Promises to Keep | Catherine Viel

By Catherine Viel, February 24, 2023

(Golden Age of Gaia)

February 23, 2023

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
~Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening



As I review upcoming medical appointments for feline and human family members, the phrase blazes through my head: I’m so ready to be done with all this. I’m sure somewhere there is someone who’s not dealing with illness in family and/or self, and I confess, I envy them. I was once such a person, and I envy that younger version of me.

Is there anything to “do“ with the irritation of constantly being yanked around by the dissolution of the flesh? Is there a cure for this mental malaise? I hear the whispers of, take a deep breath, be still and drink in all the golden light that’s flowing to you from heavenly sources…

Sound like good advice, so I take the breath and imagine an inflow of benevolence. When that minute is over, the illnesses remain, the responsibility hasn’t shifted to ethereal sources (as far as I know, they’re not able to drive dependents to doctors’ appointments), and the trudging and the drudgery continue.

Oh, woe is me. Have I added the sin of self-pity to that of envy?

*****



The self-pity and envy burble up from a bottomless well of hurt feelings that overtakes me now and then, for no discernible reason.

It’s a plaintive, voiceless lament that sighs through me like wind through the gap-boarded buildings of a Gold Rush ghost town. When I put words to it, it says: I was promised. I was promised a beautiful and bountiful life without illness or despair.

I’m not quite sure what this (surely illogical) feeling is or where it came from. I access the old promise by recalling the delights of Alice Keck Park Memorial Garden in Santa Barbara, watching turtles sun themselves on rocks in the miniature lake. Or listening to the sundown susurration of the vast Pacific, its tide pattern broken by the Channel Islands, as I meander along Hendry’s Beach and watch a single paraglider drift across the sky.



Is it a memory of freedom? Is it effortless connection with all around me, almost an assimilation because there is no delineation between what I see and hear, the sand beneath my feet, the salt air on my skin, and “me“?

In this connectedness, this beingness without beginning or end or edges between it and me, there is no allowance for illness. There is no open door letting in the sly trickle of disease or old age.

That brief sensation of endlessness and connectedness was both a taste and a promise of what should be.

And then it vanished. And the dreariness and discomfort of life in this body, on this planet, at this time, obliterated it.

*****



I’m not sure it’s possible to invite in what I know can be, has been. What I have felt and known. The discomfort and dreariness have overpowered the promise of that which I know should be.

At this point—slogging through worldwide upheaval and suffering as we do under a crushing level of deception and manipulation—a ten-minute walk on the beach is an insipid cure.

I feel that the promise I was given (and perhaps given to humanity) has been detoured and delayed almost beyond redemption.



I hope that’s not the case. In the moments when the sorrowful soughing through my mental ghost town subsides, and I remember the sharp wind off the ocean and the tar-flecked sand under my feet at Hendry‘s Beach, a pinpoint of bright promise appears, a shooting star, one horizon to another.

Don’t give up, that brief flare of light implores. You were promised. Peace and radiance and abundance in this life, in this body. The promised reality exists. Hard as it is to feel it and believe it and know it, this reality is within you, and manifesting in that invisible cauldron of pre-reality. It’s much, much stronger than those forces trying to make you believe it is not.

I take that scorned deep breath and sit for that minute. And promise myself, a promise I will keep, a stroll at Hendry’s. Not when things are better and when I am free, but now. I’ll sweeten the pot with a pastry and coffee from that beachside café I hope is still there. And I’ll wave to the paragliders when their shadows flick across my upturned face.