Eli Report May 2008 PDF Print E-mail


Eli Contemplative


Reports from Little Rock
May, 2008

Dear Friends,

Each morning I go shopping on our favorite street in Amsterdam. If I am lucky Gangaji will come too, but she is in Findhorn now and was in Copenhagen a week ago. If she comes with me, we will stop at our local coffee shop for a cappuccino for me and a hot chocolate for her. At the fruit and vegetable shop I pick up greens for a salad, strawberries and blueberries and sometimes a mango for breakfast. At the cheese shop we get yoghurt fresh from the farm and French creamy goat cheese. Sometimes we get some wild Alaskan smoked salmon from the fish store. Another shop will have mixed salads like chicken salad or mozzarella and tomatoes. I found unfiltered cloudy green olive oil at the charcuterie. Since we are staying in a hotel with a small mini-fridge daily trips make sense, we eat simply and the walking is always good. I am reminded of when Fidel first came to New York when I was in Junior High around 1959 or '60 and he made headlines when he and his men were thrown out of a New York hotel for cooking a chicken in their room. I love being in Amsterdam with my shopping bag doing my chores. I could not have imagined this six months ago.

Being here with Gangaji is so nourishing. We are deeply connected to the people, the culture and the city. We have spent wonder filled hours strolling along the canals and in the parks and museums. In the past we rode bikes everywhere. We started coming here in the eighties, before we met Papaji. I was leading month-long retreats in a castle in Austria and this was our place to land in Europe and walk off the jet lag. It has always felt like a kind of home to us.

Gangaji is so good in so many ways. She is now our breadwinner and we are both living off of her salary. We have mostly lived with all the money in one pot but now she is the responsible one. She works and still takes the time to show such sweetness in many small ways. She read a book she knew I would love while in Copenhagen, a funny, smart story about the child of sixties revolutionaries whose parents were living underground. She couldn't wait for my eyes to heal to share it, so she read it aloud to me as we lay in bed. Our tender times together nourish my soul. Because of concerns about my health when this trip was scheduled (I was in the hospital at the time) I was booked to stay behind in Amsterdam when she traveled and I miss her dearly when she is gone.

A sweet man doing a book on satsang teachers interviewed me a few days ago. He was curious about the cancer and the symptoms I was showing. In reaction to the thalidomide I have been taking as part of chemotherapy, my eyes were swollen, puffed out and weepy, my skin was blotchy, flaking and itchy and my nose had grown sores inside and was always stuffed and red like W.C. Fields. Someone at a meeting last week in Hamburg first said I looked like a cross between Papaji and Ramana but later on closer inspection said I looked like "late Bruce Willis after a fight." We all laughed and I used my now over-used one liner, "stay down Rocky, stay down." But when this gentleman doing the interview asked me to describe what I was feeling, I told him I am feeling immense gratitude. In the field of that gratitude the feelings of weepy eyes and itchy skin may appear, but they are really not worth noting. In satsang I used this metaphor for feelings as well. All the emotions can arise in the field of emptiness or gratitude. If you are in love with the silent emptiness the emotions have no lasting meaning and are not a problem. They have no place to stick. They don't have to leave any more than my skin has to get better for me to feel happy. It is just like that.

I must say that this month without chemo and without weekly blood tests was a bit unnerving at one point. Without the blood work, I don't know if the cancer is growing or holding steady. If I pay it any mind I can see how this fear of the unknown can create anxiety. It is a choice. Do I pay it any mind or am I grateful for this moment? The choice is clear. I see that if I could do something about it, it could be wise to pay attention to this anxiety. But since nothing can be done until I return, why waste a precious second on useless thoughts that produce toxic emotions?

The meetings with the sangha here have made me weep with joy. It was almost exactly a year ago that I was scheduled for a retreat in Germany and had to call Gangaji, who was already in Europe, and let her know that I had cancer. She told the group and they made me a special card. When I opened it I could hear them all singing a Latin hymn of peace that the European sangha has sung many times over my ten years of being with them. I took this card to Arkansas and whenever I had a visitor, I would open the card and their voices and spirit would fill the room. In Hamburg they gathered around me and sang it in the flesh. We all cried together. Sweet reunion. The weekend in Amsterdam was more of the same. Person after person would come up and report on what they had realized since we last met. So many had gone through a great test of love, a great burning fire, and had deepened in their realization and their steadfastness. It was beautiful to see. I think the videos should be really good and I look forward to sharing them with you. One man, whose girlfriend had brought him and had no idea what he was coming into, came up to the coach. He first looked under the coach, checked under the zafu, behind the coach and rather gruffly told me he was a skeptic. He finally sat down and said he watched so many people sitting on this spot burst out in tears or laughter he wanted to check to see if there was something going on behind the scenes. Within a few minutes he said, "It seems so easy," and burst into laughter himself. It was a very sweet weekend.

I am deeply grateful for the love that pours forth from all directions. One of the gifts of cancer is that in the past it was easy for me to love, but it was harder to let the love in, to receive. Now I am receiving on the deepest levels and it breaks my heart open to deeper gratitude. Thank you, thank you, thank you.