Bye, bye Cotchett

I wrote an email to friends who had been in the fire. We had just been dumped by our superduper lawyer, Joe Cotchett. This was done very rudely. Now we are left once more without representation and must interview and go through the hassle of finding someone else. After I wrote that email, I kept feeling very uncomfortable. I lay awake last night listening to the storm blowing in from the east, and twisting and turning internally knowing sleep would not come with such agitation in my heart, the sense that I had missed something, something unseen and unacknowledged. Then it swept over me like the windblown pelting rain on the windows and roof. It is the loss. There will never be any "just compensation". It is gone. That's what the email I wrote had ignored and what my brief romance with Cotchett had hidden with the hope of his expertise.

This summer in my green oasis, I would forget about the fire until I raised my eyes to the mountains around me, a habit of many years, a moments pause in the day's activities, and whatever mess I was entangled with for the moment, I could look up and sense the broader life around me. I was often reminded of those words from Psalms "I will lift mine eyes to the hills from when cometh my help..." and then could return to the stubborn weeds in the garden, or the wheelbarrow of wood, or the hammer and nails, refreshed, released from the grip of the ego's agenda. Sometimes of course the sense of help wasn't there. It was just an inscrutable green maze. But there was always a moment of connection with something beyond my self imposed struggle.

Now when the habitual gesture arises and I gaze up, there is momentary shock and discontinuity, not the soothing spaciousness that lifted my heart. I know that eventually that will change, life goes on, wounds heal, ect ect and I also know that to try to escape the feeling of loss compounds the pain. The truth of loss is at once humbling and also accompanied by a sense of ease, an untangling and release of knotted energy. Nothing to hide from. Having seen the truth, I could sleep.