Author: Mary Elyn Bahlert

I am a spiritual seeker, a seeker who has "taken a drink from many cups." I love to accompany others on the deeper journey to witness to their True Self. Now a writer, photographer and poet, I have retired from full-time ministry as a pastor in downtown Oakland, CA.
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A Song in My Heart

Mary Elyn Bahlert

clefs-heart

I often wake these days with a song in my heart. I begin my day with my usual routines, and sometimes I don’t notice the song that is singing in me until later in the morning. Most days, I begin to hum the tune or sing the words of the song that is in my heart.

Through my life, I’ve taken to noticing the song in my heart. I listen to the words, singing them inside my head, or singing aloud into the house. The cat notices, and I think she smiles, a bit (who knows?).   When I remember the words – I am known for the encyclopedia of words to songs I carry within me – I sing them out loud, enjoying my voice, enjoying the memory of the words, and calling to mind the memories and images that arise.

When I was a girl, my mother had a lovely china music box with a tune I cannot name. I can still sing the notes, and often do. When I stop and notice the tune, my mother comes to mind. I see her face, I remember her voice, I wonder about her and her life. What a wonderful bit of beauty that music box was, in our working class flat with its narrow windows and steep, dark stairway down to the street lined with wonderful maple trees that would disappear, killed by disease, in the years ahead.
That music box is gone, too. Sometimes my sister and I mention it. Where did it go? Which one of us ended its role in our lives?  Where did it come from, an unusual player in the life of my mother?

And yet, that music box, with its unnamed melody, has not gone from our lives. We sing its song, its beautiful song, still.

We sing its holy song, the song that arrives from the depths, a gift to this day.

Sometimes the tune that plays in my head is from a later time in my life. I mimic Aretha Franklin, or John Lennon. My song takes on the cadence of some rock n’ roll song, and sometimes, I dance. I love to dance, and the song takes on movement, in my body, in my heart, in my house, in my life…

Every day has its theme, a theme decided in some deeper place within me, the place from which the melodies arise.  I am grateful for these songs; in earlier years, when work and schedules and calendars and meeting the needs of others – and the anxiety of meeting those needs – was so important in my life, I awoke many days without a song in my heart.  Did the songs go underground?  Were the songs like plants and animals that disappear in the winter?  Is this time of life a spring-time?

What is the melody for this time of life?

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Return

Mary Elyn Bahlert

IMG_0713Tundra graveyard, Unalaska, 1/2016

I returned home after almost 3 weeks away at the beginning of January.  I had an adventure with that small group of pilgrims who worship together in community at the UMC Mission church on Unalaska in the Aleutian Islands.  I learned many things, about the place and the people, and about myself.

That time during the holidays I stayed in the large, empty house that faced the Bering Sea, a luxury given to me as part of the adventure, and I was lonely, sometimes.
When my beloved arrived on January 31 to spend the last days of my adventure with me, I was grateful. I arrived early at the airport that boasts one runway in Unalaska, waiting with the others waiters: small children climbing onto the ledge that faced the window, dropping down just to see how far it was to the floor, then climbing up again, a couple of families waiting for the next plane to arrive and to leave, to take Mom or Grandpa away, a few strong, rough-looking men – fishermen, I supposed. I waited impatiently for the plane from Anchorage. It was a sunny day, and since it was not too windy, I expected flights to be able to make it from Anchorage to this “birthplace of the winds.”  When the plane arrived and so many others disembarked, and then the line ended, and I didn’t see Jeff,  my heart sunk. I was eight years old again, embarrassed and disappointed. I got up and walked around the small airport, wanting to ask someone: “will there be another flight?”
Within a few minutes, another plane descended onto that lonely runway, then another, and another. Jeff walked down the steps of the last plane, the last of the passengers (of course!). I was grateful and excited.

For about a day after his arrival, whenever I had the thought,  I said: “oh, thank you for coming!”

On New Year’s Eve, we welcomed the New Year in that isolated place with the best firework display I have ever seen, and from the warmth of my front window. On New Year’s Day we walked in a flurry of snow, we drove on an 2-lane highway along the sea to a lake hidden in the mountains, and we watched – in slow motion – as a large rock tumbled from the cliffs above us into the Bering, just like the sign had warned: “Beware of Falling Rocks.” Ouch! Surreal, too!

Just as quickly as the days passed during my time away, the days since my arrival home have taken the month of January.

I have the sense that I am still in transition, a transition to some different part of my life, a transition from being in a community to looking for a new community, a transition to the time when I will, like other folks in The Wisdom Years, be saying: “I’m more busy than I ever was!” I’m not there. Still, since my arrival home just after the beginning of this new year, invitations to new groups have arrived, and I’ve even been able to help a few folks with their own transitions. I suppose this transition – which I trust has a life of its own, although I might not always like the life it has! – is going somewhere, or maybe not.

I like the sense of time this time of life gives me. I can reflect across a number of decades filled with the world’s life and with many experiences of my own. I can see how times changed, and how they seem to be changing now. Do things ever really change?  I have more space in myself for other points of view, and for how my own life has unfolded. Sometimes, I grieve a bit for some part of myself that has played out again, over and over, and will not go away. I come to the place where I see that is simply who I was, and who I am.  No need to change, now.

My mind still moves quickly from one thought to the next, from one idea to another, from one significant memory to a less significant event in the present, from one image to another. That’s what the mind does, I think.  Another bit of acceptance.

Acceptance is such a lovely guest during a time of transition…

Home, again. Grateful, again. “I’m so glad you came!”