Snowy Day in the Mountains of Northern New Mexico

I had just about opened my eyes when John came in to say that we could have tea by the fire to commemorate the snow that had fallen during the night. With the covers tucked up to my chin, I was just awakening from a dream about driving my vehicle while completely covered above my eyes with the comforter. It was somewhat nerve racking, not being able to see where I was going, so it was a relief to wake up.

Since we returned from our stay in Mexico just last week, we’ve been exulting at the mild weather we’ve been having at the end of December, which can often be bitter cold, here in the mountains of New Mexico. Even though the weather forecast predicted it, the snow that fell last night was more like what we associated with this time of the year. Although Christmas was balmy, it looked as though we were definitely going to have a snowy landscape to celebrate the New Year the day after tomorrow.

As always, when I see snow and know that more is on its way, I always vacillate about whether or not to drive into town to work. This is the time when we have our big annual clearance sale at the gallery and I’m always programmed to be there every day possible. However, living out in the country, there are other considerations, like visibility on the highway. By the time noon rolled around, I had made up my mind. Knowing that I’d have to leave early to come home before the snow froze on our dirt roads leading home, it just didn’t seem to be worth while to contemplate going in for just a few hours. Good decision!

With warm clothes and the heat cranked up to the comfort zone, it was totally lovely being indoors with no schedule or menu of things to be done. Leisurely, I played in the garden room, removing the remaining dead leaves from the plants that had been without my daily care for three weeks. Then I swept the floor, but all done gradually. Finally, it felt finished and the garden room was abloom again in a clean and bright atmosphere, just the way I like it to be.

And that’s how the day passed, some time on the computer, some time cleaning the kitchen, some time writing out my schedule for the next few days (but not today!), some time just sitting with John discussing our plans for our upcoming Mexico trip next week. There was nothing exciting, unusual or noteworthy. Except…..if this could be considered an ordinary day, I celebrated the ordinary, grateful for the time to be cozy and warm, unhurried and unstressed, appreciating the beauty outside.

War and Children

From Mirabai Starr's blog:
This Beautiful Wound
Exploring the transformational power of grief and loss.

August 2, 2010

With her permission, I am posting an excerpt from my mother’s personal journal. You can see where I get the impulse to allow individual loss to connect me to the suffering of the world! My mom, Susanna Starr, is my role model for compassion in action.

Susanna writes:

Sometimes I wake up from that place just preceding the deep sleep at night where I’m coughing and gasping for the next breath. Sometimes my heart is racing and I have to take some deep breaths to slow it down. For a number of years, especially in the final years of a difficult relationship this was an ongoing syndrome. Almost every night I would have the choking sensation, which I later thought of as some kind of anxiety attack.

For some fairly long period of time it seemed to have subsided and just again has begun to recur. Again, I have the same association I’ve always had: Is this what my son Matty was feeling that night at 12 PM, at the change of shifts at the hospital, when nobody heard or saw him? It was around 3 AM when we received the “dreaded” middle of the night phone call. It was from an unknown doctor at the hospital who let us know that he had to perform an emergency tracheotomy, since by the time he was called, Matty had stopped breathing and was turning blue. He was very apologetic. I was grateful that my son was still alive.

The next day at the hospital my father-in-law said, “They should have let him go.” I was astounded, still in denial that my son would never recover from the brain tumor that was destroying him, now in its final stages. But when your child is just ten and a half years old, it seems that anything that could be done to prolong their life is justified. As a doctor, himself, my father-in-law knew differently. Matty survived the tracheotomy, but never really had a quality of life again. He regained consciousness and I still held on to the belief that he’d get through this, too, as he had several times before when he was in crisis during the various hospital stays.

We brought him Christmas present, which he couldn’t see, since the muscles controlling his eyelids were no longer operative. Just the day before the tracheotomy he said that his hearing was affected, as if the sounds and voices were coming through a tunnel. So it’s likely that he wasn’t hearing, but who knows? Meanwhile we spoke to him, wrapping his finger around the new pen and pencil that we assured him were for when he returned to school. There was a small stained glass hanging that we bought in the hospital gift shop that we told him was to hang in his window in his room at home. Were the gifts for him, or for us, to keep up the illusion that there would be some kind of future for him, for whatever limited time he had?

By the next day, though, we sat by his bed and saw the struggle, calling on the last vestiges of strength he still had just to breathe, his body wasted, his still child’s face, pallid and drawn, with the bone structure showing through. When my husband Ian said quietly, “We have to let him go,” I nodded in resignation. It was apparent he was holding on just for us. That was the day that we drove out to the cemeteries on Long Island, looking for a place to bury our son, our firstborn. It was a cold, grey day, typical of the end of December on Long Island. We were both numb, but not from the cold.

We’re all accustomed to using the metaphor of the “camino” or road as the metaphor for life. We call it our “path.” The path, obviously, is unknown. We sometimes think we have a roadmap, but often we don’t. Many times we deviate from that path, going off in different directions, sometimes to return to the more traveled one, sometimes forging out into uncharted territories. But all along the way there are markers. Since we can’t look ahead, we can only look back and recognize the markers. “Ah, here was a turning point! I’m so glad I didn’t go in that direction…. If only I had…. Knowing what I do now, I would have done it differently….” Would we have, could we have?

Sometimes the markers are clear and we know when we are experiencing certain events in our lives that they will leave their mark upon us forever. Often they’re a lot more subtle and only in retrospect can we recognize their significance in our lives. Although we each have our own scenario, most have specific events that are major markers, and we have ceremonies to honor them – birth, death, marriages, catastrophic happenings that affect us forever. Some of the markers that we thought important seem to fade as in a road sign that has become weathered. Others, that we paid little attention to at the time they occurred, take on increased meaning.

Death and destruction, loss and unspeakable sadness touch us all. We sometimes think we really don’t want to continue living, but we do. “Letting go” is still one of the most difficult concepts to carry out, even when we think we have a good grasp of it’s meaning. How do people survive unspeakable atrocities? How do people witness the death and torture of their loved ones and have to bear witness to these inhuman crimes? The human spirit can be amazing in its resilience. It’s too easy to get completely submerged in despair as we live in a world that continues to treat human life not as something to be honored and revered but all too often as having been stripped of any meaning, reduced to something “other than.”

Do those who have for thousands of years sent other people’s children off to fight in their wars have any idea of what it means to lose a child, other people’s as well as our own, someone’s son, father, brother, and more recently, someone’s daughter, mother, sister? Do we each have to suffer our own individual loss to know compassion? I think not. There is no way we can each share every experience, at least not at the level of human consciousness that we’re at right now. Our experiences are limited and the freedom of expression comes from our ability to respond to our own particular life circumstances, the ability to celebrate joys as blessings and sorrows to be transcended. Often, that’s much easier to say than do.

Every day we casually say upon meeting someone we know, “How are you doing?” What if we were to answer “I’m transcending.” Even your best friends might be taken a little aback, or maybe they would respond from their heart instead of their head, and not try to figure it out, but smile because they “got it.”

Susanna Starr

It ain’t over ‘til it’s over!

As owner of a weaving gallery, I meet lots of people who are fifty and beyond. Since I feel more or less responsible for coining this phrase when I chose it for the title of my book, Fifty and Beyond; New Beginnings in Health and Well-Being, published in 2002, I’m always interested in how people who have passed this important threshold feel about where they are now.

I find that those who are fit, healthy, engaged in physical and creative activities, continue to look at least a decade younger than one might expect from their chronological age. They exude vitality, humor and an overall humble view of what they find of importance in their lives. Most of these kinds of people seem to be kind, caring and compassionate, thinking more about sharing rather than acquiring more “stuff.”

Interestingly enough, I find myself engaged in new projects as I gradually withdraw from previous ones. In 1985, my then partner and I found a beautiful piece of land in the southernmost part of the Yucatan Peninsula along the shores of Laguna Bacalar, called the lake of the seven colors by the ancient Maya. Over a period of 22 years we created, little by little, a small eco-retreat/resort. It was and is very special and intimate with 12 private handmade casitas, 2 large open air thatched roof palapas, and staffed by local people from the village. Unfortunately, the last few years had become burdened with tension as the needs of the Rancho exceeded our ability to provide them. Fortunately, once we made the decision to sell (which took a couple of years of detaching emotionally), it was purchased by a family we knew.

Because we had built our own two houses there, I knew that I would still be “connected.” I felt that divesting ourselves of the overwhelming responsibilities would free me up to write, to paint, to garden and to pursue the kinds of things that I had put on the back burner, just as I had suggested to others in my book. At the same time, my plan of gradually separating myself from the business I created here in the U.S. was unfolding and after 34 years, it seems as though I’m working just enough, without the pressure of having to. In both cases, the work I was doing and continue to do has been extremely rewarding. I’ve been fortunate to have the kind of relationship with the people and the land that have given me great pleasure.

However……I now find myself beginning a new career. Just as I suggested in Fifty and Beyond, New Beginnings in Health and Well-Being, things that we become used to as being such an important part of our lives, businesses, jobs or careers that we have identified with, need to be let go of before other things can take their place. With me, the letting go process evolved over a period of several years. But when the Universe decided that I had done my part in the process, it presented me with something else.

This something else could have been a change in homes, in the places where I live, or any number of other possibilities. With me, it was presented in the form of travel writing. It helped that my partner, who is a travel writer, has helped get me launched (he also published my first book). But I thought of that as him having recreated himself as he has done many times, as artisan, musician, artist and other interesting things that he’s done over the years. I didn’t think that it applied to me. We do, of course, share travel in our life style and both of us have had strong connections to Mexico for decades. It is, more or less, “a natural.” However, it’s something I had never thought of before.

So here I am in my mid-sixties (or is it seventies?) launched on an entirely new project in my life which fits in, as it turns out, nicely with the writing of my new book about, guess what…….these last decades of our lives. To repeat the often said quote, “it ain’t over ‘til it’s over!”

Join Us This Weekend in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Saturday September 26, 2009

This weekend will feature the work of a number of New Mexico Women Authors to be held at the Folk Art Museum in Santa Fe. Published women authors filed submissions early in the year and now those who have been chosen will do readings and book signings.

Many of my friends, as well as myself (Susanna Starr), will be reading in various categories. My reading, from Fifty and Beyond; New Beginnings in Health and Well Being will be at 11:30 AM on Saturday, Sept. 26th with a book signing to follow. It will be in the Spirit, Home & Family Pavilion.

Mirabai Starr will also be doing a reading and book signing at 3:30 PM in the History & Biography Pavilion. Mirabai, as those of you who know her, is an outstanding speaker who has given readings all over the country.

Two other friends, Nancy King, recognized fiction writer and playwright as well as critically acclaimed author, Natalie Goldberg will be reading and signing also. All three of these women have many books published and have received much recognition in their fields.

The entire event should be well worth attending if you happen to live in the area……