Smoke, howling and a sea of beautiful faces

MIssoula Public Library, Monday afternoon. The fires in Montana create conditions so smoky that I can only barely discern the mountains that ring Missoula. The local newspaper's front page daily fire log details conditions for many many fires, not just the one or two that I grew to expect while living through hot Teton summers. Now I know where the phrase "cast a pall over" comes from. Downtown, some people drag themselves along the street. It must be hard NOT to allow depression to take one over during such a long-term relentless emergency.

But I am just a relatively carefree visior, privileged to drive in and then, drive out. I so feel for those who do not enjoy my freedom to choose.

Today I enjoy the first fully free day since I started holding book events in Jackson, on July 29th. The event in Stevensville was cancelled, giving me "breathing time." Too bad the actual breath is compromised. . .

This morning I walked along the Clark Fork downtown river walk, and did Tai Chi and Chi Kung in a secluded, shady, grassy spot. Really wonderful to feel myself fully centered in that moment, the obsessive worries that dogged me during the two months planning for this trip blessedly gone. Poof!

The psychic in Kansas City told me that Jeff was saying that all I needed to do was flow with the current that I had created, that I didn't have to even think about it much, just move from place to place with no worries! And that is largely how I'm experiencing this journey—although I do have to be very aware of observing boundaries with others so as to have enough energy for evening book events.

The two events just past, one in Helena and the other in Missoula, were both, again, very very different from any of the others. In each case in these two towns, about a dozen people assembled in someone's home, and in both cases we entered into a sharing together that felt very coherent at the time, a strong, vibrant, allowing energy field that suddenly jelled around us, and then as suddenly dispersed as the event wound down.

Helena's event followed a day spent in the company of my dear friend Joan and her husband Max. Joan and I walked up Helena mountain in the morning with her little pomeranian on a rare morning when smoke wasn't so bad it would compromise breathing to inhale deeply on the ascent. That afternoon, the wind picked up, and thick smoke blew in carrying the odor of burning wood. Dread sets in at moments like these, an instinctive desire to flee. Reminded me very much of the Tetons in the '88 fires. With our rational minds we calmed ourselves, realizing that the fires near Helena were more than 15 miles away, and the wind and odor did die down later.

Meanwhile, that evening, we were inside enjoying a potluck, and stories, and my astonished recognition that this group converses on multimensional levels as a matter of course—due in part, I'm sure, to Joan and Max's long, slow introduction to the Helena community of many people and subjects that bring in "messages from the beyond" of all kinds, including E.T.'s and UFO's, just as a matter of course!

So, when we got down to work with the book, sitting in a circle on the floor to talk about our experiences of grief, and how it can be a gateway to Love, we were fully primed. As usual, there were several people there who have also been through deaths of spouses, and of course, many other typese of losses—and it's wonderful to compare notes, and to recognize the parallel courses that our emotional and spiritual journeys run in.

In Missoula, for the very first time, inside my dear friend Zamilla's home, the whole group of, I discovered, very powerful women, the youngest of whom was probably 55, listened with great intent, as, one by one in order going around the circle, the women each told some facet of their life that gleamed with with loss and grief. Towards the end, one woman gave a longer discourse on how she had tried to avoid getting in touch with grief, always running away into more and more activity—at one point even riding her bicycle clear across the country, dragging her shadow behind her every inch of the way— which then, would slam her once more into some powerful loss that she again tried to dismiss. Constant escape, until one day, out of the blue, she started screaming and howling and crying and couldn't stop—while on a ski vacation with friends in a rented condo! The next morning, no one would look at her. The group carried on as if nothing had happened. Later, one of these friends told her that they wanted to hold an intervention, because they had decided she had behaved that way to manipulate them!

As she told this story, each time punctuating the end of its various chapters with the phrase, "And still I did not know of my grief," our group was sitting on the edge of our chairs, mouths hanging open. Such a gifted storyteller! And such a classic story. Can we, for example, look at the busyness that infects America as a collective symptom of repressed, unprocessed grief?

At both events I demonstrated (mimicked) the primal howling that blew through me like so many tsunamis me during that year after Jeff died, and both times my extremely loud demonstration galvanized others into a deeper sharing. In both groups, at least one woman then commented, "But that's what I did too! And I never told anybody, because I didn't know it was okay to do that. . . "

Next up, Hamilton, two events, Tuesday and Wednesday. Think I'll get up off my library chair and mosey on down there now. Give me time to acclimate. And meditate. And thank the universe for all the blessings showering down along with the smoke! I look back already on this trip, now approaching two weeks, and what comes to mind is a sea of beautiful faces who greet each other as fellow pilgrims along the mysterious and profound journey of the soul.