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Winter darkness creates space for journey  Listen ~ 9 minutes It's raining again and the start of Advent. I'm looking out the window but haven't put my contacts in this morning so the world is a landscape of soft shapes and colours. Somehow it seems right for this moment. I'm feeling the draw into this time of Darkness, a darkness of reflection. I almost can feel it wrapping around me like a quilt. Warm and comforting .... In the darkness, if it is clear and really cold, that's when the stars shine the brightest and you can see those ancient fires telling their stories, from great distances of time and space. It reminds me that our stories, my story, comes from the dust of those same places, the sparks of those same fires .... .... .... It feels like there's a lot to consider this Advent .... .... .... Like those ancient wise ones I feel like I'm on a great journey .... To find something really important. And yet, at the same time, I don't feel like I need to look for something or to find something that is not already accessible to me. But somehow that journey metaphor still feels like the right metaphor for traversing this space and time. Almost as if what I will find does not come from outside but is in fact my story and the way that I will tell it. Stars tell us their story in light .... What is the way that I tell my story .... ? I think we have made this Advent time too clean. We have stripped it of its power by focusing on a kind of cartoon version of following wise men on the star, of holiday activities. Advent Is a time of pain, really. The bloodiness of birth In a manger. The long journey that precedes it .... .... The perseverance of continuing through a time where it's hard sometimes to see because the light is low and it's cold, where we are in any case. And now here where I am we add in rain. Flooding rain. The ground is saturated. The paths that we have laid out for ourselves, in a very literal way, have washed away or been covered in debris .... And we are called to stay where we are and just sit in this moment. I'm feeling the call to be in it from this place .... The darkness wraps around me. And although it is daytime now I can see the light that shines in the darkness. But it is the darkness that is my calling card today. It is where what I seek is held within me. It is where my love lies, my story lies. And I walk towards my story .... I walk toward myself .... ~
Centred on evocative and deeply healing guided meditations, Kimiko holds On-line Healing Circles Monday mornings at 9 a.m. and Thursday evenings at 7 p.m. pacific. Please join us. Learn more at the Good Vibrations: the Energy of Resilience facebook page, check out the Healing link on this site or drop her a note by e-mail.
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 Listen ~ 2 minutes, 20 seconds It was always the case that You would be here and gone It doesn't matter who the You is Any of us Are here And we're gone moving in-and-out of each other's circles of existence Some of you closer than others Some of you into the most intimate moments of my circle of Self And yet it's still true that You are here and gone This isn't a lament This is simply a truth telling And actually, truth be known, it is a telling of gratitude Because the part The part that I want You to hear the gratitude for the part that I want to remind Myself of Is that You were here .... And truth be known Even though You are now gone I still feel You Blessed be .... ~
Centred on evocative and deeply healing guided meditations, Kimiko holds Virtual Healing Circles Monday mornings at 9 a.m. and Thursday evenings at 7 p.m. pacific. Please join us. Learn more at the Good Vibrations: the Energy of Resilience facebook page, check out the Healing link on this site or drop her a note by e-mail.  My body knew before my brain remembered. I’d been walking around for days with this hole punched through me, like those cartoons where someone is shot by a cannon and it cookie cutters their middle out. November 11, 2016, we’re scheduled to take Paul into the hospital to spend the weekend on the palliative care ward. The idea is to be in a place where he can be monitored while they get his pain meds sorted out. Days before he had od’ed and it was scary as f*^k. We hadn’t anticipated how Remembrance Day would impact getting him there. The streets were blocked for the parade and gathering at city hall, and all the feeder streets that would take us to the bridge seemed to be barricaded. We were turned back at every route we tried until we were able to detour through the other side of the city. It turns out this would portend the whole experience. This was supposed to have been temporary. Come in, get your pain under control and then go home. Instead it all fell apart. I mean, more than it already was. Everything had started crumbling when he found that first lump that he thought was a canker sore. But for a while it seemed like the pieces could be put back together. Now they were crushed, dust.  I started to feel this hole earlier in the week. And I realize now that taking Bill into care had triggered it. The institutional feel, the medicalization, the stark room, staff in scrubs. Even the way Bill’s and Paul’s gaits resembled each other as they walked through the corridors. The Cowboy Junkies singing David Bowie’s Five Years broke me open today, tapping a deep and ferocious grief ~ a profound and alive grief that cradled love and regret, desire and loneliness, hope and joy. It acknowledged that while there is grief in the loss there is also grief in the new possibilities that emerge from that. That might seem strange. Hold it for a minute in the context of Remembrance Day and maybe you’ll see it. Five years. And it’s everything pouring out of me. Five years. Grief for lost opportunity. Five years. For the Earth, for racism and violence. Five years. For the music that will never be. Five years. And tears of joy, for the fierce beauty of life. Five years. My body alive to possibility. . . Five years. I love You, You’re beautiful Yes You ~
Centred on evocative and deeply healing guided meditations, Kimiko holds Virtual Healing Circles Monday mornings at 9 a.m. and Thursday evenings at 7 p.m. pacific. Please join us. Learn more at the Good Vibrations: the Energy of Resilience facebook page, check out the Healing link on this site or drop her a note by e-mail.  His tuneless hum cued me when he was moving. I’d listen for the shuffle of shoes to hear where he was heading. Bathroom. Back to the living room. Ok. I could relax. It's been 19 months since I came to support Bill through pandemic lockdown. Like everyone I had no idea that a year and a half later we'd still be in it. As the waves waxed and waned, the steadier tide was dementia. This is one that rolls in but does not recede. Now we're coming to the point where I can no longer on my own keep the rising water at bay. In a few days he goes into care. Two main emotions hold a balanced tension within me. Sadness acknowledges that it will be a loss for him to leave his home — his favorite spot on the couch, peanut butter and jam sandwiches, watching the hummingbirds at the feeder on the porch. He no longer knows the neighbours who greet him as they walk their dogs, but he enjoys the interaction and they all think he's so sweet. I've known Bill for 35 years and only recently have I experienced the sweet that others were exposed to. Although he and Amy, my in-laws, Paul's parents, have lived close to us, we never had a particularly close relationship. We saw them for holiday meals, occasional Sunday suppers and events. Twice when Finn was a baby we took little holidays together but that's a long time ago. Bill always seemed emotionally distant and somewhat disinterested in our lives. I knew that alcoholism had affected his marriage and relationship with his children. And although he has been dry for most of the years I've known him, his interactions with his children remained, at best, surface. After Amy died we made a point of reaching out more, more phone calls, more visits. I continued that after Paul died. The other abiding emotion, I recognize, is gratitude. And when I say that, I can feel the truth of it wash through me like a cleansing wave. Gratitude for these past 19 months. Gratitude for the opportunity to have a relationship with Bill that would not have been possible otherwise. To eat meals together, to tend .... not just that I tended him but in small ways he tended me .... Calling out and asking if I needed help in the kitchen, calling me M’dear as I assisted him to prepare for and snuggle into bed .... It was a fraught beginning for sure after the first few weeks I was here. Then his dementia took him to a place of feeling like I had done something — I had sabotaged the phones, I was preventing him from driving, which to be honest I was. I parked my car in front of the garage so that he couldn't take the truck even if he wanted to. Him threatening to call the police to make me leave but not actually knowing how to do it. And then that passed and we settled into rhythms that changed with the tide of dementia .... Where he used to make coffee, get his own breakfast and shower himself, now there is so much less that he does. The last thing that he still will do is to make himself a peanut butter and jam sandwich. The time here has given me an opportunity to slow down, to be in this place, and to inhabit a world where he and I are family. And granted, he doesn’t know that in truth we actually are. He knows who I am by name but not by relationship. He knows that I am the one who is here with him. And when the homecare worker asked him what he would do if I couldn’t live here anymore, he didn’t have a response for that other than “that would be a tragedy.” But it’s not just the fact that he is my father-in-law that makes us family. It’s that we have shared this home together, this world together. We have broken bread and washed dishes. I have helped him bathe. We have gardened together. We have rejoiced over the hummingbirds coming to feed, even when he couldn’t think of what to call them. It’s a great gift to recognize the gratitude in this time. And the other day as we sat over a meal and I realized that in a few days I would be sitting alone at that table, I felt a pang of recognition for the emptiness that the house would feel when he left. Because as much as I have kept him company, he has also kept me company. He has provided me with a rhythm of checking in, creating a break from my work in order to make sure he had fresh coffee and a sandwich for lunch. Caring for him has necessitated focus and structure. When he's gone I don’t know if it really will feel as if the tide has receded. Or is it that it had washed up so high that it was time to step out of it altogether? Maybe the latter. And, our relationship will continue. I will visit him where he is. And it may be that he will be unhappy with me, unhappy there, I don’t know. It may be that after a few days he settles right in. And I hope that at least in some way that will be the case. He will be surrounded by people who are caring for him. And I will be left here with the cat and the garden and the mementos of the life that he lived here with Amy and then with me. |
Kimiko KarpoffScattered moments 
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