I arrived at the studio yesterday morning to work on sculpture, and found a Skype request from a woman in Kiev, Ukraine who I have taken calls from, sometimes weekly, for three years, after we met on travels.  She asks me about living, and I talk about my experience in terms of mind and spirit.  Tami did it for me.  I tell her boldly, radically open, I try to verbalize for her, double challenged in my second language.

I find it miraculous that the Russian language returns, or that I slip into it, and the words burble back as needed, sometimes in fantastical analogies meant to describe something I’ve never known the word for in my hand fashioned, B-minus Russian.  I can’t be certain what she hears me say.  But she calls.  We both talk, and it always ends up that I needed to hear what got said even more than she did.

Is it limited to a peacetime activity? I read the Sunday paper.  I’ve become concerned for her in Kiev. The Skype window popped in.  Before answering, I invoked the god-thing, show me the next moment, speak for me, help me to love, comfort, and understand her.

She looked like a Rembrandt, her luminescent face emerged to me from the soft, middle of the night void.  Several weeks ago, when we last talked, she was chipper and unconcerned about events at the border.  Yesterday, though, her face was still and slow, her hands folded under her chin. There is such a thing as the look of real trouble, a tight haze that darkens the face, making the worst circumstances instantly readable at the first utterance.  She has three children.

We greeted, and, without shifting she began to talk, haltingly at first, and then to alarm, her voice tightening into rapid chatter, untiI I had to make the slow-down hand signal, in order not to miss anything.  There is fighting in the street, she made clearer to me in her voice like a wire, fighting between people who know one another, and bloodletting, even, right there on her sidewalk, local-to-local, glass-breaking civil mayhem, and the news is not reporting it, the schools are still open, and she is calling me to ask me how to walk through the world.

First I cried.  For the difficult task she has to be there. We talked about what she could let go of right away. She is especially incensed at the media’s neglect and misrepresentation of events.  I reminded her to let the national media roll by like a none-of-your-business truck, and not to spend precious personal energy in anger about it, it’s not her voice, her voice is the internet.  I told her swimming is a pretty good strategy when you’re dealing with a river, and I told her to fill herself with light and direct her energies to the very moment.

I told her what I know, not light enough to throw off the heaviness in my own brow, about perception and creation.  I told her to know herself and be what she would like to encounter.  I told her not to lay down in the road, and to advocate directly for her children as she personally feels.  I told her that the Dalai Lama left the war zone.  That we are here body and spirit, and war is a body thing.  I told her to post what she sees on the internet, and to bathe her city in light with her inner vision.  I apologized that I could not address her family strategy, whether to stay in the city or go.  She is wondering.  I told her to stay calm, that if she wants calm she has to be calm.  I told her to check with the least scared intelligent people she knows locally.

I’m having trouble contextualizing N’s call, she is living in civil unrest.  And I’m sitting comfortably choosing between peaceful, abundant options.  But we have been talking for three years, weekly at times, so she knows what I say, the kinds of reflection I give, and she called, she Skyped, so I opened, my hesitancy reveals my own doubt, but I made myself open, like at times of birth and death, no time for caveats.  Be the face of peace and kindness that you hope to find on the streets of Kiev.  For a pollyanna, I sure am well in my abundant life. I gave her the ideas, the quick mental tool kit I like, that guides me.

Machine chides me, thinking I mean my suggestions will prevent war.  Not at all; I’m talking about how to live in it, what to do about the mind in the midst of it.  Russia casts a leaden shadow.

I hope the smart people she finds tell her to leave. But  then she is moving because of war, which should never have to happen. After the talk she looked warmer, lightened. But she didn’t schedule our next call, and I didn’t like the empty place that left at the close of our call, when in peacetime it never weighed anything.

Bringers of the Light, now is good.

Even resolved, I feel weighty doubt about the conversation.  I am responsible to carry the message, not to understand it.  Signed, Rosencrantz.  Signed, Joan.  Signed, Zoltar.  What I fear is that I have given the wrong reflection, the sucker’s advice, sure to decimate her – I go over it in my head all morning. I remember two seat mates on a recent plane ride over the midwest, gleefully comparing iPhone pics of their massive firearms safes.

I take it personally, even the radio knows. It plays me garish bad news music, like Dream On, and Paint It Black. I think of Russia, great and terrible, the very heart of its own history.

Back at my studio table I think of the light runs, let’s find out what happens when I send light in …