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transcending

family history love, loss & longing transcending writing

The healing power of family history

July 5, 2010

 

My family has had a traumatic time over the past years. My younger brother died very tragically in November 2007. It was the saddest day and life was never the same. My father then died suddenly in May, 2009 so another wave of loss ensued and my happy, stable family of four was halved. Like all people dealing with grief, I struggled to get through the days, the weeks, the months after each episode and still feel the deepest sense of loss. I connect to them, especially my brother, through music as I drive to work first through the bush and then through the traffic. Music is such a powerful source of memory and connection.

Another way I found myself managing these terrible waves of grief was through family history.  I had already begun my search before these events, tracking back like a detective through the generations following the links. With the separation and the trauma from the deaths of those so close to me, family history and  ‘looking back to look forward’  has become a link to my brother and my father. My extended family, also their family, the closest link.  I could find the line anchoring us. I could lose myself in the research and discovery about where we came from. And from that, the story of our history could emerge and connect us. New narratives could form; old buried stories could be brought alive. Christina Baldwin in Storycatcher (details below) talks about tending the fire, the responsibility of being a storycatcher and the power of story to connect, ‘heal, remind and guide us.’

It’s not the only answer but:

  • if moving through is having something to cling to that helps you think about the future, ironically by planting you firmly in the past….
  • if moving through is knowing more about where you came from and the shared history you take forward…
  • if moving through is finding stories that connect you, knowing more about the stories of your ancestors and finding those that resonate…
  • if healing is about losing yourself in something so you are not completely overwhelmed by thoughts of grief and moment to moment anguish…
  • if story helps anchor your creativity and move you forward into something new, to integration and resolution even if it’s all not perfect or ever the same as it was…

then family history offers a healing place, a space to learn and engage with your origins, as far as you can, to take you forward to help you face a new future.

I am not a therapist or an affiliate of any family history sites or the resources below. I speak from the experience of working through family history as part of a  personal healing journey over the past few years. For me, it has led to an immense inner resource of narrative that I wish to tell in other ways such as through the writing of novels based on the stories of my ancestors. I am researching and planning this work at present.

For some people, family history research may not be possible or easy for various reasons, but I encourage people to consider the value of story to help connect in whatever way possible. Our stories of being disconnected also need to be told. The story from my family history that is the most compelling is one of absolute disconnection and  it is demanding to be told.

Some resources I have found useful on this journey are:

Ancestry: Amazing site with so many electronic data bases of records and existing family histories. You need to join up for the full benefits but there is much to gain from this.

Storycatcher: making sense of our lives through the power and practice of story, Christina Baldwin: an excellent book on story and the value of narrative to help frame new worlds.

The pictures on this page are some of the relatives I have found out more about through my searches. The woman above is one of my great, great, great grandmothers, Susannah Morris ( nee Richardson). The man below is her husband, William Morris. Both were early Australian settlers. How these photos have survived from such an early time, I do not know. My thanks to extended family member, Allan Morris, for passing them onto  family member and fellow researcher, Alex McDonald and I. This is the other thing that happens – you find new family connections and forge new links that you never knew you had.

Do you have any stories to tell about the healing power of family history?

 

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love, loss & longing music & images transcending

Sudoku days

June 19, 2010

 

I have been in a twilight zone this week. The twilight zone of watching someone you love being the subject of an operation, the preparation, the process, the aftermath, the lying there, the not knowing the outcome, the twilight of hospitals and waiting.

We have been there far too much these past years and know the drill unfortunately. All you can do sometimes is move things around, find ice, meet some small need, talk quietly. So much you can’t do, such a sense of helplessness.

For these times and other times of waiting, holding, healing, times when you are frozen a little and caught in that moment to moment dealing with something – my secret weapon is sudoku.

Gwen Bell talks of mindfulness in her wonderful Mindfulist blog. In contrast, sudoku at this time is a kind of mindlessness, almost meditative,  a sheer focus of attention on nine numbers that helps you manage much and gives you a sense of peace. It is akin to the escapism of watching sport, the engagement with something that enables you to rest the difficult thoughts for a moment. You still your mind, counting numbers one to nine. It is highly recommended. It’s well known to be highly addictive. I’ve been there and it can eat a lot of your time, but in its rightful place, sudoku is for me a strangely powerful source of stillness and strength.

Learn more about sudoku, get your basic skills up and look at a whole bunch of great sudoku pics here at the Sudoku Pool on flickr.

Image above: Sudoku, by Jason Cartwright, via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license

Image below: Sudoku on the Waterloo and City Line, by Annie Mole , via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license

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creativity music & images transcending writing

Gems #2

June 9, 2010

  

I am absolutely thrilled by Susannah Conway’s announcement of her book deal. As Susannah says, ‘Here’s some proof that if you put a dream into words – and put it out there – the planets will align to help make it happen.’ 

What started as an e-course will become an ‘Unravelling’ book full of beautiful concepts, photographs, creativity, an ‘elegant journal with polaroids slipped between the pages…’ It already sounds delicious and 144 people have so far commented that they will read and buy, and buy for friends and family. And through the pages of Susannah’s blog, the opportunity to engage with the potential readership is already unfolding. Inspirational!  

I am a great lover of Australian singer songwriters. Well, any singer song writers really, but there are some special Australians I love in this genre. Stephen Cummings is right up there: singer, song-writer, poet, novelist, rock star…I love his song, ‘Fell from a great height’:

‘I fell from a great height
Scrambling with myth and light
Surrendered to a dream
That was absolutely right
I fell from a great height’

The song has such layers and  depth, continuing to evolve as you listen over time. Beautiful. The song was also a duet with Toni Childs and appeared on her compilation album, Best of Toni Childs in 1995. I especially love the acoustic version on Stephen’s album, ‘Close-ups.’ 

And finally, Sage Cohen has a gem of an opportunity for poets with ‘The Life Poetic iphone contest.’ You are invited to submit up to three, unpublished poems that you feel represent the spirit of “the life poetic” for consideration by July 4, 2010. Sage will choose her favorite 365 for inclusion in a “Life Poetic” iPhone app that features a poem a day for a year. What an enduring way to celebrate the life poetic!

Image by jmtimages,  used under a Creative Commons license.

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creativity transcending writing

Balancing acts

June 6, 2010

This week has been so very busy at work; much to sort, solve and manage and all very intense. I struggled to get here at all to write after what I felt was a strong start. The balancing act of managing the ‘day’ job and creative aspirations remains a challenge for me as it does for many people.

I’m interested in how others attempt this balancing act and their commentary about this. Also how balance is perceived – work/life balance, priorities and how we can better strive to meet our personal goals.

I asked Joanna Penn from The Creative Penn about this. I have been reading her blog and listening to the podcasts about how she built her online presence, how she maintains this and how she continues to learn about social media. Also, how she is writing a novel. And then she mentioned on one of her podcasts that she has a full-time job as well – as an IT consultant to a mining company. Hallelujah, I thought, a role model – someone managing to balance creativity, the investment of time required to support this and a full-time job.

Joanna’s answer referred me to two of her posts: ‘On efficiency or how to get everything done as a multi-tasking writer,’ and ‘What will you give up to write your book?’ I found the answers fascinating and they rang true with my own thoughts. ‘Getting rid of the TV’ is right up there and confirms my own thoughts on how much time this activity can take up. Less sleep, maximising travel time, being organised, setting goals and investing in education are included in Joanna’s tips and have also featured in my attempts to achieve across a range of life goals of career and creativity.

The concept of balance is an interesting one. Joanna also says ‘love the process’, confirming some inspiring words I read recently in Ted Kooser’s wonderful ‘The Poetry Home Repair Manual’:

‘Remember that the greatest pleasure of writing are to be found in the process itself. Enjoy paying attention to the world, relish the quiet hours at your desk, delight in the headiness of writing well and the pleasure of having done something as well as you can.’

If we are always looking for balance, we may well feel we never get it right. Who’s to say any particular balancing act is right or wrong? I was buoyed by Danielle LaPorte’s joyous debunking of the concept of work life balance: in ‘the suck factor of life balance +passion as a cure to stress.’ Truly, I felt freed after reading this and decided on my own cry of intention in moving forward: ‘No more ‘either/or’….’ No more waiting for one thing to stop so I can do another; no more waiting for time or other resources which may never arrive in that perfect state. Just move ahead, focussing on what I have now. You can have a life of adventure, passion, joy of process and in a way, refuse to be balanced.

To quote from Danielle’s inspiring post:

‘When you refuse the banality of balance and go for full on life (which includes full on productivity and full on stillness,) you’ll see the inevitable mess of it all as something more beautiful and purposeful – full of peaks and valleys – an adventure. The climb can be rigorous, grueling sometimes, but the air is cleaner, and the view will blow your mind. The fruit you’ll find on your own tilted path is so much sweeter – and there’s so much more of it to share.’

So the search for balance may be just an act, an automatic response, that really doesn’t help with moving ahead much at all or worse, holds us back as we wait for a state of illusory perfection that may never come. In that sense, perhaps it’s just another form of resistance? What are your thoughts on balancing acts?

Image: Rocks balancing, by me’nthedogs’ via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license

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love, loss & longing transcending

Why transcending?

May 14, 2010

So why ‘Transcending’? What does it mean and why is it my focus? How does this word pull so much together for me?

You could ask my yoga teacher from a long time ago how he knew it was my theme, my life focus. Somehow he knew, giving me my spiritual name, ‘Turiyamani’ or ‘transcendental jewel’.

I didn’t think much about it for many years but it was in the background all the time, I guess. A spiritual path, a sense of knowing I didn’t quite connect to.

But then, difficulty and tragedy, one thing after another, testing resilience, a time through which you change radically and nothing is the same again, a turning point that makes you question not only what’s important but everything you do.

Your world arcs into a different sphere entirely. You can remember the day, the hour, people’s faces, how time stood still, how green the leaves were, how all you could do was drink tea and stare into the air. How people said to you, ‘Your life will never be the same again’ and you fought that thought desperately, trying to keep things the same.

You would trade the world to go back to the state before then, but you cannot. It is immutable and your path.

And then later I came across Chris Guillebeau and his site, The Art of Non-Conformity: Unconventional strategies for life, work and travel

Chris writes about many things: travelling towards his goal of visiting every country in the world, entrepreneurship, personal development. The ‘convergence between highly personal goals and service to others’ is a key theme. He has constantly wonderful thought pieces, challenges to the way you think, work and live. In ‘A Brief Guide to World Domination – How to live a remarkable life in a conventional world’, Chris talks about personal goals, ordinary people pursuing big ideas and also through this, making a difference in the lives of others.

He asks you to consider ‘the two most important questions in the universe’. Here they are and here are my answers:

#1 What do you really want to get out of life?

My answer: transcendence, light out of dark, words lifted high, sweet words out of loss and longing, a way of rising above

#2 What can you offer the world that no-one else can?

My answer: words of loss and longing, receptacles for managing them, a model for resilience and transcendence, structures for managing feelings, lyrical words

Those answers have led me here after a long time of reflecting on them. I am sure I am not the only one who feels these emotions but I am the only one who can connect them in this unique way, offer them shaped and formed just so. So here I am, transcending and working through what this means. I hope that it means something to others at it unfolds.

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love, loss & longing transcending

The extraordinary power of the ordinary self

May 11, 2010

You will see under the blog title that my key theme words are ‘the extraordinary power of the ordinary self…’ These words come from a book by Marcia Westkott, ‘The Feminist Legacy of Karen Horney.’  This is an amazing book and was a life changing perspective for me many years ago, about twenty years ago now. I was given this book as a gift and the gift unfolded in reading this book at that time and still resonates today. The words above come from the last chapter, ‘From feminine type to female hero.’ It’s complex but was and remains something I intuitively understand.

‘The power of the ordinary is an idea of transcendence that is especially appropriate to the feminine type,’ (Westkott, p212) It’s about how women especially create a false personality, are not truly themselves out of a desire for approval, for what others want them to be. How they become divorced from their authentic self, devalued, angry and detached. How the audience keeps shifting and the demands for perfection are therefore without bounds.

In the end, after working through a process of learning and discovery, for me, often through tragedy and in a context of all the shifting of stable supports, there is a sense of realisation of the true power of the ordinary self and what it is capable of. It is a message essentially of self-acceptance and growing into your own skin, but with a real backbone of why this occurs:

‘Neither perfect nor contemptible, she discovers the extraordinary power of her ordinary, unique self and what is truly possible…’

I know it’s a brief summary of a complex theme but do these words resonate with you also? What do they mean to you and how can they give you strength in moving forward?

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