First Anniversary of ‘Transcending’

Does a blog have a birthday or an anniversary? Following the communicatrix and others, I’ll go with anniversary. In this case, it’s the first anniversary of ‘Transcending’, a significant milestone. So what did I start out to do on May 2 last year? After much research, reading and thinking, I decided that ‘Transcending’ was my theme. And it still is. Sometimes I wonder, for sure, and I still need to do more work to build this theme and this platform; but I know that transcending is it, that it is relevant to so many people and that I need to keep mining it, milking it and keep that vein of possible riches flowing.

It’s been a huge battle at times. I’ve managed nearly a post a week on average and given the demands of my day job, seven weeks’ overseas travel, my daughter’s final year of school, a couple of operations and other dramas, that’s not so bad. I could do better, but it’s an achievement, all taken into account. The main thing is that I kept at it: writing, researching, tuning in and reading to others, synthesising and reflecting.

And as the communicatrix says so eloquently in her sixth anniversary post, it’s really all about writing:

What I’m trying to say, albeit rather clumsily, is that a lot of the time, the reason to write is just that—to write. You can write to promote yourself or write to make money or even write to find yourself but ultimately, you write to write. To be able to keep on writing. To be able to keep on getting better at writing. To be able, god willing, to write long enough that you write well enough to actually say something that will live on after you are no longer there to write.

But even if you don’t, even nobody reads your writing while you are alive and all your writing dies with you, if you are a writer (and maybe even if you are not), you are the better for having written.

Now, write.

That’s an important motivator for me: writing itself, the value of it, the process and the product. It’s what my working life has also been about.  I’ve been happy with what I’ve written here and how I’ve found a voice here over the past year. It’s a voice that can do much more and stretch itself out a little now. I do know that the feeling of having written here, once I get through the resistance and work it through, is like birds soaring in the clearest of skies. One of my earliest posts, ‘The value of howling into the wind‘ captures this in a way I am proud of and still has the  most hits of all my posts so clearly strikes a chord.

It is also the second anniversary of my father’s death today. His death and my brother’s tragic death in November 2007 are key motivators for this theme: one transcended in many ways in a sometimes difficult life and the other, also an incredible achiever, did not make it through one night. It is for these reasons, and the grief that goes with them, that transcending has become a theme in my life.

It’s why I write about transcending and resilience: working through, rising above, moving beyond, climbing across whatever is difficult or challenging. It’s not so I can look down on anyone else or feel superior in any way; that connotation sometimes worries me. It’s so that I, and you through reading and engaging, can work through, create, connect, be productive, strategise and achieve success in whatever is important: writing, grief, work, blogging, creativity, family contexts, planning and progress. Cut through and move on to the next challenge with the support of all those bloggers and other writers and creatives out there who are similarly focused on their life’s work and next project.

So what did I say I was going to do here 12 months ago? Here’s my first post:

‘Transcending’ is an exploration of the ways that we rise, overcome, climb across and pass beyond.

It celebrates the extraordinary power of the ordinary self in creativity, writing, in love, in the workplace and in our family contexts, such as our family history and what it means. It is about  resilience, grief, love, loss, longing and the resonating shapes and forms we make to deal with this and move on and through. It’s about constructive approaches at work – strategies that cut through, synthesise and provide solutions. And it’s about images, structures, texts and ways of thinking that makes this possible.

This theme resonates and connects for me in all spheres of life and I hope connects and resonates with you also.

Join me in this journey as it unfolds. Some of the areas I hope to explore are:

• writing as a way of transcending and moving through
• my own creative journey as a writer
• poetry and the shapes and structures we find to manage our emotions
• music and images as vehicles for experiencing and managing feelings
• family history and its stories of how we connect and experience life
• constructive leadership behaviours and strategies
• reading and reflections on transcending
• connections with other writers and thinkers on this theme in all its guises

Reflecting back, it’s still spot on and it’s what I have focussed on. I can do more to hone my platform and that’s a challenge I welcome. I’ve revamped my page recently and it’s whiter and brighter: a new theme, Linen, to usher in a new year. Like my theme, there’s more to learn with the technology but I’ve also loved that learning over the year: learning wordpress, flickr, managing RSS readers, linking, taking photos and everything else that goes with a blog.

It’s been a wonderful journey this past year and I thank all those who have been here with me and visited. I also thank my inspirational guides and leaders in this online space, my seven stars that continue to be guides and fellow travellers in so many ways. I look forward to the next year with a sense of brightness and light. I hope you will join me here also in the shedding of that light.

The healing power of family history

My family has had a traumatic time over the past few years. My younger brother died very tragically in November 2007. It was the saddest day and life was never the same. My father then died suddenly in May, 2009 so another wave of loss ensued and my happy, stable family of four was halved. Like all people dealing with grief, I struggled to get through the days, the weeks, the months after each episode and still feel the deepest sense of loss. I connect to them, especially my brother, through music as I drive to work first through the bush and then through the traffic. Music is such a powerful source of memory and connection.

Another way I found myself managing these terrible waves of grief was through family history.  I had already begun my search before these events, tracking back like a detective through the generations following the links. With the separation and the trauma from the deaths of those so close to me, family history and  ‘looking back to look forward’  has become a link to my brother and my father. My extended family, also their family, the closest link.  I could find the line anchoring us. I could lose myself in the research and discovery about where we came from. And from that, the story of our history could emerge and connect us. New narratives could form; old buried stories could be brought alive. Christina Baldwin in Storycatcher (details below) talks about tending the fire, the responsibility of being a storycatcher and the power of story to connect, ‘heal, remind and guide us.’ 

It’s not the only answer but:

• if moving through is having something to cling to that helps you think about the future, ironically by planting you firmly in the past….
• if moving through is knowing more about where you came from and the shared history you take forward…
• if moving through is finding stories that connect you, knowing more about the stories of your ancestors and finding those that resonate…
• if healing is about losing yourself in something so you are not completely overwhelmed by thoughts of grief and moment to moment anguish…
• if story helps anchor your creativity and move you forward into something new, to integration and resolution even if it’s all not perfect or ever the same as it was…

then family history offers a healing place, a space to learn and engage with your origins, as far as you can, to take you forward to help you face a new future.

I am not a therapist or an affiliate of any family history sites or the resources below. I speak from the experience of working through family history as part of a  personal healing journey over the past few years. For me, it has led to an immense inner resource of narrative that I wish to tell in other ways such as through the writing of novels based on the stories of my ancestors. I am researching and planning this work at present.

For some people, family history research may not be possible or easy for various reasons, but I encourage people to consider the value of story to help connect in whatever way possible. Our stories of being disconnected also need to be told. The story from my family history that is the most compelling is one of absolute disconnection and  it is demanding to be told.

Some resources I have found useful on this journey are:

Ancestry: Amazing site with so many electronic data bases of records and existing family histories. You need to join up for the full benefits but there is much to gain from this.

Storycatcher: making sense of our lives through the power and practice of story, Christina Baldwin: an excellent book on story and the value of narrative to help frame new worlds

The pictures on this page are some of the relatives I have found out more about through my searches. The woman above is one of my great, great, great grandmothers, Susannah Morris ( nee Richardson). The man to the right is her husband, William Morris. Both were early Australian settlers. How these photos have survived from such an early time, I do not know. My thanks to extended family member, Allan Morris, for passing them onto  family member and fellow researcher, Alex McDonald and I. This is the other thing that happens – you find new family connections and forge new links that you never knew you had.

Do you have any stories to tell about the healing power of family history?

Beauty and creativity

     

Further to the post of May 19 on my ‘seven stars’ - the blogging writers who have inspired me - I want to celebrate these stars further as I move forward. I acknowledged and celebrated them in that summary post but each deserves a bright and sparkling place of their own here in between other musings and jottings. I wish to acknowledge what they have given me, the windows they open, what is inspiring and what they offer to others. I am already sprinkling this through my posts in various ways, but they deserve more considering what they have given me.    

To celebrate beauty, healing and creativity, I encourage you to visit Susannah Conway’s sites:    

 http://www.susannahconway.com/ In her own words: ‘This is the online home of Susannah Conway, a photographer, writer and creator of the Unravelling e-courses. A self-confessed Polaroid fanatic, she shares insights on her blog while exploring the world through her camera lens.’    

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/inkonmyfingers/sets/ Susannah’s photographs on flickr    

You can also see Susannah talking about her creativity in a video interview, ‘Burning questions with Susannah Conway: beauty that heals’ at Danielle LaPorte’s White Hot Truth.    

What Susannah gives me:    

Clear open heart, beauty, creativity, something special to take away every time I read and visit, vulnerability, courage, a model for being open and creative and what that can do for other people, someone else talking like I feel about moving through grief, pain and healing, how that happens, what it feels like, creative ways to do this, reflections on light and shadow.    

And anyone who  takes the  most beautiful photographs of her piles of moleskine journals, a box full of old penguin paperbacks she has just found at a garage sale, all the gorgeously titled books in her library sorted by colour and her  poloraid camera collection is so very cool in my books and I just swoon with pleasure at the sights.    

One of my most treasured posts is ‘Five years’ , a reflection on grief that has travelled now through five years. I connect through music with those I have loved and lost, and this post ends with an invitation to play a Kings of Leon song for Susannah’s partner whom she loved and lost. The song ends up being played loud all around the world by readers, including by me here in Sydney, with many tears shed all over in layers of connection.    

Visit and be sometimes delighted, sometimes saddened, always touched in some special way and always inspired.    

 Moleskine and penguin pics by Susannah Conway and used with her kind permission.  

 

Sudoku days

 

I have been in a twilight zone this week. The twilight zone of watching someone you love being the subject of an operation, the preparation, the process, the aftermath, the lying there, the not knowing the outcome, the twilight of hospitals and waiting.

We have been there far too much these past years and know the drill unfortunately. All you can do sometimes is move things around, find ice, meet some small need, talk quietly. So much you can’t do, such a sense of helplessness.

For these times and other times of waiting, holding, healing, times when you are frozen a little and caught in that moment to moment dealing with something – my secret weapon is sudoku.

Gwen Bell talks of mindfulness in her wonderful Mindfulist blog. In contrast, sudoku at this time is a kind of mindlessness, almost meditative,  a sheer focus of attention on nine numbers that helps you manage much and gives you a sense of peace. It is akin to the escapism of watching sport, the engagement with something that enables you to rest the difficult thoughts for a moment. You still your mind, counting numbers one to nine. It is highly recommended. It’s well known to be highly addictive. I’ve been there and it can eat a lot of your time, but in its rightful place, sudoku is for me a strangely powerful source of stillness and strength.

Learn more about sudoku, get your basic skills up and look at a whole bunch of great sudoku pics here at the Sudoku Pool on flickr.

Image above: Sudoku, by Jason Cartwright, via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license

Image below: Sudoku on the Waterloo and City Line, by Annie Mole , via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license

Why transcending?

So why ‘Transcending’? What does it mean and why is it my focus? How does this word pull so much together for me?

You could ask my yoga teacher from a long time ago how he knew it was my theme, my life focus. Somehow he knew, giving me my spiritual name, ‘Turiyamani’ or ‘transcendental jewel’.

I didn’t think much about it for many years but it was in the background all the time, I guess. A spiritual path, a sense of knowing I didn’t quite connect to.

But then, difficulty and tragedy, one thing after another, testing resilience, a time through which you change radically and nothing is the same again, a turning point that makes you question not only what’s important but everything you do.

Your world arcs into a different sphere entirely. You can remember the day, the hour, people’s faces, how time stood still, how green the leaves were, how all you could do was drink tea and stare into the air. How people said to you, ‘Your life will never be the same again’ and you fought that thought desperately, trying to keep things the same.

You would trade the world to go back to the state before then, but you cannot. It is immutable and your path.

And then later I came across Chris Guillebeau and his site, The Art of Non-Conformity: Unconventional strategies for life, work and travel

Chris writes about many things: travelling towards his goal of visiting every country in the world, entrepreneurship, personal development. The ‘convergence between highly personal goals and service to others’ is a key theme. He has constantly wonderful thought pieces, challenges to the way you think, work and live. In ‘A Brief Guide to World Domination – How to live a remarkable life in a conventional world’, Chris talks about personal goals, ordinary people pursuing big ideas and also through this, making a difference in the lives of others.

He asks you to consider ‘the two most important questions in the universe’. Here they are and here are my answers:

#1 What do you really want to get out of life?

My answer: transcendence, light out of dark, words lifted high, sweet words out of loss and longing, a way of rising above

#2 What can you offer the world that no-one else can?

My answer: words of loss and longing, receptacles for managing them, a model for resilience and transcendence, structures for managing feelings, lyrical words

Those answers have led me here after a long time of reflecting on them. I am sure I am not the only one who feels these emotions but I am the only one who can connect them in this unique way, offer them shaped and formed just so. So here I am, transcending and working through what this means. I hope that it means something to others at it unfolds.

The extraordinary power of the ordinary self

You will see under the blog title that my key theme words are ‘the extraordinary power of the ordinary self…’ These words come from a book by Marcia Westkott, ‘The Feminist Legacy of Karen Horney.’  This is an amazing book and was a life changing perspective for me many years ago, about twenty years ago now. I was given this book as a gift and the gift unfolded in reading this book at that time and still resonates today. The words above come from the last chapter, ‘From feminine type to female hero.’ It’s complex but was and remains something I intuitively understand.

‘The power of the ordinary is an idea of transcendence that is especially appropriate to the feminine type,’ (Westkott, p212) It’s about how women especially create a false personality, are not truly themselves out of a desire for approval, for what others want them to be. How they become divorced from their authentic self, devalued, angry and detached. How the audience keeps shifting and the demands for perfection are therefore without bounds.

In the end, after working through a process of learning and discovery, for me, often through tragedy and in a context of all the shifting of stable supports, there is a sense of realisation of the true power of the ordinary self and what it is capable of. It is a message essentially of self-acceptance and growing into your own skin, but with a real backbone of why this occurs:

‘Neither perfect nor contemptible, she discovers the extraordinary power of her ordinary, unique self and what is truly possible…’

I know it’s a brief summary of a complex theme but do these words resonate with you also? What do they mean to you and how can they give you strength in moving forward?

Welcome to ‘Transcending’

‘Transcending’ is an exploration of the ways that we rise, overcome, climb across and pass beyond.

It celebrates the extraordinary power of the ordinary self in creativity, writing, in love, in the workplace and in our family contexts, such as our family history and what it means. It is about  resilience, grief, love, loss, longing and the resonating shapes and forms we make to deal with this and move on and through. It’s about constructive approaches at work – strategies that cut through, synthesise and provide solutions. And it’s about images, structures, texts and ways of thinking that makes this possible.

This theme resonates and connects for me in all spheres of life and I hope connects and resonates with you also.

Join me in this journey as it unfolds. Some of the areas I hope to explore are:

• writing as a way of transcending and moving through
• my own creative journey as a writer
• poetry and the shapes and structures we find to manage our emotions
• music and images as vehicles for experiencing and managing feelings
• family history and its stories of how we connect and experience life
• constructive leadership behaviours and strategies
• reading and reflections on transcending
• connections with other writers and thinkers on this theme in all its guises