Good morning from my blue chair,
I’m writing to share an annual reflective writing practice again with you — Finding the Beauty, Truth and Goodness in the year.
Yesterday, the Gingko tree out in front of my office here in Putney was shining a brilliant yellow and this morning she shed all her leaves at once in a snow-like flurry. This is her autumnal habit, prompted by the first night that the temperature descends to precisely 29 degrees. My autumnal habit is to reflect back over the year as I collect the leaves from the ground. This has been a particularity exquisite year for me. Painful, beautiful, and heart opening, it has been both difficult and fulfilling. Just a few days after Thanksgiving 2020, my dear mum’s delicate heart gently gave up and she passed away peacefully. With a lot of good help and a measure of luck, we managed to care for her in her Florida home while navigating all the complexity of the pandemic. Today, I’m gently giving myself permission to relive her last weeks. Reliving the beauty, the hard truth, and the goodness of that time we had together tending to mum as she went out ahead of us.
For many, this has been a year full of loss. Working with grief is a capacity these times are calling forth in us. During these tumultuous times, loss is not only felt when we lose a loved one. Many of us are also grieving for a lost way of life, for relationships we thought we could depend on, and for the health of the planet, among other things. Dropping-in to the reflective writing practice I’m offering here may squeeze some necessary grief up onto the surface of your attention. If so, embrace it as best you can. Scroll down to the musings on grief that bubbled up for me, which I’m sharing in the hope it may be helpful somehow.
Here is the practice: Finding the Beauty, Truth and Goodness in the Year
Carve out some time to reflect on the last year in your journal. Pulling out your calendar to jog your memory might be helpful. Then I suggest just softening your gaze back over the past year and responding to the prompts below for each of the four seasons. The invitation here is to be responding to these six prompts four times, beginning with the winter a year ago. (Could take you as long as an hour or so to complete . . . . ) Significant milestones or intimate moments in your answers are all appropriate. I think you will find that specificity gives wonderful depth to the process.
For each of the seasons, Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall:
Describe a time that you experienced beauty.
In what way(s) were you the cause of something beautiful?
In what way(s) was the truth revealed to you?
In what way(s) did you reveal or speak the truth?
In what way(s) were you on the receiving end of goodness?
In what way(s) were you the cause of goodness?
Upon completion, give yourself a little time to let your responses settle in you. I’ll be posting my annual year end practice in early December, which will give you an opportunity to look ahead and consider any reorientation, renewed commitments, or actions that all of this may inspire in you.
Enjoy this and all that you uncover as you put pen to page.
* * *
Selected Notes from my Beauty, Truth and Goodness journal writing session today:
This year, I have been learning to live without my mother here on the planet. That is the arc that stretches across my year long experience. Throughout this year I have been carrying a softness, a tenderness in the region of my heart that often wells up with a wavelike force and then subsides. Along with the tears that brimmed over in the grocery store aisles and at other surprising and inopportune times, a certain strength has emerged that perhaps I gained from having been with the truth of having witnessed her last breath. I don’t really know, though — the source of the strength remains a mystery to me.
This year I have been walking with grief and also joy. Held by the rhythms of life and the reliable embrace of gravity holding me onto this earth. Steadied by my work, good friends and family. Comforted by regular visits with the natural world. Cheered by the flurry of Gingko leaves.
Winter -
Beauty: Turning inward and tromping in the woods visiting old trees — oak, cherry, white pine, mulberry —
Goodness: Dear friends rallied around me with song and comfort food
Truth: Needing time alone - Daddy’s health faltered
Spring -
Beauty: Gloriously beautiful Sarasa chamber music concert at Brattleboro Music School in May
Goodness: Tentatively unfolding into reveling in the palest greens, spring breezes, and the company of loved ones. Spontaneous gifts left on my porch
Truth: That day I reminded myself that she isn’t there to answer the phone. Recognizing the need to pace myself
Summer -
Beauty: Feeling deeply filled up by being out on my paddle board on South Pond in the evenings
Goodness: Joy in spending time with my rowdy kindle of grandchildren — and then with a dear friend on the Vineyard for a few precious days
Truth: Feeling the impact of my family being so far flung - Portland OR, Colorado, Florida and Norway . . .
Fall -
Beauty: Returning to the hearth fire, collecting Ginkgo leaves
Goodness: Helping my dad travel for the first time in years. Remembering the last bowls of fruit my mother carefully prepared for us
Truth: This morning I spied an owl up in a now leafless tree at the edge of the field I walk past most mornings. Has it been there quietly all along? Onward we go . . .
Musings on grief:
How stunningly hard it is to live through grief. How deeply personal the experience is. How grief forges our hearts if we let it . . .
How grief is a many splendor ed thing — a direct result of love, a doorway to caring more about each other and this extraordinary planet that is our home.
How when I feel my grief, when it visits me and I can allow it to well up, my mother as well as my late sister, Katie, come in closer in some inexplicable way. So, too does the natural world I find myself so deeply connected to.
Grief comes in waves. With mum I watched it come towards me for years. With the sudden death of my sister Katie, almost forty years ago, it came in rogue form, — out of nowhere, quick and devastating. Now they are both part of the ebbing and flowing ocean that is my grief.
Feeling held by life allows me the courage to feel grief and to let it wash through me. For that I’m deeply grateful.
* * *
Sending strength to your heart as I complete this post. Thank you for taking the time to read it.
Warmly, Lyedie
November 11th 2021
Putney, VT
Photo credit: Leslie Williams