twists and turns

Today is Take Back Your Time Day and time has been on my mind a lot lately...in various ways and forms, then Fate stepped in last week.

Tuesday --
Gay Hayden and colleague Noreen Dionne from The HOPE Place (Scituate, MA) came to an organizational meeting that I was attending and, as part of "Finding Your Spirit During the Holidays", they distributed sheets of paper with labyrinths on them. The individual path was simple but looking at the whole, you saw an intricately beautiful pattern. The beginning and ending -- entrance and exit -- were at the same point on the perimeter, and the path itself was both the way in and the way out.

So I began navigating my way through the elaborately simple twists and turns to the background strains of soft music and when I'd finished something struck me. Not unlike life it had seemed to take a long, unhurried time to reach the center of the pattern and surprisingly less time to make my way back out. I thought of my own journey to midlife which had seemed leisurely enough (if not uncomplicated), but what is now undoubtedly the second half of my life appears to be racing along at lightning speed. I expect that I'm more aware of this passage because of my mother's death this summer: she was always the older one and now I find myself in that position.

Wednesday --
As part of working my way through this time of change, I've been participating in a bereavement support group. I recently read David Dodson Gray's "I Want to Remember" (Roundtable Press), a touching memoir about his mother and her "alzheimer journey." His circumstances were different, but David wrote about "a soft sorrow that recedes when I am caught up in other activities or relationships but which is always there, not going away." A soft sorrow -- it is just that that I've taken with me to the group for the past few weeks.

Last time they gave us simple lined journals. Coincidently I'd been planning to dedicate a new journal to exploring this time without my mother and perhaps my grief process, but hadn't purchased one yet. Done. The following day marked her birthday and my first journal entry.

Thursday --
Last Thursday was my mom's -- Dot's -- birthday as well as the day I finally opened a book that I'd borrowed over a year ago from a friend. I intended to at least guiltily flip through it before returning it to her, not a little embarrassed at having kept it so long let alone never having read it. Oddly enough maybe I am only ready for it now. It's Mira Kirshenbaum's "The Gift of a Year" (Dutton).

Kirshenbaum encourages women to give themselves a year to use as they see fit, and she offers ten evocative questions to help readers mine their lives, discovering what they would like to devote that year to, even if only an hour a day. I think I'd originally borrowed the book thinking that it might inform my own work and serve as a resource, but with no other intention. Now, however, it speaks to me directly.

I've been privately thinking of this period -- this new chapter since my mom's death -- as life "after Dot" and somehow that seems to be evolving into another experiment in living. No idea how it will manifest, but the impulse is there. To start, I've begun exploring and answering Kirshenbaum's questions and have decided to designate this next year as my own. The notion of bracketing the time with celebrations of birth appeals to me as well.

Today --
I hadn't expected to be here, and if I showed up I was going to write about "Take Back Your Time" Day. Instead it turned out that I took today for myself and indulged in the guilty pleasures of reading and writing with no particular objective. And now I'm done.



Note: E-mail Gay Hayden at thehopeplace@comcast.net to learn more about bereavement and caregiver support groups. Other programs, services and counseling are available as well.

poetry to my ears

Today was to be devoted to personal pursuits and so far my day's gone the way of the not-so-personal, but spent in lengthy pursuit.

Earlier I caught the last few minutes of Morning Edition on NPR (National Public Radio), just in time for a brief segment by Garrison Keillor. I'd stumbled upon it about a month ago and loved being treated to a poem that I'd never come across otherwise. Poetry has never come easily to me, but I've been scribbling titles and text whenever something strikes my fancy, and he has found some winners. Today I couldn't make out the author's name but was compelled by her words so came to the internet. At least forty-five minutes later I'd finally discovered the home page for what turns out to be "The Writer's Almanac" featuring Keillor.

The page held everything I'd been hastily transcribing all this time! Today's featured notable birthdays and truly notable quotes from each person. For instance, Diane Ackerman who said, ' "I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well." ' (I just changed what I found on-site: "wits" instead of "width" which I cannot imagine she said. Perhaps I'm humorless and unimaginative, a meddling editor or a good proofreader... Aha, found it here.) Anyway, isn't it just wonderful?

But what set me off on my extended search was the following, read by Keillor today, that I want to share with you. Since I don't have permission to reprint it here, I'll just offer the first few lines to entice you to visit "The Writer's Almanac", October 7, 2005, to read it in full.

"Instructions" by Sheri Hostetler, from the anthology A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry

Instructions

Give up the world; give up self; finally, give up God.
Find god in rhododendrons and rocks,
passers-by, your cat.
Pare your beliefs, your absolutes.
Make it simple; make it clean.
No carry-on luggage allowed.
Examine all you have
with a loving and critical eye, then
throw away some more...

+++

It's what I've been hearing in recent conversations, and what has been driving me for the past few months: getting down to what really matters. She says it so eloquently.