The (Third) Eye of the Hurricane

It’s wonderful to be with my mom. I miss her. The last time I saw my mom was in January of this year right around the anniversary of her death. She’s been gone now almost 12 years and with her birthday coming up tomorrow (she will be 88!), I appreciate her coming to help me move to higher ground. I am especially grateful because (knowing her) she still needs to buy a new dress and matching spiked heels for dancing, and save some time to torment my dad by taking an excruciatingly long time doing it.

As I sit here on the cliffs around the Drive with my mom, I feel calm, safe, and loved. What a relief to feel connected to my mom and released from my current internal hericane-like elements, to be able to see a horizon that was not visible to me while in the storm of myself, and to recognize the potential of self-radiated sunlight behind those storm clouds.

When I was a child, I loved hurricanes because of what they offered me. It was fun to challenge the weather by boarding up our bay windows. It was a major treat to be allowed to buy more than one comic book at a time. And, it was really cool reading those comic books by candlelight.

I depended on my home in Newport for its strong foundation, its horsehair and seaweed wall insulation, and its sturdy roof over my curly red head to remain intact while the winds and rains made its way through my town. Maybe it was naïve, but I had absolutely no doubt that my home would remain intact.

But hurricane season was much more than that.

Our three story Colonial home on Ayrault St, which was often (for me) a place of sadness and confusion, became a place alive in silence, electric in the expectancy of something much bigger than me or my family or my current circumstance, and a charged deeply cushioned and unfamiliar comfort knowing that, no matter what, my house would weather the storm.

I loved hurricane season for giving that to me.

Now as I sit here on my internal higher ground with my mom, I feel that same sense of protection, but this elevated perspective also allows me access to seeing that the safety and the silence and the expectancy and the charge I feel is not generated solely by myself or the structure of my internal or external home.

I can see how the Greater Field of Life navigates the storm by entering the flow with it. The trees, ancient, experienced, and deeply rooted in the earth stand as sentinels of protection simply by remaining rooted while simultaneously giving way to allow the winds to travel through them. These very cliffs prevent great washes of waves from overflowing to the homes behind them simply by doing what cliffs were created to do…stand their ground and offer no resistance.

Similarly, I now see, my dependable inner home is generated by being in the con-current flow of relationships: with the part of my Self which my third eye of the hurricane gives me access to, with other loving relationships I have co-created on this planet, and with the Greater Field of Life.

And simply (though not easily) doing nothing else.