Marigold Path

peregrinatio: remembering two that shaped me

We flew home a few weeks later. In the next seven year’s Dad worked to secure the future of my mother, saw a grandchild born and then worked hard to spoil her very day. He remained a light in every room he entered, changing the dynamics through his powerful presence. His body never recovered, we spent more holidays at the hospital than at home over the next 7 years. He never enjoyed another meal because of the hash the radiation made of his digestive system. But he fought to stay and live well. In late April 1993, he died of a rare form of leukemia caused by one of the chemo drugs used to treat his lymphoma (a less than 1% possibility). One of the last things I told him was that I was going to go to seminary, he both rejoiced and I think was a little fearful (for me and the church). He died well, saying what needed to be said; taking, as he described it, his last steps home.

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Author Intrusion: my uncle left too soon

Death follows us wherever we go. The first time I really noticed Death, he took Aunt Nan. I wasn't close to Aunt Nan; she lived next door to my grandparents down in Baltimore City. She wore dark clothing and old lady shoes and looked at us kids softly, never saying too much. After her funeral, we all congregated in the basement and ate deli tray sandwiches.

Death came next for my Uncle Lawrence and I've been mad at Death ever since. Every Saturday for several months, my father would drop me off at University Hospital on his way to his practice, and I'd head up to the eleventh floor where my Uncle lay dying of leukemia. Near the end, I'd wipe the blood from his lips, and he'd say thank you. Every single time. My school books accompanied me, as well as novels and art supplies and I'd sit in that bedside chair as he dozed on and off. The smell of the room still lingers in my nostrils to this day and when I think of the final afternoon in his presence, I think of blood and the November breeze swirling the leaves outside. November 5th, my last day with him, I remember a minister came and asked if he wanted communion. Uncle Lawrence, a staunch Roman Catholic, received the bread and grape juice from a Baptist minister.

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transmission: Ritualizing Shrines

All Saints Day 2006: Transmission met for house church – for eating, singing, socializing, praying, and ritualizing together. The central part of our ritual (see post below) was based on remembering those who have died before us and contemplating our own mortality. We built shrines in silence and then lay down dead (in the yoga style corpse pose), until Isaac woke us with song. Then everyone shared about their shrine. Below are thumbnail photos of their shrines with snippets of the stories they shared.

 

Paul built a shrine to his grandfather (a simple man who lived for a time in an orphanage in Ohio);

Isaac assembled one for his great-grandmother from Indiana (a good farmer’s wife who loved to bake);

and Katie commemorated all the relatives and traditions that have been lost, along with the knowledge of her family line beyond her grandparents.

 

Bowie remembered the victims of Katrina;

Elaina built a shrine to Bono (who’s not dead! but is inspirational in his work to prevent unnecessary death from poverty);

and John molded a lizard out of playdough to represent Jim Morrision (who died at the same age John is now, and who will only seem younger to John as he journeys forward in life).

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Sacred Ordinary: Looking Back and Forward to Death

For more than 20 years I have led groups of journal keepers both with the Ira Progoff method of writing called the National Intensive Journal as well as other writing groups. Death is a topic most serious writers address again and again. The late Ira Progoff used to quote from “I Never Sang for My Father,” that death does not end a relationship. We all know that, but one of the powerful tools we have at our disposal is to have a dialogue with our deceased relatives and friends if we so choose. I personally have had some extremely positive results and I’ve heard dialogues read back countless numbers of time. It is a healing process. Seena Frost’s SoulCollage method is another tool for healing where we explore our lives and our archetypes, including death itself. Collage cards are made in suits and can be read as tarot cards would be, or “sat with” individually. Not only do I have four Death cards in the Council suit, in the Community suit I have cards for many of my beloved dead, including pets, and for people I admired in life, like Albert Einstein and Jackie Kennedy. It is a method I highly recommend s yet another intuitive healing tool.

For the past few years I have put up an ofrenda, or altar, as part of the Dios de los Muertos celebration. My ofrenda has photos of all the people in my own life who have passed, but who I sense are right there behind a veil. I also put memorabilia for some of the people—notes, letters, union cards, something they personally made and that I have kept. Tonight I will add some of my beloved dead’s favorite foods and I will take time to light the fireplace, all the candles, and do some writing. Tomorrow’s post will be my day of the dead litany.

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The Corner: A Dangerous Wonder

Mike Yaconelli was indeed a dangerous man.  It is often said that no practical joke was safe within a 5 mile radius of God's Holy Jester. 

That is not the kind of safe, funny danger that Mike represented for me. Mike represented the type of danger that is potentially harmful or risky.  He embodied a faith that seemed undomesticated, one that Parker Palmer had in mind when he said that the "inner journey is to know that creation comes out of chaos, and that even what has been created needs to be returned to chaos every now and then to get recreated in a more vital form".

I first ran across the chaos Mike created in the Door, a ray of sunshine in the safe churchianity that I experienced growing up in the Bible belt.  We would exchange our copies of the Door like kids trade MP3 mashups nowadays, like contraband.  Our excitement and private joy at  Mike's musings hits at the core of the word "heresy" which comes from the Greek αἵρεσις, hairesis (from αἱρέομαι, haireomai, "choose"). Mike punctured the oppression we experienced that faith was only right thinking - Mike reminded us of a pre-Constantinian community of Jesus-followers who blew on the flames of Jesus stories, rather than codifying the ashes of that flame into bound doctrines.

go read the rest

Mike Yaconelli was indeed a dangerous man.  It is often said that no practical joke was safe within a 5 mile radius of God's Holy Jester. 

That is not the kind of safe, funny danger that Mike represented for me. Mike represented the type of danger that is potentially harmful or risky.  He embodied a faith that seemed undomesticated, one that Parker Palmer had in mind when he said that the "inner journey is to know that creation comes out of chaos, and that even what has been created needs to be returned to chaos every now and then to get recreated in a more vital form".

I first ran across the chaos Mike created in the Door, a ray of sunshine in the safe churchianity that I experienced growing up in the Bible belt.  We would exchange our copies of the Door like kids trade MP3 mashups nowadays, like contraband.  Our excitement and private joy at  Mike's musings hits at the core of the word "heresy" which comes from the Greek αἵρεσις, hairesis (from αἱρέομαι, haireomai, "choose"). Mike punctured the oppression we experienced that faith was only right thinking - Mike reminded us of a pre-Constantinian community of Jesus-followers who blew on the flames of Jesus stories, rather than codifying the ashes of that flame into bound doctrines.

Dry Bones Dance: My ofrenda to the world

I’ve been overtaken by grief the past couple of days, grief over many things past and present and many kinds of death. I am just beginning to learn how to take care of myself, and I realized that I was exhausted from two jobs six days a week and from ignoring my very real limits and my soul. So I didn’t go to work yesterday and among other things, created an ofrenda, which seemed appropriate for El Dia de Los Muertos.

It helped me sort out this complicated space I’m in, where healing and grief and joy and pain all co-exist together. I have to create my own sacred spaces these days, so this ofrenda is my way of memorializing my own and others’ pain before God and all those mysterious ways She has, and of living with hope in one hand and the cruelties of the universe in the other.

I knew I wanted to do this grid blog, but I wasn’t sure how to do it without telling stories that are not mine to tell, so instead of a regular blog post, I’ll share my ofrenda and a poem instead. It is not entirely traditional, but then, I am entirely not Mexican, so maybe I get a pass.

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emerging sideways: Remembering Mom

grief and remembering is something i must do intentionally lately. it's been 18 years since my mother, the real bobbie died. i was 21, she was 43. there is never a good time to loose a parent, but this time for me was very traumatic. she seems so very far from me now. like a distant friend living in a far away town who i haven't seen in a very long time.

i never thought i would say this in the middle of all of my grief, but it has gotten easier. it's not easy - but easier than i'd imagined it would be.

she was a bundle of contradictions, my mother. i think it was her sickness that made that real. i got stuck for quite some time in the anger stage of my grief. a lot of unresolved emotions that i had to untangle. what was god's and what was hers? it took me years of therapy to figure that out, heck, it took me years of therapy just to be able to admit it. i guess that's why it was such a drawn out stage of my grieving process.

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Escaping Into The Open: My Grandmother

My Mom and I walked into the hospital to visit my grandmother in intensive care. As we approached the private doors, the doctor walked out and casually said, “She’s gone, she died a few minutes ago.” Looking startled my Mom asked, “What did she die from?” The doctor replied, “from a lack of will to live.”

The words of the doctor stayed in my head. At 16, I wondered how you die from a lack of will to live. She stood just a bit more than five feet. She wasn’t a typical grandmother by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t ever recall playing with her or being tended to by her.

She smelled of cigarettes and Channel #5. Her face frowned downward from years of sadness. I sensed in her the mystery of pain. It both attracted and repulsed me.  People wondered if I was sad she died and I did not know. I realized I had not known her.

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Best & Worst: That was Then

When my sons were younger, each year on November 1, we would walk an old graveyard, read the tombstones, talk about loss, talk about life, speak of honoring the dead, and their lives, and remembering.  It was my attempt to honor the Day of the Dead, and to acknowledge death and grief as a part of the human condition. But in their young lives, the loss had been death of a marriage, not death of a person. Almost three years ago, my sons' father, my first husband, died. The visits to the graveyards on November 1 ended. The grief has been ambivalent and anger full. Difficult and releasing. Ice cold and fiery hot.

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pomomusings: Whooping Cough Provides a Mentor

It happened about 2 months before I graduated from my high school, 1.5 months before the Senior Prom and 1 month before I was to perform the role of Hugo Peabody in my high school's elaborate production of Bye Bye Birdie: I got whooping cough (pertussis). How I got whooping cough, I have no idea. But, it kept me home from weeks of school and probably even gave me a very mild form of depression as I felt like the weeks that were supposed to be the highlight of my life up to that point were spent laying on my bed at home.

In order to help me deal with being stuck at home all day for a couple weeks, my parents moved the computer desk into my room. This enabled me constant access to the Internet, which is where my Internet-addiction probably began...

But instead of spending my time in AOL chat rooms or playing games, I did what any other 18 year old would have done: I decided to plan my life. I decided then that I would go to seminary.

I wasn't really sure what seminary was...nor what I would do after seminary, but for some reason, seminary sounded like a 'cool thing' to do. So again, I did what any other 18 year old.

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Serendepity: Souls See Best In Darkness

 

Our season of grieving deepened today as we learned one of our professors has begun her hospice journey. She has fought cancer valiantly and lived to see remission and the gift a new lease on life can bring. But the monster has fought back and her cancer has spread. She went home today with the help of hospice support.

It's easier to speak of death as a journey when the one dying is old, when the one dying is a stranger, when the one dying is ready to go. Today death sounds more like a deep abyss I wouldn't wish on anyone, especially not this friend.

In a book I'm reading for class, the author talked about how we've screwed up our symbols and thereby screwed up our reality. Darkness isn't bad, he argued, it is necessary. It is in darkness that we rest, in darkness that we dream our deepest dreams, in darkness that we find the strength to continue on.

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Kristin Noelle: Learning a new way to see

I loved my grandma, and love her still. I knew her for eleven years, but that was long enough for her love to get inside of me and stay there, to be a kind of spring I still return to. I feel held in the web of my ancestry by her and by my grandpa, their kindnesses an encircling softness that joins with other loves to challenge my fears that life is dark and rough and lonely and cold. I love it that she lives inside of me, too–in my genes, in my memories, in the habits and phrases that got passed down to me from her.

In 1987 I began a lesson that will surely last a lifetime, of learning how light changes when someone you love dies. How their light can feel completely gone, like my eleven-year-old self sitting in all that darkness, watching a different light than I had ever known reveal the world in harsher hues. Death is a fluorescent bulb sometimes, chasing away the subtleties, the filters, the mists that often hide the things we don’t want to see: unanticipated darknesses, dads weeping, beloved things getting taken away.

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The Corner: A Book Dad Carried

I carry this with me now, in my satchel.  I do not open it or refer to it much yet - maybe that will come.  What brings me hope & comfort in my own battles is that I carry something Dad carried, that the paths I walk have footsteps of my ancestors.  For much of my life, I've seen that as a scar, as sometime to reduce, as a path to avoid. There is something about carrying this little booklet that makes my journey a little easier.

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the life and times of jcristg: Pieces of me

My paternal grandfather, C.M., was a Navy man and retired Dupont employee who loved red meat as rare as you could cook it. And horseradish as hot as you could make it. He grew the biggest, sweetest tomatoes in all of Belvedere -- and probably surrounding North Augusta too. He smoked cigars in the house on a daily basis and even now, I love the smell of them. At Easter he drilled holes in the tops of plastic eggs, filled the eggs with change, and hung them on the tree out in front of my grandparents' house. We'd pull the eggs down right before we'd cut into the coconut cake Sal made in the shape of an Easter bunny. Come to think of it, Easter was one of my favorite holidays at the time.

C.M. was ornery and difficult and hard-headed; traits that my father, brother and I have all inherited to some degree. Sal never kept the house warm enough and she always had the front door open -- he always made sure to let her know he didn't like it. The nosy neighbor across the street drove him crazy because she was unable to mind her own business. When he and Sal would take McClain and me to McDonald's (we got to spin on the high bar chairs, don't you remember that?), he'd bring his own baggie of chopped onions. Those fast-food hamburger places just never quite put enough on his order, nor were they strong enough.

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Sacred Art of Living: Saint Duke

   

Photos: Duke, Patron Saint of Napping and Deep Sighs

The poet David Whyte wonders “Why are we the one terrible part of creation privileged to refuse our flowering?”  One of the ways I understand Saints are as those people who have been honored for embracing their flowering, for allowing themselves to bud and blossom and burst forth fully into the world.

These last few months, I have been contemplating the idea of what it would mean to extend my image of the Communion of Saints to include not only the ones I love who have gone before me, but other members of creation as well.  Animals don’t refuse their own flowering, they are simply what God created them to be.  This image has arisen for me especially in response to our sudden loss of Duke in August who was a very special creature in our life.  It used to be that special connections to animals were signs of holiness.  We in large part have lost the sense of the sacred bond that crosses over species and reaches beyond our perceived boundaries.  We desperately need to reclaim a holistic understanding of the holy presence in all of creation.

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Grid Blog Image: Adam Walker Cleaveland

Thanks to creative Adam Walker Cleaveland, here's the image for our grid blog:

Join The MARIGOLD PATH

From catmadogma

Ashley Benigno introduced the concept of a grid blog (see details below) which is really quite simple:

during a period of time, folks would post their own reflection on their own blogs (including media of any type)

and also (a) include a Marigold Path Grid Blog tag in their subject line and in their post (b) include a common image (to be distributed in the next 10 days) and (c) include links to other gridblog.   

We'd love to have you join this effort by:

    * Signing Up! use your voice by posting on your blog reflections .  You can sign up by adding yourself below in the comments  - please make sure you include your email and blog url in your comment.

    * Naming It! For consistency sake, please title your post (s): Marigold Path Grid Blog: <then add your subtitle here>

    * Sending It! By sending your link(s) during this window of time to me at bobcarlton@speakeasy.net

    * Passing it on! Send this to at least 5 blogging pals and/or post the invite on your blog.

If you have questions or suggestion, let us know in the comments.

More Information on DIA DE MUERTOS

From monkeywobble

From mid-October through the first week of November, markets and shops all over Mexico are filled with the items for the Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead).  Renowned writer Octavio Paz observes that, undaunted by death, the Mexican has no qualms about getting up close and personal with death, noting that he "...chases after it, mocks it, courts it, hugs it, sleeps with it; it is his favorite plaything and his most lasting love." 

Dia de Muertos  - November 1, All Saints Day, and November 2, All Souls Day -  are marked throughout Mexico by customs that vary widely according to the ethnic roots of each region. Common to all, however, are colorful adornments and lively reunions at family burial plots, the preparation of special foods, offerings laid out for the departed on commemorative altars and religious rites that are likely to include noisy fireworks. In order to celebrate, the families make altars and place ofrendas (offerings) of food such as pan de muertos baked in shapes of skulls and figures, candles, incense, yellow marigolds known as cempazuchitl (also spelled zempasuchil) and most importantly a photo of the departed soul is placed on the altar.

What is A GRIDBLOG ?

From artelisa

Ashley Benigno initiated & named this type of collective action among bloggers: "grid-blogging" on the same day(s) about a selected subject:

Grid blogging aims to investigate the potentials of a distributed media production model spread across blogosphere nodes. It seeks to ignite attention on specific topics at set times through variegated voices. A kind of decentralised flash mobbing for the mind, if you like.

Decentralisation is key here. Unlike single collaborative blogging structures that unite discussions under the same URL, Grid blogging is about synchronized guerrilla publishing attacks carried out across a series of online locations. It respects and heightens the individual voice within a media-wise choir. It allows for idea-jamming and mosaics of diverse perspectives to emerge unfettered.