“When you strip away everything else – love remains.” ~ Diana Schwenk ~

And the completion of Freedom Isn’t Free (a line from a song the Up With People troupe I sang with in my teens) is…

“You gotta pay a price / you gotta sacrifice / for your liberty.”

Freedom rose into my awareness this morning while visiting over at Liz’s place — Just be. Love All. Live Life. — where she’s celebrating One Word Wednesday with the word FREEDOM.

In my teens, I thought freedom meant singing songs with an American singing troupe while living in Germany (that particular one celebrated the American Revolution and the invasion of what was to become  Canada, the land of  my birth — go figure) and talking it up amongst my peers about ‘what I’m gonna be when I grow up’.

And then, the grown up years were upon me and I had no clue about what I was going to do let alone be because I was too busy figuring out who I was.

Google dictionary defines freedom as:

free·dom

So, here’s the challenge, when haunted by the past, when held in the grips of adaptive thinking predicated upon the lessons learned about how to be in the world at a time when how to be was all about fitting in and surviving childhood through adolescence, acting, speaking and thinking without hindrance or restraint is impossible.

We gotta’ let go of the past to be free in the present.

But, when we don’t see the connections, when we are unaware of the link between our limited thinking blocking our view of what is possible like a line of trees blocking the not so distant horizon, how do we let go of something we don’t recognize as holding us back?

This has been my life journey. To let go of looking back to free myself to see the limitless possibilities leading out to a far and distant horizon of infinite wonder.

On her post today, Liz shares a Jim Morrison quote I love — “The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.”

Inside me a revolution has been waging. Inside me the masks have been falling. Inside me I’ve been committing  acts of treason against my adaptive self that would hold me down to keep me from rising up and being free.

It is no longer good enough for me to just do.

The world needs my best. It needs me to be acting out from my higher self, not my lesser beliefs in the limitations of my possibilities.

My higher good is to be my all. To live my most. To love my best.

Freedom isn’t free. It’s true. And neither is the past. It comes burdened with all kinds of adaptations that once upon a time protected me from, or helped me make sense of, a world that was too big, too scary, too much of everything scary my child’s mind couldn’t grasp it all. I had to adapt to understand the world around me.

Free today to see myself in the light of this moment, I have a choice.

To let the past control how I am in the world today, or, to be myself as I am without the past controlling me today.

I choose to be myself.

I choose to step fearlessly into the freedom of jettisoning adaptive behaviours that don’t serve me well. Behaviours that would have me hold a mask in front to protect me from unseen ghosts and boogie men (and women) who once upon a time taught me to believe that hiding out was safer than being seen, that fear was greater than love.

It just ain’t so.

The courage to be seen trumps hiding out, every day. Love is greater than fear, always.

Once upon a time, I  trapped my spirit in a glass jar believing it would keep me safe from all the pain in the world.

Today, the glass is broken.

There is no pain in the world greater than living trapped within fear of the past.

There is no joy greater than being myself when I drop the masks and let go of fearing all that I am in freedom.

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I’m using an image a day (mostly taken from my iPhone) to create my Everyday Poems over at A Poetry Affair. The photo today is the genesis of today’s poem, Into the Distance.

There was a night, a year and a half ago, when I let my eldest daughter walk out the door not knowing when, or if she’d walk back through it again.

I knew I had to let her go. She was 25 and for a big part of those 25 years I’d been fighting for her life.

And I couldn’t do it for her any more.

She had to fight for herself. She had to find herself and her will to live, to see the beauty all around, to love herself like no other.

I knew I had to trust the universe. To accept whatever happened next as what happened next. I knew I had to trust she would find the courage to take the actions, take the steps that would lead her back from the precipice.

Before I let her go I’d asked if she had any plans to make her threats of ‘ending it all’ concrete.

She said No. She was going to go and check herself into Emergency at the hospital a few blocks down the street.

I had to trust her. I had to believe her. I had to let her do it herself. To make the choices that said, “I can do this. Choose life. Choose to let go of the darkness. Choose to see I am loved, wanted, needed in this world.”

I had run out of options. I had run out of things to say or do. Ways to be. I had run out of words.

My daughter, Alexis, shares  the story  (here and here) of the night she called the Distress Centre and the woman on the end of the line didn’t hang up on her nor tell her she was crazy. She listened. Said a few things. Gave her some suggestions and Alexis heard her.

And everything shifted.

And has continued to shift, day by day, as Alexis has grappled with healing from an eating disorder that had almost cost her life, and a belief system that said within her, “I have no worth.”

I never wanted that belief to be hers. Never wanted her to hold onto darkness.

I wanted only light for her. Just as I wanted only light for her sister.

I remember the first time she threatened to take her own life. She was mad at her father and me for some transgression. She stood at the top of the stairs, outside the door to her bedroom, her tiny fists balled up against her hips, legs spread apart. “I am so sorry I chose you as my parents,” she said. “I’m going back to heaven.”

I tried not to smile as I asked. “How do you plan on getting there honey?”

“I’m going to go in the kitchen, get a knife and stab myself. Then you’ll be sorry.”

She was five-years-old.

I didn’t want to smile after that. I wanted to race up the stairs and grab her and hold her and shake her and soothe her and tell her I loved her and that she could never, ever say something like that again. Calmly, I asked her to take a time out. To come down the stairs and sit beside me. We needed to talk.

I wouldn’t realize for many years just how deeply the thought of ‘going back to heaven’ was embedded in her psyche. At first, I thought it was just her vivid imagination — I had always thanked her for choosing us as her parents — in her wild imaginings, I just thought she had taken that choice to mean she could choose differently when she was mad or disappointed. “You’re needed in this world,” I’d tell her and then I’d remind her of all the reasons why I loved her, of all the reasons why her presence was so vital to this world. And she would cry and tell me I was wrong. And I would talk her out of the thoughts that seemed to cloud her vision of her beauty and wonder. I thought in my spending the hours I did showing her the path out of the darkness I could make it all right.

It was, and is, one of the hardest things I ever learned as a mother.

Sometimes, we can’t make it all right. Sometimes, we don’t have the words, or actions, or even the power to make it all right for our children.

I am grateful today that at 26, Alexis has found the words and actions and power to make it all right for herself.  I am grateful she is choosing to see the light, and to step away from the cloyingly sweet tendrils of the darkness calling her to give into the seductive deceit of its promise of release.

Alexis and I have agreed to write about these events because we both believe that in our willingness to be open, vulnerable and truthful we might help someone else struggling as we did — She with her fascination of the darkness and me with my desire to help her into the light. We want to reach anyone who is blinded to their beauty and worth in the darkness of depression see, there is a way through. There is hope.

My daughter is amazing and I am blessed to have her and her sister in my life. I am so glad both my daughters chose me as their mother.

I met today’s guest blogger, Bev Boyden-Van Staden through her amazing daughter, Tamara. Tamara was 11 when she first walked into my office with an idea for a pay-it-forward project she was doing in her Grade 5 class. She wanted to sell the jewelery she made at the art-show we were mounting for the artists of the Wildrose Art Studio at the shelter. Over the next five years, Tamara and her friends would raise over $9,100 for homeless charities.

And always, Bev was there, standing beside, behind, with her daughter. Supporting her, guiding her, showing her the path to living on purpose.

Recently, Bev sent me a FB message sharing her thoughts on de-cluttering. When I asked if I could share her words here, she quickly replied, of course. And that’s who Bev is — willing to step in and be of service, to share however she can, whatever she has to light up the world.

Bev and Tamara continue to give to community. In 2008, they set-up Heartprints: Kids for a Cause Foundation, and have expanded their products to include hand-knit scarves and dishcloths, beaded lanyards and other beautiful items.

Thank you Bev for all you do to create a world of difference. You are the change you want to see in the world.

What would you carry?

by Bev Boyden-Van Staden

Your postings of purging, decluttering and giving away one thing per day prompted memories of my 1983 travels (on a “shoe string” throughout SE Asia and the fact that I had to carry everything with me on this 3+ months adventure through Indonesia (Bali, Java and Summatra), Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore and back to Thailand before heading back to Canada.

Items of extreme value (passport, travel cheques and main supply of $$) were secured on a “purse” made from an extra large pocket from jeans secured to a long shoelace that hung around my neck and was tucked under whatever I was wearing and which I even slept with. Everything else was in a durable oblong daypack … compact enough to put on my lap during transit. If memory serves correctly, that pack weighed between 7 to 10 lbs.

Your recent postings had me thinking “what would we keep IF we had to carry with us everywhere what we wanted?” Sure, at major cities throughout my travels, I had the option to mail back home keepsakes, but mostly I had to make a daily choice about whether an item was really necessary to be packing around in the sweltering heat every day. I was a lot tougher about getting rid of unnecessary stuff at that point in my life than I am when I permanently settled (home).

We’ve been in our current home since 2000. Being a creative individual, everything has potential. I usually find that I have a tough time throwing things out … except when I get in one of those rare moods.

Over the years we have had a craft area and have collected (and stored for “just in case”) many things from a perfectly shaped flat rock found on a walk to cardboard and styro-foam.

For example, when my daughter, Tamara, was younger and into Barbies, she really wanted Barbie furniture (unit price $75 and up if purchased then at Toys R Us!, which wasn’t in my budget!). So I started making Barbie furniture out of styro-foam, old leather (or fake leather) purses, fringe material and a glue gun. Voila, Tamara and her friends had a grand time turning the “Barbie Room” into a girls’ dream place to play with all this funky furniture.

Fast forward many years later and we tackled the task of purging, throwing out or giving away so much stuff in order to turn areas into a teenagers’ hang out. Still it was with fondness that Tamara said ‘goodbye’ to her favourite Barbie couch I had made from styro-foam, black leather, and black fringe (including arm rests). All the stuff that another young child would enjoy we boxed up and donated to The Children’s Cottage … to the delight of the staff there!

Decluttering is an ongoing process. Now and then I tackle a drawer, a closet or shelves. I’m not drawn to other people’s garage sales anymore (haven’t been in awhile now!). What triggered my decluttering over 2012 is the passing of my dad in January 2012 (he was 84). He lived in BC, on his own (his partner pre-deceased him by less than a year). Soon it was discovered that his house and shed were in horrific state with so much junk collected over so many years. Some precious keepsakes like photos and such were found among his belongings, but most of the stuff was just that “stuff”. My oldest sister, as executor, vowed never to leave such a mess for her children to clean up after she is gone. That influenced me to rethink the state of my closets, drawers, cupboards and storage space areas.

Still I am amused when I think of my traveling days throughout SE Asia and wonder how much “stuff” I would keep around this house, if I had to carry it all with me everywhere I went. One extreme to the other, I know; but I am inspired to find a balance.

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Today’s poem is posted at A Poetry Affair: Time Flows

I cried this morning. I knew I needed to. I knew the tears were waiting. My daughter and I had spoken of them as we drove home from an event we hadn’t want to be at, but knew there was no where else we wanted to be yesterday.

She too felt the tears crowding at the back of her eyes. She too felt the need to release them.

It had been an emotional day.

My day began early. A not unusual occurrence for me. A 7am coffee conclave to discuss an upcoming presentation. An 8:30 am breakfast meeting to map out a media strategy for a client. It was work done all in the course of doing what needs to be done to live on purpose.

And then, a two-hour drive to a small prairie town a couple of hours north of the city. A beautiful blue sky soaring above us. Dry road reaching out to the horizon in front of us, leading us towards that place we never expected to go.

It was when we reached the end of that long straight road that normal met up with surreal. At the end of the road we gathered with over a 1,000 people to celebrate the life of a young man whose end of life had arrived far too soon, far too tragically.

Brett Marshal Wiese’s life ended in the early morning hours of January 12, 2013. He was 20 years old.

A young 19-year-old man and 17-year-old girl are in custody. Their lives have taken a far different course, I’m sure, than the dreams their birth once ignited in the hearts of their parents and families those few short years ago when they were born.

And lives are shattered. Hearts are broken. Family tables reset.

And where once a vibrant, funny, courageous and kind young man walked amongst us, only memories are left behind to warm the hearts of those who knew and loved him and had such hopes for his future.

And I have no words. Only tears.

My heart breaks for Jody and Brenda and their daughter, Brett’s sister, Morgan. It breaks for Kip and all the family who must now learn to adjust to their world without their loving son and brother and family member in their midst.

I cried this morning. Not a normal way to start my day, yet, I know, in my tears I find the breath, and courage I need, to hold the space we all must hold for this beautiful family as they move through their grief in the days to come. It is that loving space we must hold open so they can find the normal of life without Brett walking and laughing and snowboarding and driving fast and jumping off cliffs and teasing his sister and playing tricks on friends and curling his 6’4″ body into his mother’s lap and being his outrageous,’ here I am, I’m so glad to meet you’ self amongst them.

I never knew him, but in watching the videos, hearing the stories, talking to family, I met a young man of great character. A man who was a hero in the eyes of everyone who came to bid him farewell.

Go in peace Brett. May the hearts of those who love you so find peace in knowing that for those of us who never had the privilege of knowing you, the story we witnessed unfolding yesterday was the story of your hero’s journey. You lived life with passion, courage and kindness. You welcomed in strangers. You held your family and friends close. In every breath, every word spoken, every photo shared yesterday, your life story embraced each us with Love and held us close.

May Love be your cradle forever more.

Namaste.

Moment after I hit “Publish” in WordPress, I visited the lovely Sandra Heska King’s blog where she shared this beautiful video as part of her Still Saturday. Thank you Sandra — this is exactly what I needed to find stillness, softness, peace and… hope.

This could become a habit. Read Hopeful Notes from Howie J and let his inspiration ignite my thinking to inspire my writing.

See, here’s the thing about my morning write. I do not generally come to the blank screen with a pre-conceived idea of what is going to fill the page. In fact, sometimes, I’ll be clearer on what I’m not going to write about than what I am going to write about — which always makes me smile when the ‘not’ turns into the very subject I’ve been resisting writing about.

Howie J calls it, “The Resistance Habit”. Our human tendency to resist anything that we perceive as uncomfortable, hard or irritating. Like paying bills, emptying the dishwasher, picking up the phone and calling that person you’ve been avoiding…

Avoidance strengthens fear.

Seriously. It’s true. When we avoid doing something we know we need to do, the little reptilian part of our brain says, “Whew! That avoidance feels good. Let’s do it again!” And so, when we go to do it, that little reptile guy says, “Oh no! Remember that feeling of relief you felt last time when you didn’t do that? It felt better not to do than to do so let’s feel better again. Let’s not do it!”

And being the path of least resistance beings that we are, (sometimes we even tell ourselves our survival depends upon it) we don’t do it. And the neural pathways of ‘not doing’ grow stronger. In fact, the brain secretes a chemical that actually re-enforces the feelings of ‘that felt good to not do’ thus intensifying our resistance and fear of doing!

Honest. It’s scientifically proven. Avoidance strengthens fear. And all our thinking in the world, won’t change our fear of doing what we fear. We must take action.

As the amazing Jodi Aman says in her blogpost, The Evolutionary Roots of Fear, we cannot think our way out of fear. We can act our way out of it though.

Which begs the question, Why don’t I just act out against fear instead of acting out — because I know acting out through avoidance also increases stress in my life!

Which always leads me to running around, making excuses, feeling less than, feeling harried as I run around, faster and faster, trying to catch balls dropping everywhere.

I am learning.

To avoid fear I must do the things I fear doing.

Otherwise, I’m thinking about what I fear more than what I’m doing — and living without being conscious of my doing is unhealthy for me.

Like most of us, I fear change. Yet, as a boss of mine long ago used to say, “Change is here to stay.”

I’m in this game of life for the long run. May as well embrace change and give up fearing it.

Or at least acknowledge my fear of change creates ripples of unease in my world when I let it lead me into avoiding doing the things I know I need to do to live this one wild and precious life in the rapture of now.

Like the small things of everyday living. When I avoid doing them, they become larger things on my horizon. My excuses grow and I become mired in the muddy waters of all my thinking telling me “I should”, I would if…, I can’t. I don’t have time. I don’t have the energy. I don’t….

If avoidance strengthens fear — Taking action strengthens my integrity.

Letting go of  my excuses, I breathe into my power to create more of what I want in my life. And in that place of possibility, skies clear and I become clearer on living up to my higher good, acting out from my highest intention, not my fears.

Taking action makes my dreams grow.

I get it. To weaken my Resistance Habit, I need to strengthen my capacity to take action by letting courage draw me out of my fears.

Cool. To live my dreams I must underfeed my fears through inviting courage to engage my body, mind and spirit in the action of living my dreams!

I like that circle of possibility!

Here’s to living today free of avoidance rising into fear.

Here’s to living my dreams!

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And in the spirit of taking action — check out my daily cleanse — I’m posting photos everyday of the things I’m clearing out of my home — KISS my life.

AND

I’m writing a poem a day to stretch my creative muscle. I’m also taking a photo a day on my iPhone to inspire my creativity and posting it on, The Poetry Affair.

I read a quote this morning at my friend Howard Parson’s blog, Hopeful Notes From Howie J, that pierced my heart.

Many people are alive but don’t touch the miracle of being alive.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh

 I read a blog this morning that brought tears — tears of sadness, of sorrow, of hope.

It was written by my daughter Alexis, a young woman of great heart and soul who lives life in the key of grace. On January 1, Alexis started a blog (The Wunder Year)  where everyday she shares about wearing her “Wunder Unders”, those stretchy, lycra leggings from Lululemon that are the fashion statement of an army of yoga-posing women. And, while Alexis is using her Wunder Unders to make a point to her psyche about her need to spend less, live more, she is also teaching me about the power of our hearts to feel, to heal and to grow in their capacity to live this miracle of life on the other side of our pain.

Alexis is 26.

I remember me at that age. I remember wanting to hide, to run, to avoid what was going on in my internal world by posing as all together in the external spaces I filled. I didn’t want people to see how broken I felt inside. How afraid. I only wanted them to see how together I was on the outside.

And I was, together. And I was also lost.

It took me a lot of years, and tears and soul searching (not to mention a lot of therapy) and some big experiences  that almost cost me my life to get the message — living in the key of grace means dropping the masks and lovingly leaving the past behind.

Alexis gets it.

And it is in her getting it, it is in both my daughters getting it, that I am humbled and filled with awe.

I have achieved what I set out to do. To be the mother I always wanted. To inspire my children to live beyond the edge of their fears in that place where they are awakened to the miracles unfolding with every breath — no matter their condition.

I am blessed.

My awareness today of my many blessings is perhaps more poignant as I consider the loss of my dear friends whose son was fatally stabbed this weekend. Like my daughters, their son was fired up with the possibilities of life. He had dreams and he was taking action on making his dreams come true.

And now, his dreams have ended at what police have identified as the hands of a 19 year old man and a 17 year old girl.

And I want to cry out, what are we doing to our children? How have we so failed them that they could do such a thing?

It is the tragedy of our times. We love our children into being and then we lose sight of our collective responsibility in creating a world that they can live in without fear, without anger, without believing that the only way to make sense of their life is to take the life of another.

These are our children.

All of them.

And we have failed them.

It is time for us to wake-up.

None of us can undo time. None of us can turn back what happened.

But we can change what happens now. What we do next.

We can re-direct our energy. We can stand in the broken and heal.

We can. I believe that whole-heartedly, but, as my daughter writes so powerfully this morning, ” it is our disconnection that brought us here in the first place.”

To heal our world we must connect to what causes us pain. To what makes us angry. To what makes us feel scared. We must face, head-on, what is undermining our belief in the miracle and sacredness of life.

My daughter is doing this everyday. She’s not just living her life in leggings for a year. She’s stretching herself to face an eating disorder that almost cost her life. And in that stretch, she is claiming life.

She is stating, I choose to live, in all my messed up, upside down and inside out Wunder Unders this one and only precious life.

I am proud of my daughters. Proud and humbled and hopeful.

Hopeful that perhaps we can stop this bleeding of our humanity, this tearing away of our children from the loving arms of their mothers, this breaking down of our families that were to have been their safe haven.

I am hopeful. And I am frightened. Will we do it? Will we choose to face the anger and the pain and the ineffable agony we are causing our children in turning our backs on the sacred trust we enacted when we became their parents?

Will we? Or by our inaction, will we risk losing another life to the hands of a child who believes their worth is to be found in striking out with a knife that pierces our collective hearts?

I cried when I heard the news on Saturday. I cried and my heart was heavy.

On Sunday, I cried again when I told my daughter and her tears flowed as she heard of the loss a family we love dearly has experienced. A loss so incomprehensible.  A loss like no other. Their child, a son, brother, nephew, cousin, friend has died. His life ended by the hands of another.

And my heart is heavy.

Just as it has felt the heaviness and the sadness that comes with trying to make sense of the insensible acts of violence we commit every day, somewhere in the world. Those acts that speak of our fear, our blindness, our unwillingness to let go of anger, hatred, racism, sexism, and a host of other characteristics that drive us away from the magnificence of our human condition. Lost to one another, we kill in the name of political right, racial cleansing, religious fervour, or simply a desire to exert dominion over another.

And the words of a song that was the anthem of a generation of anti-war activists and peace-makers drifts into my mind. Pete Seeger’s poem to the futility of war and our human cycle of waging it. “Where have all the flowers gone?” And in response, he asks, “When will they ever learn?”

When will we ever learn? That guns and knives and weapons of all making kill when a human hand pulls the trigger or strikes out.

When will we ever learn?

And my heart is heavy.

As I settled into meditation this morning sadness washed over me, enveloped me. I wanted to push it back, to send it away, to not let it enter. I wanted to not know it and knew I must. I knew I must give it space, give it room to flow. Rather than push it away, I chose instead to sit within it. To let the sadness become me. To feel each droplet of sorrow coursing through my body. I chose to feel it, know it, embrace it. Not just for me, or this family I love, but for all of us, for our humanity lost in the mire of a cycle of violence that wants to keep perpetrating more violence.

We must stop it. And to stop it, we must feel it. We must quit numbing ourselves out, stop kidding ourselves that tougher laws, or the death penalty or whatever justice we deem necessary will stop us from hurting, or killing one another.

Laws don’t stop the killing.

We do. We the people of this planet earth. We, the one’s who hold the guns and knives, who trample over human rights and lives in our endless grasping for more. More land, more drugs, more possessions, more space to claim as our own.

It is the choices we make that make war happen.

We have the power to choose differently. We have the power to act out in peace, in compassion, in love for one another.

We have the power to speak words, commit actions, take steps away from the precipice of anger, and hatred. We have the power to back away from the edge of despising another because of the colour of their skin, or where they kneel to pray or the god they worship or the space they fill that we want.

We the people have the power to change the world.

Let us stop carrying flowers to the graves of the one’s we love. Let us instead hear the call of our human condition calling out the answer to the question, “When will they ever learn?”. Let us answer with the only word that fills our world with hope for a future where our sons and daughters can live without fear of one another, where we their  parents can send them out into the world without worrying about when they will come home. Let us answer, “Now.”

My heart is heavy this morning. I can feel it. But I cannot give way to this sadness, this despair, this hopelessness that wants to envelop me and keep me from speaking out against violence, war, hatred. I will not. For I know that to make peace happen, I must actively engage in becoming the peace I want to see in the world. We must all do whatever we can, whatever is possible to put down our arms of destruction and hold out arms of compassion. And in each act of compassion, may flowers grow on the battlefields, may young girls walk safely amongst the blossoms and may young men come home to where the answer is no longer, “blowin’ in the wind”, as we used to sing in answer to the question, Where have all the flowers gone?

Let us embrace the answer that is here, in our hearts, in our human condition holding out hands filled with all that we need to love one another without fearing the answer to “When will we ever learn?” is never.