Little Martin Guitar

Yesterday I did something I had not done for perhaps…well, let's just say, a really, really long time. I walked down the street carrying my guitar.

I bought this little Martin with my babysitting money when I was 16. It was, and hopefully will be again, a beautiful instrument, small but with a rich sound. I remember playing it in California, in Tennessee, in the stairwell of an auditorium, where the sound engineer had placed me to record a Don McClean song. He said that recording in the stairs would create a natural reverberation. I sat on the stairs, closed my eyes, and sang The Circus Song. I remember carrying my little guitar with me on an 18 hour bus ride to Myrtle Beach, which I insisted on taking by myself to assert my independence in my first year of college. The case still has the remnants of an Impeach Nixon sticker on it. Over the years, the bridge has worn down and the action has gotten quite high. This means that the space between the neck and the strings has increased, making it more difficult to play. Since I hardly play at all, my now uncalloused fingers object to the amount of pressure needed to chord properly.

The little 018 has been collecting dust under the bed for years. One of the tuning pegs has popped off and it has a broken string. But I've been thinking that it might be nice to play again. I would like to remember how; I used to be fairly good at it. Now that my son has bought himself a guitar and taught himself to play, I want to get my own facility back. But the guitar needs fixing, and I had to jump through some hoops to get Martin to agree that I am indeed its original owner. My mother searched through dusty bins of newspaper clippings in an attempt to find a photo to prove it. Ultimately, one of my sisters found the right picture of me, at 17, playing my beautiful new guitar.

When the repair technician opened the case, he exhaled in admiration. Then he pointed out all the work it would need. The soundboard is cracked; the pick guard is warped. The neck has to be steamed off and reset and the bridge replaced, but he said it would be ready in one month. Most of the repairs are covered by the original owner's warranty, but it will still cost a bit to get it back in shape. I found myself stroking it gently, remembering how it used to sound.

Although I have little intention of singing in public, I am looking forward to playing my little Martin again sometime soon.

Contemplating Movement

I took a Contemplative Dance workshop with Alton Wasson last weekend. His work comes out of Authentic Movement, and he calls it "movement as spiritual practice, artistic resource and psychological narrative." For me, it felt like coming home. My body is my home, the shape in which I live, breathe, and have my being. My body is also the conduit for the expression of thoughts and feelings, not only in words but also in movement and space.

Ever since I could walk, I expressed how I felt in and through my body. As a little girl, I twirled with joy on the lawn; I waved my arms and leapt about, mimicking the movement of the trees and flowers. As I studied dance and learned a larger movement vocabulary, I began creating dances and performing them. The initial inspiration was always based on how an event or interaction felt and was expressed through the body.

We tend to forget this. We often are unaware of the coded messages, the subtle cues our bodies are sending when we are communicating. Arny Mindell calls these secondary messages – our voices might be saying "How nice to see you," to someone we don't care for, and our body tenses, our chin drops down and the person to whom we speak has a momentary confusion. They hear the words and believe them but they are also picking up the secondary "I don't like you" message. Mindell works with these secondary channels, asking clients to perceive them, to amplify them and clarify their meaning.

The clarification opens the possibility for transformation. If I notice that a difficult emotion is locked into a part of my body, I can work through the feeling with movement. By releasing the tension, the emotion is allowed to flow. By flowing with it, I transform it. If fear hunches me over, drawing my shoulders up and my arms tight around my chest, I can roll my shoulders back and open my arms. I can shift my stance and awaken some courage in the face of fear.

Moving through emotion and giving it free expression within the body is very healing. There was one session in the workshop that was hard for me because sorrow welled up, unwanted. I was resistant, yet it was real and I had to let it flow for a while. I also noticed that I seemed stuck in one spot a lot of the time, and took this for a metaphor of being afraid to move forward. In another movement session, I let myself travel all over the room, feeling the freedom of forward motion, and discovered that staying in one place was not necessarily being stuck. Being rooted could mean that I am growing.

Flights of Imagining

I've been thinking a lot about tool kits – an imaginary box filled with skills, strengths, resiliencies and other "tools" to get through the rough spots. My own encounters with grief waves have become infrequent but they still occur. Episodes of darkness, when the world feels broken and slowed somehow, used to last for days. Now, at nearly 6 years out, I have a dip every few months for perhaps an hour or so. This is real progress, but when the grief hits, I still need to rely on my inner resources. I still need to pull out an item from my tool kit.

My tool kit contains music. Listening, singing, drumming, humming – music has the power to open the channel between head and heart, so often blocked and restricted around the throat. Flowing into music and opening my voice elevates my mood. Music brings out another tool – dancing. Movement brings the music into my body and out again, integrating head heart and body. Reaching up to the sky, expanding my arms out and waving my torso and arms in spirals reminds me that expansion cures restriction. When sorrow collapses me into myself, opening my arms and chest helps to transform the sadness into a calmer feeling. When depression drops me to the floor, I allow myself a few moments down in the depths, then slowly rise, reaching up and outward. It is hard to stay in a dark place when you are imagining yourself unfolding like a spring flower.

Imagery. Imagination. When we are children, our imaginations run freely. We have a conversation with a giraffe, imaginary friends who live in China are about to arrive for dinner. As children, we have no issue with being a Bear, a Pirate or a person who can fly with special superpowers. As adults, we suppress these fantasies; they are "silly" or "childish" or "not normal." Imagination is the most important resource in our personal tool kits. As we grow up, we tamp down our dreams, our fancies. We don't trust our dreams or our envisioning power. After a while, we come to believe that we shouldn't engage in imaginal flights.

My trust in my own imagination was eroded by widowhood. My life broke open and I became afraid. The future, as I had imagined it, was gone. Slowly, I am remembering that imagery seeds my dreams; imagination is a strength I can utilize. It doesn't matter that I cannot literally fly; I have special skills that I ought to be using right now – dreaming, imagining, opening up to a fuller experience of life.

As I write this, it is a little too early to play music. But I can still dance to the sound of the birds, to the beating of my own heart. I can move to open joyfully to the experience of this day. I am going to do that right now!!

Message of Love

Valentine's Day is here again. Who invented this holiday anyway? Why is there so much pressure to purchase diamonds, roses, chocolates? I don't like chocolate, and while I adore fresh flowers in the middle of winter, I'd much prefer a random offering, say, on a Thursday for no reason at all. Seeing my husband arrive with his face covered by a giant display of expensive flowers because it was Valentine's Day was nice, but it always seemed...contrived.

We never took Valentine's day very seriously. Apart from that ostentatious bouquet, it was not a day for gifts or jewelry. We exchanged cards, searching for either the soppiest poetry or silliest innuendo we could find. He always addressed his to "My Beautiful Wife," a reference to the Talking Heads song, Stop Making Sense. I keep finding them, tucked in the back of a drawer, hiding in between my cookbooks.

Holidays are always fraught, but this one comes with heart shaped expectations. When your partner has died, the Day of Love is bittersweet, even depressing. It is a negative reminder of an unexpected end. While it is not really an important holiday, the media frenzy of loving couples surprising each other with flowers, cards, jewels, staring at each other, is painful. The red and pink heart inundation and a particular advertisement that featured an old couple holding hands in a park sent me running from the room in the first few years after my husband died. We would never be that old couple in the park.

Ignoring it is, of course, an option but rather hard to accomplish unless you stay inside for a month with the lights out, TV and radio off. So, what is the alternative? Why not use this "romantic holiday" as an ode to all the love in our lives instead of feeling awful about the love we lost. Turn a tiny bit of the pain, sorrow, regret and disappointment into expression and remembrance.

Here are some ideas for getting through a Widowed Valentine's Day:

~ Write a letter to your spouse or partner. Begin with this: I love you because you….Write in the present tense; honor the feelings you shared and keep them in your heart. When you are done, read the letter as if you were reading to him or her.

~ Write another note to yourself containing at least three answers to the following sentence. Begin with this: I am lovable because I….Recognize the wonderful, loving qualities you have. Express them, decorate them, bring them forward. Read your note aloud to yourself.

~ Buy yourself some flowers. Contrivance aside, having something pretty and fresh in the house is uplifting. They don't have to be over the top, expensive or elaborate. A $5 supermarket bunch will do. Get yourself some lovely blooms that please you, arrange them in a nice vase and place them on display. Be sure to put them in the room you spend the most time in. Allow yourself to enjoy their beauty. Let them remind you of the beautiful love you shared.

~ Send someone a Valentine's card. Your children are obvious "targets," as are siblings or friends. Yesterday, I made personalized collage cards for each of my children. You can also call someone you love (or several people) and ask them the traditional Valentine's questions: "Will you Be Mine?" Reach out, spread the love.

While I am no longer alone, Valentine's day always fills me with remembrance of Alby. I think about those silly cards; I think about his generous spirit, his warm blue/grey eyes looking at me softly. I know he will always Be Mine.

Small Woman with Big Shovel

It snowed again. I don't know why I should be surprised; it is winter and I expect snow.

I love it when it is falling, silently glittering in the light on the back of the house. This light is the Snow Gauge – it illuminates the velocity, the height of the snow piling up on the patio furniture. I peer out the kitchen window and guess at the depth – 6 inches, maybe 10. It is very pretty. It will have to be shoveled.

Out the front door, I sweep the snow away and discover that the blizzard dumped enough to come above the level of the porch. I take the wide grey shovel and start down the path. Alby made this walkway, laying the grey bricks in a herringbone pattern. We argued a lot about its placement, which he wanted to put to one side. I insisted that our symmetrical, Currier and Ives farmhouse needed a centered path. The path is here, somewhere. The snow is heavy.

The cars hunker under bulky white swells, the ends of their windshield wipers jutting out. I shovel a path towards the road, staring at the frozen mound left by the Town snowplow. This is more than two feet high and mixed with ice and sand. I can't do this, I mutter to myself as I continue shoveling. The snow seems almost blue in places. Blue, white, flecked with sand, it doesn't matter. It has to be shoveled.

Several trucks with snowplows hitched to their front ends drive by. Most drivers do not look my way. One of them waves jauntily. I am now closer to the end of the driveway; I've tried pushing the snow but there is too much of it. I settle on a two-stage method, lifting the top portion off and tossing it over my shoulder, then going in again to the same place, sliding the shovel along. I CAN do this, I mutter as I notice another truck. I stand up, and strike a pose, trying to combine frustration with the right touch of exaggerated helplessness. "Look at me, I am very small and this is a lot of Rather Heavy Snow." The truck belongs to the Highway Superintendent, and he shakes his head and drives by. Then, he backs up. He lowers his plow and swipes away the edge his workers left across my driveway. He rolls down the window and shouts, "just helping you out a little!" With a smile, I thank him and wave him on.

The piles on the sides of the driveway are up to my shoulders now. I hack away, carry, shove, sweep and lift. I take a break by the fire for a while and go back out, wearing Alby's bulky black Irish sweater and finish the job.

Winter waiting

Here, at the turning of the year, again I am standing at a crossroads. I am longing to take action, to jump over the steps it will take to develop the next phase. I've been working towards this for the past two years, maybe longer. There is value in methodical steps, there is the necessity of incubation. And I can't, as it has been said, push the river, especially when it appears to be frozen.

I am often impatient. I like to move quickly, I want to make things HAPPEN. I am restless; I have been internal for too long. Perhaps fear is clouding the situation, which actually is a good one.

Winter is the time for stillness. The world seems to be holding its breath; I am holding my breath, trying to fend off the panic generated by what seems like an endless transition. When I relax, I realize that the process is going well. I have spent a lot of time studying, dreaming, seeding. I am ready to manifest, once that proverbial river thaws.

Getting through the holidays

Grieving is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. The world felt like brittle glass; an awkward movement might suddenly shatter it. Sleep was a problem, except when I dreamt that his death was a hoax. Waking was a problem because my mind did not work; I would start something, then find myself in another part of the house, wondering why. Some days felt so bad I simply cancelled them and went back to bed. Surely the next day would be better than the one I was in. Someday I would not feel so crushed, broken and lost.

In early grief, it seems impossible to accomplish even the smallest task. We force ourselves because we know no alternative. Food must be eaten, bills need to be paid, you have to work, the children have to go to school. These children (and teenagers) need you to show them how to get through this pain. They need a model of how to live while grieving, how to heal and enjoy life again.

Holidays are perfect for this. Creating a family celebration despite your grief, or even because of it will not be easy. I can't promise it will even feel good. But finding a way to keep your traditions, simplified if necessary, will ultimately help you and your children understand, in a concrete way, that you CAN get through the sadness.

You don't have to do everything, but it is better to continue your life than to cancel it. It will take time to find it but there is joy in the midst of your sorrow. Continue to love. Light some candles, put on some music, decorate, share meals and thoughtful gifts. Remember something funny. Give yourself a metaphoric pat on the back once the holiday is over – you managed to get through it. Be compassionate to yourself. Raise a glass of something and offer a toast of gratitude.

Here are some tips that worked well for me over the years.

1. Only do what feels right but add a tiny bit more than you think you can handle.

2. Proceed As If…as if it feels okay, even though it doesn't.

3. Identify the most important things to do and let go of the rest.

4. Don't believe anyone who tells you how long grief should last. No one really understands, even if they insist that they do.

5. Don't let anyone tell you how you should feel. Don't listen to anyone who says you are "supposed to" or you "should". If someone says something hurtful, ignore it the first time. They may simply be unaware. If someone repeatedly says hurtful things, stop having contact with them for a while.

6. Allow yourself to cry; holding it in is destructive. Go to a quiet place, give yourself permission, a time limit and let it all out. Roll on the floor if you feel like it, rock back and forth, do anything that helps you release the intense emotions that are washing over you. After you reach your time limit, slow your breathing and hug yourself. Be thankful for the release. Wash your face with cold water, give yourself a little shake and return to whatever you were doing.

7. Repeat number 2 as necessary.

8. Drink a lot of water.

9. Talk about your loved one, as naturally as you can. Other people will be afraid to mention the name, for fear of "upsetting" you. Bring up his/her name, casually, often. We honor them by remembering them.

I wish you all a peaceful, compassionate holiday.