I’m happy to say that my book Mourning Has Broken is available on Amazon and Kindle

 http://www.amazon.com/Mourning-Has-Broken-C-Balawyder/dp/1461029279/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1320843244&sr=1-1-catcorr

For all who are interested I hope that you will enjoy it and if you are going through your own grief process may my book be of some comfort to you.

Namaste

These meet-ups are always an opportunity to meet new people. And I did. I met Judy. It so happens that she’s a counselor and when I mentioned to her how I was lacking motivation in my writing she responded by saying what I’ve known for years: follow your intention with action. It’s not good enough to just want to picture myself as a writer although that is a necessary step. At least for me it is. She suggested that before I fall asleep I ask whoever or whatever it is that makes good writers write to give me the motivation that I need to keep going on my novel. This I do. Not only before I fall asleep but when I awake. I pray to the gods of motivation. Give me names I can hear you skeptics out there. So here they are:

Thoth: credited by the ancient Egyptians as the inventor of writing.

Ganesha: Lord of success and destroyer of evils and obstacles.

Athena: Greek goddess of crafts, which I am taking to mean as the craft of writing.

The Archangel Uriel: Lord of powerful action.

Metatron: second only to God which is a pretty good contact, for writing or otherwise.

These names I learned from Julie a Reiki master that I go to in the change of seasons to align my energies. I love being in the presence of Julie because she is such a loving person and I am not sure whether it is the treatment she does on me or her love that makes me feel so great after I leave her place. I was there last Thursday and I mentioned to her my lack of motivation. “Whenever you notice yourself being veered away from your writing be grateful that you noticed it. But don’t be hard on yourself. And ask for motivation when that happens.”

Motivation was also a topic of conversation a third time. Yesterday evening I invited some friends over for supper. While sipping on some Cremant de Bourgogne I asked Maryam how her PhD was coming along.

“I have a hard time with motivation,” she said. “The problem is that I don’t know if I’ll get a job when it’s over.”

So much like writing. You spend years on a novel not knowing whether it will be published. Sometimes I find that I have to forget about that and simply write for myself. Write what I’d like to be reading.

“So, what do you do to get your motivation back?” I asked Maryam.

“I imagine how happy I will be when it’s over.”

Isn’t that what The Secret is all about? Visualizing the end result.

Still, though you have to show up. Which makes me think of Wah! In the jacket of her CD Unplugged she writes about how the song Show Up & Be Heard came about. Her producer confronted her by saying, “I want to hear about YOUR LIFE. What is going on inside YOU?” Wah! writes, “He was right. I was nowhere to be found. I couldn’t write a song about my life because “I” was never there….Why can’t I show up? Is it fear? Am I afraid to open myself up and see what’s really there? Am I lazy? Do I stop before I actually reach any degree of honesty?”

The refrain of Show Up & Be Heard goes like this: Well you know it’s fear and maybe I’m lazy/I just don’t want to work that hard/In the middle of this crazy world/I’m just hoping I’ll show up and be heard.

I couldn’t find Show Up & Be Heard on YouTube but I did find this by Wah! From her CD jai jai jai: It’s a mantra that Swami Satchidananda translated as “I meditate on the great effluent light which enlightens all three worlds. May it enlighten me, too.” The three great worlds are the mortal, immortal and divine planes. Wah! Explains that “this mantra carries energy of divine light, powerful as the sun. It easily nourishes and helps all living things grow.”

Maryam, may you be enlightened in the writing of your PhD and to all writers seeking motivation, including myself, may we be nourished.

As you listen to this picture yourself being nourished by the great light of motivation.

Brenda now has her own blog which I will share with her. As she continues to amuse and endear us with her disatrous dates I will write on the process of creating A Girl Called Brenda.

I had given myself a year to write on the Writing Scales blog and now that the year is almost up I will temporarly be leaving it. My essays on mourning have been put together in a book titled Mourning Has Broken which is scheduled to come out in August.

I have learned a lot in the year of blogging, both about writing and blogging…though I still have so much to learn. As I leave behind my essays on grief I am moving towards something more playful. At this stage of my life I no longer want to work unless it is fun.

My wish is that Brenda’s stories will inspire and entertain both writer and reader.

You can Google or Bing Brenda’s new address at agirlcalledbrenda.wordpress.com

On the ship they were selling cameras (duty and tax free), one of them a Cool Pix. I felt like I wanted to upgrade and I hemmed and hawed not knowing quite what kind of upgrade I wanted.

It was my second time snorkling and I had the good luck to meet two expert snorklers, Joe from Manchester, England and Claire from New Mexico who sort of took me under their wing as I followed them through narrow reefs and learned how to stay in place to watch the fish.

At one point I ran into Joe on deck and she showed me the photos which she had taken underwater. I at once knew what my upgrade would be.

I bought myself an Olympus underwater camera. And really it was a good thing that I lost my CoolPix in Fort Lauderdale for I never would have taken these photos of such wonderful fish. Snorkling opened up a new world for me.

Bonaire Island is known as the Paridise of snorkling and deep sea diving.

When I first started my blog nine months ago I was newly retired and asked the question: what do I want to do for the rest of my life? The answer to this question is becoming clearer but meeting with Thelma helped me to re-evaluate my goals at this stage of my life.

Our meeting started off with her stating that when you retire you have to build a new life for yourself – one where you’re going to fulfill your needs and pursue your dreams.

“Now that we’re living longer, if you retire at sixty it’s reasonable to expect a good twenty or thirty years ahead,” she said. “My ninety-one year old father still plays golf and has a healthy social life. Because we have become more aware of our health and are taking care of our bodies, we can be active well into our eighties or beyond.”

We baby boomers may be ready to retire from our regular jobs but certainly not from life. And we’re never too old to go after our dreams.

Ms Mariano’s tools are based on twenty years of research and coaching experience. One such tool which she gave me as “homework” is “Your Life Values” questionnaire. This is in two parts. The first part requires you to identify what you still want to experience and express. Forget those values which you’ve already integrated.

Along with a suggested list of values came two pages of notes. For example:

* Our Life Values are powerful, as they actually determine what we create in our lives and show us the areas that need change. They are also what motivates us and what ultimately gives us satisfaction.

The exercise also requires you to prioritize your list:

* Changing the priorities of your values affects the way you think, feel and behave in every area of your life. Someone who puts Challenge/Risk at the top of her list will go after very different opportunities than someone who puts Security as #1.

I relied on my gut feeling to prioritize my values and define how I will achieve them. So here’s my list:

1. Tranquility
2. Being recognized for my writing
3. Having a loving relationship with a man
4. Deepening my relationship with my daughter
5. Meeting more writers
6. Going to Barcelona
7. Having my own website as a writer
8. Spiritual growth
9. Going to interesting writers conferences
10. Attending a yoga workshop in Hawaii

The only reason I put spiritual growth at the number 8 position was because I had previously done Mariano’s “Slice of Life Satisfaction Chart” and spirituality had come out very strong so I didn’t feel that I needed to prioritize that aspect. I hemmed and hawed at whether a loving relationship with a man was more important than my writing career.

Then I thought of a TaroGold. quote which I received in my inbox a few weeks ago: “If you sacrifice your growth and talent for love you will not find happiness. True happiness is obtained only by fully realizing your potential. Love should be a force that helps you expand your life and bring forth your innate potential with fresh and dynamic vitality.” In the midst of writing this I felt caught in a chicken and egg situation. So I guess my number 2 and 3 values go hand-in-hand.

But wait! The test is still not finished. Now that I’ve identified my values I need to define them and set goals to achieve them. Yikes!

You can use some of Thelma’s tools which she’s posted on her site.

View the article here.

It is as if I am dying. Or at least part of me is dying. That part that I so identified with: the teacher. Suddenly she is gone. Or perhaps she is merely shifting classrooms and now her teaching will be somewhere else. Her writing will be her classroom.

I guess what I fear is having nothing to do. I don’t mean literally nothing to do for I could spend my days cleaning my house, cooking, doing yoga , meeting friends for coffee, biking and going for long walks. That would fill up a day, all right. But there would be something missing. Some personal fulfillment not met and this is what I fear the most about my retirement.

I cry a lot these days following my retirement but I associate them more with missing my mother, my father, my sister.

My friend, Sylvie calls and I tell her I can’t stop crying. I am so fragile and sensitive.

Sylvie is a great listener but also a great comforter. She is in a way like a man for when you tell her a problem she has the need to find a solution. Unlike a man though (at least many of the men I have met whose solution is to say not to think about whatever it is I’m thinking about) Sylvie offers solid solutions.
Don’t forget you’ve just retired. You’ve got to mourn that. In all the mourning I’ve been doing this past year and a half mourning a retirement seems so banal. Superficial almost. But maybe she is right. It is another stone on my pile of grief.

2
The school year has begun and I feel an empty hole in my life. There is lonesomeness for my colleagues and I wonder if I have done the right thing in retiring.

3
I am truly retired. The fact of being retired is in my face. I am in its early stages and although I am going towards something new and unknown I must go through this passage of grieving my career. I did not think it would leave such an emptiness inside of me. This feeling of loss and being in liminality is how Murray Stein describes this transition between work and retirement.

Liminality refers to “… a threshold between consciousness and unconscious portions of the mind… a person’s sense of identity is hung in suspension. You are no longer fixed to particular mental images and contents of yourself. … the “I” is homeless.”

4
I love not working. I am so happy that I retired. The greatest gift retirement offers is time. The luxury to do things slowly. To get out of bed when I feel like it. To chart my day as it arises.

My friend, Thelma, friend, writer and life coach sends me an e-mail regarding an update to her website. It’s full of neat ideas for anyone wanting to retire. View her articles here.

No more. No more.

At the end of the commemorative ceremony my sister’s name is written on the sand of the beach and I think about Neil Young’s Cowgirl in the Sand, how I played not just that song but all Neil Young’s songs over and over in the seventies. I wanted a boyfriend like Neil Young. I was in love with Neil Young. It’s the woman in you that makes you want to play this game.

My attention focuses inward where in the flesh of my memory I am seeing Neil Young on stage. Hello woman of my dreams. (Will I ever be someone’s woman of my dreams?) By the time it was out on the charts my sister had married. At her wedding I was her bridesmaid in a long pink A-line dress, my happiness stained with anger for her abandoning me to marry Richard. And now she is leaving me again. But this time it is for eternity. The song has nothing to do with my sister. If anything I am the cowgirl, the Brown Eyed Girl while she is the Save the Last Dance for Me and Ain’t no Sunshine when She’s Gone. Perhaps this is what the Buddhists mean when they talk about interconnectedness. Past, present, future merge into one. Events are not so random as they seem. Facts. Fiction. Imagination.Thought. The butterfly in Madagascar. Your ancestors. The child not yet born. Timelessness. This is not the way it seems.

I have experienced the power of religion to make one feel less lost. Less alone. Less angry. I am witness to the fact that the illusion of religion soothes. In my twenties I clung to the hopeful promises of religious beliefs. Knock, knock on various religious doors hoping to find a home for my vagabond soul. Catholicism. Reborn Christianity. Baptist (the gospel music drew me in), Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism. These days I rely on yoga as my religion. Yoga and nature. Albert Einstein once said that religion should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. When The Brazilian theologist, Leonardo Boff asked the Dalai Lama which was the best religion his answer was this: the best religion is the one that makes you a better person.

In holding a yoga pose I often think about gratitude. Gratitude for being alive. For my daughter. For enough money to buy food. For the people whose hands in some way touched the food on my table. For shelter. Friends. Health. Being positive. Love. And then I think. To whom am I addressing this gratitude? I have no answer. I lay in corpse pose and place one hand on my heart, another on my stomach and feel my breath. In and out. That’s the only thing I know for certain. I wear earrings made by a yoga teacher I once had at the Kripalu Centre for Yoga and Health in Massachusetts. The earrings came with this message: Sacred Om for unity with self, nature and others, and to celebrate the infinite. Jewelry for the soul.

I have a friend who tells me that religion does not talk about what happens before life but only after. It is the mystics and the gurus who talk of reincarnation. A few years back, in my continuous search for proof that life is as infinite as death, I became interested in Raja Yoga. Life, according to Raja Yoga, was karmic preparation for a better one the next time round. I stopped going to these ceremonies because it saddened me to think that my present life could not be good enough.

“There she is,” Debbie cries out and my attention is brought back to my sister’s name in the sand on the screen. Lined on a shelf in my sister’s bathroom in the lovely mountainous Eastern Township town of Bromont are bottles of sand collected from the different beaches she laid on throughout her travels on Earth. Seeing my sister’s name on the screen is accepting a bit more the reality of her death. One more mini-death in the long process of letting go. One of the principles of Indian spirituality is that when something in our life ends it helps our evolution and so that is why it is better to let go. Attachment causes suffering. Detachment

“Where you staying?” he asks me.

I don’t know I tell him. I’ll find somewhere to park my car. Without much money but an appetite to be on the road this is how I travel. In the back of my orange Ford Pinto I have built my personal hostel with a sleeping bag over an inflatable mattress and a suitcase filled with change of clothing and a cosmetic bag with toiletries to bring into the public showers of truck stops, gypsy style.

“You can stay at my place,” he says, “if you give me a ride home.”

It is the seventies. I am naïve. Trusting. A generation lost in space. It is love and peace time and more important, I believe in the goodness of mankind like someone who’s never been hurt or thinks bad things happen to other people, not me.

The apartment he lives in resembles the run down apartments that you see in the projects and maybe it is one of them but it is too dark for me to tell. I follow him up a dingy staircase to the second floor. As soon as I step inside I come face to face with a wall smothered in pornography; on a table a series of knives reflect fear. Rifles mounted on a wall. A hand gun lies on a side table. I know I have made a mistake. What kind of man is this and then all the stories I have heard and dismissed about violence come crashing to the forefront of my mind.

I freeze and then quickly thaw out because I know instinctively that’s what I have to do if I want to stay alive. How else could I know? This is a new experience for me. No one has prepared me for this. Never in my education was I taught what to do when you unexpectedly find yourself trapped in a psychopath’s web.

I once read a story about a survival mindset and the traits that are advantageous to staying alive. Of all the traits – patience, humility, perseverance, a sense of humor – calm is how I intuitively feel I need to be. This isn’t going to be the day that I die.

“Can I use your phone?” I ask him. I am living with Steven, a cartoon artist. “My boyfriend in Montreal, he’s expecting a call from me. I don’t want to worry him.”

Surprisingly, he allows me to do so. In French, I tell Steven what is happening to me – I tell him about the pornography. The guns. The knives. I give him the man’s phone number. When I hang up I look deep into the man’s eyes wanting to touch something deep inside and say, “I can’t stay here. I’m too afraid.”

“There’s nothing I’ll do,” he says. “Now that you gave my number to your friend.”

Still, I take my bag and as I turn to walk out of his apartment he says, “You’re really one of the few people who’s ever trusted me this far.” For a moment I feel sad and a streak of compassion goes through me.

Did you write the book of love and do you have faith in God above?I drive until I reach a truck stop in Connecticut. Sleep a few hours and the next morning have a shower. The hot water feels good on my back and I watch it go down the drain as if it is fear that is being washed away. I don’t remember much of my trip after that incident. There is something about my experience that takes away the beauty of the scenery and the peacefulness of the sea. I don’t stay long in New Haven and return home sooner than I have planned.

For weeks after I have nightmares of this man and am afraid that he will show up at our apartment for he can easily know where we live from the phone number on his telephone bill. But none of that happens and Steven and I break up because I want to have a child and he doesn’t but the real reason I stop loving him is that after I made that call he did nothing. He just went back to bed, angry at me for being with another man.