Chapter Thirty-Two: The Elusive Ones Finally Meet

Nightmares fill with light

May 25, 2024

The weather on that Christmas day, that summer in New Zealand, couldn’t decide if it was going to be beautiful and sunny or partly cloudy and drizzling and so we decided to have all the festivities in the house — with a walk down to the beach later and Champagne under the pohutukawa trees for those who were willing to take a chance on the weather.

It was a casual affair but even so everyone teased Dolo and M&M — Dolores and Mary Margaret that is — all afternoon for wearing new T-shirts that proudly displayed their new logo on the back:

Everyone present knew that American Dolo and Irish M&M had spent twenty years teaching in Japan before immigrating to New Zealand to run the suites and so everyone assumed that the logo was Japanese for “Mill Bay Suites.”

“Maybe Mill Bay S-w-e-e-t-s,” Beau suggested.

“Yah, sure, our Mill Bay Sweets even will use Christmas day and Christmas photos for advertising their business enterprise! So shameless!” said Tw as he laughed into his Dutch beard and clicked away with his digital camera.

“Claro que si!” said Carmelina, the Florida American from Cuba. Now a Kiwi.

Only Beau and I knew the truth. It was not Japanese but Chinese. Kay yee goh. A sort of transliteration of “kiwifruit,” literally meaning “strange fruit.”

We kept our mouths shut in broad smiles and Dolo and M&M simply made big eyes and kept arranging plates of food on the island and kitchen counters.

So much food and so beautiful, so much joy and laughter and friendship this day. Everyone had contributed some gorgeous dishes, platters of hors d’oeuvres, salads, vegetable dishes, meats and poultry and ham. Beau and I had collected mussels from the rocks on our beach the day before and had made a giant paella topped with those steamed mussels from Doubtless a Bay. There was gourmet food and desserts to delight the gods and all the angels.

There were little speeches all around, some funny, some touching, all lovely. Quiet Dan from Ireland surprised everyone by making the loveliest and most heartfelt speech of all, ending with:

“And Aaron and Beau, may you never grow old! May you stay forever young!”

“Too late for that!” I said and laughed.

And then wondered exactly what I had meant.

I always start my day by stumbling out of the bedroom, like Lazarus coming forth from the tomb, and the first thing I do is hit the giant Poulsbo bell we have standing on the deck and then I read the day’s entry from a most beautiful book I possess.

BUDDHIST OFFERINGS, 365 DAYS.

This busy Christmas morning I had forgotten. Now, as everyone gathered around the island in the kitchen and began loading up their plates, I hit the bell once loudly. Temple sound. And walked over to the long Chinese altar and read the day’s offering silently to myself.

Yes. At this very moment, I can look around and believe I am a true yogi — who has attained spiritual union — and this universe and all these beings gathered here are deities. And I am fulfilled.

So easy to believe when life is good.

Merry Christmas. And Happy New Year. And om mani padme hum.

Shanti Shanti Shanti

At around 5:30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, a call from my mother. My father died that morning in Missouri. Ninety-three years old. Not sick. Old. Tired. They had just observed their seventy-third wedding anniversary — hadn’t Beau and I just gone to Missouri for the big family celebration of their fiftieth anniversary? They had just observed their seventy-third wedding anniversary quietly at home on the thirteenth, with my oldest sister and her husband. Now the numbers were inverted. December 31 in New Zealand.

We decided we would take my doctor’s advice; we would not take the long flights back to the Midwest from New Zealand. We decided that for forty-nine evenings we would burn a candle and would say the 23^rd Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer for Jim, and would meditate together every evening, would meditate on his life and death and recite a prayer from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Liberation Through Hearing During the In-Between State. We would observe the Christian practice for Dad and the Buddhist practice for ourselves. We aren’t Buddhists, but it resonates with us more on many levels.

Three days later, in the morning, Beau turned on his cell phone, the first thing he does every morning. There was a message from Dee. She had called in the middle of our New Zealand night. Why hadn’t she called on our house phone? Why had she called on our cell phone? She knows we turn them off at night.

Beau, I don’t feel well. Call me. I love you. Bye.

No answer at her house. To make it short: Beau’s mum died in the night, in her bed. Three days after my dad in Missouri. They found Dee in bed that next morning, in her half-price pajamas from T. J. Maxx — Never pay full price for anything, Boys! — with the covers pulled up to her chin, appearing to sleep peacefully. She was dead. Old. Tired. Worn out.

All that energy. It had all stopped. Where did it all go?

We added the Hail Mary for Dee to our evening prayers and meditation. And continued on for forty-nine more evenings.

—He maketh me to lie down in green pastures

—Thy will be done in earth as it is in Heaven

—Hail, Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women

O Nobly Born, that which is called death has now arrived. You are not alone in leaving this world, it happens to everyone

—He leadeth me beside the still waters

—deliver us from evil

—Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death

—the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen

—now and at the hour of our death. Amen

O Nobly Born

Now is the moment of death.

The time has come for you to start out. You are going home.

O You of Glorious Birth—now is the moment.

Your mind in this moment is total transparency:

No color, no substance, empty,

Sparkling, pure and vibrant,

A mass of Light,

It has neither beginning nor end.

Go toward the Light.

Merge with it.

Merge with the Light.

Death has happened.

It happens to everyone.

Merge with the clear white Light.

So remain awake, O Nobly Born,

O You of Royal Birth—

Please don’t be afraid of your own Radiance.

Merge with the Light

Dee would be especially proud of Beau and me. Astounded at the price of a simple cremation — her desire — in Rancho Mirage, Playground of the Presidents!

We got out the Yellow Pages we had brought with us to New Zealand and called around, Palm Desert, Palm Springs, Cathedral City.

Dee was cremated for half the price at the Rose Mortuary and Crematory in Desert Hot Springs. By the kindest, most helpful people we spoke to by phone from our land faraway Down Under. Half-price, Dee!

Way to go, Boys!

The transition of one year to the next, December-January — some of the happiest and some of the saddest days. It is amazing how fast those forty-nine days fly by.

How very quickly time can disappear.

And now, this February summer’s afternoon, I go into the office and choose an old book of poems by Rumi, a treasured book that my dear friend and former student Faezeh gave me when we left the States.

Now I sit on the deck and watch Doubtless Bay. Faezeh’s book on my lap — Farsi on the left page, English on the right. Dolphins are swimming and jumping clear of the water, swimming in the air for a few seconds before disappearing again to their world under the waves. The sun is warm and yellow.

We are still waiting patiently for my results from the U.S. and from the Royal Bournemouth Hospital. How long things can take, especially when you live six stops after the end of the world.

How very slowly time can linger.

Looking around at all this immense beauty reminds me of the first trip Beau La Joie Rodrigue and I made to New Zealand, now a decade ago.

You remember, I told you about it.

We left Queenstown and drove up the narrow road along Lake Wakatipu, past Glenorchy, then continued on up the gravel road through the Dart River Valley.

“Right here on the map,” said Beau. “It’s marked right here. Paradise. I want to go there. We should be there now, it’s not that far from where we are now.”

We looked around. It certainly looked like Paradise to our eyes but there was no sign anywhere, no town or village or settlement. No house even. Just beautiful land, fields and forest and river and the bluest sky and fluffy meringue clouds, higher than the highest mountains across the way.

You remember what I told you earlier on in this account.

I have to tell you that Paradise is located on some maps of New Zealand, marked as being just north of Lake Wakatipu, up the Dart River Valley. But you will not find it. There is no village or settlement named Paradise. It is more of an imaginary region in this part of the upper valley. Imaginary, yet very real, visible, in fact, in the area’s beauty and unspoiled and majestic tranquility.

Now I look out at Doubtless Bay again and take up Faezeh’s volume of Rumi poems.

It falls open naturally to the poem I have most certainly read the most often:

ONE VISION

Day and night, no difference.

The sun is the moon: An amalgam.

Their gold and silver melt together.

This is the season when

the dead branch and the green branch

are the same branch.

Nightmares fill with light like a holiday.

Humans and angels speak one language.

The elusive ones finally meet.

Good and evil, dead and alive,

everything blooms

from one natural stem.

You know this already, I’ll stop.

Any direction you turn

it’s one vision.

—Rumi—

I look from left to right, from the west to the east of Doubtless Bay. And then out to the north, to the open sea of the South South Pacific.

Our first Kiwi friend told us New Zealand is The Land Near Oz and I guess Beau and I sort of came here looking for our place over the rainbow.

We all know there really isn’t any true Paradise on this earth, no place without troubles, sadness, and all the problems of today’s world, all the problems of life — no place without old age, sickness, death.

And yet.

Paradise is very real—

And now we know that New Zealand is as good as any place on this earth to live. And better than most. A place that can make it easier, perhaps, to find that Paradise inside.

But you know that by now. You know this already, I’ll stop.

Any direction you turn, it’s one vision.

END OF ‘The land Near Oz’