May You Live To Be 100! {#2 in my series on resilience}

by Susan Seale | Jun 15, 2014 | Resilience

Baba died last year just before her 99th birthday.  She spent her last decade in care homes after she had become blind.

You could hear her universal salutation when anyone left her room or her presence…

“May you live to be 100!”

and it didn’t matter who it was, they would smile.

Today she would have been 100.  

Just a side note…my sister…who died at 21…would have had a birthday today as well.  She would have turned 50 today.

There we are, me at age 2 with my sister at her 1st birthday party.  She was born with brain damage, recurring seizures and cerebral palsy so at this point she wasn’t able to sit up for her cake or her pic.

Dr.  Joan Borysenko tells us there are commonalities among people who are resilient.  These things come from studies of folks who have survived holocausts and other devastations.

Last week I wrote about Persistent Creativity.  Dr. B calls it Radical Creativity.   More here in this post {#1 in my series on resilience}   This week {#2 in the series on resilience} is FAITH.   One of qualities that creates resilience in everyday people is FAITH.

Having a belief in something that you believe is bigger than the situation you find yourself in.

In our family, I learned that there were important callings in the world. 

To be a doctor or a lawyer was best.  Teacher was next.  Anything else was okay  but if you really wanted to earn Baba’s respect become a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher.

Now, if you wanted to shine for all time and bring eternal honor to the family then you had to become a priest.  Not all families would have such an honour.

Choosing to follow this path earned much more than her respect.  Truly, she believed an entire family could earn eternal blessings if one person chose this as their life’s work.

Baba was often heard to tell strangers that she had doctors, lawyers and teachers in her family but did you know there were three (3!) count them…3 ministers in the family!?

This was like a direct blessing from and to God at the same time.

When I think of resilience + faith…I think of my grandmother.

She was the eldest child in a family of many.  Her mother had 21 pregnancies but lost every other one.  So there were 10 children in the end.  Baba helped to raise her siblings and even though she was born in Canada didn’t learn to speak English until she was in school.  She once ran away into the woods with her youngest infant brother to prevent their father from selling the baby for money.

Baba grew up in the days when women did EVERYTHING.

They not only did the housework and raised the children, they worked in the fields and helped with harvesting.

They had few choices, little education and dreams of a better life not for themselves but for their children.

Life was physical, grinding and there really never was any money. Everything was precious.  No one owned books and few could read or write.

She eloped to save money.  She only had 2 children in order to give them a better life.  She raised turkeys INside the farmhouse one year so as not to lose any to cold weather, disease or predators.

She told me this story so I would know what she did in order to save money to put a down payment on a house in the city.  She dreamed of  her children getting a better education in the city and her dream came true.

Everything she did, she did for her family.

Her belief in God was the ground upon which her family was grown. 

Baba’s resilience stemmed from her deep faith as a member of the Orthodox Ukrainian religious community.  This belief made every loss, struggle, win bearable for her.

Almost 2 decades ago, she almost died.

She had gone to the hospital with an emergency, slipped into a coma and we were told she was going to die.  The priest was called to administer last rites.  It was the Ukrainian priest so the rites were in Ukrainian.

I’ll always remember that night as we all gathered around her hospital bed with the priest swinging the chanter, incense filling the room and him singing and chanting in Ukrainian with my mother harmonizing.

It was unbelievably beautiful.  As though we’d been transported back in time to ancient places with ancient rituals.

Part way through the blessings the priest looked up and asked if there was anything anyone wanted to say.

I said yes…tell her we forgive her.  The priest’s eyes popped open!

Why he asked?

Well, I said, she’s been really cranky for the last 10 years and not very nice. So he asked us all to leave the room.

We left her with him.  I went home to bed that night knowing I would probably not see her alive the next morning.

When I arrived at the hospital the following day, Baba was sitting up brushing her hair and she had her teeth in.  I was stunned.  Baba, what happened?

Baba said the priest told her in Ukrainian she had to forgive everyone for everything.  And you can’t argue with a priest she said!

I am here because I forgave everyone, she said.

That was my first adult miracle experience of the power of forgiveness.  The doctors had no explanation for her recovery.

Baba lived for almost 20 years more after that night.

And I learned that forgiveness is a transformative internal force that when given forth can sustain your life and when withheld can extinguish life.  Forgive everyone for everything.  A resilient action step.

For me, resilience is faith in something bigger than the situations we find ourselves in.

I have faith in the transformative power of forgiveness.

With it, our lives have more possibility. Without it, we are weaker, more vulnerable, less resilient.

Happy Birthday, Baba!

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Resilience + Persistent Creativity {#1 in my series on resilience}

by Susan Seale | Jun 8, 2014 | Resilience

I realized this week, my heart has been slowly healing through what Dr. Joan Borysenko terms “radical creativity”.

For 19 months, I’ve unconsciously been engaged in an ongoing, focussed, baby-stepped creation here in our garden…an act of what I would call ‘persistent creativity’.

This is what I started with.

Nothing really…it was a tree stump.

I don’t have a BEFORE picture because I didn’t realize I was creating something when I started.  So imagine one big tree, clear cut in the garden.  An exposed stump about 4 inches high.

That stump wasn’t pretty and I had to walk by it everyday at our new home.   It looked lonely and sad (and flat) this tree stump. It needed some love and to be honest, looking at it reminded me of how raw and vulnerable I felt everyday when I got out of bed.

This stump would become the focus of my persistent creativity…but not right away.

On my first visit to the ocean in November of 2012,

with our little dog in our new neighbourhood, I found a heart-shaped stone. 

Our dog is a sniffer so there is not much walking that really goes on.  Mostly a lot of shuffling and waiting for him to finish sniffing.

It’s kind of boring + restful and I find myself looking at the ground a lot.

On that first visit I looked down and there was the first stone.  It was clearly heart-shaped.

I picked it up (you would have done the same…) and considered it a private message intended just for me, a reminder that even though my entire life had turned upside-down, that there would be love in this part of the world too.   Soon.

I kept the stone in my pocket…for a long time…it was a promise of some kind.

One day found several more heart-shaped stones in one visit.  I picked those up too.   This went on day and after day for many weeks. Of course, I was taking them out of my pockets by this time and they were sitting by the sink, by the door, in my work space.  They were gathering.  The way a small child gathers.

Then it started.  I was compelled to cover the stump with heart-shaped stones.  They were so small no one even noticed what I was doing at first.  Then I found some BIG stones and small heart-shaped shells  and added them too.

I started to count them. 12 stones.  15 stones.  28 stones.  45 stones.  62 stones.  I kept track the way a 5 year old does.  Imagining how long it would take to cover the stump.  A loooong time.

One day, I added our mosaic.

It was made by a group of children in 2008 and gifted to me in celebration of my marriage that year.
My husband noticed.  Are you collecting rocks?  he said.  Yes.  I said.  Heart-shaped ones.  They’re messages for me and I get them at the beach.  Looks nice.  he said.

By the fall of 2013 (a year later) it looked like this…

No more room on the stump!  Tidy.

This is what it looks like today…

A little unwieldy.  A sprawling giant heart-shaped installation.

One stone at a time.  About 6 feet across and 4 feet tall.

19 months of collecting.  Hundreds of stones.

It’s spread to the garden itself and I have to pull weeds now.  I even take time to remove the leaves from the arbutus trees as they shed (did you know arbutus trees lose their leaves in the spring and summer…not the fall?)

So…my lesson? 

Time doesn’t heal all wounds.

Wounding is just an opportunity to create something new, something unexpected. 

This tree stump was something I could actively + persistently love.  A natural canvas that allowed me to engage naturally with my new topsy-turvy world and put a bit of my own soul into a space that I don’t own….a space I will leave for sure.  My liminal abode.

Next post…I talk about The Liminal Phase.  It’s part of the Map of the Territory for resilient folks going through transformation.

So tell me…

anyone out there in the liminal phase? 

Any one dealing/healing with it through acts of persistent or radical creativity?