Happy New Year, dear readers. It’s been a long time since I have been on this blog, but I’ve been busy being dismal.

Wars and bitter politics were wearing me down, making me cynical. “What is wrong with people?” I wailed. “Why do we hate each other so much? Why do we fear each other for no reason?” Because, dear friends, unlike animals and plants, humans are ragingly stupid and they have ruined everything, including my home, my beautiful blue marble planet. And there is the mountain under which I was buried.

It took a little pink flower to dig me out.

I have just moved to Pasadena, California, a beautiful little paradise of palm trees, where flowers bloom in the middle of winter and rackety parrots fly over my back yard.

One day (still a bit disoriented from the move), I was heading to my car when I saw a little pink flower that had fallen onto the walk outside my house. Did somebody drop it? Nobody walks along that path but me… I had lived here for about a month, never noticing the two-story-high camellia bush that was right outside my front window. A few days later, I looked out the window and saw a gray cat staring back at me. Not moving, just staring back. In that odd, unguarded moment, I suddenly realized that I had eyes. Oh my God, I thought, I have eyes! Eyes that have seen a pink camellia! And a cat! I looked again at the wide-open eyes of the gray cat, still looking at me intently, without judgement or opinion. Eyes just like the eyes of my beloved cat Dorian, who looked at me like that for thirteen years. 

Something inside shifted. The mountain fell away. I can’t explain how these things happen. I got a little message. All it said was, Eyes. You have eyes. Other thoughts began to tumble out, one by one.

Can you walk? Can you feel your heart beat? Can you feel your breath? Can you feel again the swells of that full orchestra that lifted your soul right out of your body?

To walk, to see. To breathe. To feel love, to possess these blessed gifts that banish the anxieties that plague me and take my rest, sleep and peace. They are still here. Whatever is happening in the world, they are still here.

In the days that have passed since I saw the cat, the world hasn’t changed. But now the camellia bush is in full bloom. A caring, competent nurse practitioner has connected me to a new team of doctors who will look after my eighty-five-year-old body. I live twenty minutes away from my oldest daughter and oldest granddaughter. They took me to a miracle called Huntington Gardens (Look it up!) to welcome me to California. My second daughter, who lives just hours away, calls me every day. My youngest daughter is on the East Coast, working on a magnificent memoir, and her daughter, my youngest granddaughter, also on the East Coast, is pregnant. I am going to be a great grandmother! This is what it looks like now, standing on top of the mountain that was burying me.  

The world hasn’t changed. And yet, it has. Because of one little pink flower.

I am no longer the person who is, as they say, always rehearsing for events I do not want to happen. I am the one who is grateful for the eyes I looked into for thirty years, the blue eyes that looked into mine, brimming with love. I am the one who held four miraculous babies in my body and then in my arms. The one who held my daughters’ daughters. The one who is grateful for the boy who made my life joyful for the time he was here. I am the one who has walked in ancient rock canyons, watched ocean waves lap at the shore. Waded in a turquoise sea. Held in the arms of friends. The creature who can read. Who can speak. The creature who can act and serve others. The one who can love and forgive. I am all of these.  

There will be times when my mind will sink to murky depths in this coming year of wars where children will die, where diseases will kill the poor, where colors of skin will provoke dangerous insanity, where mean-spirited politics will taint social media platforms and dominate the airwaves in endless loops.

In the midst of the clatter, I will hear the still small voice that whispers, “Come back. Stop this. Come into the sunlight. Come. See with your eyes.”

This, my dear friends, is what will sustain me in the year ahead. I will look for the good. I shall expect it in things great and small. I will falter, and come back again to the place where camellias bloom and cats stare.

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Read these books by Helen Delaney:

The Messenger: The Improbable Story of a Grieving Mother and a Spirit Guide and The Well: Two women, Two thousand years apart, connected by a Pandemic, Slavery and a Son. Both are available on Amazon. The Well is available as an Audible Book.