Gratitude...

 A couple weeks ago, I began to feel an urge to write again, but I knew I didn't want to write another book.  Then it occurred to me that I could resume writing in my blog.  I couldn't remember when I abandoned it, but I knew in my heart that it would serve me now.  When I finally found my way back to the site today, I note that I last wrote a post in spring of 2017.  So very much has happened since then. Thanksgiving week seems an appropriate time to reflect on the many things for which I am grateful this year.

Since I last wrote, I have survived early stage breast cancer and Stage 2 tonsil cancer, and it's accompanying two surgeries, radiation, and some annoying long-term effects. And, my last PET scan showed me cancer-free. I've always brought conscious intention to creating health. This Thanksgiving, just a year after my first surgery, I am truly grateful that I am healthy again.

After 27 years alone, I discovered an old, dear friend (John) was a romantic interest, something I'd long since given up on ever experiencing again.  After 14 months, I am happy to report that the love between us has deepened and brings me great joy every day. I am so grateful for this second chance at love, companionship, and adventure with this extraordinary man.

Yesterday, John and I loaded a pot of homemade soup, cornbread, and pie, and we drove three hours to bring lunch (they'd call it "dinner") to my 94- and 95-year-old aunties.  I am fortunate and amazed that at their ages, they both are in incredible health and living independently.  As we lingered over dessert, I shared how grateful I felt to have both of them in my life.

I've mostly retired at this point, although I do have some remaining executive coaching clients which I delight in helping.  I am grateful for the opportunity to continue to serve them.

Scratching below these high points, though, the last year has brought me something much more extraordinary.  I've learned an incredible lesson. A lesson of love...a different kind of love. When I became ill a little over a year ago, friends--some very old and others very new-- came out of the woodwork to help.  I am sure I couldn't have made it without them.  I am very grateful that I didn't have to. They supported me in a breadth of tangible ways, and they enriched me, heart and soul.

A woman who had been a neighbor for several years, but with whom I'd had only passing acquaintance, formed Team Kay, Identifying my needs--food, exercise, company--and she became a touch point for all the people who said, "What can I do to help?"  She is a treasured friend and neighbor now. Through the system she created, friends knew what I needed, and they were there. One brought homemade soup. Others showed up to walk me, which at a low point meant only two blocks, but they kept me moving. One woman emailed some hilariously funny items, when I really needed to laugh. Another emailed almost daily with updates on activities which had been an important part of my daily life. Different individuals volunteered to get me to radiation treatments and home again every day for several weeks.  

One out-of-town friend sent me "a flower" every day from my first surgery until I was fully recovered from radiation.  Some days the flower was on a card. Another it was chocolate tulips, and there were socks with a rose on them.  A packet of flower seeds showed up in my mailbox too.  A Swedish dishcloth with flowers on it.  You get the idea.  I put them on the back on my entry door and by the end they covered every inch. I was so grateful for the thought and creativity she showed me.

Still others would tap on my door and ask if I felt like company.  I did.  I felt so isolated, and one day I was so weak I literally fell on my face on my sofa when I got home from radiation, awakening 90 minutes later, still face-down on the cushion. But, I could talk.  I loved having time with no other distractions or commitments to really get to know people.  Three people traveled from long distances to stay with me for weeks at a time. 

We had planned for John to arrive to be with me during what were predicted to be the worst weeks.  They were.  The pain was so intense that I can't describe it. John was there with love, steady assurance, and interventions with my doctors to get me relief. 

I've come through all this with a new understanding of what love is, and I've felt it on a visceral level.  Love is a neighbor who made me cornbread at 9 o'clock at night when I'd run out and it was one of the few solid foods I could eat.  Love is walking at a painstakingly slow pace when we were both accustomed to power-walking just to keep me moving. Love is getting me out for even a short walk in the national park next door for nature bathing.  Love was finding an Eagles concert for me on Netflix when I wanted to be out doing "normal things." Love is doing my laundry when I didn't have energy to do it myself.  Love is even a periodic visit from a 2-year-old who always makes me smile and warms my heart. For all of these gifts, I am grateful.

If you'd asked me two years ago, "What is love?" I am sure I wouldn't have answered any of these things, but today I understand love differently. Even as I write, tears come to my eyes and my heart swells in thinking of these many acts of love and kindness that got me through. On any given day now, I take time to remember all the little acts of love that come to me each and every day. And, I am grateful...very grateful for each of them.

As Thanksgiving approaches this week, I am grateful for having grown in my understanding, appreciation, and experience of love.

Seeing the Bigger Picture

For over two decades I've done a special Thanksgiving meditation.  It hasn't always fallen on Thanksgiving Day; sometimes I've done it a day or two before or after in order to accommodate travel, cooking, or social demands on the "big day."  Each year my Thanksgiving meditation has proven one of the most spiritually rewarding focuses of my whole year, and once again the practice was powerful.

This year the meditation happened last evening, and I noted a difference in how my thoughts presented themselves.  Generally, I've tried to think through the year, day-by-day, beginning with the last Thanksgiving.  As I got to each day, I tried to recall something I'd been grateful for that particular day.  On years when I've kept a gratitude journal the practice has been easier than others, like this year, when I had been sporadic in doing so.

What I discovered last evening was a struggle to even remember what had happened in the last year, even month to month, much less day to day.  I believe the crazy pace of the last year of having 20 glass balls in the air at any given time, any one of which would be irreparable if dropped, has "smooched" (technical term) the year together in very non-linear way. 

After fighting to make the old way work, I surrendered to what every meditator knows is the best way to reflect: let go of control.  When I did, an amazing thing occurred.  I held the intention to be grateful for the last year, and I surrendered to how that would occur.  I was able to observe that even amidst the craziness, something larger was afoot.

Instead of working my way through the year in a linear, one-dimensional way, clusters of events, people, and occurrences bubbled up.  What might have seemed unrelated on first blush actually did connect from a spiritual growth point of view.  I observed progressions of seemingly unrelated events that occurred during the year that actually supported bigger spiritual lessons.  Normally, I would have been grateful for single occurrences.  Last night allowed me to begin to see how random events weren't isolated at all, but were very much related to evolving me spiritually.

My one-dimensional gratitude practice quickly evolved into a multi-dimensional one.  This seems like important learning to me, and it is learning that I don't want to lie fallow until next Thanksgiving.  I am considering "upping" the gratitude journaling practice to reflect throughout the year how an event on any given day is connected with something that occurred previously. 

Before meditating last night, I watched on episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson's series "Cosmos," which aired earlier this fall.  The episode that I watched last night examined DNA and how most human DNA is shared across all species, including plants.  Earlier this week Louis Henry Gates looked at DNA on his "Finding Your Roots" program, where his conclusion across humans is that what we share is much more similar than what distinguishes us.  Sometime in the last year, I read that humans around the world share about 97% of our DNA with all other humans. 

As I drifted off to sleep last night, what spun in my head what how connected everything is. Events in our lives are not random and disconnected.  Neither are we as beings or even as a species isolated.  Seeing the bigger picture truly does allow us to see who we are: we are One.

There will never be a time...

Famed mystery writer P. D. James died today at the age of 94.  In the news coverage of the passing, NPR played part of an old interview with James.  The lead-in to the interview was the notation that James didn't begin writing until she was middle-aged (whatever age that is.)  Then she produced popular works almost until her death.  In the interview, James says that she always wanted to write, but was so busy with her family and her job that she never had time.  When she reached middle-age, she said, she determined that there was never going to be time to write unless she just made the time.

As I began reflecting on the last year in preparation for my annual Thanksgiving meditation, what immediately popped into my mind that I had to be grateful for in the last year was writing.  For close to half of the year, I wrote posts for this blog almost daily and for two months early this year, I produced almost fifty pages of my memoir manuscript.  I also connected in a deeper way with regular followers, many of whom had been in my life for years...even decades.  I loved that.

When I heard the James interview, I realized that she was right.  If I waited to have time to write, I wouldn't ever write.  Just as she had done, I needed to make time to write. 

As I reflected, I realized that what had shifted since last winter was my intention.  My work hours were just as long, and I was just as mentally exhausted and tired of looking at a computer screen last winter as I am now. I even managed to keep writing pretty regularly through two eye surgeries. Last winter, however, I came home with the intention to write because I knew that doing so was feeding my soul in a way that nothing else in my life did anymore. 

Today I am grateful for the time I invested in writing last winter and for the realization that I would make writing a priority again.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. 

Celebrating miracles

This evening at sunset began the eight-day celebration of Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights and the Feast of Dedication.  The 2013 celebration marks the unusual coincidence of the first day of Hanukkah and the American Thanksgiving holiday.  Very unusual.  If the rather complicated calculations are accurate, it will be 75,000 years before this coincidence occurs again.  Some say it will never occur again. It will surely never happen in our lifetimes.

Hanukkah commemorates a time after war when a small amount of oil--enough for one day--burned for eight.  A real miracle.  I've written about everyday miracles that we often miss. (Little Miracles, 11/4/2013.)  But this is a "big deal" miracle.  Every tradition has its stories of miracles.  Most of us grew up hearing both secular and religious stories of miracles or almost-unbelievable happenings.  They become just that--stories.  Often they are discounted or dismissed instead of being treated as lessons in how the world can work.

In The Game Called Life Lizzie keeps saying things are "incredible", a word that means not believable.  Her invisible guide Helen says that in the spiritual world they are believable; Lizzie, however, is just learning to understand how the spiritual world works.  In that realm all things are possible, and really the spiritual realm is all there is. 

In each and everyone of our lives we can think of people who were miraculously healed.  Back in the 1950s when cancer treatments were very primitive, my father's cousin was sent to cancer surgery.  As they often said in those days, "They opened her up, and when they saw how advanced it was, they just sewed her right up again.  They sent her home to die, something that they predicted would happen in 4-6 weeks."  She live another 30 years without further treatment.

I met a woman who had gone into the hospital for surgery for the removal of a tumor.  She'd been to have an MRI two or three days earlier, which the surgeon would use to make sure he removed all of it during the operation.  When he opened her up, the tumor was gone.  Not a sign of it.  In just a day or two the significant mass had totally disappeared.  The surgeon was totally perplexed.

There are other kinds of miracles too.  The rains that come in time to save the parched crops of a drought.  The woman who musters strength to lift a car from her child.  The man who missed the plane that crashed believes that the cop that stopped him, causing him to miss the plane, was a miracle.

On this day on which some people will celebrate Hanukkah, others will mark Thanksgiving, and some will commemorate both, perhaps we should take a moment to really celebrate miracles--and treat them as such.  Remembrances of miracles bolster our faith and give us strength and determination when we are tested. And, they leave us keenly aware of the possibility that exists around us in every moment.

Giving Thanks

In the United States tomorrow afternoon or evening begins what for many is a four-day Thanksgiving holiday.  The roots of this holiday, one of the biggest of the year in the States, go back to the earliest days of the settling of North America.  Marked by family traditions of food, the two things that are common to most menus are roast turkey and dressing.  Almost as much a part of standard Thanksgiving fare in recent years has been football on television and the onset of holiday shopping season on "Black Friday," the day when most merchants move into the "black"-- profit column -- for the year.

Other countries have holidays of gratitude, such as a similar one in October in Canada.  In some countries, such as Germany's Erntedankfest, the holiday is more driven by local and regional custom.  But for most, the holiday comes at the end of the harvest season, when the larders are full, and the bounty of the year is most apparent.

For at least a dozen years, maybe longer, amidst the food, football, and shopping, I have turned to a practice that reminds me of the reason for this holiday. My custom of Thanksgiving (or the day or two before) has been to have a gratitude meditation.  In that meditation, I go through every single day of the year in my mind's eye and feel gratitude.  A stroll through my calendar beforehand is helpful, but it is amazing how much comes to memory as I mentally stroll, day by day, through the whole year.

My gratitude meditation is something of a condensed version of the gratitude practice I wrote about earlier.  (Gratitude, 9/24/13)  Complaints don't exist: everything is a gift.  As I go through my days one by one, I feel gratitude.  A new client, an interesting piece of work, or perhaps a new friend...I feel in my body and my soul those experiences.  I literally let my heart run over with joy and gratitude. 

Now for most people there are three kinds of days: really good or pretty good ones, ones that we would prefer not to live through again, and nondescript days, which kind of blend together.  In the 365 days that make the year, most of us have a fair distribution of all three types. The intention of the gratitude meditation is to find something to be truly grateful for each and every day. 

Those days that I would prefer to not think about force me to remember that everything is a gift and to find the gift.  The first cold that I'd had in over 20 years knocked me flat for almost three weeks: my over-tired body got rested, and I read a book that had been on my nightstand for weeks.  The eye surgery that didn't go so well: I am so grateful that the other eye works and has learned to compensate.  You get the idea.

Now, what about those unremarkable days?  I think they are the very best.  When I meditate on those days, they make me realize how truly blessed I am.  A rainy day? I am so grateful I have an umbrella.  The garbage truck that awakened me early on my day off? The sun coming up over the trees in the woods behind my apartment was spectacular. 

On one of those ordinary days I received a LinkedIn message from a man in Pakistan.  He'd bought a used copy of The Alchemy of Fear a decade ago from a street vendor for a penny: he said it changed his life.  I was so delighted that I had tears in my eyes walking down the street, reading the message on my iPhone.

Maybe I just remember that I have a roof over my head, and I've had food in my belly every day for the year.  This year, I will definitely remember how grateful I am to be writing this blog, to have had time to work on the electronic version of The Game Called Life, and for the government shutdown that made those things possible.

The gratitude meditation has never failed to transform me.  One holiday when I was traveling, I did the gratitude meditation on an airplane, and I was certain I would levitate right out into the clouds.  This discipline puts everything in order, and I know what is really important.  As I write about it, I am so looking forward to this year's reflections. I have something else to be grateful for: I get off early tomorrow, which means I have a perfect hole in my holiday calendar to do my gratitude mediation.

For those in the United States: Happy Thanksgiving!

For others: Happy Giving Thanks!