You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen
often to people who break easily, or who have sharp edges, or
who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are
Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop
out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby.
But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real
you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.

-The Velveteen Rabbit

What Happened to God?

The tree was thirty feet or so from the house, but the dichotomy of worlds and experience was profound.

I was a skinny little girl with dirty blonde hair, my knees were perpetually bruised, and my elbows skinned from climbing the tree again and again. I carried a pocketknife and never owned a doll.

Up the tree I had found paradise. I mean real paradise. What grown-ups called words like “safety” and “stability,” I recognized as feeling states at a young age. I called this “God.” I didn’t know how to define this, really, but I knew it was there. I always knew it was there. Up the tree. Out on the branch over the water, with the least amount of Spanish moss, it existed as glittering lights and celestial choirs. I saw and I heard.

The moss had bugs in it. More bugs than flora. Mites that bit, little red creatures that looked angry when you looked closely. “No see ‘ems” that seemed to be seeking revenge for being invisible.

Thirty feet away in the 200-year-old house, rage and violence predominated. I was terrified. Mom smoked cigarettes and drank martinis. Dad came home and a threatening silence loomed overall.

I wanted to protect Rennie, my twin. I don’t remember if Mister entered the picture at any time.

I picked the white horse because I got first choice. He was mean and bit me. He balked at jumps and threw me. I couldn’t get him out of his stall. When I went to feed him, he tried to kick me.

Rennie’s gentle bay let us mount him and lie on his back in the field. We rolled his mane with pink curlers, and he tolerated it for a long time before he shook the curlers out.

I had longed for a horse for so long, and I was so disappointed. I had picked this fucker, and this fucker was mean as a snake.

This is the story of my life. I want something, I go for it, it hurts me, I am disappointed, and on and on and on…

………………….

How can I hold onto the fact that people love me? How can I maintain the stance of gratitude and kindness toward myself when things go awry? How can I forgive myself for finding out that people betrayed me when I was already in my 50’s? How can I forgive the naiveté of a girl who believed everybody? Who believed what was said to her?

How can I resolve the terrible way I felt as a child when my sister looked in a mirror at every opportunity to ask me if she looked like me? Were her lips like mine? Why did she have a mouth like that? Why? Why? Why? I do not believe I have ever overcome this pain. I would give her anything. Anything at all.

I long for her today. I miss her more than I ever have. A twin as she used to be, present and needed like my right arm.

I have great compassion for my mother, who used alcohol to medicate her dysfunction. I loved my mother, and I think it broke her heart to have a daughter her husband loved, causing her to behave childishly and in an envious way. I was the preferred child, and it is an archetype difficult to handle, much less understand and metabolize in a Family System.

My brother, on the other hand, is so tightly wound up he will break in two at some point. He is not self-reflective, but externally focused. He seems to live in a spiral of toxic shame.

I am angry that he has not taken his time, opportunity, and money – all of which he is abundant – and gotten help. I am just disappointed and very angry.

And part of the anger is grief. A very heavy, unresolved emotion.

____________________________________

So, back to God. I am spacious with a life I could never have dreamed of. My charming cottage, my animals, my beautiful things – shabby as some of them are – are filled with energy and “story.” I walk through my life grateful for my own existence, grateful for the money I make, and mostly, grateful that I am given the opportunity to help people and watch them grow in front of my eyes.

I sometimes am overwhelmed at my good fortune in having powerful teachers, like my beloved Gurumayi, like Byron Katie, Donna Eden and Stephen Levine. Donna and Katie have become friends.

I have been seriously ill in the last two years. I was told in each hospitalization that I was going to die, or at least I possibly could do so. I remember not being affected by the thought, one way or the other.

So, I am still here. Alive and kicking. I have been approached by talent agents asking me if I wanted to model again as there is an apparent market for older models.

As I compiled a portfolio and made more videos, I was interested to see how stressed I became. So, after about a year ‘planning’ my next career moves as a model, I had the realization: Fuck this! How awful! I don’t want the horrible karma of thinking about my physical self in this way any longer.

And now my videos are filled with information rather than ego and hubris.

It was like forcing myself to complete certification for Byron Katie’s program. The program is more difficult than getting into graduate school, and I had been at it for years. It is very selective, and very hard to complete. The oral examinations went on for about a year, evaluated by international practitioners.

When I finally decided to quit the program before it quit me, I had God again. I had been trying to do something with a motive, rather than doing something for the love of God.

I go astray often. But the power, the goodness, that returns me to my true Self, humiliating and enervating as it may be for a while, is greater than any thought I might have to sabotage this greatness.

And I call this God.

Anything after “God is” is a lie. God is. God is. Loving what is. God is.