Hello,
This is Jacob Watson.
I am sharing from my book,
Gifts of Grief,
A man's revelations after sudden loss.
This is chapter nine,
Red Maple Tree.
I will offer a period of meditation,
Quiet time for you.
Please use the silence for yourself and consider it a gift from me.
Drop down into the gift that is always waiting for you,
The silence.
I still have a photograph of Christine and me standing in front of the red maple tree.
It was a very special day,
Our wedding day,
And I was wearing what our children called my pajamas,
A silk shirt that I had made especially for the occasion.
And Christine was wearing an antique wedding dress that she bought in Portland's Old Port District.
The boundaries looked clear,
But there was the red maple tree right on the line.
Because I agreed with poet Robert Frost when he said,
Good fences make good neighbors,
I contracted with a surveying company to run the line and eventually got a map.
And yes,
The boundary line went right through the red maple tree.
Knowing where the boundary line existed in the human realm allowed me to look at the larger picture,
The divine realm,
And to see the boundary between life and death.
I realized that while boundaries do exist in the human realm,
They do not exist in the divine realm.
Christine was with me as never before,
And she would always be with me.
Looking at the photograph of us standing in front of the red maple tree on our wedding day,
I could just barely see her different colored eyes,
One brown and one blue.
So the more I could inhabit the divine world,
The closer I was to Christine with her different colored eyes.
Seeing boundaries in this new way allowed me to experience and have the gift of freedom.
I am now more free to express myself in the divine realm and in the human realm.
Sitting out on the deck in warm weather,
I look up and see again the green leaves providing sheltered harbors.
And the red maple tree comes from behind me,
Sending its branches out over me.
Yes,
To shelter me and also protect me and remind me that I am loved.
And that love comes from both the divine world and the human world.
I forget,
Of course,
Because I am human,
And yet the red maple tree is here to remind me.
This is true all times of year,
Fall,
Winter,
Spring,
And summer.
In the fall,
The red maple tree sheds its leaves,
So I have to pick them up,
Put them in bags,
And put them out on the street for the city to collect.
In the winter,
The branches are still there,
Black against the winter sky.
And in spring,
The small green buds of the red maple tree's leaves appear.
And then the flourishing of summer when the leaves open and spread and cover me.
What feels more true than ever is that boundaries do not exist.
They are a figment of our imagination,
Our human imagination.
It is a gift from Christine to remember that this is all in my imagination.
By all,
I mean boundaries.
We'll now have some meditation,
Some quiet time to reflect on these ideas about boundaries.
As our quiet time,
Our meditation time,
Comes to a close,
Please be kind and gentle to yourself as you make this transition.
It was a gift to me that Christine knew everything about me.
She knew that I struggled with boundaries,
The divine and the human.
And this gift grew even larger after she died.
Her love became unconditional,
I mean really unconditional.
She knew me so well and that love gave me freedom,
A freedom that I treasure.
I understand now what Christine was trying to teach me,
That everything leads to the divine.
She might not have used the same words,
But that's what she was trying to get across to me,
That everything leads to the divine.
Because she is in the divine realm now,
Everything leads to Christine,
A gift.
