When you pull together memories into a cohesive piece, like a book, some of your favorites won’t fit. One of these for me is about how, after the death of my first spiritual teacher—whom I refer to in the book as the swami—I went back home to Honolulu, got a job with a small local publisher, and took up smoking again. When my book finally comes out, this anecdote will not be in it. So, I’ll share it here. Continue reading
Category: Re-entry (Page 2 of 2)
It’s time to celebrate blackberries! It was blackberry season when I arrived on Whidbey Island. A friend showed me a culvert cache in her neighborhood where I picked a plump berry half the size of my thumb and popped it into my mouth: juicy and sweet and warm from the sun. Within a few minutes we filled a recycled plastic container with berries and, after dinner, we ate them on ice cream.
Later, I scattered blackberries over cereal and pancakes and grilled salmon; I baked them in cobblers and muffins; I boiled them down into syrups and jams . . .
These nutritious berries—high in fiber and vitamin C—are a boon to anyone who eats on a budget, and arriving on Whidbey, I considered them a personal welcome gift from the universe, my new universe. On Whidbey blackberries are, really, everywhere: on vacant lots, between driveways, beside the highway, lining neighborhood streets, climbing walls, growing up through the middle of other bushes, hugging not the shoreline perhaps but the thin, sandy soil that’s just one step away. The bushes grow thick and tall; they’re tenacious, wickedly prickly, and absolutely aggressive—a bit like our own weedy species, I think, except that humankind doesn’t come to fruit so easily and predictably between early August and the autumn rains.
As with friends, I found it’s important to pick the right berries, the truly ripe ones. Blackberries come to maturation on individual time frames, meaning that two plump berries growing on the same twig so close together that they touch can be at varying stages of ripeness: one sweetly succulent and the other mouth-puckering. The early warning sign is this: if a berry is ready to be picked, it comes off the bush with just the slightest prompting from the picker.
When a blackberry offers any resistance at all, it’s not ready; move on to another berry. This means you can pick the best berries, the ripest berries, without crushing them. It took me a while to master this light touch, and so the first year my fingertips were stained dark purple throughout the season.
The blackberry’s prickles—often incorrectly called thorns because they are capable of ripping denim and drawing blood—have provided me many other valuable lessons. One of the more obvious is the importance of appropriate attire: old clothes, long sleeves, covered shoes. Because opportunities for berrying can come up unexpectedly, I began carrying the right clothes and some plastic containers in the trunk of my car.
But dressing right isn’t the whole story in dealing with blackberry prickles, and also with the huge spiders that take refuge in those prickles. That’s right: huge spiders. You never want to thrust your hand into a blackberry bush. You need to see beyond the berry the question; you need to take in the berry’s immediate environment. Otherwise you may receive a nasty surprise.
What you cannot help but notice in picking blackberries is that the best berries are just out of your reach. This will be true even if you are tall, as I am, or if you expand your reach, as many do, by bringing along a step-ladder, a long-handled fork (to pull branches down) or a even a plank (to lay across the front of the bush and allow you access to the inner branches). I don’t do any of this because I’ve found that no matter what I do, always, just beyond my fingertips are gigantic berries, tantalizingly fat berries, berries that are heavy with sweet juice.
There is only one solution here: Get over it. That’s life, isn’t it!
And my life is so much sweeter, I’ve found, when I allow myself to be satisfied with the glorious berries that are within my reach.
So many people send me opportunities to make and save money. I have to remind myself: what’s great in life has no price tag, but nothing—no thing—is ever free. Like the message I received from the credit union that holds the loan on my car. They’ll give me $150 if I refinance my loan. It sounds good. I’m sure they’d lower my monthly payments. But what would they charge me in added interest over the course of the loan? Much more than $150!
Recently I had an intriguing offer from the car company as well. They’re offering to take my 2011 model on trade for a 2014 model—with no money down and no change in the monthly payments. Of course, I would end up making those monthly payments for a lot longer. If I did this every few years, I could pay them forever.
And invitations to change my insurance come almost daily. Everyone knows about insurance companies. They’re lovely to deal with while you’re signing up or sending them money. When, however, an event in your life might require them to send you money, the honeymoon is over. That’s when you find out the true nature of your relationship—have you aligned yourself with a company you can trust or with the corporate equivalent of Bluebeard?
When I made my recent life transition and was in the market for medical insurance for the first time ever—I’d always had an employer-based plan—I did something truly foolish. A friend told me that if I joined this particular organization, the group would provide me with medical insurance, and because of the large numbers involved, the price would be half the market rate.
I called and talked with a representative, a charming woman who told me she’d signed up for this insurance herself—and weren’t we both clever for finding insurance so inexpensively! I loved that insurance—until I fell, broke my left arm, took an ambulance to the nearest hospital for an X-ray, and learned that I needed surgery.
The medical drama was over in about six weeks; my negotiations, machinations, frustrations, and, ultimately, condemnations involving the insurance company went on for years
Initially, there were issues about the medical procedure itself: the insurance would cover my surgeon and the surgical facility but not the anesthesiologist employed by that facility. (They had the anesthesiologist’s name but at another address. “They have to match perfectly what’s on our list,” a polite voice on the telephone told me: “both the name and the address.”) The insurance would pay for a pin to be put into my elbow but not the medical apparatus the surgeon recommended.
I did have the surgery I needed and, yes, I was anesthetized. Then I dealt with the insurance company.
I would have a clear, focused, friendly conversation on the phone with one of the company’s representatives, a woman named, say, Shawnee. I would take careful notes, fax Shawnee the paperwork she said she needed, and feel that everything was taken care of. Nothing would happen. Months later, I would call and be told that Shawnee no longer worked at the company, no one there had a record of my fax—and I needed to send them certain paperwork before anything could happen at their end. I went through this a couple of times, and then by chance heard the company’s personnel listed in a voicemail recording: one of the names was Shawnee. How many Shawnees could there be?
It was two years after the original accident that the company sent the final payment: $500 for the ambulance—a fee I had long since paid myself. In that time, the company had changed its name twice and, more importantly, I had changed my insurance.
Now, I sign up only with an insurance company recommended by a friend—a friend who has collected from that very company. I figure it’s common sense. And when I hear complaints about Obamacare, I remember what medical insurance was like for me before the passage of the Affordable Healthcare Act.
Welcome to this series of observations and musings on a life transition. I lived in a spiritual community for more than three decades. When the time came to make my home elsewhere, I saw the move as a re-entry.
Re-entry means going back. A spacecraft in re-entry has been inhabiting another atmosphere. On such a re-entry, you need to gird yourself against returning to a world that may be your origin but has not lately been your support. How do you make this shift? What must you jettison? What do you need to keep?
For my move, I mailed 90 boxes of things: sheets, towels, photographs, books… Why should I buy them again? Could I even afford to do that?
With the help of friends, I rented a tiny house online, so there was a place to land.
And I drove cross-country in a car bursting with what couldn’t be mailed: suitcases full of clothes, a trunkful of computer equipment, art supplies, the cutting from a night-blooming cereus, a bunch of silk wisteria…
A drive like this demands vigilance. I learned a new attentiveness to the physical world, but step by step. I lost my car keys in Ohio, dropped my Visa card at a Starbucks in Minnesota, left my purse—with my wallet, my money, and all my identification—on a picnic bench in the badlands of North Dakota. I did what I had to, of course.
I had the car towed (courtesy of AAA) to a dealer who made new keys. I canceled my Visa and was grateful that I had another credit card. And the badlands turned out to be not so bad after all. As I was frantically backtracking in search of my purse, a woman called out, “The park ranger has it. I turned it in at the office.”
I was lucky. Without that insurance or the extra card or the kindness of a stranger, I might not have made it to my destination. No re-entry. There are those who do not physically survive re-entry. In this weekly blog I’ll go into some strategies I’ve found—and some I’ve discarded—for maneuvering this new world in which I was suddenly cooking for one, finding health insurance, starting a business, planting a garden, building community…
But physical survival is only part of re-entry. There are other, more significant issues in our lives. As the stage manager in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town puts it, “We all know that something is eternal…” While we’re involved in the physical realities of housing and feeding and maintaining ourselves, how can we remember the “something way down deep” in us that’s eternal?
For me, the heart of re-entry is remembrance. I work with remembrance every day. While I’m on a spiritual path, it is not this path I write about. There are means of remembrance accessible to every journeyman, and this is what I will focus on.
For instance: at the end of each day, I like to ask myself two questions:
- What did I do best today?
- What could I have done better?
The answers are often a surprise.
I'm Margaret Bendet. I left a journalism career to live in a spiritual community and, after several decades, left that community to become, once again, a professional writer. That’s the nature of my re-entry. The question is, how to do it gracefully. How to return while remembering where I’ve been and why I was there.