Hope

THE WAYS OF THE WINTER SPIRIT: SURRENDERING TO THE STILLNESS

My photograph for this Christmas was taken last year in Idyllwild, California. The moon star lit up the sky so beautifully silhouetted by the tall trees. When it’s so dark that I can’t see the forest for the trees, it’s definitely time to look for light sources. I looked up and there was this bright burst. Photo credit to Kathleen Dana Haine.

THE WAYS OF THE WINTER SPIRIT: SURRENDERING TO THE STILLNESS

It’s Christmas time again, but this year is distinctly different for me. Although I had a lovely visit from my goddaughter and family last weekend. Christmas time itself and New Year’s Eve will be alone time this year.

Health challenges are rewarding me by staying home, though. It’s giving me time to pause and reflect on the meaning and purpose of life. To look at what things I choose to change and which things I desire to keep. While I love socializing and frivolity, it’s a necessary introspective time right now.

My Christmas wish was to be well enough to physically attend the children’s Christmas Eve mass at my local church. Singing harmony on all the beloved carols in the congregation brought tears to me eyes…happy ones. The angels are still singing in my home: Silent Night and a chorus of “Gloria in excelsis Deo.”

This week I had a visit with my alternative doctor who gave me good suggestions and some encouraging recommendations. One major recommendation to help me stay on the planet was: add sugar to the no-no list along with calcium and protein foods I have already given up. The addiction to the sweet stuff may light up the pleasure center of my brain, but it also amplifies inflammation, causing some very non-pleasurable effects.

Along with other physical homework, like massaging the scar area of my arm to get feeling back, I still require healing on the scars that don’t show.

Grief, loss and loneliness keep sneaking back into my veins. It’s harder to full-on heal when it’s cold inside as well as out. Internal snow seems more resistant to melting. However, there are many effective remedies for these recurring feelings. Sitting down by the hearth and having a fireside chat with each one is my favorite techniques.

Grief is the emotion that’s easiest to flip for me. Grief is really just love that’s blocked by loss and loneliness. I counteract it with a memory that could melt a blizzard in the dead of winter. I have MANY of those memories and basking in them brings back the feelings intensified over the original.

I also reframe memories that are not so easy or pleasant. I rewrite the past in my mind. Somehow it changes me in the present so I can accept a better future. The mental matrix is a hologram to program and reprogram. I am getting to be a master of tweaking the system to my advantage.

Sometimes even physical pain can be reversed. I feel my cells regenerate. Epigenetics switches on and then anything is possible. (See the works of Bruce Lipton for more understanding of that phenomenon.)

Alone time is now different for me than loneliness. When it’s accepted, surrendered to, then the stillness becomes the unseen friend, an access point to answers, a connection to God/Source/Creator. the gateway to possibilities we miss with our busy “monkey mind.” Even if nothing SEEMS to be happening, linear time has opened up to infinity where the possibility of miracles makes a template for the wonderment to unfold.

Sometimes I feel like meditation and prayer put me in an unlit room, but then a door opens and there’s a surprise party inside for me with all the loved ones and gifts I have ever dreamed of. When I meet them in real time the faces may have changed or details of the gifts. But it’s often even better than I imagined.

Whether I meet the gifts immediately, or in the future of divine timing, I am still grateful. The notes of the symphony are impressions before they reach the heart, the mind, the ear, the music sheet, the instruments, the stage. To negate their existence with self doubt or non-acceptance of their beginning invisibility would be a harsh destruction of a joyful outcome.

I hope your winter dreams yield a springtime harvest. I am already hearing angelic arpeggios for healing songs when the stillness turns to melodies I will write for my mandolin and me.

DIAGNOSIS: END STAGE RENAL FAILURE PROGNOSIS: FULL-ON MIRACLE HEALING

The porch of our family home in Idyllwild is the photograph for this blog. It was a place to sit contemplating big decisions and savoring moments of solitude. It lives in my memory now, a part of the collective of our life together.

I’ve been dancing through different stages with the kidney issue for some time now. Fourteen years on an inappropriate

prescription drug left me needing a kidney transplant back in 2008. Through a strong mix of motivation and miracle, I got up to

30% function and maintained a GFR (globular filtration rate, the measure of renal function) until 2016, after my husband and I

relocated to the central California coast.

While Bob developed a series of illnesses, I had my own health challenges including two failed dialysis surgeries in my left

arm. The three years of caregiving my husband through open heart surgery, Parkinsons and dementia yielded lessons in patience,

faith and unconditional love—for both of us.

After the passing of my soul partner in 2019. there were three more years of difficult decisions: the sale of our mountain home, the

reconstruction of the beach home, the strange times of Covid………..

Then came a time of soul searching the summer of 2022 while having informative flashbacks and moving through PTSD.

I had reached a crossroad on my birthday. I learned who and what I truly was— full disclosure on that later.

I had to be in a healing cocoon for a few months before I grew my wings back again.

This time the wings seemed to be made of stained glass on steel. But even steel breaks under pressure. There were many pressures.

I had become a spiritual diamond from hard core coal, yet there was a definite crack in the system. I was reminded of the poetical

message of Rumi and Leonard Cohen…The Crack is the way that the Light gets in.

Stage five symptoms have caused more than a few cracks. However, my path does not include another surgery which will lower

my kidney function with no promise of improving it. I do not choose “status quo” with a few more years of declining function with

a nightly artificial support system. ( I honor those who do choose it but I follow a divergent direction.)

I CHOOSE LIFE FULL ON.

The fear of death does not intimidate me. If it did, my near death experience in 1979 pretty much dissolved that. I share the belief

that the body is an amazing vehicle of the spirit with guidance from an extremely intelligent Source.

I may live alone, but I am not going through this alone. I have been assembling an impressive support team of alternative and

regular doctors, magnificent healers, intuitive therapists, and am receiving the compassionate assistance of the local Hospice of

San Luis Obispo and their wonderful counselors and volunteers.

I have informed my new friends at hospice that I am going to get well, surpassing the normal expectations and becoming the

vibrant being I was meant to be.

I have started up the blogging again for a two fold purpose: to keep an account of my journey to wellness and also to encourage

others to follow their true heart’s desire, to lead them to the joy of life however they picture that.

My picture is still not complete but I have put the pentimento of my scars on the paper and am adding colors daily to the design.

CATERPILLAR DREAMS: BUTTERFLY REALITY

This photo of a peaceful pair of butterflies was taken by my husband, Bob Haine. The  background of a white flower gives a tranquil setting for the two, a respite from flight and a chance to refuel. Caterpillar days are over as they take their place in the sun.

CATERPILLAR DREAMS: BUTTERFLY REALITY

It has been awhile since I have posted anything. Not because I had nothing to say or no time to say it. I have been very busy, cleaning and downsizing our home of over thirty years for a big move.

Moving to our dream home near the beach in central California was not an easy move. But we have arrived, here and now.

I have not posted anything lately because, as the caterpillar might say, “When you’re in a chrysalis state you keep still, until you’re ready to emerge as the butterfly.”

I’ve spent the months after the new year preparing to grow wings. It has been my caterpillar stage.

Nobody delves much into what the caterpillar is thinking and feeling as it hangs in that fragile cocoon. We like pondering more on what the beautiful butterfly is feeling as it floats across the sky, manifesting those gorgeous wings.

However, the ugly caterpillar stage is the most critical part of the butterfly’s development. Without this nitty-gritty formation stage, the butterfly would not exist.

It takes time, a darkened time, to formulate the butterfly. Somehow, the caterpillar knows and accepts this.

It must be frightening, at some level, to leave the only world you know, to reconstruct the body you have had, to live on the precarious edge of a branch, yet have the quiet knowing that this is the proper sequence of things.

I admit that I did not have the natural intelligence of a caterpillar when I chose to pack up my former life, leave our longtime home and move to a totally different locale.

I did not realize that not only would the structure of my home change, but that I would not be the same creature after re-establishing myself somewhere else.

The metamorphosis from a caterpillar life to a butterfly life is not easy. During the preparatory times, there are lots of questions if one is a human caterpillar. Questions like:

When is my escrow going to close? I’ve sold my home; when am I going to find a new one? What do you mean when you say that I can’t get a loan on this property?

The list goes on and on…..

Finally, there is an ah-ha moment, a time of surrender. Like the caterpillar, it is not resignation as much as the sheer acceptance that there are bigger, more mysterious forces at work.

Go into the cocoon. Dream the beautiful dream. Let the feelings of discomfort, fear, even despair, pass through like a mist. The dew is settling on the bush, and one fine day the realtor will call and say, ” The perfect house for you just went on the market today.”

You know the minute you walk through the door that this is the home you’ve been  waiting for all your life. Much like the butterfly coming out into the light for the first time, you realize this house is not just a house. It is the repository of your feelings, the carrier of your dreams. In short, it is not just a house; it is your forever home.

My husband and I were fortunate enough to find such a home, our house of love and light. I have enjoyed the rebirth, making this place a structure with our unique imprint: the blue, white, and sand colors of the beach, the blend of my art and my husband’s photography, our shared music and instruments, my touches in the surrounding garden.

I have planted butterfly bushes and “save the bees” flowers. The hummingbirds, hawks,  and finches come for visits. On the ground, a line of quail stroll by in the morning.

The coyotes, spiders, and snails are welcome here, too. If you exclude the so-called negatives in the natural ecosystem, the system collapses. We all need a home in this interdependent world.

Has the transition from city life, to part-time mountain life, and now the rural bay life been smooth?

In a word: NO.

We human butterflies are beautiful and freed from many things. But the world outside our inner world is still throwing us curves. The wind currents and earthquakes are still slamming us:

Why do we need a cardiologist, a pulmonary expert, a nephrologist, an x-ray, a CAT scan? What do you mean we may not be covered by our insurance since we moved? What if, how can, must I…?

And the wise monarch butterfly that floats past me in the yard is whispering, “Let go. Just breathe.”

When I wake up and realize I am the spirit in my body more than the body is in my spirit, I will know my winged friend is right.

It may be hard to be a butterfly in a caterpillar world, but as more and more wings open to the light, this becomes a beautiful place to be.

I am so grateful to have my part in this world and to share  life in my new homeland with my wonderful friends and neighbors.

Beyond The “Blues”: Christmas Hope Was Born At Night

Bob’s photo for this blog shows the light shining through the forest of Hurricane Ridge in Washington. Sometimes light comes to us in ways we didn’t foresee.

BEYOND THE “BLUES”: CHRISTMAS HOPE WAS BORN AT NIGHT

Christmas has always been my favorite time of year. Even though some Christmas holidays have been difficult emotionally or financially, I am still convinced the winter holidays are the most wondrous time of year.

The nights are longer, and the winter may seem darker. However, the light that is present in all of us is strong enough to give us hope for the new year and happiness in the moments we have left in this year.

This season has presented multiple challenges for me, especially in overcoming health issues. So many friends and family members are going through difficulties as well. I have found it hard to distinguish what has been making me feel deep sadness off and on during this holiday time. Is it my own feelings or the ripple of emotions from those around me?

Turning within, rather than looking at the world of outer effects, I had a thought: hope is born in the darkest times. Faith lights the candle that is started from hope. That flame guides us until we see there is a brighter dawn.

The Christ child was not born in a comfortable palace during convenient daylight hours. But there was a star above the holy family and a light within the baby. We have the same light.  According to many texts, we also have the same possibility to make miracles.

That’s what I am requesting this holiday season. For my friends and family that are battling cancer and heart problems, I am proclaiming health. For those that are barely making ends meet, it’s time for gainful employment and having pleasant living conditions. For those that are recovering from grief over the death or loss of a loved one, I see them spiritually renewed.

As for the world, we are all connected by invisible energy that becomes visible when our works are driven by thoughts of love. Good thoughts from one heart can heal hundreds of hearts that are miles away.

I’ll just include a closing phrase that sums up all the yuletide possibilities: PEACE ON EARTH. GOOD WILL TO ALL.