Cabin Lessons: Reflections

By Janet L. Furst

In Reflections, the second book of the Cabin Lessons series, Grace returns to her childhood home to live with her parents and prepare for her divorce. While there, she reaches for her son, Justin, with calls and letters. Through writing, Grace expresses her sadness about being separated from Justin and her fears of starting life anew after years of marriage, and finds a way to trust in the light that promises peace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Dec 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781982245641

Janet L. Furst

Janet L. Furst is the author of Everyday Truth of a Rainbow Woman, prequel to the Cabin Lessons series, and Cabin Lessons: A River, Book I. A mother and grandmother, she lives with her partner in southern West Virginia and writes for self-understanding.

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 Janet L. Furst.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Balboa Press

A Division of Hay House

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.balboapress.com

1 [phone]

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Editors: Nancy Owen Barton and Jill E. Bauer

Cover Consultation: Jill E. Bauer and Catherine Le Baigue

Author Photo Credit: George Walberg

Copyright © 1987 Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust, Ahmednagar, MS, India

ISBN: 978-1-9822-4563-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-4565-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-4564-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020907049

Balboa Press rev. date: 12/07/2020

Contents

Chapter 1 Roots

Chapter 2 Filling My Cup

Chapter 3 The Sparrow’s Song

Chapter 4 My Grandchildren’s Grandchildren

Chapter 5 Loud Silence

Chapter 6 Patches

Chapter 7 All Blame Goes to One

Chapter 8 Myth-making

Chapter 9 Double Rainbow

Chapter 10 No Longer Hidden in a Hollow

Chapter 11 The Eagle

Chapter 12 Strong as a Willow

Chapter 13 Metamorphosis

Chapter 14 The Wisdom of Solomon

Chapter 15 Woman of The World

Chapter 16 Be Still

For George, who laid down his coat

Love is the reflection of God’s unity in the world of duality. It constitutes the entire significance of creation.

—Meher Baba from Discourses

Everything that happened to me, I created. I chose my life and continue the choosing every day. I am responsible for, and able to respond to everything that has transpired in my life. No one is to blame except myself. I step forward from the place of owning my own path.

I am grateful to everyone who has come into my life. All have been a gift to me. Each is a reflection of some part of myself. For we are like pieces of glass, of different colors, and shapes, of the same mosaic. A metta mosaic. May loving kindness be the force by which I make all my choices ever more. And to cultivate this force I must begin with myself, because only in giving loving kindness to myself will I be able to share it with the world.

Chapter One

Roots

I am grateful to everyone. I read somewhere that Bob Marley said to remember that the biggest bully was once a tiny baby. I am one with everyone.

My oldest daughter, Alyce, wrote a poem about oneness. She was walking through the woods when it came to her. She said that she felt in that moment that there was no separation between her feet, the snow that she was kicking up, and the sun.

I told her that I am at a place of contemplation in my book, and that fits right in—The Oneness of All. How do I live from that understanding?

After months of uncertainty after leaving first my home, then the cabin, and later Shaun, I moved in with my parents. I keep writing out my story to understand where I have come from, where I am, and how to move forward.

My parents have little idea of what I am writing. When Mom’s cleaning lady was here, I fixed lunch. While we ate, she asked me what I was writing about. Me, I said, which is the truth. She looked surprised. Then my mother said, I didn’t know that, sounding pleased.

This evening we were watching the Golden Globe Awards on television, and Mom said, If they ever do something like this (she meant a movie) about your life, the funniest thing was when your friend asked you for tea and you boiled a root. Tell about that.

What? I asked, and then remembered. After I had lived in West Virginia for a few years and had a husband and daughters, my friend Constance, who worked as a computer programmer for IBM in Poughkeepsie, came to visit. Her world and mine were completely different, yet she was wonderfully accepting. When she asked for a cup of tea, I offered what I considered a real treat. A friend had dug some sassafras roots and given them to me, so I put them in a pot of water on the stove and boiled them into tea that tasted somewhat like root beer.

I learned later that Constance had never seen such a method and probably would have preferred a tea bag. She was a good sport and didn’t say a thing as she drank the whole cup sweetened with honey. Later she told her mother, who told my mother, and now many years later the story has come back to me. And my mother wants it in a movie about my life. Steven Spielberg, are you reading?

I know where to find the roots. When I first moved to West Virginia, I went digging for them with Grantie, the older man who lived next door to my apartment. We walked around his boyhood home, an abandoned old house in the woods on a hilltop south of the town where we both lived, and he showed me where to dig. I dug and came back with a grocery bag full of sassafras roots and the worst case of poison ivy I’ve ever had. By the next day I was covered from head to toe and was so miserable that I had to go to the doctor. Doc Fisher prescribed cortisone. Unfortunately, the cortisone made my face swell like a balloon. So I went to work not only with welts of poison ivy, but also looking like a Halloween jack-o’-lantern.

Weeks later, after the poison ivy and pumpkin face were long gone, I stored wet sassafras roots in a plastic bag, and the roots became moldy. I boiled them anyway and had one of the sickest, worst stomachache nights of my life. At least I was only dealing with one problem at a time.

The root of all these root stories came from my mother’s comment about my life being made into a movie. The gift Mom gives me every day is her fundamental knowledge that With God, all things are possible.

Even though I have abandoned Hope, I haven’t abandoned God. And I trust that as I trust in the Divine Spirit within myself, all things are possible because I am the creator of my own life. The buck stops here, as somebody famous once said. I’ll ask my dad. He would know.

My parents might be a bit shocked to know what I’m writing while living again under their roof, but then, with me, they’ve come to expect the unexpected and seem to enjoy the surprises that I bring into their lives.

I asked, Who said, ‘The buck stops here’?

Mom perked up first. Truman.

Dad nodded and said, Truman.

So Truman gets the prize, and I get the reminder. The buck stops here. Whatever happens is of my making.

I recall a quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice. I’ve been trying to achieve peace within myself and my own life.

For years I worked as a school psychologist and felt that I was giving my skills in an area of the country that needed the support services. Then I became disillusioned with my work and felt that I was no longer serving the children and fueling a system that I no longer believed in, one I felt had unethical elements. I also realized that the role no longer suited me. I was growing new skin, so to be at peace I had to shed the old one.

Then I was trying to write and care for everyone in my family. I tried to be peaceful at home, while I listened to loud grumblings of discontent from my husband, Joseph, about the fact that I was not making money. There were loud grumblings during the years when I was working too. My husband usually had something to complain about.

Though there was a lot of tension in my home, I worked at being peace centered. I read and studied the works of Thich Nhat Hanh. I watched and listened to Healing Hawk’s videotape of the Peace Shield, over and over. I did attain a peaceful essence. I achieved something, yet the vital justice part was still missing. I had to leave.

Even after I left the house and our daughters were visiting their dad, they told me that Joseph, my husband, called me Gentle Grace and Generous Grace. True. I was gentle even when he was screaming at me or calling me a good-for-nothing. Or in a more subtle form of verbal abuse and even more hurtful, after we made love, he would say: This has nothing to do with love. It is only sex. After twenty-some years of marriage, no woman wants to hear that.

So I kept writing and searching for a peace wherever I was. And now I am here with my parents in the home I grew up in and facing childhood issues like their apartments, which create tension and scarcity fears as they are only partially rented and the cost of heating them is high. I remind myself I am okay as I am.

I look at my mother. Even now at eighty-six years of age she’s often trying to serve others and still not declaring her own worth. She is okay as she is. I am okay as I am.

Shaun had a kind of peace about him. He didn’t often get ruffled or angry. Then I saw him curled up tight in his defensiveness the day before I left him, challenging me to make a choice: him with the drugs and alcohol, or not him. Now what? he had asked me.

That relationship was not about true peace either.

My search for peace—that’s what this is all about. That’s how come I’m here in my parent’s home in Pennsylvania. Seeking peace is the constant in my days and nights and in all this writing.

I remember our family fussing and feuding around about going to work in the apartments when I was a teenager. Dad used to get my brother up on Saturdays to go work with him. A teenager, my brother didn’t even want to get out of bed, let alone help with work. Dad left me alone. I was the girl. He didn’t have to make a man out of me. On many Saturday mornings I lay in bed, with a huge pit in my stomach as I listened to them arguing and Dad yelling.

When I went back to Joseph the second time, the one thing he could not give up was the farm and house. That was what was important to him. I want to meet a man who values me as I am and considers me important to him. The answer is for me to first value myself as I am and believe in my own importance. Shaun called earlier this evening from Rippling Springs. I’m happy to have heard from him, though he seemed to value alcohol and other substances over himself and me.

I found some old notebooks of my writing and photos of my children when they were little among some of my belongings I brought from the cabin and before that, my house in West Virginia. Here are my poemlike notes from the August reading for me from Zuri, a Yoruban priestess, who was my teacher at a writing conference in upstate New York, and then a poem I wrote inspired by the reading:

Fear and trust do not walk hand in hand.

Taste honey first, then put it in the river for the goddess Oshun.

Talk to Oshun about my book and my love for my family.

Accept no abuse of any kind.

Be careful giving away.

Connect with my ancestors.

Trust myself.

I am the Light and your salvation whom shall I fear and from whence shall I be afraid. Put that scriptural passage on my altar and in my purse for protection.

Believe in my work and focus on it. Do not sacrifice myself for it.

Wear white clothes—underwear, headwear. The color white gives a feeling of peace.

My work is about the beauty of self.

Oshun brings beauty into one’s life and path.

The river is Oshun.

Affirmation to Myself and Oshun, Goddess of Rivers and Love

Know my beauty, both inner and outer.

Wear my light robe of multicolored cloth and multifaceted jewels.

I am a beautiful, brilliant, sensual, wise woman of light and earth.

I swim in the rivers of Life.

I taste the honey and dip deeply to serve its

sweetness to those around me.

I heal with sacred sexuality and dance the now with joy and passion.

Trust the Universal Spirit, Grace.

For Oshun, I am your daughter.

I wrote this passage and read it aloud to Zuri’s class. Silence followed, and then delayed clapping. The difference between the class’s reactions to my reading as compared with others in the class was the silence. The silence was an honoring.

I’ve been so moody with Mom and Dad. I was tense and knew I couldn’t eat dinner with them. I left and went to the mall and bought myself an outfit. Boscov’s was having a crackerjack of a sale; when the purchases were run up in the cash register, random deductions were taken off the purchases like finding a random surprise when opening a box of Crackerjacks. I bought nice clothes for little money. That was good for my soul. I mustered some cheer when I got back and settled in with Mom and Dad for the Golden Globes before coming up to my sanctuary. I can only take so much time with them right now.

I have been listening to Deepak Chopra’s tapes called Creating Affluence and The Path to Love over and over. The first tape says to settle for only the best. I’m trying to be affluent, but this creates a lot of dissonance in living in this house. Mom and Dad are feeling money tension, because of the expense of heating mostly vacant apartment houses. Yet I have too much going on in my mind to deal with their frustrations. I also know they have some money in the bank so I can’t go to their fear place. I have to trust. The tapes are also bringing up a lot of emotions in me. Some of it is anger. My anger toward myself and Mom’s telling me thank you a hundred times a day were getting to me. As I left to go to the mall, her mouth fell open and she looked like a bird. No one is supposed to leave at suppertime, which is at five sharp. I broke a family rule.

I told her to close her mouth, that I needed to get away, and that I didn’t like being told Thank you and I’m sorry all the time.

Then I’ll play Scrabble by myself, she said,

No, you won’t. You’re going to play Scrabble with me, but for now, I just need to get away. We’ve been playing our own version of Scrabble every evening before Jeopardy. We break all the rules by putting as many words as we can down every turn and never keeping score. We come up with some good words that way.

So, here I am living at home and having trouble with my parents, who love me dearly as I love them, and I find a notebook of writing that I did while a work scholar, which means I worked in in return for tuition, at a writing workshop at Skidmore College last August before I left my husband.

I wrote about my parents.

Here’s what I wrote about Dad:

This was the first time I crossed the street on my own. My father had decided that was the day to learn and created a ritual of passage. Prior to this my stomping grounds consisted of the sidewalk in front of our house and the church parking lots and the alley behind the house.

Dad held my hand