Carolyn

This dear, beautiful, splendid human being is my friend Carolyn, who I met while we were both doing time in Texas in the decade that began with Y2K. For years she, two other friends, and I had breakfast (at her house, cooked by her loving hands) once a week, and it kept us sane and connected with our hearts while living in a place that was, both in climate and social atmosphere, inimical to us all. This is a surprise visit from her...as she is driving between Seattle, where she is clearing out her parents' house, and California, where she now lives.

Carolyn is a poet, a mom, partner of a good man, and by training a holistic nurse, completing (in the days of our breakfast group) a PhD in wisdom studies, which she finished in 2010. For her dissertation she did field work with nurses in Kuwait and studied approaches to healing and caring for others in Sufism and Islam. Now she's dean of doctoral studies for Wisdom University and is on the cutting edge of expanding online course offerings and posing challenges to traditional universities. There goes yet another "gatekeeper" of the world's treasures.

Her beautiful bittersweet smile comes with our conversation: over the last year, she had a hip replacement, both her parents sickened and needed a great deal of care and then died, her husband's mother died, her youngest child was married, and her other two children had their first babies. Her husband has been working in Indonesia, so she has been needing the strength of her considerable wisdom to get through the year...and yet, as you see here, she emerges with a tender smile of both joy and sorrow. We talked about death, about what is a good death, about births and grandchildren, about all the things that really matter. We talked about friendship and holding each other in our hearts while letting go. We stopped talking and breathed together. We held between us the ever-fragile, ever-impermanent wonder of time and life coming and passing.