The Journey: A Mystic’s Journal: October 28- 29, 2006

Saturday, October 28
Westfield, New Jersey

Plan to begin editing A Mystic’s Journal and A Composer’s Journal, for publication. Diana is still working on the other two volumes, formatting and designing.

We left this morning before dawn, to visit my mother - some houses along the road were lit up from within/ mainly the houses were as dark as the night itself. Dawn in the east, ahead of us. Rain. Coloured lights on the paving, reflections of the reds and greens of street lights and car lights seeping downwards into the road, as though the reality of their depth had changed ... A new world beneath the old one ...

We again took back roads, small roads, simple roads, winding roads through forests and small towns. No cars but ours. Clouds in the mountains, mists; clouds in the fields, hanging or moved across by the wind. The colours rich and deep in the rain. Here and there streams and rivers accompanied us, along the road; the fields tan or sienna in the rain.

In the mountains trees already bare, stark - as stark as my feelings of dread. Families of pumpkins lined up cheerfully on porches, red barns no longer alone in their red against the fields. Now reds and oranges, yellows everywhere, bending over or towards the road. Old, white farmhouses with gables and wide porches, manors: here and there a plume of white smoke from a wood stove; trees bent against the wind and rain, against the empty sky.

Thoughts of childhood, images, words, scenes. They arose of their own accord and left my mind as they wished, just as the colours of the trees and fields that flashed by ... Thoughts of the past, of the present and of the future. All thoughts, none more real or important than the others as we sped towards our destination - our meeting with fleeting life, all that was left now to my mother. I am three years old, I am sixty years old, all in an instant. So many inner images, so many leaves and houses and fields, all in one lifetime, all in a few hours on Route 6, traveling east.

We all have our inner photo album, it’s pages filled with images in black and white or in colour, page after page after page ... The pages we turn to frame our memories of the past and also determine how we live the present. But today the album pages turned on their own, as though a hand outside of myself decided which photographs I would see ...

Sunday, October 29
Westfield

This time my mother did not greet me at the door. Waferlike and frail, she cannot move; her thin chest struggling for air. The unmistakable feeling that this would be our last physical meeting.

Her small frame under colorful blankets her mother had crocheted; a breathing mask, almost unable to speak. And yet her distinctive French beauty and gaiety, her inner presence unchanged..

Her first words to me were: "Prepare yourself for the worst", and I nodded. Yet, the last morning, as we left for our return to Ithaca - we found her seated at the small round table on the back porch, fully dressed and with makeup on, no breathing mask - smiling as she said good-bye. In her wheelchair, covered with my grandmother’s beautiful blankets, a vision of Beauty and Peace. And that is how I will remember her, her final Gift to me.