VOTE!

My country,
'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing…
Samuel Francis Smith

On Monday, I went to lunch at 2 p.m.

Tempted as I was to follow my usual routine – go home, take Gracie for a walk, fix a bowl of soup or a sandwich, finish reading the paper – I headed instead for the HISD Support Services Building. Early voting had begun there that morning, and rumor had it the line of people had been long. But the polling place was only five minutes away, and I figured, what the heck, I’d give it a try. Twenty minutes later, my ballot cast, I was grabbing a sandwich at HEB.

Sounds rather mudane, doesn’t it? I took a few minutes out of my busy day to vote – big deal. Well, yes, it was a big deal – to me, it was a very big deal, indeed.

We can vote a straight ticket in Texas – Democrat or Republican – but I went through the ballot candidate by candidate and chose the ones I wanted to elect. All but three of my choices were Democrats, and for the first time in way too long, I felt good about every one I’d chosen. I also believed that my vote would be counted this year and would be a catalyst for change on the national, state and local levels.

I cannot recall another time in my life when I actually stood before a voting machine and smiled – really smiled – as I pressed the button to cast my vote.

Much as I hate to admit it, there have been years when I didn’t bother to vote. I didn’t “like” any of the candidates; casting my vote seemed futile; I didn’t want to stand in line. Like so many others, I took my right to vote for granted – something I could do…or not…depending on my mood.

Eventually - better late than never - I began to realize that voting was not only a right, but also a responsibility.

Sitting on the sidelines, muttering about all that’s wrong, changes nothing. Only by standing up and speaking up can we begin to make a difference – maybe not a big difference, maybe not at first, but one day – a day like today – we find that we’re no longer standing alone, and our voice has been joined by millions of others.

Sadly, many of us don’t stand up or speak up when times seem good. If we have a house and a job, health insurance, clothes and a car and food on the table, we don’t consider (or try not to consider) how those less fortunate get by. We huddle on our little patch of prosperity, minding our own business, keeping our heads down and our mouths shut, and think about buying a big screen TV.

Lately, though, the ground has shifted under all of us, tossing each and every one a lot closer to “less fortunate” than we ever thought we’d be. Our business (or lack of business) isn’t only our own anymore. The trickle-down effect is trickling down on every man, woman and child in the world, and not in a good way. Keeping our heads down doesn’t seem to be an option anymore, not to mention making the payments on that TV.

Twisting in the wind of an eight-year downward spiral, many of us have finally begun to look at where we are and where we’d like to be, and maybe, just maybe, a majority of us have realized we’re not going to get there unless we elect honest, intelligent men and women to lead the way.

In the next 10 days, we will elect a new president – we, the people - the people who vote. It’s not just our right. It’s our responsibility. Do I want you to vote for the candidates I chose? Well, yes - that would be nice. But, bottom line, I just want you to vote.

Family Dynamics

“Watch what happens when you don’t name an experience as ‘bad’ and instead bring an inner acceptance, an inner ‘yes’ to it, and so let it be as it is.” ---from Stillness Speaks by Eckhart Tolle

I thought the conversation with my 89-year-old mother would be a reasonably pleasant one. Otherwise I wouldn’t have initiated the phone call last Sunday evening.

I didn’t expect to be blindsided almost immediately by the hard, angry, hurtful, contemptuous tone of voice she used to issue orders in a rapid-fire, take-no-prisoners manner that stunned me into silence. My heart pounding, nausea swirling in my stomach, I felt like a shallow, stupid six-year-old.

How dare she talk to me that way, I thought, but didn’t say. Instead I focused on my breathing, clung to the last vestiges of the calm I’d enjoyed all day, and managed – somehow – to eventually shift her attention elsewhere.

Later that night, I realized that she was up to her old tricks, stirring the familial pot and trying, without success, to manipulate me into doing something that would be of benefit to her and her alone. Nothing new there – I’m accustomed to her narcissistic machinations and have learned, with the help of my extremely astute therapist, not to take them (too!) personally. Yes, her behavior towards me had been hurtful, but only for as long as I allowed it to be. I know – without a doubt – that I’m neither shallow nor stupid, and she knows it, too.

It wasn’t until the next day that I discovered my pot wasn’t the only one she’d been stirring.

Imagine my surprise to find an e-mail from my brother in my Yahoo box first thing Monday morning – my brother with whom I hadn’t had any real meaningful contact in the past 17 years – the brother who had visited our mother maybe a half dozen times in those 17 years, three times fairly recently.

Seems he wanted me to know that he had decided to sell our mother’s house and move her into a senior independent living facility – something I’d been trying to get her to do for the past three years. He was going to visit her again soon and take her to the facility he thought would suit her best – a facility to which I’d already taken her. He had decided that a trust should be set up to protect her assets, as well, and wanted to know what I could do to help with the sale of the house, setting up the trust and her “transition.”

I honestly thought the top of my head was going to blow off. Who did he think he was, taking over in such a high-handed way after years and years of doing nothing for her? More importantly, how dare he ask ME what I planned to do to help HIM?

I closed my e-mail, allowed myself a little time to rant – okay, I ranted quite a while – then told myself to calm down. I read once that if you change how you look at things, things will change, and I figured, what could it hurt? I printed out the e-mail, read it again, several times, and considered how, exactly, I could look differently, and more kindly, at what my brother was saying.

First and foremost, he was stepping up, at last, offering to take the lead in a situation that had proven to be increasingly problematic for me to handle on my own. Obviously, he also wasn’t aware of all I’d done already, more than likely because our mother hadn’t told him.

In fact, she had refused to consider any alternative I’d offered to make her life easier, including an invitation to move to Houston or the hiring of a home healthcare worker. Her “solution” to the “problem” had always been that I should quit my job, move back to St. Louis, live in her house under her authority and take care of her, because that’s what good daughters did.

Finally ready to reply to my brother's e-mail, I sat quietly and composed my thoughts. He needed to know what had already been done, so I included information on the facilities our mother had visited with me, the home healthcare alternative I’d investigated and offered her, and the trust she'd set up shortly after our father died. I suggested he contact my St. Louis cousin, who had recently sold her house, for a real estate agent recommendation. I also expressed my sincerest gratitude for HIS help and (settling firmly in the backseat) offered to support HIM in whatever he chose to do.

In the past, I would have likely been jealous or upset by what I would have seen as encroachment on my good-daughter territory. Not anymore! My brother, bless his heart, had taken on the job of good son and more power to him. I’m behind him 100 percent.

I’m also hoping our mother won’t make him crazy in the process – something she’s always been really good at doing. To that end, I recommended he read a book that has helped me more than I can say – The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists by Eleanor D. Payson, M.S.W.

The experiences we had as part of our family are as they are. Changing those experiences is impossible, but changing how I look at them has made all the difference for me. May it do the same for you, brother of mine.

P.S. Hitting the SEND button Monday afternoon, I felt an enormous sense of relief. The cosmos has shifted again – in a good way.

How to Make a Wish

“The best way to understand how a wish works is to think of it as a tiny spurt of energy. Like everything in the universe, our thoughts or intentions are also forms of energy. When we focus our intentions by making a wish, we are creating a tiny energetic shove within the system of which we are all an inseparable part. Because of the power of intentions to be nonlocal, to transcend time and space, they ever so slightly move the cosmos. This is why one simple wish can help swing things a little more our way.” ---from Wishing Well: Making Your Every Wish Come True by Paul Ka’ikena Pearsall, Ph.D.

One week ago, I offered my wishes to the Universe. Since then, I’ve added one more picture to my collage, and I’ve started looking at the floor plan for a simple, two-bedroom cottage by the sea as a floor plan for a simple, two-bedroom cabin in the mountains of North Carolina, two minor but important adjustments.

Can’t say that I’ve noticed any movement in the cosmos, but what I have experienced is a sense of relief, as if a weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

I’d been dithering, you see (and I SO cannot stand dithering by anyone, myself included!). I’d been trying to choose wisely, continuing to be cautious, clinging to the tired old belief that what I really wanted was so far beyond my reach that maybe I should settle for less…yet again.

In the past, I’ve given so much energy to the wet blanket pragmatist who never failed to hyperventilate whenever I attempted to abandon my supposedly more sensible self.

Would you believe she hasn’t once raised her wild-eyed little head the past week?

Considering the current state of our economy and the financial losses we’ve all suffered, that’s flat out amazing!

Do I believe that my wishes will somehow magically come true? Well, sort of…. But what I really believe is that I’ve made a commitment to what I really, really, really, really want, and opportunities will be presented, possibilities will appear, and I’ll have the wherewithal to do whatever it takes to make my wishes come true my very own self. I’ll have the courage to say yes or no, the wisdom to choose wisely and the determination to go after what I want, one sure and certain step at a time.

Putting my wishes out there was a little scary for me, but one week later, what I’m feeling, more than anything, is liberated.

Maybe there has been a shift in the cosmos, after all….

“How to Wish Well” from Wishing Well by Paul Pearsall, Ph.D.

SD-SU-CD – Sit Down, Shut Up, and Calm Down.
Pick a wish target. This means to connect and resonate with nature by looking at something alive.
Close your eyes.
Breathe deeply and abdominally.
Place your left hand over your heart.
Press your right hand gently but firmly on your left hand.
On exhaling, whisper your wish.
Use eight short words.

Make a Wish

“As the psychologist Marion Woodman says, ‘Most of us are dragged toward wholeness.’ For many of us, the being dragged toward wholeness happens precisely through the mysterious process of wishing: through the gaps it exposes, the new edges it drives us toward, the deeper layers of longing it reveals.” ---from The Wishing Year by Noelle Oxenhandler

I’d had the pictures in a pile on my dining room table for more than a month.

Cut from various magazines during half a year or more of perusing, they represented bold wishes and deep desires – heart-thoughts around which I’d been tiptoeing for the past couple of years.

I wanted to go there, I wanted to do that.

There were no maybes as I clipped the picture of a woman atop an elephant in India or the simple floor plan for a two-bedroom seaside cottage. Each picture had spoken to me, not in a hesitant murmur, but in a clear, vibrant, edged-with-exhilaration voice that couldn’t be ignored.

My intention was to turn the pictures into a collage and display it in a place where I would see it, and think about it, every day. Yet I never seemed to remember to buy the poster board or the glue stick or the frame I needed. Collecting the pictures had been easy, but I was avoiding the next step – the more difficult step – that would shout out to the Universe “These are the things I really, really, really, really want in my life!” and I wasn’t sure why.

The answer came to me in an interesting little book about the power of wishes. I’d first read about “The Wishing Year” by Noelle Oxenhandler in a magazine, then a friend who’d read the book thought I’d enjoy it, too. I requested it at the library, and last week I settled down to read it.

I knew that my pictures were wishes – very personal wishes – but it took a passage in the book to make me realize why I could never seem to remember the poster board, glue stick or frame.

“Wishing makes us vulnerable – in many ways,” Oxenhandler says. “For one thing, it makes us vulnerable to disappointment – to the possibility that the arrow of our wish will miss the mark, that we will overshoot or fall short and thus break the appointment with our heart’s desire. How much easier to play it safe and never take that risk – by keeping our desires diffuse, unfocused, unarticulated, undirected (or in a pile on the dining room table!).”

I’ve done some wild and crazy things in my life (we will talk about New Mexico another time!), but mostly I’ve played it safe. I’ve also made a couple of bad choices in the past three years, so my faith in my ability to choose wisely in some matters has been a tad low.

But I’ve made some excellent choices, too; choices that have benefited me in ways I’d never imagined. I’ve wished for some really good things, like my dog Gracie and my job at the library, and my wishes have come true in positive and positively amazing ways.

So today, I bought the poster board, the glue stick and the frame. I sat at my dining room table, took a deep breath and stepped closer to the edge. I made my collage, and then I hung it in a special place.

I’ve offered up my deeper layers of longing, and I’ve opened myself to “the vast reservoir of possibility that is always there for us, lying in wait, ready to be tapped….”

It's a little scary, but I haven't been this excited in a long, long time!