Last Friday, I killed my Mum.
Not literally. She’s doing that under her own terms. But I shot an arrow at her with such focus and intention, that it penetrated through all the layers of mist and reached its target – her heart.
The arrow was my words, conveyed with such powerful intensity that they would have penetrated even the thickest stone.
Have you ever had that experience, either for yourself or witnessing it in someone else?
So often, our mouth is disconnected from our Spirit. We talk – our lips flap around in the wind like a bird in flight, relaying our stories, our feelings, our opinions – but they are thrown into the wind with such little force, that they rarely evoke change. They are nothing more than a verbal diatribe – a ballet of impotent soldiers who, once airborne, suddenly turn into a crumpled heap of limbs and torsos and crash to the ground, incapable of leaping to their destination.
When we listen to people talking like this, their words are like white noise.
It’s easy to tune out, to turn our focus to other thoughts – our own private, important thoughts that are occupying our inner realms.
But every now and then, we have a message that is of such importance that we indeed take careful aim, draw our bow, and shoot that arrow. We muster every particle of our attention to the task of communication, and through the sheer power of our intention, of our focussed energy, that arrow will reach its mark every time.
It’s rarely a long communication. By its sheer nature it’s powerful and to the point. It cuts through all the distractions and draws both the giver and receiver into a singular moment in time where this gift of words, of truth, can be given and received.
That’s what happened for me on Friday.
You see, my Mum is dying.
Not like tomorrow, or the day after. But her decline this past 9 months has been so rapid that my immortal Mumma Bear is showing some very large cracks.
First, she started running into things in her car. Just little accidents, but she had no recollection of how her precious car had become damaged.
Then, she began forgetting things – like where she’d left her keys, or the fact that she had run her car into her garage door and it had been fixed only a year earlier.
Then, her Doctor took her drivers’ license away from her (for the sake of herself and the people around her), and she has been zipping around on a mobility scooter.
But now…this past few weeks…even her sentences and thoughts are escaping her. When I visited her on Thursday, she kept falling asleep as we were talking to each other. She was in her own world, but her mind was in low gear. Our conversation was simple and kind. We looked at old photo albums, and although she struggled to know who was who in the albums, I reminded her of the many happy memories through those snapshots in time.
Then on Friday, I decided to call her.
It was evening. “Maybe she’s brighter in the evening?” I thought to myself. After all, she had been watching the Commonwealth Games each night – maybe that was why she was so “vague” when I visited her. Perhaps she was just tired.
Our conversation started out strong. “Ah, this is the Mum I know!” I thought, and my heart jumped into the air and did a little pirouette – a combination of hope and relief. But as our conversation progressed, my heart sank again.
She had things she was trying to say to me, but her mind betrayed her and wouldn’t give her the words….and so she floundered, and her sentences – only partially spoken and never finished, over and over – ended up like a wet, soggy piece of paper in a puddle of mud.
And that’s when I drew my bow.
I knew what needed to be said. I knew that if I didn’t say it now, I wasn’t to know if it would ever reach its mark again.
“Mum,” I said. “I love you. You know that, right?”
And as the arrow sank into her heart, her focus was there….just for an instant.
“Yes, I know that darling,” she said to me. And I could feel that she did.
Sometimes we don’t know the power of our own words. All we can do is to listen to that little voice inside, that voice that sits on our shoulder and nudges us to do and say the things we never thought we’d do and say, at the perfect moments in time.
That little voice is our connection to the Universe – our connection to God. Some call it their Higher Self. Some call it the Holy Spirit, or Jesus. Some think of it as their Guardian Angel, or their Spirit Guide.
Yet whoever it is, wherever it comes from, when we learn to listen to that guiding voice, all things unfold in our life in synchronous perfection. When we hear that voice, we know we are in the right place, at the right time, and all we need to do is to say “yes” and follow where the finger points.
And when we take “right action” in those moments in time, the target suddenly appears, and our actions – as simple as they may be – can evoke profound change in the other person or situation.
I’ve often thought of myself as a Ninja with a knife. When I’m in conversation with others, I quietly listen. I absorb what they are saying. I let their words - even their unspoken words – filter through my mind. But really what I’m doing is stalking truth. I’m looking for that perfect moment, that parting of the veils where the target suddenly appears. And when it does, when I see that target in front of me, the perfect words are always there. And they are heard, and hit their mark.
And that’s what I did on Friday night. I said to my Mum the most important words I could ever say to her. Words I’ve said before, and no doubt will say again….yet in this moment, I made sure that my arrow reached its mark, and they were heard. I made my completion with Mum, as simple as it was.
It doesn’t mean that what is still to come is any easier….yet those words are the most important message I ever need to give.
