Good Stories Pouring In

Ellen’s reflection on a conversation with a friend

Not long ago I had lunch with a friend. We talked as women do about what is hard in our lives and then shifted to what was going well. She told me about a dinner she recently had with two of her three adult sons,. She had called them together to mark a change in her life and in the life of the family. All three sons were now married and she was now on her own. She asked them what they thought should happen next in their family. She has always been at the center of the family and the person everyone turns to for liveliness, support and help. She let her sons know that from time to time she now needs their support. Her boys took up the challenge without missing a beat. They let her know that they wanted family life to continue, and they would make sure that other obligations wouldn’t eclipse the wonderful family life they had to share with each other, their partners and their children.

I was moved by the shifting sands of this family. Done with purpose and grace their family life was reaffirmed. Alice Walker in the poem below encourages Barack Obama to hold out time and attention for his family. I felt hopeful with these two stories that the strength of family life was alive and well in a time when it is too often ignored in the public eye.

From Cynthia, San Diego

An Open Letter to Barack ObamaBy Alice Walker TheRoot.com

Alice Walker on expectations, responsibilities and a new reality that isalmost more than the heart can bear.Nov. 5, 2008

Dear Brother Obama,

You have no idea, really, of how profound this moment is for us. Us being the black people of the Southern United States.
You think you know, because you are thoughtful, and you have studied our history.
But seeing you deliver the torch so many others before you carried, year after year, decade after decade, century after century, only to be struck down before igniting the flame of justice and of law, is almost more than the heart can bear. And yet, this observation is not intended to burden you, for you are of adifferent time, and, indeed, because of all the relay runners before you,North America is a different place. It is really only to say: Well done.

We knew, through all the generations, that you were with us, in us, the best of the spirit of Africa and of the Americas.
Knowing this, that you would actually appear, someday, was part of our strength. Seeing you take your rightful place, based solely on your wisdom, stamina and character, is a balm for the weary warriors of hope, previously only sung about.I would advise you to remember that you did not create the disaster that the world is experiencing, and you alone are not responsible for bringing the world back to balance.

A primary responsibility that you do have, however, is to cultivate happiness in your own life.
To make a schedule that permits sufficient time of rest and play with your gorgeous wife and lovely daughters.
And so on.

One gathers that your family is large.
We are used to seeing men in the White House soon become juiceless and as white- haired as the building; we notice their wives and children looking strained and stressed.
They soon have smiles so lacking in joy that they remind us ofscissors.
This is no way to lead.
Nor does your family deserve this fate.
One way of thinking about all this is: It is so bad now that there is no excuse not to relax.
From your happy, relaxed state, you can model realsuccess, which is all that so many people in the world really want. They may buy endless cars and houses and furs and gobble up all the attention and space they can manage, or barely manage, but this is because it is not yet clear to them that success is truly an inside job.
That it is within the reach of almost everyone.

I would further advise you not to take on other people's enemies. Mostdamage that others do to us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Thosefeelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.
We must learn actually not to have enemies,but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.

It is understood by all that you are commander in chief of the United States and are sworn to protect our beloved country; this we understand, completely.
However, as my mother used to say, quoting a Bible with which I oftenfought, "hate the sin, but love the sinner." There must be no more crushing of whole communities, no more torture, no more dehumanizing as a means of ruling a people's spirit. This has already happened to people of color, poor people, women, children.

We see where this leads, where it has led.A good model of how to "work with the enemy" internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts theChinese government that invaded Tibet. Because, finally, it is the soul that must be preserved, if one is to remain a credible leader.
All else might be lost; but when the soul dies, the connection to earth, to peoples, to animals, to rivers, to mountain ranges, purple and majestic, also dies.

And your smile, with which we watch you do gracious battle with unjustcharacterizations, distortions and lies, is that expression of healthyself-worth, spirit and soul, that, kept happy and free and relaxed, can find an answering smile in all of us, lighting our way, and brightening theworld.
We are the ones we have been waiting for.

In Peace and Joy,Alice Walker

From Mobalaji, Lagos

Ellen Dearest,
Obama's victory is the world's victory. Email messages are going round with offers of aso ebi for the inauguration! All I ask is that ours stand out, as Obama's cousins from Australasia threaten to make an impressive showing there as well. In fact, all the world's non-whites claim relationship with our cousin! Na wao! We pray that God guard and guide him.
Love,
Mobolaji A

More political outpourings to encourage us onward:

From Joan, Long Island
Check out Naked Women for Peace
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=OINStsPwgQ4&feature=email

From Jack, NYC
Check out Pray the Devil Back to Hell
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uon9CcoHgwA

From Jane, Oakland, CA
One Nation, Indivisible: A Meditation on Proposition 8
It seems we are divisible after all.
We are two separate nations,
one with the freedom to be who we are,
one without that freedom.

But we are not done with the fight.
The battle is not over,
The banner still waves proudly above our heads.
If you think we will stop, think again:
The world has already changed,
and will continue to change.

We have joined the ranks of brave men and women
who have fought and died for their rights over the years.
Freedom is seldom a gift.
It is more often a hard-won prize after a long and bloody battle.

But why should it be such a struggle?
What we want is not really so much:
What we want is only liberty and justice for all.

Good Stories from Readers

Have you checked out Obama’s new website: www.change.gov
He is also asking for stories, which I love. Cynthia

From Robert Carroll:
Poetry Vulgaris

Dateline, August, 1997—from the brochure:

The Eighth Annual National Poetry Slam
and Connecticut Poetry Festival—
For five days in August, 156 poets from 33 teams
from all over America and the world
will assemble in Middletown, Connecticut
to read and compete and host workshops,
open mikes and poetry slams.

If I told you how Jerry almost missed our plane
and we all about shit in our pants
or how at the Nuyorican Cafe in New York
hundreds paid to hear us slam
or how the audience rocked
as our voices lifted off into air
would you think,
Man, there's no poetry there.

If I told you in Cambridge
we went up against the best
and we all kicked butts
till there weren’t any butts left
and the words rang out over burgers and beer
and all the buzz going round was
Yeah, L.A.’s here.
Would you still think
that's not poetry you hear?

If I told you we invaded like insects from Cleveland,
Chicago, Worcester, San Francisco, and Sweden,
London, New York, and Providence too—
even Germany invaded—
so what else is new—
would you still turn your skeptical nose?
Would you?

And if I told you my colored skin crawled
all black-american-latino-asian-red-golden-brown
like sugar molasses running down
running down running down
would you still doubt me
or my sincerity?

So I took hold of the mic, and I tilted the stand
and my father—dead and gone—came alive in my hands
as poet after poet gave it up to be just another voice
in Whitman’s great collectivity
for this love and glory
this dignity and respect
this poet to poet
this head to head.

Day after day we slammed face to face
poetry to poetry, grace to all race.
Renegade, Patricia, Beau Sia, Da Boogie Man—
Deborah Edler Brown won the haiku slam—
Haiku, erotica, street songs, exotica
voices from Middletown rang out the land
and I could hear our forefathers and mothers all stand
and grab the mike with both of their hands.

I heard Whitman, Neruda, and Langston Hughes.
I even heard Miles blowin' out blues.
Santa Fe, San Jose, Kalamazoo—
One poet from Detroit sounded like Maya Angelou—
And we sprang up like new grass
and spread like wild fire
in this glorious August spring of our lives.

And I swear, even Willie Shakespeare was there
and The Bard be so bad he banged out a ten,
but Da Boogie Man was even more awesome
so some judge gave him an eleven.
And as the sweat poured down my head
and drenched my skin,
I was awash in it—
poetry—
stinking like life and common as shit.
Now if that’s not poetry,
I don’t know what is.

Amazing Change
By Robert Carroll

We can go through amazing changes
when we are faced with knowing
we have limited time.
After one woman got brain cancer,
she decided what she wanted
was to go to Africa
to see the gorillas.

She and her husband and the guides
began the long trek through the jungle
up the mountains, but the woman was
having trouble. The guides tried
to convince her to go back,
but she wouldn’t.
She struggled and struggled.
Eventually she won the guides over,
and everyone was rooting for her,
but there came a point.
She couldn’t go on, so

she laid down on the grass,
and when she did, the gorillas
came out of the jungle
to her.

Good Stories for Good Times

It's been a long time since my last blog, but I am going to get with it. Right now I am reading a book by Phyllis Rose--"The Year of Reading Proust". It inspires me to look at each moment of my life carefully describe it fully and see where my mind takes me. This freedom to be curious about myself is evidence that me and mine are in a period of good fortune even with the world's woes weighing in on us.

For those of you following this blog you can understand that there were many years when I lived through hard times. Writing about good times or happy families Tolstoy said was boring, but maybe boring isn't so bad when pain, want and chaos swirls around. Perhaps when those of us who are doing well share good stories we may encourage others to continue to practice hope and to notice moments of goodness. Certainly worldwide, Obama's election was a breath of fresh air for us all and a celebration of what is and can be good in the world fits this moment in history.

When I wake up now I am aware of the aches and pains of being sixty-five. Shocking as that is, I follow the pain in my mind and slowly, very slowly begin to stretch out my body. Recently I am taking care of myself for the first time in my life in a way that feels easy not demanding and the results are that I eat less and move more without demand. I am discovering that I am less hungry than I thought, want chocolate not nearly as often as I believed and enjoy stretching my body through the pain if I don't push or press on myself to do more or to do better. I remember a time in my life between eight and eleven when I was unselfconscious about my body and free to explore the world without fear.

I wrote in "Blowing in Embers" about how the protections of my childhood left me unprepared for catastrophe, but I am remembering now that those same protections and predictabilities taught me how to live easily in moments when life was livable. Getting old may be getting back to the freedom to make up each day as I did as a child. Please send me your good stories to post. We shouldn't miss this time of celebration. It will help us for what is ahead

Hope to hear from you.
Contact me at: Ellen@berkeleyfamilytherapy.com

New kinds of Stories- Renewal

Feminist Grandparents

I've been running around so much that I find little time for blogging, but here I am again. I just wrote a piece about becoming a feminist grandparent that I hope will get published soon. It is interesting to me that after spending so many years focused on catastrophehe and disaster that my attention has shifted to birth and grandparenting. One of the things that the women in Blowing on Embers taught me was to always stay open to renewal and that one of the wonders of life is that in the midst of misery there are moments of hope and then sometimes there are many wonderful moments all in a row. Keeping in mind that a both/and notion of life--- not all good not all bad makes it possible to get through event the hardest of times. The delusion that somehow we will come to a time when all is good keeps us unfocused on what is working even in the worst of times. It can even bring worry to the best of times. Like to hear from any of you still out there.

Ellen's Story

A New Story

People who have coherent life stories show us how in a pivotal moment of their lives they know where to turn for resources. It is in pivotal moments that we need a strong survival narrative and the stories in “Blowing on Embers” show us how others strengthen their stories during hard times and how we can strengthen our own stories.

I didn’t know how to respond when disaster entered my life. Below is a short excerpt from the book that gives a sense of the pivotal moment when I realized I had no story for catastrophe. At the time my husband Ron and I were living in the Netherlands with our two children. We were celebrating life, but only two months after we arrived Ron was diagnosed with ALS a progressive neurological disease. This is how we responded when the doctor told us of his diagnosis:

The day the doctor told my husband, Ron, and me about his diagnosis, we sat like children listening silently to what the doctor had to say. We didn’t ask any questions because we couldn’t believe what we were told. When we left the doctor’s office, we walked along a canal near the village in the Netherlands where we were living at the time. It was so peaceful—windmills, thatched cottages, and long open fields running along the water. But this bucolic scene didn’t match our terror as we talked and cried, not able to make sense of what we had just heard. It was inconceivable to us that Ron might die in a year, as the doctor had predicted. If we were to believe the doctor’s prognosis, then life had betrayed us. Everything that we had expected was gone, and what was coming was unknown and frightening.

Over time I became aware that many people faced tragedy and had a capacity to go on with life even during the hard times. In these life stories there was no great separation between good times and hard times, and I wanted to learn more about the stories of people who knew more about life than I did.

I began to think about what were my choices if I didn’t go on this search:
· to live in fear
· to obsessively watch for all dangers
Or
· to strengthen my capacity to know where to find help and encouragement and what we all can do when disaster strikes.

So I went on a journey to find stories ,which I wrote about in “Blowing on Embers” and continue to post on this blog. In describing my journey I invite readers to go on their own journey and strengthen their stories of resourcefulness.

Today is Ron’s birthday. He would 65 years old today. He died in 1993 at 51 after living on a ventilator at home for seven years. He was the one who decided when to have the ventilator turned off. During those years he did everything he could to hold onto a meaningful life and tried to teach me to be still with him so that we could enjoy more moments together. I wasn’t very good at sitting still, and I missed out on many peaceful moments. I was too afraid and worried every day to hold onto the best moments that we might have had. I am braver now and know more about a survival life story. One of the women I wrote about, “Janie” (See her story below on the blog) said about a moment in her life when she was too afraid to close the eyes of her dead son that you learn it for another time. I have learned it for another time.

Be Prepared

These are some of the ideas that led me to collect the stories of people who face adversity and do well:

We live in a world of personal and public tragedy about which we hear a great deal. Even when our lives run smooth we are affected by the disasters that we read about or hear about through the media from places faraway such as Darfur and Zambabwe -----

or news about the terrible war in Iraq

or the devastation of the tsunami in East Asia

or closer stories----- all of us were altered by the attacks on September 11th and the terrible effects of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

or personal stories of illness and loss in our families

or in families of those close to us

or from daily media coverage of catastrophe in people’s lives that we don’t know.

The expanse of our information and knowledge of hard times creates in all of us a sense of impending disaster.

What can make a difference?

Research that has been done with people who have experienced tragedy and disaster tells us that a coherent life narrative – a life story with a beginning middle and end in which we can integrate both the best and worst of times — helps organize people following a disaster. This kind of life story includes a sense of our past and how it has influenced us, a sense of how we make choices and live our lives in the present, and a sense of what we are looking forward to in the future. People who have such a story before a disaster seem to do better in integrating a terrible event into their life story after a disaster.

Since in moments of crisis we are disoriented preparing for catastrophe means strengthening one’s story of survival or weaving the resourceful threads of one’s life story into what I call a survival narrative. This is what it means to be prepared.

As a psychologist for more than twenty years I had worked with many families facing life’s difficult moments and lived and worked in difficult places. I thought I knew what was needed and what I would do if catastrophe struck me and my family. But I was wrong. When my first husband Ron diagnosed with ALS I had no strong survival story to fall back on. The reasons for this and how I was able to rewrite my life story is what the book is about.

I continue to search for the stories of others who can teach us how to be prepared. Send me one if you have one.

The Ripple Effect- Stories Lead to New Stories

Every day I receive emails and letters from people reading "Blowing on Embers". I heard from Mobalaji Adenubi from Lagos Nigeria and from Florence Ten Fingers (see Florence's story earlier on the blog) one of the Keepers in the book;

Florence wrote:
"I received the book and I sat down and read it through. My children took turns reading it and one son read it twice. They realized what us women (here on the Reservation) went through ---life with many hardships.
I've heard it said that a family that prays together stays together. For me it was me and the children who prayed together every day to get through.

"We've been having cold spells here with snow flurries, but it isn't as cold as it will be. For now, the snow melts as soon as it hits the ground. This year the Elderly Program didn't get any turkey for us so we had to buy some, but it turned out okay. The program receives money from the Casino every three months so it helps.

"I'll end now. Thank you for wrting the stories. May Watantanka bless you. Your friend(Muska)), Florence.


From Martha:
I read about Ellen in your book recognizing that protective bubble and Reflections on Teachers. It seems to me that all your sorrow and all your pain has pushed you to where you truly belong. I very much look forward to reading your whole book. Several years ago I had a weekly storytelling workshop with seniors. I'd never really worked with personal stories before and for several weeks I listened as they told their 'nice' stories. Finally, one week I dove in and told a difficult personal story about being disowned by my grandmother and suddenly the stories came pouring our about loss, separation, disillusionment. At the end of the session, Sam, an 84 year old, said, "You know, Martha, for weeks we've been telling the nice little stories, but today we told the hard ones, and it brought us all together." And it really did. We so need to listen deeply to one another's stories in this broken world of ours.


From Barbara:
Monday I met with a group of friends who have been meeting monthly for at least ten years. When someone was talking about the seeming end of a 40 year friendship with a girlfriend, I told them about meeting with you and your ideas about stories people have or don't have. It seemed to me then that the idea of stories we have about anything, in this case friendship, loyalty and what that friendship can expand to include has everything to do with the stories people are telling themselves and perhaps less to do with what someone has said or done.

From Gloria:
Based on hearing you speak before, I knew your talk for AFTNC would be very meaningful to me. Frankly, I was not prepared for it to be quite so powerful! I was particularly struck by your statement about surviving the crisis, but what sense did you make of it? I have had three major periods of crisis in my life to date- 3 major periods of illness and pain which seemed to combine with many losses, the first period of illness came together with my sister's suicide, my father's diagnosis of terminal cancer- and his death, my mother being in the hospital and in a serious auto accident, my husband's sister dying and 3 weeks later, his father. Then this was followed by two bouts of breast cancer, and years of constant pain from various sources.

I decided to read your book before I contacted you to see if it gave me any inspiration/direction in my quest to make sense of my experiences. For some reason, I can not figure out why, Joan's story set something off for me. I have had this great desire to tell someone the story of my illnesses- and that is always a "victim" story. But after reading Joan's story, I had this vivid memory from my first period of illness and pain. We had fenced in a small rectangle of our property so we could grow something free of deer, and had planted a vegetable garden. I remember being out there in the nude, enjoying the feeling of the sun on my body, tending the garden. It reminded me of how with all I've been through, I have always maintained my "zest". In between my surgery and my radiation for the last cancer, I went scuba diving over the objections of the Drs. I got deeply into my music and even gave a vocal recital though not in the best of health which affects singing. And after completing the first round of radiation, I did something I always wanted to do, I studied Taiko drumming, though it was quite strenuous for my physical condition.

Please send me your story so that other's can share in "the ripple effect".