My Oprah

I just spent the last 4 days with an Oprah.  Not THE Oprah.  But with a woman who possesses many of Oprah’s most exquisite qualities.  Her intelligence.  Her beauty.  Her strength.  Her power, which is never called into question.  Her loyalty.  Her ethics.  And her PROFOUND, inimitable ability to nurture others.

Sometimes we don’t know where our greatest source of help will come from nor do we know why it comes from the source it comes from.  It’s as if it falls from the sky and instead of going “splat” and ruining our day, we catch it with a buoyancy and everything suddenly shifts.  Even if for a moment, problems do not seem so overbearing or unresolvable, traffic doesn’t seem so terrible, the diagnosis seems less daunting, and because of this magnificent “fall from the sky,” our own clarity seems to rise up like a phoenix out of the ashes.

My Oprah was incredibly puzzled by the overwhelming response of gratitude she was given by many whom she had held in her custodianship.  This is also where she became humbled.  Because something which was so natural for her and inherent to her nature, became nearly impossible for her to believe would or could be life-changing to others.  But what if some of us had no one else?  What if some of us had never been told we were beautiful or magical or had something magnificent to offer by one we could trust and knew was a reliable source?  Suddenly, our nurturing Oprah, with her beautiful open arms was right there telling us what she saw so clearly.  Pushing us and probing us and making us sweat one moment and applauding us the next, so we knew we could trust her words.

Life-changing.

I think this is the reason Oprah Winfrey feels she needn’t be a mother.  She is so mothering in her nature to so many she meets and begins to know.  Our Oprah is in fact, a mother, and without a stretch of the imagination, you can see she is tirelessly devoted to her family.  It’s just her nature.  And if it is your own, you meet her right there.  

It’s always best to stick with one’s nature.  Square peg, round hole.  No way.  Our Oprah  is fully who she is at all times.  You’d never see her smile if she doesn’t mean it.  No.  She says what she means and means what she says.  She is a teacher.  As honest as they come.  And that’s why I say you never know where the greatest source of your help will come from.  

I follow my instincts.  When I don’t, I really dislike myself and put myself through hell for a long time.  Life does it to me as well.  So I told my Oprah the flat truth about my obstacles which everyone has guided me against doing.  But I had to once I saw the hours of the upcoming work.  Physically, there was just no way I would have the stamina now after 4 surgeries and losing 18 pounds to jump in with a train that is already running full speed.  

I barely gave any details.  I only mentioned the last surgery.  She knew I needed to take care of myself and that we needed to change the plan.  

That same day.  A check arrived in the mail.  We simply don’t know where our greatest source of help will come from.  

What I am going through now is nothing short of hell.  But all I can do is keep going.  I can’t afford my surgery.  I can’t afford the lawsuit.  I can’t afford my life.  

But that is not how I want to feel.

I don’t want to duck.  I HAVE a right to be here and I have been fighting for so long.  Feeling so sad about what has been crumbling in my body and crumbling around me that it has actually hurt my soul.

I think about the Buddha under the Bodhi tree.  He sat and every temptation was thrown his way and he took his seat as if to say “I have a right to be here.”  And because of the strong seat he took, all of those arrows just melted away.  

But my battle is to accept my Oprah.  Her open arms which only want to love and nurture me and see my gifts.  My battle is to accept the gift which was awaiting me at home with humility instead of powerlessness, instead of falling to the floor and sobbing and running around trying to figure out what I could do to repay the gift.  

To slow down and accept that after significant trauma, four major surgeries, another one on the way, 3 lawsuits, and major financial troubles, that“I have a right to be here” and accept help from wherever it may come.  To be grateful for this day when I met my own Oprah who chose to love and nurture me.  To be grateful for anyone who can truly see me.  My humor, my brightness (which somehow shines through even as I am in constant pain).

That now it is time to change. 

Battles will always be there.  People will ALWAYS wage wars against me for some bloody reason.  But I am always going to be the one who is like my Oprah.  Like Oprah herself.  Embracing life with love, nurturing others, choosing LOVE no matter how much pain arises.  

When does your life start?  In Les Miserables, the lyric says, “There is a life about to start when tomorrow comes.”  Now I love Les Mis.  But I take issue with that line.  Because I have faced enough loss to know that is an ignorant statement.  It starts NOW... or it doesn’t start at all.  Surrender doesn’t start tomorrow.  It starts RIGHT NOW.  CHANGE is a decision and you can say “I’ll begin in the morning.”  But firstly, it is immensely presumptuous to think you will still be here in the morning and it beats away at the level of your own commitment to your desire to change when you say such a thing.  

And so!!!  I want to be someone for the rest of my life who shows up as a force of love and support and help to people who need it and as someone who believes it to be possible that needs can be seen and heard and responded to.

Here’s to all of the Oprah’s out there.

To all of you.  I say, I love you.  And I thank you.

And I always always will.

God bless.

4.6.12

Jill Bacharach

One Day At a Time

This is it. This is it. 

This is life, the one you get 

So go and have a ball. 

This is it. This is it 

Straight ahead and rest assured 

You can’t be sure at all. 

So while you’re here enjoy the view 

Keep on doing what you do 

So hold on tight we'll muddle through 

One day at a time, One day at a time. 

So up on your feet. Up on your feet 

Somewhere there’s music playing. 

Don’t you worry none 

We’ll just take it like it comes. 

One day at a time, one day at a time. 

One day at a time, one day at a time. 

One day at a time, one day at a time. 

One day at a time, one day at a time.

By the time Bonnie Franklin hit the network in 1975, my mother had already been divorced twice and I was being raised in a single parent household for a while already.  In 1975, this was the very first demonstration of single-motherhood on primetime television and I felt at home.  

I am certain others tuned in because of Valerie Bertinelli (transforming in front of us from cute to beautiful) or because of their own fascination with the legacy of the Phillips family and a certain voyeurism in wanting to see if Mackenzie would end up like her father.  Mackenzie’s behind the scenes drama was that she was addicted to cocaine and heroine and hiding the scars of having an incestuous relationship with him.  This “profile” made it extremely challenging to work with her on the show because she would often not show up at work.

But I was tuning in because Bonnie was single parenting.  And at the tender age of 8, I am certain that felt I was doing the same.  Parenting myself.  

I looked to her for her honesty and her forthrightness.  She was real.  I know I saw what was happening in her heart and that soothed me.  She was spunky and she was courageous and she didn’t always get it “right.”  Her girls were often angry with her and she had to deal with what that felt like in front of the world.  The messiness of not knowing if she was scarring them, or helping them.  It was beautiful to watch her growing her own self every week.  Even if it was just for half an hour in the land of television where a laugh track would play and the camera would zoom in on moments of heightened drama oft-times with “TO BE CONTINUED” leaving me breathless and wanting more.

*

Bonnie Franklin, the woman who played Ann Romano, from 1975-1984, died this past Friday, March 1, 2013 at the tender age of 69 of pancreatic cancer.  She was a renegade.  For me, and for many others.  At only 5’ 3 inches (same as me!!!- and I only began to grow in college for those of you who are reading on from High School), she was a powerhouse.  A force to be reckoned with.  She could punish “Julie” or “Barbara” and send them to their rooms with a simple look.  

While Mary was the first divorcee and working woman on television, Bonnie played the first single mom and that was truly groundbreaking.  It meant more than a little something to me and I’m sure it meant a helluva lot to many others.  What I was always grateful for was that she expressed doubt.  She never went at things with self-righteous indignation.  Yes, she would send her girls to their rooms, but she would feel tender and sad and ache inside for them to forgive her.  She questioned herself.  And we always had the chance to feel her humanity.  She showed us her wrinkles and her flaws and growing up with her, I grew to truly love her as a mother.  

Dear Bonnie, I wish to offer you a final bow.  

I remember when you performed in the original cast of “Applause” with Ms. Lauren Bacall in 1970 for two years (based on the film “All About Eve”) and sang the title song “Applause.”  If only you could hear them now.  

You can’t be sure at all. 

So while you’re here enjoy the view 

Keep on doing what you do 

So hold on tight we'll muddle through 

One day at a time, One day at a time.

3.4.13

Jill Bacharach

The Living

How do we let go of the living?

In Hebrew the word tikkun translates to mean “repair” or “healing to full potential.”  It is what many of us desire, dedicate or lives towards, rip our hearts apart for, abuse ourselves for, go the distance for, take leaps we would never have dreamed of taking, show ourselves our courage in ways we never would have imagined... for an ounce of healing, an ounce of relief from the pain of a loss we cannot bear for one more moment.

How do we let go of the living?

How do we let go of the living when we know they go on in spite of us?  When the bottom line is, they no longer want to love us?  

I think the first thing we have to do is let go of wanting to know “WHY?”  Wanting to know why the others have made the choice or choices they have made.

That why is the TITANIC without a single lifeboat.  It tears and rips you apart and tears away at the fibre of your being and literally can beat away at the essence of your soul if you keep asking the question.

So we simply must stop.  We must.  Because it will drown you.  No lifeboat.  No one there to pull you out.  No one there to monitor you and to tell you to stop it.  No one to tell you are on or off track.  Doing well or poorly.  

Nothing but your own heartbeat.  And when you can hear it beating, then you actually know that you are not sinking.  That god has opened your eyes for another day for some purpose even if you don’t know what it is.  But it is not for the sake of asking why.  This is one thing I know for sure.

I think the purpose is for us to keep going.  Even if we are wasting away.  Even if we don’t know how.  Even if we feel so betrayed by love and loss that we have betrayed our very own selves to the point that we don’t recognize the reflection in the mirror.  The wasted shadow of who we once were or perhaps the figure hiding inside a protective covering.  

How do we let go of the living?

Maybe by pardoning ourselves our own humanity.  We are not the monsters others are determined to believe we are.  Some people must turn us into a delusion because they cannot face the full truth.  The truth about love.  The truth about regret.  The truth about mistakes.  The truth about betrayal.  The truth about grief.  They simply cannot hold it all.  And so they carry stories which simply make us ugly.  But if you are an authentic seeker, there is no hook.  

Healing can happen without agreeing on the truth no matter how sad or painful the story.  As long as you can hold the whole of the truth.  If part of the whole of it, is that you are not loved by someone you wish to be loved by, then until there is utter surrender and acceptance and a willingness to stop wishing it were different, there is no way to let go of the living.

We let go by not resisting what is real.  What is real.  And what is really happening in an ongoing reality even if it is one we resist.  Even if it pains us.  Even if we see a simple solution.  

Even if the living live in our hearts.

Godspeed.

2.5.13

Jill Bacharach

It Gawna Be Me

I have a penchant for watching films over and over.  Films which I think are noteworthy.  However, there is no doubt about it: I am a tough sell.  But as I have written, my list of great films is lengthy, and it would make many people fall to their knees.

A few nights ago, I watched the film The Help again.

Now the backstory to this is that I had heard Joan Rivers make a very offhand crack about the film which actually made me laugh, even though I genuinely LOVED the film.  But something about her embodiment and full conviction (and the tribe from which we both hail), just really cracked me up.  

But I digress.

I watched The Help again and I enjoyed it even more this time.  So much more.  

I mention it now because of Aibileene’s words from the end of the film.

“In just ten minutes, the only life I knew was done.  God says we need to love our enemies. It hard to do. But it can start by telling the truth. No one had ever asked me what it feel like to be me. Once I told the truth about that, I felt free.”

Don’t get me started about Viola Davis.  She was pure brilliance in this role.  And as I wrote in my last blog, my compassion has the capacity to take me out.  So the pain I felt was layered in a history I could draw from on far too many levels to name here.  But what is obvious and worth noting is that so often, we immediately love people (or feel repelled by them) based on the feelings they evoke within us from our past and it has very little to do with what is happening before us in real time.  

I noticed this when I lived in San Francisco for 11 years beginning in my early 20s.  I would hear a New York Jewish accent and I felt warmth and softness and tenderness in my heart, even if the person was being pushy, (as many of us are).  

Yesterday, as the year closed, part of the life as I knew it, did as well.  I tossed a part of myself and my heart into the fire which has been sitting in a question about my own freedom.  That’s why we forgive.  In order to get out of our own prisons.  No one can remove loss or pain or betrayal or hurt from us.  Not even god.  Not even my worried puppy who will crawl towards me in order to wipe away my tears.  Nothing but our own willingness to say “enough.”  “No more.”  “I lay this burden down.”  “I am whole right now as I am with these circumstances and this constitution.  Yes.  I am.”  It can take ten years.  Or it can take an instant.  Or it can take an army of love who reminds you of your own strength.  

Who knows what it will take for you?

Who knows what it will take for me?

But every day I keep trying, just like Aibileene from The Help.

And “it gawna be me.”

May you find forgiveness in your heart.

A blessed and safe New Year to All. 

1.1.13

Jill Bacharach

Next Trip

I have been looking for a job for several months and the truth of it is, it is a pretty ego-bashing endeavor no matter how much humility one possesses.  And I would say I have a fair amount.  

The other day, as I was filling out a questionnaire for one of my job applications, one of the questions which appeared was “What do you consider to be your greatest weakness?”  I took a deep breath and I knew immediately.  “My compassion.”  

I figured out a way to answer the question succinctly and poetically, and I felt okay with my answer because it is the truth.  But quite honestly, my fierce truth-telling may also be a deterrent in successfully landing a job as well.

Compassion.  I am far too compassionate and although this may be a good thing, it also has the capacity to take me out.  I feel and absorb the pain of others far too deeply and I suffer as a result.  It has been this way for me ever since I was a very young child.  

I have told this story before, but when I was six years-old, I saw an animated Christmas special about an orphaned girl named Roseanne and she began to sing a song with lyrics including “I’m all alone in the world.”  And at that tender age I began to cry.  But it was a cry I had not experienced before and I was utterly inconsolable.  I was bereft about this little child who was just like me but had no one to turn to.

Looking back, 38 years later, I understand that I was crying for myself but did not have the capacity to put words to these feelings.  Every time I feel “too much compassion,” there is a part of myself that is identifying with the circumstances which come to life inside of me and feels the pain of the truth I see before my eyes.  The pain of tragedy, of death, of loss which takes so many forms.  

*

Recently, two acquaintances of mine told me that they became an “US.”  And this was one of the first moments in a while where I could truly feel myself again.  I found myself joyful and buoyant and smiling every time I thought of them.  I found myself blessing their union every chance I could.  I found myself tickled with happiness even as my own union was experiencing pain and rupture.  I found myself feeling nothing but love, which is so beautiful because I truly believe that love is generous.  And so this news was affording me my own experience of myself, and for that, and for them, I am deeply, irrevocably grateful.  Not to mention this is an utterly “genius” union.  

It is poignant to mention this now because as this cycle around the sun comes to a close, many of us are experiencing a knock-down-drag-out fight with the world.  Those of us who survived the Hurricane, did so with pride and dignity and community.  Those of us who survived Newtown, did so with few words but prayers which were heard around the world.  But many of us are exhausted from this year for reasons which are our own and unique to each of us, but which cut so close to bone.

What I see with myself is that as I look around my home, I could give it all up.  I am so grateful for my beautiful dog who entrains so deeply with me and I am so grateful for the love that I feel in my heart for all whom I have placed there and I hold there with nothing but tenderness and exquisite care.  

Of course, I need to find a way to pay the bills and that seems to be a tremendous pressing cloud of fear and terror right now, but when all is said and done, all that matters to me is that those I love know it and feel it and understand where it germinates from.  I could keep giving away my possessions and it wouldn’t count for anything.  They could be taken from me, and it wouldn’t count for anything.  If my heart isn’t beating, listening, loving, honoring and bowing, then I have gone very far away from the source from which I came.

I hope that this next trip around the sun will be beautiful and inspiring for us all.  I hope it will be filled with truth and hope and trust and forgiveness and a powerful love that we can draw faith from.  

I hope.  

I hope this for us all.

And I won’t give up hoping.

A blessed, safe, healthy new year filled with love for all.

12.29.12

Jill Bacharach

It's Not Just Pie!

For much of my life, I have felt like an outsider looking in.  Peering in through a window or a doorway, a fence or a gate, at the action and feeling “apart” from it all.  Wishing I were a part of things, but feeling separate.

There are moments in films, when the action slows down, and the protagonist begins to move in slow motion and things start to sound louder in his/her head and clank and crash about and you see him/her walk away slowly to move away from the crowd so as to compose him/herself.  Those are the moments when I feel the director pulling us up close in order to feel our own humanity.  What it feels like to feel alone and alienated amidst a crowd and amidst the noise inside your head all at once.

After experiencing a very traumatic loss nearly a decade ago, I began to recapitulate relationships which were beautiful and strong and loving and which would ultimately fail, thereby creating loss again.  This happened several times over the last decade although I am sure I am not alone.  But what I have seen is that I have become more and more withdrawn, even as it is not my nature to be that way.  More and more isolated, and more and more reclusive.

During Hurricane Sandy, a neighbor of mine offered me a chance to shower in her home because she had electricity and finally one day, I accepted.  It was one of the most nurturing moments I had experienced during that week and one I barely allowed myself because there were other issues to tend to on that same day.  

Just a few days ago, a community of neighbors of a dear friend of mine gathered together to bake pies to bring to Newtown, CT to help with the grief effort there.  When I arrived at the home, it was bustling with people all cutting and slicing.  Everyone was doing something.  And everything was running like clockwork, even as the smoke alarm went off several times.  

So many people filled this house and without question, showed up simply to help.  It was awe-inspiring to me (someone who grew up on the outside and then began to re-inscribe that idea that I was somehow “safer” on the outside).  My heart felt so safe because I was there simply for the purpose of giving.  I wasn’t there to speak about myself.  I wasn’t there to do what I could not do.  And I was proud to watch myself tend to those places.  Whereas in the past, I would’ve lifted a house over my head, given my recovery status, I was not lifting anything.  But work, I did.  I sliced apples as thinly as I possibly could and at one point, I was so enamored, that I learned how to bake pies!

It was so beautiful to me to bear witness to everyone’s techniques.  Some people were mechanical.  Some were organic.  Some were nervous.  Some were free of worry altogether.  Some were so grounded, you could plug yourself into them for days.  There was so much to learn from everyone there.  But just to be there was part of my soul’s journey.  Just to be part of a community desiring to help another community.  

It was beautiful.  

And I learned how to bake a pie!

Those pies are now being distributed in Newtown, CT. with so much love, and heart, and the depth of how community comes together to offer hope in a time of darkness.

God bless all who helped in this effort, and god bless all of those whose hearts need to be held in light.  May we all continue to find ways to be with each other now.

Go to http://www.theworldneedsmorepie.com  to donate to this effort (or even just to get the recipe).  

12.18.12

Jill Bacharach

God is in Everything

From the time I was two years old, loss and grief have been a theme which continued to play out in my life.  As I grew that play turned harder, tougher, longer and more virulent.   

Each time, the growing pains came with a magnitude of costs to me and now as an adult, past middle-age, the costs are becoming more challenging to recover from.

I recall an image of myself as a child.  Inside what I felt was deep sadness, but my will was so darn resilient.  The image which comes to mind is the image of me in my “happy place.”  In the water.  I don’t know if I would really look happy to other people, but that is never something which has carried much weight with me.  I see it.  I can see it.  I know what it meant to me to be there in that moment.  Carried and held by the water.  Maybe it was from another life.  Maybe I was escaping.  But it was there that I was buoyant and happy and fully alive and joyful.

Grief can take you out.  And you can choose to allow it to define you.  Joan Didion wrote about it in The Year of Magical Thinking.  She said “people who have lost someone have a certain look... recognizable to those who have seen that look on their own faces.- They look naked because they think themselves invisible.”

Some people sit in the questions of why.  They are legitimate questions.  But I do not find them useful to me even as I hurt.  Even as I have responded to hurt by cultivating relationships which have recapitulated the precise hurts and losses I have needed to heal.  The precise things which I have set out to heal and have set my life on a trajectory to heal.  Even as... 

I recall a highly regarded teacher offering a teaching once which said, “If god is in everything, then you cannot say, BUT NOT in this cancer.”  

I know how hard that one is to swallow.  Cancer.  I know.  I get it.  You may not believe me, but I get how hard it may be to begin there.  But that was the transmission I was given that day and it had a huge impact.  

We can spend our lives fighting against what we have been given or we can step into what we are presented with.  I am not like too many who come across my path.  I feel it all.  Those who know me see it in my eyes.  I have watched how many have run in the other direction.  But I am committed to a path of being truly who I am and not a version of what makes another more comfortable in my presence.  This path is about getting to the core of ourselves and our deepest understandings so that we can bring our greatest clarity and and clearest hearts to one another so that we can come from love and not from hurt.  Does the purity of heart scare people?  Reports have come back to me that it does.  But all I can do is keep being faithful to my path and my own inner work and my own healing and pray that I am doing good work, and loving from the clearest and strongest place that I can.  Keep repairing the fractures which live inside of me and not allow them to be passed on.  Because those fractures have harmed me but I cannot not allow them to become me.  What I can do is to allow the harm to stop here.  Right now. 

If god is in everything, god is in everything.  God is in this karma which we have been given.  Yes, I DID think the hard part was over.  But maybe it just isn’t.  And sometimes words mean very little.  Sometimes its even hard to find faith.  Sometimes things fall apart completely in ways no one could possibly even imagine before anything can even begin to be rebuilt.  

But if god is in everything, then god is in everything.

A gesture.  The timing of when a question is asked.  The way in which you bear witness.  

I saw a woman today and she had a very pronounced limp.  She had a job and I have been looking for work for 7.5 months to no avail.  She was beautiful.  I wondered why she had that limp and thought how beautiful that it wasn’t an obstacle to her livelihood.  I felt so delighted to bear witness to that.  We began to speak privately and because the scar which spans across my neck is so obvious, it opened the door to a comment about herself and so I asked what her disability was.  She told me.  It was a stunning conversation.  She felt held with respect and I felt honored to listen with love and compassion to the depths of what few would ever ask.  

How she changed me.  Just exquisite.  

Step by step, I will not be defined by that look which is “recognizable to those who have seen that look on their own faces.”

I dedicate my inner life to healing and to loving.  

Some of the lights have gone out lately but when I see the reflection of that little girl who carried so much sadness but willed herself back to life, I know that god is not just in everything... but more specifically, in me.  And in everyone of us.

God bless.

11.30.12

Jill Bacharach