hope – Page 18 – Janis Dehler

Our Daily Work

It feels as if spring is arriving and we are being nudged out of hibernation. We are enjoying the warmth of the sun on our skin, if not a bit cool. We saw two young men in shorts. Maybe my brain will thaw as well and I will be able to write again or maybe it is just that life has been a bit too full and disjointed to get thoughts to line up.

I have been thinking of our travel trailer in storage and some work that needs to be done when we pull her out in early April, and planning a trip to Chicago with two of the oldest grandchildren which happens also in early April, and our family trip to the UP in June and other summer events. My body and spirit want to move more even though I exercise every morning. A bit of adventure thrown in would be welcome. I have been a student for five weeks and already I feel ready for spring break.

Since adding a class to my life, writing has had to be pushed aside for time and I miss the writing and reflection. As I sat in meditation this morning, I remembered that whether I am writing, drawing, painting, meditating, playing with the children, or sitting with a bereaved, it is all the same when I am present. Each activity when I am present allows me to see, feel, experience life in a moment. When I take a seat or stance or walk in the present moment I am alive and connected to life. It may feel like my time is torn between one thing and another but it is not, as at the core it is all the same exercise and as Jon Kabat-Zinn states, it is all “taking your seat in and in relationship to the present moment.” It is our relationship to this moment that is our life. Usually what keeps us out of the present moment is anxiety and regret, one for the future and one for the past. We live in our constant inner chatter about one or the other.

This is my life and it can all seem trite and mundane when we hear reports of yet another school shooting and the loss of so many beautiful lives and this awareness too becomes the practice of focus and staying present. We sit with our caring, our anger, our concern, our activism but not by loosing ourselves in a future or a past but by continuing to live in the moment that is ours in each breath. We connect to the source of each moment as best we are able to be open to grace, spirit, love, compassion and then we bring these out into this world we inhabit.

As Kabat- Zinn states in his book, Arriving at Your Own Door, “Now is already the future and it is already here. Now is the future of the previous moment just past, and the future of all those moments that were before that one.” We live with anxiety worried about the future and if we are where we “should be” in life. Are we where we thought we would be when we looked forward at age 21? And yet, we are our future in this very moment. We create worry and anxiety about some untold future not realizing our tomorrow is built on today. As we re-center in this one moment, the only one we have, we build a center for tomorrow. We build peace on peace, joy on joy, compassion on compassion. At the center of my being I do know why I am here and why I am drawing and writing and I trust in where it is all taking me. I believe all of this when I hold a steady attention, some days, some moments, being harder than others. By holding a steady attention, holding a focus, we can rest in the focus. There is no anxiety. There is only space, breath, and presence; all grounding for a full life.

Seventeen lovely children and adults were in the midst of a day, in the midst of a breath, and it was the last. We sit in that awareness and feel the pain of those who have been left behind, who grieve their loss, who feel confused and uncertain of their future and wish, with every breath, they could change this past. As we sit in this awareness, we enter this moment with them through each breath in and through each breath out, transforming in each breath hate for love, anger for peace, doubt for faith, despair for hope. We hold steady in the strength we have today and make this our offering, this our daily work toward an untold future, this a promise for a more compassionate loving tomorrow.

The dawning of a new day, a new moment, at Morning Sun.

The Warmth of Love in a Cold Climate

We are in a new month. I am noticing closely as we are not going anywhere for the winter months and it is interesting to watch the movement of weather while noticing how I feel about the weather. For the most part, being here in the cold and snow is fine. It just is. What I am missing is being outside walking as I just don’t go out when it is so cold. I mainly notice the weather when I see a photo on facebook of someone in a warm climate. Oh my, to walk outside again would be delightful!

We are in full moon time, the stars are bright and crisp in these below zero nights. I pray with gratitude for the warm home we live in and pray that all might have a warm safe place to lay their head for the night. My studio/office faces south and the warm rays of the sun surround me as I sit at my desk. I try to sit facing the sun streaming in through the window to soak in some vitamin D.

It is an introverted time of the year as we are still wrapped in darkness for a good part of our 24 hour day. We enjoy small intimate dinner gatherings and head to bed early or sit quietly reading. We can be more patient with our lives when we are buried in snow as travel in extreme weather and darkness isn’t fun anyway. It is as if we live through months of energy conservation saved up for the high days and nights of summer. We also notice we spend less money in winter as we go less and shop less. We add 5 lbs of extra weight to our bodies just to keep ourselves warm.

Winter requires creative endurance while creating ways to stay active, engaged, and healthy in the unforgiving cold. One of my bereaved, 83 year old gentleman, is as giddy as a teenager with the delight of meeting a woman who he finds interesting and good company. His daughter is stunned with the transformation and pleased that he has come out of himself and found a reason to get up in the morning. Winter gives us a reason to reach out to find friends who understand our need for connection in these days that otherwise draw us into seclusion.

Finding warm love in the midst of a bitter winter is good for the soul. It brings a smile to the heart and we all grow larger for knowing it.

Return To Love

Today, a young woman is dying and moving closer to her last breath. She will be leaving three little ones who will be too young to remember her. She is struggling and acknowledged to the Hospice team member, in a soft whisper, ‘I am afraid of dying.” She is young and we are used to supporting the elderly in their dying. Supporting the death of a 30 something is out of natural order and it brings pain and tears to those assigned to her care and to the whole team.

Most of us either acknowledge a fear of death, the unknown, or state that it is not a fear of death but the pain in dying and letting go of life and loved ones that we fear and grieve. If we are honest we can see that this fear gets played out in different ways every day of our lives as we make choices, usually unconsciously, based on any one or all of those fears.

We all know the spontaneous rise of fear when the body feels threatened. The feelings of anxiety and racing heart and mind. We fight to calm our breath and seek outside ourselves for answers and perspective, something to cling to that allows the fear to subside, something that distracts us and gives us a feeling of soothing or safety. It all seems to work for a while and then the cycle starts all over again At some point, we find it is the clinging that brings us full circle back to the fear of dying, the fear of letting go and having nothing to cling to in the attempt to claim our identity.

Death is not something most of us think about in our 30’s and it is something most of us can avoid thinking about on a day to day basis. When it comes time to take that journey ourselves or to assist a loved one on their journey we have little awareness of the experience.

We are a land of how to’s, directions for everything at our fingertips. I googled, “how the body dies,” and got a tremendous amount of information on how the soul leaves the body at death. And yet, it will be our first time, or not, depending on our beliefs, and we don’t know what it feels like, we don’t really know what it will uniquely be for us .

I am thinking of this today as the deeper I go in my meditation practice, I discover the more I have to let go of and to let go of clinging to, with a feeling of floating away from shore into nothingness. I am beginning to understand my meditation practice as the practice of dying.

11th Century mystic, Mechthild of Magdeburg, writes:

The soul is made of love and must ever strive to return to love….By its very nature it must seek God, who is love.

It is not what we find in the distractions or what we consider a safety net; shopping, reading or anything else that takes the mind away. Rather it is that which we seek in the inner life through prayer, contemplation, meditation, alone time in nature, and ultimately death, that brings relief to our pain, our suffering. We seek to return to love. It is something to remember when we fear death, or the death of another, and struggle to understand. We seek to return to love. It is the timing of our death we do not know. But as one team member offered, “You were born, you gave birth, you know how to do this.” We struggle with believing that we do know how to die, to return to love.

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Good/Bad/Who Knows?

Leo and I met up with our daughter and family for dinner one evening. Somewhere between the bread and salad courses, my 10, soon to be 11, year old grandson asks, “Oma, if you could go back in your life and change something, what would it be?” While I am quickly gathering my thoughts, he then asks, “And, if you could go back and visit a time, what would it be?” Time to catch a breath. Both questions begin to get jumbled so my son – in – law carefully parses out the two questions giving me more time to reflect and sort through my life. The wait person catches my eye as she walks back to the kitchen with a big, mouthed, “OH, WOW!”

Now, the easy way out would have been to say, I would have painted my house blue instead of green. The boy would have been happy. They love to play the game, would you rather… But, never one to loose a moment of intimacy or teaching,… My first response is philosophical. “It is challenging to think of changing something when everything I have lived through has brought me to now,” I say, buying me more time. Finally, I tell Oscar, “I promise. I will get back to you. I just need more time to think.”

This morning I wrote Oscar. First, If I could go back and change something, I would learn how to be a better dog owner. We bought Yoshi, our West Highland Terrier, sometime after the death of our infant daughter, when our then 7 year old daughter was begging for a dog, The dog was meant to be a grief dog which she lived up to by being a lot of grief and, I have to say, fun and comfort for the kids for a while. Both Leo and I are pretty ignorant of dogs not having grown up with trained house dogs. Yoshi was weaned too young the vet stated and would be a handful as she had not had her mother’s training and the other pups long enough to learn. The name she came with, Sugar Bear Tough Stuff, should have tipped us off. We renamed her Yoshi and did our best. She won out and ruled the house.

I am going to claim two with this question. The house we chose to buy on Princeton and live in was not meant for me. I did not know I was allergic to cats until we moved into our new home which had housed many furry critters. Along with the cats, we add dust, mold and mildew, the death of an infant daughter, a life of 13 homes in 27 years, years of military, Vietnam, living apart, many moves, law school, and the birth of three children. It all took its toll on our marriage and my health and change was required. All of these major events led me down a long path of ill health, in that house.

Oscar’s second question was easier, I would love to go back to a time and visit my parents. It warms my heart and makes me smile to think so. I would enjoy that visit.

And yet, that will not happen in this world. These are questions of a young searching mind. The question of “What would I change.” leads us to our stories of our internal/external conflicts. We all know them in greater or lesser degree. We live with our own inner battles of a conflicted mind, bodies with illness, disease, relationships with people or work that create the inner dialogue of dissatisfaction.

I consider the decade of the 80’s my “de-construction years”. The stripping away years. Down to the bones years. The 90’s were re-construction years and the new millennium brought relief. The 80’s and 90’s were the two decades in the Princeton home. The home that was a catalyst for so much change and turmoil was also the home that was stable enough to allow it all to happen. This home was our nest. The beautiful years of raising our children, meeting new friends, life adventures that helped to form all of us in amazing ways. And, it all happened simultaneously.

It is a good exercise to make a time line of your life. Where are the points of a traumatic event, a loss, a major change. Mark those and then what were the in-between years like. The years of change, adjustment, being stripped away. Then start to fill in the points where you met a key person in your life. Had a life changing moment that caused you to think, “That is why I am here.” “This is my purpose.” My life would never be the same if I never met…” Where do these transformational moments fall within your time line? How do they intersect with the years where life seemed to be falling apart? All of these moments mark the journey of a life.

When the snake sheds her skin or the butterfly is working to be released from a cocoon, they are not without the beauty of a new skin developing or the translucent wings that will carry them away. It is simply that when we are in the midst of it all we do not recognize the new, know it for what it is, trust that it will be the ground for this new life. Our own struggle with growth and development can make the journey much harder than it was intended to be. But the struggle also teaches us. As we learn, we might find that the next time, we allow ourselves to let go into the process rather than struggle against it. We might then trust and allow for simple flow.

When we left our home on Princeton it was with a peaceful heart. All the work that needed to be done in that home happened. A new home was needed to move forward into life and that home was found and continues to support. I am grateful for a home that could give my children stability while my inner world was shifting and I struggled to shed the skin that no longer served me or them. Would I change any of it? It is a fun exercise and I am grateful for my grandson’s questions, but, no. I am grateful for the privilege of being alive, for all that comes my way requiring my discernment, the growth of trusting intuition, learning from the choices made, all lacking perfection as it is a work of art, not a copy. I hold the whole of it, smile, and offer thanks.

When we are in the experience we want to judge the experience and give it a label of good or bad. Years later, after we have named something bad, we find it hard to look back at it as it reminds us of pain that we would sooner avoid. And, as we have named it good or bad we might miss the opportunity to see the flow of life, the connection of our story. Maybe by suspending judgement we will be able to give life the space to unfold.

There is a Chinese parable that many of you have heard but deserves repeating as it is a lesson we are faced with daily. It is about a farmer and a horse.

One day his horse runs away. And his neighbor comes over and says, to commiserate, “I’m so sorry about your horse.” And the farmer says “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?” The neighbor is confused because this is clearly terrible. The horse is the most valuable thing he owns.

But the horse comes back the next day and he brings with him 12 feral horses. The neighbor comes back over to celebrate, “Congratulations on your great fortune!” And the farmer replies again: “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?”

And the next day the farmer’s son is taming one of the wild horses and he’s thrown and breaks his leg. The neighbor comes back over, “I’m so sorry about your son.” The farmer repeats: “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?”

Sure enough, the next day the army comes through their village and is conscripting able-bodied young men to go and fight in war, but the son is spared because of his broken leg.

And this story can go on and on like that. Good. Bad. Who knows?

Living into Death

If we have been the caregiver of a loved one, watched another in that role or found ourselves in the throws of grief, we know all too well that life does not pause to allow us the time to do the abundant tasks of caring and grieving. Life marches on and at times that might be a benefit as we are pulled out of our deep inner pain to join in with the children or animals who need attention. At other times, it might give us comic relief needed to bear the weight of the day. This poem was inspired by the end quote, the first words spoken by one of our Hospice nurses as she began to report in team on one of her patients.

The Last Words

A window view from the bed

where Joe lies

waiting for his last breath.

The angel promising,

arriving to guide him home.

Sap green, cerulean blue,

a burst of red on the tree

bearing fruit to be canned

and made into pies.

Dorothy attending

the daily tasks of the spouse,

the work of the living:

Food, water, leaky faucet,

broken garage door.

All intruding

on this precious time left

for the next breath.

The soft hollows of cheeks,

the diming of eyes,

the whispering breath

as Joe’s lips part

speaking his goodbye

to the life he has known

on this, his farm.

They lean in

waiting for the words,

forming —a sigh—

“The pigs are digging

up the yard, again.”

c) Janis Dehler

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All That We Carry/Part 2

Phase two of clearing. Phase one was putting everything in my art closet and trying to get the door closed. Phase two, today, was cleaning everything and bagging it and making any last minute changes as to keeping or giving away. I do take seriously all the stuff we leave behind when we leave this world, which I don’t plan on doing any time soon, but…it feels good to stay on top of the stuff.

The hardest is books. I enjoy books, reading and having them around but I do have many that I will not read again and then I bring more into the house. Of course, not everyone I live with agrees with my decisions. Sometimes I have gotten rid of something I later needed and had to buy it again. And, maybe the books aren’t the hardest. The hardest I think is my art closet which holds more than art. It holds all the paper memorabilia from kids and grandkids, photos that have not been catalogued, stuff from my former businesses, wrapping paper that needs to be sorted with all sorts of ribbons. It is amazing how much one can get into a closet. But I try to keep it in order and am waiting for a time when I have a week to really focus. It will take focus and willpower, because it will.

I like fall cleaning. In the spring, I want to get outside and not think about the inside of the house. Also, in the fall it is a natural time to empty before we enter the long winter ahead both physically with maybe a cleanse and emotionally with a good hard look. Let’s throw in mental as well. November is a time in many spiritual traditions when we attend to our losses for the year or maybe a lifetime. What still needs to be said, done, mourned, named?

The physical level of clearing can be pretty straight forward with dieting, cleanses, eating healthier. Spring and fall are the most important times to pay attention to clearing on this level. The emotional level is more of a challenge. Being willing to be honest with how we are feeling, not on the surface, but deep down. What adds to our emotional weight? What needs to be named, talked about, cried over? These are some of the probing questions. Sometimes we can do this clearing on our own and at other times we need to have a person at our side who can guide the process. And then we get to the mental level. Some of these thoughts just have to go. It can get awfully crowded in there with voices criticizing ourselves or others, wishing us well or telling us we can’t do this or that, worries or regrets that are so old we can’t even remember when. And some of this crowd may have a face from the past that is long over due to let go of.

It can be a tall order but again willpower and focus are needed, and time. As with the house, when we look at the whole it is overwhelming to think of sorting through and making decisions but as with the house, the freedom that results from clearing out unused and out of date stuff on all levels can be exhilarating. It can feel like we are full of unwanted guests who arrived and never left. Sometimes, just being straight forward and showing them the door is all that is needed. Other times, we need to have a good sit down discussion and come to a point of understanding, forgiving, with movement toward peace. In this way we make more room for our spirit, our heart of love and compassion, our kindness to self and others, and our creativity. We can then begin to stay on top of it so it is not a lifetime to look through and deal with as we move through our day to day living. We can begin to notice earlier when the closet is getting a bit full.

Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. Carl Jung

Stuff that is headed for the door.

The space that is open and waits.

The Face of Resilience

The senior apartments I visited yesterday morning were full of little goblins ages 2, 3, 4, wandering from one elder to the next who sat in the entry and had bowls of candy pieces they would drop into each bucket. Then up the children went to the apartments and walked the halls popping in as cats, princesses, spiderman, to bring laughter, hoots, and smiles. I arrived early and was able to sit and take it all in. When the time was right, I went up the elevator and found the woman I was visiting, having recently lost her husband of 60 years, in her apartment looking deeply sad, feeling lost in her loss.

As we talked and she shared with me the story of her life with her husband a smile arose on her lips as she was there in her memory of him when they were young. Her face lit with contented love and then she returned to the feeling of sadness and weariness. So many emotions riding the waves of grief that it can be exhausting yet that is the sign of hope and resilience, we are not sunk in one emotion. We are complex beings and as the building was full of laughter and fun while behind a closed door a woman sat in sadness we also have access to an array of emotion at any time throughout our day.

Sadness, loss, feeling out of step, are feelings that will need to be navigated as she makes this journey and yet there will be a child, an animal, a memory that will call for attention, surprise her in a moment and her heart will respond, a smile may form, a memory of her love will show, a feeling of herself being a child again might delight. These moments are what bring us further and further to the surface so we might catch a breath before we again descend. Each day, month, year, we stay on the surface a bit longer as we attend to each feeling as it arises.

Our natural instinct is to flee from the pain. That is how we are wired. When the pain is so great, we might seek to numb ourselves, deny the pain, anything to avoid. If we can act contrary to our instinct and allow the feelings to move through us, allow the memories to arise, allow for help in the process when it is too great to be left alone, we find that out of the muck, the mud, the rocky soil of our soul the flower of our life rises. There is no time line on how this all moves. It is unique to each individual, to each loss, to each story. The loss is part of our life journey. No more no less. It is what we look back to at the end of our days as we start to name what is of value, what we have accomplished, what we have brought to the world, what we grieve and what we celebrate.

Some choose to make the journey, others do not. Some talk it through others create or write or build. There is no way. There is no judgment. There is no promise. There is only hope for the journey and the renewal of life as we heal. As we daily attend to all the losses that come our way and increase our emotional vocabulary and intelligence we build resilience for the tougher times, the losses that seek for transformation of a soul. Those losses that turn life on its head.

A flower on the Camino rising in the drought and rocky soil

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