Me and all my wonderful cousins on the course at Essex Fells after lunch following my Uncle Bill's funeral yesterday, complete with military honors and taps. He was 95 when he died on Wednesday and had lived a good long life, primarily, I'm told, on a diet of ice cream, sweets and laughter. We all loved him and will miss him. My mother worshipped the ground he walked on, her big brother. He's walkin those endless green golf links in the sky now with his wife, Doris, and most likely his brother Doug and my mom as well. God love em all. (As I recall, that was Aunt Doris' favorite expression, God love em. She was a happy woman.) The thing I will remember most about my aunt and uncle was how often they smiled at one another. They were a genuinely happy, truly loving couple. Love and laughter in their eyes every time I saw them. Bordered on a mischievous twinkle, as though they were co-conspirators in some great secret. To love like that is a great gift. A perpetual act of mutual faith that for some reason strikes us today as larger than life.

I once knew a nun, Sister Mary, the principal of Villa Victoria Academy where I taught French, who was perhaps the most optimistic person I'd ever met at that point in my life. No matter what you said to her, her response was always "God Love ya". It took some getting used to, someone, an advocate with amazing constancy, insisting to God that he/she love me no matter what came out of my mouth or what I was thinking every second of the day. Eventually she said it to me enough times that I came to expect it and to believe that God did indeed love me and that Sister Mary was the instant messenger bringing me that happy news, news I sorely needed at the time. Now that I think of it, when do we not need that message, that the Universe, God, the Mind that runs the show, loves us, and that, like the Beatles tried to tell us, Love is all you need?

I'm still workin on swallowing that idea whole the minute I get up in the morning and letting it work in and sustain me all day. And daily I fall seriously short. You know, I can't imagine why it's such a hard one for us to live all the time. But it really is, isn't it?

As always, we can turn to wise Yoda for the answer: (Revenge of the Sith was on TV today)

The fear of loss is a path to the dark side. Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.

Riiiiight. No so easy.

One trick to doing that may be to ask, what do I have left if what I fear to lose is lost to me? If you can live with that, you're good. But even that doesn't get to the root of the problem. It all comes down to faith, that the Universe is Love, at the very least a mathematical perfection, and that we are part of that. It's a kind of faith and acceptance of what is. The Be Here Now school of philosophy. Hard to do when everything around you demands an answer to "Well, what then?"

Let it be?

more later....