Wordless Wednesday / 21 Year Old Film Developed

Patrick and sister Molly, 1990, Miami

Belated Happy Blogiversary to Me

As I was making the changes to my template, wondering if I wanted to make more drastic changes, I was thinking about when I first started this blog.  It was 6 years ago in August.

I wrote then that 'terrible things' had happened in my family the previous two and a half years. It's hard to go back and read that and remember quite vividly the day I started the blog, the feelings and hope I had. I want to go back and hug that woman,  who did not know that even more terrible things were coming, that bigger challenges were fast approaching.

That fall my mother tumbled swiftly down the rabbit hole of dementia and I became torn between her needs and the demands of my son and his drug abuse. The next spring, our Patrick died.  Died. (And writing this still makes me feel I've been punched in the stomach, gotten the wind knocked out of me.)

And I blogged.  I tried to keep the very personal to a minimum because I wanted this blog to be mostly about my creative work. But there's a place where one's life events and one's art intersect and sometimes the place should be revealed.

I know that it was good that I had this blog, that I could put my sorrow into words and share it.  I received comfort and warmth from  friends and strangers and, in sharing my story, I think I gave some back to others who are walking the path of grief and loss.  And that was also a gift to me.

I want to thank everyone who reads my blog, regularly or occasionally, and everyone who takes a moment to make a comment when something delights them or touches their own experience.

So I don't think I'm going to drastically change the appearance of Lizards in the Leaves, it's got the face of a familiar friend.  Maybe a tweak here and there. And maybe more of a connection between this blog and my de-cluttering blog, A Chair Is A Closet. 

I might let a little more personal come through  in the content- I turned 60 last month, and it feels like a big deal, and I'm acknowledging that by making some changes, a lot of them of the 'letting-go' variety.

I think that's story worth sharing, too.
Namaste, my friends!

Patrick's birthday

Workshop on Grief and the Arts-update

I have simply been unable to write about this workshop (which took place on April 28) until now. I think I am still processing the experience, but I'm going to try to write about it since I can't seem to blog about anything else until I do!

I believe it was a very successful workshop, that we achieved what we set out to do: to create a daylong experience in expressive arts and show how one can use them in confronting loss. We were able to offer sessions in music, drawing, collage, journaling, guided imagery and movement. We created a beautiful exhibit of art in a variety of media from several people, all of which had the themes of loss, bereavement, healing.

Here are more pictures of part of the exhibit:




For me personally, it was exhausting and profound. I worked on the art exhibit with two other women, co-facilitated the drawing workshop with Cathie Laska, and did part of the opening presentation. For my part in that, I created a talk which incorporated several of the poems I wrote in the first months after Patrick died, many of which I first posted here. I also spent several days going through my drawings and fiber pieces in order to choose some for the exhibit, and then I had to do the practical figuring out of how to present them which included writing up a card on each piece.

It was an extraordinary and difficult experience to revisit the art I created during that intense, deeply painful period in order to share it through the workshop. I found myself becoming filled again with powerful, awful feelings and my emotional skin was delicate as tissue paper and tears flowed at the slightest provocation and I began to say, 'Patrick is Rome' because, quite literally, all thoughts led to thoughts of him. I began to worry that I might be opening myself too much, becoming too vulnerable.

When the day came, I was excited and hopeful. I'm not sure I can describe what it was like to look out at the audience during my talk and to see people sobbing. I knew that it was the resonance of my losses with their own and I felt part of something big and mysterious that connects us all. And that was just the first half hour of the day!

Cathie Laska and I called our workshop Drawing Through Loss: Telling Your Story in Line and Color. I did two small pieces during the session, on 4 X 6 blank index cards:


By lunch (a delicious one provided by Market Bella Rossa), my responsibilities were finished and it was time for me to be part of the workshop only as a participant. The expressive movement exercise was so beautiful and powerful, I wound up weeping, the tears coming from the deepest places. It was time. The exercise had all of us in a big circle. Silently and to music, we each created a movement, gestures to express something about our loss. Alone, we faced the group and performed our movement. Then we turned to the person to our left and did it again, this time with that person mirroring our movement. Then that person did their movement, turned and was mirrored by their neighbor and so on, around the circle. It was like watching a wave go through the group. No one was hesitant or seemed self-conscious, and once again that sensation of being connected to all was present.

My movement was a very stylized guitar-playing with head-banging. It so happened that my mirroring partner was Kathy Steinstra. She's the president of the Board of the Maple Center and headed the planning committee for this workshop. But most importantly, she was one of the first people I called when Patrick died and the person who organized the healing ritual for me and Patrick's roommates. So, it made the exercise even more powerful for me.

After that, I spent the afternoon in a collage workshop, choosing to work with images I found to be spiritually nourishing. The two hours went quickly. I had a very calm time, cutting, pasting, listening to a swirl of conversation around me as others worked on their collages. There was a great deal of laughter and a sense of community in the room. We probably could have stayed longer.

Here's my collage, called Universal Repair, replete with symbols and totems that are meaningful to me -- turtle, Stonehenge, spirals, sun, moon, stars...words and phrases: whole, ageless magic, enduring spirit, earth, community creativity...

For me, the end result was the satisfaction of sharing my journey with others, of sharing things that may prove helpful to others on this same painful path. I went home utterly and totally exhausted - in mind, body, spirit. But it was a good exhaustion.

And days later, I discovered that I had received a great gift, a serendipitous effect which I had not suspected I might receive: days in which I felt a deep peace and, for the first time since Patrick's death I experienced true moments of joy. Joy, allowed to come through, unmitigated by my grief and sorrow. I am so grateful for those ineffable, incomparable moments when the light is just so or the wind dances on my skin and, for a nanosecond, a sense of 'all is well' permeates my being....

Oh, I've cried and felt despair again, too...but it seems like my experience has created a doorway to finding a deeper sense of calm and acceptance at times.


People at the workshop asked for a copy of my talk and the poems, so I created a pdf to make available to them. Here's a link to that:

Making Things of Broken Things

And here's a link to the handout I created for our drawing workshop:

Drawing Through Loss

You might find it useful if you, like me, aren't experienced with drawing and would like to use it for healing work.

During the time leading up to the workshop, my friend Cheri sent me tulips:


Thank you, Cheri!!

Namaste,
Zann

Grief, Loss - The Journey Continues

I've been in a kind of cyber-seclusion of late. Except for posting the memorial we put in the paper for Patrick's birthday, I haven't written here about my grief in quite awhile. I feel as though I have this ongoing tension between my desire to maintain this blog with my original vision ( art and whimsy and joyful creativity) and the fact that my life has a great deal of loss and pain spiraling through it. If I don't write about the latter every so often, I wind up being unable to write here at all.

I think about Patrick in some way every hour of every day. A thought of him is one of the first thoughts in my mind when I awake and a thought of him is one of the last thoughts in my mind before I sleep. I cry at least a little bit at some point in every day.

The holidays were peaceful and sweet and sad. But in the middle, just before New Year's, we lost another young adult child in our small UU church congregation. Lydia was just 22, and her death was also an accidental overdose. She and Patrick were in the same dedication ceremony in 1992, a UU ritual of the adults in the congregation dedicating themselves to the children. I wanted to be there for her parents, just as so many were there for us.

It was hard. It was hard to be in the same sanctuary saying goodbye to Lydia just as we said goodbye to Patrick barely nine months before. And it was hard, oh so hard, to see the faces of her parents, and know too well the true intensity of the emotions they were experiencing. And I was brought back again to that intensity and bottomless depth of pain of my own. I didn't want anything to be about me, it was about Lydia and her family. But I couldn't not go and be there for them. It was made bearable by knowing my presence was meaningful and by the compassion extended to me by others at church quietly letting me know they knew how difficult it must have been for me to be there.

And so. As we come upon Patrick's birthday and soon the first anniversary of his deathday, I find myself having waves of grief and loss that echo in intensity and awfulness the way I felt when we first learned of his death. Back then, though, it wasn't waves. There was no surcease, just unremitting and constant soul-pain. I reach back and do those things that helped me through that time: being present, allowing the pain to flow through me, chanting the Heart Mantra, telling Patrick I love, love, love him...

And....my mother's dementia progresses and I am struggling to find a way to be there for her in more than the power-of-attorney-handling-the-paperwork way. Nothing is predictible with dementia. The way things are one day is not the way things are the next. And nothing can be fixed, we are just patching things up. Every week, it seems like something new must be dealt with.

I am carrying on, though, and there is laughter and sweetness and hope in my life, too. I still find my greatest peace and comfort in art, in creating. I want more than anything to be putting love and compassion and beauty out into the world.

And I keep looking for an old unadulterated joy I always used to feel, the joy Louise Bogan spoke of when she wrote, "I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!"

What keeps me going is pure faith that that is indeed so.



I shall end with a picture of a scrumble I made for an exchange within a yahoo group I'm in. At the end of the year, we should have a dozen scrumbles made by others and we will each create a large piece from them. This is the January scrumble I made:
Yarns are Manos de Uruguay (variegated) and a couple of sock yarns used double, Trekking XXL (red) and Brown Sheep Wildefoote (purple). Stitches are a slip stitch cord, some bullions and mostly single crochet. Also did a lot of French knots here and there with the ends.

Oh, and I finished my Round Trip Jacket! Pictures soon!

Namaste,
Zann

Birthday Memorial - Patrick