Connect to the Joy of Advent Peace

EEK… almost forgot to connect about connecting. Happy Holidays! I’m running around like a fool… I had food and money cards from church to get to our local food bank. Do you think my family is expecting gifts? hmmm. I admit it, I’m a failure as a gift giving Grannianni… I find other ways to connect! I need to find more and better…

The holidays, which ever one(s) it is you’re celebrating, are a great opportunity to connect. You know me, I’m a big proponent for celebrating lots of holidays. (There’s no place like your home for my holidays. It’s my new favorite song!) But remember you don’t need to connect with people who don’t make you happy. Lonely is far better than actively unhappy at Christmas. Lonely can be experienced (connected with) and then connections can help smooth a path and perhaps change your holiday experience.

And if you’re alone? Perhaps you need to take this time to connect with yourself. Make your space wonderful. Feed yourself healthy foods. Plan what you want to do next. Take steps toward the best you!

Connecting. It matters and it helps. Peace is all about connecting the dots and connecting the hearts.

Friendship Peace

Two of my Swedish Sisters were here this weekend to help say goodbye to Deb. They’d met her in Sweden, they’d stayed with her when they came to my wedding. They came to honor Deb and they stepped up to prop me up. Oh and they did. We counted blessings and gave thanks. Along the ways we made new memories.

They let me cry. They patted me. They fed me tea and chocolate (Finnish chocolate, tell no one!). We talked about all sorts of things and they came along as witnesses to my life as it is now. (Sadly they didn’t get to see my husband because he was sick the entire time they were here… ) They talked to me when I needed to jabber or when they needed something explained or just had something to say. And they were quiet when I needed quiet. And I could let them be quiet when their brains were exploding from all the English. We were present to one another.

They helped me remember why friends make a difference and reminded me to be grateful for all the astonishing and wonderful friends I have here and all over the world.

We all wondered at the thought that friendships such as ours — now over 44 years deep — can endure without a lot of tending, just because they are. We lived together. They shared their family (and now families) with me. They’ve met my family (now families) and loved them.

And in moments like this, you just push over bed in the morning as one of them comes in to chat and steals some covers and reassures your heart.

So even when the work ahead is hard, your heart is full and fueled for the journey. Peace goes better with friendship. Yes, indeed it does.

Profligate Peace

Oh, I had such an Evans moment yesterday. I’m still not sure that it’s finished. I went (at long last) to replace the glass shade that was broken when I moved into this house. And that, I slowly figured out, was seven years ago. Despite the huge amount of stuff at my place (and really, thanks to my friends, there’s more, but there’s also less!), I am not really a shopper. I acquire, but not because I set out on acquisition trips. And the looking thing of shopping that people do, so not me.

But I had to go to Bloomsburg yesterday and the lamp store was on the way. I’ve been feeling numb recently. Long lists of things to do, no sense that I will ever accomplish what needs to be accomplished by due dates. And I’m churning. Up in the morning, writing, sorting, meeting with those who need me… and the day goes on. It’s been so hectic here as the arrival of the new stuff has been an opportunity to pull everything out, look, sort, wash/clean, put in order, recycle, toss. You’ve seen my posts, you know.

But there I was. I did not buy the most expensive lampshade. Saying no to the upsell, I bought what I came to buy. But then, from across a crowded room. a brilliant flash of turquoise. Turquoise, well you know… turquoise. The exact turquoise, it must be said, that is in the rug that graces my living room floor, carefully agreed upon by my mother and father… the color mavens of 736 East Third.

Color was a thing in our house. So was fabric. So were lines of furniture, dishes, glassware, paintings. My mom was an artist. My dad, a dye chemist for a rug factory. A date who went to a play with my family came away bemused: You were all talking about the set of the sleeves on the heroine’s dress. Well, yes, they were very cunningly wrought. And didn’t every family? Well, it seemed not. Who knew? What DO people talk about?

My brother’s first wife, upon showing me a jar of peach freezer jam and at the same time talking about a “wall” of thin shelves for canned goods, was taken aback when I lifted that jar and said, “oh, my goodness, can you imagine the light in this kitchen filtered through this gorgeous peach jam???” “Your brother said exactly the same thing,” she said. Of course he would.

And Deb and Ann? you knew us by our colors. (Although I never wore the hot pink velor pants — I wore the turquoise polkadotted ones, back in the day. Our houses riot with color. And sure I wear black… but that’s only a foil for all the color.

But color hasn’t been very interesting to me these days. It’s a no-color world after your sister goes away. It will change, I know that. But it’s not going to be a quick transition. And I’m, quite frankly, mopey and overcome by the list, The LIST of things, that Must Be Done. And the shopping has been strictly whatever is needed at the moment. I forget food. I buy the silver polish. There’s TP. There’s paper towels.

Deb redid old oil lamps for us, and I broke my shade. And so it sat. But now she’s gone and I’m getting company and so, I will buy a new one. In memory of who she was. So there I was, a woman, checking things off the list. Do this, do that. sigh.

The store of lampshades is outside of town, along a highway. The owner has all kinds of stuff in that store and you have to weave your way through. She remembered the lamp (oh, a Juno, very nice. Yes four lamps, a red and three green shades, must have done it about 8 years ago. Your sister, was she a tall woman? — why yes, she did, yes, she was.) But one lamp shade a little furniture polish and I was outta there. Until I turned my head.

There it was, a vivid turquoise shade. Extravagantly exquisite. The color of my people. And she had two. Two! for the lamps for which I’ve never found anything but mediocre hats, lamps which came to me from my buddy Rocky (my home — a paean to my beloved dead) and now sit on the table behind his wonderful squishy leather sofa. They could have new hats. My house could be blessed with turquoise light.

Oh, I am in lust. I have no idea whether I’ll succumb… They would be Lampshades of a Lifetime. There would be Peace at home in their gentle glow. Shallow? As my friend from seminary used to say: “Shallow can be nice.” My husband won’t mind my being happy with lampshades, but he won’t understand it. His people came up buying antiques, took pride in not wearing something until it had weathered in the drawer. Pondered long and hard before buying something. Traded in antiques. Useful antiques. I come from a family where my dad would successively put on every new present he’d gotten at Christmas time, and there he’d be a sweater over his robe, a hat, new mitts… in a place with beautiful carpets on the floor and fine lines, color and fabric on the furniture.

Lust for life, a reminder that I am alive and that there will be life after my sister’s death, and because of her profligate extravagance? Mine will be filled with beauty, fine lines, color and fine fabrics. And maybe turquoise lampshades. Maybe. There is Peace in lampshades, you ask. Oh, yes. Beauty is not a sin. Neither is abundance. It’s all about how you hold it and how you share it.

Finding the Peace

— Even in the missteps. At some point you need to let those things go. Ah, but the stories? They remain…

I’m still polishing my way, silver spoon by silver salver to Peace in the china cupboard and in my home. I suppose I could just let all this go, or continue to let the air have its way with the silver. But the beginning to recall stories is the beginning of the healing. Perhaps I’m not yet ready to remember the wonderful trip to Alaska… oh, the pain… I can’t yet unpack the suitcase of Deb’s clothes that I took, but even though six of the original nine of us in this three story family are gone, I can, through the help of these things, begin, at least, to recall the folks on the ground floor…

So there are things and the removing of the tarnish unveils the stories. And I am restored even as the house is. And in the beautifying and putting away, I am calmed and soothed as ragged memories are no longer assaulting me from piles all over the floor, impeding my progress from room to room. I’m not sure if I’m making memories by doing this, or simply making room for memories.

I can’t imagine how thoroughly nettled my grandmother must have been. I wonder, had it been me — playing either roll, Gram or Sam — if I’d have been able to refrain from resilvering. Probably not, because I know, even as a child, when that urn sat in sullen condemnation in our cellar closet, i longed to restore it.

Hey! I’m an extrovert. I LIKE bright shiny things. And stories. I do love the stories. And many’s the day I sat with Grandma Helen, taking things out and putting things back into the china closet, to touch, revere, tell the stories of their family provenance, and then at the end, to set the table with. Even though I never cook, I still love setting a fine table. (maybe I need a great delivery service! oh and a million bucks — after all, the food should fit the plate, no?

But there was Sammy full of bright ideas… that ultimately weren’t. I’ve been there. It’s nice to know I inherited the oopsie gene. And all the hard work in the world doesn’t put the silver back on the urn. Ah well, silver to polish, blessings to count… a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

Softening Peace

We’re getting deeper and deeper into Autumn. Even though the temps are lolling around in September ranges, Mother Earth keeps changing and preparing for winter. The hours of daylight are lessening. Pretty soon, there’s going to be that unnatural jolt into darkness… wow, maybe the government won’t change to standard time if they’re out lolling about.

But change or not, there are still more hours of darkness… and a lot more slow dawn and twilight. And that’s the beauty of Fall.

I know. I’ve been whining a lot because I’m caught in that place in between. Everything requires two or three steps to be done before it. It’s very hard for me. I’m a charge ahead kinda woman and this is a slog through it time… outside and in… and by in let’s include both my heart and my house.

My house will be lovely. It’s unlovely now. My heart will be patched over. It’s still got draining wounds.

But this process of healing is not to be wished away. This is time too. This is what it takes to merge the stuff of generations. This is what it takes for a heart to hold love. That I can’t do what i’ve always done, think the way I’ve always thought, laugh the way I so often do, is what’s true. And in that truth is a wretched beauty.

This is the cost of having a sweet sister. This is the price of having familial history. You pay the price that the silver might shine and the wood might gleam and the glassware sparkle. All that shining, gleaming and sparkling is your past. hmmm… maybe there’s a poem in this, I should stop!

But living here, now, being present, is the only way to get to ‘way over yonder…. whether that’s ‘way, ‘way, ‘way over yonder or simply tomorrow. It’s also the only way of making memories to make our futures sweet. Peace is where we are, or it isn’t anywhere.

More Lion Peace

Writing a blog is such a fascinating process. When you sit down, you believe you know what direction you’re headed. Usually that’s true. Revelations that come are often small and pithy. But once in a while, they’re grand and sweeping.

Yesterday’s post was such a one. I really thought the lion was a curiosity. Something to explore because it had been dear to my dad and yet commemorated a massacre of Swiss guards at the Tuilleries during the French Revolution. If I think about why Dad may have had that, it takes a while. Aunt Jennie, my Gram’s aunt, used to take women on ‘Grand Tours’ around Europe. It must have been she who visited the Lion Monument in Lucerne and brought back this memento. So it’s entirely possible that it wasn’t Daddy who cherished it, or at least cherished it first, but rather Aunt Jenny, who had magical status in her niece’s eyes and then it was bequeathed to Helen. And then Sammy. And now me.

But when I looked up the inscription about loyalty and bravery and began to write about that, it was Deb’s courage and faithfulness that came to mind. She fretted after mom died that I would be ok. Was glad that Steve had come into my life, certainly for my sake, but also for hers. I think she knew she’d die before me, and felt better knowing I’d have love.

And there’s so much Love. I never worry about not being Loved. There is Love, more Love, everywhere you look. But of course when one love disappears, the heart breaks. And while the dead are always with us, where and how are questions that need to be sorted out over time. time when we want everything to happen right now, darnit.

If the Lion has taught his lesson, then what do I do with it? I’m the fourth generation lion holder. Is there another generation who wants it? What home does stuff seek when it has served? Who will have to clean this out when I’m dead? Too much stuff. All of it precious. Go figure. but luckily I’ll wait a while. I have loving to do on my husband! And we all need to be cherishing our partners. I heard from a college buddy, one I’d lived with when I went to seminary, one whose wedding ceremony I’d performed. Her husband died suddenly.

This is what happens in life. Stay present. Listen to the Lions. Make a lot of memories. and Love outrageously. This is all part of the bumpy road to Peace.

The Peace Sabbath of In-Between

In between is where the magic and the mystery happens. I believe that. Things happen on the way to somewhere else. But no one ever tells you how long it takes to get through. If they did, would we believe them? If we believed them, would we go?

I’m a woman of chaos. Lots boiling around in my brain. Lots of people and events and stuff boiling around in my life. Because of that, I keep things pared down. I can eat the same foods. Sit in the same chair. I can even read the same book, over and over and over again. Small delightful snippets to remind me. Small delightful snippets to distract me. Very little noise it distracts me. (She married a drummer????????? ah, right they live separately.)

But closing down Deb’s house, deciding what will be kept and what will go away. Making space at my house. Deciding what will be kept and what will go away. Bringing what will be kept to my place. Trying to clean it up, figure it out, fit it all in. Trying to make life simple.

Trying to do this with half a brain… people with broken hearts don’t have lots of consistent brain power to rely on. (although, rejoice, i read part of a real book! a NEW book, no small delightful snippet. something I had to chew on.)

So, even though Sundays are work days for me, my work is the work of presence. and that’s the work of the sabbath… That’s why i stayed up last night moving things about so that I could spend time today just being present to poetry, to song, to community, to people’s adventures, to friends and family, to the empty spaces. Sabbath. even in the wilderness. Hoping that the wandering helps me find my way home to Peace and a peace-filled, memory-rich home. Other people wait for me to make my way back home, but memories are what I have of my sister… so I must celebrate them.

Trying to Remember Peace

Spare me the platitudes. I know, I believe, I trust that she is with her family. Don’t tell me that God took her home, because then you would want me to believe that a loving God/Goddess killed her children and her husband one by blessed one and that is not a God I will ever worship.

Today I struggle to be glad that she died peacefully in my arms, and so quickly, before that god-awful disease ravaged her and I was able to practice what I believe — that Love is present to each gasp and welcomes your heartbeat back into the mighty and resounding pulse of life. I was able to be the hands of the Goddess who comforts me and comforted her, administering the drugs that eased her labor, being the loving face that smiled at the moment of her death, rejoicing that she is with Wayne and Jan and Chad, and stilling the voice that wanted to scream and scream and scream “do not leave me.” I could find moments of peace in her (Deb’s) and Her (The Lady’s) Love

Today, when I cannot remember that life will ever be normal again, still as I sit here in her house I remember that she was loving and extraordinary and my sister. We bickered and fenced as sisters do and we loved one another. She protected me to the very end making sure that there were caretakers to do what was too hard or beyond me and still letting our intimacy make space for the physical demands of dying.

There has been so much loss. I said to my shrink on the morning Jan’s death, the older of Deb’s children and the second to die, what makes this so painful is that I know I will laugh again, I will recover, because we recovered from Chad’s loss. Losing your sister doesn’t end your world. It merely feels that way. What I fear is that I will feel this way for a very long time.

And yet I know, you love me and so does the Lady. I know she will call me to be her hands and heart and voice again and give little heed to my whimpering because people will need shoring up. And so today, I cry and remember Deb in her living and her dying and try and remember that Peace is there, even when I cannot find it, and trust that it will invade my heart again. Oh, Deb. my heart is broken. This may be the hardest blow I have ever sustained. So I’ll try to keep being present to the pain and the beauty, try hard not to break under the weight of knowing that we will be making no new memories and I’ll go about the doing of those things that are needed at the end of a life. write the obituary, pick a date for the funeral and discover in which closet Deb hid the box that holds the ashes of our parents and her husband and will hold her in death as well. Now there’s an agenda.

cook with rosemary, don’t hug me too hard or cling, I’m fragile.

Green Apple Peace

You know you’re a certain age, when you can’t say green apples without hearing: “God didn’t make little green apples…”

So when i started this particular musing, it was the first thing that came to mind. I realized that it was perhaps one of the silliest starts to a song I’d come across. Wonderful food is certainly the purview of the Divine… however you define that…

And green applesauce! that tart and wonderful taste of summer. I think of it making its winter appearances alongside supper… the sweetest pleasure was when it turned up along pancakes and sausage for an occasional dinner. Who knew that what Mom was thinking about as a dollar stretcher… Because for us it was sheer indulgence. Especially when she cracked open the green applesauce.

All these sweet memories arise as we begin to say goodbye to my sister. It’s so odd, so many of my family memories are held in our collective memory… and she cooks, well, cooked. Tom, my brother, does as well, but he lives a bit farther away. So, I’m trying to cement things in my heart and mind so that I will be able to tell the stories without her…

ah, life is odd and poignant, isn’t it? but there we are, this is what we have. and it’s beautiful however sad… and it’s green applesauce… and the occasional pie. and there’s a certain wonderful kind of Peace in that, isn’t there? To everything, there is a season… both in life and in green apples… and for those times when it’s too hard… green applesauce is likely to save the day, at least for me. and that’s how we keep making memories. Peace be with all of us.

Departing in Peace

As we ended the cruising portion of the Alaska trip, I was a bit startled by the affection I felt for some of the people there. There was no sense that I might see them again, although some I’d be delighted to. There was simply a sense of having shared something spectacular. Something momentous. And everyone was aware, both of the beauty and of the privilege. And of the Peace. There’s something very calming and as I’ve said, elemental about steaming through that landscape. It’s not often that you get to be in Nature so vast that it overpowers the presence of cruise ships. Earth, Air, Water, in that place seemed empty of its inhabitants and its few observers.

The cruise ship had been large enough that you never had to interact with people, unless you chose to. You were not likely to meet folks again, unless you worked at it. But everyone gasped in wonder at Nature’s Beauty and shared that with whoever was standing by, whether you spoke their language or not.

The UUs sing: Go now in Peace, Go now in Peace, May the Spirit of Love surround you, everywhere, everywhere, you may go…That Peace, that Beauty and that Spirit of Love was something we had beheld together. What a marvelous experience. And for me, it was sweeter because I was with my sisty, Deb. Life really IS this wonderful. I give thanks for all I have seen and done.

Sacred Village

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