January, 2010

Dear Friends --

Many years ago -- the sum of which amazes me now -- my mother gave me a ring her mother gave to her when she was just a girl. It was not a ring I would have chosen for myself, given my age and the times, but I quickly grew to love it and considered it sacred in ways I could not then name.

The ring was simple, classic; a Baby’s Breath Coral cabochon resting in a cradle of old world gold. The shank fanned out in an artful tulip-like configuration on each side of the cabochon. When I am energized or excited or angry -- when I am in a passion or in a twit -- the coral’s normally pastel blush darkened. When I am silent and still, the stone took on an alabaster hue.
I have worn that ring nearly every day of my life, all through high school, college and graduate school, when I delivered my daughters, when I married, when I buried my parents. I wore it throughout a succession of jobs and homes, in far away countries and at neighborhood barbecues. I typed three books wearing that ring. Thirty-five years ago, when I first began to meditate, I realized that the tulips were, in fact, lotuses -- an ancient symbol of the soul’s unfoldment unto grace. Later, I learned the stone’s unusually pale color, it’s “Baby’s Breathness,” was representative of spiritual service. In these ways, the ring became a mark of who I once was and who I was becoming, an amulet and a guardian, a prompt I used to bring my mind back to my intention to live a spiritual life.

One balmy afternoon last August, I spent the twilight hours of my last weekend in San Diego before a move to the Bay Area tending the wildflower garden in front of our home. Some dearly loved neighbors wandered by for a chat armed with a question they hoped I could answer. They had begun -- in their eighties -- to take a hatha yoga class and wanted to know the meaning of a gesture their instructor used at the beginning and the end of each class. They put their palms together in front of their hearts in prayerful repose to demonstrate the gesture, and I knew it to be a pronam, a yoga mudra, an honorific that, loosely translated, means “my soul bows to your soul.” We talked for quite a while. When they left, we smiled and pronamed to each other. It was then that I noticed the cabochon was gone from my ring.
I spent the next two days digging up my garden and foraging through moving boxes in search of that stone. My husband helped me look for it, my real estate agent helped me look for it, but the cabochon was no where to be found. For the next few days, I mourned its loss; I even wore the ring without the stone in an attempt to assuage my sadness. “It was time to let it go,” said a still, small voice inside my head. I did my best to say goodbye.

The next morning I visited a local jeweler to see if he could replace the stone in the handful of days left before I moved North. It would be difficult, he said, and time-consuming to find a stone as lovely as the one I had. As I thought about it, it seemed fitting, given this new juncture in my life, to choose a different stone, but I had no idea what that might be. Something would call my name, I knew. Something would call my name. So I waited and I listened and I missed my ring -- my oldest friend -- terribly. We moved North and I went about the business of making a new house a home.

One day last December, I asked a new neighbor if she knew of a jeweler I might talk with about my ring. She had a good man, she said, someone who could certainly do the job if he had the right stone. It just so happened she had plans to see him the next day and offered to show him my ring. She asked me what I wanted to replace the coral with and I heard myself say, “a cameo.” As I said the words, I remembered how attracted I’d been to cameos as a child, how I’d often thought a cameo would be a grand thing to wear when I was a lady. That said, I gave her the ring. The following afternoon, she knocked on my door with a handful of stones I did not care for, and one cameo, the lovely profiled face of a handsome, dignified woman I adored.

The next two weeks I waited for the ring to be repaired. I sometimes wondered whether a man who did not know me could make something as dear to me as my coral ring had been. To my great joy, my “new” ring was beautiful, deeply so. I slipped it on my finger and felt its power. I felt whole again, buoyed and steadied. This ring and I would travel the rest of my life together. Because it had been so elegantly restored I, too, could pass it on to my daughters as my mother and grandmother had done before me.

This story has a moral, as all my stories do: that the loss of things that are dear to us, that are taken in one way or another, need not leave us in permanent disarray. A Baby’s Breath Coral is not a loved one or a home or a job or a nest egg. This I know. In this time of economic challenge, when accumulated years dim our strength and our faculties, when war and natural disasters and accidents and illness excise the physical presence of others from our lives and from our planet, we need not spend our days mourning what used to be. We can be comforted. If we are open and receptive, if our hearts are not made hard by loss or grow withered by the fear of continued loss, if our minds choose to see what is taken from us as an opportunity for something new to occur, something can make its way to us that is beautiful in a whole different way. If we let go, if we trust and manage our not-knowing, if we wait and if we listen, something will call our name.

As always, I welcome your support, suggestions, and prayers. Do pass on this newsletter and a copy of IN SWEET COMPANY to anyone you think would be interested. Know, too, that I am so very grateful for your sweet company.

Big Love,

Margaret
www.InSweetCompany.com