I love Easter. There is so much good in it. There’s something about the resurrection story, and the many little reminders nature offers us at this time of year of how new things are born out of last year’s death that keeps me coming back to faith.
By the end of almost every Easter weekend, after the Easter services, the time with family, the great food, and the easter egg hunts, I’m in a happy, contemplative mood.
Almost every year… except last year.
Last Easter was horrible. Epically horrible.
On Maunday Thursday – my mom’s birthday – we received confirmation that my mom had cancer. A fairly serious kind in her internal organs that had way too many unknowns for our comfort.
Three days later, on Easter Sunday, my 18 year marriage unraveled. On the way home from an Easter “celebration” with my family, I told my husband that it was either time for us to live apart, or else we’d need to find someone who could help us overhaul our severely broken relationship. It just wasn’t working anymore. We’d forgotten how to communicate and I was tired of feeling angry, hurt, and lost.
I did a lot of crying in the weeks after Easter.
Ironically, a month before Easter, I’d started a series on my blog called “Let go of the Ground“, about how we are all called to surrender – to the Mystery, to the God of our understanding, to our calling, to Love. The premise was that – like the caterpillar who must surrender to the cocoon and enter the difficult transformation process before becoming a butterfly – we too must surrender and learn to trust what is emerging for us. I interviewed a bunch of wise people about their own surrender stories, and I was preparing to create an e-course on the subject. It felt like important work and I knew I had some wisdom to share, having experienced groundlessness and transformation many times in my life.
But then… Easter came, and groundlessness wasn’t just a topic for a blog post. I was living it all over again, and not by choice. The ground had been whipped out from under me and I was plunging through space without a parachute.
It’s easy to talk about surrender when you’re on the far side of transformation and you know what it feels like to fly. It’s another thing entirely when you’re in the messy, gooey chrysalis stage, you’re hanging by a fragile thread, and you have no idea when and how you will emerge.
The months after Easter continued to be hard. Mom started chemo, lost all of her hair, got continually sicker, went for surgery in the summer, and then spent a few more months in chemo. Normally an energetic, young-for-her-age woman who takes delight in climbing trees with her grandchildren and being the fastest one (and sometimes the only one) up the climbing wall when she goes to seniors’ camp in the summer, Mom could hardly handle the many hours she was forced to spend sitting or lying around. I could see her muscles twitch when someone else was in HER kitchen making food for her.
As for my marriage… we agreed that it was best for the kids if we stayed in the same house while we tried to repair what was broken. Like a couple of brick-layers trying to rebuild after a tsunami has wiped out the village, we gathered the pieces that still looked like viable relationship-building bricks, added a few new ones, and started piecing them together slowly but surely. Fortunately, we found a counsellor who was good at helping us do that.
Now it’s a year later, and I’d be lying if I told you I feel like a butterfly with freshly dried wings, fluttering effortlessly through the air. No, there’s lots of effort still involved, and lots of unknowns. I still feel pretty groundless.
But things are changing, and Spring has come again. When we rake away the dead leaves of last year, we see the tiny shoots poking their way out of the dirt built from many deaths in seasons past.
My mom started baking buns again last week, a sure sign that some of her energy is coming back. (When she starts distributing them to everyone in the neighbourhood who could use some nourishment, we’ll know she’s truly back.) Her chemo is finished, and it appears that the cancer has been halted for now. She cooked us a big meal for Easter and we celebrated together. True to form, she’s headed off on a trip with her husband later this week, headed to places where tulips bloom in rows and rows of wild and glorious colour.
Though it’s not perfect, my marriage feels much more stable than it did a year ago. We’re finding new ways of being truthful with each other and we’re working on rebuilding our trust. It feels hopeful, like there’s something worth fighting for. There are enough salvageable bricks that we can build a relationship that is better but still carries with it the stories of the old one.
It’s because of these stories that I continue to believe in the resurrection. Life comes out of death. Hope emerges out of darkness. Beauty follows surrender. God makes good things grow when we let our egos die.
There are many, many people who will try to tell you otherwise. They’ll try to sell you magic. They’ll try to tell you that life can be easy if you have enough positive thoughts and you surround yourself with people who are always happy, happy, happy. They’ll insist that if you attract good things, you won’t have to suffer.
I’m here to tell you that those people are telling you half-truths. Don’t get caught up in their deception no matter how convincing they are. They’re snake oil salespeople trying to make a quick buck out of your desire for an easy life.
Easiness is not the path to true happiness. Surrender is.
It’s not that I don’t believe in miracles – I do. I’ve seen them happen many, many times.
But the best kind of miracles are those that show up in the middle of the grit and suffering and messiness of life. The best kind of miracles are the hugs from friends when you need it most, the breathtaking sunset that brings tears to your eyes, the offering of support when you feel like you’ll crumble, the first crocus of the season – blooming despite the threat of frost, the fresh baked buns after a year of cancer, the tender touch of a loved one after you’ve regained trust, and the butterfly that flutters past when you’re lost in the woods.
The best kind of miracles don’t take you out of the suffering or make you immune to it, they simply help you bear it.
We need the suffering if we’re going to get to true beauty. We need the dying compost if we’re going to get crocuses in the Spring. We need the gooey chrysalis if we’re going to learn to fly.
Without the death, we wouldn’t get to celebrate the resurrection.
Not long ago, I was on my way to a coordinating committee meeting for a feminist organization I’m part of, and one of my teenage daughters asked “Do we still need feminist organizations? I thought women already had all the rights they need.”
At first I was rather shocked by her response. How could a daughter of mine, who’s been raised in a home where human rights issues are discussed on a regular basis by a mother who doesn’t hesitate to share stories of the women she’s met in other parts of the world who’ve had their genitals mutilated or have been sold into slavery, not understand that there are still many women who are marginalized, ignored, tortured, raped, sold into slavery, etc., etc.?
After the initial shock, though, I realized that part of the reason she asked the question is precisely because she has been raised in an environment where these conversations are a normal part of her day – where women’s equality and ability to lead is never questioned by either her mom or her dad, where her dad respects her choices and takes responsibility for just as much of the child-rearing and household care as her mom, and where she knows she has as many options for her future as her male cousins and friends. Those are good things, and it gives me hope that young women in her generation will enter a work world where equality is assumed and no longer has to be fought for.
According to Gloria Steinem, though, we still have a long way to go. “The Feminist Revolution is the longest revolution in history. I’m not sure we’re halfway through this process. Maybe only a third. That’s why I say to take it in 100-year stretches. Movements have to last at least a century to be fully absorbed and normalized in culture.”
I am part of two organizations that are honouring International Women’s Day in different yet equally relevant ways.
UNPAC, the organization that I sit on the coordinating committee for, is releasing a gender budget report card on the steps of our provincial parliament building today (at 11:30 if you’re in Winnipeg). We’ve done analysis of how our provincial government has or has not indicated their support for women’s issues by committing funding to it and we’re advocating for change in that regard. We still need change. The government barely got a passing grade.
Gather the Women, another organization I’m connected with, has just today launched its website (that I created, by the way) for its annual gathering called Weaving Wisdom, Renewing Spirit, happening in August in Ontario, Canada in August. The women of this organization are supporting the work of women by gathering in circle and honouring feminine wisdom and what gives us unique strength as women – our spirituality, community, connection, stories, and compassion. (I sure would love to have you join us at the gathering!)
Sometimes I feel a little torn by these two approaches – is it better to spend my time and energy advocating for women’s rights, or sitting in circle and dreaming about and working toward a better world where women’s wisdom is valued?
My answer to that question is – it’s best to do both.
We need to continue to challenge the priorities of our government, stand up for those who are being marginalized and brutalized, point out the inequality in the way women are represented in our media, and empower women to make their own choices. We need to continue striving toward a world where women have access to power, and decisions are not made on our behalf. We need to ensure we live in a true democracy where women’s voices are heard as loudly as men’s.
AND we need to sit in circle; support community-building; honour our spirits, intuition, and feminine wisdom; and continue to strive for a world in which women’s wisdom is no longer considered secondary to men’s. We need to believe that collaboration is important as competition, that communities are as important as teams, that circles are as important as hierarchies, that intuition is as important as strategy, and that art and beauty really are transformative.
There are many ways to silence people. You can brutalize them, overpower them, threaten them, or marginalize them. You can imprison them, take away their rights, kill them, or ignore them.
One of the most insidious ways of silencing people, however, is to convince them that their voices are not important, that what they claim as wisdom is just frivolousness, and that their stories have no relevance. That’s what’s been happening for too long to women all over the world.
Yes, it’s horrible that women are being sold into slavery and that genital mutilation is still happening in parts of the world, but it is also horrible that, even in our “progressive” North American culture, the things that women value and the wisdom that we hold is not being valued in a world that desperately needs us.
As I’ve said before, it’s important that women have access to the halls of power (and that’s what the feminist movement has worked hard to ensure), but it’s ALSO important that we start CHANGING those halls of power. The old systems aren’t working as well as they could – they’re too slanted in one direction and they ignore half of the strength we have in humankind.
We need yin and yang – masculine AND feminine, strategy AND intuition, competition AND collaboration, industry AND community, progress AND simplicity, warriors AND lovers, fierceness AND softness, production AND environmental stewardship. We need to be involved with organizations that advocate AND those that sit in circle and honour spirit. We need to fight and we need to love.
“We’ve learned that women can do what men can do, but we haven’t convinced most of the country that men can do what women can do,” says Gloria Steinem. We can serve the world well if we not only stand in our power as women, but also invite men to experience and honour their own feminine wisdom. This is about moving away from dualism into a world where there is middle ground.
In honour of International Women’s Day, I encourage you to consider the rights of women all over the world AND I encourage you to honour your spirit and your wisdom and believe that it can change the world.
I leave you with this poem, written over a year ago when I first started imagining this work I would do with Sophia Leadership.
How to be a Woman
There may come a time, my friend,
when you have lived too many lives that are not your own,
followed too many rules that broke your spirit,
and mastered the art of imitation.
This will be a time when you’ve forgotten your own shape
and you find that you no longer remember just how to be a woman.
Believe this: you can remember again,
you can fit back into the shape that you were meant to be.
It hasn’t truly gone away.
Start by taking a deep breath, and sit quietly while you
listen to the wisdom written on your heart
by your God/Goddess.
Be kind to yourself
caress your skin, your hair, your breasts,
all the body bits that make you woman.
Gently touch the flabby bits, the too-skinny bits,
the old bits, the not-perfect bits
Stop to kiss Mother Earth, Gaia,
bend your knees, run your fingers through her soil
hug her trees, blow kisses into her wind.
Twirl your skirts, kick up your heels
and dance while you listen to the music nobody else hears.
Then, when you are ready, turn your head in the direction
your own journey calls you and don’t look back
even when you hear the cries
of those who feel betrayed by your leaving.
Stand tall, my friend,
you need to be courageous for this remembering
you need to be ready to break things
shift things, disturb the status quo.
You need to be powerful, and wise, and steadfast,
in this re-birth, because it is what is expected of you
by all of those waiting for you to lead them.
Make no mistake – they ARE waiting for you to lead them
because they are afraid, they are hurting,
and they have lost their way.
They need your strength, your courage,
your beauty, your art, to lead them into this new place.
But first,
be gentle, sit quietly,
for you need this time of rest
to prepare you for the journey.
Last night I asked my Creative Discovery students to consider the word chaos.
“What does the word mean to you? What does it conjure up?”
One woman groaned. Her job feels like chaos right now. “It’s being imposed upon me,” she said, “and I HATE it!”
Another woman (the scientist in the circle) spoke of the chaos theory and how random things are always happening. She said that helped her see chaos as a positive thing.
A third woman had a body reaction to the word – said it filled her with dread and angst.
“What I’d like you to consider,” I said, “is that chaos is a necessary step in the journey toward creativity.” And then I presented the change curve.
Before the transforming idea can emerge that will lead us to the new status quo, we have to go through chaos. There are no short cuts. You see it appear in almost every development model – from community development to project management.
CHAOS is a common factor in our lives any time real transformation is about to take place.
Around the circle last night, a few looks of recognition began to appear when they superimposed the change curve on their own lives. Ah yes, they’d been through chaos.
Getting up from my chair, I walked over to a large garbage bag. I picked it up and dumped the contents on the floor. It was full of things I’d collected from my recycling bin and garbage can – cardboard, plastic, styrofoam.
“THIS is chaos,” I said. “Out of this, we’re going to invite creativity to appear.”
“I want you to imagine your life and the space you’d ideally like to live in. What things are of value to you that you want around you? What do you want your community to offer you in order for you to feel comfortable and at home? Work on your own space, but also work as a community to develop a neighbourhood that reflects who you all are and what you value. Go ahead – make something out of chaos.”
The eager ones jumped in right away and started imagining bookstores and coffee shops. The reluctant ones took their time, but before long they too were drawn in.
Out of chaos, beauty started to emerge. A comfy coffee house; a bookstore; a neighbourhood park with a play structure and trees; a farmers’ market with bins full of fresh vegetables; a recycled water bin; an urban garden; a bike rack; a tiny picnic table with a chess board. Given more time, they would have gone on – they were already talking about building art galleries and neighbourhood learning spaces.
When we were done, we all gazed lovingly at our new tiny home. It was clear what we all valued – community, green spaces, books, good food, comfort, and friendship. There were no freeways or big box stores in sight.
At the end of the class, nobody wanted to put their new creation back into the garbage bag. This was no longer garbage – it was art and ideas and little bits of their dreams.
That classroom last night was a tiny microcosm of the world in which we live. It may feel like chaos right now, with a lot of garbage we’ve created cluttering up our lives and making us feel trapped. And yet, out of chaos, creativity emerges. When push comes to shove, and when we give space for our community and our values, something beautiful can come out of this mess.
Last night’s playtime gave me hope.
Now let’s go play with the garbage and make something beautiful.
I’m in Calgary. Yesterday I drove for 13 hours to get here, and tomorrow I’ll be awake very early in the morning to start the three day walk.
This commitment is not for the faint-of-heart. Right from the moment I said to Cath “I want to walk with you,” I’ve know that it would require a lot of me. First I had to take the risk to say to someone (whom I’d never met in person), “your story – the loss of baby Juggernaut – has touched a vulnerable place in me and the only way I know how to respond is to drive half-way across the country to walk 100 kilometres with you.”
Then I had to commit the time to drive across the country, the time to train for all this walking, the agony of a dozen or more blisters on my feet, the cost of driving here, the time to fundraise and promote the Kidney Raffle, the cost of new shoes, socks, and blister-prevention aids, and, last but not least, the emotional energy to care about and offer compassion into other people’s stories.
No, it’s not for the faint-of-heart.
Lest you think me an altruistic do-gooder, though, let me admit… there’s a part of me that is doing this for entirely selfish reasons. For one thing, for an adventure-loving wanderer like me, it doesn’t take much to convince me to travel anywhere. Driving 13 hours across the prairies all by myself? Delightful. What’s not to like? Especially when I get to stop at dusk for photos like this one:
But there are other, deeper reasons.
Reasons like these:
– It’s a pilgrimage. Walking for hours and hours feels holy to me. It’s sacred time, when I find those “thin places” that the Celts talk about, where the veil between God and me gets thinner than usual.
– It’s a time to connect deeply with beautiful people whose stories already have special niches in the corners of my heart. We will have deep and honest conversations and we will change each other.
– It’s a vision quest. I know that the deep meditation of putting one foot in front of another for three days in a row will bring clarity and revelation to me that will surprise and challenge me. It will be yet another journey that will help reveal to me my unique medicine in the world.
– It’s part of my personal search for beauty in the world. We will walk in some of the most beautiful surroundings in the world, with the Rocky Mountains always at the edge of our vision. Beauty opens me – it cleans me.
– It will challenge me – push me to the edge of my endurance. I honestly don’t know if I can finish 100 km. After walking 32 in training, my feet felt like they were ready to give up on life. I am interested in seeing how I will handle this challenge, and I know that if I conquer it, I will feel invincible.
– The connection with Cath and her story will re-connect me with my own story of personal transformation through baby-loss. For three days, I will be remembering Matthew, whose 11th birthday/death-day is coming up on September 27th, and little Juggernaut, whose 1st birthday/death-day is only a few weeks later.
And so you see, the commitment is worth it. Yes, there will be moments of pure pain and exhaustion, but I know the experience will change me and I’m ready to be changed.
