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Archive for February, 2014

For the Week of February 23, 2014: If You Had Second Chance…

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on February 23, 2014 | 2 Comments »

Imagine you wake up

with a second chance:  The blue jay

hawks his pretty wares

 and the oak still stands, spreading

 glorious shade.  If you don’t look back,

The future never happens…

(From “Dawn Revisited” by Rita Dove, On the Bus with Rosa Parks,)

A few years ago, I stumbled across a photograph in an advertisement for a Canadian insurance company.  A young man, wearily hoping for someone to offer him a ride, stands by the side of the road, his hair disheveled, wearing a worn sheepskin jacket, and holding a sign that reads “If I had a second chance, I’d be home by now.

”if i had second chance

We’d all like a second chance from time to time—a “do-over,” the opportunity to make a different choice than before, a clean page to begin a new life chapter.  Maybe that’s why we routinely promise ourselves we’ll do better:  eat more fruits and vegetables, shed those extra ten pounds gained over the holidays, mend fences with an estranged family member, finish that novel we put aside months ago, walk at least thirty minutes a day, or finally get around to painting the hallway, grown weary looking with the years. Our self-improvement plans are constant promises we make to ourselves, some successful, others not, but most of us hope for a chance to improve our lives, one way or another.

Resolved: this year
I’m going to break my losing streak,
I’m going to stay alert, reach out,
speak when not spoken to,
read the minds of people in the streets.
I’m going to practice every day,
stay in training, and be moderate
in all things…
 (From:  “New Year’s Resolution,” by Philip Appleman, New and Selected Poems, 1996)

Making good on our intentions, deciding what’s most important to tackle, requires not only action, but reflection, understanding which habits of our lives no longer serve us well, which we want to discard; which we want to continue.  “Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards,” Danish philosopher and theologian, Søren Kierkegaard advised.

The 2009 award-winning film, The Things We Carry,  tells the story of two sisters, estranged from each other by their mother’s addiction, and their journey through the San Fernando Valley to find a package left for them by their deceased mother.  As they travel together, old sibling wounds are exposed and recounted, but gradually, they find peace with one another.  “The key to moving forward,” the film’s tagline reads, “lies in the past.”

In Laura Hillenbrand’s 2010 nonfiction bestseller, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Louie Zamperini, an Olympian track star who became an Army Air Corps bombardier in 1941, crashes into the Pacific and survives for 47 days on a life raft before he’s taken captive by the Japanese.   Zamperini’s story is not only about survival and heroism, it’s about redemption, a second chance to put the brutal wounds of his past behind him.

If you don’t look back, the future never happens.  Whatever hardships lie in our past, we must find our own ways of coming to terms with them.  Everyone carries burdens in their lives, virtual knapsacks filled with old ways of being and believing, wounds or grievances, lingering pain or anger, even fear.  Writing can help.  Exposing our deepest feelings, reflecting on the past, gaining new insights, opening us to “seeing” the world and living differently.  A second chance is an opportunity to understand and discard those things that no longer serve us, weigh us down, or interfere with our healing.  It’s an opportunity to “wake up,”  be fully present to the gifts of life offered to us daily.

Like you, I have to remind myself of this from time to time, as I suspect we all do when life weighs us down.  It’s one of the main reasons I wake early each morning to walk, repeating the words of Ticht Nhat Hahn, Vietnamese Zen Master and poet, as I greet the dawn, his words first introduced to me The Spirited Walker guru, Carolyn Scott-Kortge.  Hahn’s words help me remember that each day is my second chance—or third or fourth—to live the life I want.

Waking up this morning, I smile. Twenty-four brand new hours are before me. I vow to live fully in each moment and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.

Imagine that you wake up with a second chance.  What would you do differently, given the opportunity? Why not begin your second chance today?

 

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For February 16th: The Spiritual Journey: What We Need is Here

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , spirituality, , writing and spirituality, on February 16, 2014 | 2 Comments »

And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear.  What we need is here.

From:  “The Wild Geese,” by Wendell Berry

 Yesterday, in a peaceful retreat center north of San Diego yesterday, I participated in a workshop on contemplative practices that enrich our lives.  My role was to invite  participants to consider the spiritual practice inherent in writing.  Like so many Americans, I’ve been a lapsed church-goer for the better part of my adult life.  I had dabbled with other religious traditions, tried meditation, but still, I couldn’t find the spiritual practice I longed for.  What I hadn’t realized is that I had already had the tool to enrich my spiritual life—writing.  I’d always written. During the years of a soul shattering time in early adulthood, writing was a refuge, my port in the storm, a virtual sanctuary.  I just hadn’t thought of it as a spiritual practice.  What we need is here…

Years later I was struggling with a near perfect storm of loss—my father’s death from lung cancer, Mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s, the task of downsizing a dying nonprofit, and my unexpected diagnosis of early stage breast cancer.  Writing was the lifesaver I clung to in that turbulent time.  It helped me cope, but more than that, it became an important daily routine. I realized it was fundamental to my spiritual life.

Writing is my spiritual practice, a ritual and meditation that begins in the early morning, before the outside world intervenes to pull me into its noisy demands.  It is in the stillness of early morning that I first open the pages of my notebook, the same leather-bound journal I’ve written in for years.  Like the dawn of a new day, a new page awaits, blank and inviting.  I think of Rita Dove’s line in “Dawn Revisited:”  “the whole sky is yours/ to write on, blown open/ to a blank page…”    I write without expectation, each day starting with one small observation, something noticed in the present moment—the fog lifting from the canyon floor, a trio of hummingbirds at the garden fountain, the red-tailed hawk’s wings spread as he glides just beyond our deck—whatever captures my attention.

“At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world~ now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.– Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk.

Now I will stop and be wholly attentive…Sometimes, a haiku poem emerges; other times, what I describe triggers a memory or a feeling that begs to be written.  It hardly matters.  What does matter is that I write, embracing the solitude of the morning and intertwining the external world with my internal one, going deeper into whatever I’m exploring on the page.  I write myself into “knowing.” 

Writing is a kind of meditation and it is my prayer.  It opens me, ensures I am “paying attention” to what is before me and what is inside me. It informs my intentions for each day and the work I do with others in my groups.  Although writing is my spiritual practice, anything that takes us into the quiet contemplation and deeper parts of ourselves can become a source of spiritual nourishment:   art, music, dance, yoga, T’ai Chi, meditation, prayer.  As Thomas Merton wrote, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time,”

One’s spirituality is not dependent on a specific religious belief or theology.  We all have spiritual needs and yearnings.  What matters is finding a way to nurture them, that we feed our souls as well as our bodies and minds.  It’s our spiritual lives, in times of hardship, life-threatening illness, or other suffering, that keep us from losing hope, that keep us whole. Dana Jennings, New York Times editor, was diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer several years ago, writing a series of blog posts for the Times.  I recall how he wrote  about his need for “spiritual antibodies” during treatment. 

I am not a fool. I am a patient with Stage T3B cancer and a Gleason score of 9. I need the skills and the insights of the nurses and doctors who care for me. But they don’t treat the whole man. Medicine cares about physical outcomes, not the soul. I also need — even crave — the spiritual antibodies of prayer, song and sacred study.

Medicine cares about physical outcomes, not the soul.  A cancer diagnosis may challenge all that you believed was right and true in your life.  Cancer–and many other painful experiences–may seem like a dark night of the soul, but it offers you the chance to deepen your self-understanding and compassion for others.   Isn’t this the spiritual journey?  I think so.  It’s one I witness it repeatedly in the writing groups I lead for cancer patients and survivors:  people deepening, clear about what is truly important to their lives, noticing the gifts present in every day they have.  

Through the exchange of stories, we help heal each other’s spirits…Isn’t this what a spiritual life is about?

–Patrice Vecchione, Writing and the Spiritual Life

Life’s hardships, the losses and suffering we endure,  thrust us into what can only be defined as a deeply spiritual journey.  We may kick and scream, rail against the injustices of those events, but like it or not, we’re forced to re-examine our lives in ways we have not, perhaps, done before.  We begin to pay attention, really pay attention, to what truly matters to us. What we need is here…

Varda, who wrote with me throughout the last two years of her life, died of metastatic breast cancer.  She wrote about her cancer,  humorously,  poignantly, but always honestly, many times voicing what others were afraid to express.  Cancer, as she wrote in one of her last poems, “challenged her faith,” but she was unafraid to re-examine the meaning of the spiritual traditions in her life.  Her words touched us all profoundly.

…My cancer has challenged my faith,

and I have found an incredible well I did not know I had. 

I have found true surrender,

 enormous peace.

I have come home to God, and we have renewed

our friendship.

(From:  “Faith,” by Varda Nowack Goldstein)

Varda may have been thrust into a journey that brought her to her knees, but she nurtured her “spiritual antibodies” by writing deeply about her life and learning from it.  She demonstrated enormous courage, helping others in the group, as she faced her inevitable death with grace, love, even shared laughter.  Surely this was the evidence of the depth and sustenance of her spiritual life.

What nourishes your spirituality?  What practices or rituals have helped sustain you in times of illness, hardship or struggle? Where have you found your solace, your strength, your source of “spiritual antibodies?”

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For the Week of February 9, 2014: Gifts of the Heart

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , poetry and healing, , on February 9, 2014 | 3 Comments »

Cupid, draw back your bow
And let your arrow go
Straight to my lover’s heart for me, for me
Cupid, please hear my cry
And let your arrow fly
Straight to my lover’s heart for me

(from the 1961 hit, “Cupid,” by Sam Cooke)

It’s that time of year again.  Walk into almost any retail store, and you’ll be surrounded by red and white decorations, images of Cupid and a multitude of hearts.  Glossy advertisements abound, featuring an array of gifts far more expensive than the traditional heart-shaped box of chocolates my father used to give my mother each February 14th.  And valentine cards, from the sentimental to the comic, are everywhere, obliterating the memory of those prized cellophane packages of 36 valentines we were eager to exchange with our classmates or the construction paper and doily creations, painstakingly cut and pasted, that we carried home to our parents on Valentine’s Day.

I cringe now, at the commercialism that overtakes nearly every holiday. Valentine’s Day is no exception.  And yet, there I was, last week, standing in front of the card racks, trying to find the right valentine for each of my three grandchildren and my husband.  I succumbed to the children’s cards embedded with musical tunes, knowing the fun they have when they open them, but for my husband?  I couldn’t find anything that communicated the sentiments I wanted to convey.  I ended up with a packet of red lace doilies and the intent to create my own valentine for him, something I haven’t done for years, at least on Valentine’s Day.

The truth is that I write little poems for my husband all year round.  In fact, I bought a small red metal replica of a mailbox, one that opens with just enough room for a half sheet of paper, folded in quarters.  Once a month, perhaps more often, I write a poem and place it in the mailbox.  I close it and attach a small flag with the words,“poem inside,” that I made with a toothpick and small triangle of paper.  I guess you could say I send my husband valentines year-round, which is probably the reason I couldn’t find much to inspire me among all the retail cards displayed in the shops.

Expressions of sentiment, whether captured in small verses, letters, postcards, or even the handmade paper and doilies version of youth, don’t need a designated calendar holiday to be given to someone we care about.  These are small gifts, year-round valentines that say, “I appreciate you,” “I’m thinking of you,” or “I love you.”

I think of Ted Kooser’s little book of poems, Valentines.  In 1986,  inspired by a friend who sent handmade valentines out each year, Kooser began sending out a postcard bearing a red heart in the corner and a short poem written on the card to women around the country who had signed his mailing list.  The project lasted 20 years, until his mailing list became too large, and thus, too expensive, for him to continue, but his efforts resulted in a delightful book of those valentines published in 2008 by the University of Nebraska.

This past week, we’ve received several cards, notes from friends, written by hand and sent to pay tribute to the pet we had to bury.  They may have been expressions of sympathy, but they are, in a real sense, valentines–words that conveyed affection for us and for our little dog. Those cards sit on my desk, and I re-read them often.  It’s a small gesture, these handwritten notes, but in a world that is much too given to the shorthand of text messages or emails, taking the time to express affection, gratitude, or simply friendship in this way seems all the more important. Valentine’s Day is a good excuse to get started, but here’s the thing:  you can do it anytime.  You don’t have to wait for a special holiday or event.  You don’t have to be a poet.  The simple act of pausing to remember those we care about and those who have cared for us in times of struggle, hardship or illness, reminds us of what matters most in our lives:  people, friendship, love.  These are truly the gifts of the heart.  Why not write your own valentine for someone you love?

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

 

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

 

(From “i carry your heart (I carry it in)” by e.e. cummings, The Complete Poems, 1904-1962)

 

To each of you who read these posts, I wish you a Happy Valentine’s Day.

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For the Week of February 2, 2014: On the Loss of a Pet

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , pets, writing about pets, , on February 2, 2014 | 6 Comments »

For he was small but brave of heart…

For when he slept he snored only a little.

For he could be silly and noble in the same moment…

For when he sniffed it was as if her were being

     pleased by every part of the world…

For he was a mixture of gravity and waggery…

For there was nothing sweeter than his peace

     when at rest…

For he loved me…

For when he lay down to enter sleep he did not argue…

(From:  “For I Will Consider My Dog Percy,” in Dog Songs: Poems, by Mary Oliver, 2013)

Back in November, I wrote about the comfort we humans take from pets, describing our dog, Kramer, an aging canine companion, a toy poodle-terrier mix… (he) has been at my side through cancer, heart failure, surgery and recovery, attentive to my every mood and eternally vigilant, a pint-sized protector who barks loudly when strangers come to the door.  We have …a strong and enduring bond… (from a previous post, November 17, 2013)

Kramer died this past Thursday, his demise sudden and unexpected, unlike the death of our Westie, Winston, who’d  lived for seventeen years, and, as I wrote before, likely kept alive for a couple of extra years by Kramer’s persistent adoration and enthusiasm for his older playmate.  In Winston’s final days, Kramer stood vigil, quiet and attentive, seemingly aware that his buddy was failing.  After Winston’s death, his grief was palpable.  He retreated to the shady spot underneath our deck where his older companion spent his final days, staying there a full week to grieve, only willing to come indoors in the evening.  Always faithful, he mourned Winston’s loss as deeply as we did.

I held Kramer in my arms in the final hour before his death, nuzzling his furry coat and weeping as he, ever attentive to my emotional state, kept licking my face as if to reassure me that everything was going to be all right.  And it will be of course, but the house seems empty and forlorn without him, and whenever I gaze out to the back garden from my office window, where Kramer’s body now rests a few yards from Winston’s, my eyes fill with tears again.

I remembered my childhood these past days and the first time we lost a pet, a cat named Snowball.  She had been a great teacher to us.  From Snowball, we learned about birth, standing vigil like little physician’s assistants to administer help as she bore her first and only litter of kittens.  We learned about love, and we learned about death and sorrow.  There were other pets as we grew–turtles, goldfish, lizards—each accorded a funeral when they died, always attended by our neighborhood playmates, and buried in the far end of the back yard where Snowball’s remains also lay.  Finally, our parents relented and let us have a dog, Tico, part Toy terrier, part Chihuahua, who had the heart of a warrior despite his small size.  It was Tico who saved my brother’s life when our family home burned to the ground, licking his face and barking to awaken him from a deep sleep as his bedroom caught fire.  Tico was ten, dying only a year later, but he had wrapped himself around our hearts so completely, and his death was deeply mourned by us all.  He was, as far as we were concerned, an extraordinary hero.

Our bonds with our pets are strong and deep, extolled in poetry, essays, memoirs and novels.  Our pets offer companionship, loyalty, unflinching devotion, comfort and joy.  Again, I turn to Mary Oliver’s essay about her dog:

We open the door and he glides away without a backward glance…running along the edge of the water, into the first pink suggestion of sunrise.  And we are caught by the old affinity, a joyfulness—his great and seemly pleasure in the physical world.  Because of the dog’s joyfulness our own is increased.  It is no small gift.  …What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass?  What would this world be like without dogs?  (From Dog Songs: Poems, Penguin Press, 2013.)

What would this world be like without…a dog, a cat, a pet we love?  Perhaps you have—or have had—a pet that is special in some way, who offered you comfort or joy.  Why not write about that pet this week?  Capture his or her attributes, behavior, the kinds of things that made you smile, the way he or she endeared themselves to you.  What memories do you have of that pet?

Kramer’s death is still fresh, my emotions still raw, and for a time yet, his absence will feel unfamiliar, a sharp stab of loss each time I enter the house.  Yet even as he died, he offered me a little reminder of his uniqueness, the thing about him that always made me smile.  His ears.  They were his hallmark, surely inherited from Yoda of Star Wars fame.  Kramer died, this funny little companion, with his ears fully erect, just as in life. The ears, his semaphore flags, always raised whenever he eyed us expectantly, signaling his perpetual question:  “So guys, what’s happening?”

Rest in peace, my friend.

Kramer earsFor Kramer, 2000 – 2014.

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