Posts tagged Grief and Loss

Here is an idea for a way to share the gift of story this season. It works well in the cozy circle of family that many of us won’t have in person this year. But it also works beautifully in a Zoom gathering!

“Story Seeds” is a game anyone can play that makes spontaneous storytellers of us all. I often play it in my workshops where there are several people, but you could play it with just two people if you don’t have a whole group nearby.......

The wisdom of the ancients understood the place for both light and darkness. Although we might like to have all light all the time, we live on the physical plane where without one, the other does not exist. Solstice is a celebration of equal measure light and dark. It comes on December 21, around the time when many festivals of light are celebrated around the world such as Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza, Yule, and St. Lucia Day.

I’m all for joy and good cheer, the more the better. However, I’ve often struggled with relentless holiday merriment when, as an adult, holidays bear a mixed bag of childhood memories and current reality, some delightful, some difficult.

Several years ago, it occurred to me that during the holiday ......

Patience was never my forte. My fuse shortened even more after I had two daughters who were ten months apart. It seemed that there was never enough time and there was always something spilling, or someone was spitting up, screaming or both were running in different directions. What happened moment to moment was rarely in the schedule I had set up in my head. Stopping to wipe erp off the shoulder of my navy-blue pantsuit before going to work really slowed me down, not to mention made the glam factor impossible.

It’s true, though, that people can change. I had done a seminar that revealed to me in a profound way this fact of life: no matter how I think things should be, whatever is going on is what is going on. Though so ......

There is no living thing that is not afraid when it faces danger.

The true courage is in facing danger when you are afraid.

- L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Traditionally when we think of courage, we think of a warrior’s courage – bold, fearless, and bigger than life. It’s the James Bond kind of courage, the bungee jumper flinging himself off a bridge, or the kind of courage I mustered when I led a horse packing and storytelling trip in the Wyoming Rockies with seasoned guides Val the Singing Cowboy and his wife Cindy. I had gathered ten participants, and with a total of nineteen horses packing over narrow trails with 5,000-foot drops, we were about as far from civilization as you could get.

You need ......

My friend Julius “Horse” Coffman, a medicine man who conducts Sacred Listening circles, called me into the circle for a year, during which I became both a participant and one of the elders of his community gatherings. Every Friday night we would gather around a fire on the land in Stacy, Minnesota, a land made sacred by ceremony, prayer, honor and attention.  One weekend a month we would stay for a day and sometimes the whole weekend.

As a teacher and coach myself, I love my work and I love witnessing the magnificence and growth of so many. Every so often, though, I need to fill my own well.  So, I took that year to nourish my soul.

When in ceremony, time slows down. What is ordinary becomes extraordinary. We see ......

After my daughter Louise died, for a very long time I could hardly put one foot in front of the other. What I could do was spend afternoons at Minnehaha Creek where she and I used to walk our dogs and where her women friends planted a maple tree in her memory. There I could  walk the wooded paths, breathe in fresh air, and listen to the rushing water.  All I could hear then was the wail of my grieving heart.

One June day, my bones aching with missing her, I pleaded, “If I had some way to know you are here, it would help. When you were an exchange student in Japan, you were across the world but I knew how to find you. I don’t even know if you are here now. I don't know how to find you. And I can’t......