The Grace of Change

No Shit, No Flowers

The Wonderful Husband received an generous gift from a landscape design client several months ago: 6 bags of aged, weed-free steer manure. Wow.

A gift, you ask?

Well, yes, in the right context ;-)

Several weeks ago David and I were happily putzing in the garden. One thing led to another, and in two shakes of a mockingbird’s tail (as Mama used to say) we were digging in the front and creating a real garden there for the first time. We transplanted hellebores, violets, and maples from the back garden and, along with still-potted plants David had collected over the years, created a lush new landscape.

What a gorgeous garden we created! As I’m writing this, I’m looking out on a lushness of blossoms: crimson rhodies and azaleas, creamy dogwoods, chartreuse hellebores, purple labrador violets.

We mixed said manure in all the new beds. I’ve never used bagged manure in a garden, and I was surprised to see and smell how, er, recognizable it was.

As I was digging, I remembered a client many years ago in Big Change. Elaine was a gardener, too, and we played with metaphors from nature to help ground her grief and deepen her trust in the cycles of death and rebirth in nature and in life.

One week Elaine came in all smiles, a miracle given the depth of her losses. “Melissa,” she grinned, “I’ve found the key!”

For a New Beginning

  For those of you celebrating new change, and for those of you sooooooooo ready for new change.

 
What I love about this poem is how O'Donohue emphasizes the mystery of Rebirth. Few of us, at the beginning of Rebirth, received a detailed 10 year plan of how our life will unfold. Rather, it's like the very beginning of spring: new tender shoots, sometimes unidentifiable. Sunny and warm one day, snow or miserably cold rain the next.

 

To Rebirth:

For a New Beginning
 
In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
 
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
 
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
 
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
 
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life's desire.
 
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.
 
~ John O'Donohue ~

What Doesn't Change, In Change

This is one of my favorite poems to read aloud toward the end of a retreat on big life transitions...

...mmm, I love the hushed and fertile quiet of a group of women listening deeply, with the ears of their hearts, to a good poem.

In a big transition, so much of what we "knew" about the world — our assumptions and beliefs about ourselves, about life, about relationships and others — goes away, never to return again. Given this, it is life-giving to reflect on what doesn't change, that thread you follow no matter what:

THE WAY IT IS

There's a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.

~ William Stafford

So what is your thread that you don't let go of, despite changes and how hard it might be for others to see? How does it keep you from getting completely lost?

Your Big Yes

NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This aliveness is what’s most important to me, and what I most wish — from the very core of my being — for us all.

I don’t know about you, but I regress to toddlerhood when my life falls apart. Those times when the cherished whatever that defines me and gives my life meaning — healthy body, interesting work, kids at home, relationship with someone I love — falls away, usually wrested from my fist tightly wrapped around said cherished whatever.

Noooooooooooo, I say to life/God: no, you can’t have this, it’s MINE. Nooooooooooo, this CAN’T be my life. My life, my good life, my best life, HAS to have (fill in the blank: health, wealth, primary partnership, your own cherished whatever).

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh lordy. This primal NO sucks the juice right out of me. It obliterates both the “wild” and the “precious” from my wild and precious life.

Enter the Big Yes: the no-holds-barred Yes to your own life, with or without your cherished whatevers.

Your Big Yes doesn’t depend on your health, your bank account, or your age.

Big Questions to play with

I just remembered this handout from years ago. I used to give this to participants in transitions retreats I used to lead. I'd hand this out and ask the women to breathe into all of these questions for a few minutes and notice which question most spoke to them. We'd then go around a circle and each woman would ask her favorite question into the Mystery living at the center of our circle, and the center of our lives.

One of the gifts of life transtions is that we get to be like adolescents again.

(Yeah, I know that doesn't feel like much of a gift ;-) ). Remember those all night dishes in high school and college where you talked with your girlfriends about The Meaning of Life? Being in big transition invites us to ask questions of ourselves and our lives we haven't had the time and inclination to ask in a loooong time.

In transition, it's NOT about knowing the answers to the questions.

We can't. The answers will come in their own time. What's important is to simply be with the questions in a soft and curious way.

The Path Is Made by Walking

David - aka The Wonderful Husband - gave me a necklace several years ago with the first lines of this poem inscribed on 2 rings, one silver, one brass: "Traveler, there is no path/the path is made by walking."

Isn't that what a big-ass life transition is about? No pre-made road, trail, highway. Nada.

I had a Big Dream several decades ago in the middle of one of those times of everything falling away. In the dream, I wanted to get to Phoenix (!) as quickly as I could. I tried getting on the freeway, but the on ramp was broken. Damn. I wanted to get there asap.

My only other alternative was to set out across the desert. I picked up a bike by the side of the road and started hoofing it. Suddenly, my way was blocked by a very old, very wise man. He told me to get off the bike, take off my shoes, and just start walking across the desert to Phoenix. He seemed kind, but not the kind of guy you disagree with. I wondered how the hell I was ever going to get there, wherever "there" was.

No other options, though, so I started walking. The old man called out to me and told me to look down at the ground. The ochre desert earth was, to my astonishment, littered with uncut gems.

Don't you hate it when dreams are just so blatantly obvious?

That dream has stayed with me for almost 30 years. It's part of my bones now, the matrix of my soul. I'm thinking about that dream, and this poem, as I begin to write again. Don't know where I'm going, but Machado reminds me that I don't have to fret too much about it. The path is made by walking.

Proverbios y Cantares XXIX

Wayfarer, the only way
is your footsteps, there is no other.
 
Wayfarer, there is no way,
you make the way by walking.
As you go, you make the way
and stopping to look behind,
you see the path that your feet
will never travel again.
 
Wayfarer, there is no way -
Only foam trails to the sea.
 
~ Antonio Machado ~ 
 (Translated by A. Trueblood)

Writing agin...

Ahum...hmmmhmmmhmmm...ack ack...

What you're hearing is the sound of my writing voice coming back to life. Lots of frogs in my writing throat.

As readers of my now-defunct newsletter know, I stopped writing 18 months ago. I couldn't stand the sound of my own voice any more. All I was writing about was stuff I already knew. I was starting to bore myself silly.

Life's too short for that. So I quit writing. I had just plumb run out of things to say.

The Light That Can Shine Out of a Life

A client gifted me with this poem last week (almost, almost as good as chocolate). She is in the midst of a tough divorce. Beauty and love have always been guiding lights for her, and Mary Oliver's poem "Singapore" brought her back to the grace of a light shining out of misery. Thankful, like Oliver says, that the world is not only pain and logic.

Singapore

 

In Singapore, in the airport,
A darkness was ripped from my eyes.
In the women’s restroom, one compartment stood open.
A woman knelt there, washing something
in the white bowl.

 

Disgust argued in my stomach
and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket.

 

A poem should always have birds in it.
Kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings.
Rivers are pleasant, and of course trees.
A waterfall, or if that’s not possible, a fountain
rising and falling.
A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

 

When the woman turned I could not answer her face.

To Enter Life, Be Food

Today is the fourth anniversary of my mom's death. I miss her sometimes so much my bones hurt. This poem helps me remember that all of my life - the grief as well as the joy - is food for the great feast of life itself.

The Way In

 

Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.
Sometimes the way in is a song.
But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding,
and beauty.
To enter stone, be water.
To rise through hard earth, be plant
desiring sunlight, believing in water.
To enter fire, be dry.
To enter life, be food.

 

~ Linda Hogan ~

 (Rounding the Human Corners)

Kindness First

I remember the first time anyone suggested that I could be kind to myself, no matter what.

Say what?

I was slumped over in my therapist's office decades ago, too depressed to have brushed my hair that morning. It was an abysmal nadir: physically and emotionally worn out, ill with a serious chronic illness that was sapping my soul, grieving multiple deep losses.

I was a mess.