I remember looking at Ava as she skipped up the path ahead of me after our swim, sun streaming through her hair. There won’t be many more summers when she’s going to walk like a little girl, I thought, and when she’s going to want to go for a swim with me. Right before my eyes, there she was, growing up. I felt like an old sage in the forest, aware as I took in all her beauty and her youth that these days, and my days, were more than limited. My days as the mother of a young girl and then a teenager, and my days as a woman on this planet. I would be dead soon; there was no avoiding this thing called death. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not planning on dying in five years or anything—and if I do, I guess I’ll seem really psychic!—but as I gazed at my daughter through a prism of different perspectives, both short and long, I felt my awareness of everything heighten. If cherish and psychically imprinted had sex, they would be the parents of this feeling. Before I knew it, tears were streaming down my face.
This seems like a good time to set something straight. I know I called my first book If You Have to Cry, Go Outside, but what I meant was, it’s not professional to let your emotions get the best of you in the workplace. I actually believe that if you’re crying from gratitude, you can do it anywhere (though it’s still better to not do it at the office). That day, watching Ava, I knew I was in a state of grace. I’ve never taken acid, but everything around me seemed tinged; I felt with every pore of my body the sheer amount of beauty, tenderness, and abundance in every breath and every interaction on this earth. The thing about states of grace is that they tend to announce themselves suddenly, with the backing of an angelic choir or maybe in a thunderbolt. It’s usually pretty clear that something special’s happening. Most of the time these moments are triggered by really simple things, as mine was, and maybe the moment itself is the entire teaching. The Divine could’ve just been reminding me to cherish having a child like Ava, for whom I’d manifested a country house as a single mother, so that she and I could have a more intimate relationship with nature.
I didn’t know I was being prepared for a much larger teaching, one that would last for weeks. When Mira Alfassa, or The Mother—my longtime teacher and guru—was in her body, she sent certain students to other gurus to learn lessons they needed at certain times. Recently, I’ve felt that Amma is like one of The Mother’s sisters who came to get me for the weekend—a very long weekend that has lasted over two years. The Mother and her spiritual partner, Sri Aurobindo, were very focused on transforming the self from the inside out—changing mind, life, and body into channels of Divine consciousness—and Amma is also focused on this, but in a more outwardly collaborative way. (I believe she and The Mother are just differentiated aspects of the same Divine being—that the Universal Mother has many faces.) Amma’s currently one of the greatest living examples of the Divine feminine force in full effect. In addition to being a great humanitarian, she has toured the planet for more than thirty-five years hugging millions upon millions of people (over 30 million to date). In fact, she sometimes spends up to twenty hours sitting in one place without so much as a meal or a bathroom break, receiving anyone who wants to see her.
I would no sooner arrive on the grounds of Val-Kill than I’d realize I was in a sacred space. And by end of the weekend it would be fair to say that Eleanor Roosevelt, Amma, The Mother, and Wonder Woman—all great teachers—had had their way with me.
Part II: Dear Eleanor Roosevelt, I Think I Love You
Val-Kill looks like a proper estate. It is breathtaking and majestic, an American take on an impressionist painting. Of course, all of the grace I’d felt walking to the lake that morning was soon shattered when I showed up my normal fifteen minutes late and proceeded to plow my SUV into several orange cones in the parking lot, infuriating two female-ish (and that’s a compliment) park rangers. Luckily, Barbara was there to receive Ava and me, because otherwise we probably would’ve been turned away. (I should really give you a tip here about first impressions, but I’m not the one to speak to those.) Before our tour, we were ushered into a screening room to watch a documentary about Eleanor’s life.
This is when it all started to come together. As the film rolled, it hit me that Eleanor Roosevelt was a feminine force of superhigh consciousness and compassion, the counterpart to her husband’s famous political consciousness and ambitions. Although most other First Ladies in history have sat behind their husbands, Eleanor and Franklin were really something (in addition to being cousins). In fact, to me they were a great example of Shiva Shakti, or the tantric balance of masculine and feminine dimensions collaborating to create tremendous life energy and transcendental awareness. I began to firmly believe that Amma and The Mother sent me to Val-Kill for a reason. They wanted me
