“Only love is real; everything else is illusion”
Carole King
This is a story about Catherine. Well, George, too – but mostly about Catherine. And love.
Catherine and George were residents in the same “memory care” unit where my mother lived in her final years. I often stopped to talk with George; we passed frequently in the halls and chatted easily together about the weather and baseball and I can’t remember what else. Catherine was more challenging; talking with her was so very confusing and difficult for me. She seemed always vacant and far away, lost and wandering in her own deep fog as she rambled on and on in endless and incoherent word salads and complaints. I usually tried to avoid her
One day, Catherine and George were sitting together on a couch near my mom’s room as I returned from the dining hall. My friend George jumped up to stand with me. “Where are you going?” he demanded. I edged away, explaining that Mom was quite sick in bed that day and I needed to get back to be with her. “I’ll go with you,” George replied. I carefully explained that that wouldn’t work because Mom, possibly infectious, had to stay alone in bed in her room. “I’ll go with you,” George insisted. I explained again. George was relentless: “I’ll go with you.”
I paused and puzzled. “Tell you what, George,” I managed to reply, “I’ll go with you!” That worked. We ambled off together down the hall and parked ourselves in the comfy chairs in the living room for a sweet and amiable chat about something or other. After a while I excused myself and left George, now happy and satisfied. I walked back toward Mom’s room.
Catherine was still in the same place and still, apparently, as lost as ever in her sleepy, private and thoroughly confused world. As I came near, however, she looked up. With bright, clear eyes she looked directly into mine. She spoke. “That was very kind,” she said, “That was very kind.”
Unknown to me, Catherine had taken in the energy of my exchange with George. She had felt his need and had seen and fully sensed my response. Though her mind didn’t work so well, she knew kindness when she heard and saw and felt it. And then she offered it back to me: “That was very kind.”
I think of Catherine and George today as our world seems so filled with seemingly endless distress. There have been floods in North Carolina and tornados and winds shredding the homes of whole communities in Florida. There is political rancor and the confusion of misinformation everywhere I turn. There seems to be no refuge from endless chaos and incoherent ramblings. How to be with all of this?? 
The neighbors in those weather-ravaged communities offer inspiration. They reportedly have grabbed their chain saws and wheelbarrows and – without consideration of political difference – have cleared their neighbors’ debris and rebuilt their own roads and offered comfort and food and presence where they can.
For me, Catherine that day offered me similar wise guidance. While I had taken her wounded and unpleasant superficial form to be the full reality, believing that my own view of her was real in some tangible and permanent way, she reminded me of an eternal and much deeper reality. When I look, that teaching is actually everywhere. “Only love is real” sings Carole King. So did the Buddha. And Jesus.
Yes. It is the heart of my spiritual practice: only love is real. So often my own conditioning takes over and I get distracted by the superficial appearance of things. I get waylaid by what is pleasant or unpleasant in particular events and behaviors and experiences and I take those to be the deepest reality. I then bump around, reacting to my own thoughts and stories and (mis)perceptions in a relentless effort to try to make myself comfortable. Over and over, I forget.
Nevertheless, my spiritual practice deepens a capacity to release preoccupations with those surface thoughts and objects. I return again and again to an awareness of the indestructible wholeness that is, for every one of us – without exception and always – our very deepest being.
Catherine reminded me and guided me in. Thank you, dear one.