No time for politics

 

Check your calendar.

It's August 2015.  

The GOP & Democratic conventions are NEXT summer.  

As tempting as it might be, the truth is 

paying attention to the hijinks & frothy silliness 

is a waste of irreplacable

time & energy.





There are books waiting to be written,
older friends waiting to be lead astray,
cards notes letters to be written,
crowdfund requests to be submitted,
a house to be cleared & cleaned, 
workshops needing registration,
airline tickets to L.A. to be booked,
smarter eating habits to be developed, 
cupcakes to be baked frosted embellished,
ANC students to be pampered,
BACNC staff & students to be fed,
a memorial tribute to be produced,
relationships to be healed... 

I hereby declare a pox on politics!  

Focus on the real, on what truly matters.

 

excellent advice on how to read a personal-work book

From my Australian muse, STEPHANIE DOWRICK, discussing how to read her book,  Creative Journal Writing: The Art and Heart of Reflection.  In my experience, what she says is spot on - and tough to stick to.  I keep wanting to DO something rather than keep on keeping on with my first read.


How you will use this book is, necessarily, entirely up to you. But my humble suggestion is that you first read it through like a conventional book, stopping only if an exercise here or there grabs you by the ankle and pulls you to the ground. Stop here. If that doesn't happen, experience the ideas and the many wonderful stories as a whole, and only then go back to work your way through it far more personally, engaging with all the exercises that you want, at the pace you want, and in the way you want.

 

Terra Incognita

 

Over the past few days, my older friend (who's been magnificently dealing with increasing memory challenges) has been asking throughout breakfast - "What am I doing with the rest of the day?"

When it came up again this morning, I was shocked to hear myself say, "Oh, you'll be going out to lunch & to dinner!"  

My stomach lurched, hearing those words.  I was putting her out in the foyer, like so many people, who have basically only meals to wait for, who have nothing - nothing - to DO.  

Yes, it's lovely that my friend's remarkable family make sure she has interesting company at breakfast, that most of her meals are either outside her senior residence or in company with engaging people who focus on fun banter, big ideas & delightful memories.  But that still leaves her with time on her hands, waiting for a mealtime to come alive.

She only has three days like that - with nothing to do between each meal - but they are unfortunately one right after the other.  For whatever reason, she is feeling it especially keenly right now.  

Praise be, I could assure her that she had Bible Study this morning!  A big smile lit up her face.  

Fridays are practically a marathon for her - a lively breakfast with her friend, David, and yours truly;  another care partner swings by while we're finishing up our meal & things get even jollier before the two of them head upstairs for art class;  a quick lunch in the senior residence cafe is followed by the always uplifting & informative Contemporary Religion class, which looks indepth at every sort of faith on the planet;  back to her bedroom for a nap before ending up with dinner down in the Club Room with John et moi & others, capped off by a sunset-chasing evening drive!  That's the sort of daily schedule she'd like - especially now - every day.

 

Two things occurred to me today - well, three, including the realization I thought looking forward to mealtimes made up for nothing to do between them.  

One - in my dear friend's mind, there's virtually no lapse in time between when she was a homemaker, gardener, chief cook & bottle washer, a loving wife & devoted mother to a husband who depended on her & children who needed her.  

 

Older folks don't need scientific studies to tell them there is no time, that there never was.  We youngers are not so experienced, wise.  My friend & her fellow residents could share hours & hours of stories about their younger years, years that were filled with too much to do to get everything done, years that seem a whisker of time ago, years that are so different from their here & now.  She enjoys her mealtimes, appreciates all her children do to make sure she has fun each day.  And she feels...  possibly guilty that it so often still feels barren, barren on so many levels.

The second thing that occurred to me is that I have virtually no background in dealing with my friend's dilemma.  Every older friend I was close to lived in their own homes, often to the very end.  Or they lived with their children or other doting relatives who kept things lively throughout the day.  

Mom is certainly no use in figuring out how to help my older friend.  As she & I talked this morning, it dawned on me that Mom - who lived with us at Squirrel Haven - always had the opportunity to dust a shelf, to wipe off the bathroom counters or stovetop, to shine up the kitchen sink or a mirror.  Or not!

Mom wasn't a great one for gabbing over the phone, but over a dozen people welcomed her cards, notes & letters.  Several crossword puzzles were always tucked into the carry-all on her walker & she was, to her final days, a voracious reader.  I was once raked over the coals by a younger friend of hers (a kid of 75) for not getting Mom an audio player - apparently Mom had declined an offer of recordings of church services;  I had to patiently explain that Mom had three such players, that she'd declined the offer because she READ the weekly sermons.  "Your mother can still read?" was the disbelieving response.    

 

 This would be Mom today!

John's mother was much the same - she kept her days filled with keeping her Philadelphia home neat as a pin, enjoyed time playing cards with her gal pals, tended her beautiful roses & African violets.

This is terra incognita for the two of us  - John & I never had to strike out into such new territory with any of our parents.  We are feeling our way along.  But we agree that serious attention needs to be paid to this problem.  

 

Seems that our disadvantage is actually a great strength.  We KNOW from multiple personal experiences that older people don't naturally want to sit around & twiddle their thumbs, don't seek to disengage from society around them.  And we haven't a doubt that the boob tube is NOT meant to be their primary companions.  

So, off we go, exploring new terrains, to find what can fill the vast spaces between the outposts of breakfast, lunch & dinner! 

STEPHANIE DOWRICK - my N.Z. muse

first posted on DreamReweaver...

 

If only I could clone myself to be at both the 6th International Conference on Aging & Spirituality ~AND~ at Stephanie Dowrick's Spring Retreat, both over the first week in October!  

Will soul-surf from gritty L.A. to the gathering in New Zealand.  

 

Oh, the heart yearns!

This year’s Spring Retreat runs from 1-4 OCTOBER, 2015, with an optional extension from 4-7 OCTOBER. Our theme is the peace we need and how to sustain it not only for the benefit of others and for our world, but for our own whole-self wellbeing. 

Peace is the quality from which all other spiritual powers flow. Peace brings choice, freedom of thinking, physical readiness to engage with life and to live energetically and creatively. We will not only think about peace; we will also live it.       

 

During the final three days we will deepen our times of silence, with extra time also for meditation, personal and shared reflections, walking, journaling and resting. During the earlier 3-days, Stephanie Dowrick will teach each day. 

There will be time throughout for questions and carefully guided discussions, in addition to meditation and personal reflection. Body treatments are available as an optional extra throughout (other than at teaching or meditation times). 


Nourishing vegetarian food, and unfailing kindness in every aspect of retreat life, are hallmarks of the Mana experience. 

Stephanie teaches from a deeply knowledgeable, inclusive spiritual perspective, always allowing each person to find his or her way to bring the teachings to life through everyday living.

 
Oh, how I look forward to writing the blog posting,   

From Temanos to Mana.   

2016?

That Your Days May Be Long - nurturing a 5th commandment mindset

A few months ago, I shared with the great Kim Vargas how fabulous energies were pinging off each other in my head.  As creative & exhilarating as they felt, I needed to winnow them down, to figure out which grabbed my interests (basically all of them), which grabbed my attention (a small smattering), and which grabbed my heart (the precious few).  

 

Gee, consciously give your mind a task & unimaginably awesome things can result!  Sure did for me.

Hands down, the strongest, loudest PINGING energy is around writing a book.  That Your Days May Be Long - our sacred call to nurture a 5th commandment mindset.   A book bridging all ages, from cradle to our last moment.  

And one inspired by a down-in-the-dumps grannie client!

This was about four years ago.  Anne was feeling low.  She kept bemoaning being a drain on her children, that she didn't have a car, had to depend on others & it was so unfair to them.  "I am a thorn in their sides, a drag on their lives."

After taking numerous approaches to bucking her up - all of which failed - it hit me.  She kept saying that while she needed her children, her children no longer needed her.  

That idea kept rumbling around my mind - was it true that they no longer needed her?  In what context could I argue that they did need her, that she could be of use to them in a way that literally no one else could.  In my heart, I knew there was an unarguable argument to be made, but it eluded me.  Because it was so obvious.

As our parents grow older, needing more help, more active support, they give us the opportunity to step up & be there for them.  They open ways we can discover how to care about & be helpful without harming ourselves & others.  We have countless situations primed for personal growth & learning detachment from things we hold so incredibly dear.  

In short, they give us their great final gift - the opportunity to honor & respect them, as we are commanded by the Divine to do!  Only our parents can open the way to fulfilling the 5th commandment - Honor your father & your mother, that your days may be long (prosperous) upon the land with the Lord your God gives you.  

The next time Anne slipped into a trough of sadness & despair over having NOTHING she could do for her children, I got her full attention telling her that God had different plans, that she could make a difference every day for all her days by doing the very thing she thought was so horrendous - giving her children the opportunity to honor their mother.  She doesn't harp so much on being a bother to her children - she knows that I'll just bring up God & she finds it impossible to argue effectively against Divinely given plans!

The book will be my take, from a lifetime of experience & observation, on seeing the funky fabulous call of closing years & the remarkable promise of prosperity to those who help make it so. 

We need - all of us, children & parents - to develop a better 5th commandment mindset.  It's not easy.  Can guarantee you right now that it won't include any how-to tips or outlines for the best way to respond to our parents when they need us most.  But I can help get people awake aware & ready to be active.  It's one of the things I'm best at, when people let me.  Because they often don't.  

A lot of people want easy answers, cut & dry check lists, simple to implement processes.  And that's not what wins the blessing of prosperity.  It takes developing qualities rather than accumulating knowledge, learning processes rather than protocols & procedures.  It means letting go of previous concepts & assumptions, of old hurts & often bitter assumptions.  It means figuring out just what IS meant by honoring & is it possible with a parent who might have abused you in the worst ways imaginable.  It means realizing that sometimes honoring requires setting & respecting healthy boundaries.  

This is the book I've trained all my life to write.  It's not something I want to do - it's something I'm being flat-out called to write.  To look at the fact that parents have a deep, divinely-implanted love of their children, from new born to middle aged & beyond.  Children don't have a similar strong drive to protect their parents.  What God instilled in parents was handed down to children as a COMMANDMENT.  What do theologians & others think about the difference from a natural drive to a supernatural edict from on High?  

 

Instead of pinging energies darting all around my brain, one great longing fills my heart - write what I've learned over the past 63 years that harks back to nurturing a 5th commandment mindset.  Because it's pretty clear that's just where I've been heading all along.  

Time to get writing from the heart, to start writing down the bones.  Time for discipline, learning new skills, brushing up old ones, getting it done.  

Denny Hagel makes sense

Denny Hagel is a child advocate & parenting coach - a flipped version of an oldster advocate & eldering coach.  The three basic steps Denny outlines for helping avoid the pitfalls of a parent-child disconnect can tag up (with one or two tweaks) to our relationships with parents & older loved ones.

1. What we model to our children is what they will do. 
2. Communicate  communicate  communicate!
3. Honor and value your children as unique individuals placed in our care to guide

How does each apply to developing & nurturing our relationship with parents & other older loved ones?  Read on... 


#1 - What we model to the older people in our lives is what they will  believe.   
Okay, Denny said, "...is what they will do" - forgive the tweak to make it apply to oldsters.  Because it doesn't matter what we say to them, but what we DO.  It's easy & feels personally reassuring to tell parents & other older loved ones how much they mean to us, how their happiness looms large in our life.  But if we consistently don't follow through with action, then what we say is meaningless.  And showing up with eyes & body language that yell, "How long does this have to be?" or frequently checking the clock on the wall can be even worse than not being there in the first place.  Parents & other older loved ones want to hear how much we care for them, but they want to see it, feel it even more.  What we say might sound reassuring to our own ears, but the elderly tend to spot insincerity & empty appeasement much better than we like to think.

#2 - Communicate!  Communicate!  Communicate!
Denny says it all  - "I know you hear this all the time from every parenting expert out there but the truth is most parents don’t understand healthy communication."  As a result, most adult children are clueless about effectively communicating with their parents & other older loved ones.

Talking is not the same thing as communicating.  My mother prized communication, had quotes about it posted around our home, but she was woefully lacking in actual communication skills.  It took a sister-in-law confronteding her - "Mama, for someone who praises communication, you do darn little of it!"  for me to realize, in my own late teens, that talking can be used to avoid communicating.  In our family, what passed for open communication was anything but.

To this day, nothing has wowed me more than Mom realizing - in her late 80s - that she had seriously messed up communication skills, then consciously set out to at least improve them in what time she had left.  

Adult children need to step away from holding onto how parents or other older loved ones did or didn't - in our experience - communicate effectively.  We need to plant ourselves in the here & now.  If we feel they messed up, we can set out to help set right what we feel they mangled.  That takes a lot of work on a shocking number of levels, but it is WORTH the effort & energies.  
Denny says that if we're not taught communication skills as a child, we are not able to pass them onto our own children.  Personal experience has shown me that we CAN learn them as adults & not only pass them down to our children, but also up to our parents!  I learned baseline communication skills through & because of John.  Mom saw us interacting in forthright yet healthy ways & thought, "Hmmmm..."   

Mom - raised in an era that gave no thought let alone value to women having dreams, let alone thoughts, of their own - set out to mimic what she was us doing.  She got counseling, did a lot of reading & listening to audio tapes.  Most of all, she accepted that better was possible.  All of this started when she was 87. 

#3 - Value your parents as unique individuals you are called to honor.
In addition to experiencing Mom as a parent, I always was aware of her as a human being.  It's strange to me, but a lot of people are never able to see their parents in any context other than Mom & Dad, with all the blessings & baggage that brings.


If it's hard to honor & value children as unique individuals, it's waaaay harder to do the same for our parents.  Yet, that is what we are called to do.  Before we can honor our mother & our father, we need to see them as individuals with their own parents, their own blessings & baggage, as having their own stories that reach back into their own childhoods.  

Not everyone has the advantage of a mother who was unusually open about sharing some of her most jaw-dropping life stories - although Mom's were usually wrapped in the guise of an interesting family tale, what she & we referred to her as her "war stories."  War stories, indeed.  Without being apparently so, many were remarkably self revealing.  But always told through a gauzy, diffusing lens.  Heartbreak was tempered with humor, but it was on display if you cared to see.   

Not everyone has the advantage of a mother like mine, who raised us on such stories.  But everyone's parents & older loved ones have such stories.  Everyone of them.

As we grow older. we should be better able to see our parents as unique individuals, not just Mom & Dad, in the same way we hope our own children, nieces & nephews, see us as more than just a family label. Everyone is well served when we can step past seeing them as we remember experiencing them & start looking at them in a fresh, non-judging way.  Not easy, but important.

Denny writes about children, "Our job is not to ... mold them into what we want them to be."   There are people - a lot of them - who point to Mom & Dad as molding their messed up qualities, who see their deficiencies as extensions of their parents'.  It's so easy to impose parental flaws over our own - "How can we help doing this - it's how I was raised."  A flawed parent can be such a handy scapegoat.

We cannot value & honor parents we don't first see as individuals.  And it is possible to value & honor people who were simply ghastly parents.  We don't need to love them.  Some parents do things that stomp out the possibility of loving them & being safe.  Valuing & honoring them doesn't meant that they have to be present in our lives when having them there puts our self or others we love in harm's way.  

To me, honoring & valuing our parents can be as basic as not laying our adult faults & flaws at their door.  It means not speaking ill of them in front of others, especially their grandchildren.  It means wishing them well, no matter how badly they treated us.  It means doing what we can to help meet their needs, to the best that we are able.  It means realizing that they have their own stories, their own parents, their own disappointments disruptions upheavals.  It means seeing them as clearly as we can, flaws & all, then experiencing even the worst of them with a compassionate heart.


A call to action
Denny Hagel issues a call to action, a shout-out to parents to raise "well rounded, emotionally healthy children..."  My own call to action is to youngers to take a similar approach with their parents & other older loved ones, beginning with the three steps, to develop & nurture as well-rounded, emotionally healthy relationship with the oldsters in their life.  It means setting aside the hurts & harms experienced over the years to grow something new, something more... adult. 

My thanks to Denny for her three basic steps for examining the unacknowledged thoughts, the messed up ideas & flawed beliefs about our parents that can clutter our subconscious mind.  By facing them, we can stop them from seeping out, from limiting our own lives.  

It's not easy, not even for the few blessed with awesome parents who had their own heads on straight & only helped, never harmed, their children find their own path forward.  But it is essential.  The one best served by following the steps is the one taking them.