Tag: hope in hard times

Living with Love in a Time of Dying

Posted on | by Susan Tweit | Leave a Comment on Living with Love in a Time of Dying

That’s the new subtitle of my forthcoming memoir, Bless the Birds*, a phrase that came to me this winter when I realized, as I write in the Preface, “The personal is the political.” Meaning my story of living with heart open through times more difficult than I had ever imagined is directly applicable to all of us now, as we do our best to live with hope rather than despair through what seems the death of civility, the death of our planet, and the death of our democracy. Not to mention the threat of a Coronavirus pandemic.

How do we avoid being paralyzed by grief and fear in these times?

It’s not easy, but it is possible:

This story is about living in a time of dying. It is both prayer and love song, an invitation to walk in the light of what we love, especially when times are hard or heartbreaking. To open our hearts and go forward with as much grace as we can through life’s changes. To honor our cell-deep connection to all of the other lives with whom we share this planet. To celebrate the miracle of simply being, our capacity for love that is both gift and salvation.

How can we rise above and be our best?

Walk in light of what we love, rather than what we fear. That means reminding ourselves—often—what it is that we love. We we care about, what we appreciate and can celebrate about ourselves and our lives, and about life on this amazing animate planet.

As is opening our hearts and living our days with as much grace as is possible. Consciously looking for the beauty inherent in each day, whether that is a flower blooming inside in winter, a coyote glimpsed trotting through a grassland, a fragment of bird song, a painting, piece of music, or dance; an unexpected smile or the touch of a warm hand…

And staying connected to our community, near and far. Not just the people who are most like us and easiest to love, but all of humanity, and all of the species who together make Earth the green and living exception to the vast silence of space.

You’ll notice the repetition of the word love, the quality which I think is the greatest gift our species has to offer Life. Not just romantic love or intense physical desire, the genuine attachment we humans feel for each other, for other species, and for this living world as a whole.

How can we thrive, despite the convulsive changes happening to the world we love?

I offer this personal story as an example of something positive we can do: live with love, and “lean in” to nature, the community that birthed our species. I see love as humans’ greatest gift to this Earth, and one we need to cultivate—especially now. I bless the birds because the sudden and profoundly unnerving appearance of Richard’s avian hallucinations afforded us time to learn how to walk his journey to its end with love. To be reminded of the kindness and generosity intrinsic in our fellow humans. To take heart and sustenance from the miracle of life on this glorious planet, challenges and all. To live fully in a time when life seems especially hard and heart-breaking.

When we find ourselves curling inward in grief and fear, we need to remember our species’ best gift: love.

Living in light of what we love can carry us through. That takes practice, conscious cultivation of being present with compassion and an open heart. Simply being here, hearts open to the flow of life.

Blessings to you all!

*Bless the Birds: Living With Love in a Time of Dying, is due out from She Writes Press in a little over a year, April of 2021. It’s been a long journey, and I am excited to have this, my 13th book, on a path to publication at last.

A coyote from my neighborhood pack hunting the open space below my house at sunset…

The Balm of Bobcats and Wildflowers

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In times when the human world seems to have gone crazy, I head outside for the balm of nature nearby. I always return inspired and energized, humbled, and remembering (again) that life, the capital L kind, the web of interacting species which make this planet a vibrant sphere, is an astonishingly creative and tenacious community.

Tuesday, a baby Bobcat lured me outside. Not the feline kind with four paws and a deadly pounce, the diesel kind with tracks and a bucket. (That's a selfie of me grinning as I operate the machine.)

Knowing I had yard-healing to do, my contractor had put us on the waiting list at the rental center for the MT55, a walk-behind mini-bulldozer. On Tuesday morning, Jeff got the call that the machine was ours for the afternoon. I asked if I could play. 

"Sure," he said. He showed me the throttle (a lever with a range between a turtle symbol and a jackrabbit symbol!), forward and reverse, how to steer the tracks, and how to use the bucket.

And then he set me loose. So there I was in my sandals, skirt, and nice sweater (I know, I know, but I was dressed for a meeting and I was very careful), moving and dumping fill, smoothing it with the bottom of the bucket, and running the baby dozer back and forth to tamp things down.

And grinning like a maniac, because using that baby Bobcat to mend the utility-trench scar in my backyard surely is fun. (Who knew?) 

When Jeff came back, I had to go to my meeting. By the time I returned, he was at work scalping turf from the front yard for my lawn replacement project, carving out the paths and patio I had outlined with fluorescent green spray paint. 

I grabbed a shovel and tidied edges, cut roots, and cleaned up stray bits of turf. 

By the end of the evening, the two paths and the patio were ready for gravel, and the robin mama who insisted on building a nest over the side door to the garage had figured out that the newly scraped soil made perfect worm-foraging territory.

(She was completely unafraid of the noisy mini-dozer.)

Today I led the second wildflower walk I've offered in a week. A snowy winter and wet spring have made this one of the best bloom years in decades for the high desert, and I want share this ephemeral miracle–its beauty and its balm–with as many others as I can.

Wyoming big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata ssp. wyomingensis) dotted with sulphur yellow western wallflower (Erysium sp.) and prairie Junegrass

Including you. Here's a quick tour of what's blooming in my "nearby wild":

Bessey's locoweed (Oxytropis besseyi)

Fuzzytongue penstemon (Penstemon erianthus)–you've got to love that common name, which alludes to the furry stamen that leads bumblebees inside the flower

a fleabane (Erigeron sp.) I haven't identified yet

An annual lupine (Lupinus sp) that's only about three inches tall!

Scarlet guara or lizardtail (Guara coccinea)

And the adult bald eagle we unintentionally disturbed from her perch in a cottonwood tree on the canyon rim. Look for the white spot of bald eagle tail in front of the cliff mid-photo.

The wonder of nature–spring wildflowers, bald eagles, and all–is in just that flourishing of diverse forms of life, growing and blooming, hunting and eating, mating and dying, each in their own unique way. Spending time outside reminds us that even at our worst (and global climate change certainly falls in that column), we are not everything.

Life continues despite us. Not unchanged, but determined and creative, impelled by the need to thrive. In every corner and pocket and place.  

That determined flourishing as exemplified by the myriad kinds of wildflowers blooming among the sagebrush this spring gives me great hope. Hope in the active sense, the sense of encouragement to redouble my work of spreading love in the world, of healing this battered planet and my species in the doing.  

For me, that's the balm of bobcats and wildflowers, bald eagles and the miracle we call life. 

scarlet globemallow (Sphaeralcea coccinea), also called cowboy's delight

Restoration as a Calling

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I've been home a month as of yesterday, a span of time that seems both impossibly short and un-countably long. Short when I think about everything we've gotten done on this house-project, and forever when I realize how familiar it is to be back. 

(Yesterday was also Molly's birthday. Happy Birthday, Sweetie!)

I walk almost the same route to the Post Office every afternoon that I took daily when I lived in Cody thirty-plus years ago, climbing the steep sidewalk up the sagebrush-clothed hillside above my neighborhood, and passing houses whose occupants I can name. (The photo at the top of the post is the view from the top of the hill.) In fact, I live in the same neighborhood I did back then. 

Of course, much has changed in my life and in the town. I am sixty, now, widowed with a "kid" who is an adult; when I left Cody for Laramie and grad school, I was newly divorced and hadn't met either Richard or Molly. Much less moved with them to West Virginia, Washington State, Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, and then back to Colorado.

I've lived a whole life away from this place: I step-mothered Molly, wrote twelve books and hundreds of articles, essays and stories for magazines and newspapers around the country; I nursed my mother and the love of my life through their deaths in the same year. I finished and sold the house Richard built for us and his studio too, and built a snug house and guest studio of my own.

All of that away from the place that has called me home for as long as I remember. Which may explain why I am so happy here in the midst of a house-project I never imagined taking on, with a yard that needs even more work than the house. 

My bedroom, still in progress… That green spot on the wall is a sample of the color it will be eventually; the floors are in such bad shape they can't be refinished, so they'll be covered with reproduction plank flooring.  

I wake every morning in my bedroom with the unfinished floors and walls that need painting, and am ridiculously happy. I am home, I think. I have found my refuge, one I needed more than I realized. I also have found my calling. 

I need the place itself, the landscape that smells like sagebrush, the views bounded by mountains I know intimately because I have walked their slopes and ridges in the days I did fieldwork here. 

And I need this house, both because its beautiful bones speak to me of care, craftsmanship, and comfort; and because it has been so neglected. The house needs me and my vision (and savings!). The restoration project it represents is something positive I can do when the world is so full of negativity, a way to work forward in a time seemingly stalled by divisiveness and fear. 

Restoration as I am practicing it here is both hard physical work and metaphor. It is also my calling in life, especially now. 

Ripping the horrible and filthy carpet off the basement stairs yesterday morning, for instance, not only satisfied my inner Tool Girl–using that little pry bar to remove that which I cannot restore is amazingly satisfying!–it also gave me the kind of workout that makes my muscles sing and sends me to bed early, to sleep well and long. 

Having my hands on tools and the work of bringing this beautiful but badly treated house back to life satisfies my need to heal, to reweave the fabric of the human community, if just in this small way, in a time when we have split along bitter political/religious/tribal lines.

The work I am doing along with my contractor and his trades-colleagues isn't about red or blue or who voted which way (or didn't vote at all); it's not some kind of litmus test for who is good or who is evil.

It is simply positive work. We find common ground in tools and design, and in working hard and smart, in teasing each other, in sympathizing about kids making bad choices or aging parents slipping away. We ask each other's advice, appreciate the craft we practice, and the drive to do it well.

We talk about mundane stuff and also about more esoteric things, like what it means to be a good, caring person, and how "community" comes from "common" and means remembering that we share our humanity, that we are stronger together.  

I am reminded of the deeper meanings of restoration each time we make the decision about whether some aspect of the house is in good enough shape that it can be fixed up, or it is too far gone and must go, like that truly nasty carpet on the basement stairs.

When I finished removing that carpet and its accumulated grime. I set to pulling out the staples, tacks, and even three-penny nails (who nails down carpet?) that had held it and at least one previous iteration in place.

My trusty nail-pulling pliers, which in a previous life trimmed the hooves on my horses, and served to pry out loose horseshoe nails too…

What I found underneath was a set of well-built if battered wood stairs, which when patched and re-painted, will look inviting (instead of scary) and be sturdy and comfortable underfoot. Not art, but good workmanship. 

Imagine these stairs with the holes filled and a fresh coat of paint that brightens up the space.

To restore is to rebuild (literally as well as figuratively: restore comes from the Latin word that means "to rebuild"); in that rebuilding, we evaluate what we have, save what we can, and start over on what we can't. We work with the now, knowing it's not perfect. 

Sometimes restoration brings welcome surprises, uncovering beauty hidden beneath the surface. As with the handles on the original sunshine-yellow metal cabinets in my vintage kitchen. They are gray, and I assumed until I recently took a closer look that they were metal dulled by 60 years of use. 

Not so: The gray chipped off under my fingernail, revealing bright copper beneath. Oh my!

Last night I surfed the internet, looking for non-toxic ways to remove paint from metal door hardware. On This Old House, I found this one: "Simmer" the hardware overnight in hot, not boiling water, with a tablespoon or two of dish soap.

A handle in the process of simmering away the gray paint… 

Then simply scrape off the paint with a stiff plastic bristle brush (I didn't have a brush, so I used my fingernails), and polish. It worked! 

Two handles cleaned, polished, and reattached. Forty-one more to go… 

It seems to me that what we need right now is a lot more energy aimed at restoration–restoring our lives and communities, and a lot less polarization, anger and fear. What we have is what we have. We can't go back. 

But we can go forward with an aim to restore, to thoughtfully evaluate what we find, and then work hard and smart–together–to save and shine up what we can, and rebuild what we can't. 

We may find beauty we didn't imagine in the doing. We'll surely rediscover our commonality, what unites us as caring human beings, and that is a gift we truly need. 

Can you spot those three copper handles? They match the original copper-clad range hood.