by Heather Plett | Oct 17, 2013 | Uncategorized
There’s a delight that fills you when you dream up a new idea – a piece of art, a script for a play, a dance routine, a poem, a delicious meal, a kid’s birthday party, a course… anything. The delight grows as you entertain the idea and begin to give it shape. You fashion it in your mind, you play with the details, you start gathering the pieces that you need to build it. You lie awake at night dreaming of what it will be when it grows up. You fantasize about how happy it will make you feel.
There’s a little skip in your step as you grow it from a seed of an idea to a real thing. You love it dearly and you know that it will be beautiful. It’s your baby, your work of art – you will love it no matter what.
You sweat over it, cry over it, pray over it, fill it with your longing, sadness, and deep love. You pour everything you have into this creation. It gives you life and joy, but it also asks a lot of you. In between the laughter and the delight, you sacrifice, you bleed, and you ache.
When it’s complete, you gaze on it with delight and so much love for just a moment… and then… the ego shows up uninvited, fear pokes its nose around the corner…and… you start to second guess what you have created.
“Is it good enough? I’m really not an artist. I can’t trust my own opinion.”
“Is it really worth anything? Maybe it’s useless and I’m fooling myself.”
“What if people hate it? What if nobody buys it? What if it just sits here on my shelf and gathers dust and I grow to hate it and I never create another thing as long as I live?”
“What if I am a fraud?”
You do this horrible dance – going back and forth about whether or not it’s actually worth sharing this creation of yours with the world. One moment, you’re determined to barrel through and ignore the voices of fear and ego, and the next moment you’re hugging your pillow in the corner, certain that the only course of action should be to destroy the thing you’ve created before you expose yourself to certain shame.
One day, though, you finally work up the courage to share it. You clench your teeth as you do so, holding the fear tightly at the back of your throat. Part of you wants to dance with delight at this moment of triumph, and part of you wants to weep with the agony of the release.
Lots of people ignore what you’ve put into the world. Some people turn their noses up at it. At first, that’s all you notice and you’re convinced that those are the only kinds of reactions you’ll get. You consider yanking it off the shelf and taking a hammer to it in your backyard. This agony isn’t worth it. You shouldn’t have taken the risk.
But then… in the corner, you see someone crying, and you recognize those tears. Those were the same tears that coursed down your eyes as you poured all of your love into the thing you created. Those are the tears of a person who’s letting her heart crack open just a little. They’re the tears of someone watching their own story unfold, and realizing – perhaps for the first time – that their story has found a safe place to exist.
The person approaches you. Her eyes tell the story even before she whispers “Thank you for this beautiful gift. Thank you for seeing me. Thank you for creating something that makes me feel a little more whole. Thank you for cracking me open.”
And suddenly all of those other people – those who turned up their noses or paid no attention – don’t really matter, because you know you didn’t create it for them. You created this thing for the woman standing in front of you, and you created it for yourself. Because both of you needed this little bit of healing that the creation offered. Both of you needed a place where your story feels safe.
You know, in that moment, that you will continue to create. You’ll take all of that pain again and again, you’ll fight with your ego, you’ll risk the failure – you’ll do it all as often as it is required, because you KNOW that you were put on this earth to create and to give and to love.
This isn’t just YOUR story. It’s my story, and to be specific, it’s the story of Mandala Discovery. I have been in love with this program since it began to grow as the seed of an idea a couple of years ago. I knew that I held something magic in my hands, and so I kept pouring my love into it, even when that felt hard to do. I put it out into the world in one form last year, and then – when not very many people paid attention – I let it sit on a shelf for awhile, not sure that it was worthy.
But something kept telling me that the magic I’d seen in it – back when it was only the seed of an idea – was true and good and that I shouldn’t abandon it. Something told me that people needed this little gift that would give them a safe place for their stories to unfold. And so I took it down off the shelf and started polishing again.
When it was ready, I put it out into the world again, and people showed up. Not only did they show up, but they honoured the gift in the most beautiful ways imaginable. They honoured it by creating their own mandalas and sharing them and then telling the stories of how their mandala journals are changing them. They let their hearts crack open and then they stood in front of each other and said “Here. Look deeply into my heart. It may be wounded, but there is a lot of love here.”
The stories that were shared floored me and made me realize that this gift was not mine – instead I was simply serving as a catalyst, a vessel, the pot in the hands of the Potter, creating what had been breathed through me and then offering it to those who most needed it.
One woman shared how the mandalas have become part of her own recovery and how she will use them in a drug and alcohol recovery program on a First Nations Reserve. Another woman told the story of how she’d used one of the prompts with a group of second grade students who hardly knew any English, but were able to articulate something through the mandalas where words had failed them. Others shared how they had found themselves opening up to new truths about themselves. One woman plastered her walls with her mandalas – a road map back to herself.
I was reminded once again that when we let our egos get in our way, when we keep ourselves from doing that which is closest to our hearts, when we cower in fear of failure and rejection, we not only cheat ourselves, we cheat the world out of what it needs for healing. We cheat people out of what makes them feel less alone. We isolate ourselves and we isolate others.
I would like to get Mandala Discovery into the hands of more people who need it, not because my ego says “it must be big to mean something”, but because I know that it has transformative value. I would be honoured and pleased if you would help me do that.
Please share a link to Mandala Discovery (and/or this post) with your friends, followers, fans, family, and either use the hashtag #mandaladiscovery on social media so that I know that you have done so, or leave a note at the end of this post letting me know that you have.
Two people will be selected from those who’ve shared to win one of the following:
1. A free one-on-one coaching session with me.
2. Free registration for the November offering of Mandala Discovery.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you for honouring this gift.
by Heather Plett | Aug 15, 2013 | art, Beauty, circle, Community, grace, Spirituality
I am home after nearly two weeks of journeying across the prairies. It was amazing. I am replenished, encouraged, and feeling full of the goodness of this earth and the people on it.
I am still on a bit of a high and not entirely sure that I have the right words to articulate what this journey meant for me, but I’m going to try anyway, before it slips too far into the past and is lost in a sea of other stories that want to be told.
Part 1: Journey to myself
“In solitude, at last, we’re able to let God define us the way we are always supposed to be defined—by relationship: the I-thou relationship, in relation to a Presence that demands nothing of us but presence itself. Not performance but presence.” – Richard Rohr
Though I could have easily gotten to Calgary with one long day of driving (and have done it many times), I chose to make the trip in two days so that I could savour the trip and enjoy a night of camping by myself. As Richard Rohr writes in Falling Upward, the older I get and the more I learn to love and understand myself, the more I enjoy my own company.
From the moment I left the city limits, I knew there was going to be something special about this journey. It was a stunningly beautiful day, with the kind of fluffy, storybook clouds artists and photographers pine for. It was also the perfect season, when there are still rich summer greens mixed with subtle autumn golds, browns and reds. The canola and flax are in full bloom, the wheat and barley fields are readying themselves for harvest, the round bales are beginning to be laid out across golden hay fields, and the calves born in early summer are strong, virile, and rambunctious.
Everywhere I looked, the prairies seemed to be laying out their finery for me. I couldn’t resist stopping for photos of bright red barns set against bold blue skies, fields where flax flowers flowed like the waves on a peaceful sea, and ditches where butterflies and dragonflies danced from wildflower to wildflower.
When I pulled into Regina, I stopped for a bottle of wine and a cheap plastic wine glass (to enhance the picnic I’d brought from home) and headed to my campsite by a lake. The first thing I spotted at the campsite was a shiny loonie (dollar) on the ground – like someone had left it as a good luck charm.
Pushing through a broad strip of clover that stood higher than my head and smelled of heaven, I came to the lake. There in front of me, for no reason I could ascertain, was a picnic table half submerged in water. I waded out to the table and sat on it for awhile, snapping photos of fishermen, seagulls and rocks. The sun was about two hours from sunset, as far as I could tell, but I didn’t want to miss a moment of its setting. So I brought my picnic lunch and journal to the table and spent the next two hours on my little wooden island in the lake, hidden from view from most people by the huge stand of clover along the shore.
Those two hours were magical. My senses were heightened after a day full of prairie beauty, and every angle, every bit of light, every shadow, every rock, every bird, every line, and every reflection was drenched in beauty. For two hours I sat in awe, watching the light change on the lake and the clouds glow in the sky. God’s presence was palpable. It was one of those thin places that the Celts talk about, where heaven and earth collide.
After the sun set, and night began to drift across the lake, I lit a fire at my campsite and had another magical hour of capturing light of a different kind – orange, glowing, flickering, pushing against the darkness. From the largeness of the sunset sky to the smallness of my cast iron fire pit – I was mesmerized by light.
The next day was much like the one before, with equally piercing blue skies and impossibly white clouds. I wandered on the beach, took pictures of more birds, feathers, and rocks, and then started the drive to Calgary. At one point, a storm rolled in, and the clouds changed to dark and dramatic. After two days of beauty, I wasn’t surprised to see a rainbow show up.
By the end of the day, I felt like I had just been courted by a devoted lover who was doing everything s/he could to make me feel special. In the words of Richard Rohr in the quote above, I was very much in “the I-thou relationship, in relation to a Presence that demands nothing of us but presence itself.” I found God on the prairies and God laid out the finest that the prairies had to offer to make sure I felt loved.
For more photos of my prairie journey, here’s a little video I put together.
Part 2: Journey to my family
“Always remember, there was nothing worth sharing
Like the love that let us share our name.” – The Avett Brothers
The purpose for my trip to Calgary was to visit my oldest brother, Brad, who’d been diagnosed with cancer a few weeks earlier and had had a three foot section of his colon removed the week before. When I’d heard about his cancer, I’d felt an intense need to spend time with him, and so I took advantage of the opportunity. It’s been a hard year for our family, after losing Mom to cancer in November, so the bond between us feels especially important.
If you met my big brother, you might marvel at the many ways that our world views are different, and – on the surface level – you might even question how we find common ground. His politics lean further right than mine do, he’d rather spend the afternoon in a hockey rink while I’d choose an art studio, and he doesn’t see the point in much of the self-discovery or community-building reading and writing I do while I’d be bored to tears with the kind of detail-oriented computer coding he does. (It almost seems like a cliche that he has a degree in math and I have a degree in literature.)
And yet… if you looked at only those things, you’d be missing a lot. For one thing, there’s something about 47 years of shared history, stories, jokes, faith, questions, and grief that creates a common language that few people in the world can understand. There is great safety and comfort in that common language, especially after you’ve lost a few of the only people on earth who know it. When you are in a place where you can speak that language and ask those questions without fear of judgement, it is worth more than gold.
And there’s another thing… unleash us in the mountains, on the prairies, or by the seashore with our cameras, and both of us can wander happily for hours. (Or – in the case this week – lament the fact that we can’t wander for hours due to a recently broken foot and major surgery.) And then we can sit together on the couch for another couple of hours going through the pictures to find the few in which we’ve captured the light just right.
In those things, there is plenty of common ground to make a trip across two provinces after a cancer scare an indescribably worthwhile thing to do.
I didn’t know how this visit would go, and frankly, I was a little worried to see what cancer was doing to my normally energetic and adventurous brother. On top of that, my sister-in-law (whom I also love dearly, and would easily cross two provinces for as well), has been dealing with some pretty heavy things this year, and my teenage niece has had an interesting recent time of learning more about her identity as well.
I expected their home to be full of turmoil and sadness… and yet… it wasn’t. There was a surprising amount of peace and grace in their home, not to mention a whole lot of love. My brother has a remarkable capacity for accepting life as it is and enjoying every moment that he can, and my sister-in-love has a remarkable capacity for making meaning of what is and articulating it in a way that shines new light into it. Plus they both have a deep faith that sustains them and gives them hope.
One of the most poignant moments of the visit was when I stood next to my brother in church (yes, he’s stubborn enough to go to church two days after being released from the hospital) and sang “Come Thou Fount”, a song that has a rich history in our family and was sung at both of our parents’ funerals. “Here I raise mine Ebenezer; hither by thy help I’m come; and I hope, by thy good pleasure, safely to arrive at home.” The Bible verse that those lines are inspired by was made into a wall hanging for Mom and Dad’s 25th anniversary, and hung in their home for twenty-three years after that until Dad died and the farm was sold.
Another poignant moment was standing at the shores of Lake Louise on a drive into the mountains. My recently broken foot and his surgery wounds meant that we couldn’t walk far, but it felt like a moment of grace to be able to stand there with him and Sue, enjoying the beauty around us. We are all broken people, heading inevitably to our deaths, and yet there are moments of beauty, grace, and light, and for that we carry on in this journey.
Part 3: The journey to others
“In helping others, we shall help ourselves, for whatever good we give out completes the circle and comes back to us.” ~ Flora Edwards
The final destination on this journey was a small prairie town, perched on the border between Saskatchewan and North Dakota, that looked a lot like the prairie town I grew up in. In North Portal, people trust each other enough to not only leave their doors unlocked but to leave the border unlocked. When you go golfing, you start out in one country and end in another, and they trust you to leave the parking lot through the same entrance (Canadian or American) that you entered through – no passport required. There used to be churches on either side of the border, but when their numbers dwindled, they joined and now meet in the new Canadian church in winter and in the older American church in summer.
In that town, there is an old school building that looks a lot like the place I spent the first nine years of my school life. There are not enough kids in town to fill it anymore, so they started bussing the kids to another town and sold the building to one of the townsfolk who put a friendly neighbourhood bar in one classroom and rents the other classrooms out to artists, healers, and others who need space.
In that building, Visions Art Guild holds their annual retreat. It’s a blissful week of summer camp for artists, with the local church ladies catering their meals, and everyone pitching in to do the dishes and keep the place clean. During the day, they make lots of art, have occasional inspirational sessions, and encourage each others’ creativity. In the evenings, they drink wine, make a little more art if they feel like it, and have a few good belly laughs (especially on the night of Frida Fest, when everyone dresses as their favourite Frida Kahlo painting or photo).
Every second year, they bring in a facilitator to inspire them in some area of growth. This year I was that lucky facilitator. On the theme of journey, I was invited to do three full sessions (a couple of hours each), three mini-sessions (about 45 minutes each), and one-on-one coaching sessions for anyone who wanted them (nine sessions). In between I got to make my own art and wander from station to station being inspired by the different styles and different mediums. Some worked in acrylics, watercolour, and oil, one added tiny twirly stitches to art prints, one did beautiful beadwork, one made fanciful beings out of found objects, one played with adding fabric prints of her prairie photos to her loomed rugs, one incorporated hand-dyed paper with natural objects, and one worked on a complex mixed media collage backdrop for her fanciful raven drawings. I dabbled with acrylics, watercolours, and mandalas, and took a lot of photos.
At the beginning of our week together, one of the retreatants helped me make a labyrinth in the grass, and that became the foundation of our exploration into the theme of journey. On the second day, I read Dr. Seuss’ “Oh the Places You’ll Go”, made road signs for the twelve places in the journey from the book (the prickly perch, the waiting place, etc.), and added those to the labyrinth. In addition, I’d collaged the words they’d sent me in response to some advance journal prompts onto a long piece of paper that represented the journey we were on for the week, and that piece of paper became a group art project that we added to throughout the week. We also made prayer flags to represent the things we most want to invite into our lives, our art, and our relationships.
What can I say about that week? For starters, it was SO MUCH FUN! Hanging out with artists and being inspired by their creative techniques and their capacity to see beauty made my own artist heart soar. For another thing, it was SO RELAXING! Yes, I was facilitating and coaching, but there was just so little pressure and the women in the group were delightful to work with and host in circle. They were receptive and responsive to my questions, they jumped into my activities with their whole hearts, and they embraced me as one of their own. And for another thing, it was very, very FULFILLING. In the coaching conversations, when I saw their faces soften with some new wisdom that was growing in them, and in the circle when I saw them opening themselves to new stories that will help them walk in the world with new courage, I knew that God was working through me to create safe space for their authenticity to show up.
This is my absolute favourite kind of work – gathering women in circle and fostering their growth, creativity, and leadership. This is the kind of work that feels so much like play I almost feel guilty when they pay me at the end of the week.
I left that little prairie border town feeling like I was floating on a cloud. That beautiful circle of women gifted me with more than I could have possibly gifted them. They gave me tangible gifts (shoes, jewelry, a hand-woven rug, artist trading cards, and more), but the intangible gifts were far greater. They gave me love, acceptance, inspiration, and trust.
Part 4: The scary part of the journey that reminds me of the value of all the rest
“If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I would never have to live without you.” ~Winnie the Pooh
This part of the journey was so brief it hardly bears mentioning, and yet it was so impactful it belongs on this page.
About an hour before I got home, driving along a single lane highway, a half-ton truck coming toward me swerved into my lane when it was only about 100 metres away and came at me full speed. I swerved onto the gravel shoulder on my right, and then the truck swerved there too, looking like the driver was determined to kill me. I swerved left (thankfully there was no other traffic), missed the speeding truck by mere inches, and then started spinning out of control, convinced I would end up rolling in the ditch. I finally came to a stop in the middle of the road, and turned back into my lane.
In the rearview mirror, I could see that the truck had turned around and was coming toward me again. I took off as quickly as I could, not interested in sticking around to see if they were coming to check if I was okay and apologize or try to kill me again.
The rest of the way home, my heart was racing, and I kept bursting into spontaneous tears. Just the day before, while still at the retreat, I’d gotten an email from Brad saying that the prognosis on his cancer is not good, that it has spread to his liver and possibly his lungs, and that – even with chemo and surgery – there is an 80% chance the cancer will kill him within 5 years. Between my near-death moment and the knowledge that I might soon lose my brother, life started feeling exceedingly fragile.
When I got home, hugs from my kids and a hot bath helped calm me down. I had to host a call for Lead with Your Wild Heart, so I did what I could to centre myself and be present for whoever showed up. Fortunately, the call morphed into a delightful hour-long conversation about the value of hosting meaningful conversations in circle, and I became energized talking about the work that most inspires me. That call also inspired me to write the following on Facebook:
Life is short. I know it sounds cliched, but believe me – it is. One day you find out there is an 80% chance your brother’s cancer may kill him in less than 5 years, and the next day a crazy driver tries to kill you, and then you find out a dear friend is having eye and kidney complications far away in South Africa and you can’t hug her, and everything just feels so fragile that you want to gather everyone around you and hug them and tell them to BE REAL, BE PRESENT, and BE GOOD TO EACH OTHER. There is just NO DAMN POINT in wasting your time doing things that are not authentic and full of love and true to the purpose God put you on this earth for.
Please… do me a favour, and stop wasting your time with lies and masks and artificial lives. Stop trying to please the people who don’t have your best interests at heart. Stop trying to live up to an unrealistic ideal that has nothing to do with who you are. Stop trying to find your happiness in money and possessions and fake happiness. Find people who believe in the beauty that is in you, hang onto them, and don’t stop holding each other until you all emerge with more courage to do the things the world is longing for you to do. And then hold onto each other some more, until you have spread every last bit of love God has put in you to spread and your work on this earth is done.
I nearly died on the highway today, and that moment shook me to the core, but at least I can say one thing… I would have spent my last week on earth doing EXACTLY the kind of work that I was put on this earth for – hosting REAL people in circle, giving them a safe space to be authentic, encouraging their creativity, and inviting them to live to their most beautiful potential.
I will keep doing this work and spreading this love until my time is done. Are you with me?
And with that, I end this part of my journey but continue on with the ongoing journey of my life, loving the people around me, living in the beauty that God is making of me, and serving the world with the gifts that have been entrusted to me with whatever time is left for me on this earth.
If you’re on a similar journey to a deeper place, and could use a guide to help you, consider signing up for one of my “Back to School” coaching sessions.
by Heather Plett | Jun 11, 2013 | Uncategorized
Saturday was going to be a perfect day. I didn’t have much planned, so I could get some of my long overdue cleaning done, and then enjoy the irresistible Spring weather with a bike ride, a wander in the woods – maybe even a trip to the zoo. Maddy was vying for ice cream. It was going to be full of ease and fun, mixed in with a little bit of cleaning.
Saturday turned out to be a far-from-perfect day. After deciding it would be best to start the day with a bike ride, Maddy and I headed to the garage for our bikes. I never made it to my bike. At the bottom step into the garage, my ankle collapsed (I think I stepped on the edge of something on the floor), my foot hit the floor at a weird angle, and I was suddenly face to face with the concrete, writhing in pain.
A few hours later, after the pain got increasingly worse, an emergency room practitioner told me that I’d broken a bone in my foot. I limped back out into that irresistible Spring weather on crutches and in a cast. No bike ride, no wandering in the woods, no trip to the zoo.
It got worse. That evening, limping into the bathroom, I suddenly felt very dizzy. “I think I might pass out,” I shouted to my husband, and then woke up on the floor, my face next to the toilet.
It got worse. My husband and daughter got me onto the toilet, and then the vomiting started. And more passing out. And more vomiting. (This is not new – when I vomit, I usually pass out at least once. Nobody knows why.) In between the vomiting and passing out was the weeping and extreme self-pity. “Why is this shit happening to me?” I wailed. I suspect I got food poisoning from the creamy coleslaw my husband picked up at the grocery store.
I’d like to say I’ve been in a perfectly good place since then – that I came to terms with the injury, put it into perspective, and cheerfully adapted my life around this inconvenience. Because I’m just that evolved. That would be a lie.
Sure, there have been moments when I’ve had a remarkably good attitude, when I tell people “I guess the universe thought I should sit down for awhile,” or “just when I was teaching a lesson on surrender for my Lead with Your Wild Heart program, I got a bonus lesson myself,” or “perhaps this will be a good time to work on my book, since I can’t do much more than sit.”
But there have been lots of moments in between those good-attitude-moments when waves of self-pity wash over me. “Isn’t it enough that my mom died and my husband had a heart attack in the last six months – do I really need ANOTHER challenge in my life?” or “Doesn’t God know that I really, really need those Springtime walks in the woods to help heal me from an extremely tough winter? How can this be fair?” or “I have two trips, half a dozen classes and workshops to teach, AND my annual visit to the Folk Festival coming up in the next month and a half – how the hell am I supposed to do all of those things on crutches?!?” or “I just want to phone my Mom and let her feel sorry for me for awhile. It is so FUCKING unfair that I can’t phone my Mom anymore!”
The waves come and the waves go, and I try to weather them all. Self-pitying-whiny-woman, super-spiritual-accepting-woman, angry-bitter-why-me-woman, stoic-and-determined-not-to-let-this-get-the-better-of-me-woman – all of those people reside in my head, along with a few of their friends.
Here I am, sitting in the middle of all of that, trying to find the simplicity in the complexity of these voices, trying to be okay with what shows up, and trying to extend grace to every version of myself as she appears.
This is my practice.
Telling super-spiritual-accepting-woman that she doesn’t need to make so much effort to find the path straight to the deeper learning. And when she retorts with “But… I’m a TEACHER! Teachers are supposed to be wise and find lessons in things and…” simply smiling and telling her that it’s okay, the learning can wait.
Holding the hand of stoic-and-determined-not-to-let-this-get-the-better-of-me-woman while she tries to figure out a way to prove to the world that she is superwoman and can still cook supper, teach her classes, and accomplish great things, and letting her sink into her weakness for awhile instead. “It’s okay – your husband and kids are perfectly capable of fixing supper and doing the laundry. And – just look at that! They’re doing it willingly!”
Choosing not to beat up on self-pitying-whiny-woman when she needs to feel sorry for herself, but just letting the tears flow for awhile, observing the hurt that is behind them. “You’re human – you’re allowed to have human emotions.” While she cries, just trying to be the compassionate mother I would be to my own children, or that my mother would be to me if she were here.
Biting my tongue against the platitudes that are intended to fix angry-bitter-why-me-woman, like, “it could be so much worse – you could have broken BOTH feet!” and “what right do you have to complain about First World problems when people are starving?”, but rather letting the waves of anger pass and extending kindness to her in the moment. “Fixing” usually turns out to be more like “putting a bandaid on a wound that needs air”.
This is my practice.
Being present for what is.
Simply noticing the emotions – the hurt, the anger, the frustration, and the sadness – and letting it all pass.
Letting the healing and beauty show up in little moments – the way the light makes the leaves outside my window glow – instead of desperately clinging to my need to walk in the woods.
Welcoming gratitude when it comes. Like when my daughters willingly show up with food or help pick me up off the floor.
Extending grace to myself, again and again.
Letting people help me.
Letting myself be wounded.
Letting my heart feel broken.
Letting myself be healed.
Seeking patience, one little moment at a time.
Seeking acceptance of who I am.
Inviting myself to keep learning.
This is my practice.
There’s a good reason why it’s called “practice”. It doesn’t come all at once. It comes only as I commit to it, again and again, and start over again each time I fail.
This morning I failed. I cried. And it was what it was.
This is my practice.
by Heather Plett | Feb 20, 2013 | Beauty, grief, hope, Uncategorized
I wanted to find hope again. I really, REALLY longed for it.
I wanted to have some hint of what it will be like when I no longer feel buried under the grief of Mom’s death and the added trauma of Marcel’s heart attack and the accompanying financial stress, extra workload on my shoulders, etc., etc.
I know that “this too shall pass”. It’s what I cling to every time I find myself spiralling down into the hard places in life. “I’ve been through this before. I know that I can survive. It will get better.”
When I found the necklace in Ten Thousand Villages, I knew that I’d found my symbol of hope. It’s a tree of life, crafted by artisans in Cambodia out of the shell casings of bombs that litter the countryside. Perfect. Creating something beautiful out of destruction, loss, and grief. Making the land safe again by cleaning up the unexploded land mines and making them into jewellery. Hope out of hardship. Sounds pretty close to what I specialize in.
“…and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” (Isaiah 2:4)
I texted Marcel a photo of the necklace. “Don’t you want to buy me something for Valentine’s Day?” I asked. Sure enough, he did. He was in the store later that day and the necklace was mine. I was delighted.
Not only was it a little bit of hope to wrap around my weary neck, it felt like a new trademark for the work I do with clients. “You too can find beauty in the grief and destruction of your lives. You can rise out of the brokenness and be courageous, resilient, and authentic. You can find deeper connection and more honest stories when you clean up the land mines and turn them into necklaces.”
And then, two days later, the necklace was gone. I stood in the bookstore bathroom, looking down at the chain on the floor. There was no tree of hope attached anymore. Somehow, somewhere, it had slipped off my neck.
I searched everywhere, but it was nowhere to be found.
Instead of holding my head up high and telling myself it was “just a necklace,” I took a nosedive into self-pity and hopelessness. “What the hell, universe? Do you hate me? Do you really want to take away the one thing that was giving me a bit of hope in all of this hardship?”
It was on my dad’s birthday that I lost my necklace. He would have been 79. Right there in that bookstore washroom (where I returned after retracing my steps throughout the store and into the parking lot), I sat and wept for all of the losses and grief stories in my life. The necklace was just the symbol (and the proverbial straw that broke this camel’s back) of everything else that has been lost in the last dozen years – my dad, my mom, my son, nearly my husband (twice)… and so many more, smaller losses. I wept and wept and let myself feel the weight of all of that grief.
And then the next morning, on my way to work, I had a car accident. Yes, really.
It was a minor car accident and nobody was hurt and there is only very minor damage to my car, but it felt like my whole world had fallen apart.
I sat in my office and cried some more. And raged at God. And cried some more. And raged. And cried. And then I got up, and moved my body a little, said a little prayer of gratitude that I hadn’t been hurt… And then… somehow… I carried on. I finished preparing for the workshop I had to deliver yesterday and then went out to the rural town where I was delivering it. I sat in circle with the women in the leadership program I’m co-hosting, and I let the conversation and the compassion in the room offer me a little bit of healing.
When I got home late last night, Marcel met me at the door holding a tiny silk package. Inside was another tree of hope necklace. He’d gone back the the store, told them about the clasp that had come undone, and they replaced it.
And now I’m wearing hope around my weary neck again – a neck made newly stiff from a slight case of whiplash, but a neck that is resilient and strong and will continue to hold my head up high when it needs to, and let it fall to my hands in tears when that’s what needs to happen.
I don’t have a neat little bow to tie this post up with. Life hasn’t become magically easy, and I still feel a little shaky and weepy, but this morning I am reminded that the real hope comes not from anything I can buy or wear. The real hope comes from the relationships that support me – my husband who cares enough to replace the necklace (and so much more), strangers at the store who were compassionate enough to believe him, the women in the circle who let me be authentic in their presence, my co-worker who let me be a little more broken apart than usual yesterday, the woman in the accident who thanked me for my courage in standing up to the man who caused the accident but refused to take personal responsibility, my friends who sent kind messages… and God, the source of my strength, who doesn’t promise ease, but promises courage if I dare to trust.
If another tragedy happens tomorrow, I might fall apart again, I might rage and scream and wallow in self-pity, but then I will get up off the floor and continue to make swords into plowshares. Because hope is still worth striving for. And love is still better than war. And light is still better than darkness.
And the tree of life grows best in the compost of the fallen trees of years past.
by Heather Plett | Jan 4, 2013 | Uncategorized
Since my kairos moment at the retreat centre a few weeks ago, when I decided that my word for 2013 would be “home”, some really good things have been happening. I’ve spoken of a lot of sadness on this blog for the last few months (and will again – the sadness is far from over). But now it feels like time for a happy post. Here are some of the little blessings emerging out of my heart’s longing for home…
- I have done a lot of cleaning around our home – the bedroom, the basement, the living room, the kitchen. I’ve washed walls and floors, shampooed the carpet, sorted through stacks of papers, and de-cluttered many of the surfaces that tend to hold the things that don’t have a place to belong.
- In a moment of creative inspiration, I tore the dirty fabric off an old lampshade (that we got for a wedding gift 19 years ago) and decoupaged the pages of an old book onto it (see photo above). I absolutely love it and want more of them around the house.
- In another moment of inspiration, I covered the stained and peeled linoleum in my kitchen with peel-and-stick linoleum tiles. It’s not a perfect solution, but hopefully it will last until we can get around to the renovations we’ve been dreaming of. It sure is nice to have a kitchen floor that actually looks clean when it’s washed! (I have a few more ideas to give the countertop and cabinets a bit of a boost too.)
- While cleaning out an old purse to put in the give-away bag, I came across $75 worth of Superstore gift cards and $50 in cash. Bonus! That little windfall will be used to buy a few things to help this home look a little more cozy (like maybe some new curtains for the bedroom).
- I had a lovely home-related dream the night before last in which a favourite teacher/mentor of mine welcomed me into her home. In the dream she lived in a large retreat/teaching space and I wasn’t just being invited as a guest, but as a partner in the work. It felt like a beautiful homecoming for my work – like I’d arrived at a new place of comfort that I am in the right work with the right people. I’ve had a lovely sense of calm since that dream.
- After years of being intrigued with The Work of Byron Katie, I’ve finally dug in more intentionally and am taking a look at some of my old stories to see what might happen if they are not true. It’s already having a transformative impact on me, giving me freedom from some baggage in my relationships, especially my marriage.
- I’ve had some wonderful moments of contentment and hopefulness – a nice change after months of sadness. One came yesterday as I was driving to meet my husband for lunch.
The stories that were shared floored me and made me realize that this gift was not mine – instead I was simply serving as a catalyst, a vessel, the pot in the hands of the Potter, creating what had been breathed through me and then offering it to those who most needed it.
