Category: Memoir (Page 1 of 3)

Childless Cat Lady for Kamala

August 31, 2024 / Margaret Bendet

Yesterday it was a shock to find in my post office box a letter from Donald J. Trump. At one point in my life, I did think of myself as a Republican—but then I turned seventeen, and civil rights became a personal issue. That was almost sixty-three years ago, and I am not exaggerating when I say I have never looked back. I don’t think that in my entire life I have ever voted for a Republican candidate.

How did they get my name and address now?

As I was leaving the Langley Post Office, I told the man behind the counter, “I got a letter from Trump today.”

He said, “I noticed.”

That gave me pause. It’s an association that could ruin a woman’s reputation! I wondered briefly if I should sue Trump for defamation of character, but then I decided on another strategy. Today when I walked into the Post Office, I wore my “Childless Cat Lady for Kamala” T-shirt. Again, the man behind the counter noticed. He smiled and waved.

I must admit, however, that I was intrigued to open Trump’s letter and see what he had to say. Predictably, it was a diatribe against Democrats. In it, Trump claimed, “Joe Biden is America’s worst president ever.”

A little fact-check on this: recently, a group of 154 presidential historians connected with the American Political Science Association rated every US president, and President Biden, the current and 46^th president, came out as the 14^th best in history. It was Trump, the 45^th president, whom they put into last place—naming him America’s worst president ever. So, Trump got part of that right; he just needed to apply it to himself.

Let me add that if Trump were to be re-elected, there are signs that he would be much worse the next time around. His election in 2016 came as a surprise, even to him; in 2024 he’s planning for it. He said in his letter that he will win this election “by a landslide.”

The main point Trump made in this letter—one he made three times in full before his final signature—is that, to save our great nation from Democrats, I should sign a Trump Pledge of Support and return it with “a contribution of $35, $50, $100, $175, $250, $500, $1000, $2500, $3300, or another amount today.”

Perhaps this means that he is spooked by groundswell of support for the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, who has to date raised $540 million in her brief campaign against him. It’s about $200 million more than Trump raised in that time.

Another thing Kamala Harris has done is to choose a stellar candidate for vice president, Tim Walz, who is Minnesota’s governor, a former high school teacher, a former assistant football coach, a former Army National Guardsman, and a man who has made no missteps in the campaign because he has a wide-open heart. Walz knows how to relate to people.

Trump’s pick for vice president, J.D. Vance, is a senator from Ohio who, in my opinion, has yet to do anything right. Just today he posted a clip of a verbal stumble made by a teenage pageant queen during the Miss Teen USA event in 2007. With this clip, Vance wrote, “BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview.” Even when he was told that the woman whose teenage remarks he was using in his send-up had contemplated suicide after people made fun of her answer seventeen years ago, Vance refused to apologize for, as he put it, “posting a joke.” He wished the woman well but said that it’s important to have fun and that politics has become “way too boring.”

A while ago, Vance lamented that America is being run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives and want the rest of the country to be miserable, too.” It was a bracingly dismissive view of people who do not live as he does. There was a backlash when this came out, and, true to form, Vance declined to recast his remarks—although he did say that he has nothing against cats. He feels that people without children don’t have a real stake in the future of the country and shouldn’t have the same voting power as parents.

The thought of these two weird men being the president and vice president of this magnificent country is something that can make me miserable (though that’s not a word I would usually apply to my life).

I showed Trump’s letter to a friend, who said, “I wish I still had the checkbook for my old bank account. I’d send the Republicans a huge check they wouldn’t be able to cash—and maybe it would mess them up.”

It raises the question: what can an individual do?

Well, for one thing, I’ll keep wearing my “Childless Cat Lady for Kamala” T-shirt. I’ll meditate. I’ll pray. I’ll make campaign donations as I can. I’ll write postcards to other Democrats, urging them to vote. And, of course, I’ll vote myself. Because, in fact, even having no children, I do care about the future of my country.

Let’s WIN This!

July 22, 2024 / Margaret Bendet

Joe Biden and I both tested positive for Covid on Wednesday, July 17. For the next few days, I kept expecting the president to experience this as his turning point. The debacle of his televised debate loomed ever larger in my own mind. Would he finally see, with this further debility of the virus, that it was time for him to retire from the field of combat? Day after day, he didn’t.

On Sunday morning, I read in The New York Times that Biden was feeling resentment for Barack Obama and the Congressional leaders who were urging him to withdraw—and I felt a flash of anger. This was more than hubris; it was delusion—yet one more sign that Biden could not succeed in a campaign against the Big Orange Felon. Here was the most important presidential campaign of my lifetime, and the candidate and President I had supported with all my heart for five years was showing himself not even able to assess the fight.

Fortunately, within an hour of that juncture, Biden had made his momentous and strategic retreat.

I was thrilled. I am thrilled. I am rallying behind Kamala Harris, whom I have always liked, always supported. As the friend-of-a-friend pointed out, Kamala is a Black Indian, and she’s married to a Jew. Given my personal background, you couldn’t get any better than that!

A friend of mine says that there is a moment in the classic Indian scripture, The Mahabharata, when the world is in danger and women are sent into the breach to save things. I just now spent some time looking for such an instance, and I cannot uncover it. The story may exist, you understand, but I can’t attest to it right now. What I know for certain is that at a time when the demon Mahishasura was a threat to the universe, the gods—all males—were powerless to stop him and created Goddess Durga to defeat the demon. The story is told in the Shrimad Devi Bhagavatam. Goddess Durga took form specifically for this battle and—using the weapons of the gods—this female deity defeated the monster definitively, as the male celestials had been unable to do.

Yes, this is legend.

Yes, this is metaphor.

Yes, it may be wishful thinking, but I have given money to Kamala Harris’ campaign, and I will be writing postcards to Democratic voters in certain battleground states to encourage them to cast their ballots. I’m not much younger than Joe Biden, and there is only so much I can do right now. (Like him, I still have Covid.)

Yet I think it’s time for all of us to bring forward whatever we can to support our chosen goddess to defeat this demon. As Kamala’s campaign says, “Let’s Win This!”

Older Than Dirt

March 19, 2024 / Margaret Bendet

I am sliding into my eightieth year. No, I’m not going to be eighty soon. I’ll be seventy-nine, which is—as I’m saying—the beginning of the eightieth year of my life. I still feel unaccountably young, and one way I manage that is to have some older friends. When asked her age, my friend Marilee Peterson usually glares and says, “I am older than dirt!”

One life event that comes naturally over time is the death of our friends. There is something shocking about death. It may be the one inevitable fact of life but, still, death is a mystery. It’s a passage and, generally speaking, it’s irreversible.

I say “generally speaking” because my friend Pat Brunges died—a clinical death—in an ambulance a few months back and lived to talk about it. Lived, as well, to deal with the broken rib that came from someone’s shocking her heart to restart it.

But for most of us, once we die, we move on. Whatever that may mean.

It has been my experience that the deaths that occur as a result of illness or accidental trauma are infinitely easier to cope with than those that happen years prematurely and by choice. A former neighbor of mine took his own life several years back, and I asked myself many times afterward if there was anything I could have done to change Greg’s decision. Surely, yes. Surely, there was something. A couple of times since, on the street, I thought I saw him. . . Then I realized that, no, it was not Greg. Greg is gone.

The pain of a friend’s suicide has been experienced by a whole tribe of people—fairly young people—on Whidbey Island in the last couple of weeks. In that time, two vibrant individuals in their thirties, or perhaps early forties, who lived here made the choice to end their own lives. They were connected to each other, and one of them grew up on Whidbey, so the cross currents and overlapping waves from these two personal tragedies are touching many local hearts—a daughter’s best friend, a son’s first love.

I believe it’s the thought what could I have done? that carries the greatest sting. I had affection for you. I respected you. Was that not enough?

Of course, it is never enough. The whole world can love us, but if we do not love ourselves, then, ultimately, our lives will not feel to us that they’re worth living.

My revered teacher recently published an essay about how, in our search for inner peace, we can reclaim, rename, and reconceive any aspect of our lives to support ourselves to find what we’re looking for. If something about our lives is unsatisfying to us, or has come to feel flat to us, we can find new words for it and, with this renaming, we can discover that—yes—what we have is quite sufficient for our needs. It is, in fact, divine.

For instance, in regard to aging, I could focus on the changes that are happening to my body and the way that, as an older woman, I have become invisible to large swaths of the people around me… Or, on the other hand, I could look at the mental tranquility I have developed and the way my guru-mantra—employed now over some length of time—protects me and helps to keep me steady. So, instead of “aging,” I could look at how I’m “coming into my maturity.” And what a difference that makes!

We may not be able to do this for those who have chosen to leave us but, seeing the pain their departures have created for ourselves and for those we love, we can decide that we will not make that particular choice. We will find a way to survive—and to thrive—for as long as we can.

Even if we’re “older than dirt.”

Homing In

December 19, 2023 / Margaret Bendet

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what it means to create a home for myself. This is something I have done, on my own and from scratch, ten times in my adult life. I’m not talking about simply moving, as I did from California to Oklahoma at age ten with my parents and younger brother. This did present difficulties, but creating a home was my mother’s bailiwick, not mine. Nor am I talking about going off to a state college at seventeen or transferring to a school in Chicago two years later. In both of these instances, I was entering new cultures, but I did so with hordes of other young people. I wasn’t alone in my adventure; we were all in it together.

At twenty-one, however, when I traveled to Honolulu to be in my college roommate’s wedding, I actually was on my own. The wedding covered a few days, but then Barb went off on her honeymoon, her family returned to California, and I was in Hawaii by myself—learning my first big lesson about security and self-care:

Make sure you have sufficient resources to survive.

When I flew to Hawaii on a one-way ticket, I had only a hundred dollars in my pocket. Barb had told me I’d have no trouble getting a bread-and-butter job as a cocktail waitress in Waikiki, but two days after I arrived, an airline strike started. By the time I was looking for work, the tourist places were laying off staff; they were not hiring. It was a little scary. For a while I was eating Carnation Instant Breakfast powder because it was cheap and living in a room I’d rented for twenty-five dollars a week in the Waikiki Jungle—a slum that existed beside the hotels. This was a spectacularly unsatisfactory “home,” and my first night there, I discovered I wasn’t even living in it alone. The minute the lights went off, the room came alive with hundreds of cockroaches—and in Hawaii they’re flying cockroaches. Hawaii itself is magnificent, but my first place of residence there left a lot to be desired.

Immediately, I put my energy into finding work. After an eye-opening stint as a cocktail waitress in Kalihi—which is Honolulu’s factory district and, thus, not reliant on tourists—I landed a job as a reporter on the largest of the two local newspapers. It was a relief, but, truthfully, I don’t feel I began putting together a real home for a couple of years. That’s when I married. The marriage didn’t last, but it was good for me. While I was with Ed, I learned how to cook and came to understand my second big lesson for home and nurturance:

Home is where you feed yourself and the people you love.

For some reason, my mother had never taught me how to prepare food. One of Ed’s friends gave us Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking as a wedding present. I would get home from my job at the paper, prop up the book on the kitchen counter, and endeavor to make something, taking my lessons from a real chef. I started drawing up weekly menus with colored pens and posting them on the refrigerator. I thought of it as homey.

I sometimes say that I was married for five of the happiest years of my life, and then I have to add that, unfortunately, the marriage lasted for seven years. Basically, the last year and a half Ed stopped speaking to me. There were reasons, of course. I understood this, even at the time. It wasn’t my fault, but my husband was in pain, and I was right there as the person he could close himself off from. This served, for me, as a vital lesson about what a home is not. Now people ask me how I can be happy living alone. So easily! What’s impossible, I found, is to be happy while living with someone who doesn’t want to live with me. Leaving my husband was a way to care for myself, and I learned something about home from it, too:

Don’t allow your sense of home to depend on another person.

So, I left our home and went off on a great adventure. I traveled on the staff of an Indian master of meditation, starting my life all over again. For the first year, I was living out of a suitcase—three weeks here, a month there. Finally, I realized that even though meditation is amazing, even though I spent at least some time every day in a state of unconditional love, I was not truly happy. It came to me one day with the force of revelation that if I was going to live out of a suitcase, I had to make that suitcase beautiful. It was an understanding of what I needed to feel at home.

You have to make your home beautiful—as beautiful as you can.

I started working on that, consciously, and within a month, the swami’s tour came to stop for a year, in an ashram on the West Coast. Then, instead of having just a suitcase to work with, I had a whole bottom bunk. And, understanding that beauty is a need of mine, I did make it beautiful.

I spent years in ashrams, but I also moved between ashrams in different countries and sometimes from an ashram into a community that was new to me. Each of these times, I was entering a new space and creating a home for myself.

When I was living in Washington, DC, for instance, I shared an apartment with the daughter of the congressman I was working for. She was a government lawyer and a sweet young woman, but she was completely utilitarian about our living space. She had a huge running machine set up in the middle of the living room. I couldn’t do anything to make that room beautiful, so I focused all of my energy on fixing up my bedroom and let it go at that.

The following year, I was in Knoxville, Tennessee, and I was working again for a newspaper. I had moved to Knoxville knowing no one, simply for the sake of the job. My first evening in my new furnished apartment was bleak. What I’d hoped for was an A-frame in the woods. What I’d found was a shotgun apartment behind a pizza place on Chapman Highway. (A shotgun apartment, by the way, is a small, rectangular residence where the rooms connect with no hallways. The idea is that if a gun were fired at one end, the bullet would pass through every room before going out the other side.) That first day after I’d made the bed with my new sheets, put the towels into the bathroom, and unpacked my clothes and the bargain dishes given me by my brother, I opened some sparkling water to drink with dinner, thinking this might make the meal special. It was pathetic. It all felt so flat. That was when I figured out another of my truths about home-building:

For a place to feel like home, you have to live in it for a while.

Before long, I adopted two cats… I put some art on the walls… I had friends over to dinner…I watched Miami Vice (that year’s cutting-edge TV)… I set up a little puja, an altar, in the bedroom… and there I had a life-changing meditation that I will remember forever. And, yes, by living in that space, over time and in my own way, I made that shotgun apartment my home.

I find that my daily rituals of living matter enormously, and that holiday rituals matter too—birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day. I especially love the winter holidays. This year, I put up my tiny artificial Christmas tree the day after Halloween. Why wait! It’s all so festive: the lights, the ornaments, the wrapped presents. All of this holds such a lovely sense of celebration. And this is my final understanding to share on this topic:

Home is where you celebrate your life.

I have come to realize that this challenge of creating a home is vital for me. Astrologically speaking, my north node is pointing toward Cancer, a water sign associated with nurturance, compassion, security, and home. In Latin the word cancer means “crab,” a creature who carries her home on her back. In my chart, Cancer appears in my first house, the house of self, and sitting squarely on top of Cancer is Saturn, a planet known as the taskmaster, the disciplinarian. Whatever is indicated by Saturn is something you absolutely must do—and is also something that’s not easy for you. So, my life direction requires steps that are particularly difficult for me to take.

On reflection, I can see that I have come some distance in this endeavor. I’ve been living in the same one-bedroom apartment in Langley, Washington, for more than dozen years now. I don’t even like the idea of travel anymore. Stay in a hotel? Why would I want to do that! It’s not home!

Now, You’re Mine

May 10, 2023 / Margaret Bendet

Certain memories are like touchstones. I come back to them again and again, in the same way I once would run my fingers over a lucky stone I used to keep in my pocket. This particular memory is a reminder that I am blessed.

It was a statement I heard, but heard in my own mind, from a deceased holy man I had never met in person. He told me, “Now, you’re mine.” It was like an initiation.

This took place on my first visit to my guru’s ashram in India, after I’d been there for some months. I had arrived there from my guru’s international teaching tour, he being identified in the memoir I published only as the Swami. I had met the Swami on that tour, interviewing him as a newspaper reporter, and I had then spent the next two years as part of his staff, a traveling party that went with him on that tour around America. When we got to his ashram in India, I was deeply happy to be there. On tour, we had lived in student’s homes and in short-term rentals… in a repurposed flop house… in a former Borsch Belt hotel. The Swami’s ashram in India had only ever been an ashram, built next to the site of an old but still-functioning temple to Gavdevi—the goddess of cows—with a stone idol so primitive that it seemed to have taken form spontaneously from raw rock.

The first three rooms of the Swami’s ashram in India had been built for him on the instructions of his own guru, a village holy man of such stature in that part of India that the Swami had never, after that, had his authenticity questioned in his own country. This is how deeply revered his guru was.

When I first arrived in the ashram, I spent some time visiting the samadhi shrine of this grandfather guru in a nearby village, meditating in the ashram where he had lived, visiting a local sanatorium where he’d spent his final days. In the Swami’s ashram, I meditated before a huge photograph of this grandfather guru in the meditation room—called the Cave— and I also meditated in another room in the upper garden, where there was a life-size, full-body oil painting of this grandfather guru that was so chaitanya, so full of life, that it seemed to breathe. My meditations in India were sweet and quiet and wholly satisfying.

One day after I had been in India for a while, I received a letter from my former husband, who wrote that, rather than sending our property settlement in installments, as we’d arranged, he had decided to give me the remainder now, in one large payment. He didn’t send the money to India, of course, but he’d made a deposit to my bank account. With this payment, I realized that my ties with my husband were now effectively ended.

The next morning, Thursday, I was awakened early. I say “I was awakened” because that’s the way it felt. I had been getting up at three o’clock, but on this day, I was suddenly wide awake a bit before two. I got up and walked to the bathhouse for a bucket bath. This is a lovely way of bathing. You get half a bucket of warm water, take it to a stone enclosure in the women’s bathhouse, and there you kneel and, dipping a cup into the bucket, you sluice your body, bit by bit. It’s as if you yourself are a murti, an enlivened idol, and you’re giving yourself abhishekh, a ritual bath. I’ve never felt that way in a shower or a bathtub; I always did with a bucket bath.

I then dried myself, put on a cotton sari, and walked back to the main courtyard, where I noticed that the temple at the front of the ashram, the temple honoring my grandfather guru, was fully lit. That surprised me. It wasn’t yet two-fifteen.

I entered the temple then and realized it was the day when the murti of this holy man would be given a ritual bath by the temple priests. These particular priests were all young Indian men who were swamis, monks.

One of them smiled at me, and nodded, and so I knew it was fine for me to be there. I walked to the geographic center of the temple and performed what is known as a full pranam—a full body bow—with my hands and arms stretched out above my head while I lay flat on the floor, belly-down. It is an enormously satisfying posture, one where your head and heart are at the same level. As my head touched the floor, I heard in my inner ear a man’s voice saying, “Now, you’re mine.”

That’s the touchstone, those words: “Now, you’re mine.” I knew it was my grandfather guru. It was his murti to whom I had been bowing. It seemed as if because the material connection to my husband had been severed, I now truly belonged to God—and the form of God speaking to me in my mind was this grandfather guru, this holy man from an ancient and primitive tradition.

What did I know about this grandfather guru? He had left his body in 1961, when I was sixteen. He was known to be an avadhut, which means that he was completely indifferent to the world, both its riches and its rules. He would have been a naked fakir, but his disciples put a diaper on him every morning. When it was chilly, he would also wear a shawl. The Swami, who traveled in the West wearing lungis with shirts and sweaters and even tailored jackets called himself “a gentleman yogi” in comparison with his own guru.

My favorite photograph of my grandfather guru shows him lying on his side in his diaper and nothing else. He had a rotund belly. In America, a man with a belly like that would be said to have a beer belly, but this holy man’s belly was khumbhak, which comes from breath being held inside the body. When a person becomes an advanced meditator, which I myself have not yet done, they can retain their breath either inside or outside their body. If the prana, the breath, is held inside, then the person’s belly becomes round and full. Either way, such a meditator can sit for a long, long time without breathing. Think of it. You would be taking nothing from the world around you—not even air! You would be one with the consciousness that is the foundation of everything.

So, what does it mean to me, this “Now, you’re mine”? It means that I, too, am one with consciousness. This is true even though I have never given myself to God the way that this holy man did—and did from the very beginning of his life. He was one of those holy beings whom no one could ever remember seeing in any state other than total identification with the Divine.

I am so far from that! When I first heard about the meaning of this holy man’s belly, I thought that if I had a choice, I would cultivate outer khumbhak—where the breath is held outside the body—because such a yogi remains slender. I couldn’t bear the thought of having what people would see as a beer belly.

Even with my silliness, my vanity—my ego!—the statement that I heard in my heart from this holy man means to me that I am cherished, that I’m OK. Just as I am.

This oil painting by Seattle artist Marilyn Webberley shows the sunrise over a verdant field in an ashram where we both offered service in India.

A Matter of Choice

April 1, 2023 / Margaret Bendet

I said recently that I hadn’t had a choice about spending time in an ashram. It was a surprising thing to say, but it was accurate. Of course, you always do have a choice, but there are times when one option is so obviously what you need that you know it would be irresponsible to choose anything else.

Why was this so? I had been consciously “working on myself” for five or six years by the time this option arose. I had begun noticing, for instance, that when people around me seemed to be angry, I ought to look at what I was doing to make them angry. I might be smiling and speaking sweetly, but what was going through my mind? What did I really feel underneath my smile?

So, I was beginning to take responsibility for what happened around me, identifying the cues that all was not as it should be, being honest with myself about my feelings, and letting go of some deep-rooted negativity. It was slow-going, but there had been a little progress.

I have known people who seem to have no understanding of this kind of inner work. Someone once told me that there are two types of people in the world: those who felt safe and happy as children and those who felt afraid. “These two kinds of people can never understand each other,” my friend said. “It’s as if they were living in two different worlds.”

There is truth to this, though I can see now that it’s a question of degree. Most people experienced some fear growing up. I definitely did, and more than a little.

So, there I was, in my late twenties, trying to overcome the omissions of my childhood in a step-by-step manner—talking things over with a psychologist, participating in weekend workshops and what we called sensitivity groups. As I’ve said, it was slow going.

When I encountered the miracle of enlivened meditation and extended periods of namasankirtana—chanting the divine name!—under the auspices of a living saint, it was as if I had died and gone to heaven. I was experiencing and letting go of dreck in my mind so quickly and thoroughly that it felt like magic. It wasn’t actually magic; it was a subtle science of mental and emotional cleansing—with, fortunately, the hardest parts saved for later.

The main point was being in the presence of someone who was himself beyond the various pulls of the mind, someone anchored in a state of love. And how did I know he was? Because I could feel that love. Around my teacher, the love was palpable. It was as if the air itself developed texture; it was as if time slowed; it was as if everything I felt came suddenly to the surface of my being—apparent to me and, I knew, to my guru as well. I trusted that he knew precisely who and what I was, and, still, I could feel love radiating from him. It wasn’t that he loved me; he was love; he was in a state of unconditional love.

It was the most efficacious method of working on myself that I had ever encountered. So, even though following this path meant leaving home, even though it took a fulltime focus, it was what I needed to do. I saw it as a form of training, as a way of investing in myself. I was working with a spiritual master.

I was not, of course, alone in this. I was one of thousands. I have no idea just how many we were, but our numbers were legion, and we came from many different cultures, from all different parts of the world. At one point, years after my initiation, I was in charge of an oral history project, collecting stories from those who had played various roles in this worldwide phenomenon. For some time, I worked on these interviews with a man from South India—which is the area where my guru and his own guru had both been born and reared and which, therefore, was a place where this spiritual path had, at least in part, originated.

One day this man, Sudhakar Mavilapalli, told me that he couldn’t relate to the way Westerners—meaning Americans and Europeans—spoke about our shared spiritual path in their interviews. “They talk about letting go of their anger,” he said. “They talk about becoming more kind. What difference does any of that make? They’re just talking about changes in their personality. It’s all so superficial.”

This surprised me. I asked Sudhakar to tell me how he viewed his own spiritual work. How had he changed after decades of sadhana?

He thought about this for a moment, and then he said, “I would say that over the years my commitment to the path has deepened.”

Commitment? I suppose that’s one way of saying that you don’t really have a choice but to be on the path. So, perhaps my commitment was deep from the very beginning. I did think of sadhana then as a way I could deal with my difficult personality, but I have to say that now I think Sudhakar was onto something. I don’t care so much about my personality anymore. Most of the time I know that I mean well, and that’s what matters to me. “Meaning well” has to do with my commitment to reach for the source of love within myself, however I can touch that love in the moment.

I’m not still living in the presence of a spiritual master, but I do have ways of reaching for inner love that were shown to me on this path. As a friend on the path once said to me, “I have experiences of ecstasy—of real bliss—every day.” As do I. It is utterly fulfilling, and I am so grateful now that I have always felt the need to do this inner work.

This oil painting by Seattle artist Marilyn Webberley shows sunrise over a verdant field in an ashram in India where we both offered service.

The Next Step

December 14, 2022 / Margaret Bendet

A woman in a writing group I’m in recently read a letter she wrote to a friend who had ended her own life—not a suicide, you understand, but a conscious and self-generated ending to avoid putting her family through days or even weeks of watching her in excruciating pain. This woman had a peaceful passing, a dignified death. “It was perfect,” one of the women in our group said. “This is the way death should be.”

Perhaps. But the drama of departure is only part of the story, and it’s not the most important part, either. What happens after death? What is the next step? A lot of people—my ex-husband among them—are fairly certain that there is no next step. They say that the body dies and the consciousness that was this individual dies with it, merging with the energy of the universe in a way that is both material and predictable. This is not my view, but I don’t like to get into yes/no discussions about death because no matter what side of this debate you take, it’s a hard argument to prove—impossible, I would say.

I have noticed, though, that there seems to be increasing attention given to this question—anyway, more than at any other time in my own life. There are magazine articles, interviews. My most recent editing client has written a novel about what happens after death, and it reads like science fiction. And just last week on one of the streaming services, a friend and I watched a romantic comedy the premise of which was that the heroine, a seventeen-year-old, is able to talk with the dead. She helps them complete any unfinished business they have with the living so that they—the recently departed—can be ready to move on to the next level.

All of which proves nothing, of course, except to show that we, as a culture, are giving “the next step” a little more thought than we did a few decades ago.

Unlike the heroine of that movie, I am not a psychic who has a dependable relationship with the departed, yet I will say that everyone I have ever cared about who has died has gotten some sort of message back to me from “the other side.” I receive these messages in my mind’s ear, usually when I am chanting or meditating—in other words, at some point when my mind is quiet. Though, come to think of it, the first time this ever happened was right after the death of Yashoda Duffy, a friend of mine, and the message came as I was going to her memorial service. In the moment I walked through the door of the ashram temple, where we were just about to have Yashoda’s service, I heard her voice, clear as a bell, say to me, “Hi Honey!” It was so sweet, so Yashoda.

I know that many people would say, “But that was just your mind; it was your own mind doing that.” I don’t think so, and my reason is this: I have always been surprised by these messages. They were communications I wasn’t thinking about, wasn’t expecting to hear.

Several years after that, my friend Govinda King died. I was planning to recite Shri Guru Gita for him, but I kept putting it off. Then I heard Govinda say, “I want to send blessings to you, but I can’t do that if you don’t send blessings to me.” It was a sweet, brotherly correction—and not something my mind would ever have come up with.

Shortly after his death, my father told me, “I was weak,” and that was the last thing I expected to hear from my sweet dad. it was a long time before I understood what he meant by that. He was referring to something that had happened in a past life, something I once uncovered while working with a therapist.

Then about six months after her death, my mother told me, “We’re finished.” It sounds quite intense and harsh if you just look at the words, but that wasn’t Mom’s meaning. She meant that the tricky and sometimes painful karma between the two of us was finished; it was cleared. I understood this because my mother’s concise message came with a stream of pure love.

My main point with all of this is that, though their physical bodies were gone, these individuals still held sufficient psychic power to send me a communication. I also have to say that none of them conveyed information about their after-death experience. Nobody said, “Wow, wait till you see these sunsets!” or “The music here is wonderful!” Mostly, they gave me information or observations about me; mostly they said things that might help me on my journey or help them on theirs.

My father asked me to plant a tree in his name before the first anniversary of his death. That was very specific. I did it. I had a tree planted in a holy place. A year later, I visited that tree, and when I saw it, I was washed through with waves of a supernal joy. Later, my father asked me to pray for his own father, whom he had loved dearly. “He’s not as happy as he should be,” my father told me. Now I regularly pray for George Baright Dunsmoor Sr.—and I mention his name now in case anyone who reads or hears this is inspired to do the same.

My teacher once said that, for people who have passed over, having someone on this side—someone living—to remember them with love is more precious than gold. Gold, as we all know, is a kind of wealth we must leave behind when we die. What can we take with us? Caring, compassion, reverence, love, and other such virtues are called “divine wealth” because they are thought to stay with us when we cross over.

And I suppose it’s good that we can’t know precisely what happens then. Whatever death may turn out to be, it is an adventure we all have before us.

Spaces and Flow

October 19, 2022 / Margaret Bendet

On an impulse, I asked a friend who had stopped by for chai one morning what she would change in my living room if she could. Eva hesitated—as any intelligent person would do in that situation. “I really mean it,” I told her. “I may not do what you suggest, but I would love to know what you’d tell me.”

“Well, as a matter of fact,” Eva said, “it seems to me that those four paintings are fighting with each other…”

A half-hour later, I was so glad I had asked. Eva suggested changing the placement of just three paintings, and the difference this makes in the room is breathtaking. There is now space in two places that needed space, and the result is that the paintings appear to flow across the walls. One small, intense piece is in a spot I never would have imagined for it, and a large gold-framed painting of my own is back in my bedroom, where it belongs—and where it looks perfect.

My first thought was that the value of an artist’s eye is unimaginable, but as I consider this further, I think it’s more to the point to say that what cannot be imagined is the value of our friends.

That afternoon I had a Zoom conversation with my friend of longest standing. I had to think of how to put that because Pat is not my oldest friend; what she is, is the only friend I’ve known since the sixth grade. We were both new in the school that year. We didn’t connect with each other then, but the following summer our families both moved to another neighborhood, where we were two blocks apart, and at that point Pat and I began to bond. For years, we hung out at each other’s houses. We were maid- and matron-of-honor in each other’s weddings, and we’ve kept loose track of one another in the years since. It’s always a joy to talk with her. Now, she’s the only friend I have who knew my brother, Geoff, and who also knows that he had a daughter, Heather.

Pat asked about Heather, and after a while I was telling her that Heather was the daughter my mother had always wanted—“She’s little and cute,” I said; “she’s sparkly.” Because Pat knew my mother, she understood.

When she learned that I hadn’t been in touch with my niece recently, Pat said, “You should write to her. Family is so important.”

That was how it happened that, for the second time that day, I followed some excellent advice from a friend. I emailed Heather even though I didn’t feel I had anything special to say. I simply told her that I often think about her. Heather wrote back to say, “I think about you a lot, too.” Her words warmed me.

These threads of love knit us together in a way that I find unutterably beautiful. We’re all individual creations, pieces of art. We have somehow arranged our lives so that there is a great deal space between us, but the flow—the connections—are the very heart of life itself. They’re what matter.

Another Re-Entry

June 9, 2022 / Margaret Bendet

When I take a vacation, the big question is how it will change me once I’m back home again. Some might find that an odd measure to take. Yet I feel it’s implied in the word itself. Vacation—to “vacate” one’s workaday world, to be free from duty, to take a respite from work. It traces back to vacare, “to be empty,” “to be free.” And what’s the point of freedom if it’s followed by precisely the same sort of captivity that preceded it?

Not that I see my life as enslavement, you understand, but there are habits my mind has created, and letting go of these for even just a couple of weeks gives me the option not to pick them up again when I come home. The vacation itself is a chance to evaluate—to truly see—what I’ve been doing.

And my most recent vacation had a second aspect to it. Not only did I vacate my life for two weeks but also someone else stepped into my home to take care of the cat, Mira, with whom I share that home. I got to return to my space and see how someone else had changed it in my time away—replacing, for instance, the broken tray my dish drainer was sitting on; the tray I had been meaning to replace for months, possibly years now, but hadn’t because I wasn’t sure what kind of store sold it or what to call it in an online search. That information is knowable, I see, because Laura was able to resolve this unfathomable issue in the space of just two short weeks.

She also bought a sponge and a sponge holder for the kitchen sink—I hadn’t known of the existence of sponge holders—and she put to the side the handknit dishcloths that I’d bought at the last Nordic Fest, the November before the pandemic, and which I probably should have retired at some point within the following year. In addition, Laura bought a plush bathmat, replacing the frayed towel I had been using for this purpose.

It always helps, I guess, to get a new set of eyes on your living quarters—especially after two years of Covid-inspired solitude. It was humbling, however, especially since I had spent some two weeks cleaning to make my home ready for her. I’m grateful she didn’t see it before I prepared!

The main point of the vacation, of course, wasn’t bringing someone else into my home; it was my going off with an old friend, Ganga Stater—a woman I’ve known in several different circumstances over the last almost fifty years—on a trip to Hawaii, where both of us had spent many years living through various incarnations.

Ganga’s particular genius is to create beauty—not just physical beauty but also experiential beauty. She initiates adventures and explorations. Ganga had brought about this very trip to a house in Kailua, trading the use of her own home in Sedona and also finding Laura, a mutual friend, to cat sit for me so I could go.

My favorite part of this vacation was that, on most days, breakfast involved our packing some food off to Kailua Beach by seven o’clock, sitting in our beach chairs under a tree to eat, and then my going off barefoot on a long walk along the pristine packed sands of this particular shoreline—possibly the best walking beach in the world. I found it to be an absolutely sparkling way to begin the day—moving my body, watching various dogs ecstatically playing in the sand and water, watching the ocean, listening to the sound of the water lapping the sand, walking through the tiny waves, letting it all be play…

Obviously, I couldn’t bring Kailua Beach back to the Pacific Northwest. Whidbey Island is beautiful, but the beaches are rocky, it’s been raining some mornings, and even when the weather is sunny, the air isn’t usually warm. But I’ve been going to bed two hours earlier than I used to so that I wake up with time to meditate, to eat breakfast early, and then to do something where I can move my body first thing. This may mean visiting my vegetable garden; it may mean weeding in my backyard (there’s a lot to do!); it may mean going for a little walk along the bluff overlooking Saratoga Passage. That’s a nice change right there.

I’m also re-evaluating the way I dress. I’m seventy-seven, and living as I do on rural, forested island, I had been drifting into a wardrobe that was jeans, jeans, and more jeans. Well, I can wear skirts, too, and shorts. Why not? In Hawaii I was introduced to some colorful boho tops under the label Johnny Was, an LA firm named after an old Bob Marley lyric. Buying a few of these tops means looking for sales and saving my pennies, but, again, why not?

One significant change in my life is that I’ve been a bit more adventurous—more likely to be the one to say, Yes, let’s do that! More likely to meet a friend for breakfast. More likely to invite someone to bring her twelve-year-old granddaughter with her to dinner. More likely to reach out to a sick friend… It may not sound like much, but it’s been only a week and a half.

I suppose the biggest change is my increasing awareness that life is precious and that my having this body and being able to be in it with friends—with people I know and love—is a gift that has a “use by” date, though I have no idea when that may be. I didn’t need a vacation to tell me this, of course, but it was a huge focus for the two weeks I was away. Everyone I got together with—including my dear ex-husband and a delightful woman with whom I used to work—was dealing with frailties we’d never thought about in our callous youth. One friend didn’t get back to me by email; I had to track him down. Finally, he texted me: “Don’t worry, I’m fine. I was in the hospital, and now I’m in a care home in Kalihi.” Blindsided by a sudden ailment, he hadn’t even told his friends! As we age, such conditions seem to come up in the space of a breath. Ganga, the woman I was traveling with, couldn’t walk on the beach—her all-time favorite thing to do—because in the previous month she’d broken a bone in her foot just by standing in her garden.

During this trip, one morning, early, Ganga and I participated in an online Shree Guru Gita recitation on behalf of Shanti Gaskins, a mutual friend who had died thirteen days before. “She had a super-power for love,” Shanti’s daughter said about her mom, a woman so full of life that you’d never have thought she could possibly die.

But we all do die, and along the way we’re very likely to lose most of the life powers we take for granted—things as basic as digesting food, driving at night, driving at all, walking, remembering…

So, I came home from vacation with an increased awareness that my life is a gift, and that the only sane response, minute by minute, is to reach toward gratitude for what I’ve been given—and an increased sensitivity for what I might be able to give to those around me. It won’t always work out as I’d hoped, but I’m taking a lesson from the license number on the car Ganga rented: TRY. There were some numbers with that, but it was the TRY that sang for me. This, at least, I can do.

Speaking from the Heart

April 1, 2022 / Margaret Bendet

Last week in my writing group, I burst out at one point with a bracing, “Shut up!” This isn’t the way I want to communicate with my friends—or with anyone else, for that matter—and so afterward I gave some thought to what I’d said, why I’d said it, and how I could avoid such outbursts in the future.

One of the things I did was telephone the woman to whom I had addressed this unfortunate command and apologize to her. After I let her know that I didn’t approve of my words or my tone, I asked her, “Could I tell you why I think this happened?” She was interested in hearing what I had to say… which was, in itself, a big lesson for me. Obviously, I could have said it to her at the time. It wasn’t necessary for me to remain silent while my inner steam built to the point of explosion.

What I’d like to say now is something about speaking from the heart when giving feedback in writers’ groups.

To a great extent, what we’re doing in our group is telling personal stories, reliving parts of our lives. These stories can bring up emotions for us as we’re writing them or reading them aloud, and they can also bring up emotions for others as they hear them.

My suggestion is that when we feel emotion as we listen to someone read that we recognize this and acknowledge it in our feedback. The woman I yelled at had been—to my mind—haranguing the person who had just read. She didn’t know how brilliant she was; she should be writing more; she should organize the stories she’d already written; she had stories that other people needed to read…

It is a litany that has been going on between these two for years now. And one thing that I have long felt is that this woman’s irritation with her friend is a huge projection because the woman making this complaint has her own brilliance, doesn’t write enough herself, and has just recently gone through some compelling and universal experiences that other people would truly benefit from hearing about.

But what was happening inside me, as I listened to her in the group was something else entirely. Suddenly, this friend was my mother, talking to me, complaining to me. I didn’t write to her enough; I didn’t call her enough; and when I went to see her, it wasn’t often enough, and I didn’t stay long enough. No matter what I did, it wasn’t enough—and, it seemed, it wasn’t going to be enough, ever.

In the moment, it felt like self-defense. But of course, it wasn’t. This had nothing to do with me, and if I had spoken up earlier, I would have known that at the time I spoke.

I think we need to try to be crystal clear in our communication and to take responsibility for our reactions. There is no earthly reason for us to be heated in our responses to somebody else’s writing. We are not our sister’s keeper. We might disagree with someone’s political views. We might think someone doesn’t have the best handle on an exchange they describe. Or we might think she’s the most brilliant writer since Virginia Woolf, we might not understand why such a genius would want to hide her light in the forests of Whidbey Island…

But why should any of this bring up emotion?

The fact is that most of us in this particular group are what the writer that day so perspicaciously admitted to being herself—lazy. None of us writes as much as we could or perhaps should—anyway, not as much as we want to. The youngest of us has been on this planet for more than three-quarters of a century; most of us are dealing with serious physical challenges; and those who aren’t now know that we could be in any moment. We know that any of us could be gone in the blink of an eye. We all like our rest, our reading, our entertaining films and TV series, our phone conversations, our delicious dinners. We also like to write, but I don’t think any of us is driven to write. We don’t necessarily want to relive every pertinent moment of our lives—even if it might benefit someone else to read our story.

And that’s just fine.

So, I’ve promised myself that next time, I’ll speak up sooner. I’m pretty sure if I do that, I’ll be using gentler words and delivering them in a warmer tone. I might say something like, “You know, for some reason, Donna, your feedback to Micky is painful for me to hear…” And then I’d begin my exploration of why that might be.

I am committed to doing this.

And if I do speak in a way that feels brusque or harsh, I’ve asked the members of this group, as friends, to call it to my attention. Actually, I’d appreciate that feedback from anyone–since we are, all of us, on this journey together..