“God breaks the heart again and again and again until it stays open…” — Hazrat Inayat Khan.

As a child, I used to talk to many different things – fish, dogs, birds, trees, the wind, the stars. And they talked back. After school, I’d sit and hide and read in a big old beautiful tomb and speak to the ghosts of my dead companions.

I loved the magic; it was my world and promise.

As I got older, I stopped speaking to things; people laughed at me. My parents wondered what was wrong with me, never what was right.

I moved deeper into life and started questioning the magic as a way to challenge the things that I feared were false, or maybe, too real.

I understood the social price I would pay if I didn’t abandon my mystical friends, if I kept on talking those things, or sat and read alongside a crypt. Our world has chased away much of the magic along with the circuses and elephants and carriage horses and pony rides.

The children talk to screens, perhaps there is some magic there. I suffered when I gave up talking to things; my soul began to drain away, my heart got smaller, my ego veered off onto the wrong path.

The elephants have to go, but Facebook and Instagram must stay.

Now, as I enter into my seventh decade on the earth, I am humbled to recover the magic and mystery, I learn that the wisest people believe in the magic that takes them right into the center of things.

I think God does break the heart again and again and again until it finally opens.

For many Native people, and many spiritual people, the idea that a dead person would communicate with me by shutting down my blog would not be strange, but a commonplace occurrence after death. I remember Chief Avrol Looking Horse sitting in Central Park in New York City,  and telling me the carriage horses were speaking to me. He said it happens all the time in his culture.

Spirits from the other side speak all the time in other cultures, and nobody makes fun of the people who believe it.

I think things were talking to me last night when my blog crashed.

I think it was Susan, or perhaps the energy and spirit unleashed by her death.

A woman in Southern California wrote to me that when my blog crashed, she looked up at the sky and saw a star race across the horizon. She doesn’t know Susan or me, yet her first thought was that the star was Susan leaving the confines of our planet and her life.

I’m not the only one who thought it or sensed something different was happening. I’m not running from the magic anymore. The mystery is a way into the vitality and energy and hope that waits for us in everything.

Like a lot of other people, I’ve been thinking a lot today about the moment when Susan died, and my blog crashed at the same time. People from all over the country – a very surprising number of people – saw the blog vanish and thought the same thing:  Susan must have died.

Why would that thought come to mind?

I thought it too, and so did Maria. “Susan was saying goodbye,” she said. “Just accept it,” said my friend Sue Silverstein, “you don’t need to understand it.” So many pings wrote Elizabeth Heyanga,” and you can feel the expansion and  radiance of  Susan in it.”

Why did so many of us from so many far and different places have the same thought and at the same time?

Did something spiritual or surreal happen?  Was Susan sending me a message? Was she saying goodbye? Was the message for me, or maybe for all of us? It scares me sometimes to realize how many people out there read this blog and notice when there is something unusual.

It’s not a frivolous question, really, this conversion of events. It goes to the heart of spirituality and belief.

Can I bring myself to accept this?

Sherlock Holmes always said when you eliminate the impossible, what is left is what is probable.

There is no way I can reconcile those two events occurring at the same time without turning to Susan’s death as the key. The mystics say every death releases a burst of energy into the world. They say the power of the dead finds the spirits of the living. I don’t know, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Standing in the hospital room minutes before Susan died, I took a deep breath; I wanted to know what I was feeling, to be awake and conscious of it.

Looking at Susan’s face, already detaching from life, I realized that Susan had broken my heart, not because of anything she did to me, but because the hope and promise of life had somehow slipped away and could no longer be recovered.

She was always trying to catch up with life; she never really could.

There was no hope now, only relief and release. What a battering she must have taken to give up on life so long ago and with such determination.

She called it stubbornness.

I accept that Susan’s death was a message for me, from her or the energy of the spirits. She was saying goodbye, and she was also, I think, saying thank you.

She couldn’t say it to me while she was conscious; it would be too final  and laden for her. Too sappy.  Too close.

She could only say it in this indirect and spiritual way after she was gone.

There were people closer to Susan than I was, yet she had put her life into my hands in some ways these past few weeks, an act of trust and faith that was profound.  When you are responsible for another person’s life, you are joined with them at the hip, and forever.

For all of her troubles, she trusted me to carry out her wishes, even in the face of anger and resentment.

And I did.

That sort of thing makes a person like me rise to the moment, not fall. I was not about to let her down.

One of the basic notions of Taoism is that the world in all of its mystery and difficulty cannot be improved upon, only experienced and accepted. We are asked to believe that life in all its complexity and joy is complete as is – ever-changing and dynamic, but never perfect or perfectible.

There is a difference between despair and faith, between the shrinking into fear and doubt and a big view large enough to sustain hope and possibility. I always keep my eye on the horizon, not because it is beautiful but because it forces me to see the larger picture that is life.

That always gives me hope and perspective.

Somewhere along the line of her difficult life, Susan began to despair and lost sight of her horizon. There is a point at which some people survive but no longer live.

She told me as much one morning in the hospital. ” I just quit somewhere along the way,” she said.

Last night, I felt she had found a way to say goodbye to me since Maria and I were the spark that lit the flame that brought her up her to hope for a new life.

The Taoists are right, life is ever-changing and vital, but it is never perfect or perfectible. Cancer reinforces that ancient wisdom.

I felt Susan last night much more than I heard her.

Last night, as I sat staring at my fallen blog on my computer screen and getting all of those alarming messages from people sending a change in the firmament, I thought I did hear Susan whispering something to me in the darkness of my study. I’m sorry.

Picasso once said that artists are those of us who still see with the eyes of children.

I am talking to things again. And they are talking to me.