Higher Tea: A Sip of Inspiration

Family life is full of major and minor crises — the ups and downs of health, success and failure in career, marriage, and divorce — and all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all of these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality. It’s difficult to imagine anything more nourishing to the soul. –Thomas Moore

My husband and I just drove 1,253 miles in our motor coach to visit my birth family and celebrate Father’s Day with my dad. At the urging of my other the entire family will be together—most likely with my dad for the last time before he makes his transition. Dad will have the opportunity to hold his new grandson, his only namesake for the first and last time.

This will be a bitter-sweet moment. We will all be together and will want to make it festive, but Dad’s condition is anything buy positive. In December he had another stroke. Twenty years ago, at the age of 58, he was paralyzed on the left side by his first stroke. The fact that he lost his right hand in a saw mill accident when he was nineteen and wore a hook for many years meant that my mother had to help him with many basic requirements of daily living. Twenty years later, she is still tending to him, but now he is blind, without short-term memory, incontinent, and totally dependent. It has been her labor of love.

Dad sleeps most of the time now and drifts in and out of awareness. He even sees and talks with his father and others who left us years ago. Dad is ready to go, but something has kept him here. Perhaps this gathering and the opportunity to say “good-bye” will free him from his need to hold on to his debilitated body.

This time with relatives will require lots of presence. It will be easy  to get caught up in the drama and fall back into old judgments. Or I will assume my former role as “Peace Keeper,” smooth ruffled feathers, and make everyone happy and everything OK.

Einstein spoke about “relativiTea” the impact of the researcher in his scientific work. He discovered that whatever the observer noticed influenced the outcome of the experiment. In other words, whatever we see is what is—even if only in our eyes. And we know that we create our lives through our thoughts and beliefs.

During this week with relatives, it is my deepest intention to remain aware and be a “Frequency Holder” that Eckhart Tolle described in A New Earth.  I will remain present, open, loving, and most of all, non-reactive. What is is, and all is well.