This essay originally appeared on Susan Dugan’s blog on Sep. 27, 2016.
“You’ve gone pretty minimalist, I see,” I said, taking in the glowing, spherical space in which I found myself, attempting to make light of it. Despite the fact that it took every ounce of my once-upon-a-dream legendary restraint to keep from flinging myself into his outstretched arms. After all, I’d almost given up on finding those clear, certain eyes, that je-ne-c’est-quoi smile of his, again.
All summer long, as one startling, riveting dream sequence after another appeared to rock my world, rooting me ever more deeply into the sordid soil of my unconscious guilt over the belief in separation, the decision-making mind outside the dream the Course alludes to seemed but an ancient enemy. I couldn’t seem to locate my inner professor, however half-heartedly I occasionally tried to extract myself from my hallucinations’ hold to hunt him down.
I’d only recently discovered I’d been looking for him in the wrong place. He had apparently abandoned his former office in the ivy-adorned, brick building in which I’d imagined visiting him for years. After repeated, stymied attempts to locate it at all, I’d finally found the building boarded up, decaying, as if vacated long, long ago; the surrounding campus grounds overgrown with vegetation, reclaimed by the North Country woods from which they’d once been painstakingly wrested as triumphant proof of man over nature. (Game over, man—yikes!)
That’s when I got really scared. After all, I’d yelled at him at one point a while back; I’d never gone that far before. “Read him the riot act,” (as my mother used to say and frequently demonstrate) as I sat in my parked car outside the doctor’s office, pounding on the steering wheel like a thwarted two-year-old in frustration. Why had my inner teacher abandoned me? Hadn’t I done everything he’d asked? Tried as hard as a person who still believes the woman she sees grimly staring back at her in the mirror every morning is all she has left could possibly be expected to. What had I done to deserve his defection? And could he possibly forgive me for the string of highly unenlightened words that had just fired, as if of their own volition, torpedo-like from the apparent hostage of my mouth.
He smiled now, as if reading my thoughts, motioning with his fingers like grand piano keys for me to come and sit beside him as I continued to puzzle over how I’d suddenly found myself inside this hollow room with no visible doors—open or closed—to rap on, at last. No doors, no desk, no chairs, no worn, woven carpets, no book shelves groaning beneath the weight of accumulated, worldly knowledge. No beveled windows through which to observe the first sepia tinge of autumn, the ruffled crisping of the linden leaves. Enveloped by a light that seemed to contain all possible colors within it, a haunting hum into which my whole being involuntarily relaxed. Enabling me to breathe; I mean, really, finally breathe!
I joined him, cross-legged, on a surface neither hard nor soft that seemed to spontaneously conform to the contours of the body I still think I am, perfectly supporting my weight. “So, you just up and decided to move,” I said, after a while, afraid to look at him. Afraid to let him see how scared I’d been. “Change jobs. Without notifying your students?”
“Why are we whispering?” he whispered back.
I leaned toward him. “I don’t want her to hear us.”
“Who?” he asked.”
“My decision-maker.”
His brows shot up the way they do.
“She’s been a whack job all summer,” I explained. “If she gets a whiff of me here at peace with you even for a nanosecond, there’s no telling what she’ll do next.”
“We’ve talked about this,” he said.
“What hologram was that in?” I asked. “But seriously, you have no idea what’s been going on down there while you were off on your little summer junket.”
He tilted his head; continued to smile. “I’m here now,” he said.
He had a point. He always does. I knew I should fill him in, look with him at all that still seemed so frightening and threatening that I might finally see it as it really was and not the way I’d set it up, but where to begin? I drew another deep breath and sighed. It didn’t really matter, I decided, and told him about visiting my daughter in Seattle in mid-June. How I’d been missing her so again, thinking that visiting would solve that ache within, only to discover that however wonderful it was to see and touch her, to hear her voice and lilting laugh, it really didn’t solve the problem of emptiness we all walk around with as fugitives from real love. Never had and never would.
I told him about the call from my husband while there with news of his elderly father’s sudden death en route to breakfast at the independent living facility he’d lived in since we moved him to Denver five years ago following my mother-in-law’s sudden death. About emptying out his apartment (we had only three months ago downsized him to) at the facility afterwards, about the extravagant, New Orleans-style funeral celebration of his life that had begun in that wild Southern city that we went on to host in our yard a few weeks later.
I told him about the “very atypical” and thankfully very minor heart attack I’d experienced apparently as a result of high blood pressure over the Fourth of July weekend. The way in which I’d vaguely sensed his abstract presence with me in the ER, cardiac unit, and during the cardiac cathertization that fortunately found no arterial blockages requiring stents. How I felt compelled to join with the nurses, technicians, and physicians attending to my body’s care even when I didn’t really agree with some of their decisions or conclusions about my treatment. How my fear for the fate of my body spontaneously took a back seat to my trust in a safety not of this world, the sense of loneliness that came and went over the next 48 hours of uncertainty assuaged by an uncanny sense of closeness to the strangers around me. Patients and practitioners, all in the same boat here, really. All terrified they will never find their way home. All desperately struggling to stave off the inevitable code blue, solve an essentially non-existent problem where it is not.
I told him about the overwhelming fear that set in later during follow-up doctor’s visits and recommendations, about visiting lifelong friends who’d relocated to a lovely, Spanish Colonial city, artists’ and expat community in the mountains of Mexico in early August, where I immediately developed a recurrence of the diverticulitis I’d first experienced eight years ago. How the language barrier resulted in inadequate treatment that prevented a medical emergency requiring surgery but did nothing to allay the excruciating symptoms. How hard I tried anyway to socialize with my dear friends during a week-long itinerary of festivities. I told him about the two-week multi-antibiotic and dietary regimen back in Denver that finally corrected the condition and feeling terribly victimized much of the time, unable to find him.
“Is that when you lost it with me?” he asked.
“Somewhere in there,” I said, still afraid to meet his eyes. “Sorry about that.”
“No problemo,” he said, smiling. “Sounds like a pretty bad string of dreams.”
I nodded. “But I think I know what you’re really saying,” I said, because, I suddenly did. “Even though I couldn’t find you in your office,” I began, “even though it seemed like you had flown the coop, you must have been right there with me. There in the moment I realized that however much I loved my daughter it would never replace the love I think I lost and deserved to, for example. There during the planning and execution of my father-in-law’s celebration and my husband’s emotional volatility, in the ER and cardiac unit and again in Mexico where I also found myself “making it about them,” as Ken Wapnick used to say. Taking that purpose more seriously than my fear and pain. There, even in the long weeks during which I turned away and tuned you out in my fear, and even the day I yelled at you and it had no effects on our relationship at all.”
He nodded. “Flown the coop?” he said, after a while, eyes dancing.
I sighed, smiled.
“Do you think you can look at me again now?” he asked, after a while.
I turned toward him and there he was, still. There I was, there we all were, forever together, alive, aloft, loved. I had to look away again pretty quickly, but still, I knew.
“Did I mention my husband ate the perfectly bulging, Purple Cherokee heirloom tomato, the only one to survive the flea beetles that got the rest of our fruit, right out of the still life I just set up to work on this morning for my drawing class?” I asked, in my normal voice. No need to whisper anymore. The decision maker really wasn’t up there somewhere messing with me, after all. I had decided to see that now.
“No way!” he said, shaking his head.
“You can’t make this stuff up,” I agreed. “Meanwhile … I don’t suppose you’ve been following the U.S. presidential race?”
He started to laugh out loud then; and who the hell could blame him? From wherever the hell we were right now, it did seem pure slapstick comedy, without the vaguest hint of looming disaster.
I threw back my head and laughed, too.
“Love always answers, being unable to deny a call for help, or not to hear the cries of pain that rise to it from every part of this strange world you made but do not want. All that you need to give this world away in glad exchange for what you did not make is willingness to learn the one you made is false.” (A Course in Miracles Chapter 13, VII. paragraph 4, lines 3-4)
“Christ is still there, although you know him not. His Being does not depend upon your recognition. He lives within you in the quiet present, and waits for you to leave the past behind and enter into the world He holds out to you in love.” (A Course in Miracles Chapter 13, VII. paragraph 5, lines 7-9)
“To do anything involves the body. And if you recognize you need do nothing you have withdrawn the body’s value from your mind. Here is the quick and open door through which you slip past centuries of effort and escape from time. This is the way in which sin loses all attraction right now. For here is time denied, and past and future gone.” (A Course in Miracles Chapter 18, VII. paragraph 7, lines 1-4)
“Yet there will always be this place of rest to which you can return. And you will be more aware of this quiet center of the storm than all its raging activity. This quiet center, in which you do nothing, will remain with you, giving you rest in the midst of every busy doing on which you are sent. From this center you will be directed how to use the body sinlessly. It is this center from which the body is absent that will keep it so in your awareness of it.” (Paragraph 8)
Susan Dugan’s books – Extraordinary Ordinary Forgiveness, Forgiveness Offers Everything I Want, and Forgiveness: The Key to Happiness – are available at RMMC and on Amazon. She writes about ACIM based on Ken Wapnick’s teachings at ForaysInForgiveness.com and teaches online via Zoom on Tuesday nights.