to receive gifts. It is a time to give—and the wrapped gifts that sit around the tiny tree on my dining room table give me enormous pleasure because they’re a sign that I’ve grown up, that I have a family of my own—my friends—and that within my always-somewhat-limited resources, I can create shine and sparkle and mystery to share.

Absolutely the best gift I gave this Christmas was to Mira, the Siamese-and-something cat who is now living with me. She is named after a 16^th-century Rajasthani princess, a poet-saint who is celebrated for the ecstatic love-songs she sang to Lord Krishna. Our Mira has not manifested this particular trait, but she does sit in my lap purring while I recite holy texts, and I take this as a sign of her potential for elevated consciousness.

I couldn’t help but notice, however, that this cat was actively seeking elevation of another kind. She liked to jump from my computer desk to the top of a five-foot bookshelf in the living room, switching her elegant tail in front of a picture of my Guru that hangs there. Once she leapt—I know not how—to the top of the seven-foot bookshelf in my bedroom and knocked to the floor the stuffed animals on display.

I decided that what Mira needed was her own seat, and one day last week, on a whim, I went to a sort of pet emporium just north of Freeland and purchased a four-foot-high contraption fashioned by a local artisan from Whidbey Island driftwood. This piece involves two stable steps to an upholstered perch, where Mira now pretty much lives. It took her a day to try it out—as sometimes happens with gifts—but once she’d achieved that penthouse level, she clearly knew that this was her place.

I have seen friends enjoy, and sometimes even cherish, gifts I’ve given them. But I have never before had the satisfaction of watching someone inhabit their gift. It was as if I had bought Mira a home. I found the experience quite fulfilling.

It reminded me of a conversation I had some three decades ago with a Hawaiian kapuna, an “elder”—who was probably the age I am now—about the nature of aloha, which in its broadest sense, means “love.” This woman said, “If I give you a papaya, it isn’t that I wouldn’t enjoy eating that papaya myself. I would enjoy it. I like papaya.” She paused. “But I would take a greater joy in your joy.”

So, that’s my new understanding of the Christmas spirit—it’s about the greater joy of giving.

A Gift from Dad

December 2, 2020 / Margaret Bendet

It can be quite edifying to glimpse oneself from another’s perspective. I don’t often receive such bounty, and when it comes, it may take me some time to welcome it. Today, I remembered my final conversation with my father, our last one-on-one exchange, which took place almost thirty years ago.

This was in 1991, a few months after my father had open-heart surgery. I wasn’t around for the medical drama. I was in India at the time, living in an ashram, and it wasn’t possible to jump on a plane and be at my father’s side. When I got back to the U.S. a few months later, I went to see my parents right away, and only then did I realize just how serious a time this was. My robust, high-color, very-much-alive father was pale gray. When I first saw him, the color of his skin took my breath away. It was as if I were looking at a cadaver. Yet I seemed to be the only one who could see this.

Dad and I both knew that he had very little time left. My mother was in denial. When I tried to hint that her husband could pass on at some point, she balked. I don’t remember how I tried to say this—tact has never been my strong suit—or the specific words of Mom’s reply, but I do recall my certainty that this was dangerous ground, a subject not to be broached. Not with her anyway.

One afternoon, Dad and I were sitting alone on the deck. It was the beginning of spring, and a little chilly, even in the sun. Mom was inside, probably in the kitchen, probably cooking. I told my father that I knew he didn’t approve of what I had done with my adult life. “But because of it,” I told him, “I want you to know that you’re going to be taken care of.”

He nodded. I knew he understood that at least part of my truck with God would come to him when he needed it. Then he said, “You were such a strange child.”

It was true, but neither of my parents had ever said this to me directly. I didn’t say anything in reply. I looked at him intently and waited. I knew there would be more.

“You’d stay in your room for hours,” he said, “all by yourself.” This was true as well. I would read mindless books, little mystery stories with formulaic plots and safe, predictable characters. I would listen to music, or what passed for music among my friends. I’d play the same song again and again and again. I know now that I was numbing myself. I didn’t feel comfortable with the people around me, and I didn’t feel comfortable with myself. Somehow, I never realized that my father had noticed.

“I know that you and your mother have had difficulties,” he said, soldiering on, and at this I felt that I really should say something.

“She tried to kill me,” I told him.

“When did your mother try to kill you?”

It was the summer before the sixth grade, right after we moved to Tulsa. She and I were at the swimming pool, which is where she and my brother, Geoff, and I spent most days that summer. Mom and I’d had a disagreement. I said something dismissive to her. I turned to go down a steep set of concrete stairs, and she pushed me from behind. I felt the push.

Dad listened to my little tale, and then he said, “Your mother never tried to kill you.” I didn’t argue with him. Now that I think about it, I’m certain that this happened but that my mother’s gesture was just the rage of the moment and not some diabolical attempt to end my life. She was probably horrified when I almost fell, catching myself on the bannister at the last minute.

“You may not know this,” Dad said, “but your mother loves you. And if something happens to me…” He paused then, and for a moment we shared a look.

“When I go,” he corrected himself, “your mother is going to need you. I want you to promise me something. I want you to promise me that you’ll stay in touch with her. You call her. You call her every week.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’ll do that.”

Then he said it again: “Every week!”

As I think about it, this was the most important conversation I ever had with my father, much more significant than the one where he made me promise to go to college, certainly more meaningful to me than the one where he told me that now it was time for me to find a husband. I accomplished all of the tasks Dad set out for me, but this, the last one, was the one that mattered most.

My father did leave us a couple of months later, and I started, then, reaching out to my mother—calling her every week and writing to her as well. She liked the letters, she said, because she could go back to them whenever she wanted to; she could reread parts of them. I spent my vacations with her, and when it was time for her to move into progressively smaller homes, I helped her do that, too. I got rid of furniture that didn’t fit, arranged the furniture that did; I hung paintings and organized spices. I sat with my mom and watched sappy love stories from the forties and fifties, her with her vodka and me with a companionable glass of wine. It was by my steady reaching out to my mother and, after her death, to my brother that I forged a bond to my family of birth.

After my brother died, the next time I meditated, I heard him say to me, I never knew… and by this I think he meant that he never before knew how much I had to contend with in my own mind. Then he said, You just kept coming.

Thanks to my father, I kept coming. I kept calling. I kept writing. Thanks to Dad, I came out of my room. I offered myself, strange person though I am. Possibly that’s all any of us can do, and our humanity is the measure of our willingness to reach out of our strangeness, our willingness to try.

Rite of Passage

October 28, 2020 / Margaret Bendet

A few months back, I heard inside my mind my teacher’s voice saying, “It’s not the way you think it is.” That’s all. I don’t know what “it” refers to, and so I have no idea how I am thinking about “it.” What I do know is that something I’m depending on to be a certain way is not that way. Since then, a couple of times a day I’ll recall this warning—yes, I think we can call it a warning—and I’ll wonder about it.

I have known for some time that my life is, like the lives of most of humanity, currently in a state of flux. This involves politics, the pandemic, and for me—at seventy-five—the outcomes of age itself. Life is changing in ways I cannot foresee. My next-door neighbor had his sons and few friends over for a barbecue a few months back, and, amid the conversation, I heard one person say, “It’s the end of the world.” It struck me that he was right. The world, as we know it, is ending.

All of this factored into a decision I made around this time to stop drinking alcohol. I am not an alcoholic. My late brother used to say that he and I come from a long line of alcoholics. I think Geoff was right about this; he was clearly a functioning alcoholic himself. However, my own addictive fallout from our challenging childhood manifests in other ways. It is possible for me to have a glass of wine , or two, with dinner each day and leave it at that. I just really like the taste of wine, a good red wine. (Well, not that good; I don’t have the budget for really good wine.)

I had an early experience to pull me away from drinking, shortly after I arrived on Whidbey. Having lived in an ashram for so many years, initially, I felt freed from constraint. I was drinking a glass of wine and watching a movie every night with dinner. After a few months of this, I had a dream in which I was supposed to retrieve a bunch of beets from a pantry. I opened the pantry door and saw a large angry snake, a cobra, coiled around the beets. In the dream, I was nervous, but I knew I could do this. By the end of the dream, I had the beets in hand, and I hadn’t been bitten. Then I woke up and understood that I had just done something terrible. In my spiritual tradition to be bitten by a cobra in a dream means that you will become Self-realized in this lifetime—and I had successfully avoided it. I was horrified!

The sketch I made of the snake, who I now saw as Kundalini Shakti.

Certain that the snake in my dream was none other than Kundalini Shakti, the goddess of spiritual transformation who is symbolized in India by a cobra, I pulled out my sketchbook and started drawing this snake I had just seen. As I drew, I was struck by how humble the form of a snake actually is. “You don’t have any arms,” I said to the figure taking form on the page.

I heard a voice inside reply: No, I have no arms. I can’t make you do what I want you to do.

“What is it you want me to do?” I asked.

Stop drinking wine every night!

So, I did. For a long time—years—I had a glass of wine only a few times a week. I became aware that wine is an anesthetic, a depressant, a downer, and that I never endeavored anything very interesting with my solitary evenings after drinking wine with dinner.

Then, about three years ago, I broke my back. The pain was, for a time, excruciating and relentless. With all the pills and forms of cannabis I had legal access to, the only thing that gave me relief was—you guessed it—red wine. So, once again I drank wine every night. I think that, following this experience, I was so angry about the pain that I felt entitled to the wine. Of course, I had created the pain myself by ignoring the state of my bones, but that’s another story.

Right now, we’re coming to the end of the world—and my understanding that if there is even a chance it truly is, I do not want to face this threshold with an alcohol-befuddled mind.

It’s been six months now, and in that time instead of roughly two hundred glasses of wine, I’ve drunk three. I enjoyed each of these three glasses of wine tremendously, but I have enjoyed even more the intangible benefits of my restraint. I am now focusing my attention and energy in a different direction.

In this same six months, I have been spending a little more than an hour a day reciting a Sanskrit text, Shri Guru Gita, which has the effect of smoothing out my rough and angry edges—the sparky-ness of my personality—and giving me better emotional balance.

One of the results of this is that my meditations—once an opportunity for me to rise above my emotions—have become auditory. There is a sound, an inner sound, that I hear now whenever I listen for it. I think of it as the sound of silence. When I meditate, I give myself to this sound, and it becomes… not louder but deeper, as if the sound were taking my awareness into the peaceful space from which the sound itself emerges.

I like this a lot. Also, as a bonus, I can now have a moment of meditation at any point in my day. I think this boon has come as a result of both the daily chanting and my cautious approach to wine. So, I would say the result has been worth the effort.

As for “it” not being as I think it is, I’ll just have to wait and see what “it” turns out to be.

My Friend, the Fly

October 15, 2020 / Margaret Bendet

“Can you even trust a person who has a pet fly?” one of my friends commented after the vice-presidential debate last week. She was thinking about the fly that sat forever in the vice president’s snowy white hair. I had a lot of bones to pick with Mike Pence regarding that debate, but the fly was not one of them.

I wrote back to my friend, saying that she shouldn’t knock pet flies. “I used to have a pet fly,” I said, “although I never took mine out with me.”

I had pet flies when I was living in the ashram. We weren’t supposed to keep cats or dogs, but flies there were aplenty. They hibernated through the frigid Northeast winters, and in the spring, when the weather started to warm, they would suddenly appear, trapped in the plastic-ed windows. They’d start buzzing, and I’d let them out. One always stuck around. When people came to see me in my office, they’d complain and ask, “Why don’t you kill it?” I’d say, “That’s Charley, my pet fly.”

I did not have a remarkable relationship with any of the Charleys, but I did once encounter a fly with whom I had a surprising conversation. This happened right after I read a book I still have, some fifteen years later: Kinship with All Life by J. Allen Boone. The book goes into the author’s relationships with various animals: dogs, snakes, ants, and I don’t remember what all. But I do recall quite vividly that the final six chapters of this modest tome describe the profound friendship the author developed with Freddie the Fly, a Musca domestica with whom he lived in Hollywood for a period of about six months. He writes:

“Wherever I went in the house, Freddie would come along too and share as best he could in the activity, often riding on one of my shoulders, sometimes flying ahead of me doing acrobatics. If I were in a hurry and raced through the rooms, he would always shoot ahead and show me how little accomplished I really was in speed and agility. If I suddenly stopped, he would usually make a few observation loops and return to my shoulder.”

One day, immediately after finishing this book, I had taken my lunch outside so that I could sit by myself and think through a particular problem I was facing. I put my plate on a table in the shade of tree, and then noticed that a fly was standing on the table, across from where I had just sat. Images of Freddie the Fly in my mind, I looked at this fly and thought, I came here to be by myself, and I would really appreciate it if you wouldn’t buzz my face or try to eat my food. I then considered that this wasn’t a very gracious communication. I selected a small spoonful of my lunch—a bit I felt would be most appealing to a fly—and put the food directly onto the table close to where this fly was, thinking, This is for you. I then forgot about the fly for a while; I ate my lunch and considered the problem I’d wanted to think about. When I was finished, I realized that the fly hadn’t bothered me once. I looked for him, and there he was—eating the food I had put out for him.

Thank you so much, I thought to the fly, and I added, You’re really amazing. I’ve never had a fly listen to me before.

The response was immediate. I heard, quite clearly: You’re pretty amazing, too. I’ve never had a person talk to me before.

My mind did not make that up. I knew it didn’t because I was truly surprised.

And the other thing I knew, on reflection, is that I would never again have reason to feel alone. It’s just one consciousness out there; we’re all a part of it.

And if someone wants to have a pet fly, more power to him. He still won’t get my vote.

Something to Defend

June 27, 2020 / Margaret Bendet

Since I no longer have care of a cat or a ten-pound dog, I am able to consider the finer qualities of the raccoons that live in close proximity to me. I looked up one day recently and locked eyes with a raccoon not ten feet from me, poised in the branches of the venerable cherry tree in my backyard. The two of us stopped and stared at each other for what seemed like a brief eternity but was probably no more than thirty seconds. I noticed that the raccoon’s face was open and lovely—an almost human face. I thought, It’s fine that you’re there, and then I turned and went inside. When I came out again a few minutes later, the raccoon was gone. I was sorry.

This was a radical departure from my reaction to seeing a raccoon in that same tree a couple of years earlier, when I still lived with a toy poodle—who would have been lunch for any raccoon. Then, the raccoon was a predator, a dangerous interloper, the potential murderer of a creature dear to me. I glared at that raccoon. I said, aloud, “Get. Out. Of. Here.” I went inside to look for a broom, anything to use as a weapon. When I came back out, the raccoon was still there. Eyeing me with seeming purpose, that little animal leapt further up into the tree, using what appeared to be opposable thumbs and herculean strength. It was like watching an Olympic gymnast—only this creature was stronger and more agile than any human I’d ever seen. Then, the raccoon came back down and, with perfect balance, sauntered along the top of the thin wooden fence that edges the back of the yard. He was leaving, but only because he wanted to. He was utterly relaxed.

I felt a little shaken. If I couldn’t intimidate this raccoon, what chance was Chou Chou going to have? Chou Chou is buried in my backyard now, his demise having had nothing whatsoever to do with raccoons. And today, I encountered a raccoon under entirely different circumstances—I was the one who was seen as a threat. I was on the walkway that cuts through the yard, headed for the post office, when I heard a light growling sound a few feet away. I’d already opened the gate, and I looked off to the side, where my impromptu fence meets the wall of the carport. There are some high bushes there, and peering under the branches, I could make out three little figures. One of them leapt out, ran onto the grass, and turned to face me.

It was a raccoon in full fight mode. Eyes fixed on me, mouth open and growling, showing her teeth, standing as tall as she could. There was fury in her eyes, and fear as well—but I don’t think the fear was for herself. I closed the gate, with her on the other side. I said, “I won’t hurt your babies,” and I turned and walked down the path.

I had a number of reactions. First, I was amazed at the courage of that little animal. I must be five times the size of a raccoon. I don’t have the claws, of course; I don’t have razor sharp teeth. But I am big, and that creature was willing to take me on anyway—just to defend her own. You have to admire that.

I had other reactions as well. I do not want a raccoon nest fifteen feet from my front door, no matter how noble the animals may be. Fortunately, when I got back, the family had decamped. The mother raccoon was probably thinking she didn’t want to live that close to me either. (God only knows what she thought about me!)

Then I considered the striking difference in these three encounters. It was all about having something, or someone, to protect. The feeling that our loved ones are at risk brings out the warrior in us all. I find this a disconcerting thought when I consider just how much everyone in America feels is riding on this next election, how little any of us trusts the process by which that election will be determined… and what we—human beings—might be driven to do to each other as a result. Just to defend what is dear to us.