by
Connie Schmidt
"I
was in love with the whole world and all that lived
in its rainy arms."
~Louise Erdrich
"Love
IS
And I AM
Living in an ocean of it."
~ Margaret C. Gibson
To look at
Margaret Gibson, and to hear her speak, you might at
first think she was simply a sweet, pretty, slightly
old-fashioned "church lady." Now, I'm not
talking about the smugly self-righteous Church Lady
lampooned by comedian Dana Carvey, but someone
altogether more innocuous and infinitely more
loveable — a more glamorous, sophisticated and
younger version of Mayberry's Clara Edwards, perhaps.
But
appearances can be deceiving. Margaret was sweet
(most of the time!) and undeniably very pretty, but
there was nothing old-fashioned about her thinking.
And as for being a church lady...it was true that in
her last job she worked in the offices of a large
mainstream church in Houston. When it came to matters
of religion and spirituality, however, Margaret was
quite the free thinker. The Margaret I knew was not
bound by any particular religious tradition. This did
not mean she lacked belief, however, and, sweet
though she was, she could be passionate about her
convictions, even feisty. In fact I bet she could
have given Church Lady a run for her money. (I can
imagine her countering Church Lady's "Could it
be...SATAN?!?" with, "Maybe, maybe
not...but no doubt it's all part of a bigger plan, so
let's just be a little less JUDGMENTAL, okay?")
As a
spiritual seeker for many decades, Margaret had
become not so much disillusioned with traditional
religion as aware of its limitations. However, she
acknowledged religion's very important place as a
vehicle for spiritual evolution. She felt that all
paths were capable of providing astonishing glimpses
of the truth, but that no path, not even
Christianity, had a monopoly on that truth. But if
one is working in an overtly Christian (or any other
type of religious) environment, one tends to keep
these thoughts more or less to oneself, and to tread
carefully. It is simply how one gets along.
Of course,
Margaret had a whole glorious life apart from her
church job, a life where she could be more fully
herself. She delighted in being a mother, a
grandmother, a friend, a partner, a writer, an
artist, a lover of animals and music and books and
beauty. And I know this about her too: we shared a
love of sunflowers. She had the nickname
"Sunflower" (for several reasons, depending
upon which friend or family member you talk to), and
even named her publishing company Sun-flower
Publishing. She loved John Denver and the way his
songs spoke to her soul. And, no offense to my own
loved ones who are fabulous cooks, but Margaret made
absolutely the best spaghetti sauce I have ever
tasted anywhere.
By her own
description, Margaret was, above all else, a seeker.
Her passion for finding the truth, and the truth
behind the truth, and the truth behind that, finally
became so compelling that she felt a need to try to
put it all down on paper. Her book, Journey
Of The Soul, was over twenty
years in the writing. After a couple of false starts,
she completed the manuscript, or at least completed
it enough to bring it to my partner Ron and me for
professional editing. It is hard to believe now, but
we began working with Margaret and her long time
partner Chuck White on this book in the summer of
2001, and didn't finish it until the spring of 2005.
We went through several drafts — Margaret was
very exacting and sometimes quite demanding.
Circumstances in our respective lives caused delays
at times, but finally every word was right, and it
was time to look towards designing the interior and
cover. Although she was not averse to approaching a
trade publisher, Margaret opted for self-publishing
as a way to ensure that her book got out in a timely
manner, exactly as she envisioned it. (True to her
nature, she did like the idea of having complete
control of the "look" of the book,
something rarely afforded by traditional publishers.)
The design
process was similarly painstaking and lengthy, but we
finally got all of the graphics tweaked, got the
cover just right, settled on precisely the right
font, and formatted the text according to her very
specific — and frequently unorthodox —
standards...in truth, we nearly drove each other
crazy at times, but we finally got every word and
each character in place, and the book was as close to
perfect as it could be. It was ready, at last, to go
to print.
And then
Margaret got sick. At first doctors thought it might
be a gall bladder problem, but it turned out to be
something much more serious: a particularly
aggressive form of pancreatic cancer. At Margaret's
memorial service in Houston, her daughter Allison
said that Margaret called her from the hospital after
the diagnosis and said, "Well, kid, it looks
like I'm on the fast track out of here." Indeed,
despite all that Western medicine could do (not much
— and that is a whole other frustrating story),
and despite all that state-of-the-art alternative
medicine could do (a little more, apparently
prolonging her life far beyond what traditional
doctors had predicted), this leg of Margaret's own
"journey of the soul" ended at her home in
Houston on December 9, 2005. It was a comfort to me
to know that she left gently and peacefully.
Once she
had been diagnosed, naturally, the matter of the book
had to be put on the back burner. Margaret needed to
focus all of her energies on trying to get better.
That was not to happen, but the good news is that
Chuck and her daughters have determined that one way
or the other, Journey Of The Soul
will find its way into the hands of hungry seekers.
When I expressed my sadness to my own partner Ron,
lamenting that Margaret would not be here to hold the
finished book in her hands, he said that perhaps she
had done the work she came here to do. She led her
book to a point of completion, to a place where
others could carry it forward. And that is no small
accomplishment.
For Journey
Of The Soul, I must tell you,
was not easy writing and it is not easy reading. It
is emphatically not Spirituality
For Dummies. It is a huge,
ambitious work encompassing history and religion and
myth, and the past and the present and the future.
For some it may require considerable suspension of
disbelief. For others, it may require stretching
beyond their spiritual comfort zone. Yet a reader who
has the background knowledge, the patience and the
willingness to stay with this book — and my
guess is that there are many such readers these days
— will be richly rewarded. As I wrote in the
copy for the back cover, "Revealing the truths
behind the myths and metaphors that have puzzled and
captivated people all over the world for millennia, Journey
Of The Soul takes us from
Atlantis to the Crucifixion...from Eden to the
Apocalypse...from the darkest ages of the past to the
threshold of a bold and luminous future. And then it
invites us to step over that threshold..."
Margaret,
as we who loved her would like to believe, has
stepped over a threshold of sorts, into what surely
must be a luminous future. Despite her iconoclastic
nature, Margaret's memorial service was held in a
most traditional venue — the lovely chapel of
the church where she held her last job — and it
followed a fairly traditional format. But I have to
say that of all the memorial services I have attended
in recent memory, this one was by far the most
comforting — even strangely fulfilling, simply
because it was so heartfelt. Listening to Margaret's
beloved daughters and a dear friend of hers, as well
as a couple of her associates, speak of her life, I
learned a few things I hadn't ever known about her,
but most of what I heard was a confirmation of what I
did know. I found myself smiling and crying at the
same time, but smiling in the end.
I
understand that Margaret wrote many poems in her
lifetime. Quite a few of them ended up in the pages
of Journey Of The Soul.
Margaret arranged her book so that each chapter ends
with a relevant poem, and a few of them begin with
one as well. One poem, preceding a chapter called
"Grief to Grace," was simply called,
"Grief." It is a simple poem about letting
go, a lesson that Margaret herself had to learn many
times over her life, until her ultimate act of
"letting go." Linda Christians, one of the
speakers at Margaret's memorial service, said that
shortly after Margaret was diagnosed she confessed to
Linda that she simply was not "ready to
go." Margaret loved her life, and she loved the
beauty of the world, and she still had so much work
to do. (You've heard this story before, haven't you?)
And yet
towards the very end, Margaret had made her peace
with "going." Linda told us that during a
visit, Margaret had a faraway look in her eyes. She
saw and sensed something that Linda could not see.
Margaret described what she was seeing as looking at
"fullness." "Does it look like
heaven?" Linda asked, and Margaret answered
firmly, "I don't know what heaven looks like.
What I am seeing is fullness." And this fullness
she saw was, from all indications, really quite
wondrous.
Appropriately
enough, the poem I just mentioned, "Grief,"
ends with this verse:
"I
will not leave you empty
For all that you let go
Will be replaced with more
Than you ever had before."
In times of
grievous loss it is difficult to think in terms of
having gained anything at all. But I do know that Ron
and I gained much in the short years we knew
Margaret, and it was an honor to help her bring Journey
Of The Soul to life. In his
book, How the Irish Saved
Civilization, Thomas Cahill
quoted St. Patrick as saying this about dying:
"In the end, your hungers are rewarded: you are
going home. Look, your ship is ready." It's not
too much of a stretch to believe that many of
Margaret's hungers have now been rewarded, and many
of her questions answered. God speed, Sunflower.
BACK TO TOP OF PAGE
BACK TO SCHMIDT KAYE
& COMPANY CLIENTS/NEWS PAGE
