thoughts from a threshold » caring (self, home, others)

Health and Craft – the personal bit

Jenett — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 02:28:36 +0000

Hello, dear fearless readers of this blog. I realise I haven’t updated here since May. It’s been a complicated summer, as I’m job hunting again. (Which thus far has involved two trips out of state for interviews, plus all the ordinary stuff like resumes and cover letters and so on. If you know people hiring librarians passionate about connecting people with information they care about in either the Upper Midwest or New England, feel free to drop me a note. )

The other part is something I talked about back in March, which is health issues. And reminded by a letter of introduction from someone potentially interested in group work with me, I thought I’d take a moment to lay out some of my thoughts about the intersection of health and Craft work. This part deals with the personal bit, and my internal observations, part 2 will deal with how I think this impacts group work more broadly.

Quick personal update:
Now, the short version of my health stuff is that I’m doing a lot better. (My test results at the beginning of July were back in the normal range on all sides, and I’ve got much closer to my normal level of energy and concentration.) That said, the road back has been different than I’d expected. Not better or worse. Different.And that’s made a difference in my religious practice.

Add to this that there’s a reasonably decent chance that to get a job in my field, I’ll end up having to move. (I love Minnesota and the upper Midwest, but New England also holds a lot of my heart, and I have a number of friends and family there, and the job prospects are somewhat better.)

Both of these have meant some complications for group work. I have one very wonderful student-if-we-get-to-move-forward, and I’ve had a couple of other emails of interest in the last few months. I’m doing my best to be up front and honest with them that right now, it seems like a mostly-hiatus until I figure out the job stuff makes sense.

Basically, I’m happy to do some initial exploration with people who are interested the group, but not start substantial training. Plus I need some time to rebuild my reserves before trying to run group ritual regularly again, since I’m needing to devote a lot of attention and focus to the job hunt plus related tasks (like figuring out how I’d pack and move quickly if I got a job in another area and weeding out old clothes/books I no longer need to own/other such tasks that would be good to have done no matter what happens.)

So, on to the background:

Now, as regular readers might remember, it’s not like this chronic medical issue thing is new to me. I’ve had an asthma diagnosis since I was about 19, and migraines since I was 15. These days, I manage both of them without prescriptions (other than a rescue inhaler for the asthma that I rarely need): I’ve made a lot of lifestyle changes to make that possible.

Both improved during my early Craft training: unbalanced energy (in the ritual/magical sense) was one among several of my triggers, so removing that obviously helped reduce the frequency of migraines. Likewise, while I’m a longtime musician (woodwinds, singing, and harp), with good training in various breathing approaches, my Craft training gave me a way to apply them in some specific ways that helped with asthma. (And working with an herbalist and becoming *very* aware of early triggers helped a lot otherwise.)

However, there are still some limitations:

Lack of sleep remains my most reliable migraine trigger: this means that rituals/classes/events that run late have always been a problem for me. (Especially since I’d need to be at work at 7 or 7:30: it’s hard to be at something until 10pm, drive home, have a bath, and still get 8 hours of sleep when that’s true!)
At this point, camping festivals are a lot more work for me than the enjoyment I get out of them. Basically, I can camp, or I can enjoy the festival. One-day outdoor events aren’t as bad, but still have complications.
Visiting people at their home is also sometimes complicated: I’m most allergic to dogs and to dust, so how someone deals with cleaning their home (and what pets they have) can make a big difference in when and where I can see them and how much time I can comfortably spend there.

And, of course, as with all chronic conditions, there are ups and downs. Sometimes I can deal with something just fine. And sometimes, usually due to a combination of factors, I can’t.

For example, I rarely have asthma issues anymore, but if we’re in the middle of fall (my worst seasonal allergies), and I’m running tired, and I’m at the home of someone with carpets and dogs (as opposed to wood floors and no pets), I’m more likely to have problems, or to need lots of extra recovery time (which I don’t have to spare right now.)

The new things in the equation:

The more recent conditions are both things I’m taking medication for. I’m extraordinarily fortunate that we figured out the treatment (and found me something that’s clearly working) as fast as we did: six months is amazingly rapid in terms of time from diagnosis to reasonable function for most cases.

That said, a few things have become really clear to me in the last couple of months:

I’m back to about 90-95% of my ‘normal’.
Unfortunately, that last 5% seems to have a lot to do with the speed with which I can get things done.
So most things (whether that’s household tasks or writing something) are taking me 2-3 times longer than I think they should.
It’s particularly complicated for things involving a combination of creative thought and precision communication – part of the reason I wanted to take a break from group ritual for a while. My ability to write at length and feel like it’s decent has only come back really well in the last few weeks.
My overall energy levels are much better, but I still have sudden dips that I don’t know how to predict well yet. Every day I learn a little more, but I’m still getting surprised on a regular basis.
I need to remember that dealing with relatively minor but tedious side effects takes time and energy too.
There are a lot of things about how my body works that are continuing to change: I’m seeing changes in hunger and metabolism, in sleep, in hormonal cycles, in how warm or cold I feel, and when and how I do my best focused work, to name just a few.

All of these things mean that I want to ease back slowly into specific kinds of ritual work – and especially group ritual work where I’d be the only initiate in the tradition in the group (and therefore responsible for doing a lot of the specific energy work, although there are also pieces that others could start doing relatively quickly if needed.)

Effects on ritual work:

General level of energy: One of the most basic: if I’m constantly exhausted from the very basic functions of the day (getting up, making sure I eat reasonably, do the things I need to do – work, work on finding a job, whatever), then there may not be a lot of me left over for other tasks. This is the Out Of Spoons problem. (If you’re unfamiliar with the Spoon Theory explanation of dealing with chronic illness, I recommend reading it.)

There are obviously ways to have a meaningful spiritual life while energy and time aren’t very available (and in fact, I just sent in an article on that for the 2012 Witches’ Companion almanac.) On the other hand, I have ritual itches that aren’t always scratched by those things.

Amount of time tasks take: Remember how I talked about things taking me longer? That’s just as true for ritual prep as it is for doing my dishes or writing an email.

Right now, I’m tending to work through what I want to do on one day, spend a day or two tidying and getting things together, then do the ritual work. Previously, I would have been much more comfortable coming up with the plan and doing it within a day (or maybe two.)

Ability to focus: There was a while in December when my focus was so bad I couldn’t read light fiction for 5 minutes at a time. (That would have been much scarier if I’d had the energy to be scared, I suspect.) Fortunately, that got better. However, the process of getting down into a trance state and being able to use it for various purposes have changed somewhat for me.

I’m currently working through basic exercises on a regular basis to see what’s changed for me, and how things are working now.

Executive function: One of the things that went totally away for me, for a disturbingly long time (it only started to come back in late May) was what’s commonly called ‘executive function’ – the ability to make choices between options, to make decisions about what order to do things in, and so on.

Some choices remained fairly easy for me. (What book to read next). But a lot of choices got very hard for me, and I’d sit there looking blankly at my list of options for a long time before being able to move forward on anything. If I got distracted in the middle of a task, it took me forever (like half an hour) to get back on task. Needless to say, I have hugely more understanding for my friends with ADD and ADHD these days. Even when it started getting easier to make decision and stay on track, it was still tremendously tiring for me.

In ritual and Craft practice terms, it does present some challenges for creating and following through in ritual – and more complications when working with other people. In particular, I don’t want to fall back on the easy thing when really something else might be much better, if I could get past the decision tree problem.

Meditation and trancework: One interesting note on meditation and trance work in particular: while I tried a few times in the past six months, I kept getting a very clear message that it was not the thing I needed to be doing. It wasn’t painful or bad: just a persistent door closed in my face.

In the past month, I’ve done a couple of deliberately short and gentle forays into trance work again, and while those are not my best trance moments ever, they’ve been much more functional.

Ability to raise and focus ritual energy: Which is one of the core jobs of the high priestess in ritual, and certainly necessary for my own personal work. As you might guess from my previous comments on general energy levels, this one fluctuates (sometimes unpredictability) and is harder than it used to be.

That said, habit counts for a whole lot: when I have the energy to kick in the practices and techniques that I’ve learned and done regularly in group work, those practices carry a lot of the effort with them. Think of it like getting a shuttle into orbit: large cost to get it off the ground, but once you get everything moving, the tendency of things already moving to stay in motion helps out a lot. That said, I’m not currently at a place where I’d want to trust that in a ritual with high or very specific expectations (initiations, for example) just yet.

Commitments to deity, to coven energy: These are things I’ve mostly had to set aside (other than the most basic form of attention and devotion) for a while: I just haven’t had the spare energy to send out. The deity part has been fine: the coven energy piece is a lot more complicated. (And again, it’s a place where having another active initiate would have made things much easier.)

I think my solution to the coven one is that – once I feel my reserves are up to it and I can afford a day or two of recovery time without discombulating the job search – to reinforce a number of those commitments and connections again very deliberately. (Not quite recreating them, but tracing over them, so to speak.) That includes the coven’s communal astral space, but also some other commitments and connections.

Tradition: There have been some substantial changes in the group I hived from (and where I’m still very fond of people) in the last couple of months. I regret very much that my energy levels and amount of focus meant I was less able to be present and offer my thoughts (as one of the three third degrees in the tradition) than I really wanted to be.

I’ve been making up for it a bit in the last month – partly to catch up with people I just plain like (and to hear some of what they’re thinking about things now), but also because if I do end up moving for job reasons, I wanted to make sure I’d seen relatively recently if I have to do a quick move.

Attention to detail and ability to shift plans on the fly: Here we come to the reason I’m being really cautious about group ritual: I recognise that my ability to spot details (especially in areas where I have to work a bit more for it) and to adjust logistics and plans on the fly are still very shaky compared to my norms.

Now, granted, my norms in this area are pretty high – it’s part of why I love library work, for example. However, leading ritual for others, or formally taking them on as a student (with the energetic commitments that entails) mean I want to be really sure I’m able to notice any potential areas of concern when they’re still small. While I’m getting back to that point, I’m not quite there yet.

How I present myself: While I feel mostly like ‘me’ in that core way, I’ve had a number of internal shifts over the past few months. I’ve accepted the fact that the combination of health issues means that thinking of myself in at least some contexts significantly limited is a big shift for me. (As opposed to just having two well-managed conditions, where as long as I didn’t hit the sore spots, we were mostly fine.) Likewise, leaving a job and school community I’d loved for 10 years is a complicated thing emotionally, in the best of circumstances, which this wasn’t. (As there are a number of things I wish had happened differently in various ways, both things I did and things I had no choice in.)

But I’m aware that all of these things affect how people interact with me. I talk regularly with friends who have a good baseline on me, and I listen to what they say. I’m slowly working through some ritual work around the transitional bits. But I also want to make sure that anyone who meets me right now knows that some of how I’m doing things and how I must come across is a transitional state in some ways.

(Ok: Life is always a transitional state, but some times in life are more transitional than others.)

In particular, I’m still figuring out the best way to be clear that what ritual I can offer right now is not the full spectrum of possible intensities I’d normally prefer to work along. On a scale of 1-10, with most rituals being around the 5 mark – moving and changing, but designed to do so in small and manageable doses – I’m averaging a 2-4. My normal range would spend a lot of time in the 5-6 range, with a very 8s, and the occasional 9 or 10 of initiations and other pivotal ritual moments for an individual or the group.

Integration takes time: The level of internal change and impact on my daily life from the last six months is probably *more* than any of my initiations, and more than either my marriage or divorce. (In large part because those things – while they had their challenges and really hard moments – mostly didn’t fundamentally change how I felt my brain worked in ways that were core to my self-identification.)

There’s really no solution for this one beyond time, self-awareness, and finding situations that stretch my new sense of myself in ways that help me grow into the spaces. I’m doing a combination of conversations with friends, journalling, other projects, and a bit of body modality work (Feldenkrais, in my case) that lets my brain try new things out that might work better in a structured context.

And in group terms – I’m not quite to the point where that’s integrated enough that I feel comfortable being responsible for leading someone deliberately into that state of needed-integration, and showing them ways back out: something core to initiatory work. I have a feeling I will be in a month, or two, or three. But not quite yet.

Onwards…

And now, if you don’t mind, it’s time for me to aim at bed, so I can get plenty of sleep, so I can get up in the morning, take my meds, wait a bit, have breakfast, and get some job applications out before meeting a friend for something like coffee. Part 2 of this – how I look at health issues in terms of group work (both my health issues and other people’s, and what kind of information I want to know about it when), will, I hope, happen tomorrow.

Today

Jenett — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 22:57:34 +0000

Today, I am thirty-four.

Today, some celebrate Mabon, the second harvest festival. So do I, though I prefer the name Harvest Home, these days. A day of bringing in the fruit of our work, of celebrating our labor.

Today is also the second in my personal string of new years. There is the beginning of school: the beginning of a cycle every year of my life since I was born in some way: as the child of a professor, as a student myself, or as someone working in education.

Today is my birthday: the day when night and day balance, when the days truly seem shorter, when my desire to come home and nest and reflect in the quiet competes with the growing work of the school year. They are both good, both necessary, and they continue to dance in their own helix until June. And following that, there comes Samhain (the pause before the dawning sun of Midwinter and a new cycle of potential) and the calendar’s New Year.

And I am reminded, always, of my birthday’s place, falling as it sometimes does between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Neither are my celebrations, but they were the celebrations of some of my ancestors, in the not too distant past. A time to reflect on the things I’ve regretted, as well as walking forward into the new year of blessing and potential.

Today, I came home from work, and had a long bath, with the particularly decadent bath salts, and excellent soap, and read by candlelight for long enough for my neck to untangle and my body to relax.

And now, I sit here, hair drying down my back, and I think about this past year. This past decade, in fact, for ten years ago this past summer, I picked up and moved to Minnesota. Nine years and a week or two ago, I started working at the school I’ve been at ever since. Just under ten years ago, I adopted my Athene, the small cat who makes my life a delight, and who is always a warm friendly presence.

This year has been a year of many changes. Not of ritual initiations and elevations, mind you – the changes I’ve volunteered for in more than one way, worked deliberately for, and plunged into, knowing that there were many other changes yet to come I could not predict.

But this year’s brought other changes.

Most importantly, there is the job. After seeking a professional library position for over two years as I finished my Master’s degree, I got hired last spring (as many readers here know) to become the teacher librarian. Last spring was a flurry of setting longer-term plans in place. This summer, we rearranged the library, handling every single book on the shelves (some 11,000) in the space of ten days. And this fall, work has eaten my brain, as I challenge myself to improve some skills, and to juggle administrative tasks (less fun) with helping people find information (what I’d rather spend all my time doing.)

This job has brought stability of all kinds for the first time in years. I wake up in the morning not needing to job hunt. Knowing that my salary not only lets me survive, but thrive. That I can use that stability to help out a friend, or support an independent artist.

But more than anything, not needing to endlessly contingency plan. Not knowing if this would be the week when the perfect job ad would appear, and need to be responded to quickly and brillantly. Not knowing if I’d still be in the state in three months, or six months, or a year, and thus not ever being able to make a firm promise to help with something.

It’s amazing how helpful that is. But it’s also new, and I’m still getting used to what it feels like to live this way: to live in joy and potential, rather than scarcity and uncertainty.

Let me count my blessings:

I adore my job. Oh, I gripe about bits of it. But I adore my job. I work with amazing, intelligent, thoughtful people. They’re not perfect (good thing, because I’m sure not.) But I know they care deeply about teaching, about students, about learning – and even when we disagree or bump heads, that’s always there. It makes everything better, and there’s almost never a day I come home from work feeling useless or invisible or pointless. (Exhausted, yes, like not enough butter over too much bread, yes. But never useless.)

And the students are fabulous, too. I can never get complacent, and yet every day brings me some question, some curiousity that delights me and gets me going off in a brand new direction. (It’s part of why I like working with high school students: I get to do a little of everything.)

I’ve had my first for-pay writing published, and submitted another contracted piece. I’ve continued to develop connections and ties within my community. (Both pieces are in Llewellyn’s Witch’s Companion Almanac: I write under the name Jenett Silver. The 2010 piece is about music in personal practice, the 2011 pieces are for September, and an article on online tools and Pagan community.)

This was also the year that my tradition, the religious community I look to first, recognised me as an elder. I’m still blinking a bit at that one, and working on figuring out how I want to – need to – live up to that honor. (This is, I think, a lifetime process, or should be.)

I got to see the last of the students in my parent group who I had a substantial hand in working with become an initiate. I wasn’t at her initiation, but I did get to talk to her a lot before and after, and watching the changes in her has been delightful, amazing, and a great reminder of why I want so much to help make that happen for more people. I hope for many more such joys in the years to come.

And I spent a good chunk of the summer helping a dear friend after surgery. While it did challenging things to my energy levels and ability to get other things done, I don’t regret a moment of the experience: many wonderful conversations, thoughts, gentle pushes in the best direction, and amazing other things.

Integration: I’ve made major steps towards integrating all parts of my life. I’m now quietly but easily out at work as Pagan, and as a priestess, to boot. I’ve gotten some great questions, a lot of quiet support, and no blowback at all. (I did say that where I work has a lot of wonderful qualities, didn’t I?) This, too, is a big change for me, and one I’m still learning to dance with fully.

Oh, yes. And I helped run a convention (learning bunches of fascinating new skills), continued to volunteer as Programming Chair and webmistress for Twin Cities Pagan Pride , and did various other and sundry things. I also grew my first vegetables ever. (Tomatoes in an Earth Box.)

Not a bad year, when you put it that way.

There are things I regret in this year, too.

Not enough music. I continue to struggle with how to make it my own in ways that truly fit into my life. Work is one thing, but this has been a back and forth struggle with my own expectations, built from decades of formal music training. Slow steps, this year, but not enough.

Not enough time with friends. I know I’ve also let friends down a few times (and I have the best friends, ever.) Being stretched thin, having to cancel on short notice because I just couldn’t keep going. Of over-estimating what I wanted to do and what I could actually manage. Of a few communication glitches. Of not remembering to reach out and check in with people as much as the ideal me, the one who has the best of all the mentors I know who do that as a matter of course, wants to.

Not enough writing. There’s the book on better Pagan research techniques I desperately want to revise and finish – but I need a brain that is not eaten by very similar discussions at work first, to be able to work on some of it.

Not enough ritual work: Not enough group work, though for very good reasons. Not enough personal work, either. That part needs to change, because lack of ritual makes my hindbrain cranky. (In both cases, it’s not ‘none’. There’s been some. Just … not enough.)

And all those other plans: all sorts of other things I wanted to get done, to improve. Better housekeeping, so my home is always the refuge and quiet place I want it to be. (I was not a tidy child, and as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten more easily distracted by disorder, without having the orderly habits intuitively in place to keep that true. This is not a combination I recommend.) All sorts of desires – to spin more yarn, to knit more, to create other art and beauty, to write more about books I read.

These things I haven’t done aren’t good.

They all matter to me, and I want to do them more. But I also know that the world changes, the river flows on – and this year, I will have new choices, new possibilities, new joys and opportunities, especially now that work is settling into a known foundation.

And so, now, I listen to this track (“Tam Lin” from Tricky Pixie’s first album Mythcreants) to finish. And I will go forward into eating wonderful food (chicken wild rice stew, homemade rolls, and tomatoes from my garden) and some ritual work to celebrate the season. When that is done, I intend to tune my harp, and play for at least a few minutes.

Happy Harvest Home to you. Happy harvest. Happy fall. Happy bringing in the things that bring you joy, and thinking about the things that will.

Integrating my life

Jenett — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 23:59:50 +0000

I’m back at work for the school year.

Working for a school definitely has its own yearly cycles and festival days: last night I was at the back to school barbecue for staff and their partners, this morning we had our fall all-employee meeting, book discussion, and then time to get things done in our teaching spaces.

(I come back a week before the faculty: I spent all of last week working with my new assistant to move every single book in our library, in order to rearrange the space. I’m delighted with the result, which we finished today: it’s open, with clear lines of sight and flow between different areas, and the light is even more gorgeous than before. I think we’ve solved a couple of nagging ongoing problems (involving students doing things that were perhaps better undone in corners hard to see around). We’ll see how it works with actual students next week. Best news: the most expensive actual change was about $300, other than taking out a huge elephant of a standing-height circulation desk, so if we decide it’s not working, we can always move things again.)

Anyway, this post is a great example of something I’ve been thinking about a lot this summer: the idea that to be the kind of librarian I want to be, I need to deeply integrate it with my religious goals and commitments.

By this, I don’t mean ‘try and convert everyone to my particular trad” because, ew, no. But I mean that I want to let the me that I am in circle – priestess, teacher, ritualist, creator of intentional and focused space, intuitive listener – come through more overtly in my work life.

I want to anchor and hold a space where learning and inspiration and discovery can happen in a safe way. I want to use the tools I have at my disposal to help me manage the energy and interaction demands of working with 70+ faculty and 500+ students every day. (At least potentially – fortunately, not all of them show up at the same time. But still, as an introvert, that’s a pretty hard gig for me some days.)

I need to balance the parts of the job I adore (helping people find information that matters to them, and helping them learn how to find things themselves) with the parts that are a little less ecstatic: paperwork and budgets and all those other practical details. And I need to have an eye both on each individual day’s tasks, but also on the bigger cycles of my work life: each week, each quarter, each semester, each year – and each student’s experience over the four years most of them are with us.

No small task, any of that.

And I need to figure out a way to do it that means I’m not working 60+ hour work weeks to get everything done (because that’s probably not sustainable for me) and that leaves me energy, focus, and attention to do other things after work (time with friends, writing, coven matters.)

Yeah, I know. I want a lot.

I think it’s possible. I just think it’s a work of magical and ritual creation in and of itself, even before you get down to any specific details or desires or anything else. Simply creating a life, a process, a way of living where this is even a possibility takes some change in me, and some change in what’s around me, and some change in how I look at what I’m doing and when I do it.

So, I’ve been doing a lot of that this summer.

What does that look like?

I’ve started developing daily personal habits that should help. Some of that is personal practice, some of that is trying out some different things that seem to make my body happier.

I’ve created a professional shrine in my back office that reminds me, each time I look at it, of what I’m aiming for. There are things there representing knowledge and learning and inspiration, a cool bowl of water for flow and intuition, and salt to help with grounding and crystalline intensity when that’s needed.

(I’ll take a photo at some point: if you know I’m Pagan, it’s probably obvious what it is, but it’s no more involved or weird than things many other faculty have on or near their desks.)

I wanted very much to make the space my own: that’s what I’ve been working on for the last week and a bit. Moving things around was a lot of work, but I now feel like it’s mine, it has my philosophical stamp on it, in all sorts of little ways.

I’m remembering the power of conversation. My division head (aka the person I directly report to) said something to me in the hiring discussions last spring that stuck with me: that what we’re basically getting paid for (as an independent school with, yes, a substantial tuition cost, though we also give a fair bit of financial aid) is the relationships we develop with students.

Framed in that light, spending 20 minutes helping someone (student or faculty) with a problem isn’t distracting us from our work: it *is* our work. And as I’ve started to build in time to make that easier (by going to the barbecue last night, by knowing I’m going to spend a lot of this week having 5-10 minute chats with a lot of people about their summers), it’s easier to remember that that the human connection and understanding and support are the things to keep my focus on. The paperwork can happen later, if it has to. The people are the bit that matters.

I always knew this, of course – but something about that particular conversation got it stuck in my head in a way that feels really deeply rooted now.

And a physical tool: One of my dear friends (the one I spent the summer helping, in fact) is a jewelry maker by profession. She made me (with a lot of collaboration) a bracelet to help me anchor the kinds of energy flow and focus that I want for this year, as well as to help me with some fairly specific things (like being able to work out in the main library area for most of the day and not feel totally wiped out at the end: teenagers put out a *lot* of stray emotional energy, and I can find it really distracting or draining if I’m not on the top of my form otherwise. Even when I am, it can take focus from being the best librarian I can be, which isn’t really what I want.)

I expect to wear it daily for a month or three, and then work down to wearing it as needed. Not only is it a physical reminder of my goals and intentions (never a bad thing in itself), it’s also an anchor for the specific goals I mention above, and a reminder of the power of integration.

And finally, keeping me honest: I’m doing a presentation to interested faculty a week from Wednesday (as part of our monthly teacher talks) about the integration work. I’ve been very quietly out as Pagan to a number of people for the last year or two, but haven’t talked a lot about what that’s meant.

My talk is going to focus on how working with the natural cycles of our year (both seasonal and school), seeking balance from different kinds of interactions and tasks, and about how some of my religious community skills cross into professional work (group dynamics, intentional space, recognising and creating moments of recognition for different passages), and vice versa (working where I do has *definitely* made me a better teacher in a lot of ways.) And I’m also going to talk about some of the challenges of balancing two demanding sets of skills against each other – something a lot of my colleagues know a lot about.

My hope with this is both that it’ll explain some of the reasoning behind some of the choices I’m focusing on – but also to help get conversation started about some of the broader ideas: balance, compassion for ourselves and others, going beyond the ‘expected’ answers, and all sorts of other things that are core to the mission of the school.

On taking time to tend

Jenett — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 01:44:59 +0000

I’ve had a couple of people, on hearing about what I’m doing for my friend who recently had surgery (currently in a transitional care/rehab center, and steadily improving), who say “I could never do that.”

And I point out that it’s not everyone’s gift to do the specific things I’m doing. (Scheduling and coordinating are tasks that take me time and energy, but that are not, in themselves, particularly challenging for the way my brain works: I am, after all, in the business of creating at least the simulation of order out of chaos.)

But today, I realised that there are two stories I’ve rarely told but that are key to why it’s so important to me to help in this way. One is a debt I’ll never be able to repay – and can therefore only pay forward. The other is a reminder of why it’s so important to me to build caring connections over time.

My first story:

My father died of cancer when I was 15. But before he died, he was ill for about a year, both before they diagnosed the cancer, and then while going through treatment to prolong his life.

He loved me a very great deal, and one of his deepest wishes was that my life should be disrupted as little as possible by his treatment and illness. Now, there is no way to make that happen – but he was desperate (in a quiet, British, way) – to do what he could.

I was 14, most of this time. And I was deeply involved in two things: music and horseback riding. The music was easy: school choir and orchestra were at school, my music school rented our Middle School building (on my way home from high school), and I could get myself there easily.

But the horse – that was trickier. I was a serious rider and competitor at that time, and I was at the barn 6 days a week (three of them for lessons, one for Pony Club, and the other two for pleasure or competition). At a barn 45 minutes away. And I was 14 – well below driving age.

Chemo takes a lot out of a person so my father was often not up to driving (especially during rush hour as many of those drives were), and my mother needed to be around for some of his appointments.

My mother was, at that time, working at our public library, in a close and friendly staff. At some point, one of her co-workers said “What can I do to help? No, really, anything.” And my mother, in some desperation, said “Could you drive Jen to the barn once or twice a week?”

The friend blinked, and thought about it, and came back and said “You know, I always regret not doing more riding in my teens. Sure.” And so, for most of that year, she drove me to my barn at least twice a week. Since she was a novice rider, and I very much wasn’t, my riding instructor arranged the lesson times so that suitable lessons for both of us would be back to back, and then we’d trek back home.

That year – and my beloved Dorothy – saved my sanity. I’m sure of it. And that friend of my mothers (who had not been particularly close before that) made a *huge* difference to not only my well-being, but to helping my parents feel that my life was continuing to be as stable as they could possibly manage.

That friend went on to continue riding, long after she stopped driving me. When she and her husband moved back to the Netherlands (where her husband was from), she found a new place to ride, and sent back periodic pictures of herself on gorgeous Frisians for a while.

It’s that, in those most formative years of my life, that taught me that helping not only makes life better for the person I’m helping (at least that’s the hope, or why do it). But that it can be a deeply transformative and world-opening moment in my own life.

I can’t deeply help everyone on the planet. I can’t even do it for all of my close and beloved friends who might need it. But I do it when I can, because of that memory of those drives, those riding lessons, those moments in which I could get away from everything else pressing in, and just be.

The second lesson:

The summer between my sophomore and junior years in college, I was taking intro German classes in summer school. My mother tends to show affection through driving, so even though I could get myself to and from school by bus and a walk, Mom would often drop me off at a somewhat easier stop.

One day, my mother mentioned – rather off-handedly – that she wouldn’t be able to pick me up at a particular time. When I asked why, she said that someone – my guidance counsellor in public high school, who had also been the guidance counsellor for my older brother and sister – had cancer, and Mom was driving her to chemo treatments.

I asked a bit more, and found out that my counsellor had been single all of her life, was living in another town (because housing prices in the suburb I lived in are not within reach of teachers who work there, as a general rule) with her very elderly and rather difficult mother.

She had no one else to drive her. She’d started treatments during the school year, when all her colleagues were obviously occupied, and couldn’t get free for the couple of hours needed to drive into Boston, wait during treatment, and drive back. Because of her mother’s demands, she’d never developed other close friendships, because her mother wanted her home.

And so Mom, who’d run into her casually at some point when this started, and she was trying to figure out what to do, had offered to drive. She had the time, she knew the routine. And … someone needed to care. This was a woman who had thoughtfully guided generations of teenagers into places they might be happy (so one hopes, anyway – certainly worked for my family).

My former guidance counsellor died a few years ago. But I am still delighted and proud of my mother, and how off-hand she was about it. How “This is just what you do, when you can do it.” Not because someone’s a best friend, or because it’s showy, or because it’s easy. But because you can, and you know it will truly be of help.

I also remember that there are ways to build connections in our community. The school I work at has a Sunshine Club. Most of the time, they coordinate gifts for new babies, or marriages, or other happy things. But if someone is seriously ill, or hurt, or has a family crisis, they also help coordinate a little of that help. If someone has great family support, that might be a few easy things. But if it’s someone who’s single, who doesn’t have family or other support in the immediate area, everyone also chips in with rides and pre-made dinners, and all the other things that can help.

So, those are my stories of why this kind of help – this kind of deeply personal help – are so important to me. Because I can never repay those months of my father’s peace of mind. Because no one should have to go to chemo alone, on public transit, because there’s no one to drive, or comiserate. Because sometimes, the thing that matters most of all is the simple human presence and engaged mind that can solve some – not all, but more than none – problems through creativity, attention, and a little time and effort.

Now, I’m not saying that everyone should go out and devote all their time to helping others. Most of us need to earn a living, and it’s also healthy and needful to have hobbies, spend time with friends and family, and all sorts of other things. But if I had one wish for the world, it would be that people keep their eyes open for situations where their particular gifts and skills fit – with sparkling precision and beauty – into someone else’s needs.

When I have offered my gifts and skills and talents in the ways that best fit (not the ways that look best to others, or seem most showy, or whatever else), I have been amply repaid. There’s not one time I’ve done this for someone that I’ve regretted the time and energy it took: in all cases, it deepened not only my relationships with that person and the others close to them – but it’s filled my life with greater joy and beauty and wonder.

There are few greater transformative acts. Or magical ones.

Being an external brain

Jenett — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 21:53:28 +0000

One of my dear friends is currently at the hospital for hip replacement surgery. And so I wanted to quickly post a note to something I wrote (and she reviewed before I posted it) that’s about what I’m doing for her during her recovery. We refer to what I do as being her External Brain. I talk about the details of how we make that work over here.)

Basically, I keep track of details so she doesn’t have to. So her husband doesn’t have to. So we know that there’s someone who can sit with her all the time while she’s in the hospital (my friend has adult hearing loss and lip-reads, so having someone there to both remind the hospital staff of that and of what’s necessary for her to participate in the conversation (and to do things like take notes of what’s happened, so she doesn’t have to, and can focus on the conversation.))

I’m reminded of two things every time I do this particular kind of work – and in its own way, this particular kind of priestessing.

1) It’s not about me.
It’s about what’s actually helpful and necessary, and my own ego, my own desires can just stay out of the way. (That’s a valuable lesson I carry back into my group work, my work life, and pretty much everything else.)

This doesn’t mean that I need to erase my personality – quite the contrary, as some of what makes me able to be her External Brain with great results is how our interactions work out. But it does mean I need to be clear about the end goal and the intention, and all the other pieces that go into that. And I need to focus on what my friend needs, not what I’d need if I were in a similar situation.

2) Everyone has their own skills:
And to be the best friend I can be, I can’t want to do everything. That’s not good for me, it’s not good for my friend. Currently, another friend of hers is there being Speaker to Medical Staff as she comes through surgery and out of recovery. When she’s ready to go up to her room, he’ll call me, and I’ll head over, so that someone can be there while he and my friend’s husband get a chance to take a break if they need to.

I also don’t need to be the one driving around doing errands. Unlike last time we did the External Brain routine, my friend has a personal assistant who helps her with work tasks, who has a good idea what she’ll eat and where to get it, and who can handle a lot of those details very efficently. I don’t need to be him. I don’t need to be her husband, and provide the emotional support and engagement he can. I don’t need to try and be other friends, who will bring their own comfort and skills. I just need to be me, and to do the things she’s wants me to focus. And then to spend time filling in around the edges if it’s necessary.

Mostly, though, I just need to be me, thoroughly. Completely.