Committing Peace

I’m a woman full of dreams and plans. I’ve gotten better as I’ve aged in bringing plans to fruition. But I realize, that whatever my plans, there is a thread to my life. When I plan with that thread, when I at least recognize it, my plans flow along a lot more fluidly. One of my friends would tell you my calling is to be with those who are dying. It’s true, I’ve walked with people up to death and celebrated their lives afterwards.

But I think the crux of my gift is to be present. That’s what I’m good at. And it’s sort of hard, because I’m also a doer… So those two things struggle in me for supremacy. Both have their value. But for a high energy person, I’m good at being present. And I really work well when I’m present for a specific project and then to leave when I’m no longer needed. Sometimes I feel as if I’m a gadfly because other folk have the gift of constancy, instead of my short intense forays into presence.

My friend Jean has the gift of hospitality. Through her great food, she nourishes not only individual souls but also the sense of community. Many of us have been made welcome at her table. Some people build houses. Others build organizations. Some just keep things humming along.

If we do those things at which we are best with open hearts and minds set on Peace… the world begins to change. And when we do those things we’re passionate about, people want to join us. Life can get deeper. Life can get broader. Life can become simpler and more beautiful and oh, by the way, better. Joyful, even. Peaceful.

So, what is it for you? what do you do best? How do you make Peace. The world needs us desperately. We need to stop the violence. We need to stop the hate. We do. right here. so we can call upon our neighbors and get other people involved. and slowly, slowly, slowly, and then perhaps not so slowly, the world will change.

Back to Work Peace

I think of Fall as the season of thanksgiving. If you follow the Northern European Pagan calendar, Fall started August 1. I have a mixed relationship to that notion. I’m all about giving thanks and deep gratitude any time you want. The sun really does change, and that’s what guides those designation, and yet, and yet, and yet… it’s my favorite time of summer, dog days or no. Swimming pools, skinny dipping under August moons, corn on the cob and tomatoes until you cry for respite. (haven’t reached that point yet. hallelujah!) Easy enough to give thanks, but ask any farmer, these are deep summer activities. They don’t give way until the frost comes. So Fall is sort of a moving target.

But whether we like it or not, we’re back to work. When the Sun isn’t quite as hot as it’s been, when there is some pleasant shade, it’s time they tell us, to get back to work. Even in my grief, when I have long moments when nothing other than staring into space can grab my attention, there’s a place at the back clamoring for attention. I have a service and a sermon I’ve been waiting all summer to write. So what if my brain feels like one of those extra large pocket book that’s filled to the brim with miscellany? I know the stuff is in there. I’ll sort it out.

The world won’t wither for lack of my attention, but it is time. There are many things wrong. There is war. There is bullying. There is pollution and global warming. There are people doing without, whether that’s food, shelter, health care… or even simple kindness.

At the beginning of the year, we started dreaming dreams of peace. We cleared out the undergrowth in our lives, prepared the fields, sowed and tended those dreams. It’s now time to begin to reap the harvest and put it to work. Do you have a project to create? Take the sweet breath of these cool mornings and get to work. Are you simply going to be a kinder person? Get going. Are you picking up trash and enlisting others. bend and stoop. Let’s figure out how many bonus points on Weight Watchers you get for picking up trash…

There’s much to stand in the way of dreaming. I thought I had a pretty solid handle on where I would be building way stations of Peace. But grief is a miasma that clouds our minds. And yet I know I’m dreaming still. The moments of clarity I have can be used for more than washing blankets.

And this is my world. Your world. Our World. We have work to do… We have people to connect with. We have Peace to make. There is no one else. And while we simply gnash our teeth, little pieces of our world die… people, animals, ecosystems, great forests. So, upsadaisy! here we go. Peace, my sisters and brothers. It’s what we’re about.

Labor Peace

I’ve been using labor so differently these last few days. Thinking about the labor that leads to death, which is surely as hard as any labor that leads to birth. I’ve also been thanking my lucky stars that I get one more swim in the town pool before summer’s officially ended in the school calendar. Labor Day has always been one of the saddest days of the year for me when I live on the East Coast simply because the pool closes. I’d been able to forget that while living in Oakland… Outdoor pools are open all year. Put a cap on and swim in the heated pool all year long. but whooo, in 20˚ it’s a long dash from winter clothes in an unheated locker room to a heated pool… and even longer back. but the joy was always there!

But, of course, Labor Day is not about my pool habits and the end of a season. And it’s not about the labor of birth or death, although they are good labor indeed. It’s not about the laborious reclamation of life after loss, although this may be the hardest labor I ever do.

Labor Day is about good work, safe work, good and fair wages that secure a life, adequate leisure time in which to explore that which makes us fully human. Somewhere in the midst of the picnics and the swimming, somewhere even in my grieving I must remember this. And even as part of my grieving. My sister lived as well as she did because Wayne was a member of the teacher’s union. They had a pension. They had health care. Sometimes in this country we act as if those were radical and ridiculous ideas. No, not so much.

So Labor Day, for those who labor and are weary, for those who labor and would eat, for those who labor and would be paid, for those who would Labor. It’s time, it seems for us to get to work for Labor. In my thealogy, the right to good work is a sacred one, and it is not just a cobblestone, but a whole stretch of the road on the path to Peace.

Foggy Sabbath Peace

Mornings have been gentle lately, which is all to the good for me. I’m slower to embrace the day since it brings unwelcome realities. But the intensity of this time has also awakened in me the desire to sit quietly together under the arbor (bees buzzing overhead — the bees, oh, the precious bees), with a glass of cool mint tea, and consider how we might move forward in peace. The pages of the calendar turn, the seasons change, and Sabbath comes around again, with any luck, bringing with it peace and quiet.

So many of us have worked so hard, and now is the time to press the issue, to stand together. The next month and more will find our Jewish friends celebrating many holidays… peace, repentance, a new year, the harvest. The rest of the world would do well to pay attention… With my mind occasionally able to refocus, this is my prayer, that we make Peace, that we, each and every one, become Peacemakers.

But let us be gentle with ourselves today as the morning is gentle with the day. Enjoy September’s Mandala, Peace Arbor, about which Nanso (Nancy Cleaver, the artist) says: “Where are you standing in the arbor of peace? A tiny bird’s flitting view of light, of which it is made, was my inspiration for the squared spiral.”

Peace be with you. Peace be with us all. Peace be with us all because we make it so.

Zinnia Peace

I don’t know that I’ve ever been so glad to see a month come to an end. I’m not a woman who wishes away Time, but it’s mighty damned convenient to have the month my sister died draw to a close only 3 days later. My new friend Katy, who helped me take care of Deb, pointed out that Jan died at the end of a month as well. So, in fact did Chad. Wayne died Memorial Day weekend. Sporting of them to get out before the month ended, eh? allowing us to turn the calendar page. My prayer is that the cool air that comes with the turning of the season salves my soul. Where the hell is Giliad anyway, and how do I get me some of that balm?

I’m longing for a new mandala and the chance to write about something else. I’m sure I’ll write again about this loss… how could I not… but maybe not so much when the pain is so debilitating. I crave the quiet. I drift from room to room here, surrounding by Deb’s stuff, wearing her jewelry, and an occasional bit of clothing, holding her close. I find I anguish about the fact her house isn’t neat. Deb whose house was always so neat… I, who am not neat, spends a lot of time straightening up.

In the language of flowers, a bouquet of mixed zinnias is offered in memory of someone… As I say in the poem, I love having the painting. These zinnias will not die. A bouquet of dead flowers or leaves also represents loss, but their bodies may be dead but their spirits are surely soaring and rejoicing. Wildly colored zinnias are exactly what’s needed…

I just checked. There are seven zinnias in the vase. One for each of the six beloved dead in my family and one, as the UUs would have it, for the here unnamed, but equally beloved departed. May they be at peace.

I have so much to say. So much to tell you about my sister’s very good death and my oh-so-painful losses and my deep joy at being able to be her midwife for leaving. But not now.

We often close church with a Metta meditation… I find I’m unsure of one of the words in the middle but will work with what I have right now: May we be happy. May we be whole. May we be filled with kindness and peace. I’m a long way from any of them at the moment, but soon I’ll try to claw my way back. It’s good to have a goal.

Hoping for champagne and chocolate cake in heaven today… wherever 6 or more are gathered, let there be champagne and chocolate.

The Peace of the Poppy

Blessed Oblivion. Eternal Sleep. One Blessed Oblivion for me, please and one Eternal Sleep for my sister.

Poppies… such a mixed blessing in my mind and heart. My mother’s paintings… My husband’s long-time love affair with their juice long before I met him. Deb’s leaving, forever. Sweet sleep in which my heart and mind begin to heal. Drugs that soothed Deb’s breathing. Deb’s leaving forever.

On Tuesday, when I heard Deb’s stirring and I went to help and she was so deteriorated, I feared it was my fault and I’d given her too much morphine in the night, even though it was the amount I was supposed to give her. It had to be my fault, right? It couldn’t be that she was dying. It never entered my head that she could be dying. She couldn’t be dying. Not dying. Well, sure, this was all about dying, but we’d just been to the pot four short hours before. I killed my sister.

Blessed caretaker Katy with the soothing drug of compassion, surely the morphine of the emotional world, eh, helped Deb, helped me help Deb, helped me. Told me the shocking truth, shocking even to her, she’d seen her only eight hours ago. Empowered me to call hospice. To give Deb the drugs she needed. To set the support system into busy motion. To sit in her bed and hold her in my arms.

Dying is not for sissies, I have to tell you. It is hard labor to be birthed into release. Opiates and anti-anxieties are the spinal block of this labor. You could do it naturally, but it is pretty damned torturous with release but no baby at the end. And no baby to worry that you’re damaging. Give her the damned drugs and help her breathe. Give her the drugs and help me breathe; I can’t breathe; my sister is dying. Let her go, pray her home to her kids, to her husband to her friends to her parents to a new and better place or to eternal sleep it doesn’t matter, please stop the suffering.

Looking into her beautiful eyes in those last moments, here in the room where we had sat, where all her friends had sat and shot the shit with her, looking out over her hospital bed to the view over Bloomsburg, the same view from the back window at the house where I grew up, the sweet release of joyous death, my euphoria that she made it out, she made it out, she made it over, please God/Goddess let there be an over. The poppy juice that eased her pain somehow eased my own.

Until, of course, she was gone. and then there was no easing of the pain. Now time is the poppy juice that will serve to soften the jagged edges of a shattered heart and a transformed life. But not yet, don’t soften yet. And don’t tell me it will ease, of course it will. But you don’t walk on a broken leg. I cannot function just yet with a broken heart. (My friend Peg reminded us of that in her article.) Shattered hearts leak their love and courage just as shattered vessels no longer hold water… and courage and love are required for the living of each day.

But now even sleep is no oblivion for the living, for when I sleep I hear her calling for my help and I wake and she is not there, not there, never there again. And yes, always in my heart, and perhaps even in my presence… but right now she is consumed with the work of learning to be dead and with the joy of being reunited with her beloved family, all dead. all of them. Wiped from the face of the earth in twenty years. Years that took my parents and too many dear friends. Life reshaped in a score of years. Life slowly emptied, even as Love insists on presenting new possibilities. But, still, now, not there.

I didn’t kill my sister. I did all that could be asked and tried to do more. And yet. she is still dead and I am bereft and it’s not poppy juice I want, it’s my damned sister, sitting in her chair, in her red robe, drinking her juice and doing the puzzles. And yet, I could never wish that on her. Oh.

On the upside, today it dawns on me that I’m hungry and I might want some of the funereal fruit for breakfast. There isn’t really a gaping wound in my chest and my cells urge me to life. And it’s my mother’s poppies that comfort me here in the shrine, no longer a home, that is my sister’s.

May we all find Peace. I might not find it today. And that’s just okay, because that’s what is. It is what it is, right, Lenore?

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.

Roots, Peace and a Sabbath

When the mornings start out misty, the root vegetables start coming… This time of year, they’re as tender as the mist, but infinitely more substantial… I’m sitting at my sister’s watching the sun turn the river fog pink and then gold and then ghostly white. Up here, it’s all blue sky.

Church and then brunch and then a nap, a swim and a visit with a bestie. And all along, cherished time with my sister. it doesn’t get sweeter… And now Debbie’s life, which is pretty damned ephemeral, is infinitely sweet for me, if challenging for her, for us all.

It’s the Sabbath… counting blessings, giving thanks for what is. Life in the very slow lane. With Beets. and Peace.

Spinach Dip Peace

Some foods are all about the luxury… and spinach dip is one of those foods. yum.

But spinach is a mighty food warrior. It is so good for us — filled with all sorts of vitamins and minerals. For something that cooks down to nothing you really have to give it its props.

Lots of folks love it raw. I’m one of those people who has a problem with the acid and I hate how my teeth feel when I munch it that way. But top that salad with cooked scallops or a burger with onions? I’m a happy woman.

But simply because spinach dip isn’t the best thing in the world in terms of fat content doesn’t mean it’s not food for the soul. Dips are one of the few foods we eat from a communal pot and there’s something to be said for a conversation shared over a shared food bowl. You’ve already moved toward intimacy… the conversation deepens. You’re being present before you know it. And that’s a good thing.

So eat your dip… and eat your spinach in other ways. As Popeye reminds us: “We’re strong to the finish when we eats our spinach!” (or something like that!) And just imagine, he ate canned spinach… a more ghastly invention I can’t imagine!

Happy Summer!

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