reflecting, wisdom

be here now

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I had been meditating for several years. I had learned to meditate – been given a particular mantra by my teacher, a healer I’d studied with over the course of those years. She required that her students practice meditation, twice a day. I was faithful to my practice. In the morning, I’d meditate for the first time as I sat up in bed each day. In the afternoon, I’d often close the door of my office and sit in silence, repeating the mantra to myself, for 20 minutes.

At the time, I’d heard stories of the healer’s other students when we gathered. It seemed that out-of-this world, even strange experiences were common to them. I listened with interest. And I knew that I had not experienced any of those things. Was I doing something wrong? I didn’t think so. And I continued the practice, twice a day, morning and afternoon.

Jeff and I were traveling. We were staying in his mother’s house in Brookfield, in the room that Jeff and Randy had shared as boys. I woke up and lay in bed for a few moments. I sat up in the bed. Then – I sat in complete, utter silence. I didn’t hear the sounds of Jeff’s mother moving around in the house. I didn’t hear the distant sound of traffic along Capitol Drive – a major traffic artery that held bumper to bumper traffic each morning. I sat in a complete and total silence.

And then – my busy mind began its constant chatter – again. Monkey mind, it’s been called. I knew that mind well. By any name, it’s the way of minds, it seems.

*

As I continued to meditate faithfully, twice a day, another, more subtle movement of my mind became clear to me. I realized – a surprise to me that simply arrived – that I was fully present in my life. When I sat with someone, I was present to them. My mind was not planning what I needed to do next. I was not constantly worrying about the day’s events. I was present to the person I sat with.

Now that I’m retired, I no longer practice meditation – although I still know my mantra. From time to time, Jeff asks me to tell him my mantra – he knows that a rule I was given by my teacher was to never share my mantra with anyone else. EVER. And I haven’t.

But my busy mind – some have called it “monkey mind” – no longer rules my life, as it did for so many years. I’m sorry I acted on its foolishness when I was younger. I hope that some of the decisions I made were good!

A few years after I had retired from full time ministry, I was serving a small congregation alongside another pastor. We were each 1/4 time (figure that out! ). I preached every other week and kept in touch with parishioners and visited in hospitals when needed. It was an easy gig, and the particular people at the little church made it easy. They were a kind group of folks, and together with them and the other pastor, I negotiated a move to another congregation, and gave up the church building to a large group of Korean language people who still call the place their home.

Early one Sunday morning, I woke early, long before the alarm clock was set to go off. My busy mind – my “monkey” mind – was busy, turning over and over again some unfinished business of the last week. Then – I wish I’d known this was possible, long before this moment – I told myself I wasn’t going to do that anymore. My mind stopped. The thoughts that had seemed in control a few moments before were quiet.

And I have never done that again. Ever.

BE HERE NOW

What a joy to be present to life’s precious moments… photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert

memories, remembering

My uncle Pete

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I guess some people would call Uncle Pete a “blowhard”. He did have a tendency to talk loudly in a room filled with people, and to lend his certain extraverted charm to that room.

Even so, Uncle Pete was a favorite of mine.

I watched him as my Uncle Johnny – the smart one, the sibling with the “interesting” past – spoke. Then, Uncle Pete was quiet and listened, with a certain reverence, to every word. I’m not sure how I learned the secret, but word was that Uncle Pete only rose to the rank of Sergeant First Class in the Army because of Uncle Johnny. As I write now, I can see the look in Uncle Pete’s eyes as he listened. He held Uncle Johnny, his eldest sibling, in the highest regard.

Uncle Pete was handsome. In my eyes, anyway, Uncle Pete was handsome. And Uncle Pete knew how to be an Uncle. That’s a difficult quality to explain. But Uncle Pete had it. When I was dating Jeff – who would go on to be my life partner, my husband, Uncle Pete quietly spoke to me one day: “I can see he’s showing more affection to you now.”

After I had moved to the Bay Area from Milwaukee, and after Jeff and I had moved around a fair amount, we lived in San Leandro. At the time, The Oak Knoll Navy Hospital operated in Oakland. My Aunt Athalie – Uncle Pete’s wife, the mother of their daughter, Michelle – was being operated on for the serious arthritis she suffered. I went to visit her, and when I arrived, Uncle Pete was there with her in the private room. He was quiet as she and I talked. After I’d been to seminary, I think some members of the family held me in some suspicion, and I count Uncle Pete among them. And so Uncle Pete – usually a boisterous presence in any room – stayed silent.

Still, after I’d visited with Aunt Athalie, as I left the room, Uncle Pete walked beside me to the elevator, then walked with me from the hospital to my car. He was quiet the whole way. He made sure I drove out of the parking lot safely before he returned to the hospital.

*

In 1995, I was sent by the Bishop to serve a small, half-time Church appointment in South San Francisco. I’ve always considered it a quirk of fate that the church to which I was sent was in a development of single family homes built in the hills of South San Francisco after World War 2. I say “quirk of fate” because the church had been built in the development where Uncle Pete and Aunt Athalie’s modest home stood. I can recite the address today. I’d known the address since I was a child, and had arrived at exactly the place where I’d arrived in my early teens; in a hot, humid Wisconsin summer, I’d taken an imagined trip from my family’s upper flat clear across the country to — Alta Mesa Drive, South San Francisco. The people of Aldersgate United Methodist Church (the church has since built a new building and changed its name), who made sure I had a nice lunch waiting for me every Sunday, would sometimes give me a meal to take over to Uncle Pete and Aunt Athalie.

My mother had never liked Aunt Athalie. I knew that, although I expect no words to that effect were ever spoken. And I think – again, these thoughts are my own – that my mother was jealous of Uncle Pete. Pete had been my grandmother’s youngest child and her favorite. My mother had grown up in a home filled with drinking and parties, their own kind of chaos. And while she loved her father, her relationship with her mother was more complicated. Maybe Mom had expected her mother to protect her from the abuse she suffered in her mother’s house. Still, the way these things happen, Mom was the one who carefully cared for my grandmother in her final years. But in my years getting to know Aunt Athalie, I came to love her. I miss her now.

When Uncle Pete developed Alzheimer’s, he would wander around the housing development. He might have been a nuisance, or worse, to other people. Instead, the men of the neighborhood, who knew Pete was a veteran, accepted and explained his wandering: “Pete fought in three wars,” they’d say. He was safe.

Aunt Athalie called me the day Uncle Pete turned violent – a symptom of Alzheimer’s – and asked for reassurance that if I called the police to help her, they would not take Uncle Pete to jail. I called the police local to the neighborhood and had their assurance. And so they came to take Uncle Pete to the hospital, and later a facility, where he would die.

And I have a fond memory of a visit Jeff, my mother, and I made to see Uncle Pete in the facility. He was safe there. His caregivers brought him into a small room where my mother, my cousin Michelle, her husband, Jeff, and I sat around a table. I don’t think Uncle Pete knew us at all, although he was loud and boisterous. When the visit was over, we walked outside together into the beautiful Bay Area day. As we walked away, my mother turned back. The rest of us waited as she stood again in front of her little brother, Pete, and as she gently reached up to touch his face.

“I can think of younger days, when living for my life was everything a man could want to do. I could never see tomorrow, for I was never told about the sorrow…” words and music by Barry and Robin Gibb, 1971

reflecting

Me and Mister O’Reilly

Mary Elyn Bahlert

Mr. O’Reilly was my Junior High Science teacher. I don’t remember much about him, except that he was old – most of my teachers were old by my standards… after all, I was in Junior High, and that he had gray hair and always wore a suit. Teachers dressed formally in those days. Other than the memory I’m about to share, all I remember about Mr. O’Reilly is that, on a warm, warm autumn day, when the windows of Peckham Junior High School were open to let in the clean, fresh air of the city, he sat at his desk, and – commenting on a fly that had flown into the window – told us a strange bit of information: if the fly were to land on a piece of food we were eating, whatever the fly had lit on before – the edge of a bedpan in a nearby nursing home, for example, and if said fly then landed on our hand, and if we did not wash our hands before we ate a meal – the germs that germy fly carried would transfer from the edge of the bedpan onto our food. And then into us/me.

Ugh. Enough of that memory – except to say: I’ve never forgotten that particular lesson. Wash your hands, people…

By the time I entered Junior High School, my school day began early and ended late in the afternoon. In Junior High I brought my lunch each day in a brown paper bag I carried along with my books. In each bag was a sandwich made with homemade bread, a piece of fruit, and maybe a sweet treat that Mom had baked. And by the time I entered Junior High, walked under the viaduct at 35th and Fond du Lac Avenue, I was in classes with young people who were, really, from the “other side of the tracks.” My classmates were no longer all the children of working class factory workers. My classmates often came from homes where Dad had a job that required a suit, and where Mom was not simply a housewife, but a woman who worked in an office, or who had been a nurse before she stayed at home, a home that the family owned.

And I was sensitive to all these things. I noticed.

One day, Mr. O’Reilly called my name as I passed him and another teacher, on my way to my assigned chair at a table in the cafeteria. I stopped in front of the tall teacher as he stood next to another teacher, a younger woman. They had been talking, and I somehow knew that they had been comparing the students they taught. Mr. O’Reilly – apparently to make a point – asked me where I lived. I understood completely in that moment that he expected me, a student of his in an accelerated program, to give him an answer other than the answer I gave: “I live on 28th and Locust.” Mr. O’Reilly looked at me with a surprised look on his face.

In Junior High, I was already sensitive to the homes and the kind of work my schoolmates’ parents had. I understood that I was not one of them. Later in college, I would take a class in the humanities about social class. In Junior High, I felt the tug of my difference, I saw the quality of the clothes my classmates wore – different from my often home-made clothes, and I expect I felt ashamed. I did not feel shame wash over me, wash over my body and mind as well as my emotions, in that moment in the school cafeteria, as I answered Mr. O’Reilly’s question. But I was keenly aware of what that moment was about.

In college, I would take a class about social class. These days, I’m rereading a text from that class: The Hidden Injuries of Class, Jonathan Cobb and Richard Sennet, 1972.

After my encounter with Mr. O’Reilly, I sat at the table with my friends and ate my lunch, ate my sandwich made of homemade bread. And I have never forgotten the sting of being from the other side of the tracks, for all the life of privilege I have lived.

A view of Mt. Fuji from Hakone, Japan, 2026. That’s Jeff in the bright orange jacket, seeing “the shy one” as she chose to show herself to us before we left to travel to Kanazawa. My own photo.

poetry, remembering

I’m From…

Mary Elyn Bahlert

I am from
frame flats with steep staircases, lining city streets.
Daddy’s eyes, sparkling. Momma’s worries.
Baby sister, big brother.

The smell of yeast bread as I climb the narrow steps,
cozy.
The smell of beer, always.
Cereal for breakfast,
peasant borscht for supper at five.
On the back porch, tracing Sputnik across the sky.

Shame: “we don’t say that.”

I am from
Steelworkers Union 19806,
bargaining rights and hoping for overtime.
Snow drifts. Winter winds. Slow springs, long-awaited,
lilacs in big dishes, coleus leaves, hollyhocks.

Moving – again.

I am from
up North and cooler by the Lake,
humid nights, thunderstorms crashing from west to east,
short, languid summers,
sheets fresh from drying in the sun.

I am from
hanging with the smart kids,
the Center Street library,
laughter, and lots of tears.
Anger that never cooled. Warm and loving folks.
Books. Books. Books.

Old World people and me –
tiptoeing into the New World.


“I am from,” Mary Elyn Bahlert, from Moments, published 2026

photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 12/2025