It is sooooo easy, sooooo deep the need to want my son to choose life, that he should choose life as his body, mind, and spirit decompensate, as the desperate need for him to live and live a healthy life envelopes all of me.  He's an 8 hour drive away, I don't have any idea where he is, don't know if he has his own phone or borrowing one, don't know what he means when texting he needs help.  What do you need, I'll drive there, tell me please I feel the desperation of it all.  When will he text again?  More need to know, the needs are falling like torrential rains.  Because I need him to choose life!  How easy it is to have these wants, needs, and shoulds, and how easy it is that the stress of believing them unquestioned grows.  However, what is true is that stress itself  is the invitation, laying out the red carpet for Inquiry.  Is it all true?  

It's nearly impossible to just drop a thought, especially when life hangs in the balance, especially when it's my child. So, I don't try.  I cry.  I let that fear live, and I cry.  It honors all of me, and it honors the situation.  I know I can question it when all my beliefs, and reactions have lived their life too, not so scary anymore, it becomes a sacred experience of grief, of fear, of self-compassion.  Doing this for me helps me hold the space for me, and for others, for my son.  Sacred space, sacred feeling, sacred experience.  The sacred shows up for me, holding me in it all, and holding my son in this too.

In another quiet space, I wonder what else might exist other than the only story of needing my son to choose life as I wait for the next text that he'll go to the hospital. With the thought of needing him to choose life, I'm desperate.  I'm in his business of what he chooses, a place I have zero control, not much influence at the moment even, hours away in another state, phone not working, magical thinking that if I need this enough that somehow energetically it will impact this situation, impact his choice, that somehow this need will help me.  No, I simply and truly do not need this thought to help me, and it will not help my son to be in the stress of it.  

Instead, as I sit in silence, breathe and wonder what else is possible, who I'd be right here and now, in this crisis and without the thought I need him to choose life, there is more space for all of it, as is, as is!  I am breathing, I am questioning my fears for truth.  I know truth liberates me and my son from my imagined nightmares.  I stop arguing with reality.  He is on the streets, his mind and body affected by weeks, months, years of using drugs, does he even have the capacity to choose life when his body aches in pain and need of comfort that a drug can provide?  What life?  The life I think and imagine is best for him?  Am I god here to now know what everyone needs, what their path is, to dismiss the many paths that any life can take, has taken? Who would I be, who am I without the thought of needing him to choose anything?  Available. 

I need to choose life!  For me, and for my son!  This is the truest of all.  Without my clarity, compassion, what I can contribute in peace and support, how I communicate from that place, we're at risk of worse conditions. I need to choose life, and show up in such a way that I am available and on purpose. I choose to welcome the life this fear and grief is apparently moving in me, I choose to question those fears.  I know the truth will be revealed quickly, gently, and it can live in me.  I choose that! I choose to give this renewed heart and mind to my son.  I choose to be prepared if he texts again, to choose the drive to find him, scoop him up and get him wherever he needs to go, if he so allows.  I choose his life if he welcomes my help.  And I choose to understand that for now, he may not be able to choose life the way I think he should.  These stories, assumptions, expectations, wants, needs and shoulds let go of their grip on me, and on my son.  

What remains, always in the revelation of Inquiry is Love.  I love me this way,  I love him this way as is, I send him love from this place, I am available for more love this way without the conditions that he make a choice I think he should make.  I'm here for you sweet boy (because I'm here for myself).  I'm here and we'll figure it out, together.

It is so very true that the truth shall set you free, when you know it.  Is it true that I need my son to choose life?  No.  Would it be nice if he does?  Yes.  What I really, really need more than that is love in the here and now, in the conditions of this reality here and now, to return to it in myself, to share it from this more peaceful place of meeting life as it is.  It's been my experience that fear will most likely show up again, and again.  And Inquiry can bring me directly to the truth where love lives.  I choose that!  Thank you, and so it is, and so it can be, and so it shall be.  I choose life, I choose love.  I choose to give that to my son.  Text or no text, his choice or not, whatever may come.  Drugs will not win here, do not win here.  Love does!

In gratitude,
Joanne Richards
​January 28, 2022 

My son has gone missing again, no phone again, no other contacts, no clue how to reach out to him.  The depression, the addiction, the holidays it seems have swallowed him up, again. My mind so easily goes to thinking and believing this is the time, this is goodbye.

My mother's health is quickly deteriorating. Is this the time, is it time for hospice?   My mind easily thinks and believes I am returning to see her and  this is goodbye.

My mind is lost in the goodbyes, the gasps of breath, the fall of tears, the heaviness in my heart.  My mind has just said goodbye to my son, to my mother, goodbye to hope, goodbye to anything other than sorrow. I have said goodbye to possibility.  Perhaps it is really saying goodbye to possibility that hurts the most. Yes, I think that is it. Lost in grief, I say goodbye to the awareness of love in the mix too.  This I have found to be the most painful, not the circumstances necessarily but the goodbye to Love itself that awaits my awareness of it, again. 

What if it is not goodbye?  What if it is hello?  I bring my mind to that question, and it says hello to the invitation.  Hello.  Without this suffocating and exhausting limp into goodbye, the hello's begin:

Hello breath, hello opening heart to love itself, to the presence of a deeper love and intention to feel it and live it even amidst the grief.  Hello to the possibility of healing - my mother's, my son's, my own.  Hello to that!  Hello to not knowing, not playing god - always a welcomed and comforting hello to that! There is comfort and possibility in simply not knowing, the inability to now know, and to be with the conditions of life now, knowing love finds me, holds me, moves me, continues on, remains.  Hello to that! 

This is hello.  Hello to loving now, from the deepest and wisest most connected parts of me and imagining the heart to heart connection, the energy of love shared through time and space.  Hello to it filling my heart, circulating and bursting out in its lightness, in the light of love. This is hello in this day, and any day.  Hello to that!  

This is hello to more surrender and choice to accept that which I can not change.  And a hello to the next part of that ... It is what it is, for now, and now what can I do? A hello to what is possible, to what I can do, and within my ability.  It is a hello to some challenging times and, therefore, a hello to knowing the deep healing work that invites me, has so abundantly been shared for me along the way, through time, with such special people.  Hello gratitude! 

This is hello to sharing time, love, and peace with my mother who miraculously is growing stronger.  This is hello to creating the inner peace within me this day to share with my son wherever he may be, in whatever condition.  The energy of love, of peace has no concept of time and space, it travels deep and far.  This is hello to do what I can to return to that peace.  This is hello to the wisdom that anything else is a goodbye to a truer connection to love. The very thing that will always hurt, the goodbye to it that is the little bell, even the loud gong, that reminds me to turn the goodbye into a hello.  

Love does not leave, it is I who say goodbye to it when in fear and the imagined fearsome future, when believing thoughts even for brief moments that would shadow all the various ways love can and will say hello. 

If there are to be goodbyes, the hellos are there too.  Can I know for sure that it is goodbye.  No, no I can't.  Even in the earthly goodbyes, the hellos will present themselves, if I say hello back.  Yes, there is grief, and simultaneously the hello enters in.  Hello Compassion.  Hello Peace.  Hello Gratitude.  Hello Love.

To all the possibilities of "this is hello". 

Joanne Richards
​1/8/22