Tending the Fire Within

Planning for a good death

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 13:13:00 +0000

I spent the past several days talking about dying and how to care for our own dead at home. If that sounds gruesome to you, just hang on a minute.

Death's got a bad rap it doesn't deserve. We're all going to die; maybe that's the hard part. But when we give just a little thought and consideration as to how we'll deal with this reality, death can remind us of all the wonderful parts of being alive, connected to people we love, and how to not sweat the small stuff.

I just returned from the National Home Funeral Alliance conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. We had a number of inspiring speakers, and a room full of talented, experienced home funeral educators and guides who are helping to grow the movement of home funerals across the country.

Did you know you can bring your loved one home and have a funeral for them in the comfort and ease of your own home?You can clear a spot and make it beautiful. Your friends and family can come and sing and light candles and bring flowers and eat together and decorate the room. I've been a part of this work for the past several years now and I have seen beautiful, touching, and profound home funerals. The families have felt supported, the community has been enriched. Home funerals may not be for everyone, but helping people understand the option is critical.

Caring for the dead, just like caring for the new mother and the newborn, is community work. When we don't take up that work and we pay someone else to do it, we lose our ties to our community. We don't know how to wash and dress a body. How to dig a hole. How to gather our family and friends around us to help us grieve.

But it wasn't so long ago that we all knew how to do these things. We all used to do it this way before embalming became the norm. Embalming is the primary factor that drives the way funerals are done today. Because here's the fact that so many people don't know: You don't have to embalm dead bodies. Really. There is no state in the country that says you have to, expect in some oddball cases. We don't have to embalm for safety or sanitary reasons.

The idea of a home funeral may seem new and uncomfortable. But as more people understand and experience home funerals, the movement is growing across the country. And well it should. It was only ten or fifteen years ago that people didn't know or understand what hospice care was. Today, every major medical institution has a hospice unit. It makes sense to help people be comfortable while they're dying. Many people chose hospice in their home: where they are most comfortable.

Here is my hope: that in another ten or fifteen years, we'll all know what a home funeral is. That we'll understand our options and be clear that taking our loved one home, or keeping them home if he died there, is something we know we can do.

A good death, one that is properly respected and cared for, can show us a lot about good living. It's time to give death its due.

Four secrets of the good life

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Wed, 09 Oct 2013 13:39:00 +0000

The other day a woman I scarcely know stumbled across my work here at Tending the Fire Within. Next time she saw me, she said, “Did you come up with this stuff yourself? What’s your secret?”

She was asking particularly about the upcoming communication series, “Say what you’ve gotta say: compassionate and effective communication.” I’m running the three-part series October 24, November 7 and 21 at my home and I’m also offering a two-day session November 23 and 24 at the Calliope Center that will delve deep into these practices. I hope you join us; it’s a great bit of work that can help you become a more confident and successful communicator. And then who knows what you can do in your life?

But the question of how I came up with the content for this work is a good one. I’ve been walking around this planet now for 45 years, but what in that time has particularly prepared me to help other people learn anything about how to walk through it a bit more happily?

I’ve written some in the past about the challenges and choices of my youth, particularly this piece about how I overcame my drunkenness and the dark days that accompanied it. And the ways that I learned to live more healthily and happily back 28 years ago still play out today and every day. There is so much more that I’ve learned along the way, but I always feel pretty certain that I wouldn’t have learned much if I haven’t been sober and clean for all this time.

Once I had this spiritual awakening as a young woman, I understood that what I really want in this life is deep, true connection. I’ve spent much of the past three decades committed to that idea and I love the way it shows up in my life. I’m not telling you my life is perfect, but I have created a great life for myself and my kids. I think that I’m contributing good stuff into the world. I can do this because of the boatloads of self-development work over that I’ve done over the years. I’m a graduate of The Hoffman Process and I’m an initiate in the Wheel of Initiation. I have ongoing groups that I work with and have been a part of for years.

The Tending the Fire Within work is an amalgamation of all this work and living and experience and consideration. Facing every day and every situation without altering my perception with drugs or alcohol, and continuing my own practices of well-being has taught me to stay open, stay honest, stay responsible for creating my life, and to stay with the work.

And if there were any “secrets” to living happily, I would say that list of four are right up there at the top. When we understand that we are the ones making our lives, when we commit to fully taking on every bit that we create, when we stay honest with ourselves and others about these things, and when we just keep in the game of paying attention, our lives get better. We can have what we want.

Those are big ideas. Big ideas are great, but they don’t often help people by themselves. What we really need are specific, clear, and effective practices for changing the way we do things. The ways we think. The ways we interact with others. The ways that we choose what comes out of our mouths. What we choose to do with our anger, our penchant for sarcasm, our habit of beating ourselves up when we don’t live up to our expectations, however impossible.

A Tending the Fire Within workshop gives participants specific practices that can change the way they think, the way they behave, and the way they live. These practices aren’t rocket science. But when we apply them to our lives they can rocket us into new and beautiful places. The upcoming communication series is part of that work. We’ll learn how to start being honest and clear, with ourselves and with others. Good communication is a foundational skill. Good communication helps us get what we need, to hear and see other people, to set clear boundaries, and to think good thoughts.

It’s good, good stuff. I hope that you join us for it. To register, email me at anneoconnor@tendingthefirewithin.com or call me at 608-606-4808.

Why I live in the middle of nowhere

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 12:29:00 +0000

Ten years ago, I moved to this part of the world from the Twin Cities. Born in Chicago I’d spend my whole life in cities before finding my way to Viroqua. A decade in, I’ve come to understand the ways that I love this tiny town of 5079 in rural Southwest Wisconsin.

You can’t believe this place. I’ll tell you about it, but I suspect you still won’t believe it. Viroqua is a small-town that draws people with some force that I can’t quite define. I’ve stopped trying. What I know is that people who drive through often stop, find people they love, and marvel. That if your car breaks down in town, you may end up moving here. That if you visit, you may visit for years while you figure out how to get here and stay here. And if you have a need for deep, true connection this place will call to you.

So today, in celebration, a list of reasons I call Viroqua my home.

The Viroqua Food Coop: crown jewel of the food system here in a place with all kinds of ways to get good food. photo Anne O'Connor

1. The foodscape. This may seem ironic since you can count the total number of restaurants in my town on one hand. The good ones will take fewer fingers still. Here, you have to think differently about food. You have to remember where food comes from. You have to consider the amazing potlucks that regularly have vegetarian, gluten-free, and raw options. And the dinner parties. And the picnics. We are in the heart of some of the best growing land in the world. We are home to Organic Valley, the largest organic cooperative in the world and people here love good, clean, organic food. We have more organic farmers here—density wise—than anywhere else in the country. My egg farmer delivers fresh, organic eggs to my door every Saturday.

Fresh, organic eggs delivered to my door. photo by Anne O'Connor

I can get organic milk from several farmers I know. Same with meat. There’s this Portlandia spoof "ordering the chicken", but it’s funny because there's some truth in there. Most nights, I know the farmers who are providing the Driftless Café with food. I grow shiitake mushrooms on a log in my backyard. A friend of mine makes the only pop I've ever really liked at Wisco Pop Soda. The roadside stands offer everything in season: strawberries and peas and corn and tomatoes and melons and grapes fresh out of the rich soil. I love these informal networks of food; they are a vital and sustainable way to feed my family. A little more formal are the abundant CSAs and the farmers’ market—a festive party downtown every Saturday.We have a local grocery store, Village Market, that is owned by a real family for more than 20 years. And the Viroqua Food Coop is the crown jewel where food and people meet, a community as much as a grocery store. People come from all around the country, many from cities with up to 50,000 people, to study how our tiny town has such a kick-ass coop. It’s hard to imagine any other place that has a more vibrant, thriving, and healthy food system.

We have just a few restaurants, but the ones we have are great. Like The Rooted Spoon: yum! photo courtesy of Tony Macasaet

2. The collaboration. When my kids were younger, I was part of a mamas group that met every week with the kids. We’d pick one mama’s home and while one of us hung out with the kids, the rest of us would work. This is kind of the norm around here. We are home to the coop. We have coops for everything: food, animal feed, electricity, mental health (yep), home-funeral services (really), housing cooperatives, a bank, and the Viroqua Healing Arts Center. These are just the formal cooperatives. There are so many informal networks of people gathered together to take on fantastic projects. We work together to make this a great place to live, to have a new running track and get parks and a community arena built, to restore a grand old theater, and a new library constructed.

Our new library is going to be an wonderful place. Drawings courtesy of the library board.

3. The caring. We also take care of one another. When a family is expecting a baby, or someone is ill or injured, or someone dies, friends step forward and make meals and cut grass and sweep floors and care for children. When I recently moved to a new house, more than 50 people showed up for the moving party. Yes: 50. It was a true party. We aren’t alone unless we chose to be alone. Many people are in long-term women’s groups or men’s groups: we help each other live better lives. But this caring is reflected outside of organized groups. We prepare mothers for birth with days of love and rose petals and massage and words of encouragement and listening. We stand together when our loved ones die and hold one another up. We work to maintain our love and respect for one another even when we don’t like what someone does. It’s not utopia: we are humans still. And there is a varied experience. Maybe there is a tone that permeates much of life here—we accept that you’re flawed and love you anyway. Or at least recognize that as another human being on the planet, you have a right to respect and dignity and—yes—care.

4. The creativity. This place fosters and supports creative endeavors. Artists and writers and musicians and philosophers and dancers find their way here. We are a small place and life happens on a small scale. But there are many nights when there are too many options. Good options. World-class musicians playing jazz or a Beckett show at the Underground, the town’s alternative theater? Alternative so as not to be confused with the Viroqua Community Theatre that just put on a fantastic Wizard of Oz. Oh, and there’s the Women’s Theater Project. People take up work here and make interesting things happen. We are about to have our fourth annual Viroqua Harvest Festival and Parade, an extraordinary community event. The Driftless Folk School teaches lost arts. Tons of art and writing and performance work happens at The Ark, a community arts center. And WDRT is a community radio station. VIVA, an artists’ cooperative (naturally) on Main Street, is a showcase for local work that has turned First Thursdays downtown into a fun and go-to event. You can browse for books at Driftless Books or on Main Street's Bramble Books. Viroqua Public Market is forever interesting. And there are the private groups of musicians on a porch or writers in a living room or fantastic cooks around a full table or the knitters’ circle, or the group canning together or the people making sausage together. There’s the ladies’ bike rides (no one left behind) and the power rides on our great hills and all that Bluedog Cycles has brought. There’s the group that canoes and kayaks on the Mississippi and the Wisconsin. There’s horseback riding. There’s the wild flower group at the Kickapoo Valley Reserve and the birders. There is so much that happens here, so much to learn and to discover about what makes life full and rich and varied.

The Viroqua Harvest Parade demonstrates the creativity of the place. photo courtesy of Tony Macasaet

5. The landscape. This area is called the Driftless region—no glacial drift has flattened out the landscape like it did all the rest of the Midwest. The drift went around us. So instead of flat, we have gorgeous rocks standing up out of the land. Viroqua is the heart and hub of the Kickapoo Valley, the land of rolling hills, luscious valleys, wind-swept ridges and rock outcroppings of limestone around and along one of the country’s most winding rivers—the Kickapoo. There are ancient plant and animal species not found anywhere else. You can literally dig a rock out of the earth and you will almost surely find something craggy and full of crystals and beauty. I almost don’t want to tell you about the reserve, because once people realize what we have hidden in plain sight here, well, I imagine my favorite trail will occasionally have people on it.

The Three Chimneys rocks are impressive, but just one part of the stunning landscape of the Driftelss region. photo courtesy of Tony Macasaet.

6. The schools. There are excellent school options in this small place. The public schools, the alternative schools, a thriving home-school community, and religious schools. My kids attend incredible schools. Pleasant Ridge Waldorf School and the Youth Initiative High School (YIHS) work to teach kids a holistic approach to life: “an education for head, hands, and heart.” This commitment plays out in very real ways for my kids, my family, and my entire community. The schools teach kids about any particular subject by giving them such a wonderful context for life and knowing and learning. They expect the children to develop and be full, open, free, and participating people. What I mean is that they draw the best from my kids. And from me. These schools call people from around the world to this place. This year alone, nine of the 50 students at YIHS are international boarding students. My daughter has her own little international community every time she goes to high school. It’s like that here.

7. The people. When I leave my town and go to bigger places, I remember how much people know me here. Know my children. How I can forget my checkbook but the store will still let me “buy” something because they know I’ll be back tomorrow with the money. There is great comfort in being known, being seen, being part of a whole. Of course this can feel like being scrutinized, being judged, or being unable to escape, but I guess it all depends on your perspective. Small towns—and especially this small town, push us towards one another. We have so many chances to figure out more of ourselves, who we are in the world and how we want to live our lives. We are all here in Viroqua and there’s some recognition that we have to be kind because we are in it for the long haul. You can’t shake your fist in anger at someone on the highway and expect to never see them again. Likely, they’ll be sitting next to you at your kid’s track meet. Living in close proximity to people is challenging. And immensely rewarding. I’ve been living with and learning from these people for the past ten years. I can’t wait to see what they’ve got for me in the next decade.

I was skeptical when I moved here. I've lived in big cities my whole life and, for the most part, really loved that. But there's something tremendously grounding for me about being surrounded by natural beauty each day. It is, for me, undeniably nurturing. And all these human-made endeavors help to make this place part of a genuine community.Whatever its call, I'm not alone. This land and the people it calls has been working its magic for a long time.One thing I've realized is that where there people, there is life. And even in "the middle of nowhere," we get to make the kind of life we want. What a luxury! What a life!

Why do you live where you live? How do you make it work for you? What are you building? Tell me about it in the comments, or drop me a line.

I won't lament the weather

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 13:22:00 +0000

My friend says it aloud but she might as well say it directly to me.

“Lamenting the weather is like lamenting the existence of prime numbers.”

I want to resist what she says. Prime numbers don’t numb my nose and fingers. They don’t turn my muscles into tight little wads of shiver. Prime numbers don’t make me slow and plodding and careful, taking to steps and sidewalks like minefields.

You could call it mid-April now and for the past two days I’ve awoken to a layer of ice on everything. This morning, there is snow on the ground and on the trees. It is still snowing.

I long for seventy-five degrees. I long for warm spring showers and the subsequent May flowers.

But I’ve longed and lamented enough in this life to know that longing and lamenting don’t do a whole lot of good for me or for anyone else.

So I won’t lament the weather.

Instead, I’ll notice how gently the flakes fall outside my window, and how different that looks in the April light.

I’ll remember how much I love my soft wool socks and how happy my feet are when they are tucked in my winter boots, dry and cozy with two pairs of warmth that allow me to be outside comfortably.

I won’t lament the weather.

I’ll appreciate my Cuddl Duds—long underwear that I put on sometime around September and don’t take them off until it’s warm. It may be June this year. I may be walking around looking a bit like that Michelin Man tire guy, full of big layers. But I’m warm.

I’ll notice that the robins are back and that the juncos are still here. The juncos fly south to my home for the winter. They hang out here until it gets too warm and then they fly back to their colder climate for summer. It’s mid-April and those classy white-breasted, charcoal grey-backed, yellow-beaked little guys are still out at my feeder.

I won’t lament the weather.

I will instead be grateful for how warm my house is, the rich and steady warmth of the radiators keeping the place toasty and perfect for snuggling up to read a book to my kid.

Every night in the winter, I take a hot bath, settling into the steamy room, the hot (hot!) water and letting every bit of chill from the day wash away. I come out floppy, entirely relaxed and go right to sleep. This is one of my favorite things about winter.

That and having a child come and sit on my lap, her head on my chest. Snuggling under blankets together is surely something we don’t do in July. We do it in this weather.

This weather, which is the weather that we’ve got today. I’m going to love it and appreciate it and know that when it changes, there will be other things to be happy about—as long as I remember to look for them.

Don't ignore this one critical thing in your life

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 14:20:00 +0000

I’m going to hot tub with a bunch of my women friends tonight under the full moon. It’s part of my on-going birthday week celebration. Last night was Indian dinner with one group of friends and tonight I’ll join my women in the hot tub and we’ll marvel at the moon and the life that brings us together.

My kids and I will have a different kind of celebration this weekend together: it’s always important to my youngest that we actually sing Happy Birthday.

One of the things that I’m so grateful for in my growing up is that my mother taught me how to make days count. Especially important days.

I remember her and my aunt Cheryl transforming our basement into a haunted house for Halloween, complete with smoke from dry ice and peeled grapes for the dead guy’s eyes. Once, we all dressed in period costumes, blindfolded my sister, and brought her to an alcove overlooking a gorgeous fountain in one of St. Paul’s most beautiful places, Como Park. We had an elaborate brunch waiting. Another time, I remember a detailed, across-town treasure hunt that my mom sent the kids on, hunting for treasure.

Creating a ritual around a day or an event impresses that event in our minds and hearts and becomes part of the story of our lives. And although we are the writers of our own life stories, sometimes we don’t know how to devise great story lines.

This telling of a great story…a living of a great life, is part and parcel of Tending the Fire Within. I love to plan a party or an event and I love to tell the story. They go hand in hand.

So what does it take to make a great life? A great story? A few things seem clear.

Our people. I’m not saying we have to have a gazillion friends. For some people, their “tribe” is their best friend. Or their family. Everyone does this her own way. I love so many people I just can’t keep up with them all. But however we do it, we gotta have our people and they have to have us. We need each other.

Time together. I know that quality time is important is key (I’m talking about some quality time right here, right?) but we really need the quantity, too. We have to make the time to have these things happen in our lives.

But the biggest thing that we’re losing our historical cultural memory on and more people find tricky?

Ritual. We need some way to mark important moments, some way to mark our community’s connection, so way to say: Hey, I belong to you and you belong to me and isn’t that the coolest thing?

Ritual is the linchpin of a great life. Think about it: going to the lake cabin every summer, eating that nasty lutefisk every single Christmas Eve, flying a kite on the first days of spring, hunting for Easter eggs. Our stories become our lives and our lives become our stories.

We’d best make sure we’re telling good stories.

Tending the Fire Within lives and breathes for this kind of thing. We’re damn good at it, if we do say so ourselves. If you’re finding that your group needs a little cohesive action and you don’t know how to find it, I hope you give us a call and let us help.

And keep an eye open. Because I’m about to launch some online offerings that will bring some of these ideas right to you. Right there, with you. Just where I like to be.

Let me know what kinds of things that you do with your people to make life hum along. I’d love to hear your ideas. Just leave a note in the comments below. I’ll think about you in the hot tub tonight.

An open letter to my daughter.

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 21:20:00 +0000

Dear darling girl,

Funny how sometimes a mother has to write a bunch of strangers rather than to write directly to her girl. Maybe, someday, when you’re not fourteen-years-old and pissed-off at me about half the time, you’ll be able to hear this from me.

No matter. I still have to say it. It’s one of the things that I’ve learned and I hope you learn too: Say it anyway. Even when you can’t say it to the right person. Say it out loud and clearly and then…move on.

So you’ve got this solo violin concert tomorrow: your first. And you’re scared to death. New things have never been easy for you, but standing in front of a group of strangers and playing a fairly complicated piece? Yeah, that’s got to be getting your knees shaking a bit.

The thing is I know you’re going to be great. I also know that my opinion on this doesn’t count for much right now. You were pretty clear last night when I asked you if you wanted to hear what I think: “Mom, no offense, but you don’t know anything about music.”

It’s a lovely thing for me that you consider me someone who doesn’t know anything about music. What it means to me is that your standard is high. Not because I do know, especially, anything about music. I don’t know how frustrating it is to switch to third position when you thought the piece was played in first position. The circle of fifths makes my head hurt and I haven’t been practicing the guitar enough to build even the smallest of calluses on my fingertips. I almost always have to have you sing the harmony because it’s easier for me to hold than to harmonize. I am one of the least musically-talented adults in your world.

I get it. Little do you know, though, that I sing in so many places with so many groups. One time, my women’s group was at a restaurant and we were singing happy birthday to Kristina. We sang in three-part harmonies and we sounded great! (I held the melody, of course.) When we were finished singing, the whole restaurant clapped. And then two other tables, who were also celebrating birthdays, asked us to come and sing for them. You would have been mortified.

Once, I led a national gathering of women in song after song. Yep, me, your musically deficient mother.

So, you’re right that I don’t know the technical details of your playing. If you use an up-bow and it should be down, I’ll almost certainly miss it. But I’ve been listening to you play for six years. I’m surrounded by musicians and music and it’s a huge part of my world. And here’s what I do know.

I know that the power of music is in the playing. The technical skill is nothing more than how you get to playing a piece like it matters: the technical skill isn’t enough. When a player has her soul come through her instrument, through her fingers, that’s when music hits in the heart.

I know that I am starting to hear your soul in your playing. I hear your passion, your solidness, your feistiness. Yes, it helps that you can do a strong vibrato and longer bows and that you’re steadier on your feet. But what I hear coming through is the power of Irene O’Connor’s fire in the pit of her belly. When you dash your music to the ground and scream that you can’t possibly do it, that you won’t go and that I and no one else can make you…I know you’ll be more than fine.

Here’s the thing—I don’t know what will happen tomorrow. I suspect that you won’t dare disappoint your teachers; that’s so unlike you. And I hope you go. Because when you have to push up against these hard things, you see what you’re really made of. You’re made of some pretty good grit. If you don’t have to force yourself to get up and do something sometimes, my guess is you won’t do much. And that’s not you at all.

Tomorrow at this time, it will all be over. You’ll have done it. And you will—almost certainly—be glad you did.

So, cast me out of your mini-rehearsal. Yell and fuss and agonize. Then take all that passion and feeling and depth that I so love about you, and let it come through the music. Try not to think too much about the notes: they’ll come. Just remember to say your piece in your playing. It’s beautiful, just like you. Everyone will feel that, even if they don’t know a thing about music.

P.S. Thanks for reading this before I published it and giving me your okay. Mama.

If I can keep a shamrock alive, anything is possible

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 13:02:00 +0000

There was a time when I'd say I couldn’t cook. When I was eighteen-years-old and living on my own, I ate white rice with butter and salt every night for months. Now, anyone who knows me will know that, while I still consider popcorn a major food group, I can throw down in the kitchen with some respectability. People change; they do it all the time.

There was also a time when I would say I couldn’t have kids because I couldn’t even keep a plant alive.

The best demonstration of that was my St. Patrick Day’s shamrock.

First, I have to tell you about my mother. I’ve been lucky to live near my mother for most of my adult life, and she has always been a major piece of the undergirding for me. While her lessons and support are often profound, she is subtle, because she doesn’t talk much (unlike….me.)

Many years ago, my mother gave me a beautiful, blooming shamrock on St. Patrick’s Day. My mother is not from Irish descendants. She has Swedish ancestors, mostly. But she married a guy whose parents had come over on the boat. She was the one who upheld the strong traditions of that side of the family. We learned to love Irish Soda Bread, we learned that the Irish have strong traditions of writing and poetry and music. That storytelling was an art. One St. Paddy’s, she made us kids green eggs and ham. Brilliant, if gross, hey?

The shamrock she gave me was healthy and full and had delicate white flowers. I was thrilled. I kept it alive for months. But it was with a sad and somewhat heavy heart that I handed the pot back to my mother: the flowers non-existent, the plant dead.

It was in the fall when I first gave it back to her.

The very next St. Patrick’s Day, the beautiful shamrock again appeared on my table—full, alive, and thriving. She hadn’t gotten a new one; she had nursed the same plant back to life, back to beauty. And she handed that beauty back to me.

Whew...okay. “I can do this,” I remember thinking.

But I didn’t. Again, by the fall, I would kill the thing. And again, I would hand it back to my mother.

When St. Patrick’s Day rolled around again, she gave me another chance.

And I killed it again!

I just didn’t take the time and energy to pay attention to the thing. I’d forget to water it, or water it too much or just generally neglect it.

But once again, the shamrock was sitting on my table on St. Patrick’s Day.

Maybe the third time is a charm. Maybe I just grew up. Maybe I decided, once and for all, that I can keep a plant alive. Sometimes, it’s in the deciding, isn’t it?

Today, many St. Patrick’s Days have come and gone and I’ve figured out how to keep the plant alive, thriving and beautiful. The little white flowers are wonderful. A couple years ago, I thought I killed it again: there may have been too many people watering it. I knew what to do. I cut the greens back, set it in the sun, and was patient. It came back. I can, officially, take care of my own shamrock.

Happy St. Patrick's Day, Mom. And thanks.

In love, you get what you allow

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 15:12:00 +0000

Recently, I decided that I would say “Yes!” to any attraction for a man that I felt and see where it goes. In the past, I have had a habit of preparing a cost analysis in my head, imagining what the outcome might be and one way or another, finding a way to squelch whatever comes my way.

So the “Yes!” is a different strategy. There are all kinds of reasons I suppose—my youngest child is, at six-years-old, no longer a tiny baby, or maybe I’ve just been single long enough. My ex-husband is in another relationship and I may be over him once and for all. And to top it all off, it’s almost spring and the stirrings of new life and bountiful energy remind me how much I like kissing a man who I’m wild about.

After a recent test run at this new policy, I’ve realized that I’ve got another policy pretty firmly in place. I’ve got zero tolerance for being treated badly. So, today, on International Women’s day, I’m just saying out loud that if I’m saying “Yes!” to a man, he’s got to say “Yes!” right back to me to have it go anywhere.

I’ve been out of this game for awhile. And the transition from married with children to single mother of four kids (three still at home) hasn’t been the easiest thing I’ve ever done. But it’s been good. I like my kids, I like my life, and I’m surrounded by people I love and who love me. Lucky is what I am.

Well, I’m lucky and I’ve worked my ass off. I have paid attention and made changes and worked hard to create good things in my life, to take care of myself and the people I love and stuff that has to happen for my life to work. I’m all over it and it’s working.

So, shortly after stating this new commitment to “Yes!” an opportunity presented itself. I met a man at an event that we were both attending and we were attracted to each other. We spent some time together over a few days…having meals together, talking about our lives. It was fun. When it came time to part ways—he lives in another state—he reached out, put his hand around my neck, and pulled me close to him. And kissed me.

Oh. I like kissing men—how lovely that is. I might do more of it.

We said goodbye and that we’d be in touch. My “Yes!” plan was working pretty well. I was leaving the event and I texted him and we had a little text exchange, the same way we had for the past few days. I texted him that I might like to kiss him again.

And then the phone got cold. He didn’t respond to my text. There we were texting along and he suddenly disappears. No answer. I was puzzled.

Texting can be a weird thing. It’s not a phone call, where hanging up without saying anything would be obviously rude. And it’s not an email that you get to when you get to. Texting is somewhere in between. But here’s where I’m at: if we’re in the middle of a texting conversation and I say I want to kiss you again, you don’t just drop the conversation. Unless you’re dead. If you’re dead, then I get it.

Truly, the only thing that I could imagine that would make dropping this conversation so abruptly okay is something like the man was reading my text about me kissing him and that he wandered happily into the street and got hit by a car and ended up in the hospital. And then he would apologize for dropping me like that.

But that’s not what happened. What happened is that I didn’t hear from him for another twenty-four hours. The next night, he texts and says that he’d been thinking about me all day, despite being back in his busy life. Yeah, okay. I texted him back agreeing that life sure is busy.

He’s reached out a couple times since then and I’ve been friendly, but uninterested. I'm not angry and I don't regret this thing, I'm just not interested.

Because a man is either going to be crazy about me and act like it or…not.

I told a dear friend of mine about my newly-discovered “policy" and initially, he laughed.

“You have a zero tolerance policy?” he said incredulously.

He figured that I wouldn’t get very far on my “Yes!” plan or my plan for kissing more men with such a policy.

Until I explained it to him. Basically, I realize that I have no more room in my life to be treated badly. And especially by a man. My dad is dead now, and it’s not speaking badly of the dead to say that the guy treated me like dirt. He may have valued me in some way, and I know he loved me and I’m pretty sure there might have been something in the past 45 years that he was proud of about me. But I wouldn’t have any way of knowing it based on his behavior.

And for a long time, I was looking for him to show me something better. And then I did the typical thing of looking for it in other men who didn’t know how to treat me well. Back then, I explained the bad treatment away and made the best of it. The deal is that I can understand why people behave badly--I have a lot of compassion for what makes us behave badly. That used to be enough for me to allow a man to not tend to me when I’m sick, to show up late or not at all, to say one thing and do another, to make commitments to me and blow them and me off.

I have explained and allowed bad behavior from men because I understand that under the bad behavior, there’s a great guy in there. Basta!

I’m ready to have a great guy living fully and out loud. Over the past decade, I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t matter why someone can’t meet me half way or all the way, he still can’t or won’t. And if I allow it, then that’s what I get: halfway.

These days, I have all kinds of men in my life who treat me well, who care about me, who see and respect me. Men who call me and see how I’m doing. Men who, when I was injured and couldn’t move, sat with me and read me poems and made me fruit salad and ate nachos and brownies with me. Men who come and help me push my car out of the driveway so we can jumpstart it in the street. Men who leave me licorice surprises and chocolate bars on my desk. Men who send me flowers and men who fix the gutters on my house. Men who pore over words with me and create good stuff to read. Men who raise money to help me buy a car when mine is stolen. Men who plot and scheme business plans with me. Men who hold me up when I need holding. Men who love me out loud and all the way.

I’m a lucky woman.

These men are my friends, my family, and my community. There isn’t a lover among them and I won’t be kissing these guys.

So what about that man? Yeah, where is he? I don’t know where he is, but I know this: He’s going to be open-hearted, expressive, and crazy about me. I’m not going to be guessing about where he stands—it will be abundantly evident.

And I’ll love kissing him and when I say I want to kiss him, he will happily respond unless he is hit by a car or is, in some other way, dead.

Until then, life is good and I’m patient. But it is getting to be about springtime.

When complainers are a good thing

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 14:55:00 +0000

Marcy gets up enough courage to go to her boss and tell her that she didn’t appreciate her talking to another employee about Marcy's problem without coming to Marcy first.

This is a big deal for Marcy because her boss—call her Denise—doesn’t always respond well to an employee pointing out something that isn’t working.

Instead of listening, Denise interrupts. She’s defensive and wants to tell her side of the story; she wants to explain the complaint away. Sometimes, Denise yells at people who complain about what she does. Other times, she starts crying and is moody for days afterwards. Denise just wants to be appreciated. She wants Marcy to see that she really is a great human being.

Denise may be a great human being, but she’s strangling the life right out of her relationships by not knowing how to take a complaint.

If you want to have high-quality relationships wherever you are, you need a functioning complaint department. In business or in love or with your neighbor across the fence, you’ve got to be able to listen to people say things that they don’t like. About you. If you’re committed to building good relationships, you’ve got to take that complaint and put it through a process of examination so that you can either eliminate it or work on it.

That’s not easy. But getting good at taking complaints will change your life and every relationship in it. Complaints aren’t going away. We have complaints about people and they have complaints about us. How we take those complaints and what we do with them can deepen our relationships…or blow them up.

A company without a good way to handle complaints will become known for poor customer service and won’t do as well as it could, if it survives at all. A personal relationship without a good complaint process is equally doomed.

But what if we used a complaint to learn more about ourselves, about the other person, and about how to do something differently? If we knew how to do that, we could use a complaint as an opportunity to make or deepen a connection. And connection is what we all want. People don’t complain because they want to hurt us, they complain because they have some need that isn’t getting met. Often, people complain because they care enough about the relationship to want to make it better.

That doesn’t mean people are good at complaining. That’s another blog entry for another day. But however people complain, we can get good at taking it in.

A complaint is a chance to see ourselves as others do. Or, at least as one other does. It doesn’t make the complaint right or wrong; it’s just information about how we appear. It can be incredibly helpful information, if we look at the information as a practical way to improve.

How do we take a complaint and turn it into gold?

· We have to get curious. Nobody is going to tell us the real deal if we won’t take it in or don’t seem to care or worse, we seem hostile. So skip the eye-rolling, the attitude of “here we go again” or anything else that doesn’t open the door for someone to say what they want to say.

· We don’t take it personally. This is can be a difficult idea to grasp. How can I not take a complaint about me personally? Right. Basically, you have to trust that whatever the complaint is and even if it is dead on, that this information is useful in figuring out some aspect of your life. It’s not a crucifixion. It’s not an indictment of your entire existence. Don’t make it so. You are still a human being on the planet, worthy of love and respect and care. Yes, you make mistakes and probably aren’t perfect. So what? So you’ve got something you could do better? Welcome to the human race, my friend. The sooner you accept this fact, the easier life gets. Just don’t swing the other way and use being human as an excuse for not making changes that you know you need to make. You do have the power to make changes.

· Empathize with the person lodging the complaint. How hard is it for them to say this to you? How important must this be to bring it to you? Are they nervous? Are they telling you this because they want your relationship to be better?

· Resist the urge to use the moment to lodge your own complaint. You know the old, “Well, I do that because you do this.” First, try to just hear the complaint without explaining why you do something.

· Try to play back the complaint in your own words. Denise might say something like, “I hear that you’re upset that I talked to Bob about you without coming to you first. I get that.”

· Thank the complainer for bringing you this complaint. This might be hard. But you’re looking at a complaint as a way to help you see your full self, right? So you need to find a way to welcome people's complaints. If you can genuinely say that you’re glad she told you what was bugging her, do it.

· Tell her you’ll get back to her. Sometimes, it’s enough to say you hear. If you can offer a true apology, a commitment to do something differently, and move on, great. But sometimes, complaints require more of a response. Time is our friend when it comes to responding well. Let the person know you’ll get back to them within a time frame. And then do it.

· Have a system for evaluating the complaint. After you’re done with the conversation, find a way to consider the validity of the complaint and what is required for you to manage this piece. If you’re feeling ready to hear more, ask someone you trust if this complaint rings true about you.

· Not all complaints are entirely about you. There can be all kinds of factors that bring a complaint to us, including the complainer’s inability to see her own faults. But at a minimum, the person who is complaining has an issue that is affecting your relationship. And sometimes, a brave person who complains to us represents many more people who don’t have the courage to tell us how it is. If you are hearing the same complaint from various sources, you’ll have to decide if you’re willing to make a change in your life to address this thing that is tripping up your relationships.

· If you are running through your evaluation of complaints and consistently finding that the problem is solely that of the person complaining, you may want to consider that you are denying some information that could help you create closer relationships. What I’m suggesting is that you dig deeper, because you’re probably fooling yourself.

· Lastly and perhaps most importantly, if you know that you’ve got something that isn’t working in your life, commit to doing something to help yourself. We’ve all got things that don’t work well. Don’t be that person that says, “Eh, that’s life.” Don’t set it down and forget about it until the next time the same situation comes up and look: you’ve done it again. To yourself and to everyone around you. I’m not saying beat yourself up. I’m saying just the opposite: lift yourself up. When we work to get something right and lift ourselves up, we lift up every relationship around us. And that’s what really listening to a complaint can do for us. Who could complain about that?

Dad dies, but his gift lives on

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 17:22:00 +0000

Patrick Francis O’Connor, my father, died last week. He was only 76, but he’s been sick for years. We’ve had the emotional whiplash of “last moments” over and over again:

Surely, he won’t make it home from the hospital again?

This time the pneumonia will take him.

Another diabetic coma and fall?

But every time, he came back home. A little less strong, a little less loud, a little more tender.

There were many moments that I thought might be our last together. Some were soft and gentle and beautiful. He cried every time I left him the past few years. I was able to tell him over these years that I loved him and that I appreciate what he’s given me.

But it turns out that our truly last moment together was heartbreaking. We were on the phone and no matter how calmly and lovingly I spoke to him, he was lashing out at me. He wanted to make sure I knew that I had failed as a daughter. I would never amount to anything. I was destined to fail at whatever I do. Some of his exact words were, “You’re going to scrounge away the rest of your life.”

It’s hard to write these words. For the obvious reasons, yes: they hurt me. But also because I feel loyal to my father and I don’t want to dishonor him. This was fairly typical fare from my father to me. But it feels important to say them here, out loud, in public.

And to say the more important thing: I learned better than to invest much in his words.

I know that his words aren’t true. I won’t ever accomplish anything? Sorry, Dad, too late. But I wouldn’t argue with him. I wouldn’t take these last moments to get sidetracked by his fear or his grief about his own life. I know a little bit better now. I learned how to do this by coming back to my father again and again for so many years. I learned how to not listen to his words, but to feel his heart. I learned how to know that he loved me, the best way that he could.

I can do this all now—years after kicking and screaming and fighting and defending myself. After years of trying to prove my worth to this man. After years of trying to be seen and heard and acknowledged.

Until I learned that I am not going to get those things from him. Until I learned that he has given me other things, gifts that are equally important: my strength, my tenacity, my tender heart, and my deep way of feeling every single thing. My growing ability to forgive.

So instead of arguing with him, I thanked him. I said, “I am your daughter and you are my father.” I said, “I will take this life that you have given me and do something with it.” I said, “I honor you, my father. I honor your pain, I honor your life.” I told him I loved him and that I know he loved me.

We sat silent for a couple of minutes. I didn’t know what else to do. Should I run down to Chicago and hold his hand and look him in the eye one more time? Should I let him go like this? Was this really going to be our last conversation?

He said, “Well? Is that it?”

“I don’t know, Dad, is this it?” I said.

More silence.

And then he said he’d see me in heaven. He said that tomorrow is a new day, and maybe tomorrow a light will shine down on all six of us—him and his five children. Then we said goodbye.

He died the next day.

I’ve been so sad since then. His death struck me with a force. I had been curious about what to expect. I have had a tumultuous and difficult relationship with my father, but we’ve also come to a real place of resting, with some kind of peace in the past ten years.

But yep, it’s really hard. He’s gone and with him goes so many things. He was a history of the family, of his life, of experiences and street names and his favorite restaurants and his favorite dogs (he was a Doberman guy) and the links to my aunt and uncles and my grandparents and Ireland and the way that he always wrote with a green pen, and the ways that he wished for such love and forgiveness and kindness even when he wasn’t capable of giving these things to his own flesh and blood.

I miss him. I keep thinking that I need to tell him one more thing, but he’s not there to tell. I have an old mohair sweater of his that I’ve been wearing for pajamas for twenty years. It’s fuzzy and warm and soft. It’s full of holes and threadbare. I still love it.

These are big moments, when a parent dies. The circle of my family that stands behind me is one short today. So I am dealing with these big feelings. I’m not afraid of them. I know by now that grief is painful and difficult, but I also know that it won’t kill me. Grief no longer has the power to take me down. I will take care to appreciate what I have and to let people know I love them, that I see them for their good.

After really considering that last conversation I had with my dad, I realized that this is the biggest gift he’s given me. How to stay clear in love despite the circumstances. How to let everything else go and hang on to love.

That’s what I learned from my dad. May he rest in peace.

If you can't say, "Hell, yes!" try "Hell, no!"

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 11:58:00 +0000

The other day I saw a notice on a community bulletin board about boulevard plantings. There’s been a bit of a dust-up in my small town since city leaders decided that all plantings on the boulevards have to go: no flowers, shrubs, bushes, rocks—everything has to be pulled out. A group of residents is committed to working to get a more reasonable stance negotiated with the city.

And I started thinking. “Oh, I could help with that. I could help draft language and help meet with the city leaders and help formulate a workable plan with these other good folks willing to step forward. I care about this; my neighbors and my mom have great boulevards and they’re worth preserving. Besides, my philosophy is that more plants are better.”

All of which is completely true. But recently, I’ve been trying something new when I’m about to plunge into another commitment. I’ve been using this handy new phrase that a friend of mine told me about and that I’ve adopted. It’s a great decider.

It goes like this: If your answer isn’t “Hell, yes!” then it has to be “Hell, no!”

This clever, simple little phrase is transforming my thinking about how I do things. Of course there are a million things that are worth doing. But I can’t do everything I want to do so I’ve got to pick the ones that matter most.

I won’t be working on the boulevard work. Even though it is important. Even though I believe in it. Even if my mom’s boulevard has to change.

Alas, I have to constantly remind myself of the finite number of hours and limits of energy in a single day. Does anyone else have to do this so regularly? And in a moment when I’m about to jump in with an email, or a phone call, or when I’m asked to do something, I can do a gut check: Is this a “Hell, yes!”? Because there are plenty of those.

This is one of the reasons that organizations benefit from strategic planning: you lay out all the millions of things that you want to do, and then you start the difficult work of finding the themes and coming up with just a few key, overriding plans or strategies. Everything you do day-to-day fits under the category of one of the strategic planning points.

Most of us regular people can benefit from going through the same kind of planning. It’s so easy to get pulled into work and fun and thinking and doing that doesn’t really support our reasons for being here. And if we’re doing work other than our own most important work, our own most important work doesn’t get done.

Because no matter how good you are at juggling and making the best of every moment, there are some realities that we all live within: there remain 24 hours in a day. The days quickly pass into weeks, months, years, and then, a life lived. We get a short time here together to do some things. I want to make my time count every single day.

For me, that means loving my kids and giving them the best support I can, loving my friends and family and people I meet, and helping connect people to themselves and to better ways to live. Everything I do falls under these few ideas. My key ideas are broad and can encompass everything from working to change the food system, to working to alleviate poverty and internal family strife, to helping families grieve death well, to making pizza and ice-cream sundaes on a Friday night. All in a day’s work.

There will be, for me and people like me, always more that pulls me than I can actually do. So I’ll pause before I react with a simple “yes.” Gotta make sure it’s a “Hell, yes!”

Everything is temporary

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 18:49:00 +0000

My father is in the hospital with pneumonia. Again. He’s been unwell for years. Late stage diabetes is a horror. In and out of comas, falling to the ground, hitting his head, losing a little bit more memory every time he recovers. His multiple back surgeries keep him fairly immobile. His congestive-heart failure makes it hard to breath.

And the pneumonia is persistent. This is the fourth time he’s been hospitalized with pneumonia in the past few years. This guy has been through it.

I ask him how he’s doing.

“Compared to what?” he shoots back.

He’s not doing so well, he says, after getting in his classic answer. He keeps getting worse, he says. He keeps ending up back in this place. The disdain drips from his mouth.

This hospital where they poke him and make him sit up and tell him what he can or can’t eat and where they don’t allow him to get up without help. This place that is there to help him but where people wake him up all night and it’s loud and the lights are terrible.

He hates it there.

And he knows that he doesn’t have much time left, hospital or not. I said it was clear that he is a fighter, having beaten pneumonia three times before.

“That’s not what my chart says,” he said quietly.

Then he told me about the Do Not Resuscitate order in his medical records. He hadn’t told me this before. I am happy to know it; it’s been a very tough few years for him.

Lately, though, he’s seemed to have a little bit more to do. He’s got an excellent care-taker and she has given him more will to live than anything else I can remember. He’s been going out to movies, something he hasn’t done in years. He hasn’t gone anywhere in years except to the various doctors’ offices.

But my dad is seeing his time dwindling. We talked about him moving to be near me. We talked about my childhood and walking in the woods or by Lake Michigan together.

When it was time to go, I asked him to please take care of his lungs, of himself.

And then my father, my cantankerous, impossible, beautiful, and wise father said something that we both knew wasn’t about his lungs or whether he’d make it back out of the hospital this time or whether we’d ever walk together again anywhere or whether, even, we’d see each other one more time.

“Everything is temporary,” he said. “Sometimes it’s a long temporary, but everything is temporary.”

I said goodbye to my father. The phone call didn’t last so long; just a few minutes out of my busy morning. It was here, and then gone: temporary. But I sure am glad for it.

Reading your own body language

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 14:31:00 +0000

I’ve spent a couple of days out flat: coughing, sneezing, and miserable. But this illness is cake compared to how I used to get sick. Like the time I was at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for some exhibit I couldn’t miss. I could barely stand I was so sick. I was coughing like mad, and I kept pulling a bottle of Robitussin DM out of my bag and swigging from it like a drunk. I don’t remember now what the exhibit was.

And this was after I got sober. Maybe you know—when you get yourself good and whacked out like I did, it takes a long time to unwind the messiness. It can take years to change things. Back when I was an active drunk, you couldn’t have talked to me about taking care of myself. At the worst of it, I drank a lot and almost every day. I smoked two packs a day. I took speed to stay awake and I smoked dope to ease the jitters; I slept inconsistently and not enough. I ate candy like an impulsive 10-year-old let loose in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. I took enormous risks. I suffered a lot because of my recklessness, and so did the people who love me.

Bodies can change. Lives can change. Why not? photo: Diego Delso

But I got lucky.

Early on, I got some help and I quit drinking and taking drugs. The change in my life was vast. Just like that—snap—I always knew where I was in the morning when I woke up. I didn’t have to avoid people because I didn’t remember what I’d said or done around them. Or maybe worse, did remember.

What I didn’t recognize until years later may seem obvious to you in this short telling: my body was a mess. Without the ever-present assault, my body had a chance to rebalance, to regulate, and to do what it is so good at doing: helping me cope with life.

In those early days, I was just unlearning ineffective and damaging coping mechanisms. It took longer to develop good ones. I didn’t know what a fried-out adrenal system meant, and I couldn’t recognize how it felt to have a nervous system so overwhelmed that my only response was to ignore it and keep on moving. I didn’t understand that I was walking around holding my breath, my muscles tensed, and my mind reeling a million miles a minute. I didn’t recognize this jaggedness, but my life certainly reflected it.

I was young and young bodies can take a lot of abuse and keep on going. When I started paying attention and taking care, life in my body and mind began to smooth out. Over time, I would learn to love the relative tranquility of my body without the influences of alcohol and other drugs.

But learning to grow that tranquility has taken most of my life. Sure, I got rid of the most obvious obstacles to steadiness, but there were more. Over the years, I quit smoking cigarettes, I quit using caffeine, and I quit binging on candy.

Life gets better every step of the way and I've learned tons. Still, I am me; I’ve had a habit of learning things the hard way. Sometimes I don’t know when to back off.

Flashback 26 years, to a car accident that has meant chronic pain ever since. I’ve had surgeries and rehab and ongoing body work to deal with the issues from this accident.

So I dance and do yoga to keep strong and stay fit. But a couple of years ago, my right leg went numb from the knee down and the most impressive pain of my life came to stay with me. I spent almost six months with an inability to get up and walk around for more than a few minutes without excruciating pain taking over.

Here’s the thing—leading up to that injury I remember being in yoga class, my leg up around my neck, and saying to myself, “Wow, my hip hurts even though I’m doing all these hip-opening exercises. I wonder what I need to do.”

Uh…how about “Stop that!”

I don’t think that answer occurred to me. I wanted to do what I wanted to do. Who doesn’t? Plus, I felt like I was doing good things, helpful things. So I didn’t listen to the obvious answer that my hip was looking for.

I learned a lot about bodies during those months of lying on my bed staring at the ceiling. About patience and being quiet. About not pushing so hard; about being gentle and letting things come and go. During that time and since then, I’ve deepened my ability to treat my body with respect, and to honor what my body needs.

I don’t say this as some highfalutin ideal. It’s practical and time consuming work every single day. It takes practice and it takes energy. Sometimes, I tire of the work and get exasperated with having to deal with it. But I know the cost of ignoring it. So when the nerve damage is acting up in my leg, I stop and listen. What is the stress here? Why is this coming now? What do I need to know?

This works for all kinds of body sensations. Even something as mundane as a cold has something to say. So I listen. I meditate; I mentally scan my body for stress and ask what it’s about; I pay attention to my breathing; I watch the way I hold the muscles in my body.

These days, when my body starts to show signs of jaggedness, I cancel appointments, get still, and give my body the care and attention it needs.

Inevitably, in the listening and allowing, the pain or illness changes. This process of paying attention, and breathing into what’s there, and allowing it to inform me gives me more relief than a painkiller. It’s amazing how quickly you can get over an illness if you rest. We’re talking days, not weeks. Who knew?

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that our bodies know a lot not just about pain and illness, but also about tension, fear, anticipation, and joy, happiness, and contentedness. Our bodies don’t hide what we can’t or won’t pay attention to. They tell the story whether we are listening or not. It’s a story worth hearing.

What are you doing with your new year?

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 13:59:00 +0000

Early this morning, I looked up and saw the bright, clear moon shining in the dark sky. Wasn’t it moments ago that she was full? But she wanes and the night sky darkens as she disappears again.

And now it's the New Year. It’s 2013 and we’re all still here. I love the joke running around with the woman who says, “I don’t want to brag or anything, but this is like the fifth end of the world I’ve survived.”

My brother had the idea of printing up t-shirts saying, “Okay, it’s December 22 and the world didn’t end. Now, will you shut the *&#) up?!”

Yep, we’re all still here. New beginnings and fresh starts and time to consider just what we’re doing here. New years lend themselves to that kind of contemplation.

I remember hearing once that what you do at the beginning of the year, you’ll do all year long. It’s just an idea, of course. We can change what we do whenever we feel like it.

But still, I’ve planned this day based on what I want to do the rest of the year. I’ll spend some time writing, some time doing yoga and meditating. I’ll see some good friends, and hug my kids. I’ll practice my guitar and tell people that I’m glad they’re in my life. And I’ll watch the moon as she rises again and notice how quickly things change.

Happy New Year to you!

Gratitude

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 17:10:00 +0000

For firm mattresses and soft down comforters. And mango with sticky rice. Voicemail messages cheering me on. Unwavering love. The sound of small feet making their way down the stairs in the morning.

For the salty water of the sea. And fresh water lakes. Expansive, fast flowing rivers, especially the Mississippi. For tiny rivulets, and creeks running through the woods; for cold, clear springs; for the pond in Sheila and John’s backyard. Clean water for drinking; hot water for renewal.

For exercise balls in meeting rooms. And camaraderie of colleagues. For my office painted to match the sky. For chair massages and yoga and tai chi offered by my workplace. For children and dogs wandering the office and the resultant delight of my coworkers. For working together to change the way we have food.

For clean food, lovingly tended, and abundantly available. For the comfort and community of our coop. For a piece of hearty bread toasted, covered in avocado, a bit of salt and pepper, topped with a sprinkling of truffle oil. And for Halloween candy that disappears from my home.

For a car not stolen and still in my driveway every morning. For apologies and fresh starts. For forgiveness. For the way that a very bad decision can transform a life. For understanding that people change. For when we allow another’s change.

For laughter heard from another room, and laughter over the phone and across the breakfast table and in my arms; laughter around the circle of women and writers and friends and during the meeting and conference and class and amongst the gaggle of girls and as the boys spin past.

For countertops and tables filled with tomatoes from friends’ gardens and for roasting with balsamic vinegar and salt and olive oil. For basil all spring and summer and into the fall to match with tomato and fresh mozzarella: the Caprese summer.

For the girl morphed into woman and the depth of wisdom and understanding of people and systems and her place in them.

For standing in the garden of a friend and admiring an exquisite Japanese eggplant, so delicate and fine. For the sparrows and chickadees and crows and blue jay and cardinals and robins whose song lightens a spring morning.

For trading clean bathrooms for cleared gutters. For flying across the country to tend internal fires. For the careful study of what goes into our food. For the water fire ritual on a river whose name no one can pronounce in Providence, RI. For the ways every day that art makes life better.

For gobs of paint on cardboard and a boy whose favorite thing is to create a bit of beauty. For a mushroom log sitting under my maple tree. For a story well told and a room of careful listeners. For people who write. For being able to see what isn’t obvious. For intuition. For knowing. And for trying new ways to do something that isn’t working.

For time spent caring about hearts and history and families and how we can be who we really are. For Family Constellation work. For Tending the Fire Within work. For yoga and breathing and meditating and being here.

For love in all its versions; for gentle kisses on tips of fingers; for deep brown eyes that say yes; for five-year-old hugs so tight (“Can you still breathe? I can’t!”) For first love and old love, for love between friends and love of neighbor and store clerk and stranger. For big and strong love and gentle and all-encompassing love; for passionate and unapologetic and enduring and just-the-way-it-is love. For tenderness and being all there and for not running away though you’re terrified. For love.

For staying. For leaving. For my soft pair of lamb’s wool slippers that keep my feet warm. For smiles that keep my heart warm. For the way that it is. And the way that it will be.

Pursuing our passions: big ideas and practical details

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 11:54:00 +0000

I decided the other day that I would write four books in the next five years. Two of these books I’ve already researched well, one is a fun, easy book to put together, and one is a start-from-scratch idea.

Yes, I just started a new job, just agreed to be on another board, and I’m growing my Tending the Fire Within business. Oh, and I’m a single mom with three kids still at home and one out in the world.

But it’s been nine years since my first book came out. I’ve got some things that need to be written. So, here goes. I will keep this blog going as well, albeit with less frequency.

I am excited about all these opportunities, because for me, they all work together and fit so soundly into my life’s work: I connect people. To themselves, one another, and to ideas. That’s why I’m here.

I might be a little terrified of being overwhelmed, too. It’s happened before. But I need to stop just talking about these books and start writing them. I have the support. (Feel free to ask me how the writing is going.) I have the skill. And more to the point, I’m not attached. I’m making plans. Ambitious plans? Sure. I don’t know any other kind.

But these aren’t too ambitious. There are all kinds of people who have written (some famous) books in days or weeks. Five years is a long time. When we want to do something, sometimes the hardest part is getting past all the reasons why we can’t possibly make it happen.

A friend of mine has an effective reminder to herself that she’s using a lot these days. Whenever she starts imagining how challenging something might be to accomplish, she stops herself and says, “No barriers. Drop the barriers.”

This is a woman who has accomplished so much, and is brilliant in her field. Yet she, like most of us, has to resist the thousands of ways that we can sidetrack ourselves from doing what we really want to be doing. From being the person we know we are.

Conventional wisdom says that we have to know our life’s purpose to be happy. That we need to be clear about what we’re here to do. Figure out our passion and life gets a whole lot better, right?

Okay, so far, so good. It is excellent to get clear about what is going to help us feel alive, connected to our best selves and our loved ones, contributing our unique gifts to the world.

But that doesn’t fully cover this driving need that comes from the human heart. Because it’s in the doing where things get really fulfilling. It may seem obvious, but it’s not enough to know what we ought to be doing. For life to flow with ease and joy, we’ve actually got to figure out how to do the very thing that makes us tick.

I’ll admit to a bias towards doing. I like getting things done. So I will add the caveat here that we all have to figure out how to simply “be” as well. If you’re all jazzed up about the doing and you are puzzled by what “being” is…you may want to consider taking up a meditation practice. I’m convinced that there is nothing that meditating regularly doesn’t help. Meditating makes everything else work better. If we can be easy and loving with ourselves, it is so much easier to be that way with the rest of the world.

Then imagine what we can get done! Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not talking about being a CEO, or making tons of money, or winning an important prize. If fame and power and fortune happen along the way, then they do.

What I’m talking about is fulfilling the thing that calls from the depths of your heart, your soul, your very being. This is the reward that most of us are yearning for. What I’ve seen is that the people who can accomplish so much and stay healthy and kind are the people who have mastered the essential balance between internal and external work.

The internal work is knowing ourselves, taking a continuous survey of our internal landscapes, creating space and time for our hearts to sing, understanding that we are creatures of connection and passion that need ongoing nourishment in these realms.

And the external work is creating the practical, real steps to support the very thing that makes our hearts sing. It’s setting up support and practices that keep us on the right road.

Knowing what we’re here to do, we can line up the rest of our lives to support that one thing. Even doing the laundry and mowing the lawn become service to the thing that we must do and accomplish and contribute.

Not in a frantic, obsessive sort of way. But in a practical way. In a flowing way. In a committed way. In a way that trusts that there is enough time. There is enough energy. There is enough. If we’re tending to the balance of internal and external factors, there is enough.

For me? I’ll make breakfast for my kids, and keep seeing who they are, and love them up. I’ll work hard in my business ventures, giving my best strategic thinking and powerful work to the causes that I’m passionate about. I’ll meditate and do yoga and sleep and eat well. I will delight in my family and friends.

And I’ll write at least a thousand words each day. It’s a practical, real number. It is a manageable number, a realistic expectation. It might be a pain some days. I may write a thousand words of pure drivel. But something good will emerge. I’ll keep on along this road. I like where it’s going.

Never underestimate the power of a small group...

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 02:44:00 +0000

"Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has." -- Margaret Mead

I recently completed a year-long commitment to self-development work called the Wheel of Initiation. I’m left in wonder at the power of a small group of people to change the world.

We did change the world. For fifteen people, the world became a shade brighter, a bit easier to accept, and a less random and confusing place.

The world became what it has been all along: a beautiful, supportive place where people can see all of us and find us more than worthy of love and respect. Most importantly, we were able to see ourselves in this way.

What this means is that fifteen people will move out into the world differently. We’ll be more connective and less combative. We’ll accept more and resist less. We’ll find ways to get to places where we want to be more and figure out how to stay out of places we don’t really belong. We’ll say yes to life’s sweetness. And when it’s time to say no, we’ll be more likely to do that, too.

Bit by bit, we’ll all become more of who we really are. We’ll contribute to our lives and the world as a whole the very gifts that are ours alone to give.

A while back, I was having a conversation with a friend about hope. He said that genuine hope – hope that is based on concrete and tangible reasons – is hard to come by.

There’s no question that the world offers a wide and deep selection of reasons to feel hopeless. There is so much pain, so much suffering, for the people of this planet. And much of this pain comes from one another. It is easy to drift into disconnection, into despair.

Which is why I’m such an enormous believer in small groups of people, doing the work of self development together. When we are a part of a group that is committed to seeing ourselves and one another, working towards harmony, life makes more sense. Life works more easily, we smooth the way for ease in our other relationships. We don’t get as caught up in our own default patterns that don’t work. Those things that we do even though we know they don’t work. But that, somehow, we do over and over again.

But if we are committed to changing our outlooks, if we can dedicate ourselves to seeing and understanding our inner landscape, and if we have a supportive and loving group to do it with us, slowly or suddenly, life begins to morph. It begins to make more sense. We begin to not take things personally. We begin to understand that we are completely and solely responsible for our experiences. We begin to accept people and situations as they are, and not keep expecting them to be how we would like them to be.

These are tall orders. And yet a group of committed people, well led, delivers every time.

I started joining my first groups when I was eighteen-years-old. I marveled then at how I could do this: I could do this thing called life! This realization after so much pain and hardship. And then, for a while, I imagined that I knew what I needed to know and I could manage life on my own. I left groups for about ten years. Want to guess what happened?

I lost my sense of serenity, my ability to remember that my life is my creation. I created and lived in pain. When I joined groups again, I saw the peace in my life return. Now I know that my life works best when I am working with others. I find the ways to connect and keep myself supported and loved in groups.

These days, I’m a part of any number of groups. Self-development groups, fellowship groups, writing groups, and women’s groups. No matter what I ever think I know, I will always be a part of a group striving to live life well.

These days, I know that to be the best I can be – mother, daughter, friend, lover, writer, woman, person – I need a solid group.

The miracle is that any group of people—committed and well-led—will serve this purpose. It doesn’t matter the history, the depth of pain, the amount of loss, the volume of hardship that the group has endured. I’ve been in thousands of groups, I’ve led scores of groups. It is always the same: the human being is an adaptable creature. Given love, support, and instruction, we can help one another becoming loving and supportive. Think of it. Any group of people, with any amount of pain, can be transformed.

How’s that for hopeful?

Six things your body needs every day

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 17:12:00 +0000

Earlier this summer, I camped with my kids and a group of other families. We’ve been doing this long weekend together for many years and in my family, it is the highlight of the summer.

One of the great things about the weekend is how much time we are outside. There’s the twenty-six mile bike ride. (I didn’t do that this year, but the new world champion is a six-year-old.) There’s swimming and volleyball and yoga on the riverside. Why don’t we do more yoga outside?

And there was one moment when one of my kids was feeling sick: the result of the twenty-six mile bike ride and overdoing it at the candy shop (some people call it a gas station) that is the half-way point.

So there I was, lying on the ground with him in the woods, thinking about the power of the earth to cleanse our bodies. Many of us have so little contact with the earth. We go from homes, to cars, to indoor gyms, to offices, to the grocery store and back home again. All with air-conditioning. All with concrete and more between us and the actual earth. Mowing the yard may be as close as some of us get to outdoor activity.

But our bodies want to be outside. And this got me thinking about what else our bodies want. My body got a lot of what it wants on the camping trip: riverside yoga, gentle walks, lots of hugs from people I love, some great thinking, singing with others, and good food.

There are five things that I think a body wants every day. We can throw in a couple more that are nice, but these five are what your body really needs to be healthy, clear and strong.

1. Sleep. Sleep is undervalued in our Starbucks-on-every-corner world. And yet eight hours a night makes the world a starkly better place to live in. People who sleep eight hours a night are less irritable and less stressed. They’re more productive, they can think better. They keep excess weight off more easily, and they have better sex. If you think you’re doing just fine on six hours a night, try eight for six weeks and notice the differences in your life. Try a bedtime and a wake-up time. It will change your life.

2. Good food and water. Real food, like fruits and vegetables and whole grains, will make your body happy and better able to help you do what you want. This doesn’t include food served out of a package or at most restaurants. Teach your body to crave salads. It will. And really, the eight glasses of water a day thing? It’s true: at least eight. Water is part of the on-going flushing system our bodies needs to keep things moving (next point). When we give our bodies nourishing foods, our bodies become healthy, calm, and vibrant.

3. Movement. We don’t have to be ambitious athletes. We don’t have to be the best or to push ourselves into shape. What we need is to move every day. Our muscles and minds need to move together. We need to align our tissues to our tensions -- to release them all. And sweat. Sweating means that stuff is moving. A healthy body is a body that is moving stuff through: moving food through, moving emotions through, moving through whatever comes. Living well requires movement.

4. Mindfulness. We can call this whatever we want: paying attention, noticing how we behave, counting to ten or responding instead of reacting. But if we want bodies that are healthy and strong and ready to face the challenges of life, we must bring our minds and hearts along. It’s just that simple. One doesn’t do well without the others doing well. So learn to meditate. Take quiet baths by candlelight. Think before speaking. Breathe before moving. Notice.

5. Hugs. I’ve written about hugs in this space before. We just all need to touch one another more. When we are embraced by another, our bodies release a hormone associated with loving feelings. Hello? Don’t we all need that? I’m lucky to come from a place where hugging is the preferred form of greeting. There is a pile of research that says that touch is critical for our well-being. So if you’re not a hugger, work into it. Hug the people close to you. Often. And then start asking others if you can give them a hug. Get the good juices running through your blood.

6. Go outside. Breathe real air. Feel the ground beneath your feet. Roll down a hill. Walk in the woods. Plant a garden. Hear the ancient birdsong, the crickets, and the buzz of a bee. Jump in a lake. Walk in the sand. Climb a tree. Discover a new plant. See life teeming all around and your part in it. Your body, your mind, and your heart will all recognize their place.

Last day of summer and a new kindergartner

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 22:37:00 +0000

It’s the last day of summer. Oh, I know that technically summer doesn’t end for another few weeks. But today is the last day before school starts. The last day that I have my youngest child home. The last day of my life that I will have any small child at home with me during the school week.

Molly is more than ready. She’s already asking if she can take the bus. No. Not yet. She may not need to ease into this, but I do. I’ll take her to Mrs. Henry’s class for now. Molly’s only five-years-old. Do we really send our five-year-olds out into the world for thirty-five hour weeks away from home? Apparently we do. That’s what I am going to do first thing tomorrow morning.

Today, though, we had a leisurely breakfast. We did laundry together and cleaned the porch. We played Connect Four and danced in the rain. Well, she danced. I worked and she had a play date with a friend. Next comes the evening dinner, all of us together, as we settle in for the night, clean up and play one more game before reading and bath and bed. Today, it was our life, the life that I’ve had the luxury to give to my children for the past thirteen years.

If I’m honest, though, I’m ready for my kids to go back to school. Even Molly. There have been times over the past month when all three of them need me for something in the same moment. I look at them and a voice in my head screams, “Don’t you all have someplace to be?” Mostly, that voice stays in my head. It’s real, but it’s not the main thing.

The main thing is that I am so grateful to have worked from home. Even when I’m busy on the phone or writing to meet some deadline, I can still break for a lunch together, or to read a book, or to run someone somewhere.

With the last child, the questions are the same as when the older ones went, but they seem to have more weight. She’s the last one. She’s my dream girl. I adore her.

Sometimes, I’m sad that I can’t keep Molly to myself. That I am sending her out into the broad and not-always-benevolent world. Will she be okay? Will she be pummeled? Will she be brave? Will she learn things I’d rather she wouldn’t? Will she pick herself up? Will she do good things?

It helps to know the answers: Yes and yes and yes again.

One of the things that makes parenting bearable is that we, as a species, are so damn resilient. An advantage of having four kids is that sooner or later, you begin to realize that what you do as a parent is only part of the picture. They are who they are. We can help them be that, or we can hinder them. But ultimately, it’s phenomenal how often kids are really okay. Even when life is tough. Even when there’s stuff to deal with. If you love them and pay attention and give them what they need, most of the time, people are okay.

Molly, at five-years-old, has resiliency down. She loves people; she’s curious; she’s kind. Whatever happens, Molly is ready for it. So off she goes.

I’m ready, too.

Listening: You gotta stop talking

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 17:22:00 +0000

I was part of a group the other day and one woman was telling a sensitive story. Another woman in the group kept interrupting her. She was encouraging her, affirming what the first woman was trying to say, but she was interrupting nonetheless.

I marveled, not for the first time, at how much we interrupt one another. We talk over one another, we agree and encourage, we argue, we finish someone else’s sentences, and we compete with one another for the next moment.

Ultimately, a lot of us don’t listen very well.

There are, of course, all kinds of conversations. There is rollicking and rowdy banter that doesn’t appear to require our deepest attention. There’s the “snap, snap, zing” kind of ricochet that is a blast to participate in and doesn’t bode well for deep thoughts. There’s thoughtful and intricate conversation that works to figure something out. There’s heartfelt and sincere conversation that really does ask us to keep our mouths quiet. And there are group conversations.

I spend a lot of my life in group conversations. Groups of strangers, groups where people barely know one another, groups where people have been together for years. Groups can give us some of our best moments in life. A group that works well together can focus on an idea or support someone or come up with new ways of seeing that surpass an individual’s capability.

And sometimes, people in groups talk over one another. This isn’t always a bad thing. People are used to many layers of conversations and half-listening, and throwing ideas around. Our brains can manage a lot of information and stimuli.

But what about when someone has a delicate thing to discuss, or an idea that needs careful consideration? What about when someone is going to tell you something that really matters?

When someone has something important to say, a group that doesn’t know how to be quiet and listen can miss out. There are a few key ways this happens.

· The side conversation: Two people a sparked by the main conversation to some other fascinating topic. Pretty quickly, you’ve got a group divided.

· Talking over. This happens all the time. One person isn’t finished with a sentence, and another person is jumping in with her thought.

· Someone listening who can’t resist telling a similar story about himself. The person speaking has a story or a situation he’s describing and there is often someone who had the same thing, except bigger, faster, and more important. The new story could be relevant and interesting. But more likely, this is a time to learn how to zip it.

· The encourager. Often, there is someone who wants the speaker to feel comfortable and, to that end, makes lengthy comments and encouraging remarks. This can turn into a kind of narration of a person’s story, rather than a listening to a person’s story.

I’ve done each of these things. And if you spend any amount of time in groups, I’m guessing you have your own version of not listening, too. I’d like to think I’ve gotten better since I’ve made a conscious effort to speak up less and shut up more. I tend to hear more that way. But I know how challenging it is, even for respectful and well-intentioned people, to listen well in a group. There is just so much to think, so much to say, so much to consider in a dynamic group full of spirited people, talking about fascinating things: Oh! How not to jump in?

This doesn’t describe all the groups we’re in. I happen to be very lucky on this score. Nevertheless, many of us spend a lot of time in groups. If the group isn’t fascinating, it may be even more tempting to cut people off. If we’re running the group, it’s always helpful to establish guidelines for interacting from the beginning. Or in the middle, if required. It’s never a bad time to request an agreement about group dynamics.

There are a couple helpful ideas and traditions to help groups work better together. Many groups use an old Native American “talking stick.” Whoever has the stick is talking, and everyone else is listening. This is a more formal gesture, obviously, but the stick (or the pen, coffee cup, whatever) makes it clear who ought to be talking. Anyone who wants to talk needs to wait for the stick. This is a good one for times when emotions are running high.

Another thing to do is to make an agreement that there will be a one-second pause between speakers. That pause allows people to absorb what one person has said, and to clear the way for a new speaker. Peter Palmer talks about this and much more about group dynamics in his very excellent book, A Hidden Wholeness: A Journey Toward an Undivided Life.

Mostly, what I’ve noticed is that groups tend to be either self-regulating over time, or they fall apart. If you are in a situation where the group won’t be allowed to fall apart (like a work group), then it’s even more critical that people feel like the group works.

Listening is an art and skill that requires patience, respect, and humility. Like all skills, it also requires practice. The rewards of listening—better connection—are well worth the work.

The invisible dance of mystery

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 18:09:00 +0000

Last night I went to the Mississippi River with a group of women. I think of this river as the country’s aorta, the largest river pumping life from the top to the bottom of the country.

It’s been a big part of my life, too. I remember as a child stepping over the headwaters at Itasca State Park in northern Minnesota. For the years that I lived in Minneapolis, I spent hours and days of time on its banks, watching the water flow, the barges float along, the crows gather in gaggles, and the trees change from season to season. My kids learned to spell the river’s name because every time we drove over a bridge, we’d sing it. You couldn’t stop until you’d reached the other side so the final “I” was always a stretched-out note: M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-IIIIIIIIIIIIII....

But last night, it was almost dark by the time we arrived at the park along the river. The sky was a rich vermillion, and the still-green trees stood surrounded by a flattened mat of hay-colored grass, long-past parched.

We laid out our blankets and ate our picnic. We had spent the previous hour singing songs to one of the women’s dead mother. She died suddenly—shockingly—when my friend was just seventeen-years-old. Yesterday marked thirty years. So we honored this woman. And we talked, as this group always does, of what matters most in our lives: of love and loss and heartache and hope and sex and good food and men and children and plans for the future and fear and doubt and ultimately, we spoke of trust. That life is doing what it ought to be and us along with it.

The sun was well below the horizon and darkness was around us when we noticed them. You could only see them when a car drove by and the light shone across the park’s dead grass. Hundreds of white moths, fluttering and flying just inches above the ground. When the car’s lights disappeared, so did the moths. Even as I watched them, I couldn’t quite believe it. I had never seen these delightful little creatures in this way before.

I woke this morning remembering them dancing, marveling at all that goes on around us, and sometimes when we don’t even notice.

Don't take what isn't yours

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 20:19:00 +0000

When I first started developing this work of Tending the Fire Within, I was in a particular moment in my life. I had wrapped up a divorce. I was going to write a brutal divorce, but that would be redundant, right? They are all brutal in their own ways.

Mine was brutal in the “I-think-I’m-going-to-throw-up-because-I-can’t-believe-that-we-have-to-do-this” kind of way. We were both so sad and a bit incredulous that love couldn’t carry the day.

I made it through that. And more recently, I had spent several months mostly laying in my bed staring up at my unpainted ceiling. A major back injury meant that I couldn’t stand for much more than about three minutes. That injury and its recovery changed my life as much as any workshop I’ve ever been taken.

And as I emerged from that pain, as I grew in strength and purpose, a few things became clear. I needed to make some major changes in my work. And I had gained some hard-won insights into how to move through hardships and to morph them into something new and beautiful.

One morning, as I was attempting to accomplish some piece of writing that wasn’t coming together, I was giving myself a little talk. Really, one thing kept coming: “Stop f*#@ing around and be who you really are.”

I come back to this little mantra often and for a number of reasons. First of all, I can only be good if I’m being myself. And to be my true self takes a persistent awareness, acceptance, and love of what I’m seeing. When all that’s working, life flows. And who doesn’t like a life that flows?

I long-considered naming the new enterprise this mantra, but it had its obvious limitations. Still, the spirit of these words reminds me to stay clear about what is mine: to feel, to do, and to be. And what isn’t.

That’s why I’m telling you about this now. Because this past weekend, I had an opportunity to do some work that was all about flow and acceptance and awareness.

I spent the weekend working with Peter Devries and Constellation Works. This work is a powerful exploration of our legacy as handed down from our parents and our other ancestors. We, ultimately, get to decide what parts of our legacy are ours to carry and which we can hand back or set down.

In this work, there is no sitting on the fence, no dodging the issues, no waiting on the sidelines to see what happens. This stuff only works when you dive in. Either you are ready to get somewhere different, or you just don’t do this work. Peter is an amazingly skilled facilitator, and we were ready to go.

As Peter was explaining to us the first night, this isn’t work you can describe in words very well; you have to do it to understand. I found this to be true; many people have told me about this work for years. Doing the work is altogether something else. Because while the work may be based on concepts and ideas and practices, the real art of the work is in touching our innermost core, where we store our unseen impulses, our surprising longings, our doubts and anxieties that stop us. Touching, at least as importantly, the places in us where we are all connected.

So, I won’t describe the work. But I want to talk about one of the concepts that I found useful. Peter told us about the idea of “healthy shrinking.” When we consider where life comes from, we see that life comes from big people to little people. Over and over again, big people give little people life. What a gift. And yet, sometimes our parents aren’t up for the task before them. And sometimes a child grows up quickly and assumes the role of a “big person” when they are, in actual life, a small person who needs care.

There is a loss in not being allowed to be a small person. And there may be a pattern that emerges of strength and “bigness.” The one who gets things done. The one who takes care of everything. There is a some good in this, of course.

But of course, none of us can take care of everything. We all need one another. We all need help. We all need the time to “be small.” And so we consider healthy shrinking. Letting go of what isn’t ours to deal with. What never was.

We give back what isn’t ours, we set it down. Then, and only then, can we become ourselves.

Green burials the natural extension of home funerals

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 22:49:00 +0000

One grave holds the cremated remains of a soldier killed in Afghanistan. Another, the remains of the body of a stillborn baby. And another, the body of a mother, a painter, and a community pillar.

These were, then, people just like people in any cemetery.

But the graves and the cemeteries are different. They are hidden among in the rolling and untamed hills, a plot here, another over there. You could find them with a GPS, that’s how they’re plotted. But left to your eyes alone, you would likely imagine that you’re simply hiking in a pristine and lovely wood.

A tangled old burr oak stands with arms spread wide over the child’s section; there is no hint that there are bodies buried here. There are no grave markers, no neat rows, no mowed lawn, and no flower arrangements. Here, there are just the trees, the forest undergrowth, the paths, the plentiful monarch butterflies, and the birdsong of the woods.

This is one of two giant burr oaks that frame one section at the Natural Path Cemetery.

This weekend, I went with a group of my colleagues on a tour of two green cemeteries around the Madison, Wisconsin, area. My colleagues and I form the Threshold Care Circle, a group of educators and guides for home funerals and green burials.

We were touring these green cemeteries so that we can gather information to begin the work of creating a green cemetery here where I live, about two hours north of Madison.

A green cemetery is dedicated to keeping a piece of land in as natural a state as possible while allowing people to bury their loved ones. The requirements vary from cemetery to cemetery, but generally this means no embalming, no elaborate caskets, no concrete grave liners. Some green cemeteries don’t allow markers, some do.

The path to the rock circle at Circle Cemetery in Barneveld, WI.

We visited two Wisconsin green cemeteries: Circle Cemetery, in Barneveld, and Natural Path Sanctuary in Verona. They each have a beautiful piece of land where people can bury their loved ones in this simple way. The number of green cemeteries is growing throughout the country as more people begin to understand that they have choices.

Circle Cemetery, in Barneveld, WI, has a rock circle that is made of rocks people have brought from all over the world.

Our group, the TCC, exists to help people plan and realize their options when it comes to thinking about end of life, post-death care of the body, and burial.

Most people today rely exclusively on others to take care of preparations for their loved ones: someone else pronounces him dead, someone else washes the body, someone else dresses the body, someone else lays him out, and someone else buries him.

New growth is the only hint of burial sites at the Natural Path Cemetery in Verona, WI.

And there are a lot of things in a “typical” funeral and burial these days that simply aren’t required or really necessary. Embalming isn’t legally required or almost ever necessary. A casket isn’t necessary, a concrete grave liner isn’t necessary.

Many people in these green cemeteries were simply buried in a shroud, or, in the case of the baby, wrapped in a blanket, placed in a handmade basket, and lowered into the ground. The family and friends stood in the woods and helped to fill the grave, singing, crying, and saying their goodbyes in meaningful ways.


Some green cemeteries allow markers. This is nestled between two trees at the Circle Cemetery.

It’s easy, walking through the woods with a bunch of like-minded people, to marvel at the simple plots where the land has already begun to reclaim the area and to appreciate the beauty and simplicity of this approach. Families who take this approach tend to feel more involved and useful. For people who have lived their entire lives being conscious of the environment, this option feels right.

In those places, as a bluebird flitted from one tree to another near us, it’s easy to forget how threatening and scary and just plain weird the ideas of home funerals and green burials are for some people. So part of our work is to help people understand that this is the way that we buried our dead for so long. We took care of the people we loved. We prepared their bodies, washed them, dressed them, and laid them out. We buried them with the help of our loved ones and our communities.

This way is still a valid way. Of course, there are those who would prefer to have someone else handle the preparations.

A child's grave blends into the natural setting at Natural Path Cemetery in Verona, WI.

But everyone I know who has been involved in the actual work of caring for their dead or being involved in the burial in some way has found the work incredibly rewarding. We don’t have to hand off one of the most important things that we’ll do in life to strangers. We can learn to do this work. With planning and help, this kind of involvement and care of our loved ones can help us say goodbye with honor, care, and love.

You can find out more about the Threshold Care Circle at www.thresholdcarecircle.org, Natural Path Sanctuary at www.naturalpathsanctuary.org, and Circle Cemetery at www.circlesanctuary.org/cemetery.

Surrendering to the single task in front of you

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 18:46:00 +0000

The word “multitasking” has been around only since the 1960s when we first found that computers could perform several functions at once. It was a marvel to behold. Since then, we’ve incorporated multitasking into our daily lexicon and decided that we, too are multitaskers.

But we’ve also had plenty of research that shows that humans, for the most part, are simply incapable of performing well doing many things at once. We are, by and large, single-task processors.

So many of us resist these facts. We want to believe that we can handle the email, and the phone, the project in front of us, and the interruptions from others, all while eating lunch and listening to music.

Maybe we can. Just not as well. And often, not as quickly. Still, some researchers believe that we can train our brains to handle many tasks at once.

Perhaps what we can hope to become really good at is being a quick-change artist. To be really good at what we do requires being completely focused on the task in front of us, and being able to switch from task to task capably.

Watch the people who always remember names and details, who absorb information and use it well, who are critical and analytical thinkers, and who have a keen sense for what works. Almost without fail, you’ll find someone who engages fully with what is right in front of her. No matter how menial the task or the low the rank of the person she is talking to, she is right there fully involved. And when the next thing comes, she’s right with it again.

It doesn’t matter if your task is running a school district or cleaning people’s teeth or teaching kids mathematics or selling a product or mothering a child or working at a deli, we all have competing demands for our time, attention, and care.

Since multitasking doesn’t really work (I know, except for you), we have to learn to put one thing down and pick something else up with excellent transitions and with laser-focus.

You’re engaged with clients, then you’re finishing a report for a meeting, you’re presenting your ideas, and then you’re crunching data for analysis. The morning spins by. But the way that we transition can help us in our next task. Something as simple as a 10-second conscious inhale and exhale where you say in your mind, “Okay, done with that for now. Next!”

If we give each one of our tasks its time and place, chances are that each would be handled with more clarity and more finesse.

photo: Bart Everson

So I say if you’re going to write, write. And if you’re going to make calls, do that. And if you’re going to eat lunch, maybe you’d be more inclined to eat better if you really paid attention to what you were eating.

When you become a quick-change artist, you figure out how to give your full attention to whatever you are doing. If you simply have to eat lunch at your desk maybe you could pause every time you took a bite, look at your food, smell it, and say, “And now, I’m going to eat this food. Oh look, it is cold and crunchy and tart. Excellent.”

When you quick-change back to the work at your desk, you can fully be back to that work. Of course the best-case scenario is that you take your lunch out to the tree in the park and sit there and eat it. The reality is that when we do multitask, we not only don’t do our tasks as well, but they actually take us longer to do them because we have to refocus our energy so many times.

But I know how life works. I’ve got three kids at home. I run a business. I am thoroughly engaged in my life and I’ve got a million things going on at any given moment. I make dinner while I help kids with homework. I talk to clients about workshops while I answer my kid’s question patiently written on a scrap of paper: “Can I go to the library?”

And sometimes we have to do these things. Most of the time they work just fine. But more and more, I’m working to do one thing at a time.

If I am thinking about the seven hundred and fifty three other things that have to happen while I’m talking to a client, I’m not going to give that client the best I can. And I’m all about giving my best to whatever I’m doing. When I don’t? I’ve lost an opportunity to give the world something good. It’s lousy for the situation, a drag for others involved, and ultimately, doing less than my best just brings me down, too. So while I do my quick-change artist impression regularly, for the things that matter most, you’ll find my phone off, my email shut down, my door locked, and me doing my work. When I need my best, I give my full attention to what’s in front of me.

But even without such extreme measures (No phone? No email? No music. Wha??) we can bring some form of this kind of single-focus to everything we do. It may require surrendering to the task. It may mean some deep breathes while you quell the panic of ALL THAT MUST BE DONE so that you can concentrate on the one thing in front of you. It may just mean saying to yourself something like, “I’m here doing this now.” No matter how overwhelmed we are the only way forward is through the pile: do this thing, do it well, and then get to the next thing. And the next, and the next.

How about you? Do you consider yourself a great multitasker? How often are you doing just one thing? How do you move through what must be done? I’d love to hear your strategies.

Nothing like hanging out in criminal court to help you appreciate what works

noreply@blogger.com (Tending the Fire Within) — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 18:37:00 +0000

I went to court this morning and watched the proceedings on several criminal cases. I was there to see what happened in the cases of the two young men who stole my car earlier this year.

One of my young thieves, as I’ve taken to calling them, was there with some people, probably his mother and sister. He waived a hearing. As they were getting up to leave the courtroom, I wondered if I ought to jump up and follow them. I wanted to meet him, and his mother. But it didn’t seem like the right timing.

The other young man didn’t show. He blew off his court date. His mother called to say that he had hadn’t been around for a day and a half. This is the guy who already had one felony conviction by the time he was sixteen-years-old.

Before I knew he wouldn’t show, I sat in the courtroom for an hour or so, and listened to the mundane proceedings of a typical Monday morning criminal docket.

There was the jerk representing himself against the woman who was filing harassment charges. She was scared, but she answered the district attorney’s questions about dozens of unwanted phone calls, about the guy showing up at her work, about the morning she woke up to have the tires slashed on several vehicles in her driveway.

When it came time to cross-examine the witness, the guy’s first question was, “How is your new grandchild?” The prosecutor objected and the judge sustained the objection. Please people, if you’re ever charged with a crime, get an attorney.

Then there was the group of young people who were charged with a number of burglaries. They looked young and scared, and they all dressed at least somewhat appropriately for a courtroom. I’ve spent a lot of time in courtrooms and I’m chagrined when defendants show up in t-shirts and jeans or worse. Nothing says, “I really don’t give a shit” more clearly.

Like the next guy who was charged with selling methamphetamines. He sported a scraggly few days of beard, a black crumpled t-shirt and jeans. Who knows, maybe he just doesn’t care.

It’s a tough world to stomach, the Monday morning criminal docket. It’s the stuff of could-have-beens and eye-rolling and grandmothers crying and mothers sitting beside their young ones, mostly men, and feeling… what? Sad and disheartened? Ashamed and embarrassed? Defiant and resentful? Maybe some of all of it.

And what about the young men? What about that guy in his twenties who was convicted this morning of two counts of battery and disorderly conduct after a drunken fight with a woman he knows. The one who says he was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder and has lived with his mom, unemployed for the most part, since he dropped out of high school? When the judge says, “I want you to turn your life around,” what does that mean for this guy?

Is his mother helping him by giving him a place to live? Is he at all interested in changing his life?

The struggles of young people, and particularly, young men, have enormous consequences for our neighborhoods, our communities, and our country and world as a whole. Can we help young men find another path? Is it our responsibility? What can we do? How can we teach our young people to find some inner strength that will lead them to better things for themselves?

I was contemplating all these questions as I came home from court this morning. I came home to my peaceful, friendly block full of great neighbors and close community. And that’s when I saw him. One of my favorite neighbor guys, sitting in the sun, in the classic meditative pose. He’s just 12-years-old, but his life has certainly had some bumps and bruises. His brother was killed in a car accident two years ago, and that loss has been enormous for him.

But there he was, taking some time to do what his father and mother have taught him. To sit quietly. To become less reactive. To gather peace. To know himself well.

When the world comes knocking at his door again—as it certainly will—with pain or temptation to do something stupid, or an opportunity to do something he knows is wrong, this young man will have some resources to fall back on. He’ll have a better ability to know himself, to not have to prove something, to stay clear about what is right.

I don’t imagine that everyone will teach their young people to meditate. But what a different world it would be if we did.

In any case, today, after the criminal docket, the sight of my young neighbor sitting steady in the sun was a beautiful sign of hope. I’ll take it.