The Land of Lost Things

Two Thursdays ago I had a wallet. A wallet and a zip. A silver card case wallet in a red leather zippered clutch. The card case I've had since my 20s, the zippered clutch only a few years. Both carried cards and cash but mostly they carried me. Everytime I unzipped the one and pulled out the other, I touched leather and metal, clasps and zips that reminded me who I was. This may sound like an overstatement, but truly, the silver case in particular was the Essential Me. Maybe because I've had it so long - that case has seen me through Camden and Europe and through the move back to Vancouver, through first dates and marriage with Scott, through babies and first days of school. Every place I've paid for something over the last 20 years, that case was there with me.

Two Fridays ago, I realized both were gone.

[insert denial, grief, bargaining, anger, acceptance and replacement of all my cards and identification here]

At the bottom of my closet, I found my grandmother's old Birks bag, and in the bottom of that was a coin purse. As I collected new cards and new versions of me, I slid them into this inherited case and tried to make it mean something new.

Wednesday, I lost that one too.

Thursday around 12:34pm the universe whispered gently, Ask Lisa. So I sent this text: "I keep losing things and misplacing things and I want to weep even though I'm not in the Weep Zone of my cycle. What am I not hearing??? I feel like the world is speaking a language I don't know and I'm starting to feel so afraid."

Lisa replied, "I'm going to ceremony tonight. I'll ask. In the meantime, breathe."

So I took breaths and wept a bit and waited a bit more.

Lisa is... complicated. I won't write a biography here, but in addition to the regular old work/family/life things she is, she is also a healer. Somehow, along the way, I became a person who got a friend who loves a Creator and knows magik and hears Truth and speaks healing. I'm pretty sure my teen-aged youth group self prayed against people like her but I think it's possible her Trinity Western grad self would have joined me. Grace and years and goodness have thankfully freed us both.

And now I am healed.

Lisa went to the water's edge and listened for me. Her still-a-child son kept the fire. Earth, Water, Fire, for real.

And as always happens, the words I'd already heard but couldn't understand echoed back and as she gave them to me, one text message at a time, something eased.

Identity. Losing who I am. Becoming someone new. But in the journey between me and me, being pulled away from Actual Me and being tempted to become someone who is not me instead. Someone else who's fears I already know instead of the Me who's fears are new and newly terrifying. I was layering myself in inherited fears about worth and value, about being qualified to be ME. Family stories about secretly being frauds were coats easily layered over top of tender, vulnerable me.

I have just quit my job. I have just decided I will be a Writer. I have just decided I will be a Coach. I have just decided I will do and be the me I have long imagined I could be one day.

I have just taken off my Competent and Paid jacket and feel quite naked and under-dressed. No wonder all those old clothes are so tempting.

Sadly (happily), they are not mine. They will not serve me in this season.  But I wasn't listening to the voice that said so, and so I guess the source of that voice starting taking my shit. All the shit that told me who I was kept going missing. And not just my wallets. My phone. My notebook. I kept losing and misplacing and leaving behind all my things.

Three minutes after Lisa's texts arrived, Nate phoned. My latest wallet was on his desk. There are a thousand reasons why Nate having my wallet is it's own poetry but I will save those for another post.

"You have to not want to be afraid. You have to want to occupy your own power, part of which manifests through the fullness of the truth you're seeing."

Fear has been my constant companion for a long time but this next season requires me to not want to be afraid. That means saying no thank you to some of my inheritance; we are an anxious people, the women in my clan. Being anxious meant being In.

But for a season (or several, who can say?), being anxious and afraid is not who I am. The cord was cut by my beloved healer and Me in this season is picking up a different inheritance. That coin purse that is my Second Wallet belonged to my other grandmother; from her and her family I inherited Welcoming Others by Being Youself. The stoop starts in Grandma's backyard. Open-handed ease grew under her apple tree.

And so it begins, this season of ease. There is a lot to be afraid of, but it turns out, fear is not required anymore. I gift my red zip and silver case to the universe, a weird little sacrifice I guess, but I'm not the first human to let go of things to make space for Truth to show up.

A lot can change in two Thursdays. For me, I changed up which inheritance I'm spending. I blew through that first one in 20 years and it brought me all the way here. I am grateful for all of it and for what it afforded me. Who can say how long I can live on this one? It could take years to just remember it's there.

Regardless, there is no doubt there are two grandmothers in Heaven wondering how in the fuck their descendent got healed by a medicine woman down at the riverside via text message. I hope Jesus can explain it all for them.

Idiot

My kids both get straight As.

They both have good friends, more than one.

They can both talk to adults with ease and confidence.

They are comfortable meeting new people.

They can say how they're feeling with surprising accuracy.

They can play together for hours at a time.

They can read.

They are creators and builders.

They are funny.

They both have learned a sport.

They have both auditioned for and taken solos in school productions.

They can both swim.

They can both drive a boat and a dinghy.

They can both sail a Laser on their own.

They both say please and thank you.


Why do I feel like such a failure?

For real.

Why?

It turns out I wanted more than that? I'm an idiot.

I'm So Glad You Told Me

I don't read authors who write in a tone of voice that sounds too much like how I wish I sounded when I write. Brene Brown, Glennon Doyle Melton, Nadia Bolz-Weber... I hear they're amazing and that I'd love them so much. Oh well. They make me feel like shit, writing all their thoughts down first, so I just act like they're not there most of the time.

Sadly social media interferes with my campaign to make them not exist so I trip across what they think quite a bit. This long preamble to say, Brene Brown said something once and I read it lately by accident and now my whole life is different.  God knows what would happen if I read the rest of those assholes.

I think I've mentioned here that parenting has been more work than I wanted these last months. It has been for years really, but since late fall, things really took a turn for the dumpster fire and I wasn't altogether we'd all four make it through to the other side. I did what I do and spent most waking hours scouring the interwebs for hope. Looking for a solution that would cure what ailed us, ideally with only 5 or 7 minutes of effort.

Where I landed was where you all knew I would land: there is no shortcut to peace to be had - one can only decide to point themselves in the direction of peace and hope there are enough granola bars in your pockets to get you there. The trick is to find the straightest path there, and just keep taking the next right step*. For years. Years and years and years and years as far as I can tell.

For me, the path to peace seems to be marked Empathy Road. Correction Crescent, Angry Alley, Punishment Path and the Vale of Resentment and Tears all led to places I did not want to be anymore. But empathy - believing that a child wasn't giving me a hard time but was having a hard time and needed help handling that hard time - that brand of empathy and living with another seemed to lead to the place I most want to be. A place kind of like Hawaii - it's expensive and I'm never sure we should go, but I'm so relaxed and warm and happy there that I keep going back, embarrassed though I am that we spend so much to be there.

Meeting a child who's words and actions are awful with warmth and calm makes me look like an idiot. I worry all the time about teaching people (read: my children) they can treat me poorly when I don't demand they Stop That Right Now or All Manner of Goodness Will be Removed From Your World. I have judged a thousand mothers for letting their sweet progeny get away with being assholes.

And yet.

It turns out that shouting and stomping and demanding and insisting and drawing lines in sand and not giving in turned me into someone I loathed. Someone who cried in the dark and knew my adult children would drink because of me.

But as I really decided to listen to the whispered hurt behind the shouted angry words my child hurled my way, I discovered they told me what they were afraid of, and what they thought might go wrong. They told me they didn't know how to do the things asked of them out there in the world, and as often, not even the things asked here at home. They whispered, 'please help me'.

And so I started whispering back, 'okay'.

Because I have known my own self to be washed over with rage and anger when fear got the best of me. I have shouted curse words because they were easier to say than "I'm afraid I wrecked us." I have ranted and raved out loud while my sweet tender heart whispered "please help me turn this off". I have felt the rage grow and grow when instead of help I was offered criticism and disappointed dismissal.

Cruising the internet to learn about how to get to empathy eventually brought me to Brene Brown. Of course. In her TED talk, she includes in a script for empathy, "I don't know what to say, but I'm so glad you told me."

Everything is different now. I don't have to have solutions for my people. I just have to be grateful that they told me they can't. Even if they tell me with hurled sticks and stones and words that mean to hurt me.

I'm so glad you told me, I say. And thus find myself one step closer to peace.

As I said to my own mum a few weeks ago, I decided I'd rather regret grace.

May it be so.

Good Intention

What if it's true that all behaviour has good intention?

What if it turned out that the very worst things we do (yes, even that) are fuelled by a desire for something good to happen? 

I think about this a lot as a parent. I find it easier to stay calm in the middle of my child's shit-storm when I can find it in myself to believe that the child is trying to make something good happen and just got a bit derailed by hard stuff along the way. I am trying to remember that it may be true of my beloved husband too; that his worst transgressions against me, like eating too loud, may be in fact his own effort to make something good happen, like nutrition.

I've been thinking about it a lot, watching the most recent version of the world falling apart. It's horrendous, what's happening out there in the world. The planet is running out of steam for dealing with our bullshit, while we run out of steam for dealing with each other's bullshit, all of it happening faster and faster all the time. It's terrifying.

But.

It's also peace-making for me, now that I wonder about what good each bad actor is trying to make happen. What gets done is awful, but what is hoped for is wonderful. Heart-breaking often, these unmet bids for goodness with life-wrecking outcomes. But there is love in this heart for the heart that is seeking goodness, every time.

Life is a long, hard wander but the hunt for goodness has given me purpose along the way. So there's that.

Still Getting up Tomorrow

I thought we'd have problems.

I knew to expect it would be hard.

I know it to be absolutely, irrefutably, unceasingly true that Life Is Hard And Good and that we would end up walking the whole way with Hard and Good as companions.

I just thought that it would be a nicer kind of problem. A more pleasing kind of hard. That the walk would be challenging but only in ways I like.

I also thought that all the Hard we'd get would be Hard we are well-equipped to handle. That if we didn't have the tools to handle it, we'd happily and easily get the tools and then do the work and then Hard would be just one more thing that we were good at doing. That's really the heart of it there: I really thought we would be good at doing Hard and that because we were so good at it, it actually wouldn't be all that hard at all. 

It turns out that watching his grandmother slowly die over many months, and then watching his dad suffer a grievous injury and swimming in the bath was our life of pain and disappointment and pain and sadness and pain and anger - it turns out all of that left our boy a wee bit broken. It turns out that 3 is too young to think you saved your dad's life. It turns out that if your parents are a bit distracted by all of the above, they may not notice that you've become a bit anxious and worried and that your big feelings aren't just growing up feelings but are deep down, Life May Be Awful All The Time Feelings.

And if that goes on for five years and no one really figures it out and you find out that getting mad gets a lot of care and attention in your house, you may become a nine year old who is mad a lot. And your mad may get bigger and bigger as you get bigger and bigger until eventually it's just way too big for an eighteen-hundred square foot house.

When that happens, a mom might be surprised to discover that it turns out there is a Hard that isn't turned into beauty and goodness as quickly as she has long believed it can be. A mom and dad may discover that new tools don't fix broken things all the way or very quickly, if at all; that some broken just stays. A family may find out that Too Hard isn't an option and that the next day must be done, even if the day before was The Last Straw, a Bridge Too Far, More Than We Can Bear.

On days like that, sun is welcome and neighbours more and we just make some toast and write it down and hope Goodness shows up eventually.

That's what some of us do.

Open Surrender Strong

These were words in the "No Fear Yoga" practice this morning.  And in a week where fear got the upper hand, they were extra useful. And really great words for putting fear in the right place.

Open heart, open to life, open to love.

Surrendered heart, surrender to life, surrender to love.

Strong heart, strong for life, strong for love.

I just wanted to remember.

So Many Rocks, So Many Hills

Work is hard and I don't want to do it anymore.

Being the mum to a sick boy is hard and I don't want to do it anymore.

Making decisions with another person who is equal parts handsome, handy and ludicrous is hard and I don't want to do it anymore.

Spending money on boring things like tires and groceries is hard and I don't want to do it anymore.

Trying to dance with hope while the world burns around me is hard and I don't want to do it anymore.

On days like today, I re-read the blogs of friends who's kids have cancer, or who had cancer before they died and I try to remember these are all wonderful problems I have.

Actually, writing that down makes me feel like a bit of an asshole. Because indeed, these are wonderful problems to have and no amount of clever blogging is going to make them less great problems to have. These aren't even the HARDEST problems I've had. They're just a lot of them at one time and they're getting boring.

And even I know this: boring problems are the best problems. No one wants problems that aren't boring. Not even me.

So today, tonight, the thing I am reminding myself of is that if indeed our biggest problem is that we're bored of our problems, we better figure out how to get unbored in a hurry before life does that for us.

I can't remember exactly how to do that, but I think I'd rather put my time and energy into that.

Stay tuned.

One True Thing

Tonight's yoga practice asked me to remember one thing I know is true.

And I remembered that God loves me.

Or maybe I remembered that I believe God loves me.

And then I remembered that I believe because God loves me, I can love the people I'm given to love. And I can rest in the imperfection of my love for them because of the perfection of God's love for me, and for them.

That is One True Thing tonight, and I'm so grateful.

Parenting while the world falls apart

Two things I've written down lately that I want to remember:

First this, in response to a question about how to offer children authentic hope:

Part of my hope rests in the belief that all that matters isn't just in the here and now but extends into eternity somehow. But that hope isn't really enough to get me out of bed most days. 
Hope that good people do good in terrible circumstances buoys me though. Hoping in material security won't serve us, but hoping in values like goodness and kindness and justice - that even while we are less physically or economically less comfortable, there will be more justice - that is something I can teach my kids to look for and be working to be part of. There are already billions of people living lives full of meaning and value in terrible circumstances - we may well join their ranks, or our children may. But circumstances are not the point of this life - character is, and so I am full of hope that my own children will be people of character who chase goodness and justice, even in the midst of suffering. That's my authentic hope.

Second this, as I made sense of a morning gone terribly, terribly wrong:

What do I need to hear/say today?
I'm not sure, but it's something about being a good neighbour. About loving who you're given to love IN THE MOMENT. This morning it was my daughter and my son and I loved them so poorly. Really, really, really badly.
As I processed it with my friend and co-worker, we got to the inevitable, "Well, what do you do?" and I remembered that all we do is apologize, own our mistake and try to get better, try to make that particular mistake less often.
Here's the thing: I give my kids lots of good. And some terrible.
I try to shift the balance to more good and less terrible every damned day.
Some days, today, I fail.
Most days, I pass.
I'm doing the same thing in the fight against evil. Some days I get it mostly good with only a hint of terrible.
Some days, it's just a lot of terrible.
But every day, it's on my radar and every day, I get to practice doing it and hopefully over time, the practice itself leaves a mark. ON me, on my people, on my world.
The world doesn't have more terrible in it today than it did on January 19. The terrible that is present is louder and has more power, but so does the good.  Good is louder these days. That's a miracle. And of course, power that I care about isn't political power. It's heart power. And I think Good might be getting more heart-powerful these days.

Also, Soft

An additional word for this year: softer.

A group of women gathered this weekend to celebrate my mum. They said a lot of wise things, and many will linger. But Nanny's words, that she wished she had been softer with her people and with her sweet self... that has lodged itself in my heart, and I find myself meditation on it these many hours later.

Yoga is a practice that asks for strength and softness to work together.

Softer. Stronger. That is what this year is going to require of me.

May it be so.

Strength for the Journey

One thing I like about yoga is setting intentions. It has replaced prayer for me in the last year, in as much as I sit quietly at the beginning of practice to see if there is something I can hear. Most often two or three words come, and then I carry them through my practice, breathing them in and out, literally inspiring my movement. At the end of my practice, I remember what brought me to my mat and I lie quietly for a few minutes to let it soak through me, and settle in my bones.

The first practice of the year brings with it the words Strength for the Journey. The prayer, strengthen us for the journey; strengthen me for the journey.

That is what I'm starting this year with: the prayer that we will each find and build the strength needed for all that lies ahead.

Amen.

Back to Basics

I bet if I looked, I'd find I've used this title before.

Mostly because I've freaked the fuck out before. And then had to recover. Or at least keep feeding my family. Neither lets me linger in the dark for too long.

And so, today was possible. I only cried one time, and that was gratitude crying which is much nicer than despair crying. I was grateful for Alix, who is leading Girls with Grit for sweet peas like my sweet T. It's possible I bullied her into it, but no matter how it happened, this beautiful soul has decided to gather girls together and teach them how to move their bodies to let shit go, and then let them write and create and build and dream so that their souls have a bit more bounce to them to get them through this world.

Surely this world needs more women with souls that bounce and bodies that flow.

I also walked in a forest. I tried to be really deep and thoughtful, and notice how healing nature is. Maybe I didn't give it enough time. But for 30 minutes I didn't read any articles that made me nauseous, or hear another news item that made me want to drive into the sea.

But mostly, I did the one thing that always heals. I shared communion with my neighbours. It's my favourite kind of communion, apple ginger cider and vegan chocolate mint cookies around the kitchen with the atheists I love best. They did more for my soul in 75 minutes than anything else has done in the last 5 days. We raged and wondered and gasped and laughed. We compared our various reasons for despair and delighted in how many there were.

But mostly, we were together and we were safe and we were agreed that justice is our responsibility. And that sometimes kids just need to play outside.

I have walked through several different phases of post-election trauma. Denial, grief, rage, acceptance and then back again. I have read 17 different ways to respond and read 17 different reasons why each of those ways are dumb. March! Don't march! Safety pins mean safety! Safety pins mean white privilege! Give money! Don't fund the war! There is no right answer here friends.

And when there is no right answer, that's when we go back to basics.

Love God.

Love your neighbour.

Who's your neighbour?

The person you come across who needs what you have to give.  Or maybe it's the person who has to give the very thing you need.

Either way, when the gift is given and the gift received, the Kingdom is on earth as it is in Heaven.

I don't have to fix western civilization. I just have to be willing to give away what it is I have to give and receive what it is I need from the people who I come across.  Tonight it was cider and cookies. Tomorrow it may be shelter and food. I'll just keep my eyes open as I walk for those journeying the other way.

What Hope Looks Like in the Dark

I am so afraid.

I have made myself walk through the last three days since the American election, but my heart is still curled up in my bed weeping like a fourth grader. Like the fourth grader I was, who wept through the night believing we were minutes away from nuclear war. That fear feels the same 35 years later. The tears burn the same way 35 years later. The hopeless "I don't know what to do" sinks me the same way 35 years later.

What's different is that I have children I'm sending into this dark future we face. I'm not just afraid of my own small legs not being able to carry me away from danger. I'm afraid of watching helplessly as my children... I can't. I can't even type it. Oh shit. I'm just so scared.

Another thing's that different is that I know fear does not serve me. No bad thing is deterred because someone thought to be afraid of it before it happened. No good idea is borne of terror. Despair has yet to inspire the next right thing.

So I'm working hard. Scott just got irked that I can't turn off my angst to listen to him talk for two minutes. But he doesn't know how much effort it takes to turn down the volume on the voice in my head saying "you're about to watch the end of the world". He doesn't know how hard it is to stop planning how much food we can pack into the boat, because that's the only thing I can think about that's remotely constructive. How nutritious are fiddleheads anyway?

But every day, I'm going to work a little harder at it. Because hope is our only hope this week. I will hope that I can look up often enough to catch people in the middle of goodness. I will hope that the God I love will grow love in me for the people who were so angry, so disenfranchised, so scared themselves, that they chose this man for their next leader. I will hope that something happens that boosts peace and cooperation back up to the top of the global agenda.

This isn't a pretty piece. Not so eloquent or helpful. Hope in the dark can be ugly like that. But I'm going to keep at it. I'm going to write it down - maybe the rhythm of typing will soothe me.

I'll let you know how it goes.

But What If...

What if we're fine?

What if this is the point, right now?

My boy harvesting raspberries with the sons of my yoga teacher, my daughter working on the boat with my husband, my tea hot and my novel engaging. Our home open, home to some young kid on his way to his own 20something life exploring in that same inlet that has brought so much life to our own crew.

What if this is all that's required for now? If the next thing will come when the next thing is due, and we're fine until then?

I'm not convinced really. I don't see anything else to do but enjoy this moment, but I'm not convinced I shouldn't be looking harder.

And another thing... (double-posting because I'm double-fucked)

We have a just-right sized house in a community full of people we care for.

We both have jobs that are fine. We do not always spend our days doing what we are built for, but we are paid enough to keep our home and feed each other, and live generously with our friends and neighbours.

We have most of our family within a five-minute drive and then a few more half-an-hour away and the other two just six hours away.

We do not have a lot of clarity about what the point is right now. The vision and mission part - that's what is missing.

We are low on community these days, more now than we have been in a long time.

What is so wrong exactly?

It's that part where we don't have a point.

For the first few years the point was trying to get pregnant, trying to become a family. Then the point was trying to keep those babies alive and just get through. Then the point was helping Joanne die. then the point was getting Scott back on a fire truck.

But now there's no point.

I worry if we don't come up with a point soon, we'll be given a new one. A new terrible one like more dying parents or joblessness. Or worse.

To love God and worship God forever. That's supposed to be the Grand Point of It All, but I think I'm looking for something a bit more specific.

Love God and love your neighbours. And who is your neighbour? Whoever you come across who needs what it is you have to give. That's my own personal point, my grand guiding mission and vision. Can it be all of ours?

So then the work is to just keep journeying with eyes open for those who need what it is we have to give. And to be maybe be sure to be living in what it is we have to give so that it's easy to be giving it away.

And what is it then that we have to give, our little foursome? Maybe that's what needs to be lingered on next?

No exorcism today.  Maybe tomorrow.