Tag Archives: soul work

Growing Soup

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When my daughter Jane was small, she would put her hands on her hips and declare indignantly, “When I grow up. .  . I’ll stay up as long as I want. I’ll watch as much TV as I want, or I won’t clean my room unless I want to.” We smiled and let her complain.

Sooner than I imagined, Jane was in her twenties, with an undergraduate degree, no job or clear vocation, wanting a car, and those things that come with growing up. I remember her declaring to me, “All my life, I’ve wanted to grow up, and now that I am, I don’t like it. Nothing is the way I thought it would be.”

Those words could well apply to me and growing older. Unlike Jane, I was never in a rush to grow old, but still, I’ve been doing exactly that, making me inclined to say, “Nothing is the way I thought it would be. My body just can’t do what it once could.” Some days I rail against these changes. I want 45-year-old Karen back. I plan exercises and diets that will magically restore me. I adopt schedules to take better care of myself. I resolve to make new friends, find a passion or renewed purpose in an unknown something. Maybe I’ll paint a bird house, make a resistance hat, or start making my own bread. Maybe I’ll do all of these things – or something else that is different.

But I still go to bed another day older.

This morning, reading a Lenten meditation by Parker Palmer, I saw another way to consider growing older. He argues that although we were originally an agricultural society, tied to seasons of growth and rest, we are now a manufacturing one, and the “master metaphor of our era” comes from manufacturing. Rather than “growing” our lives, we make them. He notes our everyday speech: “We make time, make friends, make meaning, make money, make a living, make love”.

I wondered, could I reframe growing older into a positive perspective?: I could ask how can I grow time, grow friends, grow meaning, grow money, grow living, and grow love? I could move on from the “making” approach that probably fits much of adulthood and embrace the growing in growing old.

One suggestion for growing old is from Cynthis Bourgeault’s Ten Practical Guidelines for Conscious Aging.Number 5 is:

Watch what happens when you try to draw energy from an outmoded image of yourself.. . .You get an immediate rush of ‘Ah, I’m my old self again!!’ But that is exactly who you do not want to be. Your old self is the sacrificial lamb you will lay upon the altar of your deeper becoming.

Sounds like Bourgeault is talking about hanging onto our former self versus growing into a deeper becoming. I have no idea of what the “deeper becoming” might be, but I’m willing to find out.

As I engage with these ideas—growing instead of making myself into the perfect aging senior, I’m reminded of my second husband, Gary.  Gary did not cook at all. When I met him, he lived on Special K for breakfast and Healthy Choice frozen meals for lunch and dinner. When we married and forgot to say “no presents,” someone gave us a crock pot. Gary thought it was the greatest cooking invention ever.

He loved homemade soup, and the crock pot was perfect for making it. I’d be off to the office in the morning and he’d say. “I think I’ll make some soup today. What do you think should be in it?” I’d add some broth and maybe leftover chicken and, as I ran out the door, suggest that we could add noodles later.

While I was gone, Gary grew the soup, scouring the refrigerator for leftovers and the cupboards for things that might add flavor. I’d come home to a completely different amalgam of soup than the one I left. He grew the soup with what we had and with his imagination. And like many things that grow, some soups were forgettable, others unexpectedly outstanding.  But because they grew organically, there was no recipe for replicating any particular soup, and that’s what made his soups so interesting.

While I was busy making a life, I was also growing my own life soup, with a variety of personal experiences. Some have turned out great and others I wish I could do over and would just as soon forget. But in the end, it’s the growing that counted.

The other Karen mentioned in her blog, Who Is the Old Lady Directing the Circus? “growing down,” acting with greater spontaneity and less regard for the product than the process. Surely by 82, I’ve earned the right to grow up, down, or sideways. I hope I can grow like Gary’s soup, adding wisdom from my cupboard of life and a pinch of adventure, stirring in love and more love to taste. 

What Our Mothers Never Told Us

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Photo by Natali Bredikhina on Unsplash

How much do we really know about our parents – and how much do we want to know?

We in the boomer generation grew up knowing that fathers never talked about their experiences in the 2nd World War.  They were raised in a time when we kids were supposed to view them as super-beings, who cared for us but didn’t have much emotion themselves (except the random yelling when frustrations boiled over). 

But our mothers often told us even less. My mother grew up in the Midwest during the Great Depression, and knew or observed significant hardship, although she and her sisters were housed and fed. I inherited some of what she learned: Saving string and rubber bands.  Washing and reusing tinfoil and plastic bags.  Now that we are in a new age of conservation to save the planet, the habits that were passed on in our childhood look remarkably prescient.  But her stories were slivers of a lived reality in an age where people rarely shared their deepest and more difficult experiences, and generally believed that therapy was for those who were weak and broken, as not for people like themselves. People who knew how to put one foot in front of the other and march on.  They were tough – and in the case of my mother, also tender in her care for my sister and me.

But my parents also told stories that gave me insight into the uncertainty that surrounded their lives as children and older adolescents – and also the lucky circumstances that allowed them to prosper when others did not. My mother told me about learning to clean the kerosene lamps, the only evening light in her home, when she was quite young.  Uncle Richard, a brilliant man, had no choice but to take any job he could during the depression to help support his family including a sister with significant disabilities.  He was a charming, well-read, funny – and a short-distance truck driver for his whole life. He never complained.

What our parents didn’t talk about was what it was like to be orphaned during the Great Depression.  In my father’s case, having a father die removed any certainty about the future, but he was lucky to have an uncle who was a professor (one of the few positions that was largely “safe” from unemployment during the depression) who gave him a place to live and attend college. Nothing was  said about moving from the family home, the separation from siblings and his mother, or the displacement and hunger that must have preceded his break.

I knew even less about my mother, and the slivers of hidden but still palpable trauma were always unconnected.  As a child, she told me that she was orphaned at 14 in “the accident” that killed her parents.  Decades later, I learned that she and her sisters were not allowed to go to the funeral in the tiny town of Scandia, Minnesota.  No relative could take all three girls, so they were quickly dispatched to live with people they barely knew in towns that were, at a time of poor roads and slow cars, impossibly distant from one another. As the oldest, my mother went to live with Uncle Sherman Johnson, in North Dakota, who was (for the time) economically privileged.  She very rarely mentioned her life there, but the tiny bits inserted into other stories made clear that she struggled to fit in.  There were younger children; she took on the role of older sister, but once said that she felt like hired help.  Although the Johnson family tried to stay in touch (their fondness for her was apparent in cards that I read) she rarely saw them after she left for college, also paid for by Uncle Sherman.  I never visited them as a child;  She never told any details about “the accident” to anyone, nor did I ever hear her talking about it with her sisters on the rare occasions when they visited.  When I was an adult, I was able to discern from tiny fragments that her father shot her mother while cleaning his gun and then shot himself. 

She survived by putting it behind her, to create a life that, on the outside, looked happy and vibrant.  It worked for a while. 

My mother and me, in 1956.

As I talk to other friends, the holes in our mother’s stories occupy vast spaces. A period of poverty that required them to give up their children for a time — but the decisions and events that caused that to occur and the struggle to reunite with them were hidden.  A grandmother who died in childbirth, leaving their mother to be raised without a sustained loving presence during a time when responsible relatives would have been consumed with making sure than there was food. A mother who never talked about being thrown out of her parent’s home when she was 14.

We now think of these events as trauma, and have developed strategies, therapeutic and educational, to support children’s resilience in the face of loss and deep uncertainty.  We read the newspaper and feel intense compassion for the children growing up in war zones or places of extreme poverty in our own country, who face even greater challenges. But, as a child of parents who lived through it, I had no access to their deepest places of pain, or the moments of joy that obviously sustained them since they managed to be caring and—on the surface, sometimes carefree—parents.

I have my own traumas, although not as deep as those of my parents.  I have shielded my children, who are now middle aged, from them.  Is this the way it is supposed to be, protecting my loved ones from knowledge of the places in my heart and life that have shattered, and stories about how I put the pieces back together?  Would knowing more make us compassionate or increase our desire for distance? Should we burn our journals and other evidence before we die in order to preserve our own fiction of wholeness?  Or, as I wish my mother had done, spill the beans and come clean….

I saw it first as suggestion

….We both drew in our breath and looked away

….And it magnifies in the eyes of those no longer young

Katherine Solniat, excerpted from Secrets About Nothing

Curiouser and Curiouser….

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–          Alice in Wonderland illustration by Arthur Rackham (1907) [Public Domain

Grown-ups never understand anything or themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them (Antoine de St. Exupery, The Little Prince)

A few weeks ago, someone quoted from Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart: “Choosing to be curious is choosing to be vulnerable because it requires us to surrender to uncertainty”.  Brown goes on to associate curiosity with discomfort:  “We have to admit to not knowing, risk being told that we shouldn’t be asking.” Later, Brown links curiosity with the perception of an information gap that we commit to closing.   I immediately bristled – internally, since it would have been inappropriate to react to the nodding of heads and pervasive affirmation in the group. 

When I was a young child – and even when I was old enough to read them myself – two of my most beloved books were Alice in Wonderland and The House at Pooh Corner.  I read them joyfully to my children – and later to my grandchildren.  What I cherish about both of them is their exploration of simple, uncomplicated curiosity.  Alice hesitates only briefly before biting, although she knows that “one side will make you smaller, the other will make you large”, while the doorknob says “nothing’s impossible.”  Pooh looks at every day as a fresh adventure, whether it is confronting the loss of Eeyore’s tail or stalking the mysterious Heffalump.  While Alice sometimes bemoans a choice she has made, she quickly picks herself up and asks another impertinent question.  Pooh, on each day’s adventure, only hopes that there will be honey involved.

Curiosity may involve a risk, but it is not something that holds either Alice or Pooh back – more than momentarily.  Eeyore reminds us that worrying about not knowing – at least more than briefly – can be a path to cynicism and depression.  I took this lesson to heart:  Be curious.  Move on with the adventures.  Don’t do anything potentially life-threatening, but assume that the jams that you get in to will be temporary.  Don’t think about the “information gap” but move toward the unknown.  In other words, nurture the impulse to try stuff, and a full range of emotions that encompasses trepidation, but also the delight that comes with doing or learning about something new.

It turns out that Brown is talking to people who feel “stuck” in a comfort zone.  She covers all the research that says that we will be happier and freer if we respond to “I don’t really know” with curiosity. We all get stuck sometimes….certainly, retirement for someone like me, who loved going to work, meant that I had to allow myself to drive past the exit for my office without feeling lost and uncomfortable!  And although many routines nurture us (brushing our teeth, eating lunch, going to bed at roughly the same time on most days), it is easy to slip into ways of thinking and habits that constrain.  But getting stuck seems to be something that we choose more and more often as we exit adolescence.  With Alice, Pooh, and Thich Nhat Han as guides, however, we see that embracing vulnerability (which Brown endorses) is not a conscious decision to endure discomfort, but a practice of anticipating novelty and adventure – of embracing childish wonder and a Beginner’s Mind.  

And then there is the spiritual side.  One version of Genesis situates our humanness in “original curiosity”:  “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit…”  Albert Einstein echoes this, suggesting that “curiosity has its own reason for existing.  One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality…Never lose a holy curiosity.”  Julia Cameron also argues that curiosity is a spiritual path rather than a cognitive decision, and that it requires habits – she suggests random writing in “morning pages”, scheduled “artist dates” to explore a new esthetic, and regular walks that have no purpose other than to look deeply at whatever is in one’s path. 

Photo by petr sidorov on Unsplash

I admit that I don’t do these as consistently as I once anticipated, but I have other habits that invoke the same opportunity to approach the world with a Pooh-like sense of wonderment.  Meditation – something that for years I thought that was beyond my capacities – clears my brain of monkey-mind, and creates space for hope that goes beyond ticking off items on the incessant to-do list.  Connecting every week with someone (or several people) who are willing to engage in authentic and vulnerable conversations about “big stuff” never fails to make me curious.

Of course, I take Brene Brown’s assertions about the benefits of curiosity to heart because it is particularly important as we age.  According to Henry Emmons and David Alter’s 9 Keys To Staying Sharp, curiosity comes only a few steps behind the basics of moving, eating well, and getting enough sleep in warding off mental decline.  Nor do I want to ignore Brown’s s admonitions against getting too comfortable and avoiding vulnerability.  If I am always afraid of falling, will I ever learn how to skip again?  However, I also note that as we age we can more easily choose to embrace vulnerability and become more playful, as long as we are willing to follow Shel Silverstein and  “grow down” (along with giving away our business attire and our mother’s china):

He got his trousers torn and stained,

He ran out barefoot in the rain,

Shouting to all the folks in town,

“It’s much more fun, this growin’ down.

 — Shel Silverstein

LET OLD THINGS PASS AWAY (2 Corinthians, 5:17)

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Or

DO NOT GO GENTLY INTO THIS GOOD NIGHT (Dylan Thomas)

Or

NEVER WASTE A GOOD CRISIS (Milton Friedman)

Photo by Peter Hermann on Unsplash

Perhaps an inevitable part of aging is looking backward, searching for meaning in the distinctive chapters of our lives. After moving past obvious markers (leaving home for college, getting married, etc.), I keep stumbling across the fact that there are periods that are less clearly marked by an anticipated beginning or a clear end.  Some of these are unpleasant: Queen Elizabeth had her annus horribililis,  Karen Storm writes about her past experience with prolonged grief, Katherine Malanga reflects on being in the middle of  figuring out the job of loving and caring for someone who is declining. 

For me, 1998 and 1999 were such a chapter.  Nothing exceptional happened that distinguishes me from other fallible human beings who experience suffering –  except that everything occurred in quick succession.

Photo by Damiano Baschiera on Unsplash

Well, to be perfectly honest, the symptoms started earlier, beginning with rocky transitions to college for my children.  The resultant stress and disagreements about how to handle myriad other issues tore at an already fragile marital relationship. By 1997, we were living together in 17th century house on a beautiful canal in the Netherlands (because we were on sabbatical) without our children (who were still causing us anxiety). 

With a lot of travel, living largely separate lives, we struggled through.  I responded by spending weekends with friends in another city and drinking Jenever (Dutch Gin, which smells a bit like rotten cabbages), straight from the freezer.

Back in the U.S.  The semi-separation became a real separation.  The children were gone.  Frisk, a beloved dog, was very old and barely able to move. My parents died, a little over a year apart.  My sister felt like my only support, but our grieving took different forms – she turned inward and to her family, and I wanted to turn outward because my family was….well, disintegrating.  I was able to briefly distract myself as International Karen — a 1999 Fulbright trip to examine the condition of higher education in post-Soviet Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Czechoslovakia and an invitation to cheer in the new century with friends in London, accompanied by bagpipes in the Royal Park in Greenwich.  I am, however, here to let you know that, in spite of the popularity of Eat, Pray, Love, treating distress by relocation is overrated.

I thought that I needed a project, and foolishly took my half of the sale of the jointly owned elegant town home and bought a “fixer-upper” in Uptown, a densely populated, just-on-the-edge-of-becoming-trendy part of Minneapolis.  The house was owned by a blind woman, who lived with two alcoholic sons and a husband who had recently entered an assisted living facility.  Her sons assured her that they were maintaining the property and redoing the kitchen.  Hah…the ring of cigarette burns on the floor outlining their beds was evidence that only dumb luck kept them from burning the place down.  I am not a very handy person – I have no idea what inspired me to take on a neglected home despite its “good bones” and untouched quarter-sawn oak woodwork in all the rooms. My friends were worried.  But I barely saw them because I spent most of my time isolating when not at work. I was a contemporary version of the Prodigal Son, who after failing to maintain my social and financial assets, wanted to go home.  Except, although I had a house, I had no real home to turn to.

Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash

One day, when walking the dog, I fainted and hit my head.  No concussion, but my doctor insisted on a sleep-deprived EKG.  Now, I am a person who could never stay up all night even when I was in college…I had no idea what to do other than to rent a machine that would pinch me regularly.  At a rare social gathering, I humorously asked where I could get one.  A bit later, Dan, who I barely recognized, approached me and said that he had worked nights, was easily able to stay up, and would be happy to help.  He suggested the local all-night Home Depot, followed by a very early breakfast in the café of a 24-hour grocery store.  Putting aside every caution – I, after all, had inhaled Judith Rossner’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar that left woman my age thinking that behind every eligible middle-aged man lurked a serial killer – I agreed.  And I thought about Carol, who was as close to an intimate friend as I had. I knew that I could cut the evening short because she got up ridiculously early and could get me to the test before 7.

When I least expected it, two people came into my life to accompany me on what turned out to be a quotidian medical adventure. A few years later, I married Dan, who never made the slightest pass or sign of flirtation during our 5 hours examining hoses, shovels, and industrial cleaning implements at the all-night Home Depot or the coffee shop.  Carol and I grew into closer friends over the years, even when our conversations were rare due to moves.  This modest, almost non-event was, in retrospect, a crack that widened and allowed me to see that things could be different.  I can only conclude that one mystery of life is that when I am experiencing the greatest turmoil, it is often a small voice that reminds me that relationships can change and heal. 

The prodigal son returned to his father’s home, but as a humbled and open person, ready to leave what he had become in order to be changed. There was no instant moment when I saw a way out, but Dan’s kindness and Carol’s support at a juncture where I felt my human frailty so intensely allowed me to see that I was not alone.  I was ready to be changed, but I needed to see that I had companions who could walk with me.

Photo by Sebatian Pichler on Unsplash

Unlike Dylan Thomas’ cry for an intense battle to grasp what joy is available, I was listening to gentler voices that recognized that chaos – what in 12 step groups is referred to as psychologically “hitting bottom” –  is often required to provide the courage to return to oneself.  I learned that it is precisely when I am in existential turmoil that I must depend on others to support me.  Milton Friedman’s assertion that  “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change”  is also time to remember John Donne:  “No (wo)man is an island.” This minimal insight has altered my life and the way I respond to those first inklings that “things are not going well….”  Instead of isolating, or throwing myself on the most immediate comfort or escape, I try to look closely for the small voices, usually of others, that remind me that I am worth saving.