My Mantras

God knows, in your lifetime, you’ve read gazillions of lines or adages or truths and every now and then one appears that just speaks to you.  That has happened to me exactly twice.

The first time was when I was 18 years old, a college freshman, in a VERY liberal arts, VERY small college....maybe 500 students...and I was introduced to The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran.  Let me tell you, this was not part of my southern religious upbringing.  That was religiosity; this was spiritual.  It spoke to me LOUDLY.  I was so into it, I was practically manic!

I got so excited, I called my mother to share this wondrous discovery of mine.
 “Mom, I just read this amazing book, The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran!”
“The Prophet???  Jesus Christ is the only prophet and don’t you forget it.  What is this man’s background?  Is he Christian??”

Oh, boy, you got me there.  Of course, there could be no other prophet in any realm.  What was I thinking?  And with that conversation, two decisions were made.  1) Sharing my ‘great’ discoveries with my mother was off, and 2) I, for better or worse, was going on my own spiritual journey in this life.  In fact, I ended up majoring in Religion and Philosophy....huge demand for that major!!  But, I didn’t care.  I was going to read all the great masters and make my own decision.

So, Kahlil came to my wedding in the form of excerpts of his passage on Marriage.
“Sing and dance together and be joyous,
But let each of you be alone.
Stand together, yet not too near together.
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”

But, that was not my mantra.  My mantra came from his poem on Joy and Sorrow.
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy it can contain.”  I cannot tell you how many times I’ve conjured this up.  Pain just sucks.  It’s gut wrenching to find out your best friend and mate has been diagnosed with AIDS or you learn you have breast cancer and you think your life is over.

So, I say to myself, feel it....feel the pain, cry, scream, sob, whatever it takes.  Because if you feel sorrow deeply, you can also feel joy deeply.  There is always tomorrow; there is always hope.  I never wanted to feel dead when I am so clearly alive.  I think when you won’t let yourself feel emotion, that’s dying.

And, in my life, I can tell you I’ve felt great sorrow and great joy.  God knows, I prefer joy but would I appreciate it as much without sorrow?

After I graduated from college in 1969, my new husband and I took a leap of faith and left our home state of Florida to take up residence in New England.  Why?  Because it was a hotbed of antiwar activism and my husband had gone AWOL to New Haven several years earlier and decided it was the place for us to start a new life...mainly, among people like us who were testing the “establishment” by living in communes and growing organic before anyone had a clue what that was.

And, so we took off in our Volkswagen bug with all our worldly possessions and ended up in Northampton, Massachusetts....the home of Jonathan Edwards, the fire and brimstone preacher from the Puritan Era. He was widely acknowledged to be America’s most important philosophical theologian and one of our country’s greatest intellectuals.  In 1741, he delivered his most famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

 I’m fairly certain Jonathan would not be happy that townspeople were smoking weed on the steps of his church when we arrived!   To me, that was just another sign that we were supposed to be there.  Yes, I am laughing as I write this....laughing at my naivete.

But, it was here that I found one of my life’s passions:  American History.  

One day, I was touring Katharine Hepburn’s childhood home in Hartford, Connecticut and there inscribed on the fireplace was my other mantra:  “Listen to the song of life.”

I’ve been singing ever since.