Dear friend,
I’m munching on a biscuit and drinking wine from a plastic cup. Angelo takes a swig and we both nod as the woman serving takes what looks like the nozzle of a petrol pump and pulls the lever. Except it’s not petrol, it’s wine. It’s delicious and what with it being ten in the morning, goes immediately to my head. I can’t help falling just that little bit more in love with life out here in the Italian countryside.
The wine costs something like three or four euros a litre. But this is wine country and we bought it from a producer’s cooperative.
We drive back through vineyards and fields of corn. Every now and then tiny towns are made ugly by the road cutting them in two, but the rolling wooded hills are pretty. Purple flowers, blue, white, yellow. A field of sunflowers huddled together in rows face the sun, like a crowd in front of a big screen.
Tractors in the fields with metal arms raised to the sky.
Everywhere circular bales of hay being brought in for the animals.
An easy silence in the car, voices on the radio sound like they’ve cut into the speakers, sentences overlap and buzz and the occasional song dissolves into sonic mush but it feels perfect to be here speeding through the hot July air with Chiara’s father.
Sometimes we’re going so fast and so close to the oncoming traffic I think this is how it ends, but the brakes are a match for Angelo’s reflexes.
Like my own Dad Angelo is living with memory loss, and multiple health challenges. Yesterday the three of us stood, grateful for the air conditioning, in a pristine corridor in a cancer research institute - waiting to see a team of doctors.
A mother in a head scarf and surgical stockings hugged and kissed her daughters, while their father looked on and said brave inanities loaded with love and concern. You don’t need to speak the language to read the energy.
Husbands sat with wives. One of each pair wore a wristband. Patients wheeled by on hospital beds, attached to drips, pale and still, conversations lowering along with our with eyes as they pass.
I’m praying that a legion of angels take up their station here, that they bring comfort to all in need. That the divine use me to bring whatever healing is possible to the souls in this place. To bring comfort to the staff. I have no idea how, but if it may be done then let it be so.
Healing happens through us, not by us.
It’s a long wait and Angelo is understandably agitated and nervous. Eventually the door opens and Chiara asks me to wait outside. She and Angelo enter together and sit in a circle with eight doctors in their white coats and expensive shoes. I see there’s a large screen with documents projected onto it, the door closes and I sit and meditate on an easy chair, focusing my attention on the infinite loving intelligence in and around us.
I’m a little nervous too. I recall long hours, next to Nana as she succumbed to the cancer in her brain. I was a child then.
Is it any different now?
Eventually you realise no human is controlling the universe, we try but it’s a short lived illusion.
This is all I have right now, this growing ability to focus on love.
To be clear I’m making no claims, only turning over and over again to kindness, forgiveness, letting go of the madness of the false self as it arises within. I used to think it was ego to contemplate that we are one with the divine, now I see it upturned.
It is ego or false self that says we are not.
The news was good even before Chiara and Angelo visited the circle of white coats. They emerge visibly relieved having had it confirmed, it took less than ten minutes. We leave the Institute watched by patients whose prognoses we cannot at this moment comprehend.
As we walk through the blazing heat of the carpark I look back over my shoulder and see the angels in position. We drive home and book a table at the local Pizza place to celebrate.
How rich are our lives on earth?
How wrong I was when I sought happiness in my never ending parade of desires.
What more pressing human need is there but the desire to love and be loved in return? To explore the mind blowing diversity of being.
The doorway being inside the human mind and heart.
We enter in stillness.
Look within.
The door is open.
The guards deserted their posts long ago.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey