Nancy Ford

Nancy

Dana used to say, “No one crosses alone.” I would add to that, that no one crosses alone not only from 3D to non-3D, but in the long journey from birth to death. We can’t do it. One way or another (and hopefully, in more than only one way) life gives us the companionship that we need.

That companionship  may come from family or from friends, living or remembered. The friends may be living presences, or they may be friends we’ve never met: authors, historical examples, any who serve us as role models; even the unseen presences that are always ready to support us, including the very strands that comprise us.

But primarily, we need the warmth provided by living, breathing, people, and they need us no less. In this context, re-read the Transcendentalists on friendship and love, and it may become clearer, what they were talking about.

Although I met Nancy before I met Rita Warren, for about 10 years I knew her only as a friendly acquaintance and Hampton Roads investor. But just at the time Rita passed, Nancy’s and my relationship changed.  She was experiencing a problem with her hand that she couldn’t fix. Although she was quite experienced with healing, including self-healing, her guys told her that I could help. I said I’d try if she would make the trip to Nelson County (I was living at Rita’s house at the time), and she did, and our deeper relationship began. Suddenly we weren’t relating around Hampton Roads, nor even around metaphysical discussions. Now we were into experience. Now we were into real work.

And although in most ways, my relationships with Nancy and with Rita couldn’t have been more different, in one crucial way, they were identical. Nancy, like Rita before her, was willing and able to accompany me. It made many things possible.

It is one thing to explore and discover. It is quite a different thing to figure out what it is that you have discovered, and what it means, and how you should react to it. It is one thing to explore externally, and quite a different thing to explore internally. Internally, where are you going to find landmarks? How are you going to coordinate what you found today with what you found two years ago? How are you going to view the changes in yourself – particularly the changes of which you are unconscious?

You can’t. You need help. No one crosses alone.

What you need, first and foremost, is someone you can trust to give you an honest response. What good does it do you for someone to say, “Yeah, yeah, that’s great, well done, keep at it,” at the times when you’re going off the beam? Ultimately that would be just as destructive as someone saying all the time, “You’re wasting your time. Give it up.”

But opinion needs to be grounded in something. If the person doesn’t have the experience, doesn’t have the depth of character, doesn’t have the active interest, how much can they help?

I have been fortunate in my friends, but mostly they come, and stay for a while, and go. They die, or for whatever reason we move off in different directions, and in any case perhaps our friendship is based in this or that special interest. Even lasting friendships change as each of us change. It is as Thoreau said, “No man was ever party to a settled friendship. It is no more a constant phenomenon than meteors and lightning. It is a war of position.”

It has been more than 16 years now since Rita died, and in all that time Nancy and I have been cooperating and contending. I knew, as soon as we moved from acquaintanceship to friendship, that here was someone who was absolutely straight, a rigidly honest person who could be depended upon to give her opinion without shading.

That doesn’t mean such opinion is always comfortable to hear, nor that it is invariably accurate. But it means, here is an honest, interactive mirror, someone to be counted on for honest feedback.

This sounds like I’m talking about a sort of literary criticism. It is way deeper than that. It is the confrontation of everything that is in you with everything that is in your friend.

It may sound like I am the intrepid explorer and Nancy is left on the shore waiting for my reports. That isn’t right either, for not only does she do her own exploring, she has her own deep background in these matters. I came to this through Monroe, she via Machelle Small Wright. I always dealt primarily with my own strands and resonances. She dealt primarily with nature. The differences have been as illuminating as the similarities.

And then there is the healing work, which in a way is where we began. She has her methods, I have mine. She has her problems, I have mine. What a great laboratory for experimentation and feedback! As anyone with the experience knows, you can do a certain amount of self-healing – sometimes an impressive amount – but it is often easier to have someone else work on you than for you to work on yourself. This is not because you are lazy, or need self-confidence, but merely because another person works from a stable platform unaffected by the problem you are working on.

For 16 years, ever since the day her own guys told her to see me about a persistent problem she was dealing with, Nancy and I have been working together. Her continuing contribution hasn’t always been obvious, any more than Bob Friedman’s was, in those mornings when I would be transcribing my latest conversation, wondering what he would make of it. That doesn’t make it any less important.

No one crosses alone.