Ruhaniat Press presents: Fatima’s Touch

After six years of writing, editing, re-writing, more editing—the book is here. I can hold it in my hand.

You can pre-order a limited edition deluxe hardcover of FATIMA’S TOUCH  at $40 plus $6. shipping. (Europe and other countries allow $12 for shipping.)  Please pay by paypal  <tamam@completeword.com>   The book ships around September 20.

The paperback comes out September 26 and is available here or on Amazon  $19.95. The hardcover will not be available on Amazon, even though it is posted.

A box arrived a few days ago containing the advance copy paperbacks to promote Fatima’s Touch. Shabda was leaving for Istanbul the next day, so he took a dozen to give out at the Universal Sufi Conference. He just sent me these three pictures of  friends from Turkey, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, each holding Fatima’s Touch.

Esin Chelebi, Konya

Esin Chelebi is the 22nd generation granddaughter of Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi. She works to promote his teachings.

Fakhira Najib, Pakistan

Fakira Najib started “Broad Class” an organization bringing education, clothing, books and food to thousands of poor marginalized students and parents in Pakistan.

Ni’mah Nawwab, Saudi Arabia

A few years ago, I bought Ni’mah’s elegant poetry book: Canvas of the Soul: Mystic Poems from the Heartland of Arabia. She is “a voice for Arab women and youth,” and a beautiful bridge between East and West.

What a wonderful moment. Today, on the other side of the globe, these three women, are holding the book! May Fatima’s story be shared in America the way it is known in the Middle East, North Africa, and South East Asia. May she be appreciated and valued for her wisdom.

 

I will be reading in Cambridge, Mass. at Cambridge Friends Meeting House, at 7:30 pm September 7th,  as part of an evening with the Dances of Universal Peace. Info: 617-876-5272. I will be reading from Fatima’s Touch in Seattle the first week in December.

 

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Repetition, Mountains and Shibori

My granddaughter, Oona keeps drawing mountains. In the spirit of repetition, I say yes. yes! YES! and want to write poems and introduce her to Shibori.

Shibori: is the Japanese word for  ways of embellishing textiles by shaping cloth and securing it before dyeing, using a variety of techniques in different shapes to make different patterns. I was watching a small video and thinking how I would show it to Oona,  to inspire an art project we could do. Patterns.    http://skl.sh/video-shibori

video: at source click bottom (free entry) then go to line 11 “3 simple Shibori Styles”

“The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free… The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit!”  Igor Stravinsky.

“Meter, in the most basic physical way, releases illogical energy and brings it in coaction with the rational part of the mind, creating a synergy that might seem badly needed today—a balance between the unconscious power that perhaps composes what we sense as sanity.”  and “Repetition pulls the reader down… into the preliterate, the childlike… appeals to the right-brained qualities of space, being, and unindividuated consciousness…”   Annie Finch

Let It Be Forgotten   ~   poem by Sara Teasdale

Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,

Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold,

Let it be forgotten for ever and ever…

As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall

In a long forgotten snow.

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Oona has been drawing mountains for awhile. As I write this she is up in the Sierras. The repetition brings her  closer to what she is drawn to. Mountains, mountains, mountains……………………………………..

The Patterns in art and words made visible.

A repetition poem from Marilyn Hacker works both ends of the line with a repeated word at the beginning (anaphora) and rhymes for the final word. It gives a kind of hypnotic progression which goes on for six more stanzas than are shown here:

Casting Out Rhymes
Yes, dictionaries opening again
Yes, scorched across her forehead like a stain
Yes, less to say than cognate words contain
Yes, caffeine and butalbital for pain
Yes, ruptured synapses hobble the brain.

No, watched grey water circle down the drain
No, looking out the window of the train
No, not the melody, just the refrain
No, not temerity, no, not distain
No, stroked across the scar against the grain….

                                                                                                                              
from William Blake ~The Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright…
…What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp…

Closing with a humorous moment, having found the mountain with the Starbucks on the top. Oona’s dad, Ammon, VP of Product Design at the new company Takt, on brief vacation in the Sierras, is due for a coffee stop near the top. Yes!

The next post will announce the arrival of my new book: Fatima’s Touch, Poems and Stories of the Prophet’s Daughter, Ruhaniat Press, September, 2016.

Remembering Solomon 2016

SOLOMON KAHN & JON BRILLIANT ~ BRINGERS OF JOY!

So many of us love and think about you every day.  Happy 39^th birthday Solomon! You brought so much fun and wisdom and joy into the world and our lives. It is astounding how much you lived in 34 years. You are missed, but live on in each of us.

Solomon and his dad, Shabda

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday we celebrated your life with a windy visit to the new bench that sits next to a tiny bird lake in Marin. It has a view of Mount Tam and the East Bay in the far distance. Sun sets in the hills and is reflected here in front of the bench. The water is mostly used by cormorants and pelicans now, with a tribe of Canadian Geese claiming the North-East side. The swans are in the next lake.

Celebrating at the bench
July 10, 2016

The idea of the bench with a plaque came during my luncheon visits with my close friend Girija Brilliant. Girija’s son, Jon died a year before Solomon ~ and magical connections have occurred bringing the two (who never knew each other) together.

Jon Brilliant and Solomon Kahn.

Our favorite was this photo of two inscriptions on a beam at the large temple in Burningman several years ago. A friend of Jon’s took the picture and by chance there was an inscription to Solomon by an unrelated person inches above Jon’s name. Understand— there are over 1,000 messages written in this place every year, then offered to the fire. So we decided to create a bench in honor of our two sons. Las Gallinas Water District land provided the place, and last week the plaque was finished. Here’s to Jon and Solomon!

The Brilliant Family: Larry, Jon, Iris, Girija, and Joe

On this day of CELEBRATION of SOLOMON’S LIFE I am grateful for the friendships of those who joined us, and those like Nicole, Ryan and Samantha Rose, Ean Golden, The Lewis, Cherners, Lama Palden and many of Solomon’s close friends who we not there, but may visit the bench another time. Turn left after the railroad tracks at the end of Smith Ranch Road. Park in the small lot at the end, cross the bridge and walk until you see the BENCH at the second fork in the road!

 

In honor of Solomon’s birthday, please read this stunningly beautiful tribute from his dear friend Leila:

There are no words to describe how much I miss Solomon in my life. For days now, leading up to his birthday I have been thinking of him, remembering his smile and steady spirit, his ability to make us all feel at home with ourselves because he appeared to feel at home with himself. I remember the time we shared and I am forever honored, humbled and grateful to have had his friendship. And though his spirit still informs my life, and so in some ways he is still present for me, it doesn’t solve the problem of me missing his voice at the other end of the phone, or yearning to see his smile one more time, or feeling a sense of comfort to have a friend nearby who when in his company things just always felt okay.

 Thinking of you all today, on this special day. How blessed we are to be alive. To know each other. And to dance this dance of life, where past informs present and present is all that is true. My work is to get out of my head and into a more heart centered and trusting way of living, where all things do not need reason or explanation… its all play in the field of love.

I love you. Am grateful for each of you.

 In memory of Solomon. May his soul be free and may his light shine bright! And may we dance this dance saying YES to all things that return us to love.  L.

WE LOVE YOU SOLOMON!!

Lesley Hazleton’s New Book

 

Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, Riverhead Books, N.Y., 2016, by Lesley Hazleton

When Lesley started working on this book I wasn’t sure what I thought or felt about the word AGNOSTIC. Now it is published and selling briskly. I read this book with great pleasure—the questions it raises and the wild ride in ideas and words. I’ve marked and turned down the corner on countless pages. I’m happy to share my interest and enjoyment.

Lesley and I had met years ago over our various writings on Muhammad and what needed to be said about him and the women around him. She read the Qur’an cover to cover in several English translations! Who can say they’ve done that? She gave TED talks. I am in awe of her accomplishments. Pilot. Journalist. Funny friend. My all time favorite book she wrote is Mary, A Flesh and Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother. Lesley Hazleton is my SHE-ro, that’s hero with a she, the most skillful driver of the vehicle of the written phrase. Her sentences move you right along.

I wondered how agnostic thoughts might fit into my world of Sufis, my research on Muhammad and Fatima. There is a very wide scope to this book.

Begin with the title. …A Spirited not Spiritual Manifesto. Yes! I like that. I live in a world where sentimentality lurks very close by, since Sufism is about LOVE. Like GOD it is almost impossible to discuss. Lesley writes:

God is such a little word for such a huge concept. A mere three letters in English, it’s so short, so concise, so …familiar. Far more user friendly than the amorphous idea of the divine or the transcendent or the infinite, its really kind of a nickname, a shorthand claim to intimacy…. 1

See what I mean? As with LOVE, everyone assumes the meaning is shared. Like LOVE, GOD gets held hostage by personal beliefs and experiences. Then the AHA! we share is lost. Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto brings up and stirs around what we assume we know, yet don’t question.

The agnostic stance defies artificial straight lines such as that drawn between belief and unbelief, and shakes off the insistence that it come down on one side or the other. It is free-spirited, thoughtful, and independent-minded—not at all the wishy-washy I-don’t–know-ness that atheists accuse it of being. 2

I want to explore unanswerable questions with an open mind instead of approaching them with dismissive derision or with solemn piety… to get beyond old, worn-out categories and establish an agnostic stance of intellectual and emotional integrity, fully engaged with this strange yet absorbing business of existence in the world. 3

The following lines make me want to be Banksy, Graffiti Master of UK, painting phrases and paradoxes on buildings at night— everywhere.

The meaning of life is that it stops. 4

…to be lost is to be fully present. 5

(The agnostic )…takes a spirited delight in not knowing. 6

Names pin things down…create the illusion of understanding. Which is why naming God might be the trickiest business of all. 7

As with your keys or your wallet, you “find” God or “lose” your faith. 8

This is the agnostic’s faith: not in answers, but in possibilities. 9

She speaks a truth that is rarely spoken:

By refusing to accept death—by seeing it as failure—both physicians and their patients (assume)…death is the enemy… “you can do this, you can beat it,” as though we declare war on death, As though, absurdly, we could kill it… 10

Perfectibility seems so hollow to me. The definiteness, the absolutism, the dead-endness of it— all these leave no room for life. The perfect tomato in the store turns out to be tasteless, genetically engineered for shelf appeal, not for the palette…. Complete agreement with whatever I might say leaves me gasping for intellectual air, longing for something more than a mirror of my own thoughts. 11

I can’t follow her into the mathematics of the universe, big numbers and infinity, so these pages with words like ouroboros and googolplex have me scanning and page-turning.

The book ends with a discussion of “soul.” She does that thing like the child’s game of repeating a word until it’s like Dr. Seuss, or like cracking an egg—

…soulful, a good soul, soul music, soul food, soul mates Soul… we seem to end up in a haze of well-meaning sentiment…

 Then she brings in a deeper layer:

…soul not as a thing, but as a dimension of being that defies the narrow lens of dogma…12

Hazrat Inayat Khan, the great Sufi who came to the West in 1910 calls the soul “…consciousness, which is all-pervading. That same consciousness is caught in a limitation … All the holy beings of the world have become so by freeing the soul, its freedom being the only object there is in life.”13

I like this, since I am in the lineage that reaches back through Inayat Khan for over 1000 years of direct guidance and experiential understanding. It is not a religion. I like to call Sufism, “the fragrance over the flower of religion,” I am open to what these Sufis have shared, but also look for and cherish a healthy “spirited” view including humor and paradox that insists on real experience, not just accepting what I’ve been told. Out of the deep sincerity of that attitude, devotion to the path I walk can be born in my heart.

This book …to quote Lesley’s final page about the soul, “makes my heart swell… makes me glad to be alive.” 14

Reference Notes

1     Lesley Hazleton, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto p. 25.
2     p. 4, 5.
3     p. 6
4     p. 135
5     p. 117
6     p. 6.
7     p. 51.
8     p. 47
9     p. 79
10   p. 145,146
11   p. 190
12   p. 193.
13   Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Sufi Message of HIK “Spiritual Liberty.” vol. 5, Chapter 1.
14   Lesley Hazleton, Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto p. 204

Fatima’s Touch—my new book!

I just finished a phone conversation with Steve Scholl of White Cloud Press in Ashland, and my book will be published there in 2017. Yes. I can celebrate, and will be— over the next year. FATIMA’S TOUCH, POEMS AND STORIES OF THE PROPHET’S DAUGHTER.

I have felt the urgency to make this happen, as world events usher in terrible stories linked to Islam, driving away any association with kindness and compassion, with no thought to the family visited by Angel Gabriel at the beginning of the seventh century, or the man Muhammad, who believed he was in the line of Abraham of the Old Testament. FATIMA’S TOUCH looks at her life based on historical writings in fifty-three poems. I should stop here, because much can change in a year, but for the moment, this is it.

[There are three poems from the book and an interview  with me in the April issue of AJI Magazine: http://www.ajimagazine.com ]

I remember living on a small sailboat, a thirty foot trimaran,  in 1970. We were sailing down the coast of Baha, with no radio or cellphone, just point-to-point navigation, calculating latitude and longitude. We’d had our dingy stolen near San Diego so we needed a dock to land. There was no road down Western Baha in those days. All that was left in the cupboard was rice. We had fresh water. It was my watch, the 9-12 slot, day and night. That morning, and I was at the helm with a line out the back, trolling for fish. Suddenly a strike! Reeling it in carefully, there on the deck lay a good size tuna. I remember my stunned surprise and delight, not unlike being told I have a publisher, not just a line out. A fresh meal-of-words lifted out into the sun.

May this book’s story continue to unfold and bring understanding and increased clarity. May it be read far and wide.  <><  <><   <><

ON PROCESS: Poetry with WendyTC

Wendy’s here from Eureka Springs Arkansas. She came to give a poetry reading at Willow Glen Library in San Jose. Wendy Taylor Carlisle. My heavenly poetry muse. She has been editing my 52 poems. My back has been out for weeks. Working at the computer, I’m sometimes kneeling or standing with boxes under the screen, the mouse.

6 lines to this poem, # 40 in my Fatima book. She looks with concern at line 2. Metaphorical beings….

Can’t say that.

After dancing with the Thesaurus for awhile I change it to Inconceivable hands

I wave it in the air at her as she stands at the stair landing.

Then I recite it as I walk down the stairs.

That’s arrogant, honey. You put yourself above those beliefs mentioned

You need something else.

And I’ve got the metrics. Needs to be a /u/uu/

Look up “Mystical.” In the Thesaurus.

Enigmatical?

            no

Preternatural

That’s good, but “outside nature” is that what you want to say?

Clear, ambrosial?

Ambrosial refers to food.

But I like it!

Can’t do that. How about encompassing.

YES. I like that but it needs another syllable!

            Strong encompassing hands.

Wait.

 

           Firm.

 

That’s it!! Firm encompassing hands.

Great. Listen…

 

Letters of Love

Houris call to her spirit, signal nightfall.

Firm, encompassing hands untie her life; she

exhales Arabic.  Dazzling repetition

lifts: Muhammadan-Rasul’illah re-echos

“God’s perfection through human limitation*.”

On these letters of love she can fly to heaven.

[*quote: Hazrat Inayat Khan defining Rasul – Messenger of  God. Also, a text says that Fatima died saying the words Muhammadan-Rasul’illah: Muhammad is God’s Messenger. The form is hendecasyllabic, 11 syllables /u/uu/u/u/u.]

We did it.

I’m going to take a bath.

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Here’s my blog. I just wrote it while you were in the bath. I’ll call it

“Editing.”

Call it: On Process.

Done.

 

Zaatari Refugee Camp, Jordan

artwork at Zaatari Refugee Camp

82 new Syrian Refugees entered Jordan in the last 24 hours, according to Albawaba News posting (2/17/16). The estimated number of Syrian Refugees in Jordan is close to 1.5 million, almost 650,000 are actually registered as refugees, but all are being offered food, water, and a place to stay. Having spent nearly a month in Syria in 2003, this beautiful place and people are still very alive for me.

I look back at my first blog posting, August, 2013, Zaatari Syrian Refuge Camp in Jordan. At the time there were over 115,000 refugees. In 2013 the camp swelled way beyond capacity and services to 156,000 people.

In April 2014, another refugee camp was opened in Azraq and both new arrivals and people from Zaatari began to settle there. The latest numbers put Zaatari under 100,000 people in two square miles. It is a city with a wall around it, no trees in the northern plain of Jordan.

        

Above is a satellite picture of Zaatari almost two years ago.

Young Syrians playing computer games at a market in Zaatari.

There is so much attention to the flood of refugees across the water to Greece, or North and West into Europe, but Jordan and Lebanon are in a waterfall of displaced persons. Blessings on the King of Jordan, who continues to offer food, water and shelter to so many.

New housing modules, distributed by the UN High Commission for Refugees

 

We in America need to think of these refugees as  people of all levels of education and training, with languages and skills, those who stayed in the beautiful city of Aleppo, now steadily bombed, places that a year or so ago were normal cities, and are now places of death. They had no choice but to flee. Here are some more recent photos of Zaatari:

 

There are no water pipes to deliver water to the dwellings. It is supplied by water trucks like this one.

The main market. There is even pizza delivery. People here have accepted they are likely to be here a long time…

Here is a staggering fact: only just over 1% of the residents here are over 60 years old. 26% are children, and now infants are growing up in the camp. This is the only home they know.

It is important to keep these people in our thoughts and prayers, that they be safe, well, and even find happiness in their everyday lives, in friends and loved ones.

Celebrating Solomon ~ Four Years

Solomon Kahn left us on January 31, 2012. He lives vividly in the light on the faces of his family and friends. I take him with me on all adventures. Love you, Solomon!

Nicole and baby Samantha Rose

Nicole has gone on with her life, mothering and leading yoga classes, parenting baby Samantha Rose with Ryan Lucero. Here is Sam wearing a warrior’s baby suit as the Golden State Warriors win another one. Solomon would have loved it! He was DJ for the Warriors for all those years before they were champions.

Nicole shared the other night how he would get home from DJ’ing at a club very late  and rise at 7:30 to go for a bike ride before breakfast. It seemed he had an enormous amount of living to squeeze into 34 years on this planet.

As the hours count down through my fog of sadness, I remember that it picks up in February. Every year at this time I write about my son Solomon’s life and I feel better just sharing sparkles from his complete and completed life with those who knew and love him.

On the trail where the BENCH will be sometime this spring

I’ve been looking for a place to install a bench with Solomon’s name on a plaque. After asking about Mount Tam and an ocean view, I understood dealing with the state and the park commission could take years. Then there’s the wetlands below Lucas Valley Road where Las Gallinas water treatment property has created three small lakes with walking trails.

Shabda and I go there often for the abundance of wildlife including ducks, geese, swans, egrets, night herons, hawks, swallows, pelicans, a coyote or two and otters. We can see Civic Center and Mt. Tam in the distance. There is a place with a couple of large rocks. That is where the bench will be. Not just to honor Solomon, Jon Brilliant’s name will be there too. A pilgrimage spot for friends of Solomon and Jon (who died in January 2011 of cancer.) In an extraordinary coincidence Solomon and Jon’s names were next to each other in different handwriting on a beam of the large wooden Temple at Burning Man a couple years ago. Jon’s mother, Girija, has become a close friend.

Sol and Jon at Burningman

This year Scott Kaiser shared a new story about inviting Solomon to surf off the Marin coast with him. This is a sport Sol did not engage in, but he had snowboarded with Scott and wake-boarded often. He was up for it. The day had really big waves. Scott said this was no day for learning to surf, but Solomon wanted to try. He had difficulty just getting beyond them. Scott gave Sol his wet suit—which was a bit tight, and a couple hours and many spills later it was shredded. Solomon refused to do anything but give this adventure his 100%.

Scott and his son Arun Solomon on the board…

As the mother of a thirteen-year-old, I remember seeing him refuse to stop at a swimming meet, even though it looked to me like his body could not go another stroke. He would never give up.

Solomon and good friend Sheikh Tijani

I brought a picture of Solomon to Ammon’s house this week. I showed it to Sol’s niece, Oona. She kept asking me to tell a story about Solomon. I thought of this part of a poem I wrote in the ‘90s:

When Solomon was twelve

He mentioned one night over spaghetti

That he found out mediocre was a real word.

Someone not in our family had used it.

He always thought his dad made it up…

I could tell her that when Solomon got his permit to drive with an adult, he wanted to drive in a rainstorm and I said no. Come on, mom, how am I going to learn to drive in a rain storm if I can’t practice in this one? (He could have been a lawyer) I said no again and he said: Why? I replied: Because I don’t FEEL like it is safe. He never let me off easy if he thought he was right. (I won’t tell Oona that story.) I can show her the picture of the last day she was with him. (She is now six years old) He carried her on his shoulders to the schoolyard Christmas day. He was wearing a paper crown.

Uncle Solomon and Oona Christmas, 2011

I end with a video that Sol would have loved. STEVIE WONDER CARPOOL KARAOKE. He opened for Stevie Wonder in 2011 at the Salesforce.com party sometime that year. He loved Stevie Wonder. Who doesn’t?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqrvm2XDvpQ

photo Solomon took at the Salesforce party

Annie Finch all-day class

Poet Annie Finch is giving a day-long class at my house February 20, 2016.  There are still a few places open.  [See flyer below].   A decade or so ago I was lucky to attend powerful writing gatherings such as “A Room of Her Own” at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference), and West Chester Poetry Conference in Pennsylvania, places where recognized word masters opened my perception of poetry and let in fresh air.

 

Annie Finch was present with her gentle strength and delight in well-chosen words. She read in Berkeley when her book Calendars came out in 2003, and I found myself reading with her from the poem of that name, “A poem in chants for four voices.” I was Demeter reading: …make me our shadows/ as I reach for flowers. With Annie I always felt like I was “in the band,” a very rare feeling in the unspoken hierarchy of recognized poets.

After my second time at the West Chester Poetry Festival I received an offer, probably from Kim Bridgford, a list of poets willing to engage one-on-one with a skype or phone conference meetings. Annie’s name was there. I requested her. For the last three years she has looked over many of the poems I have written. She is a perfect editor for metric poetry. Correcting patterned poems is a rare specialty. You need to hold a deep understanding of metrics and rhyme. I write about Fatima, a lesser known woman in history. Annie, a feminist, has been supportive of the vision I hold of this seventh century Arabian women’s stories.

Hazrat Inayat Khan wrote that “motion is the significance of life, and the law of motion is rhythm.” That is the first sentence of chapter two Annie Finch’s magnificent book, The Poet’s Ear. This is a coincidence that stunned me. She is not directly connected to our Sufi family founded by Hazrat Inayat Khan! The book is a profound work that shares metrics in a way I could apply directly to what I was writing. When I read it I was in a writing residency at Ragdale Foundation in Illinois. I began to explore dactyllics, and hendecasyllabics, (rhythmic patterns)—like finding a skateboard-of-words after years of riding the red wagon.

If you look her up on the internet, Annie Finch has a rich presence: her poems, her many books, The on-line Poet Craft Circles Community, and her work with bringing women and nature forward in The American Witch. For these reasons and her good-heartedness, I am very happy to offer a container for her to connect with writers and lovers-of-words. I’ll end with a poem she wrote. Listen to the rhythmic music of each phrase:

Chain of Women

These are the seasons Persephone promised

as she turned on her heel—

the ones that darken, till green no longer

bandages what I feel.

 

Now touches of gold stipple the branches,

promising weeks of time

to fade through, finding the footprints

she left as she turned to climb.

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For more info on the all-day write to me at tamam@completeword.com

Ann Riley: in Memoriam

Guruji (Pandit Pran Nath), Ann and Terry Riley

Friday evening, November 27^th my beloved friend Ann Riley passed away, surrounded by family in hospice care at her Moonshine Ranch home in Camptonville, CA. In 1974 Shabda took me to Terry and Ann’s newly-purchased ranch for an overnight. As I remember we were warmly welcomed, and slept under the stars on the hill behind the house. Shabda and Terry rose early to sing together, and Ann and I began a soon familiar kitchen tea-talk. She was an excellent listener, with a wide variety of interests, known to break into a smile or laugh easily. Soon we were pregnant together with Gyan and Solomon, so the conversation went down that path. There was the porch with the grapes, and the garden, the pond, and the barn, where the music happened, until the remodel, considerably later.

Both our husbands had another “wife.” The same one. Shabda called Pandit Pran Nath or “Guruji” his first wife, and I was the second wife. Terry and Shabda spent a great deal of time in service to this wonderful Indian singer, who honored each of us. We were a family. Our private family occasions were times when the guru stayed with us and music was everywhere. The public ones were concerts, in the San Francisco area, at Mills College, in The Garlings’ house, or in New York City at the Cathedral of St John the Divine, in New Delhi and places I no longer remember. After Guruji died, Terry and Shabda went to India for the next four years, then as time passed we saw less of each other, but in the last decade, Gyan, a brilliant guitarist, performed with Terry, and we’d go to see them whenever they played in the Bay Area. Birthdays. The decades stretched out.

New Years Eve was a time when Ann and Terry and I sang standards way into the night years ago. Grab your coat and get your hat, leave your worries on the doorstep. Just direct your feet to the sunny side of the street…

My 50^th birthday I spent as an overnight with several close women friends. Ann was among them. Shabda’s 60^th we were together by Donner Lake. Weddings, funerals,  family gatherings. For my last birthday party they appeared with a sweet gift. It was a colored gourd with an OM, a Buddha crowned with flower patterns hand-painted in gold, white, green and brown. Inside was a card with birds wearing party hats and the message in Ann’s tidy script “We love you, Tamam.”

This morning, in meditation there was Ann all covered in light and I knew, before the phone call that the line that held her here had stretched thin. She was already gone beyond the body. I searched my poetry books for the right words to honor her. She liked Naomi Nye, wrote me in 2011 she had bought her poems.

from Fold:

I am partial to poems about

little rumination, explosions of minor joy,

light falling on the heads of gentle elders.

Also the way pampas grasses look toward

the end of summer, shining, shaggy…

 

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I like the melancholy tone of this one—

From One of the Butterflies by W.S. Merwin

…I cherish

only now a joy I was not aware of

when it was here although it remains

out of reach and will not be caught or named

or called back and if I could make it stay

as I want to it would turn to pain

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Ann and Shawn, Alia Meyer, Shabda and me at our wedding, 1976

Ann, dear friend, what a beautiful life you have shared! Married to Terry for 60 years, friend to many, teacher to many, mother and grandmother, you will be missed. You will bring love and great benefit wherever you go.