Winter Solstice 2023

             “Return.”  That’s what ancient Chinese sages called the Winter Solstice, when they asked people to cease travel, stay home, and celebrate in warmth.  Coming immediately after “Disintegration” in their system of the I Ching, Return is an especially beautiful moment of peace, one I can now resonate with.  When I started this tradition of Winter Solstice messages, I titled the first one “2020 was Different,”  smiled at the understatement, and was thankfully unaware of what more “different” was still coming in 2021 and ‘22, for me at least.  Ironically, this year that has brought more “disintegration” globally has been one for me personally – finally – that has been less “different.”

It's still had loss – becoming an empty-nester – but at least this time, it’s of the celebratory sort.  And right now, I have both kids home for Christmas for a few weeks – yay!  My son graduated from college, moved into a home he’s leasing with good friends, and secured a great position working for a warm and dedicated legislator at the OR State Capitol.  Three months later, my daughter, now a college sophomore, also moved out into a home she’s leasing with friends, and even took the cat.  I knew I’d miss the kids, but I didn’t realize how much I’d miss the cat!  I plan to find one of my own, but my current work as a substitute teacher lacks the stable routine to introduce a pet, so I’ll wait for the summer.  

When I was asked recently to compare substitute teaching to having my own class, I paused.  Hmm.  It depends on your moment in life.  There is something very special about watching your own students rise into their success.  That moment when their “light” turns on, and they “get it,” and produce something amazing, after you’ve been pumping them up for weeks – “You got this!” – and they don’t think so, and then they finally do and surprise themselves and delight you, is Magic.  For a time, I lived for that Magic.  But I also didn’t get to “leave” work; some of it was always coming home with me.  Itching to write, substituting is now a blessing. 

            As my blog shows, I had been writing while teaching, but it was a constant challenge not only to find the time but also the mental space for it.  Having completed the book I was blogging, “Just like Eve,” I am now working on another behind the scenes.  I hope to show future publishers with this blog, especially “Just like Eve,” they can trust me as an author.

            I had never anticipated when I began “Just like Eve,” quite how much I would identify with my heroine Jasmine, accused of being “just like Eve,” who through her marital shakeup, forbidden love, eviction from church, and her own research into the figure of Eve, even from the biblical story's plain text, and, even more, in its own language, discovers both Eve’s heroism and her own.  Calling the book a “spiritual quest novel,” I also didn’t know how many of my own trials I’d face while I was writing story and how much these trials would teach me about myself, about life, and how to find it in its abundance.

            I’ve seen how hard, yet important, is to maintain honesty through our trials, facing them without pretending “resilience” or blaming anyone else.  When I was brainstorming my 2022 Winter Solstice message in November 2022, I intended a message of hope after loss.  Then on December 2 came the next loss, the fire to the racquet center where I worked, played, and met with friends.  Hadn’t I been through enough?  Of the fire, I recalled that classic ‘90s sitcom and said, “If Cheers went up in fire, Sam and Diane would have lost more than just their jobs.”

The planned optimism of last year’s Winter Solstice message was replaced with one my mom called “too dark.”  “It’s honest” I said, noting that the message already contained my reply: “we need to learn to allow ourselves to enter into the darkness and be honest that we feel it, and that it is hard.”   If I had tried to pretend optimism, I might have found surface peace, but not true peace.  That comes only by way of truth and the type of Return the sages considered the most meaningful: the one that carries us back to our original, truest selves, that self before our culture has conditioned us into something else.

Through this process, including my own trials of “disintegration,” I’ve landed onto something amazing.  There’s a remarkable place of miracles just beyond the five senses, and once you can reliably tap into it and conquer the forces trying to keep you out, you find that peace.  And if you can see your trials as entry points into it, you’ll gain a fresh perspective on everything that happens.  I hope you’ve been discovering this or will soon.  May 2024 be a year when we all come toward peace.

 * * * * * * *

For any curious about some of these I've learned, here is a capsule from one of my 2023 posts, Letting Go Part 2: Life without Hands:

Humility: when your teenage daughter is bathing you and your college student son is clipping your fingernails, you have to become very humble very quick.

Take nothing for granted: when you celebrate a thumb that works so you can dress yourself, you start to see how much you’ve taken for granted. 

A gentle touch:  You don’t realize how hard your touch can be until every touch brings you pain.  You’re starting to get better, so you’re now opening doors, pressing the walk button at a crosswalk, closing your dresser drawer, shaking someone’s hand, patting your teenager on the back for a job well done, squirting out hand cream, and knocking out those coffee grounds: those things you’ve done every day for years and taken for granted, and now they bring pain.  You wonder if your touch has been too hard, and then you wonder if your speech has been too hard, and if you need to seek a more gentle way to touch, to speak, and to live.

Forgive yourself:  You were foolish and you fell.  Now forgive yourself and learn.

Release yourself from other people’s expectations: there are those who think you should heal fast and get back to life.  But your body knows, and it tells you.  Listen to your body and set yourself free from those who think they know your body better than you do.

Show compassion: If you find yourself impatient with anyone, remember they might have just fallen.  Maybe they can’t use their hands.  Maybe there’s something else they can’t do that you can’t see.  Show compassion.

Slow down!  You’ve forgiven yourself – good.  But if you don’t want to re-injure yourself, slow down!

Let Go!  No matter where you are, where you’ve been, how hard you’ve fallen, nor how stupid you were when you fell, let it all go.

© 2023 by Karina Jacobson.  All rights reserved.  Please use with permission and/or a link to this blog post.

The Energizer Bunny Learns the Rhythm of Nature (Part 2)

From Part 1:

The Rhythm of Nature
strides as the turtle
who wins a race
he doesn’t know he’s in

Ever evolving,
neither static, nor constant
 yet slowly progressing
beats the rhythm of Nature

Even when we see not
the burbling beneath the volcano
the plates shifting into an earthquake
the atmosphere transforming into a tornado
the waves building to a tsunami

Even then, even when we see not the signs,
the Rhythm of Nature is ever evolving
neither static, nor constant
 yet slowly progressing

            I was trained not to stride to the rhythm of nature, but to the drum of the Energizer Bunny, that mascot toy for the battery that keeps “going and going and going” and, even after everyone else’s batteries are dead, is “still going.”  My mother is wired like the Energizer Bunny, and by some genetic quirk, I am not.  Vacations were full, as Mom booked each hotel with a “guaranteed late arrival” and even planned in which rest stops we’d take for our picnic lunches.  Her errands at home, however, were not planned and seemed to follow a random order, defying geographic logic, zigzagging out of the way, and then returning to previous stores that had deals three dollars better than the later stores.  Like all of the competitor bunnies in the Energizer ads, I, her tag-a-long had batteries that died part-way through, but hers were “still going.”  Thinking I should be wired – or “batteried” -- like her, once I had hit my wall, Mom had one of two replies: “Quit whining” or “The world doesn’t revolve around you.” 

             In time, I gained the endurance to quit whining and eventually grew into an Energizer Bunny myself.  Early in our marriage, my then husband teased me for my to do lists that also kept going and going and going.  I had a love-hate relationship with these lists; part of me longed for days with short lists, but the other part reveled in those days when I crossed out a multitude of items on a long one.

Click here for the body of Part 1

 The conclusion of Part 1: 

. . . It was then that I decided to hire myself for the landscaping project to the side of our house that had been itching at me for four years.  Roughly 40 feet long by 14 feet wide, this plot had previously housed two vegetable gardens and a play sand pit, each bordered with bricks and stones.  But our kids had grown; the gardens had been left to waste; the bricks and patio stones were broken, scattered, and buried; what amounted to seven 20 gallon tubs of stones to be collected that were then also mostly buried; and weeds, many thigh high, had taken over the entire plot.

Since the plot is right outside my bedroom window, every morning when I opened the shades, this disaster welcomed my day, and then it presented itself to me again in the evening at my favorite outdoor spot, also immediately adjacent to it, our hammock.

For the plot’s neglect, I mostly blame the wildfires, of which we had already had three since 2012 even before the 2020 fires.  While one came as close as three miles, most were further away, but we live in a valley, where the smoke from all of the neighboring fires comes to settle itself as an unwelcome guest for weeks of choking, hazardous air.  How does one care for vegetable gardens in the likelihood of such toxic air?  To those who do, bless you.  By 2018, after the third set of fires, I was done.  With some help from my then husband, I began to clear out the plot of weeds, bricks, and stones and hoped to clear enough to hire a professional landscaper to build a stone patio, for which I was also saving money. 

In the summer of 2021, I needed peace at my window and on my hammock.  And between jobs, I needed that savings for the landscaping.  Why not use the stones and bricks I was collecting and hire myself? 

 Now Part 2: 

I spent two years weeding, unearthing stones and bricks, shoveling, weeding and unearthing more stones, raking, weeding and unearthing yet more stones, then finally placing a single strip of landscape fabric over about a third of the length of the 40x14 foot plot.  Then I did more weeding, unearthing stones, raking, and yet more weeding and unearthing stones, then, finally, laid a second strip of fabric on that first third of the plot.  I did the same for the third and final strip for that first third.  A significant accomplishment.  Triumphantly, I returned some of the stones onto the fabric.  Since I had vowed to use whatever stones I’d collect in whatever way I could, my vision for the final product was still vague.

 I did the same for the second section, and the following year, completed the third.  After two years the seemingly endless task was completed with a creative design I had not conceived.  Thankfully, these years were 2021 and 2022, two gracious years not covered in smoke.  Still, most of my work was done in the heat of the summer, and the Energizer Bunny still in me urged me to head out into the heat to finish more quickly.  But my body rebelled.  If I worked for more than three hours in a day, my body refused to budge the next day.  That judgmental Bunny in me pointed to the professionals who do this work for eight hours a day, five days a week.  Why, he demanded, was I such a wimp?

 Listen to your body.  It speaks for Us.  Though my whispers were soft, they overrode the loud Bunny and reassuringly disputed him and our culture, for whom the Bunny speaks.  Under their guidance, I worked for about an hour in the morning and another in the evening, five or six days a week, and my body, in gratitude, quit rebelling.

 While collecting stones, I was reminded of the story of the tortoise and the hare.  The hare, like the Energizer Bunny, is a rabbit who keeps going and going and going, quickly bouncing in many directions, often off his path, seeking short-cuts, and through most of the race, he’s ahead.  The turtle moves by the rhythm of nature, slowly, step by step, in a race he doesn’t know he’s in.  He walks straight, never veers from his path, and keeps a steady pace.  Many times, my whispers came: Be the turtle.  You will finish. 

 To become the turtle, I needed a new rhythm.  While collecting stones, I reflected on how much I had been living as a Bunny – filling up long To Do lists, feeling that I had to cross all the items off, not answering the phone when a friend showed up on caller ID because I thought I had too much to do, worrying over how untidy my house was when people were coming to visit, feeling guilty when I wasn’t volunteering for the kids’ school or activities, stressed when I did sign up for them, screaming at the repair guy for being late, and so much more.  And that was only at home. 

 At my teaching career, Energizer Bunny was more insistent.  Students had constant needs and administrators asserted never-ending demands, changes, trainings, meetings, and announcements of new problems we the instructors were all expected to seamlessly take on without complaint or mistake.  And that was before the pandemic.

 Then came Covid.  The expectations didn’t change, but the work did, and we had to do it at home, use our own technology, have no on-site support, and face new problems as we stayed at home to save lives.  I had my office and my classroom in my bedroom.  The Energizer Bunny in me was done.

 Energizer says its batteries don’t run out.  Its Bunny “keeps going and going and going,” and even after everyone has stopped dead, “it’s still going.”  I’m no Energizer Bunny.  I might have been trained by my mom to be one, but I had not inherited her Bunny DNA.  My own make-up had never been wired to be the Bunny.  But I had to learn that the hard way.  My batteries stopped dead.  I could not keep going any longer.

 Be the turtle.  You will finish.   While maintaining their compassion, my whispers were nonetheless firm.  But everyone mocks the turtle, I replied.  No one lives like the turtle.  In real life, the turtle is bullied, scoffed at, and the butt of everyone else’s jokes.  Maybe in the end, he wins, but he’s not enjoying himself if people are laughing at him.  I felt my whispers’ compassion and heard their brief reply: He’s counter-cultural.

 Yes.  The turtle’s journey is counter to all that I’d been taught, had lived, and to our culture.  Even if his fable is well known, nothing about his lesson fits into our cultural patterns of life, especially where I was raised in high tech San Jose, nor even where I now live in a small Pacific Northwestern town.  I might have moved away from the Bunny’s territory, but I could never get away from him. To be the turtle, we have to slow ourselves into a counter-cultural rhythm.  It is to this rhythm that Nature strides.

 I chuckled to myself that I had tried for years to teach a turtle-like rhythm to my writing students, even if I hadn’t learned it myself.  Having observed the usual strategy students follow for their persuasive pieces, to decide on a thesis statement and then begin writing, I advised a different strategy.  “If you decide on your thesis before doing your research,” I warned, “you’ll find yourself a stationary bicycle, expending a whole lot of energy, but getting nowhere.”  Instead, “Decide on your research question, research it, and then develop your thesis.  That way, you’ll get on real bicycle that goes places.”  And wins the race.  My whispers spoke up again, interrupting my thoughts I was unburying stones.

 I realized that I, too, had spent most of my life on that stationary bicycle.  Progress had come.  My To Do lists were shorter, but the long ones I still kept in my head.  Every day, I set myself to accomplish certain goals, leaving little room for spontaneity or leisure with friends and family.  So much energy I had expended on a stationary bicycle, but not getting very far.  Is it necessary to get far?  My whispers had once again shown up.  I let the stones in my hand drop, took a breath, and sat against the fence.  Maybe not.  What had I been striving for and why?  My whispers were gentle.  Be the turtle.  Walk in a race you don’t know you’re in and see where it takes you.

 I felt my inner spirit breathing a new rhythm into me.  My stone garden was the first step: one stone at a time, one step at a time.  Like a turtle, I built my Zen stone garden.  And like the bicycle that goes somewhere, I built it without a “thesis” at the start.  Having vowed to use whatever materials I could unbury in whatever way I could, I didn’t know what the end product would look like. 

 

When I finished, I posted this, with the photos shown here, to my friends on social media:  

One step at a time: weeding, cleaning, shifting, simplifying and zenning to create something new.  Two veggie gardens & a sand pit lived on this 40x14 plot years ago.  Then came the fires and smoke.  One year ago, old, torn tarps, lots of weeds, bricks and stones, many of them buried, lived here instead.  This past year, one weed and one stone at a time, and $300 for some bark and a few more bricks, I've zenned my way into new simplicity and beauty.  I just finished and hope its completion also zens into simplicity and beauty.

            Living according to the rhythm of nature in a world that runs like the Energizer Bunny is challenging.  To trust in the turtle’s pace calls for perseverance, patience, trust in the greater forces beyond ourselves, and a willingness to let go, if that’s the way through.  Success is not necessarily assured. 

But Nature does not give up.  She continues to stride to her own rhythm, and if we learn to step into her beat, slowly progressing, like the turtle in a race he doesn’t know he’s in, we will begin to align with the deeper part of our own nature, connected to Nature herself.  This work is a process, carrying obstacles and losses, yet increasing peace.  But if we, like Nature, do not give up, we can, one by one, like the turtle, return the rhythm of Nature to humanity on Earth.

© 2023 by Karina Jacobson.  All rights reserved.  Please use only with permission from the author.

Return to the Energizer Bunny, Pt 1

The Energizer Bunny Learns the Rhythm of Nature (Part 1)

The Rhythm of Nature

strides as the turtle

who wins a race

he doesn’t know he’s in

 

Ever evolving,

neither static, nor constant

 yet slowly progressing

beats the rhythm of Nature

 

Even when we see not

the burbling beneath the volcano

the plates shifting into an earthquake

the atmosphere transforming into a tornado

the waves building to a tsunami

 

Even then, even when we see not the signs,

the Rhythm of Nature is ever evolving

neither static, nor constant

 yet slowly progressing

             I was trained not to stride to the rhythm of nature, but to the drum of the Energizer Bunny, that mascot toy for the battery that keeps “going and going and going” and, even after everyone else’s batteries are dead, is “still going.”  My mother is wired like the Energizer Bunny, and by some genetic quirk, I am not.  Vacations were full, as Mom booked each hotel with a “guaranteed late arrival” and even planned in which rest stops we’d take for our picnic lunches.  Her errands at home, however, were not planned and seemed to follow a random order, defying geographic logic, zigzagging out of the way, and then returning to previous stores that had deals three dollars better than the later stores.  Like all of the competitor bunnies in the Energizer ads, I, her tag-a-long had batteries that died part-way through, but hers were “still going.”  Thinking I should be wired – or “batteried” -- like her, once I had hit my wall, Mom had one of two replies: “Quit whining” or “The world doesn’t revolve around you.” 

            In time, I gained the endurance to quit whining and eventually grew into an Energizer Bunny myself.  Early in our marriage, my then husband teased me for my to do lists that also kept going and going and going.  I had a love-hate relationship with these lists; part of me longed for days with short lists, but the other part reveled in those days when I crossed out a multitude of items on a long one.

            By the time little ones arrived, my love-hate relationship with the lists turned to a hate-only relationship.  One sheet was no longer enough for all that I had to do; multiple sheets were filled, and included only what needed to be done at home; at work, I had another list.  My anxiety grew with the lists.  My chest, neck, and face flushed with a pinkish glow; my heart rate beat fast; my nights were endlessly sleepless, with a cherished hour or two of sleep.  My doctor prescribed me with Prozac.

The lists had to go, and so too did the Energizer Bunny still in me.  In 2005, while juggling a toddler, a preschooler, and a teaching position, I decided to pray every day of the year for a quiet and gentle spirit, and miracles came that began the process to loosen, layer by layer, that Bunny that didn’t belong in me.  Still, for years, vestiges of this battery remained, insisting that I keep going and going and going.

 My body knew what really needed to go were the batteries and that the rhythm of nature needed to come.  What my body might have known, I did not.  Having already been greatly healed, I didn’t know quite how much of this Bunny still beat its drum within me.

             Then came the pandemic.  “Stay at home.  Save lives.”  This was no time for an Energizer Bunny.  Even Mom learned to slow down.  The word Blursday was coined, time felt different, and the process in me was reignited to discard more of the conditioned Bunny within me.  Part of me rebelled; I got out more than most of my friends, but I also acquiesced to begin to learn the Way of Zen.  To my blog and my social media page, I posted this meme with my intent to learn this Way of Zen. 

        

         The Way of Zen is hard for an Energizer Bunny to learn.  In the summer of 2020, we had begun to “flatten the curve,” and we were all getting out more. Feeling I had had my zen, I was eager to get out. My inner Bunny was relieved.

Then came the wildfires, 1800 of them raging throughout the western states.  Our masks returned, we once again retreated indoors, and even more of the Bunny in me was called upon to let go.

             The West burning in flames mirrored my life, as both my marriage and my career also ignited with burning embers.  My husband and I were compatible for projects and parenting, but not for love-making, nor for my soul’s transformation.  He met someone else with whom he shared the right mix of love elements to maintain a thriving marriage.  The following year, after months of marriage counseling and a trial separation, we chose to close our marriage with friendship, which still continues. 

Meanwhile, the university where I taught as a non-tenured track (second-class) faculty member was grappling with a severe budget crisis and turned my employment ladder upside down.  Instead of downsizing and laying off those on the bottom rungs of my ladder, they transferred assignments from many of us like me who had earned the highest promotions to our lower paid colleagues at the bottom of the ladder.  I was eventually downsized all the way, and given with notice, citing a loophole, that I was to be laid off.  But I found a loophole of my own: Emeritus, the university’s honored form of retirement.  My promotions and 23 years of service qualified me to apply.  I did, and I got it, but I was also too young to actually retire. 

The anxiety, tight chest, rapid heart beat, and insomnia returned.  It was the summer of 2021, and I was now both separated from my husband and without work, a financial double-whammy.  I had put out applications, had interviews, and even had completed new hire paperwork, a month earlier, but still had not yet been called with a start date.  The Bunny in me begged to make phone calls and put out more applications.  But the whispers and synchronicities encouraged me to wait.  It will come in its own time.  And it did. 

But first, I had to wait and learn the rhythm of nature.  It was then that I decided to hire myself for the landscaping project to the side of our house that had been itching at me for four years.  Roughly 40 feet long by 14 feet wide, this plot had previously housed two vegetable gardens and a play sand pit, each bordered with bricks and stones.  But our kids had grown; the gardens had been left to waste; the bricks and patio stones were broken, scattered, and buried; what amounted to seven 20 gallon tubs of stones to be collected that were then also mostly buried; and weeds, many thigh high, had taken over the entire plot. 

Since the plot is right outside my bedroom window, every morning when I opened the shades, this disaster welcomed my day, and then it presented itself to me again in the evening at my favorite outdoor spot, also immediately adjacent to it, our hammock. 

For the plot’s neglect, I mostly blame the wildfires, of which we had already had three since 2012 even before the 2020 fires.  While one came as close as three miles, most were further away, but we live in a valley, where the smoke from all of the neighboring fires comes to settle itself as an unwelcome guest for weeks of choking, hazardous air.  How does one care for vegetable gardens in the likelihood of such toxic air?  To those who do, bless you.  By 2018, after the third set of fires, I was done.  With some help from my then husband, I began to clear out the plot of weeds, bricks, and stones and hoped to clear enough to hire a professional landscaper to build a stone patio, for which I was also saving money. 

In the summer of 2021, I needed peace at my window and on my hammock.  And between jobs, I needed that savings for the landscaping.  Why not use the stones and bricks I was collecting and hire myself?  

Continue to Part 2

© 2023 by Karina Jacobson.  All rights reserved.  Please use only with permission from the author.

Finding Life in the Dead Rose Bush

            I have two rose bushes, one of which received attention last year, needs more this year, and can be saved.  The other I had not yet attended to before I lost the use of my hands in August.  I have my hands back, but only after months of healing and therapy.  For that story, see “Letting Go, Part 1.” 

            This spring, my second rose bush spoke the message of its neglect.  The lost treasure was now overcome with a great many dead branches protruding through a mass of weeds, four feet high, towering over a plant that had previously produced a burst glorious magenta, rich blossoms of roses abounding with life.  None were now to be seen through a corpse covered over with weeds of various sorts and crabgrasses a foot above the branches.

I have no "Before" photo of the rose bush with its towering weeds, but they looked like these.

And here the weeds and dead branches now.

 

            Expecting the need for a landscaper to come in with some equipment to haul off my dead bush, I spent this spring attending to other parts of my yard.  Finally, last week, I skeptically wondered whether my dead bush could be saved.  If nothing else, I could reduce the cost for someone to come in and haul it away by minimizing its size.  

With a deep breath and determination, I met my former treasure, the current adversary I had created, and I began weeding around the bush, through it, and clipping dead branches.  It’s delicate work because even the dead branches have thorns, pricks screaming at me for what my neglect had done to their source of life. 

To my astonishment, as I pulled the weeds and clipped the dead branches, little signs of life – small, tender branches with green leaves on them – came into view.  These brave little babies poked through, trying to survive beneath their oppressors and crying for help. 

Now my work became even more delicate.  I had been its careless killer, and now I vowed to be its careful savior.  I knew this remnant with life, these little, courageous branches of green, must be protected while their aggressive invaders and the corpses among them get cut out.  Slowly, carefully, patiently, I made progress to save the lives of the budding branches.  

I can save the rose bush.  I had been sure it was dead, and now, I am sure it has life.

 

Amazingly, the rose bush has life!

This process of weeding, pruning, and cutting out what’s dead mimics my life of the past three years.  During this time, I’ve lost my marriage, my career, my next job to a fire, the use of my hands, my kids off to college, and just last week, ended a temporary position.  Weeding, pruning, cutting out what’s dead.  Letting Go.  For three years, letting go of what has lost life has marked my life, and now it is time to find life in death.  My rose bush tells me I can.  Surprising life buds in what has died. 

This morning, as I shared the story of my rose bush, a friend spoke what many have said to me in these past few years.  “For all you’ve been through, I admire you and honor you.  I would have been crushed to lose so much so quick.” 

“I don’t think I would have made it had I not seen little signs of life, like those promising branches of life,” I replied.  “Surprising, little buds of life that I would not have expected to be there, kept showing themselves to me, keeping me going, giving me hope, helping me to never give up.” 

There is Life in death.  Now, after years of letting go, I am sure of that too.  Let go, and watch the surprising blossoms shoot into Life.

© 2023 by Karina.  All rights reserved.  Use only with permission.

With love comes . . .

 With love comes sight
With sight comes wisdom

With wisdom comes grief

With grief comes service

With service comes exhaustion

With exhaustion comes brokenness

With brokenness comes letting go

With letting go comes Freedom

© 2023 by Karina.  All rights reserved.  Use with permission and/or a link to this blog post.

To live like Water ~ Lao Tzu

          When life is in flux, or it's time to let go, or change is the only constant, or all of the above, the wisdom of ancient eastern sages offers perspective.   Here's Lao Tzu, Stanza 8, according to Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching:

"The supreme good is like water,
which nourishes all things without trying to.
It is content with the low places that people disdain.
Thus it is like the Tao.

In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don't try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present.

When you are content to simply be yourself
and don't compare or compete,
everybody will respect you."

Letting Go, Part 2: Life without Hands

            One day you’re on the go, vibrant, athletically active, and doing heavy labor for a landscaping project.  The next day, your teenage daughter is dressing you, bathing you, and tying up your hair.  Both of your hands and wrists are bandaged up.  In the coming days, she and your 21 year-old son will be opening the fridge for you, pouring your water, making you sandwiches, tying your shoelaces, clipping your fingernails, driving you wherever you need to go, and cleaning whatever you and they agree to, which is not much, leaving you with a home and a yard in much disarray.  You have to Let Go.

            That was me in August, 2022 after I had fallen six feet from my kids’ play gym while clipping tree branches from it and the beam I was leaning against gave way.  Thankfully, I immediately fell into a dream-state which cushioned the force of my fall, spared me from pain, and protected me from shock for the first 90 minutes after my fall, as described here in Part 1.

            It’s said that physical pain is mental, something I now know first-hand.  For the first hour and a half after I fell, I was in a dream-state and unaware of pain.  Once I began to regain normal consciousness, I became aware of a mild headache.  As it grew, I complained of it and asked for some pain medication.  The doctor said I could have no medication until the CT scan had been completed and examined.  To me, he seemed nonchalant to my growing headache, but he was probably smiling to himself that I was not complaining of pain in my two broken wrists (or the yet-to-be discovered crushed ligaments in my right hand).  Not until about three hours after my fall and a half hour or so before I received pain medication did I begin to feel the pain in my wrists and hands.  Quite how much physical pain that dream-state spared me from I will never know.  But for that and much more, I will always be grateful.

            “Thank goodness I had no concussion,” I texted my mom and two best friends the following morning with my working fingers.  “Back & neck OK, I can walk and 4 working fingers.  And 2 kids who are awesome – much to be grateful for.”  By divine mercy, I was also naïve about how little I could actually do and how long my recovery would be.

            A week after my fall, I texted them again with my orthopedist’s warning to do barely nothing through August, and closed, “I’ll heal, but this is hard.  Thank goodness I didn’t injure myself more.”

            “I know taking it easy isn’t your style,” one friend replied, “I hope you find ways to relieve your anxiety.  Healing takes time and better to not re-injure those delicate bones.”

            I agreed.  ”I’m working to keep it all in perspective, especially that I wasn’t more injured.  The orthopedist was surprised my injuries were minor compared to what they could have been.”

            But I didn’t agree enough.  I kept improving, able to do a bit more each day, and kept wanting to try something new every day.  Two or three weeks after my fall, “new” meant simple tasks like sweeping the floor, straightening the blankets on my bed, pouring water, wiping up the water I had just spilled, making toast and spreading margarine on it, cleaning a few dishes, heating soup in the microwave, and making coffee.  That last one turned out to be harder than expected.  My coffee maker has its own reusable filter that needs to have the old, wet grounds knocked out and cleaned before scooping in new grounds.  In addition to opening a lid, pouring water, and scooping new grounds in, I also had to knock out those old grounds, a simple task that sent pain surging from my fingers to my elbow.

            I was counting on good news at my four-week appointment with the orthopedist, but she informed me my x-rays showed that while my left wrist was healing, but my dominant right was not.  “Our bones are like twigs,” she warned me.  “Too much bending or stress builds on the break.”  Again, I texted my trio: “my body is not invincible and I have a very hard time releasing myself of that delusion!”

That I am not invincible was just the start.  Life without hands showed me I had much to learn:

Humility: when your teenage daughter is bathing you and your college student son is clipping your fingernails, you have to become very humble very quick.

Take nothing for granted: when you celebrate a thumb that works so you can dress yourself, you start to see how much you’ve taken for granted. 

A gentle touch:  You don’t realize how hard your touch can be until every touch brings you pain.  You’re starting to get better, so you’re now opening doors, pressing the walk button at a crosswalk, closing your dresser drawer, shaking someone’s hand, patting your teenager on the back for a job well done, squirting out hand cream, and knocking out those coffee grounds: those things you’ve done every day for years and taken for granted, and now they bring pain.  You wonder if your touch has been too hard, and then you wonder if your speech has been too hard, and if you need to seek a more gentle way to touch, to speak, and to live.

Forgive yourself:  You were foolish and you fell.  Now forgive yourself and learn.

Release yourself from other people’s expectations: there are those who think you should heal fast and get back to life.  But your body knows, and it tells you.  Listen to your body and set yourself free from those who think they know your body better than you do.

Show compassion: If you find yourself impatient with anyone, remember they might have just fallen.  Maybe they can’t use their hands.  Maybe there’s something else they can’t do that you can’t see.  Show compassion.

Slow down!  You’ve forgiven yourself – good.  But if you don’t want to re-injure yourself, slow down!

Let Go!  No matter where you are, where you’ve been, how hard you’ve fallen, nor how stupid you were when you fell, let it all go.

 

            By the time of my fall, I had already and very recently had to let go of more than I ever thought I could.  Within the past year, I had already lost both my marriage and my teaching career, both of over two decades, and both so seemingly strong.  My marriage had been a strong partnership for service and home projects, parenting, and friendship and concluded itself amicably, after turmoil and grief along the way.  In my teaching career, I was continuing to excel, even with my office and classroom moved into my bedroom for the pandemic, but I was caught in a political drama outside of me, a pawn by top administrators, mostly new and from far away.  I learned that no matter the excellence of my own performance, I am not invincible.  To release a career I was passionate about and my marriage all at once called for super-human strength in Letting Go.

I discovered a remarkable truth, one that people say, but you have to discover for yourself: there is much freedom in losing and letting go.  When everything we’ve thought we need to do and need to be is taken from us and we can’t do and can’t be what we’ve thought we needed to, we discover we don’t need to do that or be that.  We have the freedom to let go of all of those expectations we’ve placed upon ourselves and that we think others have placed upon us.  We also discover that whether or not others have in fact placed those expectations upon us doesn’t matter.  Either way, we have the freedom to let go.

As we let go, we also learn one of life’s greatest lessons: Life will work for you if you let it.  This is true even when you lose what you love.  As I was learning to literally let go during my life without hands, I had no knowledge that before the year was out, I would have to let go yet again, also of something very significant, from a fire to the place where I worked and played, a story I hope to share in a third part in a few months.

The universe provides what we need for our own growth and, ultimately, for our abundant life.  Security and being in control might be what I had wanted, but they were not what I needed.  What I did needed: to surrender, slow down, and Let Go!

Return to Letting Go, Part 1: The Fall

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