There is an ebb and flow to my healing process.  I have been aware of this for some time now, but the acceptance of it is new.  I love the sea.  There is something so reassuring about the rhythm of the tides.  Like the rising and setting of the sun and moon, they are the Earth’s breathing.  Life’s constant breath in our midst.  The breath of our Source itself.

Yet, I didn’t allow Source into the metaphor.  I excluded the Divine by placing a seal of human conditions and judgment around my sea.  Incoming tides were good.  They meant fullness, moving toward joy, coming into wholeness, healing.  Ebb tides were bad.  They meant loss and estrangement, regression and new pain.  They angered me.  They signified a washing away of all that I’d gained, a withdrawal from the flow, the separation of me from my healing process, a loss of what had come in with the tide.

Back and forth, back and forth I’d go, just like the tide coming in and going out, and how frustrating it was not to be able to stop that motion!  At the low tides I’d picture them and see the gleaming sand stretching out for miles to the tiny breakers.  I’d see all that open space as loss because I hadn’t managed to keep the waters high.  I’d punish myself with self-recriminations because I’d abandoned the journey, and in doing so had let all that bountiful water slip away.  Or so I thought.

A spiritual teacher told me to “love everything as it is”.  I didn’t know how to do that.  How do you love the bad things?  The things that irritate you, frustrate you, exhaust you, scare you?  I notice my distillation process is quite organic when it comes to learning what life has to teach me.  I don’t try to force much.  Eventually though, things have a way of filtering into my consciousness if I sit with them long enough and give them space to be there.  Sometime, I don’t know exactly when, I decided to try to do what she said.  I decided to try it with my tides.  I would try to love them just as they were.  I would take my healing process just as it came, and love it as it was.

When I accepted my tides as they were, I realized that I had overlooked a few things.  I had left a few details out of my metaphor.  Ebb tides are one half of a perfect, harmonious cycle.  Ebb and flow cannot exist one without the other.  They are one thing; the ocean’s natural movement.  They each play a vital role in the life of this entire planet.  They are part of a natural balance.

With this realization came an insight that I had moved on from a process of healing into something else.   What were once the ups and downs of the healing journey had simply become the natural ebb and flow of my continuing growth.  There was nothing wrong from this perspective; nothing to feel frustrated or dejected about.  All is well and as it should be at ebb tide.  When the tide goes out, it reveals hidden treasures.  It gives me a chance to walk on ground I can’t usually touch.  It takes away the roar and lets me contemplate seashells in quietness.  It gives me time to build a sand castle.

My ebb tides are not the drained waters of defeat I once believed in.  They are a restful time of curiosity, exploration, and joy.  They are a time of reflection and conscious appreciation.  They are a necessary part of my natural balance, a vital part of my life.  My ebb tides are the counterpart to my flow, one part of the whole me, accepted and loved as they are.

My dentist is still in the neighbourhood where I grew up, so three times a year I make the trek there for my regular check-ups.  On my way to an appointment last week, I was waiting at a traffic light, looking up a hill where one of my mother’s “bridge ladies” lived.  When we moved across Canada to our new home on the West Coast my Mum wasted no time in finding ways to become part of the community.  She joined the Newcomers’ Club pronto and became part of a group of women who were all recent arrivals looking for friendship.  They met every week to play bridge for the next 40+ years.

As I sat looking up that hill, I remembered how, as a young teenager, I used to feel dazzled when I’d look at the mountainside and see the very visible condominium where bridge lady Pam lived.  “Up there” was where the rich people lived, and it seemed to me this was true since she looked so glamorous and elegant whenever I saw her.  Thinking about this as I waited for the light to change, I felt a certain sweetness for myself and how in my naivete I created a fairy tale like filter for this tiny part of my world.  My mind then shifted to the fine bone china teacups my mother brought out every time it was her turn to host.  The red light changed to green and I turned left and headed down to the ocean, leaving the mountains behind me.

While I drove, I thought of how excruciatingly carefully I’d chosen six cups from her collection.  I thought of the gift boxes I’d sourced from somewhere, just the right size because too big or small would not do.  I thought about how I’d wrapped each cup and its saucer in crisp white tissue paper and reverently placed them in their boxes.  I had tasteful labels made and tied equally tasteful ribbon around the sealed boxes.  Somehow I carried out the delivery, making sure not to damage the contents or put a single blemish on the packaging.  It surprised me that I had no memory of dropping off any of them, but I know I did.  After my mother died, one by one I went to their homes and gave a teacup to each of the remaining ladies in her bridge group.

I noticed that feeling of sweetness I’d felt for myself had intensified after recalling these memories.  Now many decades on from my youth and into the second decade since the delivery of the teacups, I could look back at this whole story with compassion for the innocent teenage newcomer who looked up the hill and felt a sense of awe, and for the grieving adult finding ways to temper a seemingly insurmountable loss.  I could see clearly that I had carried out a ritual of farewell to my mother in an attempt to assimilate her absence into my new reality.  At the time it seemed like nothing more than a nice thing to do.

Healing happens over the course of time and continues as long as it needs to, sometimes forever.  With time comes the clarity of seeing the world constantly renewed as the fog of grief dissipates more and more.  That’s how it is that these memories could now make me chuckle as I headed towards my dentist’s office.  The bridge ladies were my mother’s contemporaries and would all have been in their 80’s or somewhere in their 90’s when they received the cups.  Undoubtedly they were touched by the gesture, but there’s a high probability they did not want or need one rogue teacup.  They would have all have died now and who knows where any of those precious tokens ended up.  It doesn’t matter.  What mattered was going through the ritual.  That’s what allowed a little bit of healing to happen.

Lately I’ve been on a mission to clear things out of my living space that I do not use or, for that matter, even look at anymore.  Into that category falls the Rubbermaid bin in my closet where my mother’s teacups and various other artifacts from her life have been stored.  It hasn’t seen the light of day since I put it there.  This made me chuckle even more, in a sweet, compassionate way absent of judgment and full of the peace of wisdom gathered over time.  The gifting of teacups to a group of my mother’s gracious friends seemed terribly important at the time, but the real gift is the healing that came out of it and the understanding from lived experience that it’s the ritual that counts.

I need time.  Time to sit quietly at my kitchen table and eat my food in silence.  I need time, to eat my bowl of soup with a small spoon.  I need the time it takes to put effort into keeping my focus on the moment so I can maintain an awareness of my jaw opening and closing, opening and closing, slowly, methodically.  I do not count.  I don’t want the stress of rigidity.  I need time to notice that my food tastes good.  Not just the first two bites.  Every bite until my bowl is empty.  I need the time it takes to notice that my food has a temperature that feels a certain level of pleasing in my mouth, that I have too much or too little or just enough in my mouth, that it is time to swallow.  When I notice a feeling of gratitude for the nourishment my food is giving my body, I need time to express that, to open my mouth and hear myself say thank you to God.

I am a quadriplegic woman.  I have been “in a chair” for 41 years come this July.  I feel grateful to have been able to live with this disability for so long with relatively few problems.  I feel proud of the effort I’ve made to treat my body well, as imperfect as that has been.  For 40 years and 11 months of that time I have tried my best to keep pace in a world I can’t keep up with.  When I was younger, it was easier.  I had the energy then to deal with the chronic, low grade stress that comes from being chronically behind.  I’m in a chapter farther along in the book now.  This year I’ll be 66.  I can’t do it now, because now it is making me sick.  An upper respiratory infection and the flu back to back kind of sick.  That’s too risky for me.  Besides that, I want to be healthy.  I have a niece who just became a doctor.  Her sister has two small children and a talent for writing.  I want to see what they all do and I’ve got plenty to do myself.  I have an astonishingly strong and forgiving body and now it is asking me to do just one thing; slow down.  And so I am taking the time to learn how to do that, and be in the world at my own pace.

I can remember sitting on the bus, probably coming home from downtown.  The sun was streaming through the window beside me and as I looked out into the bright light I immediately squinted.  A searing pain shot through my eyes and then was gone.  I didn’t pay much attention to this since bodies do offer up various assorted aches, pains and twinges that amount to nothing.  As it turned out, it was not one of those.  It was the first symptom of an illness careening way off track from its normal course.

A sore throat came next and thus a descent into full blown mononucleosis began that would change my life forever.  This is a common enough malady, especially among young adults.  But it very quickly turned itself into something extremely uncommon in my case, and over the course of a few days I gradually became almost completely paralyzed and lost sensation in most of my body.  At one point, when I could still pretend to be better than I actually was, my doctor came to see me on a house call.  I remember looking at her and only being able to see half of her face.  I said nothing.  I knew the situation I was in was not good and I was afraid of making it worse.  Telling her half her face was missing would not sound good.  She would think I had lost my mind.  In my fear I decided to be quiet and avoid making things more complicated.

Despite my plan and most valiant effort to deny that anything was out of the ordinary, the downhill slide continued.  I really was losing my mind, quite literally.  I don’t remember going blind but that happened too.  Gradually I slipped into more and more unconsciousness until I drifted off entirely into the safety of a coma.

That’s the nutshell version of what happened.  The more medical version that was explained to me was that my immune system, for reasons still not understood, could not distinguish the invader virus from the myelin sheath insulating and protecting my nerves.  It launched a colossal attack to eliminate both and I have to say I cannot help but admire the mighty strength of my body’s seek and destroy mechanism.  No wonder I almost never got sick!  It almost succeeded in killing all of me off but not quite.  On the night that the doctors were most doubtful about my survival I stabilized and then much more slowly than I went down, I started to make my way back up again.  The details of what happened are not interesting anymore.  Through many more years of living they have eroded down to irrelevance.

I was almost 25 when Life lobbed this curve ball at me.  Now I’m in my 60’s.  I’ve had decades of learning things that I may never have known, and I’ve gained insights I may never have had without this experience.  One of the most important things my journey has taught me is this:  what happens to us in life is not so important.  What matters more is how we respond to what happens.  That’s a choice every time.  That’s where your power is and that’s exciting!