Tapping Into The Quiet

Last blog was in February when we put down our beloved dog Hershey and here it is June 24th. How do I get a grip on the time that has passed? Guess that's one motivation to keep writing. When a person sits down with a pen in hand, to listen to the quiet...the words pour like sand through the hourglass. Perhaps this time of quiet has been my moment of silence...a paying of deep respect for the passing of a special presence in my life. Surely there has been healing called from those tiny grains and each tiny little second passed has carried my heart a little further along the river of grief and closer to dry land...a place where the sorrow turns to joy and the sadness becomes a dance of celebration. March was a tearful month and I made art with my memories. In April, an early warmth descended and the garden was made ready for planting weeks earlier than usual...and we were blessed by a birthday visit with our sons. Sam turned 26 reminding us that we have been married for 27 years come August. May was an extremely intense month...bringing both the planting of seeds and upheaval in the home. Stephen opened up the center of our house and a day or two after completing the project, was off to Togus to get some symptoms assessed because he was due to go down to Antigua to sail a boat back on May 20. Instead of having that journey, he had quadruple bypass surgery and I canceled all our play dates to make use of our new kayaks. Then on June 5th, Sam danced his way into a nearly severed achilles tendon as he staged a photo shoot. It was a trauma to deal with after being home from the surgery for just a week. I couldn't see fit to have too much health, so I slammed my finger in the dishwasher. Now my hands are hurting and my efforts to use them are clumsy. Ive already shattered two items this summer and summer started just a couple of days ago. I have been stress tested and called to the caregivers task and with the calling, I have been reminded yet again of my lifelong issues of self care in the balance of care for others. I had my ear debrided and the build up of debris after two years was painful to have removed. But maybe...just maybe I'm beginning to hear again.
I am a star at tending...tending the vegetable garden, tending to Stephen, tending my home...and the more I tend outwardly, the more I feel untended myself. I have neglected to complete the two promises I made...and make and remake on a regular basis...to do 30 minutes of cardio daily and to write for 1 hour. That's it folks...my commitment to myself. Sounds easy, yes? And my blog hasn't been tended since February. My tendency to tend has an addictive quality as I obsess about the house and garden. I am tripped up by my neglect of inner tending. So right now I promise the great Task Master Karma that I will be good. I will do 30 minutes of cardio and an hour of writing to explore my neglected tendencies and once a week I'll dance on this blogspot. There are inner gardens to tend and they are calling me. I hear you.

Goodbye Girl

The hovering is done. Death has been hanging around our hearts since last June when our beloved dog of 14 years had a stroke and since then, we have observed her becoming frail and senile. Stephen and I went to see Avatar at the Imax 3D theatre in Saco and were gone for 9 hours. The very next day when we woke up in the morning, she had another significant stroke. That followed a week of daily messing in the house...once she even pooped on her bed and then unwittingly laid down and slept on top of it. In her right mind, she would have been mortified for having an accident and would never have laid down as if nothing was there. Her ear-speak indicated a sadness and perhaps even a presence of pain.

After talking about her end of life plan with the family, and calling the vet to discuss the developing situation, the moment for scheduling the appointment arrived. I was struck by the vast gulf between thinking about the moment and then the actual acting in the moment. All the talk and mental planning did nothing to ease the actual arrival of the moment. The other day she was here, lying on the rug...watching me cook with devoted eyes and hopeful glances sideways. She was asking to go out at dawn and coming in for the treat she lived for even in her vacant moments. She was circling around her bed and scratching up a measure of comfort, finding just the right place to plunk her aching body on.

Now she is gone.

How could I pre-realize the hole she would leave in my heart? How to prepare for the void in our house? The aftermath of putting her down has its own teaching, ebb and flow. The tide of grief rises, spills over and ebbs while I seek the treasures that were the gifts she brought to our time together on this Earth. She was like me in many ways. She was shy and tended to hang back before moving into the center of things. She wanted to be brave and friendly and with coaxing, she could be very social but there was a suspicious and fearful side to her nature. She would always meet a door and assume it was closed to her even if it was partially ajar. Over the years her courage grew and she managed to become more assertive...even pushing through a door that was closed if it would yield to her the push of her head. She looked for loving strokes but also enjoyed her private space. Her creature comforts were appreciated and her sweetness was domesticated. Moving to Maine put her in touch with her inner fox and she loved to roam the fields and paths at our home on the Bog Rd. Hershey was prone to jealousy...she would seek reassurance if Stevo or I started to talk to and make of Tico, the cockatiel. She was downright brokenhearted when we took in Mosey, a yellow lab puppy on a breeders agreement. It was for her peace and our pocketbook that we gave up the little lab who couldn't go near water because of skin problems. Over the past year, I have weaseled out of many social engagements to spend time with Hershey together at home. Her greatest gift to me was to bring us home...back to the green growing things of Earth and to the lush emerald green of unconditional love.

Now, when I take part in the Locals Challenge Race on Wednesday mornings and I stand in the start gate getting all tied up in nervous nelly knots...anticipating all the what-ifs and what-nots...becoming paralyzed by thinking too much, I think of Hershey opening the door with her head after all the years of waiting meekly for someone to open it for her. I think of her...free from the fears, free from the anxieties of being alone, free from the thoughts that hold her back and I drop into the race course. I just do it. I take one gate at a time until I cross the finish line...exhilarated and at play in the fields of the Lord.

A Soft Light

Sliding into home for the holidays...wondering where the year went...where all the years went actually. Time slides away faster every year. This Christmas, we decided not to do presents bought from stores but instead to celebrate the greatest gift of all...each others presence. It's amazing how ingrained Christmas shopping is and the rut worn by 57 years of staging Christmas. Harried people are everywhere...in a race with time to get a mountain of errands done before the holiday arrives. Stress, rushing around, fighting for parking places,spending money you don't have, racking up debt on the credit card...all side effects from the brainwashing of the great Christmas machine. Once I thought the machine was plugged in for recharging myself...the perfect gift for Stephen, the boys and always a basket of bubble bath and soaps for my Mom and sisters...new books, music, movies...the hot new toys and of course the always needed winter clothing and snow toys. If I bought the perfect gifts and baked a million cookies and managed to clean my house all before the darkening sky of Christmas eve...then the holiday would be perfect. I did all the running around, the baking, the cleaning, the filling of the stockings and the holiday meal preparation...not to mention the clean up. The day after Thanksgiving I would don my red cape and conjure up my extra powerful powers and like super-Santa...whiz through the month of December with hardly a moment to breathe. Then Christmas would come.

Of course it was never perfect tho in hind sight it was perfect in its imperfection...always some kind of disappointment follows such extreme anticipation and such high expectation. The holiday became the perfect set up for me to go all out in production and achievement...and then to come crashing into the finish line with a sense of failure, exhausted and frazzled...and dissappointed by my humanness. This is not what Christmas is all about.

This year we will gather for a holiday of relaxing together. Going skiing/snowboarding or sledding and watching old home videos and sharing a good meal together with a spirit of love and non-expectation. This year I will not out do myself outdoing myself. I will not spin myself into a tight tornado tearing a path through obstacles without regard to their need or nature. For once, I will let Christmas come and go on it's own and not feel one-handedly responsible for making the whole event "perfect". I will welcome the silent night...the soft light of candles, the deep story of the birth of a new year and allow that light into my heart to share with my friends and family. This year...I am the giving, the giver and the gift...and the folks I love are too. Merry Christmas and a divine farewell to 2009. May all feel the deep peace of the holy season of light.

The Dark Side

Today, an army officer went berserk and killed several military personnel as they were being readied for deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. He wasn't just an officer. He was a psychiatrist who treated other military personnel for PTSD. I am grappling with this event because last week a local counselor here in Bethel killed himself. The 2 events are linked by the fact that both were violent acts perpetrated by mental health professionals who practiced the art of soothing souls distraught by despair and trauma. One unleashed his violence upon himself. The other took out 13 people and wounded 30 or so other innocent people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. My first thought upon hearing the news of the shooting at Fort Hood was that it might be the work of a terrorist..and that led me to ask myself, what is a terrorist. In the war against terror...who are we fighting?

Both these American men were "terrorists". Both these men were terrified. Were they Muslim? Were they suspicious? Would Border Patrol recognize them? The United States is at war and has been for nearly 9 years in the "War Against Terror". Iraq or Afghanistan...the country is irrelevant...and there is no difference between what occurred on 9/11 and what occurred on 11/5. On both dates...fear and desperation lashed out and attacked life as it went about it's daily business.

The American military unleashes it's fear and desperation day after day in Iraq and Afghanistan and the civilians who are simply trying to live their lives are paying the price...whether it is an American worker paying taxes spent on the war or an Afghan child seeking nourishment, their lives pay the cost of war. The extreme muslims seek retaliation by explosives strategically placed...in a shoe bomb, a suicide pilot or a training in suicidal glory. From what I can see...war is war. Both sides are terrorists. Both sides are irrational, intolerant and in a sense, ignorant. How many generations of learning does it take to understand the simple law ...for every action there is an equal reaction.

I sometimes imagine what might have happened if the USA did not react to the 9/11 attack on the twin towers. What might have happened if the money and effort went into caring for survivors? Instead of righteous indignation and assault, what might have happened if the USA invested it's resources in strengthening itself? By sending armies out to fight, the available resources are being spent on violence and the result is more violence. We kill our enemies but at the same time, we kill ourselves. As we wage this war against terror, we become terrorists and the people that are hurt the most are the people that idealistically believe they are doing something positive as they set out and realize they've lost themselves when they return and in losing themselves, they lose a sense of life having value. If we are at war against terrorists, we are terrorists because we are at war. Perhaps it is time to try a new approach. Honoring human differences might be a good start and in honoring differences perhaps we can begin to establish common ground.

I can't help but think about the people who poured out their souls to the psychiatrist that went berserk...or the folks who sought strength in the counsel of a mental health professional who then committed suicide. There is betrayal and evidence for yet deeper despair. How did these professionals not see things getting out of hand? Why did they not seek treatment themselves? In listening to and supporting the anguish of others did they absorb the very energies they sought to heal? Is this the time when sin eaters sin? While we "help" other countries become safe, will we watch ourselves breakdown? I don't know. I just wonder.

Hovering

Hey...hummingbirds do it...kestrels do it...bees do it. There are scads of examples of hovering in nature. What do you think of when you think of hovering? My first image is of my mother hovering around my room when I was sick...though she didn't do it often. Maybe the mother was me hovering around my boys rooms hoping to know them better...glean some key piece of information from their sleeping bodies...hovering around when they entertained friends. Hovercraft...its not an easy skill you know. You can't appear to be hovering...so you have to practice being invisible as well. Ahhh, finding the empty film can or the note from a girl in school. I never hunted on purpose for the clues into the lives of my teenage sons. I was lucky. They left obvious trails and I was curious and curiouser, so I followed the signs. Hopefully, I learned to respect their privacy while satisfying my curious sniffer. Certainly I soon realized that I don't want to know all their private goings on. Keeping track of my own is a full time job and the day comes when a mother needs to trust her children to navigate their own journeys as surely as she learns to navigate her own. I explored hovering a bit when my sister Beth was dying. She was in a hospital bed for 4 and 1/2 years before she managed to slip out of this world. I went through lots of stages myself, before finally letting go. Somewhere between denial and anger and sandwiched between bargaining and acceptance was the stage I call hovering.
Maybe angels do it. Insects surely do. How about souls? There is a time when a body is way past useful but it hasn't stepped over the threshold. I've seen that place in Beth's life...when Dad was dying of lung cancer and everyone wants to know when it's going to happen. Now, my dog Hershey is fluttering on the threshold and the clock is useless. The only time that keeps proper time is her time. I get up several times a night to see if she is still breathing. The room is crowded. It's not just me and Stephen and my girl sleeping on her bed...but the presence of a fourth energy. The presence of death. The gas she passes and the smell of her breath all require a balsam pillow...the presence of the tall majestic trees...scent of the forest. The piney essence is restorative and fresh. My girl still breathes. We visit the nursing home where Stephen's mother hovers at her threshold. The balsam pillow would be welcome. Why is it so hard to allow...to let each single soul come to their own point of crossing? To let the creature take their time? Why does it seem like you have to do something? There is no grace in pushing someone over the threshold...so I wait and breathe and love...happy for the time...confident the choice will be perfectly timed. Hovering. We all do it.

Unfinished Business

I feel my way through the technology maze and I do pretty well but I could not figure out how to get back to my saved draft of my musings on change. My only options seemed to be delete or publish...so I published it unfinished. Thus, this entry becomes a meditation on Unfinished Business. I was thinking about the challenge of change and the difference between change in the external circumstances of life that one can control vs the kind of change that happens to us and affects our deepest self and is not in our control at all...in fact it controls us with wave upon wave of emotion be it happiness or sadness. There is a piece in all this called resistance too. How much do we allow ourselves to be moved? Do we open our hearts to the depths of grief or do we avoid going there for all we are worth?

There was once a hopelessly idealistic and romantic poet that lived within me. She amassed a mountain of material over the first half of life. She embarked on a journey back to the land and a search for the deepest roots of soul and love. At one point, she became sick with the flu and nearly lost her life when complications developed into heart failure. Perhaps she did lose her life because I no longer seem to feel driven to write. Heart failure for a poet is way more complex than just the physical illness that gets treated with medication and diet changes. It's a failure of spirit as well. Perhaps I just let her die. I simply ran out of words. And I became tired of language, tired of words and verbal description...tired of trying so hard to make myself understood...tired of the internal noise. I craved silence and stillness. A similar thing happened when my Dad died. After taking his cremains out to sea and scattering his ashes, my old joy in sailing died too. I suddenly became prone to seasickness where I once passionately loved the open ocean and the rolling waves. My deepest desire was altered by the void left by the death of my Dad. Suddenly I became a stranger to myself.

Perhaps the challenge of change that happens at our marrow is in allowing ourselves to be temporarily unknown and vulnerable...carried by the waves on a journey toward some unknown becoming. Resistance manifests in holding on tight to our previous definition of ourselves rather than trusting the movement ever onward toward evolution of spirit. I think of my cousin, my friends and family in the throws of cancer...and I pray they greet their changes with less resistance and a deep openness to their vulnerability because it seems to me that embedded in the mystery of change lies a fragrance of something far sweeter than our human minds can conjour and the only path is through feeling.

Is there anything more vulnerable than a baby bird on the cusp of learning to fly?

Challenge of Change

Here we are cruising into the last week of June slightly rusted from all the rain but ever hopeful for a warm sunny growing season still to come. The ribald idealism of bright green May and nothing but growth to come, has given way to a tempering this June. There was murder and mayhem out back at the bird house that has been occupied by swallows all spring. The house was literally turned upside down hanging from the pole, suggesting vandals of the cat kind. The 2 unhatched eggs had been drained by the telltale puncture of a snake tooth and the one hatched baby was dead. The swallows are still landing on and around the house...perhaps wishing to wake up from their nightmare to find their home intact and children alive. Out of 24 days of June, 22 have been rainy and cucumber beetles have destroyed my squash and pumpkins. Some kind of black aphids have turned my fava beans from healthy green to wilted sick. I also haven't found a job beyond my own home and garden. Guess it's understandable that my thoughts turn to the challenges of change. I'm a person who loves spontaneity, surprises and the not quite knowing what's happening frame of mind. I've called many places home and been fortunate to work in many different capacities through my life. I know I am not commitment-phobic because I've been married to the same wonderful partner for 26 years and have held the thread of journal writing since the age of 12. No. I'm not afraid of change. But there is change and there is CHANGE.

Lower case change is about changing external circumstances. I'm not saying it's easy. Usually changing externals means lots of work...hard earth work...moving stuff, cleaning stuff, sorting and dumping stuff. But capital CHANGE is internal change. It's far reaching and life-altering. It seems to come about when external circumstances change you. I just heard from my sister that my cousin's wife had a heart attack on Friday and died very suddenly. In a moment he has experienced a loss that totally redefines him. Two years ago, another cousin was driving with her husband to deliver her 18 year old son to college. In the passing lane of the highway, her husband had a heart attack and died while she reached over from the passenger seat to get the car under control.