Monday, March 26, 2012

Time for the sages to step in

Monday, March 26, 2012


The writing tide has gone out and it’s not flowing back in a timely fashion in my neck of the woods this week. 
Today my “write” mind is as the rusty burn barrel that is sitting upside down on the south side of the old red barn in my farmyard. There’s nothing in this noggin but an empty space. 
It’s been a very tough week on the wild mouse rollercoaster. I’m going to sit back and eat chocolate and let the sages I hold dear take the floor from here. 
Some quotes are anonymous and others are not. 
It’s all short and sweet and  . . . until next week  . . .




“If you can’t see the bright side of life, polish the dull side.” 


“Few situations can be bettered by going berserk.” - Melody Beattie


“Everyone is gifted – but some people never open their package.” 


“I have learned that when you harbor bitterness, happiness docks elsewhere.” 


“In exchange for the promise of security, many people put a barrier between themselves and the adventures in consciousness that could put a whole new light on their personal lives.” – June Singer


“I’ve learned that the best classroom in the world is at the feet of an elderly person.” 


“Watch your thoughts; they become your words. Watch your words; they become your actions. Watch your actions; they become your habits. Watch your habits; they become your character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”


“When the path is blocked, back up and see more of the way.” 


The fastest way to freedom is to feel your feelings.” – Gita Bellin


“Believing is all a child does for a living.” – Kurtis Lamkin


“To see takes time.” – Georgia O’Keeffe




“To journey without being changed is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and to be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim.” 


“Today I shall behave as if this is the day I will be remembered.” – Dr. Seuss


“We tend to make the thing in the way the way.” 


“When I was five years old my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down “happy.” They told me I didn’t understand the assignment. I told them they didn’t understand life.” – John Lennon


“Expectation is the root of all heartache.” – William Shakespeare


“How people treat you is their karma. How you react is yours.” – Wayne Dyer


“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” – Albert Einstein

Monday, March 19, 2012

Hope floats on notes and sunshine

Monday, March 19, 2012


It’s been nearly 45 minutes since I sat down to write this column and I am doing everything BUT writing it.

I’m following all the traditions that I usually do each Monday to set me up for the task; hot coffee at the ready, good music, comfortable clothes, and all the notes I’ve written myself in the last seven days.
Maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s all about the notes.

Last spring, Jon bought me a pocket notepad called “Great Ideas,” for those light bulb moments he’d witnessed me having when I was devoid of paper, and instead used a pen to chicken scratch the idea on my forearm.

At first Jon thought it was cute, until that time I was having a brainstorm about my dogs and—with no paper to write it on—borrowed a pen from someone at the next table and wrote “nuttier than squirrel turds” on my arm while we were out to dinner one night.

The next day he came home with the “Great Ideas” notepad and I’ve never been without it since.

But today when I copied the memos to my laptop like I do every week, I noticed there are only three pages left on the notepad and suddenly I felt like all the oxygen had been sucked out of the room.

The gifts that Jon bought for me during our time together all are writing-related and mean the world to me. Three of them are books Jon learned about because he was a very good listener when I talked. They were on a bookshelf that I’d seen in a photograph of the late Andy Rooney.

The fourth gift was the “Great Ideas” notepad and although I think he bought it to save my skin, I’m feeling a bit of “writer’s block” looming when the last page is used up. But then again I shake my head and snicker. I doubt there’ll be a bump in the creative process. 

My 21-year-old daughter arrived home from College on Friday and if nothing else I could spend the next three months talking about the notes I’ll be pinning up everywhere to remind her to pick up her laundry, do the dishes, and shut off the light when she leaves her bedroom.

I jest. Her company will be among the many gifts I am thankful for these days.

Those moments of gratitude extend to both ends of the spectrum and into the night air that I inhale for the scent of skunk that will come a’ calling with the arrival of the expedited warm weather.
I still breath easy; as yet the air is clean and clear.

But every time I let the dogs out for a pee before bedtime or in the minutes before daylight each morning, I cringe at what I am guaranteed to soon be mixing more times than I care to admit—the recipe of dish soap, baking soda, hydrogen peroxide and a generous sprinkling of pet-friendly fabric softener. It is unavoidable in my neck of the woods.

Unavoidable too, is the heart homework that beckons after a 14-day respite. I must compile a graph of all the losses I can recall from my life for discussion at my upcoming counseling session.

This is the fork in the road where I am told many people who are in grief recovery counseling stop going because the impact of facing the reality of life loss, and its unfinished business, is just too painful.

“Until you heal your past you will continue to bleed and bleed and bleed.” I heard that in a movie once. I wrote it down. I never knew when I’d need to use it. I guess that time is now.

If I was being unloving of myself, I wouldn’t go back to counseling.
On the contrary I do love myself very much and I want to know what I’m holding on to that holds me back, and I’m pretty sure I’m about to find some “stuff” that I haven’t completed and that hasn’t gone anywhere but underneath.

To my own credit though, I have to say that when I was on my walk on Saturday morning in the incredible sunshine, and watching the geese map out their field nests I think I took a step forward.
Indeed in the beauty of the moment, I thought how sad it was that Jon wasn’t there to enjoy it with me. In the last nine weeks a thought like that meant I would continue to wear a dark pair of glasses through my entire day.

But in the circumstance of Saturday morning I was able to feel the sadness and then put it down and let go and choose to feel peace and dare I say, happiness.


The realization right then of being able to make that happen in the context of my day was amazing and indeed it made me cry, not from a place of sadness—but from understanding that it was the first time I had purposefully chosen to do that since Jon died.
 
And that, my friends, means hope is peeking through. 










Monday, March 12, 2012

Strike a pose and breathe your own truth

Monday, March 12, 2012


In the past six weeks I’ve written about outing the “elephant” suicide, how joy is medicine, how books take me places, my black cape, a rollercoaster ride, and my desperate need for tweezers and for advocates who will listen and not give advice.

The latter are worth their weight in gold, and I’ve discovered that I weave them into my life with precious care as if threading a needle with a fine piece of silk. The spools of friendships that make the best embroideries are the ones who—when you need them most—are there with no agenda of their own to spill.

Granted we all need friends like that and taking turns at being the one who listens instead of talks is a fine art that is finding its way back into my life too, and allowing me to be the sounding board instead of the sound.
I dare say I think that’s a sign that the deepest end of my ocean of the last eight weeks is finding a bit of shallow water to rest in.

That’s not to say I haven’t had my moments where I completely lose all sensible control. I don’t get angry very often but I had a classic flip-out the other day while I was combing my hair in the bedroom.
Jon’s presence is still in there of course on the dresser where he kept his meticulous little pile of note pads, pens, his watch, loose change, and a pile of folded laundry he hadn’t dealt with.

I caught the collar of my sweatshirt on my hair comb twice and in a normal world it shouldn’t have caused a Medusa response, but the second such snag triggered something inside of me.

I threw the comb across the room and started yelling at an otherworld Jon who couldn’t defend, shaking my finger at his invisible self in the corner of the bedroom and chastising him for all the future opportunities he will miss; the lives of his children and his grandchildren and of me growing old with him.
The emotions were new and raw and admittedly shameful and embarrassing to me in the aftermath. In our living life together Jon and I never argued, never raised our voices to each other, never spoke in ill terms, never once.

I cannot stress the benefit of “recovery from loss” counseling, folks. If I have learned anything since I woke up to how much alike we are than unalike (to half-quote Maya Angelou) I have found a whole new sense of freedom in telling the truth about who I really am inside. Sure, I’ve been doing that here in this column space for a long time. There’s a different kind of release however in sharing your truth with someone who specializes in how your brain and heart works. Counselors are awesome, or should I say on a less “global thinking” scale; my counselor is awesome.

Yoga is awesome too. Inexperienced and knowing nothing about the art, I’ve committed to six weeks of classes. I put myself on the mat for the first and second time last week.

“Ohm.” “Gobsmacked.” Can I say those two words in succession and not be in trouble?

The instructor and all the other yogis are the most non-judgmental group I’ve ever met. However, I was not so accepting of myself that first class.
Poses? Downward-facing dog? Monkey? Warrior? Tree? Cobra? Not to mention Sun Salutations? —All news to me.

I believed I’d held the wrong pose every time, as crooked as a dog’s back leg—not to mention that I forgot to breathe. By the time class was over, I was as blue as the July sky. My painted toenails were the only nice shade of pink on my green thumb yogi carcass.
My heart and I wanted to run crying out of the room and hide in the corner. My instructor changed all that negative thinking.

I’m not a quitter. This I know for sure. Oh how well I know this for sure.

I went to my second yoga class with a different mindset and I surrendered to the process of letting go of the outside world and my hang-ups about what I don’t know.

When class was over I realized that for more than 60 minutes I hadn’t had a care or a worry in the world and my breathing was steady and my skin was pink and my body was alive.

And I’m hooked on yoga as sure as my friend Cheryl is on hooking wool rugs.
“Let the beauty we love be what we do.”


Monday, March 5, 2012

Laugh With Me And Then Listen

Monday, March 5, 2012


The way you get sideswiped is by going back.
When you get sideswiped and stay there too long you forget to do some very important things, like have fun or pluck facial hair.
Seven weeks and counting.
My apologies to anyone out there in the world who was standing face to face with me and noticed the long, crooked, grey eyebrow hair growing from the space between my eyes and the tufts of black ones shooting out from the sides of my temples like cactus thorns.
The long hairy strand growing out of my chin and clearly visible to the naked eye of someone standing at the other end of the grocery store, could have been entered in the Guinness Book of World Records for length.
All those monstrosities are gone now.
And I used to believe that “Millie” the cat was using the feline prerogative best described by Pam Brown of working out “mathematically the exact place to sit that will cause the most inconvenience,” but instead I think she was trying to tell me something.
Each morning at 6 a.m., and increasingly so in the last three weeks, Millie has been rubbing her whiskers against the side of my mouth in what I thought was a wake-up call.
Turns out she was grooming my moustache, which also had begun to sprout out like an alfalfa garden.
It too has been plucked.
Joan Didion was right. “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant.”
I drove into the yard and life as I knew it ended. But it is not the end of my life; it is just the beginning of a different one, as I am slowly learning . . .
But I must breathe some fun too or I will quite simply fade away into the nothing.
Of course the Universe hears me think that and “poof” sets me up.
I had parked the car in the garage and the dogs were in there with me in their usual excited state to greet the Alpha. I closed the big door while still inside and was about to exit out to side door when I figured out I was not the one the dogs were barking at.
In that microsecond as the long-tailed rodent sprung from the shelving unit on to the top of my car did I comprehend that I was blocking the escape route of a cornered squirrel that the dogs had flushed out of my storage space and no doubt the nest it created in my sleeping bag.
His beady and wild eyes met mine and in a move straight out of the “Matrix” movie my upper body leaned back as the squirrel flew by me and out the open door—followed in leaps and bounds by the canine capers.
I just had to laugh. Some things never change.
Some things need to change however, including the contents of my fridge, which currently rivals that of Mother Hubbard. If I didn’t know better I’d swear I was living on pumpkin seeds and raisins of late, as I have no appetite, but sadly the size of my butt has not been reduced by this hen-pecking diet. Time to go shopping.
And when I return home with all my groceries, I can be sure that two dogs will expect the bags will contain a beef bone or two, and they will pay attention while I talk to them about it.
There are six little words I learned online from Dr. Bill Webster, a grief counselor, that have become very important in my world these days.
I am human. I hurt. I hurt a lot. So when you see me or someone else you know who is suffering a loss and we want to talk about it—let us—let me. It’s really all that I need and you are off the hook from having to do anything more than give me the gift of six words.
“Mouth closed, ears open, presence available.”