I am rereading Dawna Markova's "I will not die an unlived life: Reclaiming purpose and passion." This book is a gem, in my opinion. In the introduction to Section III, Living on Purpose: Landscapes of the Soul, she quotes Rachel Naomi Remen (Kitchen Table Wisdom author), who says: "We are not broken, we are just unfinished." Dawna continues: "Suddenly I realized that my future was not a series of damaged places I needed to fix. Rather, my life was a work of art waiting to be completed."
Then Dawna poses these four questions:
"What's unfinished for me to give?
What's unfinished for me to heal?
What's unfinished for me to learn?
What's unfinished for me to experience?"
In another month I will be closing my Colorado experience and returning to Vermont. I am planning to not remain in the rut of the same job experience that I've had for the past 23 years. One thing I'm doing to change direction is honing my copyediting skills; I'm learning grammatical terms that I haven't heard for decades.
It will be hard to break out of what I know, especially when what I know has brought in a paycheck. I took a trip to Vermont a couple of weeks ago and was looking at the help wanteds in the Times Argus. There it was, ready to tempt me: an ad for a part-time office administrator for the Northern Forest Alliance. (I later learned that a former TWS co-worker had just been named NFA's executive director, a person who had also done a life experience move from Vermont to Georgia to work for TWS and then back again.)
A number of directions call me:
Activism on social-political-environmental issues that are not so strongly focused on land preservation in the form that I've been working in; issues such as protection of water resources from privatization; reducing nuclear weaponry and power generation; cross-species genetic modification and agricultural monocultures; pesticides and herbicides in and on food; the chemical soup that we live in and its effect on health.
Delving into music as medicine. On a KGNU program recently, I heard a woman describe her work with hospice patients by bringing the unmetered music of the Celtic harp and song to ease their pain and their transition. I could see myself studying this form of healing and using my voice to work it.
The return of botanical medicines and the over-harvesting of wild herbs draws me to consider working with my family to grow herbs on my brother's 240 acres of pasture and woods in New Hampshire (see SkyEarth Letters – Herbal Sanctuaries).
Before I moved to Colorado, I began visualizing a place where people come to spend unstructured time creating —an retreat for artists and writers, a place that had a large home with "working" cabins or yurts. The vision is still in the back of my mind.
My own writing: putting my work into the marketplace and publishing a collection of SkyEarth essays and poems.
Recording CDs of songs and of spoken and sung poems.
The ever-present delving into readings and discussions about things of the soul and the spirit.
For the last two months, my brother-in-law has been undergoing radiation treatment for a cancerous tumor in his throat, accompanied by living with a tracheotomy (throat tube that needs cleaning three times a day) and a stomach tube (for five liquid feedings a day). After nearly a month of treatments, the tumor has disappeared and now he waits for the radiation burns on his throat to heal enough to remove the tubes and return to normal eating and breathing.
My sister, his wife, is twelve years older than I am. The stress of this has caused complications in her health (one day, they each ended up in the E.R.) and in the process of trying to figure out exactly what is not functioning right in her body, tumors were discovered in one kidney and diagnosed as a slow-growing cancer. And then one afternoon, she had a mini-mini-stroke and temporarily lost her short-term memory.
Even though our father died when he was 54 (although his brother is still living at 94) and our mother when she was 78 (although her three-childless-siblings in their 80s), we seven siblings have been managing to have mostly decent health, and we range in age from 70 to 54 (me). Three of us don't have children, and I recently had this thought that, while caretaking parents is not a concern, caretaking older siblings will likely become so. And then I thought of my own aging and -- good heavens -- what it would be like to be physically dependent.
Yeesh. I need to get healthier, lose many pounds, clean the crud out of my fat cells, where ingested toxins get stored. I have no desire to tote around a box of prescription drugs, that cost hundreds of dollars each month, just to stay alive. As some muscle twinges in my body or a brief pain is felt, I am reminded of an elderly woman's pungent remark: "getting old isn't for sissies."
Then I read my list again and know there's so much unfinished in my life, and wow! there's incredible joy in that. And challenge.
Cherie