Feeds:

Archive for December, 2014

My granddaughter and her parents left for their home in Toronto this morning, and in the wake of their departure, I face not only the predictable heartache of good-byes, but the more difficult and immediate task putting our house back together after Christmas holidays:  decorations, bins of playthings meant to occupy a three-year old, guest bedding, laundry, boxes of household items to donate–all in an effort to restore our home to order just in time to bid good-bye to 2014 and welcome the new year.

It’s a time of remembering and reflection, looking back over the past many months, taking stock of accomplishments and disappointments, and looking ahead to the promise in the coming year.  It’s also a time of choices, deciding what we will carry with us into 2015 and what, because it no longer serves us, we leave behind.

What we leave behind…Every new year involves elements of choice, letting go of old ways of being, discarding items no longer needed, re-designing our lives.  It’s also a time of healing—leaving the difficult or stressful events behind, firmly parked in 2014.  I think about my expressive writing groups and classes as I think about letting-go and healing.  So much of writing for healing is about leaving the pain or sorrow of the past behind, and through writing we begin to make sense out of those difficult chapters of life and grow from them.  As the Danish philosopher and theologian, Søren Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards.”

In an independent, 2009 award-winning film The Things We Carry, the viewer follows the story of two sisters, who, in the different ways they chose to deal with an addict mother, were pushed apart.  The story explores their journey through the San Fernando Valley to a dingy motel in search of a package left for them by their deceased mother.  Their old sibling wounds exposed and recounted,  the sisters finally achieve peace with themselves and each other.  “The key to moving forward,” the film’s tagline reads, “lies in the past.”

“Cancer has been,” one writing group member remarked, “a great teacher.”  She had been writing about her life before and after cancer,  lessons learned, and  understanding gained that she intended to carry into her “new” life.  She made a choice, not to “carry” the pain and suffering of cancer into life after recovery, but rather, to use that experience to shape a new life for herself.

I think of C., who died of metastatic cancer in 2008.  It was only mid-way through our Scripps Cancer Center workshop that she revealed she was a sculptor.  She created sensuous and striking forms from stone, treasured and displayed by collectors across the country.  In her obituary, her husband quoted C.’s description of her artistic process:  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 …something akin to giving birth and seeing your creation change from a gawky adolescent to a sensuous adult…

I think of C.’s words each New Year, how they are a metaphor for how we re-shape our lives after serious illness or other life hardship.  At first, it may be difficult to imagine shaping a new life or chapter for ourselves, but like a sculptor wielding the chisel, each choice we make begins to change us—the way we see our worlds, our hopes and dreams.

It’s a bit like those old New Year’s resolutions, I suppose, but richer.  Why?  It requires time to reflect and remember, to define and incorporate the lessons of experience, then make our choices:  what to carry into the New Year, what to leave behind.  Only then do we truly begin to discover new creativity or strength, the resilience residing within us.

C.’s words and the poem, “I Am Running into a New Year,” written by Lucille Clifton serve as the inspiration for this week’s writing.  Think about the life you want to shape for yourself in the coming year.   Consider Clifton’s lines, “I beg what I love/ and I leave to forgive me.”  As you run into 2015, ask yourself how you intend to shape the life you want out of the material of your past and present.

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.

(From: Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980)

I wish you a very happy and healthy 2015.

Read Full Post »

Dear Friends, It’s the day of winter solstice, the longest day of the year, and in a few days, my husband and I will awaken to the excitement of our third granddaughter’s voice as she awakens to Christmas day.   My eldest daughter, her partner and child have flown from Toronto to spend the holidays with us in San Diego.  We decorated the tree only nights ago, sifting through the boxes of ornaments, some from my childhood and others collected each year of our daughter’s lives until they had families of their own.  It’s both tradition and a source of humor that we tell the same stories each year as we hang the ornaments on the tree…but part of our family tradition is to now tell those oft-repeated stories every year that we manage to share Christmas with one another.  With one daughter in Toronto and the other in Okinawa, it’s more often my husband and I who are packing up our suitcases and standing in the long lines at the airport to reach one or the other during the holidays…not the other way around.

Today, I’m relinquishing the usual time I spent to post my weekly prompt in favor of spending this much too precious time with my daughter and granddaughter…so for this week, I’ve “re-cycled” a post from December 2010 and offer it to you as inspiration for writing during your holidays. To all of you who follow this blog, I wish you a joyous holiday–filled with the warmth of friends, family, and those traditions that make your holidays unique and memorable. –Sharon

From  December 2010 :  Memories of Holidays Past

We received a Christmas card from Germany last week, a greeting from a friend of our daughter’s, reminding us of the Christmas he spent at our house, far from his British family.  I realized that it was also the last Christmas holiday that we—my daughters, husband and I—had shared the season together in one place.  It was only a year later one daughter called from Beirut to say “Merry Christmas,” and the other traveled east to Florida to meet the man who would become her husband.  Our annual holiday celebrations have been changing over the past few years.  Sometimes we’ve traveled to spend the holiday with one or the other daughter; at other times, depending on who is living where in the world, one of them has come to us.  Now, as they create their own holiday traditions with their spouses and children, we will, as we are doing this year, be joining the throngs crowding the gates at airports, hoping the weather cooperates enough to get us to our destination as planned.

It’s a bittersweet time for me.  I don’t enjoy traveling during Christmas, but there’s nothing more joyous that celebrating the holidays with my grandchildren, reading Clement Moore’s “The Night before Christmas,” baking cookies, stuffing the stockings with clever little surprises, and Christmas morning, sharing in the children’s excitement.  Yet there’s nostalgia too—memories of Christmases past.

…Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang “Cherry Ripe,” and another uncle sang “Drake’s Drum.” It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird’s Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.  (From: “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” By Dylan Thomas)

Early this week, as I drove home in the evening, the neighborhood was alive with colored lights and decorations. I pulled into our driveway, awash with memories of long ago Christmas times.  I remembered how, as a child, we’d climb into our Ford station wagon every year, driving through all over our small town to admire the display of lights and decorations.  I recalled my father’s annual trek into the snowy wilderness to cut the perfect tree, of the bubble lights and themed decorations, packages piled high beneath the branches, and Christmas day, dozens of cousins, aunts and uncles gathered together for the holiday meal, everyone singing carols.

There are other memories too—ones less romantic but every bit a part of our family’s history of Christmas traditions:  I had always wanted to be an artist, and once I reached middle school, my mother assigned me the task of painting a Christmas scene in the front picture window, ever hopeful we’d win a prize in the “best Christmas decorations” contest each year.  My artwork was colorful but untrained, and I was a little embarrassed to have my efforts on such public display.  The year my painting earned an honorable mention only served to reinforce my fear that, despite my desire to be, I wasn’t really an artist. There was also the tradition of annual disappointment—my mother’s– when we brought home the freshly cut tree—never perfect enough to her liking, followed by the inevitable disagreement over placement of lights, and later, my father’s failed attempts to bring home the “right” present for his critical wife.  These things became, although none of us liked them, part of our family’s holiday traditions just as the carols, hanging our stockings or opening gifts on Christmas mornings.  They have become part of the stories we tell—and re-tell—every December as we decorate our tree.

As children, we knew there was more to it—
Why some men got drunk on Christmas Eve
Wasn’t explained, nor why we were so often
Near tears nor why the stars came down so close,

Why so much was lost. Those men and women
Who had died in wars started by others,
Did they come that night? Is that why the Christmas
tree
Trembled just before we opened the presents?

There was something about angels. Angels we
Have heard on high Sweetly singing o’er
The plain. The angels were certain. But we could not
Be certain whether our family was worthy tonight.

(From:  “A Christmas Poem,” by Robert Bly, in Morning Poems,1998)

Whatever your beliefs or religious practices,  holidays are filled with our familial traditions of celebration.  Remember the holidays you celebrated as a child or at a particularly significant time.  What memories have become part of your family lore?  What’s most vivid or poignant?  Write about holidays past—traditions you remember fondly or even the ones that you don’t.  What are your favorite stories ignited by this holiday season? Happiest of holidays to you.

Read Full Post »

‘Tis the season…or so the ads proclaim.  Drive through the streets, and houses blaze with colored lights, some garish, others more tasteful.  Walk into any store and holiday decorations abound, but by now, weeks old now, my brain has been on strike, protesting against the commercial glitter and recorded Christmas carols playing since Halloween.  Although one might say, “it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,” the decorations and lights enticing us to buy, buy, buy, have grown wearisome.  I have avoided malls for the past several weeks to every extent possible, knowing I will only morph into a modern-day zombie unable to make any sort of decisions about gift choices.  My holiday spirit has taken cover from the full court press of commercialism, sadly unescapable in our society.  Add to that, I live in a place, unlike the places of my childhood or Canadian years where snow isn’t visible, even in the far off mountain tops.

But take heart.  This morning I baked some pumpkin spice scones for my husband’s birthday breakfast.  The kitchen was filled with the aroma of cinnamon, sugar and nutmeg.  “It’s beginning to smell a lot like Christmas,” I sang as I pulled the pan of scones from the oven.  Last night, we set up our tree, ready to be decorated with our collection of ornaments, a hodge-podge of figures, shapes and colors, acquired each year of our daughter’s lives they had their children, and the tradition continues for each of our grandchildren.  The tree is fake, something we resorted to in our empty next holidays when, more often than not, we’d be traveling to spend the holidays with one or the other daughter.  I missed the smell of pine, so I placed a few pine boughs around the dining table, inhaling the fragrance and remembering the Christmases of childhood, climbing into my father’s pickup truck to head into the mountains to cut our tree.  I felt the first blush of holiday spirit.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived.  The odors of fruits waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard.  Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief.  Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening fields far away. — Helen Keller

“The eyes have it,” we often hear, or do they?   Our ability to smell is highly linked to memory. A smell can trigger a flood of memories, influence moods and even affect work performance.   According to author Sarah Dowdey, “smell can call up memories and powerful responses almost instantaneously.” Smell is our oldest sense, as Tom Stafford describes in a BBC online article.  It has its origins in the rudimentary senses for chemicals in air and water – senses that even bacteria have. Before sight or hearing, before even touch, creatures evolved to respond to chemicals around them. Smell is unique among our five senses.  Unlike the other four, smell enters directly, deep into the brain.

In the 1990 book, A Natural History of the Senses, author Diane Ackerman writes, “Our sense of smell can be extraordinarily precise, yet it’s almost impossible to describe how something smells to someone who hasn’t smelled it…

We see only where there is light enough, taste only when we put things into our mouths, touch only when we make contact with someone or something, hear only sounds that are loud enough to hear.  But we smell always and with every breath…Smells coat us, swirl around us, enter our bodies, emanate from us.  We live in a constant wash of them.  Still, when we try to describe a smell, words fail us…

The physiological links between the smell and language centers of the brain are pitifully weak.  Not so the links between the smell and the memory centers, a route that carries us nimbly across time and distance. A smell can be overwhelmingly nostalgic because it triggers powerful images and emotions before we have time to edit them…When we give perfume to someone, we give them liquid memory.  Kipling was right:  “Smells are surer than sights and sounds to make your heart-strings crack.”

 Ah, those cracking heart strings…All it took to finally enliven my holiday spirit, after weeks of Christmas advertisements and  carols playing everywhere, was the smell of a few pine boughs and pumpkin scones baking in the oven.  Memories of Christmases past flooded into my head.  Smells were doing the work of a Christmas spirit cheerleader.  Perhaps you have similar associations with pine and cinnamon, or perhaps it’s other smells, like the ones of Hanukkah, potato latkes sizzling in the pan or chocolate gelt, unwrapped, given after spinning the dreidel. Whether Christmas or Hanukkah,  smells  may bring up childhood memories or ones more recent, one that make you smile, ones that bring tears to your eyes.  Kipling was right: “Smells are surer than sights or sounds to make your heart-strings crack.” 

The candles flicker in the window.

Outside, ponderosa pines are tied in red bows.

If you squint,

the neighbors’ Christmas lights

look like the Omaha skyline.

 

The smell of oil is in the air.

We drift off to childhood

where we spent our gelt

on baseball cards and matinees,

cream sodas and knishes…

(From “Chanukah Lights Tonight,” by Steve Schneider, in: Prairie Air Show, 2000)

Let your nose guide you to inspiration  as you write this week.  List the smells you associate with the Christmas or Hanukkah. What memories do they invoke?  Write some.

Read Full Post »

This past week I had lunch with my friend, Sue, both of us temporarily free of schedules that left little time for midday socializing.  Sue was my “first” friend when I moved to San Diego seven and a half years ago.  We’d met in Berkeley, when she attended my summer class on writing as a way of healing.  A gifted writer, her essays on her experience as a mother of a son fighting a war in Afghanistan, published in the , Christian Science Monitor, earned her a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize.  I knew none of that then, but when she learned I was relocating that fall, she followed up with a welcoming email and an essay she’d written about the San Diego area.  When I arrived that fall, she called and took me to an art show, featuring several local artists, some I soon got to know personally.

Sue and I lingered over lunch, recalling my first year in San Diego.  “I still think of you as a new friend,” she said, as we laughed over  shared likes and dislikes.

“Oh no,” I said, “I’m an old friend now.  It’s been more than seven years…”

“Has it been that long?”  I nodded; it had.  Time had, once again, flown by.

Our conversation  turned to the topic of friends, losing them and gaining new ones in all my many moves from California to Canada to New York, Washington and back to California.  Now as my husband and I consider a possible return, at least for half our time, to Canada, I admitted to Sue that I have mixed feelings–all because of friends.

“It’s more difficult to make new friends with each move,” I sighed.

Besides, I am well aware that as we get older, it’s friends—the ones who know you well–who make a place feel like home.  Like Bette Midler sang, we all need friends.

you got to have friends.
The feeling’s oh so strong.

You got to have friends
To make that day last long.

Despite our many moves, I’ve been lucky with friends.  Two weeks ago, Sharon, a friend from graduate school days, traveled west from New Hampshire to spend the weekend with us before heading to Silicon Valley to visit her son.  She and I were close during our doctoral study years, both of us single parents who’d elected to go back to school later in life.  In fact it was Sharon who first introduced me to John, who would, a few years later, become my husband.  Despite years apart and sometimes scant communication, she and I quickly fell into our old rhythms during her visit, shared conversations and long walks.  She remains as dear to me now as she was all those many years ago.

In two weeks, my daughter and granddaughter will be here, and Lynn, whom I met while in high school, will drive from Claremont to visit.  Lynn was always “Aunt Lynn” to my daughters, a constant presence in our lives, whether we lived in Nova Scotia, Toronto or California.  It hardly mattered.  Our friendship endured our mutual moves around the continent and periods of great physical distance between us over the years.  A phone call to Lynn was always enthusiastically received, and within a minute or two, we’d be laughing.

“The good thing about friends,” a poem by Brian Jones begins, “is not having to finish sentences” (“About Friends,” in The Spitfire on the Northern Line,1975).  Do you know that feeling?  It’s something I experience with Lynn, Sharon, or Sue, all among my dearest and most enduring friends.  Whenever we manage to pick up the telephone or meet, we’re laughing together within minutes in a conversation punctuated by unfinished sentences.   It’s a particular comfort shared with enduring friends, ones who know you by heart, who you’ve shared so much of life with and despite time and distance, can still pick up the conversation where it left off, even though you’ve not seen one another for months , sometimes years.

Friends matter in all kinds of ways.  They are important in helping us fight illness or depression.  They help us recover from illness, trauma and loss.  They celebrate our good times and offer support during the tough times.  They keep us from feeling lonely.  They often become closer than family, and they raise our spirits and keep us laughing.  No wonder friends are important in slowing down our aging process and prolonging life.  As Gail Caldwell describes finding a special friend in Let’s Take the Long Way Home, a story of her long friendship with author Gail Knapp, it’s “like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived..”

It was those enduring friendships I thought about this morning, grateful as I remembered each person’s face, their roles in my life, and knowing how much richer my life has been because of them.  Whatever and wherever my husband and I plan for our next chapter in life, I know that there are a handful of people whose friendships that will endure no matter what.

I remember the little round learned as a  Brownie Scout so long ago:

Make new friends, but keep the old.

One is silver and the other’s gold.

Think about friends or friendship this week and try writing about them.  Here are a few suggestions.  Describe a first meeting of a dear friend or a time when you discovered a friend in someone you never thought would become so close to you.  Tell how a friend has helped you through a difficult time.  Write a praise poem about a friend or friends.  Was there a time you lost a dear friend?  Write about that.   If you had to write a definition of friendship, what would it include?  What qualities matter most to you in a friend?

Through darkness, cold, and snow,
Wherever you may go,
You bear my friendship true, you bear my friendship true.

(“Blow, blow thou winter wind,” by Anonymous)

Read Full Post »

Follow