Category: holy days

  • Lessons in What Not to Be, Or How to Choose Your Last Room

    Lessons in What Not to Be, Or How to Choose Your Last Room

    My Aunt died this week. She was 101, active, and happy. Beautiful with her years and, though I have not seen her in decades, suddenly missed. Thinking of her passing put me in mind of another passing, another end of life, this one sad and reluctant in life and death. I find myself thinking deeply about the two lives that turned out so differently, thinking about the choices that led away from the same place down two divergent paths, wondering about lessons they have to teach me.

    You cannot choose the prison of your senile old age, they say. When dementia takes you over, it devours you and spits out your essence, your lost self, as waste. They say.

    I’m not so sure that is the complete answer. I think that we spend a lifetime building the walls and windows of the places we wander at the end.

    “Life is a choice,” according to Arnold. It’s so true. There are choices in every moment, and every one of those choices is an opportunity to build our capacity for happiness.

    Some choose iron bars and concrete blocks for their building materials. They bed down in their little cell, leave the door cracked open just in case, and learn to like the familiarity. Over the years, they come out less and less. You can watch the change in their eyes when they realize they’ve wandered too far from the comfort of sadness. You can watch them look around, take in the sunshine and loveliness, think about it—and say no.

    I watched the old person I know so well do that as she crouched in her wheelchair at the end of the hall. She looked at me, she saw me, she heard my singing, and she touched the tips of her fingers to the shine of happiness in the air.

    But she found the space too open, too frightening, too strange, and she missed her hard little bed in the dark cell. Goodbye, said her blurred blue eyes.

    And she was gone again.

    She wrapped fear and anxiety around her thin shoulders, scurried away to her darkness, and peered out through her fingers at the blinding light outside. She saw things that weren’t there, things she’d carried with her for decades, things she’d fed and cosseted inside her mind until in her age and weakness they chuckled darkly and came out to play.

    There in the nursing home, I tried to drown them in my music, to shoo them away, to firmly point them out the door, but they just stuck their warped claws into my flesh and sought to drag me deep into the stinking prison where they live. And she turned away her head, reached to draw her monsters close around her, snuggled them under her stiff blankets, sucked in their bile, and spat it at the world.

    I sang to still my soul and weave a shawl of peace around me while I watched her. I thought about the years, the long years, of branching paths along her way, the paths she refused.

    No judgment. It’s hard, so hard, to walk away from the path your elders trod ahead of you. The ground underfoot is invitingly smooth (or so it seems in the dim light), while the unfamiliar paths wind under thick and tangled trees, around rocks, through flooded streams.

    Those other ways will lead you to strange hollows and foreign towns. You don’t speak the language. And you are, you believe, alone. So many reasons (or so it seems to your terrified soul) to walk where your parents walked.

    Her choices took away so much from me. Even more from herself.

    But now, nearing the end, she has a gift for me, and I think that in some shuttered corner of her soul she knows about the gift, caresses it, polishes it carefully before handing it to me wrapped in her bruised love.

    Her at-last gift is the gift of knowing.

    I open the invisible card that comes with her gift and read her shaky disappearing handwriting:

    Do not be like me.

    Choose happiness at every breath and branching pathway.

    Learn while you still can.

    This is good enough for me. I accept the gift. I will choose differently.

  • Press On! And Happy Imbolc, Brigid’s Day, and (later on) St Brigid’s Day

    Press on!

    That’s the new handmade sign on the tree at the end of the riverside forest path, right before a short but steep snow-covered hill that leads from the forest to city sidewalks, cars, and apartment buildings. I love finding art messages on my walks, and I’m always pretty certain they’re meant for me! Ok, they’re meant for every person who reads them, and I always read them.

    Press on!  

    Not necessarily something I want to hear, not necessarily something that’s helpful to hear. For instance…

    At the beginning of our first shut down, I decided to do yoga, just like I used to. Feel that stretch! Make it happen! Dig deep!

    And I gave myself bursitis. 

    When it happened, it sounded as if every muscle in my hip tore. It felt as if my leg was hanging, unattached, but not quite falling off altogether. It hurt too much to walk. How much hurt is that? I don’t know how to measure pain, but I do know that I fell asleep between labour contractions. So.

    It took months of physio before I could face that hill. Months of learning how to use my body, discovering I’d become used to a duct-tape version, worn duct-tape barely holding together neglected bits and pieces, catching in the non-act the muscles that were having a drink with their feet up while other muscles, not meant for the job, worked too hard and got hurt. 

    As I take some photos and enjoy a few more precious minutes of the frozen river and the tiny sounds of winter wildlife, I think about this new message. I wonder if the artist had that steep and slippery hill in mind when they hung the sign. Which kind of press on did they mean? Or did they want to leave that up to me, show me the possibility of a new way to press, dig in, demand more of myself? 

    Pressing on can serve you, and it can also harm you. Brene Brown talks about her experience of digging deeper, of pressing on, pushing herself to the point that her whole being stopped functioning and she had a breakdown. 

    But, we all know of circumstances where someone made a huge and beautiful life-changing contribution by hanging on, pressing on, digging deep for that last burst of energy.

    So, what’s the difference? When should I, and when shouldn’t I?

    Or, more to the point, how should I?

    In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brown writes

    “Men and women who live wholeheartedly do indeed dig deep. They just do it in a different way. When they’re exhausted and overwhelmed they get:

    — Deliberate in their thoughts and intentions through prayer, meditation or simply setting their intentions;

    — Inspired to make new and different choices;

    — Going. They take action.

    I spent far too many years digging deep in that old, exhausting way, pushing through to survive another chaotic day in the debilitating, possessive circle of a narcissistic, abusive husband (now so joyfully divorced for many blossoming years!), somehow coping, though not well, with raising two beautiful boys. 

    Now, I know the difference. I see that sign and I see the steep, snowy hill. The hill must be climbed unless I go all the way back to the beginning of the path–and, even if I do, there’s another hill! It must be climbed, and I can climb it. But I won’t huff and puff and slip and slide and climb it obstinately at any cost.

    Instead, I pause to check in with my body, breathe deeply with the trees and the slow, frozen river, and make sure that the core of my being, the part that endured all those years of digging in, the part that is energetically and physically the centre of me, is engaged and ready.  

    I breathe and begin to climb, step by conscious step, grateful for my life now, grateful for the learning of my life then. I can see and appreciate the ever-changing perfection in my chosen path of deliberate, inspired, active intention. My morning walk on the forest path is a gift every day. I am blessed to be here. My body is stronger each time I walk the path, more ready each day to climb the hill. (My spirit is too.)

    The quiet little sign with its handmade lettering and stenciled dove still invites me to press on every day. Whatever the artist intended, I’m grateful they made their offering here, where I can see it and be inspired.
    Imbolc is all about Press On!
  • Samhain is still Samhain (So there, COVID!)

    Samhain is still Samhain (So there, COVID!)

    Today is holy in many cultures. Here in North America, we’ve nearly lost the holiness in a mess of candy chasing and best-costume prizes. This year is different as COVID rages and people choose to — or are made to — stay home. I would have anyway (solitude is my refreshment), but I have rarely felt so deeply the need, on this day, for spiritual connection. Pandemics can do that to you.

     

    Ghosts of October 31 past grin at me from the wind storm shadows and tossing branches outside my tree-top windows. Many Hallowe’en parties, many All Hallows Eve vigils, some Dia De los Muertes (thank you Mariachi Ghost!) celebrations, some Samhain gatherings. But this is the first time I’ve watched the full moon rise and understood the meaning of the night, looked for the ending and beginning that my heritage (Irish and Catholic) teaches me. 

     

    Samhain moonrise

    My grandmothers and great-grandmothers for generations prepared in vigil for the Feast of All Saints on November 1. They would have kept, and slowly lost, the memories of an earlier time, a time when the great fire festival at Tlachtga in Meath marked the passing from the light half to the dark half of the year. 

    I imagine wandering back to Ireland, slipping into their Rosary circle, letting their prayers lead me deeper into memory, to ancient times, until we glimpse the brightness of the Samhain fire far across the island from my grandmothers’ homes. 

    “This is a momentous time in the lives of a people to whom the changing of the seasons was a matter of life and death.”

    https://www.newgrange.com/tlachtga.htm

    What did they do when they saw the beautiful light? Samhain was the end and beginning of the year, the last gifts of the precious harvest stored, the thinning of the veil between this world and otherworld, a time to honour and welcome ancestor spirits and protect from harmful spirits. There were rituals to be followed in those ancient times just as there were for my grandmother and her vigil with her ever-present Rosary, just as there are for each of us if we are willing.

    And, I think there must have been private, hidden, silent words, soft thoughts and barely articulated feelings. Whatever the ritual then or centuries later, I think they said, thank you. 

    Thank you for the promise of the sun once we’ve made it through this long darkness,
thank you for the promise of light and new life,
thank you for 
this dark night to let our sadness out and watch it disappear into the dark,
this thin veil to release the grief of the year past,
the sorrow of unwanted goodbyes, 
the end of things we would have held closely. 

    Things change, and we need a holy place and time to make peace with the change. Our beings rest in ritual, relax in familiar prayers. We do well when we can set aside time and prepare a particular, separate space to give thanks for change, to allow, to rest without resistance as the seasons shift, as darkness and light circle in their long dance, and as the moon rises on this holy night.