Stephen’s brother and niece are visiting us from the West coast, and it has infused some new energy into our daily routine that had become a bit stale and lifeless. It is so revitalizing to have family visit after a year of not seeing any relatives.

As July begins, I am reflecting on and trying to embody my word for this month which is joy. A simple word yet elusive to many including myself. I know when I feel it, but I can’t always grasp it. I have to wait patiently for it to come to me even though I believe certain practices can open ourselves up to receive more joy in our life.

My wise teacher Philip Thatcher asked my West Coast Institute class several years ago during our reading of Parzival, “What is joy?” My hand shot up immediately to answer, surprising myself, the quiet one who learned to keep my mouth shut and ears and mind open during most classes unless I felt I had something worthwhile to say, and as Philip called on me I heard myself speaking from a place of deep knowing–of course I know what joy is. Joy is that feeling and experience of holding pain and suffering while at the same time feeling your soul and heart expanding and bursting with love. For me, it’s the image of the mother, the conscious mother, I should add, fully awake and aware, in childbirth. Giving birth to my children was one of the hardest things I had to do physically in my life; it stretched me like nothing else could and yet the knowing that my child would soon be in my arms brought a fullness of heart that little else had in my life until then.

When I embody joy, it feels like an expansiveness and spaciousness, an acceptance and allowing for all feelings and experiences to be felt while knowing I am not alone. It has depth that happiness does not. For me, happiness remains on the surface but joy grows deep roots into the pain and suffering of being human by remembering that none of us is truly alone. I believe we all have an angel or guide and the Great Spirit who lives within us and all around us, making space for joy even through our tears of suffering.

As my telehealth psychotherapy private practice is beginning, I am reminded again and again of how we need to be gentle with one another. We all have our shortcomings, our failures, mistakes, and vulnerabilities. But we also have so many gifts to share with one another, the simplest and yet the hardest perhaps is loving-kindness. I tell myself frequently to be a blessing towards others and not a curse. May I bring more joy into a room instead of pain. May you do likewise this day.

I leave you with a quotation from David Driskell, a local artist whose work we saw at the Portland Museum of Art:

“When the indomitable human spirit rises above the chaos of violence, hunger and pain and soars to a heightened relief through the making of art, we are classless and raceless so long as we create the spiritual vision. As an artist of African ancestry, I have had to learn to live with racism, sexism, and all the prejudices. I often find refuge and, indeed, solace in the creative process. In the quiet of my small studio nestled in the majestic pines and white birches in Maine, two worlds merge in my work, one of sight, the other of vision. The beauty of nature and the creative world of the imaginations together express the joyous vision I have as an artist, responding to the spiritual urge within to fulfill my earthly task of making and creating my own beautiful world.”

-David Driskell

Popham State Beach, ME

I realize this blog title is misleading. It makes it sound like I am going to tell you how to move forward in these difficult times we are living. These difficult times we are living, as if the present has known more difficult times than the past, which we all know isn’t true. This is just life as it is evolving in front of us, as we live. I know you don’t think I have all the answers because I don’t. I’ve remained silent for too long, like so many, worrying I will say the wrong thing yet wanting to speak out. Yesterday I was reading this article “How to Start Making Real Change in Your Organization,” where Heidi Brooks, Yale School of Management leadership expert, talked about the mistake of keeping silent. She says, “Silence is not neutrality. If you’re saying nothing, what you might be projecting in your organizational culture, especially if you’re a leader, is the way that we deal with these things is through silence. If you’re thinking you’re kind of a neutral Switzerland in this, I would say silence is not neutrality right now.”

I was invited to join a small group recently to discuss consciousness raising, and I shared how I haven’t written on my blog because I don’t want to write something that will offend people. But the reality is that I will offend some people because we all have different perspectives. My experience is not your experience. I think perhaps I could rename this post “Allowing Ourselves to be Moved.” For a long time I would skip over news articles that were too painful to read. My excuse was self-care; working as a therapist and hearing clients’ trauma stories was enough for me. But perhaps a truer excuse is that I don’t like to feel uncomfortable. But I’ve known for some time now that growth happens in that place of discomfort and fear if we allow ourselves to stay there and pay attention to it before running the other way or distracting ourselves with what feels good. For me, the discomfort or fear starts as an ache in my heart and feeling unsettled in my belly. This internal feeling makes me feel restless, wanting to do some thing. As I live this 42nd year of my life, I’m trying to do that very thing that scares me, that makes me uncomfortable, the hard things, the impossible things. How can I translate this discomfort into healing, into a movement of action and compassion? 

In my own little world here in Southern Maine, my one little thing is writing on this blog. I can share with you how I am trying to learn and listen and reflect on the present and the past in order to inform how I can live into the future. Here’s a free online course Yale offers on African American History I am taking. I also highly recommend listening to Krista Tippett’s On Being interview with Resmaa Menakem. 

I recently finished reading When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron. A former client, who was a practicing Buddhist, introduced me to her writing. Here’s a passage from Chapter 13 of the book to sit and reflect on, my offering to you this day: 
     “How are we ever going to change anything? How is there going to be less aggression in the universe rather than more? We can then bring it down to a more personal level: how do I learn to communicate with somebody who is hurting me or someone who is hurting a lot of people? How do I speak to someone so that some change actually occurs? How do I communicate so that the space opens up and both of us begin to touch in to some kind of basic intelligence that we all share? In a potentially violent encounter, how do I communicate so that neither of us becomes increasingly furious and aggressive? How do I communicate to the heart so that a stuck situation can ventilate? How do I communicate so that things that seem frozen, unworkable, and eternally aggressive begin to soften up, and some kind of compassionate exchange begins to happen?”

That’s a lot of questions, I know. But she has a starting point, a place to begin again and again. Pema writes, “Well, it starts with being willing to feel what we are going through. It starts with being willing to have a compassionate relationship with the parts of ourselves that we feel are not worthy of existing on the planet. If we are willing through meditation to be mindful not only of what feels comfortable, but also of what pain feels like, if we even aspire to stay awake and open to what we’re feeling, to recognize and acknowledge it as best we can in each moment, then something begins to change.”

I had to write these words before I could move on to writing about our day to day life with my little family. I’ll share what we’ve been up to next time.

Photo taken by Zoey at the arboretum in San Francisco

My days begin around 5 o’clock in the morning. The sun has not yet risen. I rise in the dark and in the quiet of the house. I rise to make lunches for the kids, lunch for myself, breakfast for myself while reciting John O’Donohue’s A Morning Offering:I bless the night that nourished my heart/To set the ghosts of longing free/Into the flow and figure of dream/That went to harvest from the dark/Bread for the hunger no one sees. Stephen makes his way downstairs around 6 o’clock, making breakfast for himself and the kids. We do our morning dance around the kitchen, back and forth as we get food cooked and prepared. By 7:30am, I am off down the mountain to work as the sun begins to rise. Orange and pink fills the morning sky.

Tonight as I drove home from work, I listened again to the SuperSoul conversations with Joan Chittister.  In the midst of darkness, how do we hold light for one another? I make attempts at that daily with all the patients I see at the clinic for therapy. And in my own family and friends? I could do better. When I turned 40 in October, I had this awakening that seems perhaps obvious, but usually isn’t until we bring it to our consciousness. I realized I had the choice to choose what media or content passed across my eyes. I didn’t have to take everything in and feel crummy afterward. I didn’t have to watch a scary movie and feel frightened. I didn’t have to read news stories that were ugly and disheartening. I could filter what brought more light, beauty, laughter, and joy into my being. It’s not that I’m not aware of what is happening in the world. Reading the headlines is often enough to fill me in, or perhaps an article sent from a friend that I can trust is worth reading and being moved. But the daily bombardment of ugly, selfishness, and greed? I’ll pass on that.

As we move towards greater darkness, we hold on to the hope of the coming of light. Nature points us in the direction of more understanding if we wake up and look. There are beautiful, inspiring things happening in this world. There are people who are living their life as prayer. May you and I be one of them. And in the words of John O’Donahue, May I have the courage today/To live the life that I would love, To postpone my dream no longer/But do at last what I came here for/And waste my heart on fear no more.

Summer is coming to a close even as school has already begun and the 100 degree weather rages on with smoky air lingering from local fires. I pressed the reset button again in June. I couldn’t sustain the life I was living at my previous job. The term “quality of life” has been ever-present in my lexicon since working in hospice nine years ago. How do I want to spend my days? How do I want to live my life? These past few months, as I complete paperwork for my new job, I’ve realized how little patience I have for tedious, seemingly unnecessary work. I have no guarantee that this new job will be better than my last. That’s been my life, changing jobs in search of the better one. I keep coming back to the question, how will I live my life differently this time around? How will I balance home life and work as a therapist? How do the two become integrated into my one life I am living? After seven different jobs in two decades, maybe the answer is that there is no balance for my life as I am living it. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I was listening to the Rewind Yourself Podcast #151 Ancestral Amnesia and the Village Mind with Stephen Jenkinson yesterday, which really stretched my brain in thinking about my life. I won’t summarize the interview, but challenge you to listen to it. It was a bit like listening to a foreign language, trying to comprehend something just beyond my reach. A friend in her sixties said to me yesterday that she didn’t know why she was here, meaning her purpose in life. From my viewpoint, twenty years younger than her, I was shocked and surprised. How could she not know after 6 decades? In my naiveté, I assume that wisdom will come in 10, 20, 30 years from now, but the truth is, we are all just living our days trying to figure this life out. I think that is part of the poverty that Stephen Jenkinson speaks about.

Zoey often will ask Stephen and me to share a story from our childhood. There aren’t too many I remember. And then I started thinking about how the stories we could be telling her and Zane would include not just stories of one generation past, but also the stories of her great-great grandparents and who they were and what their life was like.

So I come back to that question of how do I work differently this time around? The truth that I have lived again and again is that work is hard. Work is tiring and draining. It can be boring and tedious. And sometimes it can be fulfilling and inspiring. We live in a time when we’re always looking for the next best thing, trying to avoid where we are. That’s my story anyway. So maybe this time around I open my hands and welcome it all in. The difficult and the easy, the sorrow and the joy. That’s a life lived, right?

This morning I slipped out of the house while Grandmom was reading Charlotte’s Web to Zoey. The boys were down by the shed. I walked over to the lake, sat down at the picnic table on the dock, and watched the wind moving across the water. The sun was shining, there was blue sky, and a cool breeze. Time appearing to stand still or at least passing more slowly.

The last time I wrote on my blog, I wrote about my struggle to survive the demands of my job. I was reminded of the constant change of life as I watched the wind blow across the lake, seeing the ripples expand. There is much to do when you are young, and I imagine the meaning of the doing becomes less important as you age. Doing my paperwork, doing the laundry, vacuuming, cleaning the kitchen, etc. All that truly matters now and ever matters is the being. As I look at nature all around me, the lake just is, the flowers just are, the trees grow where they stand. Nature teaches us what we have forgotten as we advance our minds and forget our bodies and spirits–we are living and breathing beings–we are of nature and a part of nature. Our greatness and value is that we are, not that we do these amazing things that set us apart from other creatures on earth.

There is such beauty in life. I need constant reminders and moments like this morning to reawaken to what it means to be human. I have not yet been able to welcome and embrace suffering like the flowers and trees who accept the fading of their days with grace. We humans may be smart but we are often foolish in spirit, forgetting the wisdom of our ancestors and fellow earthly creatures. I think to be human is to be one with the earth. We who are capable of deep knowledge, we all have a call to service and to care for one another and the earth we live on. But we too must rest and follow the rhythm of the seasons. As I near my middle years of being, doing takes up much of my time, balancing family life and work life. And somehow living in between. And I hope as I advance in years, the wisdom of the flowers and trees will stay with me and teach me how to be more as I am able to do less. And that I will recognize the value of my being even as my spirit and body fade back into the earth.

I find myself in a state of listlessness or of acedia as the Christian monks would have called it. My inner rhythm has been thrown off since returning to work. For quite some time, I held on to the vision that I would be a runner and enjoy running, but I never did. I would get stomachaches every time I tried to run (except perhaps when I was playing soccer because I’d have rest periods). And then I discovered yoga a little over 10 years ago, and I fell in love with the slower pace that let me breathe deeply but also got my body moving and stretching in challenging ways.

I realized the other day that my present work feels like I’m running everyday. And it only dawned on me after going to Zoey’s school for a parent meeting in the middle of my day. We sat down around Zoey’s circular lunch table to felt little mice for our children for Christmas. We talked and shared ideas and thoughts about gift giving and there was a sense of stillness and rest. And then I returned to work and felt the difference in the energy at my office. We should be a place of healing. We work with children who are traumatized, yet the energy feels frenetic, agitated, and restless. What kind of healing place is that?

About a week after Thanksgiving I was called to my supervisor’s office to explain why I was late on several reassessments for clients which resulted in lost billable hours (meaning our agency lost money). Last month was rough. I got sick for about a week, Zane was sick for a week. I took almost a week off for Thanksgiving. And as much as possible, I try not to do office work at home. As much as I would like to think I could turn my office work into a yoga rhythm, the truth is that I would just fall further behind in my billing, and would feel the need to keep running to catch up.

I recently finished reading Circle of Stones by Joan Dahr Lambert. Towards the end of the book, she writes this paragraph that seemed to sum up how I feel, but on a larger scale seems to also reflect the condition of our world: “There will come a time of imbalance when the dark will blot out the light, when the strong will brutalize the weak, when men will rule over women, force Akat upon them and make them bear young they cannot feed. In all that I have created, there has been a balance, between strength and weakness, between predator and prey, between that which is female and male, between the coming of new life and the resources to nurture that life, between the joy of birth and the release of death. But when the Mother’s ways are lost, the balance will die with them. So terrible will be the imbalance that the earth will no longer be able to renew itself but will strangle in its own decay. All of you to whom I have given life will be trapped in a chaos of your own making.”

I think it comes more naturally for women to be more in tune with daily rhythms and monthly cycles, but often women, too become disconnected from those rhythms. To work non-stop from morning to night without breaks feels more like imbalance to me than balance. My inner Wild Woman called out to me, so I started rereading yet again Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. She writes: “Don’t be a fool. Go back and stand under that one red flower and walk straight ahead for that last hard mile. Go up and knock on the old weathered door. Climb up to the cave. Crawl through the window of a dream. Sift the desert and see what you find. It is the only work we have to do. You wish psychoanalytic advice? Go gather bones.”

The bones I’m gathering tell me what I’ve already known–the best part of living is talking to others, soul to soul talking, sharing meals/breaking bread with others, digging down deep in the earth, moving my body, making something beautiful with my hands, breathing deep, sitting still, and listening. This is what I want–in addition to some really good loving–I mean body on fire, tingling loving.

I haven’t found my way yet, but I’m hunting with my nose to the ground.

We took a mini-vacation over the weekend to go camping on the coast. We escaped the 100+ degree weather to experience the coastal mid-50 degree weather that chilled us. I love the beauty that surrounds us here on our land, but I am drawn again and again to the coast.

I think a lot these days about the work I’ve chosen to do. I was listening to Dr. Aviva Romm’s latest podcast Natural MD Radio and heard this quotation I wanted to share because it sums up my desire to change my attitude towards work.

“What if the word work was changed to dance with life? And instead of being viewed as an alternative to fishing or a way of paying our dues, it was seen as our own chance to meet creative new friends, discover your own untested potentials and unpolished gifts and open avenues for abundance to come pouring into your life.”

What if work was no longer a burden but a gift waiting to be unwrapped? Each day a surprise waiting to be discovered? I’m not sure I’m there yet. Meanwhile, I hold on to memories of our camping trip hoping one day I can feel that same sense of buoyancy at work that I feel when I’m sleeping under the trees.