A Glimmer of Light

in /by

Leonard Cohen said, “There is a crack in everything—that is how the light gets in.” I think I have seen a glimmer of light, and I want to share that story.

The last few days, after watching my country’s divisions played out on the screen, I have awakened with tears in my eyes. A way of grieving.

After a recent Zoom class of writers, I flipped on the TV and propped myself up on pillows to watch the news. At first I was busy picking at a late dinner and only half watching, but then I caught a glimpse of an unexpected image on my screen. A black man, handcuffed, is held to the ground, knee in his neck. The video seems to go on forever, and I sit up in stunned disbelief. Suddenly I jump to my feet. “Get up!” I shout at the policeman on the TV screen before I realize how futile my words are. “Get up!!” I scream again. But it is too late.

Since that moment, the moment of witnessing George Floyd’s death, I have tried to write my blog 23 times. Today is 24. Today I think I see a glimmer of light and my words are coming. I can only hope to make sense of this jumble.

Even before Floyd’s death and the riots, life amid a pandemic was filled with painful losses. What are you grieving? What are you missing? I grieve for my work with writers and cancer patients. I miss human contact with not only writers, but friends, children, and grandchildren. Like most of us, I am working hard to rework this new chapter in my life. In the past two months I have been teaching on Zoom. I thought I would struggle with how impersonal it seemed. I like to see the eyeballs of writers in my classes, and I love to hear the timbre of a voice vibrating with pain—or lilting with joy. When asked to teach online during the pandemic, I went back to online teaching–but with reluctance.

Within a week, my friend, Jan Adrian of Healing Journeys, made a believer of me. A Zoom class could work. She brought together an incredible group of strong women from across the country who had been friend-sisters for years. Together they had formed a nonprofit to help those facing illness to not only survive-but to thrive. Together we spent seven weeks reading and writing our way through The Story You Need to Tell. A wise sage with bobbed hair, Jan was the first to offer her story.  When we read Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Journey,” Jan cried. She took us inside the words of that poem. Words that made her see her life in a new way. A path that allowed her some time ago to leave a destructive relationship and move her life forward to new meaning. Courageously.

In weeks to come we wore silly hats, laughed at ourselves, and shared powerful insights from our work. Given the challenges of our times, I was grateful that all of these women, wove meaning around our reading. Every one of them. They asked important questions. How does our brain hold our stories? How can we rewrite our understanding of our broken stories?  Carol asked, “How can one overcome a “stuck story”? We talked.

Then Carol showed us how to overcome a stuck story. She bravely modeled how it was done. In reading her old journals, she realized when she had stopped managing the Healing Journeys conferences of this group, she felt like a failure and assumed she had let these dear friends down. After years this painful perception was still trapped in Carol’s brain. Once she shared it, her friends helped her see this story in a new light. They viewed Carol as the hub of the group, the planner, a beautiful soul of deep wisdom and insight. After class, Carol explained to me, “This is helping my healing. Truly.” The light was breaking through the cracks.

After class I scrolled through the news and found a clip from AZ Central that should have been in the headlines. Last night in downtown Phoenix, minutes before an 8 o’clock curfew was to be imposed, police in riot gear stood in front of 100 protestors. Then a young woman stepped forward and asked,

“I’m asking you in this small group right now what these police can do to concede for you guys to go home. I have a brave young man right here who has suggested that if at least one officer takes a knee with us, I can get all of these children home safe. Do you guys agree?” she asked. The crowd replied, “Yes!”

Then it happened. At least three officers kneeled. It was quite a moment. The crowd began cheering, applauding, and calling, “Thank you.” The young woman announced their demands had been met, and the crowd disbursed peacefully. There is some light slipping though some cracks. May we work hard to find it.

Holding to Hope

in /by

Recently I mailed my granddaughter Macy a copy of a book, Esperanza Rising. It is a book about a young girl who faces many hard losses—her father, her home. I thought a book that held to hope might help Macy navigate the hard bumps that might come of living through this unusual time.

When I was Macy’s age, nine, I received a similar book. My dad brought home a copy of Little Women as a surprise. I imagine it was a peace offering. I thanked him, but I suspect I purposely left that book on the kitchen table for a couple of weeks before I opened it.

At that time, I was struggling with a world crisis of my own. Not a pandemic—but an unexpected move overseas. My dad was a good man, but he had a penchant for adventure and travel. When I was seven, he was offered a job in Japan that he had planned to take until my mother said, “No. We don’t speak Japanese.”  When I was eight, he tried to accept a position in Germany, but my mother put her foot down again. “We don’t speak German!” But at age nine, I was uprooted from a school and friends I loved, and I was hauled off to a new life in Kilburn, a small coal-mining town outside  Derby, England, a country where we could speak English. Still, the cockney accents of our new neighbors sounded foreign to me.

My first day of school remains scorched in my memory. I wore a bright red, full-skirted dress, not the required green wool jumper with starched shirt and striped tie. I also lacked the knickers required for gym class where I toppled off a pommel horse, landed on my head, and displayed my cotton undies for my new classmates. For years I considered this moment the biggest humiliation of my life.

After school I trudged home in the English drizzle, sunk into my mother’s arms, and I cried. I wanted to go home to America. I wanted my friends. I wanted to hear voices I could understand. I did not want be “the other” or the odd girl in the school. In the coming days, I seriously contemplated running away. But it was 3,895 miles to Indiana, and although I was only nine, I was fully aware that my savings of a little over $4 would not get me there.

I was miserable. Not even my new uniform made me feel part of a class that called me “Red” because my cheeks colored with humiliation after my fall from grace in gym class. By the second week, I had my first British friend. Janet. Her father was a coalminer like most of the dads in my class. My new friend helped me learn how to straddle the horse in gym class, how to dump peas and vinegar on my French fries at lunch, and how to master the local accent. It was cool to say, “Hey up, ducky?” or to use someone’s nickname. Turned out that having a nickname was a good thing.

I began to adjust, and to signal this to my dad, I started reading Little Women. Turned out that book helped, too. Discovering a character like Jo who felt weird and struggled with how she could fit in her world comforted me. She showed me how to be strong.

Today, granddaughter Macy and I sat on Zoom reading Esperanza Rising together. Suddenly Macy paused and looked up at me on her screen with the earnest eyes of a nine-year-old. “Gigi, I feel bad for Esperanza. She had really sad things happen in her life.”

“She did.” I nodded.

“I am glad that our lives are not as hard as hers.”

“Me, too,” I said, sucking in a deep breath. She continued to read.

I continued to hold to hope.

Embracing Peace in a Pandemic

in /by

Two weeks ago as the coronavirus was silently stealing into our lives, I made my usual weekly trip to Costco. But, of course, it was not my usual weekly trip. It was sheer mayhem! People were pushing and shoving, grabbing boxes, crashing carts into one another. Elbows poised for attack. Faces wiped of smiles. The clerk told me the paper towels and toilet paper had been cleaned out days ago. “Try to be here when we open,” she suggested.

As I drove home, I contemplated all the chaos. How odd that a strange little virus, a quirk of nature that we could not figure out, was closing schools, canceling sports events, and sending humans in droves to the grocery stores desperate for toilet paper. That morning my three upcoming events in Albuquerque were canceled. I knew this would probably cascade into cancelations from Los Angeles and Salt Lake, too. (It did.) The headlines declared we were diving into a pandemic, and on the news Lester Holt explained that a pandemic happens when a new disease for which people do not have any immunity spreads around the world.

Knowing a “pandemic” was beyond my control, I pulled out my laptop and sat down on the patio to cancel my reservations. After a week of rain, the sun was cutting a golden path across my backyard. As I wrote, the sun warmed my back and a cactus wren who likes to sunbathe on the block wall perched herself near me. Her song was shrill and demanding. I stopped tapping. I started listening. She had a stunning voice, and she held my attention with her message.

Of course, she was right. I had been missing the show. Missing the bigger picture. The peace. The beauty. The wind sculpture was throwing dancing shadows across the back wall that were reminiscent of Matisse’s dancers and beneath my little warbling friend the sun had thrown a ring of light onto the new pink guara that I had planted in the fall. The guara had shot up at least a foot in the last month, and it was sprouting fragile pink flowers that would rival any wedding bouquet, and it was aglow with a halo of light. I marveled at it.

In that moment I could feel the shimmer of spring coming. No virus. No cancellation. Nothing would stop it—the cycle of life would thread a path forward, and under the circumstances, I might have time to embrace it. To appreciate it. Of course, I wish the same for you.

As we try to meet the challenges of kids out of school, out-of-stock everything, and a lurking virus, may we notice the sun and the flowers and the trees—and may we be thankful for what we do have.

 

Italian singing from balcony during pandemic.

A girl sings from the window during the flash mob, March 13, 2020. Some people have organized a flash mob asking to stand on the balcony and sing or play something, to make people feel united in the quarantine. Getty Images

 

Upon finishing this blog, I discovered this heartfelt poem and I had to share it—

Lockdown

~Fr. Richard Hendrick

 

Yes there is fear.

Yes there is isolation.

Yes there is panic buying.

Yes there is sickness.

Yes there is even death.

But,

They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise

You can hear the birds again.

They say that after just a few weeks of quiet

The sky is no longer thick with fumes

But blue and grey and clear.

They say that in the streets of Assisi

People are singing to each other

across the empty squares,

keeping their windows open

so that those who are alone

may hear the sounds of family around them.

They say that a hotel in the West of Ireland

Is offering free meals and delivery to the housebound.

Today a young woman I know

is busy spreading fliers with her number

through the neighbourhood

So that the elders may have someone to call on.

Today Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and Temples

are preparing to welcome

and shelter the homeless, the sick, the weary

All over the world people are slowing down and reflecting

All over the world people are looking at their neighbours in a new way

All over the world people are waking up to a new reality

To how big we really are.

To how little control we really have.

To what really matters.

To Love.

So we pray and we remember that

Yes there is fear.

But there does not have to be hate.

Yes there is isolation.

But there does not have to be loneliness.

Yes there is panic buying.

But there does not have to be meanness.

Yes there is sickness.

But there does not have to be disease of the soul

Yes there is even death.

But there can always be a rebirth of love.

Wake to the choices you make as to how to live now.

Today, breathe.

Listen, behind the factory noises of your panic

The birds are singing again

The sky is clearing,

Spring is coming,

And we are always encompassed by Love.