Remembering My Brother On the Anniversary Of His Death

 For John

 

It was 44 years ago today that my twin brother ended his life. As January 30th comes around once again, I am surrendered into the sadness of this loss that does not go away. The sorrow that I carry in my heart changes, evolves, and is transformed, but it does not go away. I both go on without my brother, and John is also always with me, always in my heart.

The suicide of a loved one is a very different and difficult kind of death to experience and come to terms with. It's taken me many years of deep work and loving and wise support to learn how to carry this loss in ways which have empowered me to grow in compassion, kindness, and love... and even joy. And this journey of healing and opening and expanding my heart continues, as it will for the whole of my life.

 

* * * * *

 

There was such deep sadness, loneliness, fear, anger and shame in our childhood home. And the trauma that we experienced was also tragically not unique. Over the years of my sobriety and gradual awakening, I've come to recognize how it is that the pain that was so deeply rooted in our family is pervasive in our society and beyond. So many of us are lost to ourselves and our sacred interrelationship with one another and all of life. So many of us are lost to love.

 

It is not my belief that we are born with sin, but rather that we are born blessed, beautiful, and with the Divine woven through our being. My personal journey has been grounded in coming to recognize the illusions, the harmful beliefs, the obstacles that I've built against love and shedding them one by one by one. 

 

Over many years now, I've gradually been growing into me, Molly, an increasingly fully embodied human being ― and who is also connected with and a part of, not separate from, all life. I've been laying claim to the beauty and strength of love and compassion that I was born with, that was an essential part of who I am before I first became lost as a very young child. I believe that this is the essence of us all.

* * * * *

 

John never found the support that he needed to recognize and go through the doorway out of hell. Instead he was given Valium and shock treatments and mental institutions and psychiatrists who did not know how to help him heal his broken heart. The gifts of the alchemist were always out of reach.

 

My brother wrote this poem about not being loved by our then deeply mentally ill mother and not finding love in his short lifetime:

 

If Only

I love to be loved.

I need to be loved.

And I am angry when

I am not loved.

And when I am angry

I am not loved.

If only I weren't angry

About not being loved,

Maybe I could find the 

love that I need.

― John Strong

 

 * * * * *

 

Too many of us do not find those doorways through which love can be found and embodied. And without love, without replacing separation with connection, without experiencing the sacred truth of our worthiness of love, we wither and die. 

 

For many years, and through my addictions and disassociation, large parts of me were cut off from the truth, the truth about myself, about love, about all of us. I did not even know that another vastly different experience of life and love was possible. I was lost to myself and the sacred thread of life.

* * * * *

 

All of this leads me to why today I am so passionate about compassion. And love. The heart of this great loss of my twin brother has been transformed. Deeply and profoundly.

 

Many years ago, there were those who didn't write me off, who didn't give up on me, who saw me and both the pain and the beauty that I carried inside. They recognized who I was through all those veils of illusion that I had mistakenly believed was reality. And those who reached out to me with kindness, compassion, and caring made all the difference. They saved my life. 

 

My beloved Judith Duerk was among them... which I will share about another time...

 

My brother did not make it. He couldn't. John did the best he could and for nearly 27 years struggled to find his way out of unbearable pain into the love that he had starved for and was always, always worthy of. But my twin didn't know that. And for many years, neither did I.  

* * * * *

 

And so this is the way that John is always with me, always in my heart, always my guardian angel on this path of heart. Over and over and over again I am reminded of love, the great Medicine of Love. And compassion, kindness, generosity, wisdom, joy, and beauty. And the Sacred Web of Life. And that there is always more to open to, to embrace and embody, to heal and learn from, and more ways to experience and share loving-kindness.

 

This is what I get to do today. I get to embody and share the love, the love that my brother and I were once starved for. But no more. No more. And this is how my beloved twin lives on in me. We were once "wombmates," as John used to say. Now John and I are soulmates on this heart-path rooted in the deep gifts of compassion, kindness, and love. Something that we are all worthy of.

 

Out of this death has come new life. As we heal ourselves, we also heal our ancestors and new generations. And we contribute to alleviating the suffering in our beautiful hurting world. In the wake of great loss, out beyond the tsunami of grief, there are these gifts, these blessings waiting to be claimed.

"The work of the mature human is to carry grief

in one hand and gratitude in the other and

to be stretched large by them."

― Francis Weller

 

Bless us all,

💗

Molly 

 

Photos by Molly

Kuan Yin, Goddess of Compassion

Naomi Shihab Nye: Kindness

Photo by Molly

Kindness

 

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken 
will stare out the window forever.

 

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, 
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho 
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans 
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

 

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, 
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.  
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

 

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

 

― Naomi Shihab Nye

 

Mary Oliver: Wild Geese

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting ―
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

― Mary Oliver 

 

Einstein Letter To His Daughter on the Universal Force of Love

In the late 1980s, Lieserl Einstein, the daughter of the famous genius, donated 1,400 letters, written by Albert Einstein, to the Hebrew University, with orders not to publish their contents until two decades after his death. This is one of them.

 

…”When I proposed the theory of relativity, very few understood me, and what I will reveal now to transmit to mankind will also collide with the misunderstanding and prejudice in the world.

 

I ask you to guard the letters as long as necessary, years, decades, until society is advanced enough to accept what I will explain below.

 

There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us.

 

This universal force is LOVE.

 

When scientists looked for a unified theory of the universe they forgot the most powerful unseen force.

 

Love is Light, that enlightens those who give and receive it.

 

Love is gravity, because it makes some people feel attracted to others.

 

Love is power, because it multiplies the best we have, and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their blind selfishness. Love unfolds and reveals.

 

For love we live and die.

 

Love is God and God is Love.

 

This force explains everything and gives meaning to life. This is the variable that we have ignored for too long, maybe because we are afraid of love because it is the only energy in the universe that man has not learned to drive at will.

 

To give visibility to love, I made a simple substitution in my most famous equation.

 

If instead of E = mc2, we accept that the energy to heal the world can be obtained through love multiplied by the speed of light squared, we arrive at the conclusion that love is the most powerful force there is, because it has no limits.

 

After the failure of humanity in the use and control of the other forces of the universe that have turned against us, it is urgent that we nourish ourselves with another kind of energy…

 

If we want our species to survive, if we are to find meaning in life, if we want to save the world and every sentient being that inhabits it, love is the one and only answer.

 

Perhaps we are not yet ready to make a bomb of love, a device powerful enough to entirely destroy the hate, selfishness and greed that devastate the planet.

 

However, each individual carries within them a small but powerful generator of love whose energy is waiting to be released.

 

When we learn to give and receive this universal energy, dear Lieserl, we will have affirmed that love conquers all, is able to transcend everything and anything, because love is the quintessence of life.

 

I deeply regret not having been able to express what is in my heart, which has quietly beaten for you all my life. Maybe it’s too late to apologize, but as time is relative, I need to tell you that I love you and thanks to you I have reached the ultimate answer! “

 

Your father Albert Einstein

 

[Regarding the controversy surrounding this letter: “‘The writings were not donated by Einstein himself, nor his daughter, Lieserl. The letters were donated by Margot Einstein, the scientist’s stepdaughter,’ claims Diana Kormos — Buchwald, editor — in — chief at the Einstein Papers Project.] 

https://thriveglobal.com/stories/einstein-letter-to-his-daughter-on-the-universal-force-of-love/#:~:text=When%20we%20learn%20to%20give,for%20you%20all%20my%20life.

 

Alison Rose Levy: Addressing the Wider Arc of History Which Our Time Demands

I deeply appreciate this recent piece written by my friend Alison Rose Levy. May we all work in an ongoing way to shed our indoctrination and illusions, our apathy and inaction, our ignorance. May we channel and transform our denial and despair into truth and critically needed action. We are all needed to do our growing part in this great struggle for justice, peace, equity, unity, and preserving a sustainable and habitable planet. We are truly all in this together. May we not look away. ― Molly

Wasn't planning to write on Holocaust remembrance day but David Bedrick inspired me.

One of the most significant books of my life which I read in college and have never been able to find since-- was written by a German from a noble background (if I recall correctly) who witnessed the period before, during and after Hitler came to power, and was aware of the wrongness of it all and watched his fellow Germans, relatives, and people he knew look away, deny, rationalize, protect their own families and comforts and allow the country to go down the rabbit hole into fascism. I also went to high school with girls whose parents had been in the camps and who were first generation descendants. (Which I was not but had been significantly influenced by the war due to my father's service in the US Army on the Western front.) 

 

It wasn't until mid-life that my classmates and I began having those conversations about the past. But being in a state of recovery from such a history often requires a lot of comfort and safety for healing, so that current political choices are often based on assuring those comforts rather than seeing and addressing the wider arc of history which our time demands. This has been true of many of my generation and many people now here in this country. And it's why we have blinded ourselves to arrive at the point where we are. 

 

All of my advocacy work was aimed at a redirection of our system, but many people look at their need to put food on the table for their family, hard enough in times like these, and leave it at that. This Holocaust, or any genocide or enslavement or economic entrapment is not just about the people targeted as victims, it's about all of us. This misguided cooption of Darwin by capitalism has taught everyone that we survive at someone else's expense, not that we are all in this together. This isn't even what Darwin taught.

 

Nevertheless, here we are still believing that. And even the billionaires building a spaceship to nowhere, along with all of us (or our children or grandchildren if we have them) will all suffer different flavors of similar consequences-- unless intervening becomes a mass priority. 

 

And anyone lining up behind their favorite puppet still is blind to the truth, just as the pre-war and wartime Germans were. And some hyper-educated white boy, hung up on the purity of his body, telling us that HE and his kind are the prime victims of the capture of our country by the two-party puppet political system, is the blind leading the blind on the road to hell. 

 

The arc of history and what happened in Germany, in genocides, and in enslavement and economic entrapment, have a lot more to say about the real and mounting threats to human survival. Giving our children and grandchildren, and other species survival and a future requires that we leave our comfort zones, stop bowing to puppets in all directions, and deconstruct and reconstruct to give social voice back to all people.

 

― Alison Rose Levy