I love the stillness of the wood.

I love the music of the rill.

I love to couch in pensive mood

Upon some silent hill…

Here from the world I win release,

Nor scorn of men, nor footstep rude,

Break in to mar the holy peace

Of this great solitude.

(“Solitude,” by Lewis Carroll, `832-1898)

 Our human need for solitude, inspiration or spiritual renewal has a long tradition, whether for religious reasons, to retreat from the demands of the world, or to fully experience nature, as Thoreau did at Walden Pond, or to deepen our understanding of our own lives.

In a world where our lives are bombarded by busyness,  the constant ring of cell phones, crowds of people in shopping malls or on city streets, “breaking news” of natural or man-made disasters, political campaigns, and advertisements for some new hot consumer item, it’s easy to lose ourselves in the melee.  Worse, we begin to feel stressed, dissatisfied, rushed or unhappy with our own lives and not know why.  How do we reclaim ourselves?

Whether in the demands of daily living or in the aftermath of a difficult  life event, it’s easy to become overwhelmed   by the many different choices we have, the expectations of others, and the voices of our internal critics, whispering “but you should be…” in our ears.  It’s hard to make time for ourselves, difficult to admit that we just might march to the beat of a different drummer and that we need space and solitude to reclaim ourselves.

Even in the recovery from cancer or other traumatic events, we hear many and sometimes conflicting messages about what it means to be a survivor.  There’s actually something called “survivor guilt,” when we can feel guilty about surviving traumatic or painful events while others have been less fortunate.  We feel lucky, yes, but guilty too, and we drive ourselves to take on goals, to accomplish more than we might normally do.  That’s not necessarily bad, but sometimes, we wake up and wonder how we got back on that treadmill when what we desire is a sense of peace, quiet or simplicity to discover what we really want our lives to be like.

Nancy, a writer from the Stanford Cancer Center group, described her feelings after treatment and recovery:  In the beginning, it was comforting to think of fighting to survive…  I believe that I should have a powerful drive to accomplish something…a goal for which I need to survive.  But I don’t find that drive in me. 

“I should have…a goal for which I need to survive.”  She dismissed the feelings of “should,” and rather than chaining herself to a goal that didn’t honor her true feelings, she found renewal in the ordinary and commonplace elements of her life:  I love the things I do day by day.  I hike with one beloved friend.  I spend time in the wonderful garden of another.  I meet others for coffee and conversation. I meet these friends with pleasure and leave them with a joy and benefit to my mind and spirit…

In a poem entitled “Directive,” Ann, a poet living with cancer, reminds us of those ordinary moments in our lives that offer a kind of sanctuary,  a refuge from the demands  of a busy world that sometimes threaten to overtake our lives:

Remember the commonplace, the wooden chair on the white planked deck,
trees kneeling in the rain and deer prints
leading into elegant rushes. A kinder place
cannot be found: where you sit at the top
of shadowy stairs, the window lifted.
Consider the slight breeze, almost erasable,
the boundless oscillating atom, its radiance
tactile, in the mirror your shining hair.
Let me speak for you: there’s comfort
to be found in fatigue, in letting principles
fall like stones from your pockets.
Let the flesh of your breath relax,
overlook not the spacelessness of
monogamous self-love. Fall into the ordinary,
the rushes, the deer looking up into your heart,
risen, full in the silver hammered sky.

This week, consider the importance of solitude and sanctuary in healing.  What little islands of sanctuary, those common and ordinary moments of life, that have helped you heal and find renewal?

Loss.  It’s often synonymous with cancer.  Loss of hair, parts of the body; loss of self-image, of dreams, or loss of loved ones.  We feel overwhelmed as we face a landscape defined only by losses, hopelessness and grief.

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

–from “Kindness”, by Naomi Shihab-Nye in The Words Under The Words ©1994

When cancer strikes, life, as we once knew it, will never be the same.  The landscape between those “regions of kindness,” does appear desolate.  Our bodies are forever altered, and the self we took for granted feels like a distant memory.   But hope somehow finds a way back to us, solace is given, and in those small moments of kindness, we begin to heal and find our way back to life.  As Shihab-Nye says,

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore…
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

During times of loss and grief, when we least expect it, we discover kindness.  We make  new friends, build new dreams, and discover gratitude for small gifts life offers us, ones we overlooked or barely noticed before.  We find new facets of ourselves to explore, strength or resilience we never imagined possible.  Perhaps we even discover we haven’t lost as much as we thought.  The kind of loss that comes from cancer or other serious illness is often fertile ground for new knowledge and understanding.

Writing helps us articulate– even mourn–what we have lost in the difficult chapters of life,  but it offers us much more.  When we write, we have a blank page, an unblemished open space upon which to reclaim lost stories, create new ones, reclaim our voices and ourselves.  We discover new insights, new possibilities.  Our words have the power to touch others.  We find new realms of creativity we never realized we possessed.  We find ourselves again.

Here’s a suggestion for writing.  First, take a blank sheet of paper and list  all that you have lost.  Don’t stop there.  Turn the page over.  Now list the acts of kindness that you remember, the ones that made a difference. And gave you hope, rediscover what you thought your lost or help you see things in a new light?  Explore what you’ve lost and what you’ve found

is what a grandmother clock

does with it: strike twelve

and take its time doing it.

You’re the clock: time passes,

you remain. And wait.

(From:  “Mother,” by Kurt Brown)

I admit it. Waiting is something I don’t do well, whether I’m waiting in line in at airport security, for an appointment in a doctor’s office, a ticket at the movie theater, or, as has been the case for the past few weeks, on my daughter, whose perpetually last-minute style is even more pronounced as she juggles dressing herself and her six month old daughter.  Despite giving her all the help I can, much of my time during the holiday season has been punctuated by trying to tame my impatience, the restless tapping of my foot, as I wait to go somewhere together with my daughter and granddaughter.

In Worcester, Massachusetts,

I went with Aunt Consuelo

to keep her dentist’s appointment

and sat and waited for her

in the dentist’s waiting room.

(From “In the Waiting Room,” by Elizabeth Bishop)

Waiting.  We seem to always be waiting for something to happen, and we’ve done it most of our lives. Remember how eagerly you waited on Christmas eve, hoping to catch a glimpse of Santa?  Or that first crush you had on a boy or girl, waiting and hoping they might notice you?  Ironically, as an expectant mother, I waited for my overdue daughter to be born, the one who continues to keep me waiting today.  But waiting is something that sometimes seems to dominate an entire day of my life.  I’ve sat in restaurants or stood in subway stations waiting for loved ones or friends, and waited on the sidewalk as my dog relieves himself.  I’ve thumbed through outdated magazines and checked my watch a dozen times, waiting for an appointment  scheduled for an hour earlier.  I’ve waited for calls or letters from loved ones, for acceptances to schools, and results of dozens of medical tests.

I’ve waited with hope; I’ve waited with dread, but all too often, I’ve waited impatiently, unable to concentrate on anything but the waiting, a trait inherited from my father, whose impatience was manifested in the nervous twitch of his foot, his fingers drumming quietly on the kitchen table, or the constant flick of his cigarette in an ashtray while he waited for someone (usually my mother) or something to happen.

Some days will be rainy and you will sit waiting

And the letter you wait for won’t come,

And I will sit watching the sky tear off gray and gray

And the letter I wait for won’t come.

(From “Caboose Thoughts,” by Carl Sandburg)

It does no good to pace the hallway or sit at the table, foot tapping restlessly, willing something or someone to speed up.  Time—and events—move as they will.  If I allow impatience to be my master, then how much of life have I failed to notice?

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

(From “The Four Quartets,” by T.S. Eliot)

The faith and the love and the hope are … in the waiting.  These words make me reconsider why life makes us wait.  I am still learning, even after all these years, to accept what I cannot control, to let things unfold as they will, even if it’s as simple as waiting for my daughter to meet me at the door and say, “I’m ready to go now.”

Starting here, what do you want to remember?

How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

wherever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

 (From:  “You Reading This, Be Ready,” by William Stafford)

What do you wait for?  When has waiting kept you from noticing, from appreciating those small moments of beauty that Stafford describes? Do you remember a particular time when your life seemed to be consumed by waiting?  Write about waiting.

I admit that I look forward to a new year with mixed feelings.  On the one hand, I welcome the possibilities that a shiny, new year seems to signal.  On the other, time moves by much more quickly as I age, and I look at years past with sentimentality, even the occasional twinge of “if only I had …”

2012 aside, the fact is that  new beginnings are not so much defined by calendar dates as the events that truly alter our lives.  The tough events that can come at any time of the year:  job loss, natural disasters, the loss of a loved one, a debilitating illness like cancer.  In those moments, the world seems hostile and unforgiving, and yet, and yet:  we survive, even shaping a new life from the rubble of the old.

I am always inspired, even humbled, by the men and women who share their lives—and their cancer experiences—in my writing groups.  They are, without a doubt, my greatest teachers.  As I considered a new year’s day writing today’s prompt, I remembered Carol, diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, who was part of my Scripps writing groups for two years.  She wrote with raw honesty and beauty, but her real art was in sculpture.  She carved and shaped sensuous, breathtaking forms from blocks of stone, work she continued until her death in 2008.  Carol described her artistic process this way:

At first the stone seems cold and hostile. As the shape emerges, the stone becomes warm and alive. The joy and pain involved in the carving process is, to me, both cyclical and strangely predictable, something akin to giving birth and seeing your creation change from a gawky adolescent to a sensuous adult. The whole process is deeply satisfying.

Carol’s words offer a metaphor to us for how we re-shape our lives after we’ve been dealt one of life’s blows.  Our world may also seem like the cold and hostile stone she describes.  At first, it’s difficult see the shape and form our lives can take, but as we take those first steps into the unknown, we begin shaping a new life, incorporating the lessons of the past and working them into the life that lies before us.

I am running into a new year
and the old years blow back like a wind…
that I catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what I said to myself
about myself
when I was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even forty-six but
I am running into a new year
and I beg what I love and
I leave to forgive me.

(“i am running into a new year,” By Lucille Clifton, in Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980)

As you run into this New Year, think about how you want to shape or re-shape your life.  Re-readClifton’s lines, “I beg what I love/ and I leave to forgive me.”  What in the years past do you want to leave behind?  What do you want to retain in the coming year how will you shape the life you want out of the material of your past and present?

I wish you all a very happy and satisfying 2012.

Watching her eyes grow big as her mother held her up to the tree, sparkling with lights and the ornaments collected since my childhood, we recalled her mother’s first Christmas, the rubber hedgehog that became her favorite toy, the red felt stocking her grandmother sewed by hand to hang among the others on the fireplace mantle, hearing her coo happily as she awakened in her crib that Christmas morning, as if she somehow realized it was a special day.  I repeated those “firsts” stories, as I have done nearly every Christmas of my daughters’ lives, and even though they’ve heard them countless times, it has become a Christmas tradition, a ritual of shared experiences, a way to reaffirm our history and belonging to one another.  It is a remembering of the past that grows even more poignant as their father and I grow older.

I was witness to other firsts too, watching my granddaughter’s parents forming their own traditions as a family.  My firstborn daughter, who, just a year and a half ago, was the country director for Alert International in Lebanon, has transformed herself into a mother, something I found at once surprising and yet natural.  I caught myself staring at her so many times as she nuzzled her baby, tears unexpectedly filling my eyes, my mind flooded with memories of her as an infant, when I was a new mother and when, just as she had with her child, I held her up to a decorated Christmas tree to see her smile with delight.   Where had the time gone?

It is in the small things we see it.
The child’s first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone…

(From “Courage,” by Anne Sexton)

Our stories—pieced together from time and experiences—define us.  They remind us of what it means to be “me.”  We tell and re-tell them; we write them into memoir, poetry or personal essay.  They even become the inspiration for novels.  We carry our stories in our heads, yes, but also in our hearts.  I teach a week-long course in writing and healing at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley each summer, and the first day of the class, I begin with an exercise that asks “What stories—people, places, events—do you carry in your heart?” Not surprisingly, most of the stories written are memories of “firsts,” those unforgettable moments, whether joyous or painful, that offer new learning and insight.  They are memorable in the indelible marks they leave, because they are the stories that ones that shape our understanding of who we are, how we are unique.

You may have had the opportunity, during the holidays, to recall “firsts” of your own with friends and family. “Remember when…?” you might say as you tell one another the stories of shared experiences.   Write about one of those “firsts.” Begin by allowing three or four minutes to make a list of “firsts,” for example, a first kiss, a first haircut, first pet, a first big holiday celebration, the first time you fell in love, the first time you experienced death, the first time you remember being ill, even the first day of school…   Write quickly, noting as many firsts as you can.  When you’ve finished your list, choose one “first” and, for the next twenty minutes, write about it with as much detail and description as you can recall.  When you’ve finished, read what you’ve written and reflect on it.  What meaning does it hold for you now?