Recipes for a Sacred Life: True Stories and a Few Miracles by Rivvy Neshama (top rated books of all time .TXT) 📗

Well, that made them more sympathetic in my eyes, if it were in fact true. And a few weeks later, I found out it was! I heard tiny grackles grackling and saw something I’d never seen before: Grackle after grackle would come feed the little ones—not just the mother or father as I’d observed with other birds, but the whole grackle clan, bringing worms to drop into the mouths of the babes.

So this is a shout-out for grackles. Add a chair to the table and welcome them too.

Thank you for the birds that sing,

Thank you, God, for everything!

WITH BEAUTY MAY I WALK

Around the time we were thinking of moving back East, back to family, our friend Carrie took John and me to a summer art show. It was called Dual Visions and featured the work of artist couples. Each couple had written a statement as well, describing what inspired them to create and how their partner’s vision influenced their own. One couple wrote that nothing inspired them more than the beauty of nature: “It reminds us to make our life beautiful, whether it be the garden, our home, the art we make, or a dinner with close friends.”

Carrie and her husband, Hal, were the oldest couple whose work was displayed. Carrie was eighty, but still had bangs and the air of a tomboy. With her lilting laugh and endless curiosity, she seemed to be forever young. Hal, her longtime partner in art and adventures, had died at eighty-four, one year before the show.

An environmentalist and geologist, Hal had also been a photographer. He loved the native beauty of our world and wanted to preserve it. To realize that goal, he photographed some of the most untouched places on Earth for the Nature Conservancy, an organization that raises money to purchase such land and protect it. The Dual Visions show displayed a few of Hal’s photographs of woodlands and wilderness. Shot in black and white, each rock and tree looked ancient, and there was drama played out between shadow and light. Hal had written before he died that his aim was twofold: to capture the beauty and to enhance it by the way he framed each photo.

Carrie’s pictures were also of trees and rocks and wildland, but hers were charcoal sketches, softer and more intimate, and her aim was to lose herself—or find herself—in nature. “Hal searched for the truth of a place,” she wrote, “and I for a metaphor.”

After viewing the show, we drove up Boulder Canyon to have dinner at the Red Lion Inn, which sat alone by a creek amid forests of pine trees. Later, as the sun was setting, Carrie, John, and I stood outside, staring at a golden mist that veiled the Rocky Mountains. “Carrie,” I said, “it’s so beautiful. How can we ever leave Boulder?” She assured me that natural beauty could be found anywhere, “wherever people haven’t ruined it.”

And then she told us that when Hal was dying, he was very stoic, but she felt his sadness in some of the last words he spoke: “Our world is so beautiful,” he said. “How can anyone bear to leave it?”

I sometimes wonder why we’re here, all of us, living on this planet. Most likely, there are many reasons. But one of them, I’m sure, is this: to see the beauty, to savor it, and then create our own. That’s how Hal lived. And that’s how he died.

With beauty before me, may I walk.

With beauty behind me, may I walk.

With beauty above me, may I walk.

With beauty below me, may I walk.

With beauty all around me, may I walk.

In old age wandering on a trail of beauty,

lively, may I walk.

In old age wandering on a trail of beauty,

living again, may I walk.

It is finished in beauty.

—A NAVAJO PRAYER

Part Four

TO FORGIVE IS DIVINE

When we forgive, we return to our center,

where things on a good day feel just right.

LOOKING FOR GOD

IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES

I was wrestling with night demons, reliving a fight I’d just had with a friend. In the darkness of the hour, I saw her as cold, scary, and attacking, and myself as hurt, innocent, and ready to strike back. “See God in everyone,” I thought, an adage I once read—written by some monk, I bet, who lived in a cave, with no friends or family to deal with.

I mean, seeing God in everyone isn’t something I easily do. The first time it happened was in the ’70s on the New Jersey Turnpike, when Barry and the kids and I stopped for lunch at a Howard Johnson’s.

The kids were cranky and fighting, tired from the long ride. I was cranky too, muttering about fast-food chains and how there’d be nothing here I’d like and I’d rather starve. The waitress, who had a beehive hairdo and whose name badge said “Pat,” smiled broadly and handed us menus.

Well. The special of the day was key lime pie. Now that just happens to be my favorite dessert. Still, I grumbled, it would probably be all chemicals and taste like that too. It’s just a stupid “Ho-Jo’s,” what do you expect?

But I took a chance and here’s the truth: It was the best key lime pie I ever ate. Cool, tart, and a crust like butter. I savored each bite, and as I did I looked around. What I saw were families: all sizes, all races, laughing and eating, squabbling and alive! A wave of love washed through me, and I suddenly saw God everywhere—in that pie and in Pat and in everyone in the room.

Right. But you can’t just make that kind of thing happen. And on this dark, restless night decades later, I sure wasn’t seeing God in my angry friend. Forget God. I wasn’t even seeing anything good.

Then I thought of something the Dalai Lama said, something about remembering the good in the person you’re angry