Interview: Elizabeth Lesser | Lessons of the Soul

Elizabeth Lesser

Lessons of the soul

Interview by Kristen Noel, January 5, 2017, Woodstock, New York

Photographs by Bill Miles

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

Rumi

Kristen:                  Hello, my friend. Thank you for sitting down with us today and for welcoming us into your beautiful home. I feel very grateful to have the opportunity to be able to sit with you to discuss this book, Marrow: A Love Story. This is truly an exquisite book. I cried. I laughed. I highlighted passage after passage. I also felt myself crack open as I was reading it.

Even though I knew of your journey to become a bone marrow donor for your sister, as I was making my way through the book I realized that this was about healing on so many levels. It isn’t a book about dying. It’s a book about living and as you so beautifully said in the prelude, it is a love story.

Elizabeth:              Thank you for those kind words.

Kristen:                  Before we dive in, I have to formally introduce you because I want to make sure that our audience knows of the incredible experience that you’ve had which has led to here. So, just bear with me as I gush about you a moment.

Elizabeth Lesser is a New York Times bestselling author of the book Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow. She is also the author of the Seeker’s Guide, her first book that chronicles the years at the Omega Institute (the renowned retreat and conference center in New York’s Hudson Valley), which she cofounded in 1977 when she was in her 20’s.

Prior to Omega, she was a midwife and a childbirth educator. Today, she has woven that rich experience into the fabric of her life, as a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a friend, a coworker, an activist and a visionary.

I had the delight of seeing you this past summer walking through a local farmers’ market hand-in-hand with your grandson — you appeared to be beaming in that moment. I recalled it when I read a line in the book where you said, “Thursdays are my Sundays in the church of grandparenting.” It’s a rich portrayal of quite a Technicolor Dream Coat life. And I’m thrilled that we get to chat today and to dive into some of it!

Elizabeth:              Thanks. I’m happy to be with you, Kristen. You’re just such a light.

Kristen:                  Well, thank you and back to you on that. Let’s start at the place where it all began, with KaLiMaJo.

Elizabeth:              Katy, Liz, Maggie, Jo who are the four sisters that I write about in the book. I’m one of four girls.

Kristen:                  Four sisters, four personalities, four lives converging under one roof. I think that sets the stage for us.

Elizabeth:              You talked about me being a grandmother — I’m now getting to watch two little boys be brothers because my grandkids live right here in town with me and I get to see them almost every day. It was really interesting writing a book about siblings and then watching them create this — the Cain and Abel story we all know as Westerners, depicting the love and the competition between siblings.

In Western psychology, we’ve put so much emphasis on the effect parents have on us. We do a lot of thinking about how this is because of my mother and that’s because my father. But the role of the sibling is powerful; your sibling is your first real ‘other’. Parents are too formidable to be your other. They’re like the God heads, but the siblings are these powerful beings in our life.

Kristen:                  We play it all out on our siblings.

Elizabeth:              Yes, from the very beginning.

Kristen:                  You have a great quote about siblings. “If you have siblings they will be your first teachers in this arena. They will serve you a confusing cocktail of care and competition, friendship and rejection, please forgive them for mistaking you as an invader.”

              I’m not leaving out single kids, who don’t have siblings, because often you have that with your