An important question for life writers …

Early in my life, traveling was a fact of life. I thought it was normal to move frequently, change schools, make new friends, fit into a new neighbourhood and readjust every few years. It was normal, whatever that means. There was always a sense of excitement about going somewhere new. I’ve only recently, at the grand old age of 62 come to appreciate the gifts of a transient upbringing.

Life too wanders, circles back, and detours. We go off on side roads, lose the path, get caught in the brambles. Even when I have a sense of direction in my life, I wonder where life is taking me and what the purpose and meaning of experience is. So I journal with questions. Lately I’ve been asking, “What are you looking for?” because I am such a striver.

If you too are seeking to understand your life, ask yourself “What is it I am seeking from the life story process?” Do you know? When I began writing life stories in the early 1990s, I didn’t know why I was writing. I thought I was looking for material for writing poetry. I was surprised when a writing instructor suggested I write prose and that I had “a wide canvas to paint.” I didn’t realize it would turn into a passion. That’s why its so important questions. I realize now after years of writing that poetic inspiration was exactly right because poetry is my way of expressing my soul journey. My soul ached to speak. Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and soul speak was not in my sights then.

Where are you in the cycle of life?

Where are you in the cycle of life? Are you just starting out? Considering a mate? Having a baby? Starting a career or searching for advancement? Are you approaching middle age and seeking that something more? Perhaps you’re considering a change of career or retiring.

No matter what age or stage you are in, change is part of the human journey. So is suffering. Each stage comes with a lesson. Understanding your life story is key to overcoming blocks and moving into the next stage.

Life story workshop offerings will be described on my new website.

I invite you to visit when everything is up and running.

The art of letting go

“The beautiful journey of today can only begin when we learn to let go of yesterday.” ~ Steve Maraboli

The gift of life story is in embracing the present moment, where passion lives. Ideally, we flow like a river of energy. Being held prisoner by the past blocks the movement of emotion. You can remove these blocks by feeling them. It is safe to do this, especially when you have a coach to accompany you and a container for holding the story.

Retrace the steps you have travelled so far in your life, and you will eventually return to your beginnings. At some point in our lives we must confront the pain of the past. This requires courage. We must face our own darknesses as well as hurtful incidents over which we had no control.

Our Inner Child coped by clothing itself with roles and disguises in order to protect its integrity. Meeting this child again, having been matured by life and experience, is a remarkable experience. The freshness of genuine authenticity enables us to fall in love with our real Self.

This is much easier when the sojourner’s perspective is one of playful observation. Self-discovery is exciting when viewed as a whole story. Appreciation and gratitude, patience and the ability to risk are the qualities required for this journey back to the Self. You have these qualities within you!

How is it you’ve come to this place in your life? Perhaps it is time for a new route or new companions. How and when will you begin

Eyeing the Birds: Part 3

In this 3rd and last part of the story into which I was born, I found the beginning of my writing journey. When I first began to write, my focus was on the legacy of being born into the military life. I spent a great deal of time imagining and writing my father’s war experience. I wanted to know how my dad was transformed from a medic to a machine-gunner, how a gentle, shy, loving man handled the horror of it, and how the war affected him and our family for a life time. I have a number of stories like this one and they are all dedicated to my Dad. They are his legacy.

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As it turned out, he’d gone to visit the mother of one of his dead war buddies, a kid named Red. It was a pretty tough visit. He’d argued with himself long and hard about getting roaring drunk afterward. He lost the argument and ended up sleeping it off on a park bench. The next Monday, he made it to the office in time for afternoon coffee break, and he walked right over to the F – H filing cabinet.

He apologized over and over like a goddamn fool until the two of them ended up standing in the hall at the top of the stairs where he actually took hold of her hand and begged her to let him make it up to her. Janice came out of the washroom right about then, and consequently, the subject of Romance was all over the office by quitting time. It took my parents two more tries before they actually managed the movie.

My mother claims the reason she let my father get away with all that nonsense was because he seemed like such a nice guy, like his Dad. She began to notice things that reminded her of her own father: the way he let the cigarette go out and hang from the side of his mouth, his habit of fishing for a wooden match deep in his shirt pocket, the pleasure he took in giving the dog a scratching behind the ears.

But I think there was another reason. I think she recognized something in his eyes. It might have been the nervous way he jumped at sudden noises, or the way he raked his fingers through the thick auburn hair lying low on his forehead, or the slight tremble of his hands. She knew there was another other side to my father. A dark shadowy side, much like her father’s.

A war-wounded quicksilver ghost would come hovering, circling around them, uninvited and unannounced, flit past his eyes and transform his laughter into melancholy. Sometimes, he’d get a faraway look in his eyes, then get up and walk away without an explanation. She’d find out later he gone for a stroll in the evening, got lost in his head, and wandered until dawn.

My mother compared it to dating two different men. There was the smooth-dancing party man who could knock back a case of Black Label and still waltz a lady around the floor, tell ribald jokes and not forget the punch line, keeping it up until he had a crowd of young men like himself doubled over with laughter. But she never heard him tell gruesome war stories like the rest of them.

My father loved to tell the tale of the night when the host at a Victory house party put his arm around her and asked what she’d been drinking and if she’d like a refill. My mother doesn’t deny that she made family history that night by turning to my father and asking in an innocent voice, “What have I been drinking, dear?” She says they giggled all the way home in the rumble seat of a friend’s 1938 Ford Coupe. That last glass of wine sealed the whole affair. Their first kiss was chaste and brief, and she claims that afterward, my father walked the five miles home on a pillow of air instead of taking the street car.

A lot of girls might have given up on him, but my mother knew a Blue Ribbon winner when she’d found one. She’d seen my grandfather’s gentle hand on my grandmother’s knee, and she loved the way he’d give her a quick little grin when he teased her. My grandfather was a good apple. And she thought my father wouldn’t fall too far from the tree.

The legend of my father’s yen for my mother’s silk-enclosed legs grew over the next fifty years. The two of them went on to feather a nest and lay a half dozen eggs. My father often crowed about the way he’d netted my mother, and she added her own bits of binder twine and shiny wishful thinking to keep the tale together. When she tells it, she adds a blush and a little nervous laughter.

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Tristine Rainer explains in “Your Life As Story:Discovering the “New Autobiography” that there are three parts to any story:

1. A beginning in which something happened so that a person had a problem and a need;
2. A middle in which a person pursued his or her desire and a struggle ensued;
3. And an end in which the person changed with a realization.

When I consider the larger picture of my life story, the family into which I was born plays a major role. It is not necessary to dwell on the past, but it is important to understand the power of beginnings so that one can undertake endings as well.

Eyeing the Birds: Part 2

This is Part 2 the story into which I was born. From these tales of my parents early lives together, I see how my parents beliefs have contributed to my belief system. This is true for everyone, no matter the generation, culture, religion or race. We are “domesticated” as Don Ruis calls it. Our attitudes and values are reinforced and added to our “pot” of “how to” be a person. We can learn so much about ourselves when we listen to our own stories.

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At 10:30 in the morning, most of girls looked fresh from the mirror having just made a point of applying a new coat of red lipstick and patting up hairdos mussed up by the breeze. They were preening before they put on the new smocks my grandfather had purchased just the week before. Janice, the office busybody who said exactly what she thought, said in a chirrupy voice, “I don’t want to look like some mother-to-be at the corner grocery store. I’m a working girl, doncha know?”

Now, my mother thought Janice was pretty shameless making a declaration to the boss about what she would and wouldn’t wear, even though none of the girls, including my mother, wanted to wear a blousy, apron-like tent that came in sick green or pale yellow. Janice said he should have asked her to pick them out!
Not one of them wanted to box up dusty, yellowing papers written in pencil lead that was barely legible. Janice refused to go into the dim, dirty space under the stairs where the spiders, mice and rats had taken to nesting in the piles of old files. But my mother did her part. After 15 minutes, she came back out to the main office with a smear of dust on her face and a trolley full of files.

The sunlight was falling from the windows along the ceiling quite nicely despite the streaks of grime collected on the glass. Long sunbeams cascaded onto the silent ranks of grey filing cabinets standing along two walls. That eventful Monday, the three clattering Underwood typewriters in the middle of room were silent and tucked away out of sight on the spring loaded trays of the big wooden desks.

I can imagine my father right about then, dressed in his freshly pressed uniform and polished shoes, smelling of shaving soap and sunshine, sitting cross legged in a tilting wooden chair just outside my grandfather’s office. I can imagine him eyeing the birds with a quick, shy grin. A crowd of girls might have gathered hoping to meet him. After all, he was the Boss’ son. And he had a mature, worldly manner about him. They knew he was just back from overseas and glad to be home. They also knew that he, like a lot of other boys just coming back from the war, needed time, attention and care.

My father might have been telling tales about London, or waiting to be shipped to France, or being engaged to a gorgeous English girl. He’d have said she dumped him for a British Air Force officer. According to my father, he wasn’t going to take guff from any girl, because, he claimed, if he asked a girl out and she said no, there’d be no second chances for her.

My mother never said whether she’d been listening as she bustled past the S – Z filing cabinet, or whether she heard the story he was telling about dancing at the Red Cross dances. She’d noticed, however, how scrawny he was, and how dark the circles were beneath his eyes. She noticed the nervous way he flicked the ashes from his cigarette into the overflowing ashtray on the worn lino floor. But my mother, being the smart one she is, knew a little about how he looked before the war. She’d seen his picture, the one in which he held up a fine catch of bass and beamed from ear to ear, the picture sitting right there on the windowsill above the radiator in my grandfather’s office.

My mother wouldn’t have said anything to him of course. She might have picked up bits of conversation as she bent down to open the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet to remove files of soldiers Missing in Action, 1918. I can imagine her blushing as she looked up to see him watching her. She would have gone all flustered. I wouldn’t be surprised if my father had continued to watch her, sneaking a peak at the seams of her stockings. He always claimed to be a leg and hip man.

The next day my father showed up in the office at about noon, and this time he was bolder. He managed to place himself in just the right spot, at just the right time. The lunch bell sounded and the whole Steno Pool flock scattered from their places and headed for the coat rack. He was holding open the frosted glass office door, and he smiled at her when she thanked him. It took him a few tries to get out the question. “Would you like to take in a movie on Friday night?”

Now that seems like a pretty easy question to me, but my mother wasn’t quite sure if he had been bluffing about taking guff from girls who said no. So when he suggested going to the pictures to see “A Walk in the Sun” with Dana Andrews, my mother wanted to say, “Yes.” A movie with the Boss’ son, and ice cream on the way home seemed a fine way to spend an evening. On the other hand, she may have been playing a little hard to get, as some young women do. Anyway, she told him no thanks, she had other plans.

Movie stars like Gene Tierney and Andrews were all the rage during that spring when Ottawa was the location for filming, and my mother had even skipped lunch and waited for an hour in the rain with her office friends just to see the cast walk by. It wasn’t the wet and cold that spoiled it for her though. It was the fact that both of them had come staggering out of the Carleton Hotel drunk as skunks.

Andrews was dressed in a rumpled Yankee Army uniform with his hat cocked back on his head and a cigarette hanging from his mouth. No Canadian soldier would ever have gone out in public looking like that. And Gene Tierney, who they all thought of as fine actress, surprised them all by wobbling on her heels and hanging on Andrews’ arm like some lovesick puppy. Even so, my mother was a fan.

My father was not about to give up easily. He surprised my mother by asking her out again. This time she really was busy. Remembering his comments about giving up on girls who said no, my mother added quickly, “But I could come next Friday.” With a big grin, my father said he’d pick her up at 6:03 so they could make the 6:17 street car and still be at the theatre by 7:30. However, after all that, the next Friday he didn’t show. Since it was a long way out to Rockcliffe Park, she gave him the benefit of the doubt for awhile. She waited on the porch, all dressed up in a brand new cotton seersucker suit for two hours. By 8:00 she had decided he was a chump and not worth the wait.

And that’s why I write

When I first began to write stories about 25 years ago, I discovered things about myself that were entirely new. At first, I thought I must have been asleep or lost through the first half my life. My viewpoint, my thoughts, my feelings, and my judgments were largely unknown to me. I had no words to express how I had come to be here at this point in my life. Memories emerged from my pen that I had totally forgotten. Apparently this is true of other people who moved repeatedly during their childhood. That’s probably why I was so taken with Elizabeth Berg’s book “Durable Goods” about a young teenager who grew up as a military kid. In it, she tells the reader she had to make up whole scenes so she wouldn’t forget. At first that’s why I wrote.

In my teen years, I spent a lot of time acting like a chameleon, changing myself to fit circumstances. I operated from a sense of what things “should be” or “how I wanted things to be,” rather than what things “really” were and deciding on my course of action from there. My community and school constantly changed too. I was operating out of appearances and a desire to be accepted rather than from my own inner directives. That’s why I continued to write.

When I grew older, and began searching in earnest for understanding why I was unhappy, and I wondered what possible purpose I could have, I wandered about with a metaphoric flashlight, shining it into closed closets and dark corners. I didn’t know where it was going, and I had no map. Old ghosts and family skeletons danced in these closets and now that I had disturbed them, I had to pull them out to be examined in the light of day. That’s why I still write.

Over the years, I began to understand that every one of them had a learning message. I purposely searched for new world inside me because, I reasoned, like the universe itself, much of me is buried in the great unknown and it’s my purpose to go looking, like Captain Kirk or someone like that. That’s the best reason of all to write. To go where no (wo)man, namely me, has gone before. I’m the only one who can take the journey into my own frontier.

Who am I Anyway?

I’ve been asking this question in one form or another for years. As a kid, I wasn’t even aware it was a question because I was spending all my energy changing myself to fit circumstances. When I was attending new schools, meeting parental expectations, and fitting into the peer group the question was not even on my radar.

Now, in my Crone years, I look at my white hair in the mirror and wonder if I’m the same person who once had smooth skin and perky breasts. The music of Simon & Garfunkel still warms my heart, but I know that although they make beautiful poetry, parsley, sage and rosemary are used for cooking Thanksgiving dinner. My mind can’t remember the names of my daughter’s friends, but I remember a boy named Ian Rutherford who shared a boxed lunch with me in grade 4. And spiritually, I am more concerned with aligning with the Divine than with reciting the order of the books in the Old Testament.

Kidding aside, there are confused days when I fret about who I am, but they are fewer and farther between than just a few years ago. Since I took my journaling facilitator training, my awareness has grown. I began waking up to my senses, took the time to pay attention to my emotions, tuned in to my thoughts, and listened for my soul. Over time, I’ve connected with my internal witness who keeps a nonjudgmental eye on events and my reactions to them. This part of me can be detached and calm in the face of highly emotional events. She watches my puppy mind thoughts and my impulsive actions, and is kind and patient as I consider my options, like a good parent.

Sometimes I wish I could paint this who-I-am part of me and put it in a frame on the wall or capture it in a photograph, but my witness is part of my soul, a fluid, ever changing, evolving thing. Whenever I want to capture a glimpse of myself, I go to my journal to word paint. In the silence, I reconnect with that ever-present part of me using a metaphor from the natural world. When I am wind or river or changing seasons, I gain some distance and safety from my present situation, while remaining connected to all things.

If you are journaller and want to try a new way of looking at things, find an item in your immediate environment that calls to you and write from its perspective. It can be fun to gain a new view of your body by seeing it as a car. Are you a Ferrari or a Volkswagen? What if you viewed your personality as a kind of dog? Are you a German Shepherd or a mongrel? Simply imagine yourself as that and begin, I am… Let me know how that works for you.