Category: Well Being

It’s All True

“Anger is always the bodyguard of our woundedness.­ There’s the trauma, ­there’s the anger, ­there’s the rage, but healing is about moving through that. Not distancing, not distracting, but moving through it to that really fundamental sadness and hurt that’s beneath the anger.”

Buddhist teacher Lama Rod Owens in the Harvard Divinity School’s newsletter

A few decades ago, I sat in a week-long workshop with a teacher I’d long admired. Noticing how we were passively note-taking, he suddenly threw down the gauntlet, asked why we’d each spent the considerable time and money to attend a program devoted to authentic leadership when we were, at that moment, like sheep grazing in a pasture?

I knew in my bones this was the invitation I had to accept and so, taking a risk by being the first one to reply as honestly as I could, I said that for several months, I’d been feeling a low-grade anger with so much of what I’d been seeing, experiencing, feeling both at work, and in the world. That I was irritable, quick to judge, hypercritical of myself, and those around me. That I’d lost my spark, my joy, my initiative and creativity. That while I didn’t feel depressed, I wondered if I was.

And he said, looking me straight in the eye, that my anger was my response and in direct proportion to my heart’s deep sadness for the state of the world and my life.

I felt my shoulders drop, my gut relax, and almost wept with relief for this re-framing. Later in the week, he also dropped another belief bomb: that as leaders, we had to learn to keep our hearts open in hell.

Right now, and for the past three months, I have again been feeling anger. Though more the righteous outrage variety. I’m irritable and hypercritical. I’ve lost my spark, feel flat and less inclined to engage in conversation. I haven’t written a poem in ages, and wonder if the fallowness has given over to being stuck in frozen-solid clay, a nearly impossible medium from which any creative seeds might sprout and emerge. Right now, I’ve wondered if I’m depressed.

In quiet moments, when my heart softens and my eyes well with tears, I remember this is truthful protection. The urgency I’ve felt to shake up and ask for action and accountability from those who have helped create this current hell, IS my deep sadness, though its origins are from long ago. The inherited trauma from generations who lived silenced by threats, abuse, and death. The small child in me – who was me – who, sensing things were terribly wrong and seeing no one do anything, felt betrayed and anxiously compelled to do something to fix it.

I’m leaning into the realization that NOW I’m feeling the same betrayal, first felt as a child, at the hands of people who should have known better and done better, and now towards people who are intentionally making it so much worse. Its fear and anxiety have been both driving and distancing me from an almost wordless sadness and hurt. I’ve been acting out from this long ago wounding.

To continue – mindlessly – would be further wounding.
To continue – mindfully – is keeping my heart open in hell.
“It’s all true,” the mantra I learned from another wise teacher.
May it be so.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

This Spring

soon…

It’s 7:00 am Sunday morning. I’m an early riser. Lately, too early as I’ve been plagued with a bout of early morning insomnia, waking around 3. Sometimes I toss a bit, listen to the slow and steady breath of Sig sleeping beside me and try to synch my breath with hopes of falling back to sleep. When my mind overrides that intention, I quietly rise, slip into my robe and slippers and head downstairs to read, or write, or take my place on my cushion, or stare out the window, wondering.

In a couple of hours, I’ll be attending an onsite, in-person writing workshop. Hosted by the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, it’s described as “an all-day retreat designed to nourish your creative process. Writing exercises, inspiring prompts, and focused discussion will get your juices flowing and keep you motivated for days and weeks afterwards.” Goodness, I hope so, for like an Alberta spring, no sooner do my juices start to melt and flow, when they freeze solid and need to be chipped and chopped to get flowing again.

Last week in my monthly online writers’ circle, we each spoke of being in a fallow season, making reference to Katherine May’s memoir Wintering; gave space for our reactions to democracy’s demise in the face of growing fascism; and anticipated Spring’s arrival the next day. A closing offering of a poem which I’ll share here to close today’s short, and “OK enough” post.

This Spring

How can I love this spring
when it’s pulling me
through my life faster
than any time before it?
When five separate dooms
are promised this decade
and here I am, just trying
to watch a bumblebee cling
to its first purple flower.
I cannot save this world.
But look how it’s trying,
once again, to save me.

~ James A. Pearson ~

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Mindful

Mindful

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for –
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

– Mary Oliver –


“How are you?” ask friends who I’ve not seen, nor spoken to for a while.
“Terrified,” my response.

Not afraid, but terrified…for my country…the illegal apprehensions, deportations, and denied entry…the constant blatant disregard for law…evil in the guise of leadership.

Not a very mindful response, or is it? Certainly more intense and less palatable than “afraid.” But in the moment, truthful, uncensored. And then it passes. The weight of it lessens for its utterance. But I know, too, that I need those moments of seeing and hearing that kill me with delight.

Thankfully, Walker obliges. Every day. The shine in his eyes, tongue hanging in joyful anticipation as I dress to play with him outside. Chasing him with one of the store of sticks he’s taken from the woodpile in the back. Our backyard scattered with them. Or inside, tugging on the damp-with-drool dishrag nearly shredded, or his blue racquetball, or red kong – each tight in his mouth, until he lets go in false surrender just to keep the game between us going.

Thankful, too, that yesterday’s sunshine and warmth allowed me to sit outside on a cafe’s patio to eat lunch after my 8+km river valley walk. All of it a balm. Nature and good food as co-regulators.

And that exquisite hand-made card sent by a friend who is excelling at paper quilling, her latest fascination. In yesterday’s mail, the envelope with my name and address, written by a hand I didn’t recognize. The note inside, bearing the same beautiful script, thanking me for my words, the tapestry I weave with them, the meaning they bring to her.

Coming through a “wintering” season, again with many more rejections of my writing than acceptances, with words laying fallow, deep underground, her gift like a prayer made out of new, spring-green grass.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends. And to you, Cate, thank you.

Rest

Walker… we all fall into bed after a full day

In yesterday’s inbox, I received two emails that struck me as contrasting approaches to coping with the current global state of affairs. In one, subject line: Sanity Repair Kit, its author listed thirteen personal strategies to help her stay above despair. The second, the weekly love note from Christine Valters Paintner, abbess of the online contemplative-creative community Abbey of the Arts, opened with the 6th principle of its Monk Manifesto:

“I commit to rhythms of rest and renewal through the regular practice of Sabbath and resist a culture of busyness that measures my worth by what I do.”

Deep, holy breath in and out…I could feel my body relax into the truth of rest being, as Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, writes: an act of resistance in a culture that wants to exploit and deplete our labor so others can profit. Could this be more on point at this time when we’re told that empathy is the fundamental weakness of Western civilization?

While the first email’s list included practices I know I could be doing, should be doing, and am doing – more or less – mostly, I felt overwhelmed and out of breath …except for the invitation to stare off into the sky for several seconds or minutes. Something I do quite regularly, sitting in my living room, often with Walker sleeping there in the sunshine. I understand “different strokes for different folks,” yet I want to uplift here an appreciation for and the wisdom in doing no-thing.

Suddenly, I am remembering with a smile the story I used to read during staff inservices, written by Robert Fulghum of the All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten fame. I no longer have that well-marked, tabbed, and dog-eared copy, but it was his experience of taking a pair of favorite leather shoes to the shoemaker for resoling that captures the essence of doing no-thing. He writes:

“The shoe repair guy returned with my shoes in a stapled brown bag. For carrying, I thought. When I opened the bag at home that evening, I found two gifts and a note. In each shoe, a chocolate-chip cookie wrapped in waxed paper. And these words in the note: ‘Anything not worth doing is worth not doing well. Think about it. Elias Schwartz.’”

“Sabbath is not a doing, but a way of being in the world… In those spaces of rest comes renewal, with dreams for new possibilities. As a culture we face so many issues that feel impossible to tackle in meaningful ways. One way to begin is to allow enough space for visions to enter, to step back and see what happens when we slow down our pace first. . . .” 

Christine Valters Paintner

Part of my Sabbath often includes cooking a good, ample meal giving us leftovers to get through the beginning of the week. With classical music or relaxing jazz streaming in the background and an occasional glass of wine, I’m in my element. Too, writing my Monday blog, warmly ensconced in my studio, surrounded by my various creative endeavors, inspiring images, vision boards and books, I sink into the wellspring of potential beneath the heartlessly cruel rhetoric filling so much airspace today.

Years ago, before The Abbey of the Arts, or The Nap Ministry, my friend Christina Baldwin penned the exquisite Seven Whispers (2002). “Move at the pace of guidance,” is the second whisper, combining two instructions: to re-humanize our speed of life, and to use a slower pace to actively listen for spiritual guidance.

“The pace of guidance, like peace of mind, begins internally – in me. Even though all my conditioning teaches me to accommodate speed, I am responsible for the pace I bring to the moment, just as I am responsible for the peace I bring to the moment.”

Christina Baldwin

What chocolate chip cookies might we find as we allow and settle into a slower pace and use this overwhelming and despairing time to do no-thing? What visions of possibility and inner wisdom might we access by resting and resetting our overwrought nervous systems? What might be the outcome of such a bold, strategic act of resistance?

“We must hang onto our humanity, it is why we’re in the world.”

Christina Baldwin

Much love, kindest regards, and moments of deep and abiding rest, dear friends.

Each moment of rest, of doing no-thing, of being our own Sabbath matters.
Each word, each photograph, each email matters.
Each kind word, each warm embrace matters.
It’s what we have which I have to believe can turn the tide,
perhaps first within the unseen, liminal spaces.

“Lightly my darling…”

Last week, I received a lovely anonymous response to this blog, originally written and posted three years ago. An unusual occurrence given the time lapse, it’s lingered. Then, thinking about what to write for today’s post, being tired from another viral infection and wrung out from the aftermath of the latest brutal undoings in the USA, I’ve accepted as gift the right timing of its reappearance and have chosen to repost it now.

Three years later, its essence still fresh, its message more relevant, though the context and circumstances quite different.

I hope this finds you bearing up well, dear friends. We’ve had less than two months of this near incomprehensible, yet strategic dismantling of our world by the Republican administration of the United States. When I take a “holy breath” (thanks, Tenneson) the shock of it all softens into feeling grief and uncertainty (mine, the world’s). Those tears stuffed inside my head cold escape, and the feeling of fear for my country and the world again emerges. This is not “politics as usual,” and while more subtle, nor life. Yet, I must feel lightly…cope lightly…walk ever so lightly.

Much love and kindest regards…

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days… Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me…So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling…”

Aldous Huxley, Island, 1962

Reading this quote last week it landed, more than lightly. Funny thing is I thought Huxley was advising “slowly my darling.” Musing on that for several days, recalling nearly a decade back, when at a week-long movement intensive – I there quite literally to “sweat my prayers” (Gabrielle Roth) – I met a woman recently retired though pursuing her independent coaching practice. She told me she never scheduled herself before 11 AM, preferring to enter each day slowly. I’m sure I countered with something like me being a morning person, liking to rise early, getting a good start on my workday.

Looking back, I was driven in that first year of “retirement,” striving to make a success of my independent coaching practice, not knowing how it would all work out after the decades’ long security of a pay cheque arriving twice monthly in my bank account. In those early months, I remember saying I needed to “make hay while the sun shone,” and secured contracts with people I enjoyed, doing work I loved. But I was exhausted. I remember falling asleep at a Friday night cooking class a couple of days before we flew to China for what ended up being an intense two-week tour. That whole trip I was cold, with photos showing me bundled in toque, scarf, and coat. I suffered through a couple of migraines, and within weeks of our return, developed Bells Palsy, a condition that left its indelible mark. A mark that to this day reminds me to go slow.

In my experience, while going slow is akin to walking lightly, it’s not the same. Trusting last week’s confusion, when I follow its thread, I see how going slow reveals the extent to which I am not “walking so lightly.” Lately, when I slow down, stop, sit still, or simply pause standing to notice the sky, step outside with Annie and breathe in the new day, sadness suddenly arrives. Nothing too pronounced, so it’s been easy to dismiss as I start moving or shift my attention. Despite its subtlety, it’s a sadness that’s been here for several weeks. I’ve alluded to it in one of my first posts of the new year, and last week’s when I wrote about remembering the light in the darkness.

I’m not one who writes to impart advice. In ten plus years of blogging, I can count on one hand the number of posts wherein I’ve listed, recommended, suggested what someone else can do to make their life better. Nor am I “reveal all” writer. Instead, usually prompted by someone else’s words, I disclose some of my own internal meanderings – messy as they might be. It’s through my way of writing – a process that can take several hours – I begin to catch a glimpse of a thread that shimmers, that when I tug, brings me, and perhaps someone else, a bit more clarity.

beauty in a hard place

I was a child taught to try hard and do well. Taking that lesson to heart, I tried too hard, grew too serious, and in ways, too hard. To “lightly let things happen, and lightly cope with them” was not what I saw, was never my lived experience. Fond of saying “it’s all true,” pithy wisdom from a long time ago therapist, helps me both to remember to hold the paradox of it all, and to lessen my need to try hard to understand, to fix, to make sense of it all. In the matter of my sadness – or perhaps the sadness that belongs to us all, and to the trees and the land and the sky and all the beings that have been holding our collective, unacknowledged, displaced grief of late, or since our beginnings – now to apply its wisdom to “feel lightly even though I’m feeling deeply.” Now to lighten my grip. No need to try hard despite the quicksands all about, especially as I try to fall asleep.

“Lightly my darling.”

Lightly, with much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Instructions on Not Giving Up

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the trees seem to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm. I’ll take it all.

– Ada Limon, The Carrying, 2018 –


Just reading this poem I feel my heart lift and lighten.

My gosh, what a winter. What it’s done to us. The brutal cold and snow covering much of Canada, the least of it. Innumerable, immeasurable ways, “the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.” No need to list them because I know you know.

Spring in these parts takes her time arriving. Winter is reluctant to leave. Teased by today’s thirty degree rise in temperature, and a weeklong forecast hovering around zero feels balmy. But we know spring’s capricious nature.

The greening of trees gets to me, too. Recalling that birthday years ago, when Sig gifted me with my first hot-air balloon excursion. Silently floating upstream in the spring green of our river valley. Lacy silver tree limbs and thick dark conifers in contrast to those thousands of tender unfurlings.

Remembering that. Writing this.
Knowing once again. Not giving up.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Regardless of My Age

“baby, it’s cold outside”

It’s been mighty cold here in Alberta, and across Canada. A much-needed, honest-to-goodness winter with a snowpack forecasters say will lessen the impact of spring and summer forest fires. Temperatures well below zero, made colder with wind, killing off viruses and vermin. A restoration of balance that, while I appreciate, as I said to Sig as we layered to go out, I wish I wasn’t in. It’s been less than a month since celebrating his birthday in Huatulco, Mexico, but it feels like ages with this profound contrast.

And Walker, despite inheriting Annie’s insulated coat, and boots that he reluctantly wears, has found his first winter too cold to do much more outside than his business. And even that’s done fast, carefully perched on three legs, alternately the fourth to keep it from freezing. Last week, both of us bundled to play in the backyard, not a minute later and he was at the door. That night, he didn’t eat his dinner and slept all evening instead of his usual watching TV (I kid you not!) or playing with us. I sensed he was depressed and reflected to Sig we needed to move someplace more temperate, as both Walker and I need to walk…outside…in Nature…without freezing.

I’m going on about this because I’ve noticed with every passing year, I’m less inclined to brave winter’s elements and that troubles me. I used to ice skate…cross country and downhill ski…I haven’t walked with my Camino group since Christmas. Dog walking has become episodic. Reading my friend, Gretchen’s post this morning got me to thinking more about my own aging and how it’s showing up.

“Ageism is the last bastion of political incorrectness, and no one is going to fight it with us or for us. No one else cares, until they arrive there themselves…”

Gretchen Staebler, “You’re Doing Great…For Your Age”

I met Gretchen at a writing retreat years ago on Whidbey Island. Then, she was working on her – now published and highly recommended – moving, tender, and funny memoir, Motherlode: Confessions of a Reluctant Caregiver. (For local readers, it’s available to borrow from my public library.) I love Gretchen’s fresh and candid take on life, and too, her big heart from which she responds to my recent posts about the harrowing state of our world. From her post which inspired my writing today:

“What do you see when you look in a mirror? Go ahead, look. Do you only see wrinkles and sagging skin? Yes, they are there, it’s a fact of the third act, it’s what the body does. And what else? What is reflected in your eyes, your smile?”

In this “third act,” what I’ve been calling “the eldering landscape,” my body is having its say, and I’m having to become more adept at listening. In this year, crossing the threshold into my eighth decade (mind-blowing what becoming seventy actually means!!!) I don’t know how I’ll celebrate. I do know I’ll continue to be enthralled, amazed, bewildered, curious, vulnerable, astonished, uncertain, afraid, grateful, courageous – the whole enchilada of words describing me being in love with the gift that is my life. Regardless of my age.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.
I’m so happy to welcome you, my newest subscribers, and grateful to you who have been reading me regularly.

The World Has Need of Us

cliffs and gulls and boats
Port Anthony, Newfoundland, 2015

The World Has Need of You
everything here seems to need us…
– Rilke

I can hardly imagine it
as I walk to the lighthouse, feeling the ancient
prayer of my arms swinging
in counterpoint to my feet.
Here I am, suspended
between the sidewalk and twilight,
the sky dimming so fast it seems alive.
What if you felt the invisible
tug between you and everything?
A boy on a bicycle rides by,
his white shirt open, flaring
behind him like wings.
It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little. Does the breeze need us?
The cliffs? The gulls?
If you’ve managed to do one good thing,
the ocean doesn’t care.
But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,
the earth, ever so slightly, fell
toward the apple as well.

– Ellen Bass –

This notion of being reminded…remembering…knowing that we are needed by the world has been a theme in the poetry I’ve chosen for these recent Friday posts. Given that I retrieve many poems from social media, saved in a file for future sharing, apparently, I’m in good company – being reminded and inviting others to this remembering. When I read these poems, I feel soothed. My breath slows and deepens. A spaciousness from which to settle, reset, and choose emerges.

Yes, among many of us, last month’s US election and the subsequent appointments of those who will assume positions of power (over?) have evoked a collective bracing, an autonomic tightening of our bodies. This month, as we (in the Northern Hemisphere) are nudged or tossed into winter’s cold and growing darkness, and into a Holyday season where Hallmark cards and streamed movies consistently and reliably portray “the happily ever after,” and stores are filled to the rafters with Christmas tchotchkes, many of us are living a vastly different reality.

Yes, for many of us right now, it’s a hard time to be human. We know too much and too little. Suffering devastating losses, living in that tension, actually that grief, we may need to be repeatedly reminded – from whomever, wherever, whenever – that the world – animate and inanimate, human and more-than-human – has need of us. That “everything here seems to need us.”

Believe it. Then, notice the evidence.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Caretake This Moment

CARETAKE THIS MOMENT

Caretake this moment.
Immerse yourself in its particulars.
Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed.

Quit the evasions.
Stop giving yourself needless trouble.
It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now.
You are not some disinterested bystander.
Exert yourself.

Respect your partnership with providence.
Ask yourself often, How may I perform this particular deed
such that it would be consistent with and acceptable to the divine will?
Heed the answer and get to work.

When your doors are shut and your room is dark you are not alone.
The will of nature is within you as your natural genius is within.
Listen to its importunings.
Follow its directives.

As concerns the art of living, the material is your own life.
No great thing is created suddenly.
There must be time.

Give your best and always be kind.

~ Epictetus ~

I’m glad to have not only a folder of saved poems for Friday’s photo and poem feature, but ones already crafted and sitting in the draft folder that occasionally fit the mood. Today was my good fortune as after yesterday’s grueling session at the dentist for a root canal (“Hard work,” declared the dentist. “Tell my jaw,” thought I.), all I was up to last night sipping soup, with a side of Tylenol and Advil, was watching the recommended new Netflix series “‘Man on the Inside.”

Epictetus says it. And in a similar vein, John Muth in his classic children’s tale, The Three Questions, a reworking of Leo Tolstoy, here read by Meryl Streep. Too, a verse from Mary Oliver’s poem, Dogfish, that I love:

“…And anyway it’s the same old story – – –
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world…”

Better late than never, here it is.

May your Friday be touched by the glow of nature that shines as much from within you as it does from outside. And may we each and all be kind as we caretake the moments of our lives.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.

Geese Sense

…”the greatest gift you could give a child — or the eternal child in you — is ‘a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments… the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.'”

– Maria Popova citing Rachel Carson, The Marginalian

Musing on what I’d write for today’s post, my direction shifted after reading Sunday’s issue of The Marginalian. The above quote and story that followed stirred a memory of responses I’d had during recent walks, during these past weeks fraught with global disenchantments. The unmistakeable sound of Canada geese – flying overhead, landing in the nearby pond, or in formation ready to make their annual southern migration, honking to announce their presence. Whatever I had been thinking up until that point quickly gave way to awe as I gazed up in admiration and remembered the once popular story I’d often read to groups I’d facilitated.

The Sense of a Goose described the group and leadership dynamics of a flock of geese flying south, and how their innate wisdom could be applied to us building teams and making communities. Reading aloud that story, how many times I’d almost be moved to tears. Even recalling it during my recent walks, watching those geese overhead, I had the same visceral, poignant response.

Delving into its edges and source, I realized I had been feeling the longing – that often barely acknowledged human condition – for the deeply rooted sense of wonder as an indefatiguable source of strength; for the feeling of inner safety and outer belonging; for trusting in the reliable support of others. In that story, among the people with whom I worked, and watching overhead now, I felt what the geese and their flying physics illustrated:

…”the physics of any healthy community, any healthy relationship — the physics of vulnerability and trust. Because life always exerts different pressures on each person at different times, internal or external, thriving together is not a matter of always pulling equal weight but of accommodating the ebb and flow of one another’s vulnerability, each trusting the other to shield them in times of depletion, then doing the shielding when replenished. One measure of love may be the willingness to be the lead bird shielding someone dear in their time of struggle, lifting up their wings with your stubborn presence.”

– Maria Popova citing Rachel Carson, The Marginalian

As the story goes, may we all learn from and practice the sense of geese. Goodness knows, we and our precious world are in its need.

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends.