Angels Surround

The evenings in the late summer garden are intoxicating with the scent of the Angel's Trumpet swirling in through the window's on the night breeze.

I am saying thank you to All That Is for the ability to look back using the art form of the memoir. It allows a space for the gaze into what was without being pulled away from the preciousness of the moment. I love reading, writing and taking classes in memoir.

Here then is a short Afterward to the Memoir in Two Chapters that ran between June 8 and September 11.


AFTERWORD


I was raised to believe in Guardian Angels. And believe in them I did. I had a trust in life, a naivete' that caused one person important in my life to refer to me as "unassuming".

Mother always said, "Give them the benefit of the doubt." and this particularly odd one "You'll catch more flies with honey than you will with vinegar."


I was house sitting in 1982 and I read an essay in my host's college journal that was titled 'Rape as a Spiritual Experience'. I was enraged and outraged. I became 'beside myself' the same way I did when I took rape crisis training and learned of the documented post traumatic stress (PTS) syndrome that is no different than that visited upon veterans of war.


It took me years to realize that the Hells Angels were, for me, 'The Angel's from Hell'. These Angels took be into the Underworld and showed me a cavernous dark.

Like any demons worth their salt will do they tried to make me small and of no use.

Like any monsters, dragons or strange beliefs that we invite in either consciously or unconsciously they tried to strip me of all dignity and worth.

Like any demon they brutally lay in ambush.

They preyed upon my Innocent state of being. And from them I learned that when brought face to face with what we believe we cannot endure we do indeed. We do indeed. We endure. And more than that, much more than that, we rise above...individually and collectively...our true spirit, beyond the Beyond, lifts us away from danger. We float with effortless ease above the battlefield. The body may be battered upon return, or we may not return at all (transcending the body), yet our sweet strong empowered creative spirit lives on.


This is a Big ol' School called Earth. I learned that at 19. I wouldn't have been able to comprehend that or assimilate that without a model. Immediately Life sent me that model, my mentor, my guide...my guardian Angel in Alice. She offered me an example of what Life could be. She demonstrated a life of lightness of being employing yoga, art making, gardens, gentleness, laughter and balance in all ways...even in the midst of her own severe loss and heart break.


I could address these issues at length and ad infinitum but I prefer to recognize that the 'Angel's from Hell' made me a life member of what Clarissa Pinkola Estes brilliantly refers to as 'the scar clan'.


Like my friend Indigo Girl decided, I hope that you will pull Estes' work off the shelf and read again this concept. You'll find the treasure of her wisdom on page 374 of Women Who Run With the Wolves.

You too may discover that we are each indeed much stronger, far wiser and certainly more capable than much of the mass consciousness cultural out picture would have any of us believe or subscribe to currently.

Notice the manner in which you have faced your demons and faced them down. Celebrate your ability and your capacity to thrive rather than survive.


This Life is all so temporary and precious.


Rumi says it so well: Let the beauty you love be the work that you do there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.