Constant State of Change

From one of my art journals from 2016. I created the journal by gessoing an old atlas that had been Rob’s. 

“...[E]very aspect of life is in a constant state of change” (p. 1). I reread this from the opening of The Art of Resilience: One Hundred Paths to Wisdom and Strength in an Uncertain World by Carol Orsborn. I read this book off and on in the weeks following Rob’s death. Someone, and I am embarrassed to say I could not remember who, sent this to me and then I noticed the taped paper in the inside cover. Two women I work with. 

Rereading the book Nearly four years after Rob’s death finds me in a different place. It’s as if I am reading the book for the first time as I have forgotten most of it, if not all. What I have mostly learned from being reflective is that grief and shock are entwined. Without this written record, I would remember little in the way of detail. 

Not Being Careful

Rowing (M.A. Reilly)

I. 

I walked past an older woman whose husband was helping her to remove a jacket. She leaned heavily on a cane. When I pulled my car out of a parking lot, I saw this same couple slowly walking into the doctor's office I had just left. They held hands and seeing them made me spontaneously cry.

Sometimes the soulfulness of love undoes me. It was almost as if I was looking at a future I once thought probable. 

II. 

Mary Oliver writes, 

Not anyone who says, “I’m going to be
careful and smart in matters of love,”
who says, “I’m going to choose slowly,”
but only those lovers who didn’t choose at all
but were, as it were, chosen
by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable
only those know what I’m talking about
in this talking about love. 

 III.

It’s easy to get burdened by what might have been. Oddly, it is love that lightens despair. To have been loved and to have loved without choice is a gift. 

As Rumi reminds, we knew each other well before meeting. We were inside one another all along. 

Equal Rights Amendment

I.

I was fortunate to grow up as a teenager during the 1970s when feminism was rising. I took my first women’s studies class in the late-1970s at college. It was a history I did not know.

During 1982, I would wear a button that read, ERA YES each day as I taught high school English. It was my first year at the high school in a more rural section of New Jersey and like all English and PE teachers there, we did lunch duty every day. During one of those days, a school administrator stopped me to ask if I was taking a survey. I must have looked confused so he clarified. “Are you asking the kids which laundry detergent they prefer: ERA or Yes?”

“No, I’m wearing this button to support the passage of the equal rights amendment.”

The ERA is brief, yet powerful statement that if passed would afford women equal protection under ten Constitution. The word, she, does not appear anywhere in the Constitution.

Here is the full text of the Equal Rights amendment:

Section 1: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
Section 2: The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 3: This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

The House vote in 1983 would fail. 35 states had ratified the bill. 38 were needed.

II.

I was reminded of this as I watched the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. I heard the term, feminism spoken about and mentioned on the radio and on Twitter usually by women who mostly seem to have been tenagers during the Reagan presidency when the ERA was not ratified.

Last year I attended a lecture given by Sally Roesch Wagner about the history of feminism in this country. She provided a rich history of feminism and for the hour I sat in that audience I was filled with a hope that equity might be possible. That hole was fueled recently by the bite last Wednesday in Virginia.  There a vote on these ERA occurred 1.15.2020. Virginia became the 38th state to pass the measure. Finally, 38 states passed the measure. Trump’s (un)Justice department killed that hope when they decided that the measure could not go forth as it was dead.

Now states will need to challenge the ruling in court.

Will the USA ever see an equal rights amendment included in the Constitution?

Trauma-Informed Writing: Why Writing through Grief and Other Trauma Matters

Watercolor, Reilly, 2017.

I.

I open a recent issue of JAAL and the first article, "Humanizing the Practice of Witnessing Trauma Narratives," by Rossina Zamora Liu has me thinking about the partial stories I heard by Board of Education members a previous night. Several were recounting  time spent with young girls in high school who have experienced trauma.  There were large spaces in the retold stories; partial expressions of what remains unknown, unspoken. How to get told the stories that must be told is a salient question.

Liu (2019) who founded and facilitated the Community Stories Writing Workshop (CSWW), at a local shelter house explains that through personalized correspondence, she helps "writers negotiate the layers of vulnerabilities that come with revisiting painful memories." (p. 347).  She says she does so with the "hope to illuminate the importance of recognizing writers’ emotional labor as a humanizing practice of witnessing (Paris & Winn, 2014) trauma narratives and how we, as writing teachers, might reposition ourselves from that of presumed authorities on writing to that of “worthy witnessing” (Winn & Ubiles, 2011, p. 296) of writers’ drafts—if they grant us admission" (p. 347). Each week homeless adults gather for 90-minutes at the center to write.

Reading the article,  thinking about the recent conversations, as well as the thousands of pages I wrote in the months leading to my husband's death and the years that have followed, I wonder how we might leverage writing workshop for trauma-informed work.

II.

Stories have always mattered. Telling stories in the months after Rob died surely kept me grounded as it afforded me a process to work through the terror and then the sadness of grief.  Liu succinctly states, "Writing helps us uncover our past, labor with it, and move toward other possibilities" (p. 347). For  me it was part word, part image that helped. Creating helped me to make sense of what was largely inexplicable.

How might we afford the gift of expression to young girls at high schools? What might that process look and sound like?  

#PoetryBreak: The Well of Grief

The Well of Grief

     - David Whyte (2019)

Those who will not slip beneath
     the still surface on the well of grief,

turning down through its black water,
     to the place we cannot breathe,

will never know the source from which we drink,
     the secret water cold and clear,

nor find in the darkness glimmering,
    the small round coins,
          thrown by those who wished for something else.

Rooms

“An Offering” (image I made from the side yard of my home ).

I keep remembering specific rooms in the house I lived in for 18-years. In some ways, I am still living there. I’m here, in my new home and suddenly realize that I am daydreaming, picturing myself walking from the kitchen to the hallway in a house I left nearly three months ago. Or sometimes as I look out a window here, I am remembering the view out the back side window to the woods that edged a side yard. How many images of those woods did I make across those 18 years?

The familiar is soothing. The known comforts.

I have lived in my new place since Halloween. It’s unsettling  how unfamiliar it remains. I can count on a hand the number of times I have gone downstairs to the basement. I have yet to even see the attic. It all feels temporary.

A home is a way of being in the world that is tied to the familiar. David Whyte (2015) writes that “taking a new step always leads to a kind of radical internal simplification, where, suddenly, very large parts of us, parts of us we have kept gainfully employed for years, parts of us still rehearsing the old complicated story, are suddenly out of a job.”