I am on virtual retreat this week, and what a week it has been! Only Day Four and a lifetime has been lived, inside and out: from rainstorm to windstorm to snowstorm (and up to 11 C by Saturday again), and inside, a tempest of energy surges, resistance, and sheer exhaustion. But I have never felt more alive, more real.  Here’s a glimpse of my day today:

It started with homework: sit with the phrase ‘consciousness choosing’ and write about what comes up. Last night after our conversation ended for the day, I didn’t have the strength to pick up a pen. So I slept on it and awoke this morning with it atop my mental agenda. I turned on the fireplace in my bedroom, snuggled under the covers with my journal … and nothing happened. No words. None.

I skipped to ‘choice rewiring’ that I had scrawled on another page. Words started to come:

We are born with clarity of knowledge, existence,  limitless energy to attract, love, create and the wisdom to know when to have, when to do, when to be. Then we are extruded through a fleshy constricted canal into a harsh world that is cold, glaring, demanding: Cry, Nurse, Open your eyes, Close your eyes, Poop, Pee, Eat, Sleep … We are expected to do all of these things on time and on schedule, delivering for others the ideal infant experience with little thought to whether we are actually hungry, lonely or simply curious when we wail and lie wide awake at 3 am, our tiny nervous systems bursting with capacity our caregivers have long forgotten. But we are born with compassion for them and a passion for ourselves to reclaim, choose and rewire our shorted-out nervous systems, to tap our capacity, live in the brilliance and warmth of a thousand suns rather than the single bulb of tradition. Rewired for choice, our light is limitless. 

The homework was done, but I was miserable. My head was heavy, my body cold. I read what I wrote and felt queasy. It didn’t land, it wasn’t right, I didn’t feel it. I didn’t even use first person, hid behind the royal We.  What crap.

I glance back at ‘consciousness choosing. ‘  Suddenly, there were words.

Consciousness choosing … is too great, too vast, too much, to amorphous, a cliche. Yet I want it, I have it. I need to allow it. No, I WANT to allow it. Wait, I CHOOSE to allow it. Dammit, sneaking up on the word choice as if it is a wild animal needing to be caught, when it is just standing there, waiting for me to invite it in. 

What a mess. I am tempted to rip out the pages and shred them in the compost, but I am too tired. Tired of being cold and heavy and dizzy. Tired of trying to write what I can’t seem to touch. Tired of longing to love … someone, something, but unable to touch the passion, to feel anything but the grey pall of indifference, turn the longing into life. A wave of tears. Now cold, heavy, dizzy, weepy and snotty. Two more symptoms and I can have the seven dwarfs of misery. But no more time. The day’s virtual call is about to begin. I pull up to my desk, wrap in blankets, and pull a card from my Mana deck.

And burst into tears again. The card is Lei, Cherish, an image of an adult and child in a loving embrace. The card appears when it is time to cherish with affection, to trust and unload cares, to give and receive. I stare at the card and think: have I given the love and passion I seek? Have I cherished? Will I choose to cherish?

My abdomen cramps and my uterus begins to shed. Safety, stories within it, celebrate the cherished and discard the rest.

The card told of a Native American tradition of ‘take the shawl.’ The shawl symbolizes coming home and being wrapped in a loving embrace. I become aware that under all of my layers of clothing and blankets, my back is cold. There is nothing but the chair to keep it warm. So I rearrange my largest blanket to go behind me and wrap over my back and shoulders. Like a shawl.

I created this blanket, an afghan, actually, that I knit for my father. After he died, my mother offered it back to me. it is the warmest blanket I own, wrapped around me now because I created it all – the yarn on the needles forming each stitch and connecting to the next, the relationships that inspired me to make it and that returned it to me to keep me warm like a shawl embracing one coming home when my father moved on to where there is no cold, and all is held in eternal embrace.  Choice has me here, cold, bleeding and carsick, inviting the rewiring of my nervous system from scarcity to abundance, blame to choice,  ‘we’ to ‘I’ and I alone. Choice has me wrapped in blankets and surrounded by women with whom to celebrate, to cherish and to discard. I am choice rewiring and in this moment, I am feeling it all.

Mahalo, my fellow travellers.

 

Lessons from a Mother’s Day in Isolation

The calendar says Mother’s Day. This year for me, it’s Apple Pie day.

I’ve always known what apple pie was. It’s only recently that I’ve allowed that I didn’t know it as well as I could. The wonderful motherly women in my life all baked. My grandmothers. My aunts. My mother.  Home baked goods were as common as beans on Saturday night, and through most of my child, just as unappreciated. Twinkies, Oreos, McCain frozen cakes, those for dessert lit up my world. Homemade cookies and apple pie? Boring.

Four decades and three children later, I stand in my kitchen with a notebook, tatters of wear and splatters of sauce creasing its sturdy crimson cover. Inside, pages full of my grandmother’s tidy penmanship, recipes for doughnuts and meat loaf and zucchini pickles consigned to paper at the urging of my mother. My grandmother cooked like she crocheted and lived for most of her life: never looking at a pattern, just knowing what to do.

Sweet smell of survival

At an age when girls were worried about their hair and what to wear on their dates, my grandmother became a breadwinner for her family. By the time she would have graduated high school she was married with an infant son and twins on the way. She cooked on a wood stove without digital readouts and convection settings. There was no microwave, food processor or yeast in neat little envelopes, no sliced bread at the corner store for those days when you were sick or tired or forgot that the last slice went into the morning lunchbox. Cooking was not a hobby or a pastime; it was literal survival. But she made it taste like a joy.

As my grandmother’s life turned grey and cool my mother set up in her kitchen with bowls, spoons, pen and paper, watching and asking and helping my grandmother set down a roadmap for the rest of us.

Ingredients and measurements, techniques and cooking time could all be captured and recorded. The joy, well, that could only be shared in two ways: our memories, and our daily lives.

Heart and Core

As a child, all I saw and felt was her joy. When I fell at the playground, she dried my tears and joined in my chorus of ‘Bad Swing’ until I smiled. She would read to me for hours and answer any of my hundred daily questions with clarity and honesty. She made me feel that time with me was the most important thing in the world, as she did with my mother, and I in turn learned from them that there was nothing more important than family. The joy found in millions of daily chores and unsung tasks … that lesson would take longer.

Four decades and three children later, in fact, when my children asked for fresh apple pie. My mother always made the pies, for every Christmas and Easter and visits in between. But this year as we isolated from Covid-19, there was no spring break visit, no Easter dinner with my mother at the table, no Grandma’s apple pie. So I stood, crimson notebook in hand. I remember a picture of my baby brother, barely walking, clad in Tshirt, diaper and a giant grin, his chubby legs swallowed by my father’s workboots in which he eventually clumped around the entire house. I had to fill shoes that felt would swallow me whole.  

But maybe, just maybe, I could fill a pie crust.

Finding the Map

I flipped through the notebook, drinking in memories of cookies baking, my grandmother’s kitchen with its oil stove and neat little pantry and stalks of summer savory hung overhead to dry. I search crimson cover to cover but there is no recipe for apple pie. I call my mother. She chuckles. “I don’t have a recipe,” she admits. “I just bake them.” Pen and paper gave way to Facetime, as we walked each other through the process. How many apples? How high to pile them? How much sugar? How hot an oven? So many questions, and in the end, a partial map. She could lead me so far. I had to figure out the rest. Like good cooking. Like motherhood.

Grains of Truth

Success is in honouring the little things, the sprinkle of cornmeal on the bottom crust to absorb the moisture, the extra dash of nutmeg, the minutes added to the baking time because my oven is cooler than hers. Learn by doing, and sometimes, it will be messy, confusing, not what was hoped for. The joy is in the work, the satisfaction of turning a bag of apples and a few scoops of flour into a one-of-a-kind creation that can be shared and add something warm and comforting to the world. A mother’s hope for the meal she cooks, for the children she raises.

I baked a pie. It was good. It was appreciated. Thank God. Peeling six cups of apples is a hell of a lot of work. Making pastry that doesn’t stick or crack or fall apart is my penance on Earth. But the shortcuts would leave out too much of a journey I want to enjoy, minute by minute, task by task.

I thank my mother and the mothers that came before us for the recipes, the memories, their lives that led to mine. Most of all, I thank them for the ability to discover the joy for myself and make it my own. That is something I can feed my own children, long after the pie is gone.

It has been a tough winter, and one of transition. Where have I been for most of it? At the grocery store to feed my rapidly-changing family of teens, or at funerals to bid farewell to yet another beautiful soul called from our world to ‘home.’ Both sides, living and death with me firmly in the middle. No wonder I have the flu.

In the past week, two ladies have passed which have for me left a gaping ache  in my life. I didn’t know them well, but in their presence, I felt they knew me, or at least wanted to. Beautiful, both of them, in every sense of the word. I met them in church, Bernice quiet and calm at her husband’s side, Muriel enthusiastic and active in any church event going. Vibrant in their own ways, always welcoming, always authentic, always time to ask about the children or my writing or how things were going. These were the qualities I admired: trust in faith, strength in self, optimism, generosity, smarts with just the right touch of sass. Watching them in action, thinking of their life experiences, I felt childlike in comparison. What have I done, what have I witnessed, compared to the challenges and bravery in which they lived and evolved? In their presence, though, I felt we could chat about anything and everything, solving the deep mysteries of life then sharing a few laughs over the antics of raising children or the insanity of politics. There was nothing about age, about circumstance, about education or experience. We were all simply women, united in faith, conviction and the greatness God made us to be.

Now, in their absence, I feel again like the woeful child. Who can step in to roles so dynamic as theirs, fill a space as brilliantly as their essence?

I know the answer, and I don’t like it.

Growing up, I was always the youngest – in my class, among my friends, with my cousins – and that became a great place to hide. We are taught to look out for the younger ones, expect less, help them more. As an adult, I still tended to have older friends and hang in circles, like church, where at age 50 I am still usually the youngest in the room.  My hiding place is shrinking, however.  I am transitioning from respecting my elders to being an elder and with every soul called home, I am inched a bit closer to the tipping point.

Despite what my kids say, I’m not old enough to step up and step in. I can’t lead like the elders I know and respect. I don’t have the experiences, the knowledge, the stories. I can’t speak of wars and jalopies and milk in bottles and lunch in tin pails. My historical reach consists of Pierre Trudeau and bell bottom Levis and telephones you had to dial. How do I inspire a generation with that?

Time marches on and I will be marched with it. I can ignore it, allow the child in me to defy reality and slowly fade away as a flame strangled for air. Or, I can honour the memory of those who inspire me – and they will continue to as long as I remember them – and step forward into the transition. Trust, welcome, gratitude, joy, confidence … those are the words that come to mind when I think of these great ladies and these are things that I can be, if I allow it. They will help if I ask. That’s just who they are.

Allow the ache left by their passing, allow the scenery to adjust, allow for new to grow. Getting older, but maybe never completely growing up.