Life, I love you......All is groovy.

I had a long chat with one of my BFF's who had a stroke a year after mine. We confer with each other quite often as a check-in to see if we are going crazy or if we are just still experiencing deficits due to our strokes. We are our own support group, which is really nice in a weird sort of way. If anyone had of told us back in 2004 - 2008, when we worked at a local hospice together, that we would both have strokes a year apart, we would have laughed. But it did happen that way, and we are grateful for the companionship of someone who understands that the things that have changed for us are not due to age, or this or that....it is all due to the strokes we experienced.

Her mother has also had two 'mini-strokes' within the past 3 years, one happening just before mine did. She is slowly getting more and more forgetful, not just age forgetfulness, but forgetfulness that is due to the strokes. She has had a lot of tests and her diagnosis is not dementia. It is brain damage from the strokes. So, my friend asks me...Is this what we have to look forward to? I don't know. Neither does she.

People who see us being competent at our work, functioning at a very high level think that we have 'recovered' and all is well in the brain department. Yes, we both have recovered. I think we both have accepted that we are now as good as we're gonna get, yet we both face our own brains every day, and those who live with us, or our closest friends know that we have been changed forever, and we have to learn to compensate for the deficits which we live with every waking moment.

We talked also about how frustrating it is to have people tell us "Oh, I experience the same thing...it's just age." No it is not just age. No it is not the same as you, who are aging and forgetful. We have that aging process too, on top of the damage to our brains, so it makes it doubly weird to not remember things like we used to. There is more to it though, than just memory loss.

My stroke was a Left Basal Ganglia lacunar infarct of 1mm . The left basal ganglia is a group of nuclei in the brain that helps motor control of the body, emotions and learning. Great...the big emotions and learning place! My friend's stroke happened in the left base of her brain, and was considered small too...so from those tiny places that went without Oxygen we have been gifted with these:

• Getting overwhelmed in crowds. 

•  Not wanting to go anywhere but to the couch after a long day at work.

• Still having times when someone asks you something and you cannot understand what they are asking for.

• Not being able to add in your head anymore.

•  Not being able to understand something someone is trying got explain to you, and when they try again to explain it, you have that deer in the headlights look, and have to say.."I  am just not going to get this no matter how you try to explain it."

•  Not being able to have spur of the moment changes in plans happen without freaking out.

• Not being able to handle all the information which comes into our brain and having to say "WAIT". "SLOW DOWN, You are going to fast, we've got to make the morning last." [It is having one thought, and then going off on another wave to somewhere that the electrical impulses firing takes you...just like now, when I was writing Wait, slow down.... I was headed in one direction, then went into the song by Simon and Garfunkel, which is a way cool song especially when thinking of the 'good things' from the stroke. Then getting stuck on the spelling of Garfunkel, because it just doesn't look right, and even though I Google it and find that it is spelled right, I have to go back and forth from tab to tab, because by the time I have gone from the tab with the words to the song and the right spelling of Garfunkel, to the tab to write this post, I have already forgotten if that is truly the right spelling or not.]

• Being in a place that brings us back to times long ago, things which happened that we both were in therapy for, and experienced healing from. Then we get stuck on what I call the hamster's wheel. It is a place where we keep going around and round and round with a set of thoughts and we need someone to remind us that we are on the wheel again. I am so grateful for a husband and daughter who can say "What's going on? You already dealt with all of that and were at peace with it all." Then it is as if a button is pushed and I reset, and all is fine and dandy, but there is usually the aftermath of cleanup for words spoken, actions taken during the "not so merry-go-round" of being stuck on the wheel.

•  Living in hell when we are on the wheel. We say things we wouldn't ordinarily say, we look at things as being hopeless, we see ourselves going around the same mountain time and time again with no stopping point.

For me, it is a place where I have a run of migraines, day after day, I will notice afterwards that I am much more vulnerable to being overwhelmed, I say it best as "I cannot compute today." And there is the fear of ....did I have a TIA (Transient Ischemic Attack) or am I headed for another real stroke?

So, all this negative is just that negative. Me, who has always had a Pollyanna attitude, deemed so by my Aunt Nell standing outside my Dad's hospital room during his years battling pancreatic cancer. I am still not used to thinking in such negative terms so frequently. Reset, I need a reset!

When the reset comes that is when I see all the positives that have come from the stroke.

• I value life more.

• I don't take crap off of anyone anymore. No matter who they are.

• I have lots of be still time.

• I  don't have time for anyone who is going to drain me.

• I am much more connected to Spirit, and choose to be involved only in things that I am called to BE involved with.

• It is so easy to say NO.

• I dot no see anything that I have to FIX, either in myself or in others, or in situations which occur.

• I enjoy the sound of the birds more.

• It's really enjoying the song from The Wizard of Oz ... If I only had a brain!

•  It's playing charades to get people to understand what word you can't get from brain to vocal cords.

• I love to just sit and stare, "at what?" you ask  Nothing, my mind can just go blank...into a place of total encompassing peace.

• It's being able to laugh at myself and say, "That does not compute." (and laughing at the memory of watching the Robot on Lost in Space...Danger, Will Robinson, Danger.)

It does not compute

• I can forgive myself for things said and done during the wheel process.

• I am patient with myself, compassionate with myself  in this process.

• I forgive others and have compassion for them just as easily.

• I can stop the world and spend all day writing a blog posting, or more importantly write my  grandchildren individual old fashioned letters.

• I can walk out of a store if there is too much information coming into my brain, shopping can always wait til another day.

 I can sum up where I live now with the song 'The 59th Street Bridge Song"  written by Paul Simon. [See my brain did know I needed to connect with this song]    Slow Down, You Move too Fast


 Slow down, you move too fast
You got to make the morning last
Just kicking down the cobblestones
Looking for fun and feeling groovy
Ba da da da da da da, feeling groovy

Hello lamppost, what'cha knowing
I've come to watch your flowers growin'
Ain't cha got no rhymes for me?
Doo-it in doo doo, feeling groovy
Ba da da da da da da, feeling groovy

I got no deeds to do
No promises to keep
I'm dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep
Let the morning time drop all its petals on me
Life I love you, all is groovy

So, no matter that there are negatives to the stroke, the migraines.....my Pollyanna rises as a Phoenix from the ashes and yells at the world:

Life, I love you......All is groovy.

Hope - One Extraordinary Day

I love books. Real books. Hardcover. Softcover. Well read and worn. Brand new off the shelf. Just books. I may someday own a Kindle or another new high tech machine to read if I am on a trip, but at home...I want the real thing. Here is why:

This morning I went to put away some books I had removed from the man cave and taken into our office. As I was rearranging the books on the shelves to make room for these new ones my eyes rested upon a couple of titles, so I pulled them out. One was a book I read in 2004, 'The Dance of the Dissident Daughter' by Sue Monk Kidd. This book mirrored my own journey from Christian tradition to the Sacred Feminine. The other book was a book given to me by a woman who touched my soul just by being in her presence and who allowed me the gift of being with her on her death journey. The title is 'With Open Hands', by Henri J. M. Nouwen. I have not read this book. I have quite a few books on my shelves that have yet to be discovered by my eyes and spirit.

I open the one given to me first and begin to read. It is a book about prayer. Deep prayer. True prayer. I thumb through the pages, filled with a lot of beautiful black and white photos which make a stunning impact upon my spirit. I stopped at page 84 when my eyes saw the word 'hope' in the first line. It made me excited, because I have named this year of 2012: My Year of HOPE.

The words on the page speak of praying with hope. "Hope gives you a new freedom which lets you look at life without feeling dejected. this freedom comes through in the words...

                                   

                                    Hope means to keep living

                                    amid depression

                                    and to keep humming

                                    in the darkness.

                                    Hoping is knowing that there is love,

                                    it is trust in tomorrow

                                    it is falling asleep

                                    and waking again

                                    when the sun rises.

                                    In the midst of a gale at sea,

                                    it is to discover land.

                                    In the eyes of another

                                    It is to see that he understands you.

                                    . . . .

                                    As long as there is still hope

                                    There will also be prayer.

                                    . . . .

                                    And God will be holding you

                                    in his hands."

"Whenever we pray with hope, we put our lives in the hands of God. Fear and anxiety fade away and everything we are given and everything we are deprived of is nothing but a finger pointing out the direction of God's hidden promise which we shall taste in full."

Then there is a full page photo of two women hugging, reminding me of how much I would love to be able to hug my oldest daughter right now and tell her that nothing will separate her from my love. My eyes brim with tears, for these are words that pierce my heart, and I sing...

"My life is in You Lord

My strength is in You Lord

My hope is in You Lord

In You, it’s in You

I’ll praise You with all of my life

I’ll praise You with all of my strength

With all of my life, with all of my strength

All my hope is in You"

Written by Daniel Gardner

I needed these words today. I needed these words today. I needed that picture today. I am humbled and grateful for HOPE.

Then I picked up the other book and thumbed through it's beautiful pages, marked here and there from my reading in 2004 ... 8 years ago. Yet, as I read the portions I marked, I marvel at the words I thought were important back then ... they are just as important today.

My hands stop on page 88, in the middle of the page the words I wrote in the margin jump out. "This is where I am now 5/15/04." Almost exactly 8 years later I read these words and my soul remembers where I was then and feels where I am today.

"Initiation is a sacred disintegration. Despite it's pain, we carry the conviction (often only faintly) that even though we don't know where we'll end up, we're following a soul-path of immense richness, that we're supposed to be on this path, that it's required of us somehow. We move in a sense of rightness, of lure, of following a flute that pipes irresistible music."

"...I carry the sense of belonging on this path, but I knew nothing of the intensity I was about to enter. I only knew I had waked and was entering a place where the old concepts, and values no longer fit. The vista of the Great Transition."

"When landing in a place like this, usually the best thing to do is be still, be quiet, gather one's wits. Inside I felt queasy and alone, ... When a woman starts to disentangle herself from patriarchy, ultimately she is abandoned to her own self. She comes to an unknown place where she must let the old way of being woman die and the new way come forth. During initiation the new female potential - that rambunctious girl-child who was conceived and birthed inside during her awakening and who really had been there all along - starts to grow and develop into the woman she will be."

I did go through a deeply intense disintegration/integration beginning in 2004, when I entered Seminary. I spent those years disentangling myself from the patriarchal, male dominated world in which I had grown up in and lived in for so long.

I went through another huge shift again in 2009 when I experienced the migraines which brought on the stroke like signs, finding my way in the stillness, in the quiet, being alone with myself, getting reacquainted with all that is spirit in me...truly it was a stroke of insight as written about in Jill Bolte Taylor's book, "My Stroke of Insight, Peace is Just a Thought Away." I got very used to 'Being Still and Knowing that I AM.'

Yet, today I find myself in the middle of the most enormous shift of my life cycle. All that I knew before is passing away, old thought patterns, old habits, old defense mechanisms, they are all dissolving into ashes at my left foot. And what is coming in on my right side is a totally new way of thinking, of feeling, of responding, of BEING. It is a place where I stand, in my own feminine power, and say in no uncertain terms, "Life ain't gonna be the same baby." It is as if my energy grid, all the energy that makes up this persona of Charlotte, is being rearranged, and the spirit of who I am is standing here watching it all unfold, and all I can say physically is....WOW.

I needed these words today.....they are Creator's way of letting me know that I AM exactly where I am supposed to be.

But there is more . . . .

 

singer-songwriter and instrumentalist Adam Young



I go to type this posting, and I am trying to find the image posted at the top, I run across this image. I click on it which brings me to Adam Young's blog, his entry for May 2 is entitled "Garden Party." I read it and immediately feel a bond with this guy, who is from Owatonna, MN., the town we lived in before our 2003 move to Arizona. Plus he speaks about singer/songwriter Ricky Nelson, who I had a huge crush on when I was young. I get halfway through the blog and there is Adam Young's rendition of Rick Nelson's song, 'Garden Party'. And I get it, just like Adam did...I understand about living your life under the microscope. From his blog:' Rick’s son Gunnar wrote, “After a lifetime of pretending to be a character he wasn’t — wearing the sweater on Monday on the set of Ozzie and Harriet after being a real rock star on the weekends — he was writing and performing for his own pleasure and satisfaction.' I needed that song today. Please see his whole blog here:       

 http://owlcityblog.com/2012/05/02/garden-party/



For me the Owl City image has three Spiritual pieces to it.

1. First is the word OWL. In native terms the Owl represents wisdom...which settles into my spirit that even if I doubt it, I am walking in Wisdom. (plus, Owl is my youngest daughter's Spirit Guide)
2. Second, Here's Hope jumps out at me meaning that HERE is hope. It doesn't say, There's Hope, as if Hope is somewhere over there, somewhere I have to go for hope. No, Here is hope, right Here inside of me. I have all I need within me, because I house Spirit. Hope is here NOW. Hope resides in me.
3. Third, the words I AM. Huge strong words I AM. I AM that I AM. the I AM presence which lives in me rises up and knows that I AM right where I AM supposed to be.

By now I am really grateful, for all these connections that I have been given today, and I begin to type this post. I feel myself again singing My hope is in You, so I look up the song on YouTube and play it as I am typing. I am jazzed. Air around me is buzzing, the energy level is so high it is hard to sit still. The song stops and I clicked on the next one in line and went back to typing. What words do I here? "Lord, you have told me who I am. I am yours". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjhxOv9YDag so I click on the YouTube tab and see that it is a song by Casting Crowns. I read the video's description and what words do I see?  

 "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!" 1 Corinthians 5:17

Which brings me full circle back to all the old HAS passed away and all that is

new HAS COME NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!

After a lifetime of pretending to be someone else, the never stand up for yourself woman people in my life want me to be, I am living in this NOW moment being all I was meant to be. My given name, Charlotte, is from French origin and means STRONG. (In German it means Free...I like that too) My Native name, White Wolf Woman  means a woman who runs with the wolves, strong and free, nurturing and loving, the total package, strong woman standing free in the light and glory of Spirit.

I AM woman, hear me ROAR!