What Becomes a Legend Most
[I wrote these words at JP's request last year. When she first received them
she called me in tears of loving gratitude. After her crossing, her oldest
daughter wrote to me with an echo of both those tears and their specific
thankfulness. For this reason I re-evaluated my decision to keep the tribute
a matter of private business between Creator, me and Jeannine.]
The legend I tell could belong to any one of us. In fact, the key elements
resonate far beyond my personal experience. Jeannine Parvati is not
becoming a legend; she’s been one for years. Perhaps, over time, her
deathwalk will become legendary. We may find ourselves embracing parts
of her life’s path in ways we never expected. She may visit us in
dreamtime, during glorious yoga practice or perhaps while we’re standing
idly in a check-out line intent upon the most mundane of chores.
The profane nature of the human world, and our often illusory walk within it,
has very little to do with the way I’ve embraced and intend to continue
holding Jeannine’s spirit, soul, and my memories of her incredible mind &
body. Yet, in the most mundane and ordinary ways, I became close to
Jeannine. We spoke of our children, our gardens, our faltering memories.
We could have been any other pair of mid-life women who meet and share
their hearts as well as passing time. We spoke of what we were having for
dinner, our private demons of frustration & temptation, and offered each
other comfort where none had been forthcoming elsewhere.
What do I know about Jeannine as a midwife? I know that she embraced
the job as a sacred calling that transcends the physical acts of gestation,
labor and delivery. I know, without question, that any baby who first entered
this world hearing her voice or gazing into her eyes is inherently blessed for
the rest of their days. I know their mothers and fathers walk in the footsteps
of a lotus-bringer. I know this without firsthand experience. But when I
called my own baby home to me, it was because Jeannine had described
conscious conception as if nothing else was sensible or relevant to the
evolution of our species. I no longer wished to have a uterus that had never
known its original purpose.
This is how I know that Jeannine is a world class healer. Last fall in
Manhattan, I had the opportunity to begin seeing the glow she casts in
different aspects, within the energy spheres of many special women. I didn’t
watch Jeannine herself so much as I watched the other women’s already
illuminated auras growing downright prismatic. Restricted and hurting
auras expanded with fresh new life and hope.
Many times, as an Unknown Source of support to Jeannine, women would
write to me of her meaning for them. Each time I learned something
different about the spirit of gentleness. On any occasion when Jeannine
attended to me directly, I felt as if I were transported back to the original
Elysian Fields. All was well if not perfect. Everything was beautiful if only
in a cosmic vision.
My first dialogue with Jeannine occurred in email form. I introduced myself,
unknowingly, on her birthday. I offered a gift I have yet to deliver and I
really couldn’t be happier about that. Forestalling my personal plans of
completion has given Jeannine gifts of tangible hope, sisterly laughter, and
a deepened re-membering of her most cherished worldview and sacred
visions. This in turn has allowed me to know her more completely; in a
more fully aspected spectrum of womanliness and sisterhood.
What will I personally miss most about Jeannine? Laughing with her.
Possibly this is closely followed by knowing that she will, in turn, laugh with
me. I’ll miss the awareness that no matter how far I wander in the lateral
and topical sense, she will get my meaning as well as ‘general direction’.
In that, I’m saying I will miss the extreme range of her intelligence and
humanistic insight. I’ll miss her hand colored astrological symbols,
embellished refrigerator magnets and ongoing awareness that somebody
else honestly believes that love is the only thing worth giving or keeping.
Yes, we delude ourselves in how we live as well as how others among us
have died. We each hold innumerable belief systems and also an
underlying self-styled code of ethics. We are imperfect beings but that
doesn’t mean our luminous qualities can’t sustain the darker edges of
imperfection. Some people in attendance already know that I won’t hear of
negative judgment where Jeannine is concerned. Others are inherently free
to speak it, but I will not imply complicity within the receptive hearing of it.
Why is this? Simply put, because I know how much it would bruise her
most tender aspects and that hurts me a whole lot more. It isn’t a question
of Jeannine’s spirit and soul being incapable of handling a few rough edges
of the collective grief process. It’s a statement about my own belief as a
fiercely devoted sister that her very frailties are what ought to make us
mindful of just how publicly we clean our personal wounds. It is unthinkable
to know we must now continue our own walks without her. Let us not add
other unthinkable bricks to a wall between truth, beauty, and basic human
nature.
Jeannine has often teased my own very basic sadhu nature in ways that
allowed me to laugh at it more authentically. One night, after I’d literally
cried myself to sleep over the public wound cleaning issue, Jeannine visited
me in a dream. She was in the guise of Big Wind Sister. Eagle Spirit had
given her a certain pair of lightning boots. She showed them to me without
realizing I’d recognize them. Then she told me not to waste energy on
things that couldn’t be changed. I understood from that dream that she knew
at death’s door more than I had realized in my place among the living. I
also realized those boots gave her some massive kick-ass power in the Next
Place. And so I laughed, though gods and goddesses may need to help me
for that more than once or even twice.
I’ve laughed a lot because of knowing Jeannine and also shared something
very rare and precious and utterly locked-away from myself until we
dovetailed in the universal place of Sisterly Confessions. Yes. Jeannine
told excellent confessions and heard them with uncommon grace. She
freely expressed her fondness for fantasy and supposition. And she had
attained the fleeting glory of her Cronehood : shining in all ways as an
authentic, spiritually powerful Elder and granny midwife; lifting the wise
divining finger of timelessness and living-on within that guise and our
collective dreamtime as surely as she merged with the constantly moving,
self-recreation robes of Changing Woman. This is how I know her best in
death as well as life for this is the direct codification of sacred female
mystery that we most concretely shared within my all too brief passage of
personal acquaintance.
Jeannine was also a mystical expert on the subject of pomegranates. I sent
her many favorite images of them – most of these talismen were notecards I
had saved and lovingly reviewed for years. This made them shopworn.
Who but Jeannine would see the love and psychic value more clearly than
the wear and tear? She understood the value of belovedness and in that
wisdom I daresay we’ve all benefited and learned a thing or two about
magical beauty and its loving embodiment.
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