Search Results for: I Saw An Angel Last Night

I have often written  how unfortunate it is that death is often seen only as sad, and it is certainly that. But it also brings extraordinarily beautiful and profound moments,. It can be a mystical and spiritual experience.

It can be a time of joy and celebration. it can open our hearts as few things can.

I experienced several of those moments today, sitting with Ed for several hours while Carol went out to go to the bank and do some grocery shopping. It seems I have drifted into old and familiar ground, that of the hospice volunteer who offers respite to the caregivers and listens to the dying.

Only Ed and I are very close friends, and that makes it quite different.

Mostly, Ed slept while I sat quietly and read a novel.  At moments, he knows I am there, mostly not.

In the late afternoon, is quiet and peaceful at the Gulley’s, Ed sleeps most of the day now, and once in a while talks a little. The farmers and cousins and friends don’t come much in the afternoon, it is quiet.

Sometimes, Ed will open his eyes and smile at me or  mutter some words and then fall back asleep.  I believe he is descending into a coma-like sleep now, and if so, that would be the best outcome for him. Everyone who dies does so in their own individual way.

With brain cancer, the doctors say the deep sleep drifting into coma is the best way.

In hospice, they call the face of the dying the “death mask” at the end, the patient’s face is drawn and distorted, like a death mask would be. There was no death mask on Ed’s face today, he looked younger, stronger, he looked to be at peace.

I don’t take photos of the death mask.

I believe the angels – or spirits, as some prefer – have entered his consciousness and are doing their work with him. He has begun to dance with them now.

The trajectory of the illness is shifting to this deep sleep and unreachable sleep.

At one point, the light came in through the window and touched Ed’s forehead, and I had no doubt that there were spirits in the room come to visit him and prepare him for the next chapter. I said Ed is larger than life, and he is.

I closed my eyes, and was mesmerized by the silence.

It was impossible not to feel the presence of something from another place when I saw the way in which the light touched him and the farm went totally quiet – no barking dogs, complaining cats, no Cockatiel shouting, no clucking hens, mooing cows, grumbling refrigerator, laundry spinning, taunting crows, no tractors in the field, no clothes washer spinning, nothing on the radio, no grandchildren talking or playing, no cars and trucks rumbling by the house,  no neighbors visiting.

It took my breath away.

For a few minutes, absolute silence, and then the world came awake again, and the farmhouse and barns were filled with sounds. Perhaps his own spirit was coming and going, or preparing to leave. I don’t know what was happening, only that something was.

Ed looked completely at peace today, almost like a statue or sculpture. I don’t recall seeing this look before.

Something was occurring in that room, I could feel it all over my body.

And then Ed’s son Jeremy came in to check on his father.

When Jeremy was a teenager, he was nearly killed in an awful tractor accident that left him in a coma for 40 days, Jeremy is perhaps the closest to Ed in understanding what he is feeling and needing now, and what he can’t bear to feel or need. Ed says he believe one reason Jeremy’s accident occurred was to prepare him for now.

Jeremy and I had never really been alone before, although I had heard about his awful accident and  his grueling recovery.

I asked Jeremy how he is doing, and we had a good talk, our longest, Jeremy, the youngest,  is deep and thoughtful and angry – about what happened to him, about losing his father. All he wanted to be when he was younger, he said was Ed. How awful for him to relieve a personal tragedy.

I told him he might need to speak to someone about this, he was a victim also, and I gave  him my numbers. The farm people are doers, not talkers.

I’d like to talk more with him. He has been to a place few of us get to go, and where his father is now. That is a connection, for sure, one that almost no one can really share. And he is hurting as much as anyone.

Jeremy always wanted to be just like his father, he says, and now he tends to Ed in the most personal of ways.  The two have been drawn together in the most powerful of ways by Jeremy’s accident and Ed’s cancer.

Jeremy learned over Ed and took his hand and Ed started crying, and I left the room so they could be together and talk privately. They talked to one another intensely.

Jeremy left after five or ten minutes to hay the fields. I felt close to him. He thanked me for being Ed’s friend. Jeremy is his own story of courage and rebirth. Jeremy understands acceptance, he understands what is happening and where it is going.

It was a very beautiful thing to see the connection between father and son, the love and the trust passing between them, so strong and thick you could touch it.

Jeremy said he and Ed fought all the time, they were both bull-headed and resentful of authority. But now…it was different.

Death can be like that, profound and meaningful.

The scene was sad, but also beautiful, a  testimony to what is so unique about the human spirit. No other creature on the earth feels the things that we do.

I’m going back tomorrow afternoon, as I usually do.  I’ll bring corn and blueberries or peaches, as I usually do. Carol and I will sit for awhile and talk. She is slowly accepting what is happening. I just listen to her, she doesn’t need any advice.

I receive a lot of messages urging me to tell Carol or Ed about this cure or that, or this treatment or that, but I refuse to do that. Ed’s medical treatment is not my business, and I don’t interfere with it. Carol and Ed have a doctor they love and listen to, and it is not for me to give them medical advice, especially from strangers on the Internet.

That is not why I am there.

In many ways, as I wrote yesterday, Ed is already gone. He is up at night, struggling to rest, but alway asleep now when I come. We talked briefly and he said he was ready to go, he didn’t wish to live like this any longer.

He also said he had to go out and tend to a sick cow. Carol said he said the same thing to her last night, she told him that he already had taken care of the sick cow.

There was no talk today of walking or visiting the cows. Perhaps that will come another day.

Carol is struggling to know what to wish for.

She doesn’t want to let him go, she doesn’t want him to suffer.

There is no easy place to be for her right now, but she is strong and thoughtful, and loves Ed very much, and she will do what she needs to do and decide what she needs to decide.

Should he be encouraged to eat? Walk? Take more medicine?

Or given permission to let go, as he says every day he wishes to do? There are all kinds of questions, there are no easy answers.

I remembered a scene from Jenny Downham’s book Before I Die:

“It’s all right, Tessa, you can go. We love you. You can go now.’

‘Why are you saying that?’

‘She might need permission to die…’

‘I don’t want her to. She doesn’t have my permission.”

I found my visit today uplifting, I left feeling strong and grateful for my life.

I read half of a novel sitting there, held Ed’s hand for a few minutes, gave him some water, and I remembered yesterday, when he asked me what he had done to deserve to be stricken in this way.

I brought a poem that a long-time blog reader and cancer survivor named Lorlee e-mailed to me. She went to a cancer writing workshop and the exercise was to write to cancer, and have cancer write back.

This, she said, sharing the poem,  is what  cancer wrote back toher. She thought it might help Ed to not blame himself for something that is not his fault:

The poem is called “It Is Not Your Fault.” I read this to him this afternoon.

“I am random

I am not  selective of my victims

Don’t take it personal.

I am simply a force in nature,

scattershooting.

I am not malevolent.

Just haphazard.”

I told Carol I would be happy to go sit with Ed Thursday afternoon. Tomorrow. It is the right place for me to be. Maria wants to come, it’s on the way to belly dancing class. All around us, life is everywhere.

“Creativity is a little like opening the gate at the top of a field irrigation system. Once we remove the blocks, the flow moves in.” – Julia Cameron.

Once Ed Gulley, a hard-working dairy farmer,  incorporated the creative spark into his life, he and his life  were never the same.

This week, sitting with Ed in the late afternoon in his suddenly quiet room I understood why so many spiritual people are creative, the great artists of old times all believed the creative spark came into being when God created the earth, at the time considered the greatest creative work ever.

I asked Ed if he wanted me to read some spiritual texts to him, he  said he did.

The Kabbalah, the texts of the Hebrew mystics, also often speaks of  the creative spark, the unique gift God gave only to human beings, of all the creatures of the earth.

No other species has felt the call to write poets and books or compose great works of music. In the Kabbalah, a gentle God warns that it is unacceptable to fail to unleash the creative spark inside of each of us.

—

I went to see Ed around 3:30 this afternoon, Carol wanted to go shopping and Maria went with her to keep her company. It was very quiet in the house, a friend and blog reader came by with spice cake and strawberries, which Ed devoured and loved

But for most of the afternoon, I just sat quietly next to Ed with a book while he sketched. Almost every colored pencil he used fell to the floor at one point or another, and I kept picking them up and putting them back in the box.

It was mostly silent time, when I wasn’t helping him to eat the strawberries and cake and taking away the plates. Silent time is a new thing for me and Ed, we are both talkers and story-tellers and this silence is new for both of us, and deeply spiritual for me.

But now, it feels natural and rewarding.

I told Ed that when he was deep in mystical rapture, St. Francis would often hear the sounds of music.

The Little Flowers of St. Francis tells us that one he was deep in meditation, “all of a sudden an angel appeared to him in a very bright light, holding a viol in his left hand and a bow in his right hand.”

As St. Francis gazed in amazement at the angel, the latter drew the bow once upward across the viol. In an instant a beautiful melody entered his consciousness and his soul “and suspended all of his bodily senses.”

Ed nodded and smiles, he seem to get the story.

I think any writer or artist or musician or sculptor will recognize this implosion of feeling and impulse. It is the embodiment of the creative spark, it is the great joy of creation.

I thought I saw and felt this watching Ed  focus so intensely on his sketches today,  perhaps his last remaining path to dignity and meaning, the one contribution he can make, the last productive thing he can still do.

I am not sure about God, but if he is real, he was in that room, shining a light on Ed, who seemed to gain strength and power as he drew. There almost seemed to be a light on him.

Suddenly, just close to 6 p.m., he turned to me and said he thought he needed to sleep, and  we lowered the bed and his eyes closed, and I said goodbye and held his hand. He was already deep in sleep, it just took seconds.  The sketches exhausted and depleted him.

I took the pencils and the sketches and put them on the table next to his bed.

He would not awaken until much later in the night, and I would be gone.

My new afternoon activity with Ed is to just sit  with him, I think we are past talking much or telling stories or taking videos. Silence can be a gift at the right time and place. My hospice work taught me about Active Listening, and people at the edge of life need it and value it.

I don’t try to cheer Ed up or tell him things will be fine, I am not there to do that, and he would spot it as a lie right away. People at the edge of life hate it when people try to cheer them up or tell them everything will be okay.

Ed can no longer sit up or stand up, he is confined to bed, and subject to all of the indignities that come with that.

At night, I am told, he is sometimes fearful and emotional. I rarely see that in my visits.

When I see him, he is very quiet and focused completely on his sketches, they were good and colorful today. It was warm, and he chose to be shirtless. He had no lectures to give me, or stories to tell me.

There was something very powerful and very spiritual about this image above. I asked him if it was okay to take a photo, and he said, as he always does, “sure.”

When he sketches, Ed seems to go deeply inside of himself. He is transformed, he appears strong and healthy, even though his cancer is making its way through his body and changing him in real and visible ways.

When people are terminally ill, there is an initial rush of visitors, then it quiets, and most people don’t return.

It is hard for many, and they don’t know what to say. A neighbor came to the farmhouse today and told Carol she was thinking of them, but she couldn’t bear to go and see Ed. She wanted to remember as the big and powerful man that he was. Carol said she  understood.

My photography has once again become the best vehicle to tell Ed’s story, as he gathers himself to die. I thought I would have to stop taking photos, but not yet.

The farmhouse seems more peaceful to me than before, I think there is more acceptance there, almost every becomes somewhat normal if it goes on long enough.

The presence of hospice has taken a great deal of pressure off of Carol and the family to make all the decisions about his health care and well-being and comfort. Whatever happens, they are ready.

I feel some peace in Ed now, and in the farmhouse around him. And great peace in his room.

It is unfortunate that most people don’t think of themselves as creative beings, even though all of us are. Religion and politics teach people to follow strict rules of thought and behavior. There is nothing in public life less creative or thoughtful than the left or the right, both symbolize the death of thought  and creativity in public life.

Parents consciously snuff out their children’s creative urges by telling them to grow up, choose careers, find day jobs, get real, move to big cities where there is work, go to expensive colleges. At every step of their lives, children are warned to be practical, avoid daydreaming or fantasizing. So many are ridiculed for being different or thinking differently, the birth of creativity.

Almost everyone I meet tells me they are not creative, our culture has done a good job of leeching creativity out of them an robbing them of creative courage or faith. Creatives are the others, people who get paid poorly to make art and music and literature, people to not be taken  seriously in the land of money.

The author Julia Cameron teaches seminars in unleashing creativity. She  refers to God as the “Great Creator,” and says the secret of unleashing the creative spark lies in an “experience of the mystical union” with our own personal divine. Creativity, she says, is “God’s gift to us. Using our creativity is  our gift back to God.”

I know what the means, even if I have my own ideas of God.

Ed reminds us that the creative spark is in all of us. Perhaps it always needs the nourishment of creativity to rise and grow. Perhaps that’s all it needs.

For ten years, I’ve snarled and grumped about Maria’s Yaris.

I called it a “toilet bowl,” or a “lawn mower with tires.” Many people laughed at this joke, and I didn’t think much about it until Maria got ticked off earlier this week and told me I had overdone it, and she didn’t want to hear about the Yaris any longer.

And that was before Charlie called us from the garage to pronounce the little blue car dead.

This startled me into thinking just what it was about this car that bugged me, and I realized that cars, like dogs, often mark the passages of our lives. There are Toyota Yaris and Honda Fit people, and there are people like me for whom cars are more than just a way to get from one place to another, but a statement about who we are. (Of course, I realize now that Yaris’s and Fit’s are also statements about who people are, I just didn’t get what the statement was.)

The Yaris died last Friday and Maria bought another small car, a Hyundai Accent which is quite similar to the Yaris in many ways. But I like it, I thought it was perfect for her the first time I saw it, and I recommended she go and look at it. We are off to a good start,  we are fortunate to have had enough money in the bank to buy it outright, and won’t have to make any monthly payments.

Tomorrow, the Yaris heads off to the dump. A part of me wants to say good riddance, my better angels stop me, and whisper “don’t be so small.”

As cars go, it is inexpensive, well maintained and just right for the driver.

Maria and I have an understanding, when either one of us is upset about anything, we sit down and try to figure out why.  And I could see she was upset about my ragging on the Yaris. Perfect marriages are not marriages without arguments, in my mind,  but marriages with problems and arguments that are addressed and sorted out in an open and respectful way.

The Yaris meant a lot to Maria, it symbolized her emancipation as a woman and a spouse and a human being.

For the first time in her life, she had her own car, and it took her where she wanted to go for ten busy years. I am sorry to have dumped on it for all of that time, but as often happens after arguments, I am just figuring out why it bothered me so much, and I hid behind humor to deal to screen manger and fear.

Maria and I met one another in the Fall of 2008, as it turned out the darkest year of my life.

The year of the Great Recession, the collapse of book publishing as I knew it, the very loveless year of getting divorced, breaking down, living in panic and depression and dread,  alone on a 90 acre farm on a hilltop in a town nobody heard of ever had reason to go to. The year I either faced up to things or would almost certainly perish. A year of awful loneliness and fear.

Maria came into my life along with the Yaris, the kind of car I would never buy, and Frieda, a dog who, like her mistress, disliked men and wanted to eat as many of them as was possible. The Yaris would soon find a home in my driveway, and that was good news, it meant Maria was in my house. Maria and Frieda both hated men, but the Yaris seemed to take no notice of me, at least at first.

That winter, Maria took a job in remote Argyle, N.Y. tending to people in a home for the emotionally disabled. It was a rough job, she had to get up at 5 a.m. to get there. We both were separated and in the midst of divorce proceedings, I was desperately seeking the help of therapists and Maria was eager to show and know that she could take care of herself.

We became lovers that awful winter, and my life was transformed over the next months and year.  I loved Maria more than I had ever loved anything in my life. So my life was different, I began to heal, and quickly, before she decided to leave.

Every Sunday she went to work, and every Sunday during that winter, we had a blizzard, every single Sunday for more than two months. These brought high winds, ice, and heavy, driving snow. I knew Maria would manage to get to work, she is like that, but I begged her to take my SUV, which had four-wheel drive.

She refused, she said she had to know she could take care of herself.

I can only be honest, I was not in good shape at that time, I obsessed on her driving that tiny car, it tapped into my fear – it didn’t even  have snow tires – out into this icy and usually unplowed roads and hills in darkness and sometimes, whiteouts. The roads were slippery, and all day ling, I saw cars slipping and sliding, often off the road.

I am my mother’s child, as we all are, and she was always terrified that one or the other of us would be killed in a crash on the way to her house, she had memorized every State Police barracks on the way so she could call them when we failed to show up.

The route to work was not easy on sunny and dry days, in these snow and ice storms it was especially treacherous, we heard of cars flipping over, sliding into trees and ending up upside down in ditches, especially those cars with no four-wheel drive or snow tires.

Sometimes those accidents hurt people badly.

It just killed me to see  her drive off into those two-and-three day storms. For much of the day I would start out the window, studying the roads, and then later, watching to see if she could make it home. Cell phones didn’t work much in those hills, and she had no way either of getting help or calling me.

I can still remember those Sundays as if they were yesterday, my heart still races, I break into a sweat, and I feel the worst kind of stomach-churning panic. I am so glad Maria never listened to me and stayed home or switched cars, she knows now that loving me will never take away her independence and strength. She just wouldn’t let it happen, not then, not now.

Our snow plow man came by one day to tell me not to let her drive the Yaris in a storm. A neighbor whose father was a deputy sheriff called to tell me he saw Maria driving her Yaris down our steep and icy road as hail fell and he said: “are you out of your mind, letting her go out in a car like that on a night like this?”

The car was just too light for blizzards, his father said, it had no traction or weight to it. I told him the truth. Maria didn’t care what I thought about her car, and she didn’t care what his father thought about his car either. She was never going down that road again, I told him.

What road?, he asked me, puzzled.
You know, I said, the road where men tell her what to do or where to go. If  you want to talk to her, call her yourself.

He did not call me again. He never called her either.

I  understood even then that it the car was Maria’s business and she needed to know she could handle her car in a storm.  It was just that simple. I wouldn’t presume – or dare – to tell her not to drive her Yaris, not after I  saw what it meant to her.

I see now that these Sundays were traumatic for me, it wasn’t a joke, I was terrified that I would lose something I had just found and that was precious to me. I also knew that love was not about clinging to someone, it was about letting them be free to live their lives.

On Sundays, I nearly lost it,

I had finally found the love I had been seeking all of my life, and it was in danger from a little blue car in blizzard after blizzard. I couldn’t read or watch TV or listen to music or write. I just paced back and forth until she got home. I got dinner and a fire going.

I  still get the chills when I think of those Sundays, storms still trigger all kinds of symptoms if Maria drives out in them, and she did and still does, bless her, she agreed to at least get snow tires. But she never did agree to drive my car in a storm. I love her for that, but I hated the car for it.

Maria never quite understood my bitterness towards the helpless car, she couldn’t quite imagine what it was like for me, and didn’t really want to know at the time

How foolish to project these feelings onto a  helpless car. I went out and said goodbye to it tonight, and thanked it for driving Maria around safely for 10 years. It’s odd,  her new car is also small and light, but I have no ill will towards it, I think it’s just right.

What has changed?Not the car, but me.

I am stronger now, and I know Maria is quite strong and able to care for herself. To dump on the car was almost a way of telling her that she couldn’t take care of herself, that I knew better than she did what to drive. For me, ragging on the car was always an act of love, nothing less, nothing more.

So one passage ends and another begins.

We had fun getting this car and were happy to be able to pay for it. I want to start out on a new wheel with the Hyundai, Maria test drove it this morning and I sat in the back seat, which I had never done in the Yaris, not once in ten years.

It was fine, the ride was quiet and smooth, there was ample room for my feet and my head.  Maria is already fond of the car and its saucy deep red color. So goodbye, Yaris, I think you were a trauma trigger for me, a PTSD car, you caught me at a bad time. You got into my head.

The Hyundai and I will get along, and if I have any jokes to make about it, I can shut up and keep them to myself.

Americans believed Thomas Paine when he declared that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Franklin Roosevelt’s beloved teacher, a man named Endicott Peabody, told him: “Things in life will not always run smoothly.

“Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights,” he wrote, ” then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward, that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend.”

When I was a child, I could not have imagined a movement for transgender people. I did not imagine that African-Americans would be legally awarded equal rights to whites, at least under the law.

I never saw a woman challenge the authority of a man, or speak out against the rampant violence towards and abuse of women. I never  saw a woman defy or challenge the power of a man and win.

I never thought I would live to see a me.too movement or a day when the U.S. Supreme Court would protect the marriage of gay people to one another, and legalize their bonds. I never once thought there would be a movement to support and protect the rights of transgender people, and that most Americans would support it.

Or that we would even think of granting legal status to any of the hundreds of thousands of children living in the United States illegally for some or all of their lives. I didn’t even know they were there, they lived only in the shadows.

These things were not even on the edge of our imaginations, they were almost literally unthinkable. Can anyone name any other country which made so much progress at expanding the rights of people, however imperfectly?

Watching the news, I sometimes despair for the souls of the American people. Reading my history, I reclaim my faith in them. We usually end up getting it right.

***

It is in response to such change, to such expansions of freedom, for such support of the “other”, that epic conflicts occur, and demagogues rise  up and masses of people feel threatened and undermined.

There is always an “other” for the demagogues and their followers to feel superior to,  to feed on. The “others” are woven into the American experience, drawn here like moths to a flame, persecuted and blamed and marginalized, so much a part of our country’s fabric.

They are always coming to us, finding a way to get in,  demanding freedom, needing help, scaring the wits out of small and frightened people. They are the river that never dries up.

If there weren’t a lot of expanding freedoms, there would be no need of a great struggle, nothing for a demagogue or his angry followers to feed on.

We live in a time of cultural and political and media hyperventilation, our noses are so stuck in the moment.

in the arguing, see-sawing, maw of ever-changing expectations, things happen so quickly, and are transmitted so instantly and incompletely, that they all blend into one another, a furious cacophony of tension, anger and frustration.

It doesn’t feel good, this tension, day after  day, and to many people it is now a  frightening time with no clear end in sight.

The beast we call the media will never tell you there is an end in sight, or even possible.

They make too much money scaring us and keeping us fearful enough to never pull ourselves away from our  screens. The corporate media and the politics  pretend to hate one another.

They don’t, neither could live without the other. We spent too much time watching them.

In the up-and-down ideology of media, where everything is covered like a sporting event at loud volume, where everything is an argument,  the hopes and fears of the opposing sides ride up and down a roller coster from from the Dark Side.

This morning, when I woke up, I was told the election was a disaster for Democrats, then a victory for them, then a night of mixed and uncertain results.Then a great Republican victory. Then they fought about it all day.  I am responsible for what I believe and put into my head.

It seems that no one bothers to wait to see what really happened, unthinking and unfounded speculation pelts us like hail in a storm. Every sentence begins with “I think…”, never with “here’s what really happened.”

I think it’s wise to keep history in mind. That works for me.

Something big is happening around us right now, and in many ways it is good, healthy and necessary. It is also inevitable. It is also not new. We have survived. We will survive. Politics, like fear, is a geography, a space to cross.

Democracy is an ugly thing ,a messy and chaotic thing,  not a perfect thing, just the best thing invented so far for ruling people and hurting as few as possible and trying out the very radical idea that people have rights. That does not seem to always  be the human default position if we look out at the world.

This is why the American experiment is so precious. We have rights. They have rights. The government’s job is to protect our rights. When they fail, everything is thrown off balance.

It might be orienting and grounding to grasp the past, it is for me.

I love history, it  has always comforted and grounded me. In his new book The Soul Of America: The Battle For Our Better Angels, Jon Meacham quotes from the great orator Daniel Webster and U.S. Senator:

“When the mariner has been tossed for many days in thick weather, and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm., the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course.”

in 1830  Webster added:  “Let us imitate this prudence, and before we float farther on the waves of this debate,  refer to the point from which we departed, that we may at least be able to conjecture where we are now.” Simple enough. What is happening now is a very American response to more freedom and change than anyone imagined or foresaw,  just a few years ago.

In the 1950’s during the great and frightening Red Scare, political writer Richard Rovere wrote of Senator Joe McCarthy: “I cannot easily conceive of circumstances in which McCarthy, either faulted as he was, or freed of his disabling weaknesses, could have become President of the United States or could have seized the reins of power on any terms.”

McCarthy was loud, vulgar and loose with the truth, and he had large masses of people supporting him for years.

Then they tired of him and abandoned him, and he died a lonely alcoholic wreck, another American ghost.

If you have worked in the media for any length of time, as I have, then you know what the media creates, the media devours. TV made Joe McCarthy, TV did him in. Media is carnivorous, it eats its young. And its old. Anyone who lives by feeding off the masses, dies by feeding off the masses. They are insatiable.

Read your history.

“To visualize him in the White House,” Rovere wrote of McCarthy,” one has, I think, to imagine a radical change in the national character and will and taste.” For sure.

Politics has always spawned cults, that is the very nature of democracy, one of its reliable side effects said H.L. Mencken. We always revere the masses, but we often don’t like what they do.

Demagogues appear when government lies to its people. Cults are the nourishment of the demagogue, like people with devoted dogs, they can only be nourished by unconditional and unquestioned and unrelenting love.

“Cults can hide in many places,” wrote Natacha Tormey in her book Cults – A Bloodstained History.”They are so adept at blending into society and making their true colors that often their victims do not realize that they were even in a  cult until they have escaped it. Nor do they fully comprehend the severity of the brainwashing that they were subjected to, until they are finally free of it.”

We are undergoing a radical change in our time, it seems, a change in the national character and will and taste. Americans have a short attention span, they easily tire and get bored or distracted.

But they are very much awake. And certain values re-appear.  I imagine some young charismatic with a new idea and an even better understanding of technology will appear soon and spark yet another  radical change in the national character.

I think it is the new normal. This is a new age. Ideas are memes, they travel and replicate on their own.

And this certainly won’t be over soon, or in a simple and clear-cut way.

The past, writes Meacham, an honest and respected historian, tells us that demagogues can only thrive when a substantial portion of the demos – the people – want them to.

In the American Commonwealth magazine, James Bryce warned of the dangers of a renegade president.

It wasn’t the individual himself that was so dangerous, cautioned Bryce, that from the White House he could overthrow the Constitution. The real danger would come, he warned, at the hands of a demagogic president with an enthusiastic public base.

That is  scary, but not apocalyptic.

A bold President who knew himself to be supported by a majority in the country, might be tempted to override the law, and deprive the minority of the protection which the law affords it. Wrote Bryce, “He might be a tyrant, not against the masses, but with the masses.

He would have to be popular with almost everyone to pull it off, says Meacham.

Throughout our history, the masses have fed off of the masses hatred of the elites, and the demagogues feed off of the masses.

Meacham says there is cheering news and room for much hope.

The pain angry reaction is a reflection of deep and once unimaginable changes in the American idea of freedom. We sometimes forget that America was the first country in the history of the world to pledge freedom to all of its people. From the beginning, the America idea has been to steadily expand and protect the freedom of its citizens, even as it denied  freedom to so many of its citizens.

**

Take heart, say the historians. The more freedom, the more turmoil. Expansion of freedoms are the terrain of the demagogue. “”The people  often make mistakes,”  said Harry Truman, “but given time and the facts, they will make the corrections.”

We cannot argue and taunt the people who see things differently than us into seeing a different way.

They must see it for themselves, and come to it in their own time.

It took a century for many African-Americans to even be legally entitled to vote, it took decades for gays to legally marry, the transgender fight is just getting underway. It will take awhile, but Lincoln wrote that such change is always glacial, people’s hearts soften slowly and over time. America is all about the Open Field.

I think Lincoln should have the last word in this essay.

Truman said of him “he had a good head and a great brain and a kind heart.” We can’t say that of too many of our leaders today. Perhaps one will rise up and show us the way. I think so.

Addressing Union troops returning to Ohio after a fierce battle, Lincoln stopped to speak to them as they left Washington. The tall, tired, President was exhausted.

“It is,” he said, “in order that each one of you may have, though this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field, and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise, and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life with all its desirable human aspirations – it is for this that the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthrights – not only for one, but for two or three years if necessary, to secure such an inestimable jewel.”

To me, we are in yet another epic struggle, perhaps two or three years of struggle is not too long a time for us to keep our birthrights, for me, for others, for the refugees and immigrants in need of our help. I am a patriot, I love what America stands for. I believe our values will prevail, and are more powerful than any demagogue.

For all of our darker impulses, writes Meacham, for all of our shortcomings, and for all of the dreams denied and  deferred, the experiment begun so long ago, and carried it out so imperfectly, is worth the fight. There is, in fact, no struggle more important, and none nobler, “than the one we wage in the service of those better angels who, however besieged, are always ready for battle.”

I have found my better angels, or at least some better angels. We have joined the battle.

Keep some history in mind.

I rarely remember my dreams, or understand what they are about.

Maria can recall her dreams in great detail  hours after she  wakes up, but I rarely can recall much about mine. Over the last two nights I’ve had distinct and vivid dreams.

They are representations of my other life and  I do remember them in great detail, perhaps because they came from real life.

I dreamt about my other life both nights. I don’t know why.

I sometimes think the world is divided into two types of  people, those who had other lives and those who have One Life. The One Life people are the stables ones, they choose a career and stay in it, they make friends in high school and still have them decades later, they marry their high school sweetheart.

They live a few doors down from their parents, have dinner with them every Sunday, and are close to their families for their entire lives.

No life is perfect, I think, but some lives do move in a straight line, some zig and zag and twist and turn. I used to resent One Life people, but then I got over it. They had their own problems, you can’t judge a life from the outside.

But still, they were fantasy figures to me, it’s almost as if their lives were a script, written out by protecting angels from cradle to grave. I have had several lives.

The longest so far (although this life is getting close) was the life I lived after my daughter Emma was born.

She and I and her mother lived in the same house on the same suburban street for 25 years. Mostly, we saw our neighbors pulling in and out of driveways in their cars. We had little to do with any of them.

Maria and I both had the experience of having other lives, from time to time we have to pinch ourselves to remember who we really are and where we really are.

I  became a writer in that house of my dreams,  that 20’s house, frayed but sturdy. I began to really love and appreciate dogs in that house and write a lot of books and magazine articles there. I became a father in that house, perhaps the most complex and confusing and important experience of that other life.

Like many women and few men at that time, I was deeply absorbed in Emma’s life. It was probably too much. She was not given the chance to solve too many problems on her own.

For the first few years, I went off to big jobs in the big city, then I saw that I could not work for other people or be in the corporate world and remain sane. And I wanted to help raise my child, not hear about it at night.

Ever since then, sane or insane, I have worked for myself. That was a lifesaver. I wrote novels, non-fiction books, mysteries and sex advice columns for women’s magazines (yes, they paid $5000  for 2,500 words). Every day that I have written, I have had something to love.

The house was in a suburb of New Jersey, my wife thought it would be the best place to raise my daughter Emma, and back then, fathers like me – I was too busy –  didn’t really get too involved in those decisions. I wish I had fought harder to live in Brooklyn then. Our town in New Jersey  was a hip, child-centered and beautiful and affluent suburb, full of reporters, writers, editors and actors who worked in New York City. Everyone’s kid was headed for the Ivy Leagues, almost all life centered around the children.

Safe streets, find schools.

It was what we now call a “progressive” town, crammed with intolerant people on the left, I’m not sure we even met a Republican while we lived there.  It was diverse racially, but not economically. Few poor people could afford to live there.

There I learned that people on the left and people on the right share a kind of social bigotry, a smug hatred of the other, a sense of grievance, and a civic selfishness and myopia. Dissent is just not tolerated.

I disliked living there, from the first day to the last. I was lonely, unfulfilled and sick of heart. I am sorry for the pain I caused other people. I thought it was an intolerant place, filled with driving, child-obsessed yuppies. Soccer was the common faith.  I made a good living there, there was plenty of work for an energetic writer living near New York City. I just didn’t belong there.

I see that way  back the love had begun to seep out of my marriage, we both cared for one another and still do, we just  fell out of love and began to drift apart rather unconsciously and with little self-awareness. We lived different lives even back then. I wanted to fix up the house, she didn’t, and over the years we lived there.

I don’t think we ever invited a single friend to come over and have dinner or just visit. We had very few friends, or at least I had very few friends.

We were so isolated I couldn’t quite fathom why we were there at all, but of course it was for Emma. The schools were said to be the best around. And it turned out to be a good bet on that score, Emma got into Yale early, the grand slam of Boomer parents. At the time, that meant a great deal to us. I don’t think it would now, at least for me.

Every morning, my wife got up to go to exercise class, and I went out to walk the dogs. We then went our separate ways to our separate offices to do our separate work. We lived on parallel tracks, but not really together.

I worked in the basement and wrote much of the time, she worked in an office upstairs, she was a reporter, and worked much of the time and was often away. I supported her work in every way I could, and she supported mine.

I did the shopping and much of the cooking, and  drove Emma back and forth to school, to her lessons, to visits with friends. I was in the carpool, that most suburban of things. I loved taking care of Emma. Her schedule was in my head.

Her mother was a modern woman, rushing off to the city to do important things. I was the author, holed up in the basement for  hours in my Dickens gloves,  freezing for literature, slaving over words.

I suspect we were both lonely.

I worked hard on my books, printing out reams of paper, editing them, sending them off to New York City.

I often  took the bus into the city  to meet with my editors, they liked to meet the writers then, and talk to them face-to-face in long boozy lunches,  it was quite a different world, I wrote and wrote and wrote and have never stopped writing. My editors and I never talked about sales, it was considered inappropriate. Now, we talk about little else.

I went on long book tours and spoke to large crowds and gave long and intense interviews.

Writing has saved my life, it was a ship that survived all kinds of storms and gales and battles, scarred and creaky,  but is still somehow sailing proudly.

I remember that my world centered much around Emma, and her schedule and well-being. Still, I began to drift, hanging out on farms in Pennsylvania where dogs herded sheep, and mists covered the hay fields in the morning. It got into my blood somehow, it seemed that this was where i truly belonged. It was mystifying.

My wife and I were beginning to lead increasingly separate lives, although neither of us saw it or wanted to deal with it.

We got up at different times, went to sleep at different times. On Fridays, we all went to the movies together, then out for pizza. It was one of the only things we all did together. The other was going to very hip Wellfleet on Cape Cod, where everyone on the beach wore clogs, had cotton beach umbrellas, and read the New York Times or New Yorker Magazine.

On weekends back home, we had separate interests, separate chores to do, usually in different places.

Life took on a ritual quality. We thought we were quite modern, giving each other the independence we both wanted. We thought that was love. We gave up on sex.

Otherwise, we were mostly on our own. I didn’t realize this was a problem, neither did she.  People can really get used to anything if they are frightened enough. Bit by bit, I gave up on life and love, I thought it was too late for those things in my life.

My involvement with dogs deepened in that other life.  I started writing books about them, and they led me to the country and the natural world and the world of animals. The natural world touched something deeply inside of me. There, I began to reawaken and slowly crawl out of my deep sleep.

I started going upstate to visit a good friend, a writer who later moved away and no longer speaks to me. He opened me up to the beauty and appeal of the country, of life in a beautiful place with streams and woods and nature all around.  He changed my life. The  rest is well- known, I think, i don’t need to revisit it, I’m tired of telling it.

I ran to the mountain, moved to a cottage on a hill, then bought the first Bedlam Farm, and TV crews were driving up to see me regularly. One even wrote that I was the next Thoreau. He was the only one.

They even made a movie about me. I began to explore the spiritual life. I began to see that I was living in fear.

I was drawn to the country, my wife loved the city. I loved living on a farm, living with animals, re-connecting with the natural world. Turns out, I am lost without it, I just didn’t know it.Be

After awhile, my wife and I both realized we had essentially been living apart.  My daughter and almost everyone who read my books saw it. I did not see it. She took care of the bills, I ran around like a drunken adolescent, free at last.

Fear, I came to understand, was fragmenting my life. So many things to do, to think about, to plan for,  fear fills our loves with torment. I spent a lot of time  attacking others and defending myself, fear pulled me apart and made me lose my center. A friend, a priest, said I had an address but could not be found there.

I decided to give up living a life in fear, it took me many years to push it out of my life. I  decided to take responsibility for my life, that took even longer. Then, a few years later, I began to live another life, a  second life, a completely different one. One with Maria, with animals, more deeply in nature. My shrink said I had come to the North Country looking for love. I guess she was right.

I rarely think about my other life now, it is disorienting and confusing to me. The dreams haunted me all day.

I was married the first time for 35 years, and the last six of them were spent apart, me on my farm, she working in New York City, which she loved. We sold the musty old hose, she lived there in a small apartment in the same town where  we had lived  for so long. I had my farm and I did notice there was not much space for me in the apartment. But then, I wasn’t there for very long.

The divorce was hard on my daughter, and we were hard on one another. We are past that now, time does heal wounds. We lost something we have never fully recovered, but we are coming together all the time.

I think we did a good job with Emma, we had our bumps but she is living the way we hoped she would – she takes good care of herself, has a husband she loves and a daughter she adores and work she also loves and where she is appreciated. She is happy and independent and self-sufficient.

She leads her own full and productive life.

Isn’t that what it’s really about?

My life here is rich, full of love and connection, it always feels like home to me, my other life seems like that of a stranger, someone other than me. I have few friends left from that period, when I do see one they tell me I am unrecognizable from the person they knew in that other life. I am different, they say, in almost every way. I guess I wouldn’t know. I didn’t know me then.

And does it matter any more?

My life, and perhaps me, have changed so much I really can’t recall that other life, it seems ghostly and remote to me like a talkie-movie, no sound. i drifted a way from the few friends I had, and they from me. I lived mostly for Emma, she is my connection to that past, and in many ways, is much more a part of it than I am now. When she left us for college, I left us for the mountains.

I’ve learned a lot of things. Community is important. So is making love, it is at the core of the soul connection. I’ve shed my secrets and most of my anger. I like me now much better. Maria is responsible for much of that, but not all. It’s what I wanted and worked for.

And up here, i also had a reckoning. I came apart and went mad.

Perhaps that happens when you transition from one life to another, a disturbance in the field. One Life people don’t do that.

It’s like one of those rocky space travels from one planet to another.  I left the familiar for the unknown, faced great perils, met magical helpers, some on two legs, most on four legs, and came out of the dark places alive and mostly unscathed. I learned to love a donkey.

I remember asking myself if my life was worth living, and I didn’t have an answer.

So I set out on my hero journey and sought fulfillment. I was angry in that other life, bored, resentful and depressed. All of these are symptoms of disconnectedness. When we are lonely we perceive ourselves as isolated individuals surrounded by people but not a part of any supportive or nurturing community.

There was, at first, nothing to hold me up or to stand on.

I am still lonely, I suppose, but life is very different. I am connected to my wife and partner and to my community and friends, they are all supportive and nurturing. We can take a lot of pain and suffering, but when I was cut off from the human family, I lost heart, and nearly my life.

I had the strange sensation of being filled but unfulfilled, busy but disconnected, rushing around but never home.

I wanted to come to the place where I belong, and I am now there. It isn’t a perfect life, but it is my life, the one I was destined to live, my real and true life.

I bow to my knees at least once every day and give thanks to whatever power brought me here. I was  living a false and somewhatempty life. Perhaps pain and sorrow are the greatest of healers, they force us to think about who we  really are.

My dreams of the other life have brought back this sense of isolation and disconnection. My other life is hazy. I felt like I was trapped under water, popping up to the surface from time to time to gasp for air. I remember that I was very busy, rushing from place to place, my life was full of drama, but nothing much else.

There was a message in my Other Life dreams, I’m not sure what it was.

As it turned out, I found the love I was seeking and thus began the journey back to life. It is still underway, this trip is thrilling, fulfilling, challenging. Tonight, I sat out on the chairs on the lawn with Maria and ate dinner together. We are anything but separate from one another, even though we also have our own lives.

I turned to her after dinner, a breeze was blowing across the pasture, the sheep and donkeys were out grazing in the meadow, the border collies sat still like  Sphinxes, watching the sheep, which is the greatest thing for them.

The wind was cooling, rippling the young flowers emerging in the garden in front of us, swaying the meadow grass back and forth. The late afternoon sun was blessing the hills on the horizon.

This was a scene that did not fit into my other life in any recognizable way, and it comforted me, the other life was just a dream, after all.

I turned to Maria, Red and Fate sitting regally in  front of us, the wind rippling their coats. We saw the chickens, hugging the fence (to keep out of the sight of hawks), and the sheep standing in the tall grass,  eating something fresh.

“Did you ever think you would sit outside having dinner looking out at two donkeys grazing in a field?”

Maria turned to me and smiled.

“No,” she said, “I didn’t.”