Tag Archives: healing

New Lessons From My Hometown

Posted on by under Guest, Learning & Place

I grew up in Claremont California, a town often called the “City of Trees and Ph.D.s” for its well-known colleges and graduate schools and the matching tree species that lined the streets, including my favorite, the periwinkle-blossomed Jacaranda.

After high school, I moved to the east coast for college and graduate school, on campuses with buildings and foliage reminiscent of my hometown. Eventually I landed in Williamsburg, Virginia, pursuing my editing career and training to teach yoga classes on the side. Ten years on, I was a married mother of a twelve-month-old baby boy. I was settled in my career and the very best nest, but in spring 2011, something out of my control lured me back to my lifelong friends in Claremont. I had always known the town was filled with academe, but my recent leukemia diagnosis soon opened my eyes to a different type of learning: I needed to learn the real meaning of kindness.

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image (1)One day about a year after my diagnosis, when I was feeling tight and uncomfortable in my own body from the lingering side effects of treatments, I wandered into Mint Leaf Thai Massage near Claremont’s railroad depot. I asked the lovely woman at the front-desk for a gentle massage. The petite Thai woman, my mother’s age, stood up and beckoned me to her massage room. When I pointed out the port protruding under my collarbone beneath my skin, she knew all about the tough road of chemotherapy because she had gone through breast cancer. She gave gentle, thoughtful massages that would lengthen my tight muscles. After several monthly visits, she insisted I come to her twice a month. When I explained I did not have the budget for so many massages, she offered to give me free massages until I felt better. And she did. Her kindness gave me a safe place to face my changed body after enduring chemotherapy, radiation, and a stem-cell transplant. Often, I would be crying with relief by the end of a session, thanking her for her caring touch.

I began taking classes at Claremont Yoga in summer 2012. Out of shape and with “chemo brain,” I quietly introduced myself to each teacher, explaining my circumstances. The teachers took me under their collective wing, adapting and accommodating poses I could not do because of my port or lack of flexibility or stamina. Other students in classes came to know me, my son, and at least some of my leukemia journey. At Claremont Yoga, where the teachers and students support me with encouraging words, I’ve been able to laugh at moments when I blank on a pose or name. From my hometown yoga community, I’ve come to embrace the light, joy, and kindness that yoga has brought to my life.

unnamedDown the street from Claremont Yoga in the Village is a store full of singing bowls, fountains, incense, gongs, flags, books, figurines, and all types of jewelry. Called Buddhamouse Emporium, the shop intrigued me. At first I would visit for heat relief in the form of air conditioning. Soon, I came to know shop owner Charlotte. During our wide-ranging conversations surrounded by art on the walls by local artists, she and I would talk of gratitude and generosity. She encouraged me to put together strands of what I called Pranayama Beads, with each string of beads following a breath pattern. I showed her several, and she liked them so much she wanted to sell them in her shop. It was a creative endeavor that I never would have pursued without Charlotte’s friendship.

In summer 2013, I followed another passion all the way to a writers’ workshop. Filled with creative people as enamored of the written word as I am, these folks have helped unlock my creative writing juices. Though I had written short professional pieces before, I had never followed my writing passion on a more personal level. In the workshop, I shared essays about the harrowing first year of my leukemia journey with the group. Members gave not only constructive criticism but also encouraging words, hugs, and chocolate. Their feedback on my work always left me feeling strong and courageous about my writing life. For the cost of admission—photocopies and a dollar or two donation per session—I’ve been buoyed by a camaraderie I had missed from my publishing days.

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Today, I’m a die-hard Claremonter. My son and I visit with longtime gal pals and their families. I am teaching in a limited capacity at Claremont Yoga. And next month, I will give a reading from my newly self-published book at Buddhamouse.

I’m also embracing a whole new community of intellectually engaged parents at the elementary school where my son just started kindergarten. Like my son, who is progressing from a toddling preschooler to a more independent youngster, I am moving beyond my cancer identity, transforming into something better and kinder. Just as this village will help raise up my son, I’ve learned that it takes a village to heal a person physically and spiritually. I’m grateful to all who have taught and loved me along the way.

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image“New Lessons From My Hometown” is by Erin Michaela Sweeney. In February 2011, Erin was diagnosed with ALL (Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia), a rare and aggressive blood cancer. This story is an adapted excerpt from her self-published memoir: Every Breath Is a Gift: Reflections on My Leukemia Journey, which she is releasing in September to coincide with National Leukemia and Lymphoma Awareness month. Erin is now a writer, mommy, yogini, daughter, editor, sister, and napper extraordinaire who lives in Claremont, California. For more information about her memoir, visit www.ErinMichaelaSweeney.com .

Photo credits: Welcome to Claremont courtesy of the Southern California Violin Makers Workshop; Pranayama Beads and author profile image, courtesy of the author.

Island, Dharma, Cup

Posted on by under Alone in Place, Guest

“It was a bad breakup that brought me to the dharma,” a teacher once told me. The dharma — and whether or not I’ve been brought to it — is an open question yet. But it was surely a bad breakup that brought me to the island. And the island that made me whole — not just once but twice, so far. It’s good knowing there’s a place that heals heartbreak, because life can be generous with the heartbreak sometimes.

I first found the island in the pages of a catalog. I was just twenty years old, stuck in a humid, landlocked city and itching to get free of a relationship that was hurting. I felt bound to my lover by the delicacy of her mental health; if I went for a long walk to look at the magnolias, I might come home to find her in the bathtub, bloody from a half-hearted suicide attempt. I couldn’t even get to the “bad breakup” stage until I got her some Prozac or something, but that was easier said than done. Going away to college seemed like it might let her down gently. So I looked for the furthest college I could find and found it: a bare refuge of a school, small, out of the way, on the northern ocean’s edge. A place I could start again.

When I told my lover what I hoped to do, she applied and got accepted herself. So my triumphant ride to freedom was on a Greyhound, half the country over with a woman who, by the end, would barely speak to me. That was a pretty bad breakup.

Halfway UpWe went such different ways that few would believe we’d ever known one another. Free, finally, to take long walks without having to worry what sadness might be waiting for me on my return, I fell hard in love with that island. I got a bike and rode it off roads and on, deep into woods bringing nothing with me but my thirst; and I drank from dripping rocks and soaked moss and boughs laced with fog. I would throw my bike into the brush at the base of a mountain trail and climb over red rocks up into a sky that fell over ocean and pine. Until I was finally strong enough to leave.

And it would be there, to that island, that I would drive almost 20 years later, having learned that marriage can be a multiplier of loneliness. That your heart can break with longing for love, despite the ring on your finger and the child you created together out of your two bodies.

I found myself, once again, climbing those rocks up into the sky, this time with a daredevil child in tow and an old dog that preferred the gentler trails. We climbed higher than the vultures and watched their finger-wings glide below us. We’d walk out like dancers on bits of board into a swamp and sit quiet to hear the peepers. I carried my daughter on my back when she got weary, pulled ticks off the dog and I woke early, to see the sun purple the nearest hillside before anyone stirred. And my heart knit itself back together in the astonishing, delicious aloneness.

I wasn’t lonely there, until a few years passed and brought me into love again — unexpected, unsought — and yet there it came, just as thunderous as heartbreak, just as undeniable as the ocean. And I mourned to leave the island, but love rendered it the wrong place to be; if I stayed, I stayed alone, with my love far from me. So I followed love, back to the mainland and away. It nearly broke my heart to do.

It’s been five years now and I haven’t been back since. And I haven’t really needed to.

There’s a story about a teacher who describes the dharma by holding up his teacup. “This is my favorite cup,” he says, “I love it in every way. And I consider it broken already.”

I like tea and I like teacups and I first heard this story as a caution against getting too attached to things. I could also hear it fatalistically: nothing lasts forever, so be ready. But the first part of the story is essential, I think, the part about loving something in every way. Because one of the ways things can be is broken — and hurt, diseased, suffering. What kind of love encompasses even what our hearts rebel against?

On the island, I can be alone and whole, not aching for any place but where I am. But I’m not from there, I’m from away. From the places where I’m broken already, and learning to love, with this heart I have, in every way.

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Alison on a rock“Island, Dharma, Cup” is by Alison Coluccio. Alison lives with her partner and teenaged daughter in Ithaca, New York, in an urban eco-village, where she loves gardening to build bird habitat and fun food. In her not-spare time, she studies plant genetics at Cornell in a USDA lab. She’s worked with people and plants in Togo, West Africa and Irapuato, Mexico, and her writing on seeds and spirituality has appeared in Parabola. (Landscape vista photo, above, taken by Caitlin Regan.)

 

Where I Am: Twenty Minutes from Alaska

Posted on by under Welcome to You Are Here

“[‘Nature’] always happens in a place, and generally, whatever you see and learn, you do so in a small place…So why not look around and see where you are?”    – Gary Snyder, The Etiquette of Freedom

 

My sons’ mother and I had barely pulled into town in August 2003 when longtime residents informed us, “Alaska is twenty minutes outside Anchorage.” The fact that our newly adopted city wasn’t in league with the Truly Wild and Last Frontier initially struck me as unfortunate and disheartening. I’d held higher hopes for the place in which we’d soon start raising a family.

Still, it was helpful to learn that sage little chestnut. It alleviated some of my bewilderment towards the city we had – albeit, a little impulsively – elected to call home for the next couple years (which has since become ten, though that’s a different story).

Only days earlier, after nearly two weeks spent road tripping from my city of origin, Philadelphia, and through some of the most scenic and jaw-dropping wilderness areas in North America, I pulled into Anchorage feeling just a little duped, appearing to have landed…in South Jersey?

To the new arrival – especially one from a major metropolitan area relocating to Alaska’s largest city – Anchorage looks less like the Metropolis of the North than a complex and intricately woven web of strip-malls, each of which rests couched in the massive, sprawling lots that contain them.

And for the first few years that we lived here, that’s all I could see. It ate at me constantly: Never mind brown bears and wolverines! How have you people survived such garish aesthetics? You’re an architect? Can’t you do something about all this?

So, while we were married, the kids’ mom and I thrilled in every possible opportunity to peel past the city limits, beyond the gaudy shopping centers and stop-and-go traffic, spilling headlong into the jaw dropping landscapes always twenty minutes or more beyond Anchorage. And in that way, yes, we’re very spoiled here. I won’t pretend otherwise: It’s incredible. It is Alaska out there. With camping gear and rations packed, the grand SUV of fat-tired strollers in the trunk, and a Baby Bjorn strapped to one of our chests, we were often wilderness bound, city-free, and soon romping around in a real-life postcard in no time.

However, when I became a single dad to my two boys a couple years ago, those postcard-romps became a little more difficult to achieve. Not impossible, but a whole lot tougher to pull off single-handedly, much less with anything remotely resembling frequency, or urgency, or – more recently – even energy and drive.

Between parenting, domestic duties, juggling a couple jobs, and moonlighting as a musician, nothing seems more adventurous or wild in my mind many nights than a solid, single night’s sleep.

Nowadays, I’m happy to let the John Krakauers reveal their life-altering Into the Wild and Into Thin Air adventures (and misadventures), if only because I’m trying to conquer the Mount McKinley of laundry piles preventing me from freely collapsing to my bed, or couch, or both. By day’s end, a few meals worth of dishes in the sink, and a minefield of the boys’ most sinister, microscopic Legos embedded in the carpet – brilliant for late night, barefoot walks across the living room – the only adventure you stand to sell me features red wine and my guitar.

The Baroness, the apartment complex in which I reside and spend part of each week with my sons, is nothing to look at. In fact, let’s disregard the building. If you visit, I’ll want to turn your attention the other direction. From our second floor balcony, turn your gaze towards the Chugach Mountains strung along the horizon line, the not too distant range resting there, cradling our funky and flawed effort at a ready-made city, oblivious to our mess. We witness the moon’s cycles, sunrises, and sunsets from this same landing, too. In recent years, even despite the nearby city lights, I’ve somehow seen a handful of aurora displays dance across the winter’s night sky from our building’s front yard.

There’s a creek a short walk away from the apartment, running along a trail network that winds the length of the city. These days it strikes me as only regrettable that during all the years we were firing up the Forester and blowing out of town towards postcard-worthy locations, I never acknowledged or considered this minor-miracle trail network for the nearby wonder it today, time and again proves to be for me. Could I have survived my failed marriage without this stretch of winding path, without the creek’s song singing me through any number of the soul’s dark spells all those long nights a couple years ago?

Sure, the creek is frequently littered with empty cigarette cartons, Wal-Mart bags, and spent liquor and beer bottles. But in recent years I’ve come to adore and rely on how the sun’s light hits the water and trees lining its banks a million different ways in every day. The creek, too, runs in every season, even under the ice that will soon cover it. And its song never changes. I’ve only recently begun to hear that song, and it seems a timeless one, moving to some universal heart’s rhythm, a lulling song that – if it used words – might croon,

“Here You Are,

Here You Are…

And Here You Are…”

Chester Creek, AK

 

 

Where I Am: Four Houses, Four Turning Points

Posted on by under Welcome to You Are Here

I live in Urbana, Illinois, a city I didn’t want to move to in the first place. My opinion on the matter was weakly based on the handful of times I had driven by the Champaign-Urbana exit on Interstate 57. From that vantage point it was just another flat, cornfield-edged town with predictable, treeless suburbs and chain restaurants.

But in 2001, when my youngest daughter was still in diapers and I was finally admitting to myself that my marriage was falling apart, it felt like God was urging us to move. More precisely, I thought that moving—and my husband’s new job—would somehow save our marriage.

In the 13 years since moving to Urbana, four houses have been home. I don’t know if it’s by design or coincidence, but it seems that each significant Act in my life here has demanded a new stage, as if the inner transitions couldn’t be complete without the leaving of one tangible place and the arrival at another.

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Our first Urbana house caught my eye because—if you could see beyond the birdhouse and ivy wallpaper—it reminded me of the beloved house we sold in Michigan before moving here. Both were 1920s-era Mission style, with sturdy stucco exteriors, generous wood mouldings inside, and plenty of tall windows paned with thick, wavy, antique glass that creates mottled patterns of light when the sun shines through.

During the three years we lived in that house, our toddler and pre-school-aged daughters were at that kill-you-with-cuteness stage of life, busy choreographing dances, creating elaborate plastic feasts in their play kitchen, and layering on the most unlikely costume combinations.

But in spite of those bright moments, I think of that first house the House of Pain. Yes, I know it’s overly dramatic (and also the name of a nineties hip-hop band), but for me, the house was the scene of much yelling and crying and despair. Ultimately, it was the place where I gave up—not just on marriage, but also on my long-held childhood belief that God had plans to prosper me, not to harm me.

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If I was drawn to my first Urbana house because it reminded me of a house in my past, I was drawn to the second Urbana house for the opposite reason: It was nothing like the House of Pain. It was one-story not two; 1960s not 1920s; brick not stucco; and straight-forward, not “full of charm and character.” Most importantly, I was bound to it only by a 12-month lease, not a mortgage. I signed the lease after my divorce was final—after the House of Pain was sold and our marital collections of books, CDs, artwork, and kitchen appliances had undergone a necessary but unnatural process of division.

This second home can best be described as the House of Rebellion (clearly a perfect name for an angry metal band). Just like music that serves to numb the mind, the House of Rebellion provided an escape hatch from the life my ex-husband and I had shared. It played into my desire to be tied to nothing: not a marriage certificate, a church membership, or a mortgage. I devoted myself to my daughters when they were with me, and on the weekends they weren’t, I did whatever I pleased.

Like many rebellions, however, this one led to rock bottom, not freedom or enlightenment. One day about a year after moving into the rental, I knew it was time to stop feeling sorry for myself and start claiming my place. Maybe if I chose to live here—decided to put down roots on my own, in a house of my own—that whole sob story about “following my husband to save a marriage that couldn’t be saved” would lose its power over me.

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Buying house number three happened amidst a flurry of change: I ended a bad relationship, decided to try church again, went to a new counselor, and generally began figuring out who I really was.

This was my House of Healing (yep, cue the cheesy eighties CCM band). It’s the house where I learned to sit and just be in the moment, and where I learned that God wants me to find myself, not fix myself.

I worked in my garden, pulling out weeds with deep roots and planting perennials, and I invited new friends to sit around my table and share the meals I cooked. My daughters grew in those sunny rooms, writing stories, learning to play my grandmother’s piano, and forging great “wilderness” adventures with friends in our large, tree-filled yard. Along the way, as I mowed, painted, baked, and parented, I recognized this truth: I have more power to shape my place than it has to shape me.

And then I met Jason. We eventually got married, blending our families in that House of Healing, all five of us crowded in, watching and learning in awe (or at least the grownups were in awe) as redemption was worked out in one surprising way after another.

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Finally, last spring, as our three girls (and their groups of friends) grew bigger, Jason and I sold “my” house and bought “our” house: The House of Hope (or Truth)? The House of Second (and Third and Fourth) Chances? The House of New Creations? I’m not quite sure yet, but that’s OK—I don’t feel the need to pin down the life that’s unfolding here or the God who works in so many places, in so many ways.