Spiritual Images: Peach, Lake, Wood’s Stream

At my request, a healer and friend here on pilgrimage and visiting on our only opportunity, guided me to lie down on the sofa. Seated behind me, he then spoke in gentle tones, “On an in-breath of three, breathe in the peace and breathe in the calm and breathe in the tranquility and breathe out the anxiety and breathe out the worries and breathe out the aggravations.” As he repeated this, I began to let go, until I was in an altered state, distanced from the sofa and watching inner abstract visions. He had been sharing a lengthy story of healing himself when doctors couldn’t that had taken two years. I was absorbed in listening, identifying with my personal journey, when my arms and legs began to move with kinetic energy, making it difficult to focus, until it became impossible, and I had abruptly interrupted him to ask for a healing.

As he was leaving in two days, knowing that I wanted to record his meditation, I took the one chance that I might meet him and did. Every morning and evening I would listen to the recording. Then one morning it would not play. My disappointment felt stuck. But then I understood—I was becoming reliant on his voice. The peace and the calm and the tranquility had to be prompted in my own voice, so I created a short version.

Thinking that I would like to write about these three words (peace, calm, and tranquility), I wrote peach on a piece of paper. Seeing my mistake, with an “ah,” I smiled, for I recognized a long-time pattern. Almost any time that I have started off to write “peace,” I have looked at the paper and seen “peach.” This day, however, I looked for a reason why, and found one. It was a prompt used in creative writing workshops by my mentor of many years, Pat Schneider, and one that I had written to many times. “Begin to write with something that your eye sees.”*

After years of reading while eating, I stopped this practice in May and have since eaten in quiet.

Now, at breakfast, I see a peach as I repeat “peace” several times in inner voice. My memory is of going with my granddaughter, then twelve (and now fifteen), to an open-air fruit stand for peaches, and more. Home, I took a big one from the bowl, its fuzzy roundness cupped in my hand. I lifted it to my nose to sniff its sweetness, then taste just how sweet, and juice had run over my lip onto my chin.

Two more images appeared, one for “calm,” and one for “tranquility.” At my noon meal, I see a lake I went to in my teenage years. My boyfriend—who would become my first husband—and his family had a camp on a seven-mile-long lake in the secluded woods of Maine. Mornings, I stood hip-deep in cool, greenish water, glass-clear to my feet, which were placed in a solid stance, for the stones were few. Turning my head, I looked out at a long view of the lake filling the cove.

At supper, I see open woods with a stream and leaves and moss and twigs and different shapes of stones under the water and sticking out and on its surface the trees above serenely moving up and down, going nowhere. I had been going down a wooded road after visiting a new friend, Anna.* An older and more experienced writer, she had liked my writing and invited me to visit. Driving away, once when I glanced to the side, I had seen an opening in the woods and stopped to explore. Thirty years later, not having seen Anna since that day, and just before the end of her life became apparent she had been the original editor of my first book, A Flower for God.

My realization is, “We are sensory receivers in a world of details. Any may prompt a recognition of quiet that lingers within us in silence for years, until it later reappears.”

*Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In, Writing as a Spiritual Practice (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013) 226.

* Anna Kirwan-Vogel, The Jewel of Life (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991).