by Cay Randall-May

“Within loss, God always weaves a lesson and whispers the promise of healing.”-Eleanor Roosevelt

Some people eat chili peppers; I paint them.

The idea came to me one December day, sixteen months after my twenty-seven year old son, Paul, took his own life. I was numb with shock after his passing and, although I continued to work at my ordinary tasks, my thoughts obsessed on my loss. My days were a nightmare as I relived the horror of the police call that told me he had died. The few fitful hours of sleep that I got each night were my only time to forget, but they were much too brief.

For the first year after his death, I lost my usual enthusiasm for painting and drawing. All I could visualize were the balloons that we released at Paul’s memorial as they carried my dreams for his life into the sky. In my imagination, the tiny specks would eventually explode, snagged by jagged clouds.

That’s why the first peppers I painted that December day were so hopeful. Through them I had found a potent symbol for my continuing grief process.” There were just two of them in that first painting. I composed them in jarring contrast to a turquoise background — the color of the Arizona afternoon sky. The menacing clouds that had overshadowed me for months had finally cleared.

In that painting, the top pepper is green and torn open all along its length to expose its seeds. It symbolizes my heart, filled with hope but forever damaged. Below is an intact red chili of equal size, representing the internal combustion engine of creativity. I didn’t consciously begin this painting by choosing this symbology; it just flowed, felt right. So I followed my feelings.

More pepper paintings came in quick succession. I didn’t want to stop painting them. Sometimes I would start the next painting before completing the one before. To date, I have painted nineteen in this series, which I call “A Passion for Peppers,” and they continue to fill my imagination.

They document my healing as I move through profound grief, the pain of my son’s death catalyzing my process. I now realize that my emotions were partially numbed after my parents’ divorce, my own failed first marriage, and many other losses. What passed for happiness for most of my adult life had always a flat, gray feeling to it. I had been depressed for a long time without knowing it.

My son’s tragic decision made me examine my own will to live. My grief hurt; it burned within me, just like my stomach burns when I eat hot peppers. There was no relief from this constant emotional and physical pain except prayer, which I believe led me to more help.

One day in a bookstore, I came across a copy of “The Grief Recovery Handbook” by John James and Russell Friedman. The authors suggested working through feelings of loss with a partner, which I did. Soon after, I was given another answer to prayer. Someone told me about a Survivors of Suicide support group. Here I could talk with others every week. They truly understood my pain because they, too, had felt it. I learned that others who had lost loved ones to suicide struggled with the will to go on living.

The more I talked out my feelings, the more I wanted to paint peppers: yellow, red, orange, green of all possible sizes and shapes. I turned on cheerful, Latin music and danced as I painted. Each picture became more rhythmic, more alive. Eventually I included people in my paintings. First a woman with a pepper for her mouth suggested how I felt when I talked out my sorrow. It hurt, but it was essential. Next I painted a young, strong man with a pepper tattoo on his arm that proclaimed, “I love peppers.” He symbolized my own willingness to openly discuss my process with others. At the same time, I began to write articles on suicide awareness and became a volunteer public speaker.

Anyone who regularly eats peppers builds up a tolerance for capsicum, the chemical that gives them heat. People who work through their sorrows, who really taste their feelings, also become stronger. A friend emailed me this anonymous wisdom: “A strong woman has faith that she is strong enough for the journey, but a woman of strength has faith that it is in the journey that she will become strong.”

I realize that my journey through grief will be life-long, but it will make life more real. We do not need to feel to live, but if we feel, we can’t avoid living.

When someone first told me that every loss leaves us with a gift, I thought they were out of touch with the reality of my situation. How could my son’s death hold any gifts for me other than aching loneliness, guilt, and remorse? The “shoulds,” the “maybes,” and the “whys” tore at my soul. I was certain I could never receive any other gift. That was before the peppers.

Now I know otherwise. Paul’s death presented me with a choice. I can truly feel, or I can go totally numb. Every day, I renew my choice to awaken my heart through positive prayer. I don’t pray for my situation to be changed. It never will be. I will always miss my son and occasionally think that I see his face, recognize his stride in the silhouette of a stranger, or hear his voice saying, “Hi, Mom.”

Instead, I pray to feel life and to give others the courage to feel life. Without a doubt, my pepper pictures will be just kitchen decoration to some who see them, but to those who understand my journey, they will speak of renewed faith, hope, and joy.

Cay Randall-May
-read Cay’s bio here

My friend Badieh told me this story and I asked her to share it with you. -Terry

A Message from Heaven

This year I had the best Father’s Day I’ve ever had after the love of my life, my first love, my Papa left us ten years ago. In remembrance of his life, every year on Father’s Day my Mom, my sister Talieh and I go to La Jolla Cove where his ashes were scattered. This helps us with the many other days of the year when we miss him terribly.

Unfortunately, my Mom became so sick this year that she was not able to go with us. She was very upset that she could not make it and she said a prayer to my Father telling him how sorry she was. I was worried about her and I did not want to leave her at home alone, so I asked Talieh if she could go first to say “hi” to Dad and when she returned I would go.

When Taliah returned, I went with three red roses in honor of my Father’s loving, caring and kind personality. He was my angel.

When I got to the cove, I made my way down the cliff towards the ocean, but it was too stormy to try to get near the water. I got as close as I could and then I threw the roses in the ocean. As I watched the waves, one rose disappeared. I could not find the third rose, the other two were playing with waves and all of a sudden one of the two roses was thrown on to a huge rock. The waves were not so large any more and I had no hope that the rose would be washed into the ocean to bless and join my Father.

As I was wondering how I could get the rose back to the ocean, I was staring at it and I felt the rose becoming “alive” and that I was not in this world. I began communicating with my Dad through the rose. He wanted me to stay longer, he wanted to look at me because he missed me and I wanted to stay too. After a long conversation I told him, “Okay Dad it is time to go, I promise I will come to visit you more often.”

As I turned to walk away for last time, I quickly turned back again to look at the rose as a big wave swept it into the ocean. I felt my Dad saying, “Goodbye, I have to go too.”

I broke down crying as I made my way up the cliff. At the same time, I saw an old man who was tall and thin climbing the rock towards me with the red rose in his hand! He approached me and he said, “I believe this is for you.”  And I said, “I thought I lost this in the ocean. And he said with a smile “You will never lose him. Happy Fathers Day!” and he walked away. I burst out crying.

When I went home Mom was in bed, Talieh was lying down next to her watching TV and I walked in with the wet rose. I gave the rose to my Mom saying this is for you from Dad. Both my Mom and Taliah stared at me in awe as I told them the whole story.

Then Talieh said, “Oh my God, I got my answer!” On her way to La Jolla Cove, Taliah was wondering if Dad could see her coming to say, “hi” to him and she was questioning whether or not the spiritual life really exists. The strange thing is she had taken two red roses and she had lost one of them in the ocean but she walked away without finding it. In the back of her mind she thought, Badieh will find it.

My Mom was overjoyed to receive the rose from my Dad, Taliah felt her beliefs were renewed and so we all were touched in a very loving and simple way.

Later that day, I was talking to my eleven-year-old nephew Cameron as we were driving to Laguna Beach to see his Dad for Father’s Day. I told him what had happened to me that morning. He was busy eating a chocolate croissant as he listened to my story. When I finished he became very quiet and after a very long silence he turned to me and said, “That was a message from heaven.”

-  Badieh Yagoubhi

Terry Laszlo-Gopadze has collected stories from women that will move you, touch you, make you laugh, cry and cheer out load. It doesn’t matter if you are a man or woman, this book inspires. Terry has been through her own personal journey which lead her to create this masterpiece. These short stories will create a sense of community among all of us and help us move beyond the struggles which sometimes get in our way.

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Enjoy the art of Nichola Moss and visit www.Nicholart.com.

Nichola’s magical art is on the cover of The Spirit of a Woman and throughout the book.

by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D.

“I wait for you your whole life, not something you made up, but air against air, light against light draped over your shoulders like a sweater of no weight.”
-Imaginary Friend

When I was a child, I didn’t have any human friends. It wasn’t that I didn’t want friends; I just didn’t understand how to get them. Hard-wired for interior sound from the get-go and growing up in a tumultuous home, I found imaginary friends for each day of the week. Monday was an older sister, reserved and confident. Tuesday had straight blond hair and a penance for dolls. Wednesday and I were thick as thieves, and she understood me best. Thursday was a standoffish brother, Friday a party animal, Saturday a patient and exhausted mother, and Sunday, a distracted father.

When I grew older, drawing took the place of imaginary friends. The images I made on paper kept me company, told me someone else was there – a tree coming into form, a snake swallowing its long tail, a face of a woman I didn’t know. Eventually, images weren’t enough.

I started writing like a maniac when I was fourteen, sitting on cements steps outside of what was called a “garden apartment” on a hot July afternoon in New Jersey. My best friend and her mother, who was dating my still-married father, were due any minute.  At home, in the middle of their divorce, my father barricaded himself in the master bedroom, while my mother slept in a guest room. Battles encompassed raiding bank accounts, poisoning plants, and putting the kids, especially the oldest – me, on the front lines.

In that air, heavy with humidity, just-cut grass and a dying rose bush, I wrote a poem, not surprisingly, about the cruelty of people and hopelessness of life. Something must have shifted in me during the writing, however, because I returned to the page the next day, and the next. Writing became my language of survival, how I spoke to myself in a voice I didn’t hear anywhere else, edged with compassion and hope. I asked if God was there, and I heard back “yes” in each line. I asked what to do, what I felt under all my numbness, why Mike liked Denise more than me, and when my father would stop yelling and my mother crying?

The night my father dropped me off at our suburban house, threatening to kill himself, all I had was my journal. The afternoon my mother told me I was a bad daughter for siding with my father, I wrote. When our relatives took sides, I turned to poetry. It wasn’t that writing gave me answers so much as it gave me a place to ask questions, and to feel, simply in the asking, held.

During the long year of the divorce, I told myself repeatedly that what was happening would make a great novel. Because of writing, I had close-up and panoramic vision at once. “Remember this scene,” I told myself during the courtroom fights and other moments of high drama, which were plentiful.

In the year after my mother and siblings moved out, my father’s girlfriend broke up with him and my best friend with me, I found myself thrust into the role of a daughter-wife – now responsible for cooking, cleaning, laundry and entertaining my younger siblings on the one night a week we saw them. Many steaks burned, and dress shirts mildewed in the washer because I was more concerned with getting a line in a poem right than pleasing my un-pleasable father who transferred his screaming and throwing of dishes from my mother to me. Depressed, exhausted and more alone than I imagined anyone could be, I survived because I wrote. If life was as interesting and satisfying as writing, I might as well stay around to see what would happen, I told myself.

Writing was how I came to sit face and face with my soul, and ask, “What’s up?” It was my spiritual companion, a sidekick who tapped me on the shoulder, rolled her eyes and said, “Yeah, this does suck, but think of what material this is for our writing,” or held me as I fell asleep at night, an invisible friend who showed me who I really was: a writer.

Like many people bound to create something somehow for a living, figuring out what to do with my writing led me on a path of my own making. After a disastrous experience in journalism school, five years exhausting myself through political organizing, and picking up jobs along the way from waitressing the graveyard shift at an I.H.O.P. to demonstrating energy conversation techniques for homeowners, I made my way back to school where I dove into poetry. A master’s in creative writing and Ph.D. in English, plus three children later, I found my calling to write had a sister-calling: helping others find healing and strength through the written word. I taught at various universities, and since 1996, in Goddard College’s Individualized MA program, where I founded a master’s degree in Transformative Language Arts, focused on using writing, storytelling and performance for individuals and community transformation. I also began leading community workshops, where I came face-to-face with the sheer and vulnerable power of writing in our own best voice.

From the first workshop I offered in my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas — “Write from Your Life” — in 1992 through the present, I continually find how people want and need to write toward softening the hard skin of their wounds, opening the locked gates to where and when they knew freedom so they could come home to themselves. I’ve learned the importance of opening the doors and windows of our lives to write of our yearnings and fears, and to use writing to revise our lives from adults in transition, teens in crisis, people diagnosed with mental illness, low-income single moms, people in recovery from addiction, children so young we sang and clapped out the poems we created aloud, and elders sharing the essential stories of their lives. No matter where I go, I find writing our deepest, truest stories (while putting concerns of grammar, spelling or making sense on the shelf) is the great equalizer, cutting through class, education, race, diagnosis and age.

Such writing can make a group of strangers into a community, and a small room in a hospital basement or community center into a sanctuary, as I found when I began leading workshops for people with cancer and chronic illness. Propelled toward this work by my own experience of breast cancer, I began offering workshops to patients, doctors, nurses, and caregivers.

In each workshop, I see miracles: how simply witnessing each other makes a welcome space for spirit to rise up. In each page or screen, blank before my hands start moving, I also witness the expansive beauty of life’s possibilities. Each time I begin a new poem, essay or novel, the first thing I think is, “I don’t know how to do this.” I feel the same way with the first downward facing dog of the day. Yet I love that feeling, that newness, that sense of being so alive that all my cells are thrilled, scared, happy and ready to witness what the page says.

As a child, I asked each day of the week, then the blank page, to be my friend and show me how to engage with the life of this world. I’m still asking, living the words each time the page answers, “Yes, I’m here. Always.”

Biography
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D., is the 2009-2011 Poet Laureate of Kansas; founder of Transformative Language Arts at Goddard College, where she teaches; a beloved teacher and workshop facilitator; and the author of ten books. Her publications include four collections of poetry, Landed, Animals in the House, Reading the Body and Lot’s Wife; a writing guide, Write Where You Are; a memoir on cancer, community and coming home to the body, The Sky Begins At Your Feet; and she served as editor of several anthologies, and as co-editor of The Power of Words: A Transformative Language Arts Anthology. The poem she quoted from Julie Cowdin can be found in My Tree Called Life: Writing and Living Through Serious Illness, which Mirriam-Goldberg edited. She also has been deeply active in the bioregional movement since the early 1980s. In 2003, she founded the Power of Words conference at Goddard College, which brings together writers, storytellers, performers, musicians, community leaders, healers, health professionals and activists to develop the field of TLA. She also worked with others to found the TLA Network, a not-for-profit dedicated to right livelihood and networking to grow TLA as a field, profession and calling.www.TLANetwork.org, www.Goddard.edu, www.CarynMirriamGoldberg.com

This is the season for Spiritwalkers, my little retreat center in Mount Shasta.

We have had a very late winter, it snowed last Wednesday!

I am trying to de-winterize the garden. I have a Foundation for Shamanic Studies Spirits of Nature workshop here this next weekend, and a large day group here on June 19th.

Of course the garden is unfolding in it’s own miraculous way, and as we rake, plants beginning to bud are revealed. Others, like the wisteria over the cottage porch, have visibly suffered from the frost. Some trees still have branches down from the end of January storm.

Mount Shasta was declared a disaster area. Trees went down on roofs, and roads and facilities and services. There was no power for heat in town, and many of us who live on the slopes of the mountain were cozy with our wood stoves but were snowed in during the blizzard. Our community really came together on many levels to assist those who were suffering.

I was very blessed and protected and had little damage, but there is still a lot to do to clean up.

It is challenging to find balance between doing and being when you have expectations. That is why things flow so much easier when I can just be present with what is in the moment.
The garden, now, is the ideal place for finding this balance. It just is.

My garden is pretty rustic. There is a framework here, but it is not a very controlled environment like most gardens. I must admit, I do protect the vegetable garden.

Rather than discourage the deer I welcome them to have all they want of the water, grass and thimbleberry (a native plant they love).

We have an agreement. In the Fall, they can eat what they want in the garden. It works most of the time. I actually saw the does chasing away a young buck who tried to eat some flowers.

(Max is telling the deer it’s OK to eat the thimbleberry.)

There is Spirit in the garden. The same Spirit that flows through us. We are one in Being.

I have heard people say they enjoy working in their garden. I enjoy being with my garden.

Somehow, the doing gets done being present with what is. Life keeps flowing and I am connected to that. The garden is a wonderful teacher!

Della Clark is a contributing author to The Spirit of a Woman and her website is www.spiritwalkersretreat.com

Iconic moments reflect our a sense of aliveness. We recall a time when life felt best and brightest, fullest and deepest. Crystallized and enshrined they become icons of memory. At their best these moments become guideposts and treasured touchstones.  However, if we think there is nothing beyond the moment defined by the icon, then we’re held in the past. All shrines must be tended to be made new.

Will we make these memories touchstones or dross that drowns us?

In my twenties I lived and worked in Africa for five years. This time was my widest and deepest field of dreams filled with iconic moments–that best of times. Was it just youth, as someone suggested? No, I don’t think so. It was a soul connection that infused the rest of my life with meaning, shape, and difficulty.

By returning to both Botswana and Ghana in 2008 new life shone into this enshrined past. Moving into my future was a huge creative act–one not written between the covers of a book. Life truly is our highest art.

Last night I slept under two African quilts, dreaming. I’d made one quilt in Ghana and the other in Botswana. Each is made from the fabric of that place. Each swatch in these quilts tells a story. This morning my quilted dreams lingered to nurture new iconic moments for the day.

______________________
Buy our new audio book “Sightlines: A Family Love Story in Poetry and Music” at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/janetgraceriehl.
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Read Janet’s story in The Spirit of a Woman: Stories to Empower and Inspire.

Enjoy the art of Nichola Moss
Visit www.nicholart.com

Womens-Spirit.com is a place to awaken and engage us in our spiritual birthright. This is my first blog and with it comes the delightful opportunity to do something new, and to meet women from all over the world.  This is a place to share our stories and the mysteries and openings that they bring. This is a place to share the challenges and joys of living a spiritual life. I’m certain there will be surprises and gifts as we get to know each other.

We need resources to live well through the intense changes in our lives. We live in a time where we are aware that we are a global community and the better we understand, enjoy, and learn from each other, the better life we make for all people. We come from diverse faiths and backgrounds and we don’t need to agree with each other to share respect, compassion, laughter, peace, creativity, courage and wisdom. Living spirit is in all things and all peoples.

Let’s tell stories. Stories heal us and inspire us from the inside out. They deepen, soften and nourish our inner spirits.  They work on us until we begin to live their truths and shape our lives. Let’s pass on the goodness and the greatness in the world.

I have met many women who changed my life while listening to their stories.  I’d like to hear yours.  What is the theme of the story you would tell to help make a difference in the world?

Terry Laszlo-Gopadze

Wisdom lives within us, we have only to connect with it. But, how? In the 1980s, when I lived in New Mexico, I studied Psychosynthesis Professional Training with the Intermountain Associates of Psychosynthesis, co-directed by Molly Young Brown and Walter Polt. Walter collaborated with me on training programs for my consulting firm Clear Communication and I coached him as he first put his “From Anger to Power” process into words and then into print.

Whenever Walter was in a situation with a client or group that required him to dip into his well of intuitive wisdom, he wrote these words on the page: “Write, pen!” and then proceeded to find out, from thus beseeching and invoking his pen what the heart of the matter was. What really needed to be done or said in this situation? Where did the truth lie?

It’s a wonderful tool and every time the work went to a deeper and truer place because Walter checked in with his wisdom self. Try it yourself next time you could use some words of wisdom末from your own storehouse.

Janet Grace Riehl explores the human hunger for connection in every direction. Upward into the world of spirit. Inward and downward in a search for greater cultivation of self. Horizontally and outward into relationships with romantic and married partners, family, friends, community, and casually encountered strangers. Visit www.riehlife.com to read more of Janet’s work to connect through the arts and across cultures.