Beltane Emergence Moon
It has always been so, I imagine. That those closest to us teach us life’s important lessons. Over the last couple of years my longtime and good friends in the Woolly Mammoths have taught me many things. This sort of teaching is much closer to apprenticeship than classroom lecture. That is, the lessons are taught by example rather than declamation. When we learn by example, we integrate the lesson into our journey; we learn as it affects us, rather than focusing on getting it right.
Two lessons stand out though there have been many from each Woolly. The first, accepting the death of a spouse has come from Woolly Bill Schmidt whose wife, Regina, died in September of 2012. The grace in his acceptance of her death, his willingness to give voice to his grief and his sense of loss while remaining upright and present to all around him teaches one elegant way to walk the ancientrail occasioned by our mortality. It is not in mimicking him that we will learn his lesson but, in heeding the deeper lesson, that is, to be present to grief in a way that is authentically our own.
The second is the homecoming of Frank Broderick. Frank has been in tremendous pain from spinal degeneration for the last couple of years. To deal with it a back operation, his second, was the only solution. But, Frank has a bad heart. Frank had to choose between a 
life of constant pain (He’s 81.) or an operation with some risk of death. As Frank does, he weighed his options seriously, getting a second opinion at the Mayo Clinic. Satisfied with the level of risk, he decided to go ahead.
He came home yesterday after a grueling 10 days of rehab and faced with several weeks of rehab still ahead. Again, the Frank lesson is not in how to deal with pain or a bad back, though he did both of those well, but how to bring personal courage and intelligent decision making to the often complex health matters we will all deal with as we age.
Both of these men have granted me access to their lives and to the way they live them. When the student was ready, his teachers appeared.
