Woodcuts

by Allison Moore | May 21, 2019 | Day by Day |

“I live my life in ever-widening circles that reach out across the world.” —Rainier Maria Rilke 

Did you know that the Anniversary #5 is traditionally celebrated with gifts made of wood? Dendrochronology is the science of dating events and variations in former periods by comparative study of growth rings in trees. Think of a cut tree-trunk with a pattern of annual rings orbiting it’s center, protecting the heartwood as it grows. If there is damage or trauma to the trunk of the tree, the rings will record it, and there will be a mirrored abnormal pattern on every new circle on out until the whole trunk has changed its shape and righted itself. It becomes the tree’s thumbprint, so to speak, the story of its life imprinted one ring at a time.  And isn’t it interesting that the center of the tree is called heartwood? It’s what over time becomes the strong spine of the tree. 

I’ve also been thinking about how my relationship to Vernon #3 has changed over time. He’s no longer with us, I know, but part of his soul got mixed with mine and as long as I’m around, he’ll be a part of that soup. Without a doubt, he is in the children—their faces, mannerisms, intelligence. Whereas in earlier years, I could only describe his memory as sort of feeling all around me at times, ready to jump out and overwhelm me with rip currents of grief/trauma, now I feel like I’ve sewn him into a pocket of my heart, something small and manageable. An invisible carbon reduction. A diamond in reverse. A portable piece of star. Something I can live and travel with. The love hasn’t gone away, its just changed it’s form to whatever it is supposed to be now. (And that’s ok, I’ve morphed quite a bit too.)

Now we are at the five year mark. Well, we will be in a couple of days. I was only married to Vernon #1 for 7.5 years. And Vernon #2 for another 2.5. How lucky for me, I got three of him, each so different and each utterly lovable. He has been my greatest teacher so far. Mostly, he taught me how to love unconditionally. I know, especially after his accident, that he became a teacher to many others too. He’s still managing to fulfill his purpose.

These beautiful woodblock prints were created by an artist named Bryan Nash. He died at 52 years old…that’s how old Vernon would have been now. I know he would have also loved this work, as one of Vernon’s passions was wood-working. He deeply loved trees in general. Check out more of Bryan’s work and mission HERE.

 “I found that things were as or more beautiful and complex inside than what was visible from the outside…You’ll never know what you’re missing if you don’t find some way to get inside and look.” —Bryan Nash

Return to Place

by Allison Moore | Mar 18, 2019 | Day by Day | 18 comments

It seems to me that a room or a building or a field or a town can be a container for memories you once left there, so returning to this place after a long time can be a powerful experience. Of course, the person you are on the day you return can temper the exchange. It’s a collaboration of ideas in that way, as if the familiar space is someone to fall into conversation with, reminding you of things you hadn’t thought about in years. For a moment, you can pick up where you left off, but of course, you’ve changed in the meantime, and now you are simply a listener. One day it might feel awful to return, as if the place is haunted. But another time, maybe you are ghost passing through, separate, detached. I guess it depends on how ready one is to listen…or to re-interpret the story.

This is something that’s been on my mind lately, which is probably why I was ready for my unplanned field trip this afternoon. I happened to have an appointment in the Mission Hospital complex. Remember Mission Hospital? That’s where Vernon was in his coma for three months (now so long ago.) Ah, the blissful days of not having to figure anything out…not really, they were scary, but back then, all I could do was hang out and wait and hope. I spent a lot of time walking around the hospital, noticing the things and people around me. I was a different version of myself then, but I’ve been meaning to go back and walk the grounds again…I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Guess I was waiting for an invitation.

Since I had enough time after my appointment, I decided to take the long walk back to my car, which meant circling around the back of the hospital by the ER. I only ever had to deal with this particular ER once, so I didn’t think I had much emotion attached to it, but as I walked by I saw a Davita Dialysis truck parked outside. Ugh. Davita Dialysis—probably my least two favorite words in the world anymore. I’ll admit that triggered a little mistiness, not for the memories of the hospital itself, but for the younger me that didn’t realize when he started dialysis in that hospital, it didn’t just mean extending his life as we were able, but that it would eventually be a huge sacrifice of energy and life-quality. I couldn’t have known (and if I had—I probably would  have made the same choice.) But moving on quickly, I walked past the outdoor tables of the cafeteria, where I used to eat my oddly-timed lunches. I smiled at the sight of doctors and nurses gabbing and laughing under their table-umbrellas. What a sight. I was glad to see that they could still find moments to connect as normal humans within their stressful duties and difficult interactions. As I came around the corner of the building, I noticed the huge fountain out front. How compassionate that architect or planning committee must have been to welcome guests in with the comforting sight-sound of running water. I don’t know if I appreciated that before, but I certainly could now.

As I ventured into the lobby (I’d come this far, why not?) and noticed the people waiting in chairs or volunteering at the desk, I remembered thinking once-upon-a-time that every person there was going through something too. They are hopeful, thankful, relieved, worried, or in mourning. Hospitals manage to press all of this into a single nutshell. A hospital is meant to be a building of healing…even though trauma can sometimes make us think of them as the opposite. The barista at the coffee kiosk I used to visit was a girl I didn’t recognize. If it were still my old friend who made my daily cappuccinos, I would have queued up. Instead, I entered the gift shop, thinking: “Maybe there is a message here? I’ll look for one of Vernon’s fonts.” But the only ones I saw were on new-baby onesies. How funny is that? (Our friends who had a baby in the same hospital last month had mentioned how strange and disturbing it was to hear emergency that went through the building from the ICU, calling specialists to that ward, when they were in the middle of labor. And I remember the comfort of hearing the occasional  angelic chimes that rang through the entire hospital every time a fresh new life exited the front doors. It’s clearly all happening there in one building: birth, death, and the physical complications that stretch between.)

I didn’t feel like I had the right to visit the ICU, nor did I really want to, but in passing the doors that would lead there, I recalled there was a meditative chapel just inside that I could access. I visited the space a couple of times in my early days and found it quite comforting as a place to escape on breaks from coma-vigil. No one was there today, thankfully, or I would have turned around. Immediately, I noticed the little basket of prayer-requests on a table by the door. I wondered if I had written something of my own once, surely I must have. I sat down to read what was there, hoping to honor someone else’s reality and pain. Perhaps it is because the chapel is next to the Trauma Unit (NICU) there were a couple of hand-written statements about someone who is in there right now…suffering from blood clots. They were concerned he would be brain damaged. I hurt for these people, knowing a little of what they might be going through upstairs. I didn’t know how to pray for them, but I did sit and cry for them a bit, holding space for their pain and hope and fear in my heart, mingled with the little I recalled of my own.  Maybe that was the purest prayer I could offer.

Then I walked back out to my car, with my validated parking ticket, free to move into the rest of my day without deep concern for a family member in one of those rooms and grateful to not have to visit regularly. I was simply a passing tourist, an observant ghost who happened to come through on this day, separate now from everything going on there, but connected by indelible strings. If I’d have gone on a different day, I would have experienced it differently perhaps. But today was the day it was meant to be, the day I was invited back, the day I was ready to listen.

“Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning.

And your memory is ready to show you everything.

Having waited all these years for you to return and know.

………

So that for the first time, you can walk away from that place,

Reunited with your banished heart, now healed and freed,

And feel the clear, free air bless your new face.”

—John O’Donohue

Therapy and Poetry

by Allison Moore | Feb 25, 2019 | Day by Day | 7 comments

“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.”
― Fred Rogers

Five months ago, in October, I began regular therapy sessions in the hope of working out some traumatic thinking. Although I wasn’t regularly feeling the sadness of classic grief, I found my brain couldn’t focus well, all my thoughts seemed to have equal importance, it was as if my thinking was fractured. It was causing problems because I felt stuck in moving forward. It was as if everything had changed in the world and I was struggling to trust myself in it. But actually, I knew it was me that had changed, and my understanding of the world had changed. It was hard to see any big picture clearly with such splintered lenses.  I felt overwhelmed and dizzy in my spinning, kaleidoscopic view.

Of course it turned out that it wasn’t just trauma that had messed with my head. In some ways, all that trauma really did was shake up the roots in the garden for a prolonged period of time. When my therapist gently suggested some of my doom-y thinking might have been there for longer, my heart sunk.

“Ugh!” I remember putting my head in my hands. I could only see a too-familiar long, deep tunnel.

“What do you think of that?” she asked.

“I think this is going to end up being veeeerrrry expensive.” That’s all I could come up with.

“My job is to get myself out a job,” she replied. “Do you trust me in this process?”

What else could I do? I was already weeks in, more regularly feeling peaceful than I had in a long time. I could see it was worth it so far, and she was great, the best therapist I’d ever seen (she recommended poetry to me as homework, for goodness sake!) but it did seem like I could potentially be sitting on that couch for years to come—crying, free-associating, trusting forever. I’ve done a lot of counseling in the past, so I know this from experience. It’s about the journey more than the destination. And for complicated, sensitive types like myself, well…we are the ideal sustainable clients. A psychotherapist’s dream! 🙂

Anyway, in light of all this, with a little satisfied self-back-patting, I am proud to announce that last Wednesday, I told my therapist I was ready to stop our sessions for now. There has been a sense of change lately, a jolt of momentum, transformation perhaps, as if I’ve been in the shadows for a season—but it’s time to practice what I’ve learned, time to leave the brain-spa of my sessions. More a sense that it was time, really, than any real mental health I’ve been able to prove in the world. I don’t get a certificate or even a sticker. At least when you vote, you can go to the grocery store afterwards and proudly show off the sticker on your lapel (so totally worth it too!)

I suppose now I can rephrase why I went in the first place and also why I knew I was ready to stop: I felt I’d lost my intuition, which has served me so well in the past. And now I think I have it back, a little battered and taped together, but I’m ready to trust it again. And if I can’t trust it, I have lots of new tools to help me if I break down by the side of the road. Basically therapy is like auto-shop for the soul. You can keep a classic old car going for a long time if you know how to maintain it. Fixing the weakest points is inevitable, but as you go, sometimes engines simply fall out and tires explode on the freeway. I wish they’d told us this was all part of the human experience. But would we have listened if we hadn’t got there yet?

I was surprised and delighted at my confidence in saying I was ready to stop.  Maybe that’s all she needed to hear to agree with me: that voice. (It’s not like I can’t go back—and I probably will for tune-ups.) So in our final session, here are some things we discussed, and these are some of the ideas I’ve marinated over the past five months.

I was enlightened to the idea of personal constructs, which I came to think of as temporary housing (sometimes distinct vows to myself and sometimes concocted ideas) built on a beach, perhaps on bamboo stilts to stay dry above the waves, from the battered and eroding shore…these are constructions to which I’d return for shelter but I found that most of them no longer worked the way they had, I was being flooded out as they had splintered and shrunk during the storm. Returning to them was futile, suffocating…they were limiting more than sheltering. It’s a humbling process to find that the ideas you’ve claimed as an anchor from discomfort are often just meant to be temporary. If those are temporary, what else is? These aren’t easy questions to ask or answers to listen for. (For example: “I’ll never love again.”  Or “The other shoe will drop any second.” Or “It’s pointless to hope for lasting good things…I know better now.”)

My therapist was very much into the idea of untangling our narratives, which I hope to continue to put into practice. It takes a lot of imagination to look at the things we have looked at so long in a certain light that we just assume to be the TRUTH. But it takes even more valuable energy to hold on to our old constructs and the no-longer-helpful thinking that we’ve carried with us. Our minds are so brilliant, aren’t they? They get the better our peace all the time. We held a mirror up to the fact that I do tend to make my life harder than necessary because I lean toward thinking that is the right way, the best way.

As we summarized our time together into that last session, here is something she said that stuck with me: “You are going to get to where you are going no matter what. You don’t need to worry about controlling that. But what you can control is your emotional reactions along the way.  You can stress over it or you can relax into it. It’s all about getting a little distance and reworking your words and ideas around things. There are other ways to look at these things. They don’t need to be gloom and doom. Just because its your experience once doesn’t mean it has to be that way again. Can we switch the word “end” to “and”…think of your endings as ‘and-ings.’” As a trauma survivor, that totally flips the script. And I love it. 

(I told you she was great.)

Here is a poem she sent me as homework early on in our sessions. Poetry is a gift in my language, never to be taken lightly. She suggested I rest with it a bit.

Here are a couple of passages that I discovered  as I entered the new year. I think they match the season of internal work. The top and the last especially spoke to me, I still think on them often.

You can see some of that influence in this poem I wrote after a quick prompt in my monthly writing group.  Love in all its forms is powerful…maybe most, when it comes from within. 

Baby Theo

by Allison Moore | Feb 19, 2019 | Day by Day | 7 comments

“Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.“— Rabindranath Tagore

February. What a month. So many significant dates. Vernon’s birthday, Valentine’s Day. Today marks 4 years since we found out he was ineligible for a kidney transplant (the most disappointing day of my life.) I was going to write about all of this to get it off my chest, but…something better happened instead.

In this season, there happen to be a lot of significant closures as well. They seem to be popping up all at the same time, some I’ve known about for awhile, and some are coming without warning. It’s definitely a season of change. I won’t write about that here tonight either, but its in the light of all this, that I am especially mindful of the wonderful symbol of love and life and hope and newness that a new life brings us. Little baby Theo couldn’t have come at a better time for our family. (And by family, I guess I mean tribe….but it feels like family.)

Our dear friends Sarah and Scott Hendrix had their first baby, Theo, on Valentine’s Day in the midst of the biggest February rain storm we’ve had in Southern California yet. For this couple, their most significant life moments have happened in the rain, which is usually rare. (They even got married on a surprise rainy day.) In the early days of their marriage, before I knew them, Sarah and Scott had taken Maki under their wing (here they are at his 13th birthday party) and of course Justine wanted to be a part of the action shortly after. We love them dearly as a family and as individuals and we are so blessed to walk beside each other on the journey. We’ve been looking forward to this birth for a long time now. And here he is! The first baby we have had around our little campfire since Vernon went away. Births and Deaths. Basically all of life is contained between these things. So we are so grateful for this bit of newness in our sphere. I speak for myself here, but I know that both Justine and Maki, at the ages they are, and the personalities they have, and where they are in their grief journeys, they are so happy too. We already love this little person, regardless of what he symbolizes. We are so looking forward to watching him grow.

We realized tonight, also, that the kids are 8 1/2 years apart. Maki is 17 now, and Justine in 8 1/2. So Maki was the same age that Justine is now when she was born. What a trip life is. Good thing we have the younger generation to gage things for us. Life sure has a way of coming to the surface, time and time again.

Anyway, February just got a whole lot better. <3

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The Seed in the Scar

by Allison Moore | Jan 2, 2019 | Day by Day | 7 comments

A few weeks ago, I had a long conversation with an old friend who is coming up on the first anniversary of her dear mother’s passing. She asked me how long it took after Vernon’s death to get my energy and focus back after heavy grief. I couldn’t answer clearly as I’m not sure how focused I’ve ever been, but I listed off the obvious helps I could recall: regular exercise, writing, artwork, temporary support groups, therapy, connective time with friends. But even as we talked, it dawned on me that those things were just fillers. Sure they helped, but none of us can know how long a healing will take.  If we could, we would all take the best-proven pill. Perhaps it doesn’t matter what we do. Perhaps all that matters is that we get through the time without pushing ourselves backwards (but there is even grace for that…some self-destructive behavior can be part of the process as well, although coming back from that may require even more time and effort.) But somehow, we do get through the time—that’s just basic waking and sleeping and eating and breathing. Just because it feels like forever, doesn’t mean that’s true.

My grieving friend and I spoke about how deep healing happens under the surface…and perhaps it is just a matter of believing that it’s occurring at all. We can’t see it, we certainly can’t feel it, but what if God is always nudging us toward our health? What if the keys to wholehearted living are hidden within us, but they just take time to emerge. Regrowth is the natural order of things. It’s in our DNA as carbon creatures. It’s true that our physical bodies act completely opposite as we hurdle through our time here (thus, the painful gaps left by our losses and disappointments), but our minds/ hearts/spirits, the hidden parts of ourselves that actually run the show: this is where regeneration happens. I don’t know much about gardening, but I imagine some seeds take longer to germinate than others. I know that some years, a tree might not bear much fruit, and then suddenly it does!

I remember when Vernon was in the early days of his coma, with all sorts of beeping digital monitors plugged into his skull. He looked like a science experiment—perhaps he was! They were keeping his brain activity as low-level as possible so that it couldn’t consciously think, just aware enough to keep the rest of the body and its vital organs ticking. I noticed in this stage how quickly his wounds healed, how the deep cuts through his skin became light movie-star scars (a la Harrison Ford.) I mused with the doctors: if people were able to shut our brains off and rest as deeply for a month, would our modern stresses, our physical pains, illnesses, cancers diminish? We couldn’t know but in the conversation, we agreed it was likely. Because how seldom are we allowed deep rest? Even light rest doesn’t come cheap these days. Rest takes effort. What an oxymoron. Healing takes effort. It’s HARD to slow down and trust the process. Our whole society (and our shaky idea of self-worth) is designed to resist it.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Just looking around, we can see that it is nature’s natural state to heal and grow stronger. Just look at your miraculous skin and all the bruises and cuts it has endured in your lifetime. Look at broken hearts that love again and bring everyone around them renewed smiles and hope. Look at cut rose bushes that continue to flourish, smelling more lovely every season. Look at lizards with their tails. Look at the daily over-comers we know personally: those who recreate their lives after tragedy we can’t imagine. Look at refugees who are forced to begin their dreams over….and survive. Look at little dogs who run on three legs (or even two…with wheels!) Look at the green shoot of grass that grows-against-odds through the pavement, the flower of peace in war.

It’s probably easier to marvel at all this mending-momentum around us, than it is to see it in ourselves. I suppose we are just too close to our own version of our story. We are too close to our own private wounds.  But we are all made from the same stuff! If we could only believe in ourselves the way we believe in each other….the way we believe in the smallest plants of our gardens (and those adorable dogs on wheels.)

Some time ago, I made this painting and called it The Seed Dreams of Flight. I was thinking about how long it seems to take to emerge from a dark place, a beginning place. But what if the long work is done under the surface, and suddenly, when the plant is ready for sunlight, it were to grow quickly, like an unstoppable vine? I imagined a budding seed, that perhaps is ingested by a bird, who then takes wing, as it would. The seed is redeposited back into the earth, having to start over yet again in the lonely dark soil—but even in its re-incubation, it remembers the echo of something higher, something brighter, so it holds on and lets the work happen. (Perhaps we even do this as babies, I really don’t know.) The seed remembers the air, it remembers sunlight, it remembers flying, it has a dream of the past and the future at once tucked into its core. It’s wired to grow, a dream of flight is in it’s ancient/new heart, even as it lays buried in earth and more earth. It won’t always be this way, but for now…it seems like forever. This may be stretching, but i think:  This is science. This is faith. This is healing. This is nature. This is us. All of us.

Here is a poem by the poet Wendell Berry (a farmer himself, so he would know):

The river takes the land, and leaves nothing.

Where the great slip gave way in the bank

and an acre disappeared, all human plans

dissolve. An aweful clarification occurs

where a place was. Its memory breaks

from what is known now, and begins to drift.

Where cattle grazed and trees stood, emptiness

widens the air for birdflight, wind, and rain.

As before the beginning, nothing is there.

Human wrong is in the cause, human

ruin in the effect—but no matter;

all will be lost, no matter the reason.

Nothing, having arrived, will stay.

The earth, even, is like a flower, so soon

passeth it away. And yet this nothing

is the seed of all—heaven’s clear

eye, where all the worlds appear.

Where the imperfect has departed, the perfect

begins its struggle to return. The good gift

begins again its descent. The maker moves

in the unmade, stirring the water until

it clouds, dark beneath the surface,

stirring and darkening the soul until pain

perceives new possibility. There is nothing

to do but learn and wait, return to work

on what remains. Seed will sprout in the scar.

Though death is in the healing, it will heal.

Seed will sprout in the scar. Sigh. Imagine that. For the new year, I wish you this: not only the healing of your wounds, but the belief that they are healing whether you feel it or not. And maybe: the willingness to put the time and the rest in to accelerate that growth. May it be a wonderfully surprising 2019 for us all!

27 Months (Numbers and Poetry)

by Allison Moore | Dec 16, 2018 | Day by Day | 7 comments

I love poetry. Not every poem I read, and certainly not every one I’ve written, but since I was a teenager, I’ve loved the imagery, the rhythms, the depth, the stillness, the variety. I love listening to the stripped-down similarity of so many souls that have come before, all trying to express the most unchangeable things, to capture the most fleeting. I fill up notebooks of random thoughts…few become real poems, but when they do, there is such satisfaction. When I go to a bookstore or a library, I always end up in the poetry section. Just leafing through the pages makes me feel more centered. The older I become, the more I am drawn to poetry as a purer kind of language that gets more quickly to the heart of things.  Only yesterday, when I listened to a wonderful podcast in which the poet Naomi Shihab Nye was interviewed, did I begin to find better words to explain why. She says that in a way, we live within a poem:  “When you think, when you’re in a very quiet place, when you’re remembering, when you’re savoring an image, when you’re allowing your mind calmly to leap from one thought to another, that’s a poem. That’s what a poem does.” That was so helpful for me, with my over-wordy tendencies and runaway train of a brain that really only wants to make its connections for a truth it can hold.

I start with that because my mind has been having a difficult time making certain connections as of late. Bear with me while I try. Perhaps if I could turn these musings into an elegant poem, I could be forgiven for my reach. As those who have read this blog over the years will know, I am interested in the significance of anniversaries, the patterns of time. This is the closest to caring about numbers that I come, so I make the most of it. For a long time, I was counting the Fridays when we turned left past the fatal stop-sign at the end of our street. I was relieved that Vernon almost made it to our ten-year wedding anniversary so that I could celebrate our marriage with a party instead of just marking a death with a memorial service. I’m aware that my ten-year anniversary with Maki living under my roof is coming up in a few months too. I recognized on my birthday this year that I was the same age Vernon was when he was hit. I don’t know if numbers have any real significance, but there is poetry in the patterns, something to stop and hold a moment for, if I’m paying attention.

Somehow I got the idea in the past weeks to do the math, to figure out the time that has passed since Vernon died…and how it matched how long he had been in his injured state. Sure enough, the two seasons were almost exactly the same: 27 months. Of course the first season seemed much longer than a mere 27 months (I have the lines on my face to prove it) but if the past 27 months were the equally long second half of the book, we’d be at the end.What strange meter our lives are broken up in. We all know that life doesn’t make simple sense of numbers and there is no such thing as equal halves, but if this were a poem, can you see how evenly those seasons have been split into stanzas?  On realizing this, I didn’t know what to do but cry…many times over many days.  I cried in a way I hadn’t since he was hit, which startled me at first. These were a different kind of tears, opening up space in my heart that I didn’t know existed. Perhaps it hadn’t yet. Does saltwater taste different if it comes from a deeper place in the sea? I tried to stay present, naming things I’d never named, and at last, there was a sense of moving through another threshold into a hazy new season where I’m no longer defined by what has happened so far. If I try to imagine the grand timeline of my life, I can see these two matching verses were not long at all. There is a lot of space—and a lot of stories—on either side. My poem is not limited to 54 months, and I don’t want to be limited to all the things I decided were true during that time (even if I needed them to be true during that time.)

In another 27 months, I’ll be 49, the same age he was when he finally passed away. I’m sure I’ll try to process that pattern of numbers too. I imagine I’ll cry (I hope so) but maybe not so hard. Perhaps by then, I’ll need to find less meaning in everything, to string together less bizarre and wild connections.  But who knows? The future doesn’t exist. What I do have is now…which is filled with great possibility. And I still have poetry: a gift to help me make a loose sense of things, whatever comes and goes, to break things up in bite-sized verses, to make connections along the long way.