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There will be occasional guest spots from my, uh, “other personalities”….

At least you’ve been warned…

I Still Believe…..

Dear Santa….

I’ve been contemplating this “naughty and nice” thing. The truth is, I’ve been both.

The difference this year is that I’ve been catching myself in the act and when I do, I ask myself, “Is this what Santa would want me to do?”

This year I noticed that there are times when my socks are so dirty that I think you might have put coal in them but then I get real and take care of what’s actually making them dirty by washing the kitchen floor.

See, changing how we behave is not a huge thing. It’s a bunch of silly things that we keep overlooking. Washing the kitchen floor isn’t a big moral issue. It’s an act of love for the others around us whose socks will also get dirty and then there’s a whole family with dirty socks.

Turns out I do still believe in you, at least the part that sees me when I’m sleeping and knows when I’m awake, but especially when I’m awake when I should be asleep. Those are the times when I contemplate how I could be more like you, at least in spirit and not in judgment (I try to avoid milk and cookies these days but it’s okay if other people eat them). How I act is not always a reflection of who I am and I’m trying to bring those things into line a little better.

So, I think I’ve figured you out. If we want to know if Santa’s happy, look at our family’s socks, right?

Thanks for your help, Santa. I think I’ve got it from here.

Love, Ellen

Will Social Media Cause The Next World War?

Or are we already fighting it and don’t even realize it?

After four years as a Facebook junkie, I’m moving into an introspective period about its value and how it has changed me and those in my life.

When I first joined, it was an oasis. Introvert that I am, I am not energized by physical interaction with people. I find conversation difficult because my head is always moving faster than the conversation and I have a hard time listening, which sort of defeats the purpose of verbal discourse. I often want to rewind the discussion to go back to an interesting point but by then we’ve moved on to talking about flowers and birds and cupcake recipes. Facebook allows me and others to address something that was said earlier so we can expand on it. This is like candy for me!

But on the shadow side, Facebook is a place for us to dispel our aggression on each other. As hard as we try to explain ourselves in civil terms, there is always someone (sometimes it’s me) who can’t stop their own train of thought long enough to hear what is really being said. Feelings get hurt, misunderstandings occur, and prejudices are inflamed; all the ingredients for a good feud.

Four years has allowed me to follow the arcs of growth for a number of people. Some who have been too shy to speak up in real life have found a forum for expression here and we have tapped into absolute gold mines of thought; the meek have inherited a whole new world. By the same token, those who have typically experienced great power in the physical realm have stumbled on an army of bully victims who now have at least a virtual shield against their wrath. No longer is the power one-sided. People across the globe are standing up and being heard and it is catching the bullies off guard.

What I have yet to get used to, though, is having to “listen” to the voices of the formerly powerful as they pull out their back-up arsenals of vitriol in an effort to regain their authority. The Bible gets tossed around like a hot potato and pictures of guns make a vain attempt to impersonate the real thing. Caustic humor is rampant as we try to impress our friends with our cleverness and end up stabbing others in the heart.

So my question is, will social media cause us to sharpen our blades or will it encourage us to lay down our weapons? Will those whose inclination it is to divide and conquer continue to feel further empowered by this anonymity or will they be healed by gentle encouragement to examine their thinking? Will we accept the responsibility not to just spew rhetoric and attempt to educate ourselves about what is true on a deeper level?

Bottom line, we know more about each other now than many of us ever wanted to. We’ve gone deeper and seen into the souls of people we thought we knew and in most cases found that we didn’t really know them at all, for better or worse.

Will social media cause, or will we use it to prevent, the next world war?

And So, We Begin Again….

In the days unfolding after the birth of my first greatnephew, I am filled with thoughts of what this means….

Though I was nearly the youngest in my own family even among the extended generation, I was still one of the first to become an aunt. My first nephew was almost too heavy for me to lift even at less than 7 pounds. As several others followed after him they got progressively easier to carry.

Now, nearly 40 years after that firstborn, a new generation has begun in my family and as I look back over the travails that got us to this point I have some thoughts for the new parents of this sweet gift of renewal about how we went about surviving long enough to continue the family name in the person of my newborn greatnephew….

My 9-year-old self who was an aunt for the first time held the weight of a new life in my inexperienced hands, afraid that I would drop him. He wiggled and jiggled and did his best to escape my grasp. I put him down and to my surprise, he stopped struggling. There will be times all throughout your boy’s life when you will want to give up because you can’t control his movements and in those moments you will have to let him go with your arms even as you hold him tighter with your hearts. Don’t be afraid to release him gently to the world.

There may be others who follow him and they will all be different no matter how consistent you try to be. Who they become may be in absolute defiance of what you would have wanted for them, but trust that this is who they were meant to be regardless of outcome, and understand that no circumstance, no matter how painful, is without value. Someone else’s life story relies on the whole unfolding as it must.

For you as parents, though it may sound overly dramatic, this is your first step toward obsolescence. Instead of living for yourselves, you have now stepped aside and accepted that your lives are about supporting the greater good as it manifests through your child. Your dreams, through your children, must not be played out literally but rather as wisdom. You will need to put aside your own failures and personal tragedies in order to offer up a clean slate that still bears the chalk dust of those who have gone before but stands ready for this child to make his own mark.

Share with this boy all that you are, but know at the end of the day that the most important part of who you are right now is a parent. Be kind but be firm. Be wise but be willing to learn. Be amazed and delighted, and comfort him as he struggles to grow. And for yourselves, be renewed through all that he is.

Thank you for the reminder that all of us live on through those who follow and our stories become their heritage. Let us all remember what our lives mean to others as they pick and choose their way to their own legacy. May we all be the examples of survival and triumph they need to inspire them forward.

And most of all, may your sweet young family bring you more joy than you ever imagined it could…..

Where Did Those 30 Years Go?

I was disappointed to learn that a favorite friend would not be attending our 30th year high school reunion this weekend.

A centerpiece of my growing up experience, his reason was: “I just don’t feel like I’ve grown over the past 10 years since our 20th.” I almost laughed but didn’t, knowing how often I have felt the same way in my adult life. I didn’t push him but reminded him that there is hardly one of us who feels that he or she has “made their mark” yet and that we never know when our presence will make a difference in someone else’s life.

I’ve gone to every reunion since we started having them. It’s a strange thing to do, introvert that I am, but for the same reason I used to go to the dances on Friday nights and sit up in a dark corner of the bleachers all alone, I’m afraid I’ll miss something if I’m not there.

But lots of people don’t go to their reunions, usually citing high school as the most miserable time of their life. I can relate. Though I had something to center my experiences around, a safe place, I realize that in my own misery, I didn’t notice much of what was going on around me, the things that made others’ days unbearable. All I know was that my own struggles made me pretty unpleasant to be around sometimes.

So I go to the reunions to atone for how I might have inadvertently hurt others, though when I tell them about the incidents I recall, they graciously act like they don’t remember. But I do, and those memories weigh me down. Having the opportunity to let them know that I was aware of them then does something to heal me, and them too, I hope.

If these 30 years have taught me anything, it’s that change is constant, people die without our noticing, and we will always have more growing to do no matter how many reunions we live to see.

I hope my friend will change his mind and join us at the last minute to engage in meaningless reminiscences and small talk, and maybe a few healing conversations. I know his presence would have great meaning for me….

Heroes or Idiots?

This morning I posted a video on Facebook that received mixed reviews.

It’s a fairly crude, mocking representation of soldiers doing what some soldiers do to blow off steam in a hot, barren area surrounded by other young people with huge guns and too much time on their hands, fueled by anxiety and Red Bull.

It made me remember back to when I thought to enlist in the military myself, but my dad, a WWII veteran, discouraged me from doing so. Though he was vague about his reasons as they applied to me, he just said that it might be an uncomfortable situation. Dad told many stories over the years about the heroes he’d served with who had sacrificed life an limb for their fellow countrymen. The image he created made me want to be one of those people.

But there is a reality most soldiers don’t talk about that is probably more accurate than the image of the strong, stoic Marine we see in recruiting advertisements. Maybe this is the stuff Dad was talking about.

When thousands of young people, mostly men, are thrown together thousands of miles from home, often with nothing to do and nowhere to go, a certain amount of “idiocy” is bound to occur. These are kids who just a year or two earlier were doing what teenagers do — hanging out with their buddies, driving fast, testing limits — so the fact that they are wearing uniforms and carrying ridiculously powerful weapons around does not mean that they have instantly gained maturity.

I have to wonder if the reason so many soldiers don’t talk about their experiences when they come home has to do not so much with the horrors of battle they’ve seen, but maybe with the struggle to grow up they’ve observed in the face of incredible pressure, realizing that many of them are still just teenaged boys inside. A good many of them have likely been pushed to participate in activities they knew were not acceptable, yet the camaraderie of being part of a group caused them to make decisions they might not otherwise have had to consider.

This year, the suicide rate among soldiers is averaging one per day. Serving one’s country in the military, once considered a rite of passage and an honor,  is causing many to collapse. The pressure of fighting a 10-year war that’s continued purpose is questionable, and coming home to an economy that is having trouble supporting their return is making re-entry into society too difficult for some.

I have no idea what the answer is. I don’t know what should be considered acceptable behavior in the military so that our kids don’t lose their marbles. More discipline?  Less?

All I know is that in an age where videos of every kind of behavior imaginable are available at our fingertips, I have to just SMH (shake my head) and RME (roll my eyes) at some of what I see and be grateful that the creative mind is still alive, regardless of my judgement about the art-worthiness of its output.

I guess, for me, it’s the heroism of the “idiots” who remind those around them that though the situation is deadly serious, moments of ridiculousness do as much to keep them all alive as the automatic weapons they are carrying.

When Lightning Fails to Strike

A few times a week I spend about a half hour with a friend from my neighborhood.

Our relationship has been forged by a circumstance relating to her eyesight that requires me to help her out by giving her a ride to take her daughter to school. My friend’s field of vision is narrowing, sort of the reverse of macular degeneration, so her peripheral vision is slowly closing in and will eventually leave her blind. Fortunately, the rate of loss has been slower than initially expected but still leaves her unable to drive.

During these quick jaunts that make my aging car feel useful we manage to have some pretty deep philosophical discussions. She and I are about the same age, are living in similar circumstances, and have many of the same fears and worries.

What we’ve come to discover is that we are both waiting for lightning to strike, for that jolt that lights up our understanding of what we are supposed to do with our lives.

But life doesn’t work that way, does it?

From what I’ve experienced (and often choose to ignore) is that life is a constant flow of tiny sparks rather than grand flashes. In our every action is a barely discernible pinprick that gooses us a little, like sitting down on one of those electrified mats that keep pets off your couch. They’re not strong enough to cause pain, but they are definitely uncomfortable, forcing us to change our position out of avoidance.

Maybe that’s our problem. We’re only uncomfortable enough to seek to make ourselves less uncomfortable. We’re slightly frustrated by our lack of initiative but not outright pissed off. We turn up the car radio louder so we don’t hear that clunking sound in the engine that warns us that our world may soon be screeching to a halt.

But we keep on rolling, ignoring the signs. We rely on what we know about ourselves to keep us going. We are educated, aware, and know what we are capable of. My friend has an MSW degree and once worked with cancer patients, possibly one of the most difficult jobs a social worker can do. She is extremely capable but under-confident, having begun her career when she was too young to be fueled by wisdom. And then her vision began to close in.

When she started a family, her life as a stay-at-home mom accommodated her vision loss. I chose work that is satisfying but leaves me fairly isolated. We have both spent many years away from the outer stimulation that reminds us of where we fit in a world that seems to grow ever larger and more complex. The spark plug wires that used to connect our inspiration to our deeds are corroded and we’ve come to crave the force of lightning because we’ve lost connection to the steady current that used to keep us moving. Everybody else seems to have a newfangled computer-controlled engine now. Heck, my car still has a cassette-tape player.

So maybe ignition of our inspiration is not the problem at all. More likely, we’re afraid that we’ve been sitting in one place to long and don’t believe the fuel in our old tanks is any good or trust that the old car is up for the trip so we don’t dare leave the driveways of our minds lest we break down in the middle of our journey.

The smart thing to do would be to hook up a trickle charger and slowly let our batteries revive, change the oil and put in a new fuel filter, some fresh gas, and trust that the frame of the old car is still sturdy enough to carry us where we need to go. We could try jump-starting the system with huge shocks all we want, but with faulty wiring and sludgy internal combustion, no amount of lightning force can do anything but fry the battery. At our age, we need a gentler approach.

Ironically, maybe it’s the humility of age, wisdom, a little rust, and a narrowing field of vision that are exactly what we need to fix the problem and focus on the rest of the journey.

But a new car couldn’t hurt either….;)

Grace and the Art of Not Setting Goals

I used to think there was something wrong with me.

I was, and still am, constitutionally incapable of setting a goal. My brain just doesn’t work that way.

So I felt bad about myself.

A lot.

All the time.

I would get so anxious knowing that even if I did set a goal, I would not achieve it, yet the world kept pushing me to “make a plan!”

As I look around me these days, I’m learning that maybe I wasn’t so crazy after all. The “plans” that people made for themselves seem to be falling apart. They thought that if they saved enough, invested enough, played by the rules enough, they could earn the grace they prayed for.

But grace doesn’t work that way.

OK, so I don’t know exactly HOW grace works, but I don’t think it’s something you are worthy of or not. It just IS.

Maybe it is grace that kept me healthy when I didn’t have insurance, or sustained me when I needed a job, or allows me to spend a peaceful half hour in the morning therapeutically massaging my aging dog, watching the sun rise on another day in our life together, not knowing if it will be our last but allowing us the peace to just enjoy the moment either way.

In the cacophony of our modern world when everyone wants to tell everyone else how to achieve their wildest dreams, I realize that my wildest dream is the one I wake up to every morning when I open my eyes and catch the jet stream that carries me up and away, like a starling in a murmuration….

No goals, no worries…. just flying….

Becoming…. The Chaos of Taking Flight

Letting Sleeping Dogs Lie

If we let sleeping dogs lie, should we expect them to tell the truth when they wake up?

I’m feeling grammatically cheeky this morning, but this idea actually encapsulates what I’ve been thinking about lately. I am neither a historian nor a social scientist so I won’t even attempt to inject anything but my own observations into this, but it seems like a pattern is emerging.

Three things caught my eye on Facebook this morning. One read:

Everybody!!!!!!!, let’s do this. We should flood Facebook with this: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands: one nation under GOD, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all”. RE-POST IF YOU THINK GOD, OUR COUNTRY, OUR FLAG, AND OUR MILITARY DESERVE RESPECT!!!!. Let’s just see how many people will!!!!..

Another said:

It is interesting to me that when you do something with a giving spirit, there are often those who need to search for an ulterior motive.  (Renee F.)

And the third:

On our way home …. a deer leaped out and landed on the car. What that did to the car and everything that involves is secondary to how we feel about the Deer. I’m still processing…and, finding that I’m afraid to get back on these country roads. (Michele S.)

What tied these three ideas together for me was their common theme of TRUST.

As we are wrestling to find a way out of the mess our economy has become and people stand in public squares all across the country to voice their disillusionment about it, the dog that is our collective conscience is waking up …. and it’s hungry.

A college community is feeling shaken to its core by the shattering of trust that has been accomplished by the revelation at Penn State of a scandal involving the sexual abuse of several young boys by a former coach of the football team. Though this is not the first time such an incident has happened in our country, it points to a much deeper issue involving our collective morality. A revered community leader has engaged in a most base violation of those in his care and yet he can’t bring himself to admit that his actions were wrong. Those surrounding him who were aware of the problem had a similar dilemma. It makes me wonder how this pathology of deception and abuse of the powerless has become so prevalent in our country.

Since 1954 when Congress changed the Pledge of Allegiance to include the words “under God”, our country has been in spiritual turmoil. A decade earlier, we had righted one of the most egregious wrongs in recent history with WWII but our victory had created a taste for rooting out evil. We began to see it everywhere and in everyone.  Fear of our country being overtaken by Communism resulted in this knee-jerk decision to amend the original Pledge of Allegiance, written by Francis Bellamy in 1892, in an effort to fend off Godlessness, like a necklace of garlic warding off a vampire, as though a profession of allegiance to God in the public square could force people to abide by the rules of the United States and by extension, the Bible. All it did was incite rebellion.

This rebellious pioneerism has come to define most Americans. We want to be free to choose our actions with a minimum of interference. When we feel our ideals are being compromised, we are allowed to stand up and protest. Too often, though, we have left the dog to slumber too long while our rights were being impinged, relying on the stink of injustice to reach its sensitive nose and bring it back to consciousness.

Now, the sleeping dog has shaken itself awake to the smell of what’s going on and it is snapping, growling, and barking at what has been happening to the freedoms in our country, a Constitutional Republic that had been formed in reaction to this very oppression by government that had demanded control over how people worked, worshiped, and contributed. It has become increasing clear that we have allowed the misplaced perception of evil to once again invade our trust and shake our confidence.

In the early part of the 20th century as America became more prosperous, we seemed to forget why we existed in the first place. We had declared that every man had the right to determine his own destiny, with the idea that if we all pitched in and lifted ourselves up by helping to fulfill each other’s needs, we could create something that had never existed before — an open society of opportunity, free of the constraints of an oppressive government that would demand to determine our course.

Little by little, as our country grew beyond our wildest expectations, we panicked and lost our ability to trust that ideal. Companies bought other companies in order to squeeze out competition and maximize profits. In reaction to unfair business practices due to the size and power of these organizations, we thought that if we created laws to dictate fairness and prosperity for all then everything would be made equal. We thought that if we told people how to behave toward one another, we could create an atmosphere of mutual respect, but we can see now that the corporations ultimately won out. The concentration of economic power we had so eschewed in our early years, then in the form of government, had become the kind of bully we thought we’d escaped by rising up against it. The accomplice was looking the other way as the abuser took advantage again and again of the little guy who had no say in the matter.

I don’t know what inspired the coach at Penn State to initiate the violations he is accused of, or who was the first banker to make the decision to sell and profit from a bad investment, but history reveals that if we get away with something once, we’re likely to try it again. If no one disturbs the dog, we have carte blanche to do whatever we want, right?

We can declare our allegiance to God, the flag, and apple pie in public all we want, but does that absolve us of what we do when we think no one is looking or does it simply cover up the misdeeds of some very unrighteous people, like the bankers and politicians in our country, buoyed by a lack of regulation that allowed them to flagrantly cheat their way to unprecedented personal profits at the expense of those who trusted them to be the backbone of our economy? Were the jobs of the other coaches at Penn State more valuable than the spiritual and emotional health of a young boy whose life would be irrevocably altered by their indifference? Did they forget to pledge their allegiance to a higher moral call or were they the ones shouting it the loudest?

We, the people, are feeling the visceral ache of a trust violated. In the wake of a violent raping on 9/11, we were encouraged to take a ride in search of prosperity on our bucolic country roads in an attempt to build a brighter future for ourselves and our families, but then a huge deer suddenly ran out in front of us and there was no way to avoid it. The peaceful grandeur that had been our country was suddenly laid across the hood of our common vehicle and we were faced with the decision to put it out of its misery or try to save it. Meanwhile, the vehicle is wrecked and we’re going to have to figure out how to get to work as we ponder whether the deer was being chased or if we had simply built the road in its way.

Our society, once based on mutual nourishment, not a commune but a community, has lost its sense of responsibility to the health of the whole and our appetite for hunting down evil has grown stronger again. When a neighbor comes to welcome us with a fresh batch of cookies, we immediately wonder what they want from us. When a friend is experiencing need, we think they must have done something to deserve that lack. We don’t want to get involved but we’ll throw money at a charity so we don’t have to look into the eyes of the homeless person that used to be our neighbor or get our hands dirty by touching theirs; we might catch their bad luck. And we definitely don’t trust the government to decide how to fix the problem. Everybody knows that dog is vicious and unpredictable….

So, if, as we pledge, we do trust in God, then we will do the right thing even when God and the dog seem to be napping. We’ll stop poking God awake and whining, “God, tell those guys to cut it out! They don’t love you as much as we do so they don’t deserve anything!” It seems to me, as in any good relationship, that God needs to be able to trust in us just as much, yet we’re too often proving ourselves unworthy partners. Are we honoring our own pledge?

In these struggling relationships that are eating away at our collective trust, will the Penn State victims be able to forgive their abuser and his accomplices? Will our politicians and bankers stop encouraging us to blame each other for our troubles when they were the ones speeding down the road in the car that hit the deer that got us into this mess? And will we be able to give of ourselves to those whose spirits are so diminished that they feel they have nothing to lose, with no questions asked and  no expectation of return? Are we willing to offer them a ride until the car gets fixed no matter how long it takes?

Oh hey, since the dog’s awake, I guess I’d better go feed it something nourishing. Wouldn’t want it to go in search of evil just to satisfy its appetite. Nice talking to y’all.

Steve Jobs Was My Spiderman

“To design something really well you have to get it. You have to really grok [to intimately and completely share the same reality or line of thinking with another physical or conceptual entity] what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to thoroughly understand something – chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that. Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask a creative person how they did something, they may feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after awhile. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people have.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. They don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions, without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better designs we will have.”

-Steve Jobs, Founder of Apple, 1955-2011

Yup, I could have written all this myself because it says what I’ve been trying to articulate since I was young.

I got in trouble a lot for daydreaming in school. It wasn’t that I wasn’t listening; I was simply connecting what I was hearing to something other than what the teacher might have intended. The information was a spider and the activity in my head was the web being spun, shooting itself off in all directions while remaining attached to a solid center.

The way we’ve been trying to educate kids today through standardized testing seems to assume only a solid center floating in empty space, as though making it more dense will somehow make it stronger. But if you’ve ever walked down the street early in the morning and been caught right across the eyes by a single strand of spider silk, you know that can’t possibly be true. A spider knows that to walk the distance a microfilament of webbing can travel in an instant would take forever, so why do it?

If Steve Jobs did anything for humanity, it was to teach us to think like the spider and imagine a whole new universe all in the midst of an intricate, spectacular, ever-expanding web.

And A Little Kid Shall Lead Them….

A friend lost her father suddenly last week and she has been sharing her experience of grief with us in a way that reminds me of the profound days and weeks after my own father passed away nearly 20 years ago.

When I was 28, my father had been unwell most of my life. After suffering a near fatal heart attack at age 50, he was forced to retire from a busy job as the senior minister at a large Congregational church in New York and start over again somewhere less stressful. We moved to a farm my parents had bought a few years earlier in southern New Hampshire.

For years prior, we had traveled from NY to a summer retreat near there with a large group of families from the church, and one of our favorite destinations to visit was The Friendly Farm in Dublin. We’d all show up and spend the day feeding the vast array of farm animals with the food provided. It was an exciting experience for a bunch of kids from the suburbs.

When he heard we were moving to the farm for good, the owner of The Friendly Farm presented my dad with a beautiful Jersey calf as a gift. We loaded the week-old calf, whom we named “Irene” (eirênê) after the goddess of peace, into the backseat of our VW bug and took her home.

Over the years, Irene was mother to several calves, many of them not her own. They were Holsteins, Herefords, Ayrshires …. she had no qualms about who nursed off of her as long as her udder was empty and comfortable when they were done feeding. She lived for many years as matriarch of the farm.

So it seemed right, many years later when it was time to make a transition in my life, to spend a summer working at The Friendly Farm as a way to clear my head with some hard physical work at a place that represented good memories.

As the warm, early April sun filtered through the tall pines to melt the remaining snow, I would arrive early each day to begin the Spring chores. A batch of tiny goats had arrived for the season and my first task was to feed them — all twenty or so. In a 5-gallon bucket I would combine warm water with a powdery formula mix and fill twenty 10 oz. Coke bottles, fitting each one with a rubber nipple. In order to not lose track of who had already eaten — goats are tricksters — I would lift two at a time over a wooden gate and when they were done they’d be replaced by two more. The ritual made my spirit laugh.

But even as my own heart was expanding, my father’s was shutting down. When I told him I was working at The Friendly Farm, instead of his usual feigned disappointment that I wasn’t studying to be a brain surgeon whenever I’d tell him about my latest occupation, he just said, “That’s great, El.” His fight was gone. On April 22, 1992 — Earth Day — he finally gave up for good.

I thought about him in the weeks that followed as the farm began to come alive with new babies from the cows, sheep, chickens, and goats. I remembered all the creatures that had been born on our own farm in the early dawn before school, finding a new baby calf or foal all slippery and slimy being licked clean by its mother, and the amazement at watching that hour-old baby stand up on its shaky legs and begin nursing. All around me, new life was springing up again even as I struggled to fully understand that another had come to an end.

I worked through those days feeling some sense of comfort in the routine of the farm but still wasn’t experiencing acute grief. I wondered why I couldn’t feel anything. I decided that I had grieved him so many times over the years that what I was feeling was relief that he finally wasn’t suffering anymore.

Then one day a goat gave birth to triplets. Twins are the norm so when a third is born chances are that the little one won’t survive. It was clear when I saw this tiny kid plop out after the other two that he would not live for long. He was half their size, his breathing labored, and he couldn’t stand up to nurse. His mother refused to help. I tried to get him to drink some formula but he wouldn’t take it.

I did the only thing I could think to do and brought him to a quiet place in the bottom of the barn where I made a soft bed out of sawdust and hay. I lay down beside him and stroked his tiny frightened head and assured him that he needn’t be afraid, that it was okay to let go.

And then I remembered that those were the very thoughts I had spoken in my mind as I watched my father’s life drain away in the week before he died. I picked up the baby goat and put him in my lap, cradling him against my body as he took his last heaving breaths and when at last he became still I threw my head back and let out a guttural sob…. and then spent what seemed like hours weeping and rocking that little kid as though he were my big bear of a father who had died all alone in a hospital room.

In my heart I knew that this sweet baby goat, this little kid only hours old, had been sent to help me let my father go and I watched with my mind’s eye as the two of them, healthy and strong, walked side by side into the early Spring sunlight….