My dear friend Reta said something to me today: “If we are concentrating on something, we’ve lost it.” Reta suffered a stroke a little more than three years ago. She is slightly disabled physically, weak on her right side, but her most catastrophic loss was her ability to read and write. As a result of her stroke she lost her business, her home, her pet dog, almost all of her possessions, and her emotional connection to most of her memories. She has been settled in an assisted care home in town with help from the County. Her income is a $700 a month Social Security check. She attends classes at the excellent center for stroke victims here and has regained the ability to recognize numbers and even read a word or two when she is feeling calm.

Reta cried for months during the first year of her new life, but always pulled herself toward joy. She has an awareness of what she has lost, in fact the awareness grows as she slowly regains limited use of short term memory. She is extremely articulate but usually cannot say my name. But what she is mostly about is joy and acceptance, cut right down to the bone. So for Reta, what she said about concentrating and losing has more than one meaning. She knows that if she thinks too hard she won’t be able to connect with the thought or piece of information she is trying to find. But if she relaxes, it may move toward her. She also means it in a spiritual way. Working too hard at trying to find the connection is not the way to be connected. In fact, connection is not about ‘achieving’ in any way. It’s about being with it, or not. And if she can’t be ‘with it’ she simply works at accepting.

Reta has always astounded me, and continues to. She has always had a spiriutal practice, but with her stroke, her whole life has become an expression of it. Sometimes, it’s a cypher. But more often she seems to me like a spiritual canary in the coal mine–way ahead of me, ahead of her time, short-circuited by stroke into an unfettered consciousness. I hope I will never have to experience a loss like hers, but she’s my role-model, and I often find myself thinking: “What would Reta do?”