Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Thirteen Ways on facebook

Hi my dear friends and readers - you can now 'like' Thirteen Ways on facebook.  Thanks for all your support! https://www.facebook.com/pages/Thirteen-Ways/521388194590439


thinking for yourself: thrift shop wisdom

"This is what I call getting swindled and pimped...this is what I call getting tricked by business."  - Macklemore, Thrift Shop

Maybe because my husband is a salesman and his territory has been the Midwest, we are naturally a road trip family.  One of the great accomplishments of my life was driving as the lone adult from St. Louis to Southern Florida with my four and six year old children.  Happily, they each threw up only once. 

This past week, we enjoyed a vomit-free road trip to Northern Minnesota. Being a bit older, the kids like listening to pop music while we drive and you can't listen to a pop station right now without hearing Macklemore's Thrift Shop  (Clean version!).  The poet in me is predisposed to like rap and hip hop and I actually think this is a great, fun song.  The thing I like best about it, is that it's really pretty subversive...the 'speaker' is basically saying that if you're buying a Gucci T-shirt for $50, when instead you could go to a thrift shop and purchase something totally unique for half the price, then you're getting tricked by business. 

Why is this subversive?  Because it asks us to question who gives us our version of reality.  It expects that even little kids who are listening to pop songs can question why and how we want what we think we want. 

We can and should do this in many areas of our life, because there is always someone else's idea of truth or reality that can influence us for better, for worse, or for neutral - but if we are not aware of it, we lose our power of choice.

A small example, maybe a silly one, from my own life, is the influence of my grandmother - my mother's mother.  She lived to be 95 years old and was a lady who enjoyed people, enjoyed life in general, played and won bridge games well into her nineties, and read the newspaper up until the last months of her life. She said the key to longevity is a sense of humor and faith in God.  She also was a lady who 'put her face on.'  I remember visiting her in the hospital when I was in my mid to late twenties. (As many older people, she had somewhat frequent hospitalizations in the last few years of her life).  I walked in, smile on my face, bringing youth and cheer with me and she looked at me and said, "Kate, you look terrible."  Huh?  I noticed she had just put on her lipstick.  I myself was not wearing any lipstick.  This is why she thought I looked terrible.  In my grandmother's version of reality, it was a truth that all women look better with a little makeup.  It brightens their cheeks and shows they have pride in themselves.

It was like the air I breathed growing up: "women should wear makeup."   I can't say this is as malevolent as 'getting tricked by business', but as an adult, I see that there is no objective law of nature stating the above.  While, I am still a makeup-wearer,   I have the responsibility to look at who and what has influenced me and then decide what I want to keep and what I want to get rid of, or where I want to fall in-between.  (Lipstick: only on dress up occasions.  Mascara: everyday.) 

Another example - there was just a editorial in the New York Times this week http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/opinion/sunday/unhappy-clean-house.html?_r=0 about how and why we've come to see the perfection of our homes as a means to happiness.  How did this get prescribed to us?

Here's the upshot:  we've got parents, friends, schools, business, religion competing with one another and sometimes overlapping in their efforts to influence the way we live or what we think about the way we live.  I find that some people I meet are not happy with their lives in part because they are so frazzled trying to live up to someone else's standard. 

It seems to me that Macklemore is doing and saying something right.  Let's use a little common sense.  Let's adopt a little of his swagger.  When you're wearing flannel zebra jammies, you just have to think for yourself.

Friday, March 15, 2013

The Kindred Spirit Principle

Miss Barry was a kindred spirit after all," Anne confided to Marilla, "You wouldn't think so to look at her, but she is. . . Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.”
L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Working in home hospice, I met new people all the time.  In fact, every morning I worked, I called a voicemail system that instructed me, not only about who of my patients had died overnight, but also what new patients had been assigned to me since my previous work day.  In the medical system, there is not too much time to linger over loss, but always the next patient.

I tried to care for all my patients and families equally - to provide the same listening, the same compassion, the same resources, the same attention, regardless of whether the patient and family seemed kind or cold, loving or angry, flighty or attentive.

Over the six years I worked in hospice, however, I found that there were certain patients or family members I met, and sometime pretty soon after meeting, I'd feel as if we just 'clicked.'  As time passed I noticed that the 'work' I did with these families and patients wasn't the same or equal.  There was a qualitative, intangible difference.  And I realized it wasn't what I did that was different, what was different was the way what I did was received.

One of these kindred spirits, for me, was John.  When I met him, he was reclined in his Lazy Boy, dying of colon cancer.  Or would die of colon cancer in about 5 months time.  He had a big dog that greeted me at the door and when I walked in and sat on his couch, this big mutt gave me a lick on the face.  "He licks his balls, too," my patient said, deadpan.

So here demonstrates, what I'll call the the Kindred Spirit Principle.  When we meet a Kindred Spirit - we know it and they know it.  We relax into being our Selves and they relax into being wholly them Selves.  With Kindred Spirits, we can give and receive friendship and truth (and humor) freely.  What we do with these wonderful friends is not any different, but it feels different.

Kindred Spirits can be the other mom at church, who looks just as tired out from taking care of her tantrum-ing toddler as you've felt when taking care of yours.  It could be the guy sitting next to you on the airplane who you have an unexpectedly interesting conversation with.  It could be the best friend you've had for 25 years.  I might even think that the L.M. Montgomery, who wrote Anne of Green Gables is a kindred spirit of mine - I feel more connected on this Earth knowing that this lady wrote with such humor, imagination and awe and expressed so many things that I feel, but a hundred years before me!

And thankfully, Kindred Spirits appear at many moments in life, not just in times of crisis.  Be on the lookout for them, be open to them.  Be grateful for them.  And know that they are grateful for you.  Like Anne of Green Gables says, they are not so scarce as I used to think.



Tuesday, March 5, 2013

love that book - how love (and books) help us heal after loss

My son and I got to church early on Sunday because his sister was practicing with the choir.  He and I went to our usual hang out spot - the children's library.  He pointed to a book on the shelf, Love That Dog, by Sharon Creech http://www.sharoncreech.com/books/love-that-dog

"I heard that's good," he said.  I sat down and started to read.  Here's the first page:  

Sept. 13

I don't want to
because boys 
don't write poetry.

Girls do.

The short novel is a series of journal/poems written to the boy's teacher.  All the entries are free verse poems.  The boy, Jack, is fighting two battles at the beginning of the book - he doesn't want to write poetry and he definitely doesn't want to write poetry about his dog who died.

I know, there are people reading this who stopped reading the blog right now because they can't even bear to think about a book about a boy whose dog died.  But I'm here to tell you, it isn't maudlin, depressing or sappy.  It is bittersweet, but more sweet than bitter. I fell in love with this book. And in fact, it was so enchanting that I brought Love That Dog straight into the church service with me and finished it all right there, tears streaming down my face and snot coming out of my nose (as I tried to discreetly wipe it with my sleeve). 

Here's what I love about the book and why I think anyone who has ever lost someone - a person or an animal - would find it meaningful and healing:

It's okay to not want to think about what we've lost.  Thinking about what we've lost is heartbreaking and overwhelming for a while, so our brains protect us by not letting us understand it all at one time.  It can be especially hard to think about the last days of someone's life if you were taking care of them when they were sick, if you felt responsible for their comfort, if you witnessed suffering.  We really want to protect ourselves from thinking about these terrible times.

Eventually, we will think about those times.  Our bodies will get tense and sick and we'll feel like we're reexperiencing those terrible times again.  If we can try to calm our bodies down while we think about it, that can help. If we maybe go and talk with someone else - a support group or counselor - this can help too.

We will always be sad about this loss, some thing will change  Life will call us to love again.  Usually it will be a surprise.  For Jack, it was a love of poetry.   And most amazing is how poetry helped Jack talk about not just the loss of his dog, but the love of his dog.

Here's an excerpt from the poem by real life poet Walter Dean Myers that inspires Jack:

Love that boy,
like a rabbit loves to run
I said I love that boy
like a rabbit loves to run
Love to call him in the morning
love to call him
"Hey there, son!"


Sometimes, you find yourself crying and crying right in the middle of church after reading a book about a boy and his dog, and you realize you're crying in grief, but also crying in wonder of love - how one boys love for his dog can feel as true and big and mysterious as all the love in the whole, wide world.