Imagine if not mincing our words was valued, rather than seen as rude, inconsiderate, abrupt or inappropriate. 

And when it comes to loss, grief and heartache, wouldn’t allowing people an honest voice rather than silencing, ignoring or stumbling on what to say to be “respectful” be valuable and an antidote to suppressed or covered up grief and loss. Surely the truth is also the doorway to considered and more consciously made personal choices and a catalyst for well-needed change in the collective.

What are some scenarios of not mincing words?

A physician being open and honest when asked about a cancer prognosis.  A complaint letter after malpractice causing a stillbirth.  Revealing your abuse to someone you trust. Approaching an employer about a colleague whose mental health is in question and who may need support.  Holding a health awareness event about something you’ve been through and the pitfalls to avoid.  Having a conversation around the family table to talk about feelings about how life really is.  

It’s not an easy task for many of us to speak what’s really on our heart.  Instead, we mince our words by softening what we want to say, keep things to ourselves, or cage things to sound more appetising.  Why do we do this?  We’re scared of….

It takes both violets and sunflowers in this world to make an impactful garden of change.

Imagine a delicate violet flower bending away instead of standing tall. Let’s call her the shrinking violet.  Can she too speak up about her difficult lived experiences and what change she wants to see in the world when her norm is to be somewhat shy, timid, modest and reluctant to be the centre of attention or someone seeking recognition?

Sounds ironic doesn’t it.  But I believe a shrinking violet can be an advocate and be impactful.

 At a recent event Advocates Rising that I facilitated, 12 “gritted women” who had been through darn difficult life changes and challenges turned up.  A great start showing they were at least part of a “garden.”  Many felt a degree of strength, but with reservations and tendency towards shrinking violet.

When we looked at what stirred them, but also what slowed them in speaking up and creating some well-needed change in areas where they had suffered, many were shy, modest and certainly not wanting to attract attention with a common theme being they didn’t feel qualified enough. Here were some other common and familiar traits:

• Avoiding public speaking or feel like they don’t have the skills to speak up.

• Feeling nervous about stating their point of view that may feel confrontational.

• Hesitating before sharing their vulnerable story for fear of “bringing it all up.”

• Scared they will be judged, ostracised or shamed.

  …

My dad had a living while he was dying experience.  He was fortunate to have a cancer that had a degree of predictability in prognosis, but dad didn’t ask the timeframe.  He simply asked the specialist to support him live well while he could consciously decide what was important to him.  Dad also liked checking off lists, so intuitively he did what he felt called to do. This included doing his last timely road-trip, selling his car before his disease could potentially rob him of this pleasure and privilege and making amends as best possible with people and what was still a little incomplete.  From my reckonings, he did this as best possible.  His final phone call to me was short.  He knew.  I knew.  He simply said, “Today this phone call will be short.  Farewell.”  And as I lit a candle for him the following night speaking in the airwaves to him  “choose your time dad”, I noticed a long streak of pink light emanate from the candle into the air.  I knew in that moment he got his wings.  And indeed, it was in that exact moment.

Yesterday in my Bold Women Speak role I spoke with a young woman, who has just supported two important women in her life die as best possible.  Her favourite nana and her husband’s mum. 

This woman is wise beyond her years, and her soul sings Death Doula.   Not yet qualified but soon to be, she certainly has an innate sense of offering dignity in the dying process and she is “uber-qualified through lived experience” in my opinion….

Your advocacy recipe needs to be served up.

Last night I roared internally over something that’s been brewing for some time. It didn’t spill over in loud, angry or menacing shrieks or shouts-off, but it felt heard volcanically under my breath that had no steam-escape route.

To let you into this story that involved potato and leek soup may be too trivial.  But in the larger scheme of things, this soup is about long-held grief and having a voice which has been squashed for some years.  I made the soup as a statement.  It got uneaten by the other.   Words say it all.  He’s not interested in my stance on roles and contribution that I have been grieving the loss of.  That’s an important ingredient in me hanging with those who appreciate truth-telling, grief-sharing and hange-making.

So what does my potato and leek soup making have to do with me writing about grief and the importance of your advocacy being out there in the world? 

Think about your own grief soup? …

Slip one, knit one, yarn forward, slip stitch over the knit one and other stitch, purl one.  That creates the pattern for my pullover I’m trying to complete well before the end of  winter when I no longer need it for the cold season!

This week I’ve been knitting as compulsory brain rest from writing my book proposal for Hay House with a deadline in a week’s time.  I’ve brought that timeline forward to this Saturday morning so I can finally enjoy a weekend off putting pen to paper or typing on the laptop.

But the book writing process has not just been about book structure, story arcs, chapter headings, competitive analysis and chapter samples amongst other things that demand a lot of time and thought.

Writing is simply the knitting needles.  With the proposed title of my memoir Follow the Red Thread: The Voice beneath the Weave, I’ve been looking at patterns in my life which have had an impact on who I’ve become and the voice I have or haven’t had. 

Grief doesn’t happen from one event.  It comes from repeated little deaths or living losses that erode and shape our identity over time.  I call this threads of little deaths that get woven into our lives. And those cumulative losses and our response to them get threaded into recurring patterns of silence and speaking up. 

Our life basket of what we carry is made up of all those threads - some fine, others bulky, a few frayed, some mended, some maybe even cut, but all are worn to some degree.  Our role as life-weavers it to see what’s shaped us, and how we want to weave or reweave the fabric of our life story.

So, what are some warp and wefts that create the tapestry of our life, how we handle those, and subsequently how they impact our voice or ability to speak up.

The warp are the long threads that run vertically and are held stationery and taut on a loom.  Let’s see this as an analogy for our foundations, our structure, our roots, our upbringing.  Being human, our foundations have been shaped by losses like death, relocating, migration, changing family dynamic and early childhood experiences, but…

Advocacy is sometimes NOT speaking up. It’s sometimes quiet without words.

Imagine this.  12 gritted, gifted and life-shifted women speaking up about life’s turns, churns and burns and their “why” around their reason now for speaking up and asking (in fact demanding) change.  My Advocates Rising event last Sunday was such a pleasure for me to lead in the presence of powerful truth-speaking change-makers.

But these women are not all self-proclaimed “speakers”.  In fact, most downplayed that ability.  Who cares?  Advocates don’t have to be grand speakers.  You can write, paint, music, lobby, fundraise, entertain, crochet, blog, placard-hold, or use your God-given other creative skills to channel your “voice.”

Another profound moment at the workshop was this. An activity where we “zipped up” (no talking allowed) and…

‍‍Last night, advocacy arose out of a random crochet conversation.

‍I didn’t head home last night but I went to a local accommodation spot where it’s easy to have a drink, be around people, and be in the warmth where blog writing flows more easily than heading home to the cold.

‍Seating myself next to a lone woman on the comfy sofa, she asked if I had arrived for the book club.  No, I hadn’t but I said we could start talking books.  I recommended  Motherless Daughters from an author who I am currently studying under and whose book I’ve just ordered.  What a fruitful advocacy conversation commenced.  I had taken on 3 young girls after they lost their mama in an accident.  She too was from a family of 6 and her mother had died aged 41.  The mum’s name and life was then kept quiet.  Case closed. 

‍Following that hearty healing conversation, she…

‍The roar of the Mother Lion for her cubs

Mum was a servant of Christ.  She sought out lost souls to help. She served well and others prospered from her assistance and care. For a sensitive soul like me however, who needed emotional connection like oxygen, I felt starved of mother’s attention that was beyond teaching me to cook, sew, play the piano, tap dance and attend churchly gatherings of which there were mountains. 

What did I do to get my fix of oxygen that would soothe my soul and feel like motherly protection, guidance and nurturance – all vital ingredients in being mothered?  I became a perfectionist, a good little girl and a model scholar.  I kept churchly pure, not straying from the roots.

I also became painfully thin – skeletal in fact

‍The grief of feeling unwanted and unneeded

‍One in fifteen children and teens. according to Hope Edelman, author or Motherless Daughters, have lost a parent before they turn 18.  That percentage may have grown. Her groundbreaking 30-year-in-the-making work focuses on motherless daughters who’ve lost their mum during those developmentally important years, and its impact in the aftergrief* process.

‍Today however I pondered on the notion, one not potentially even considered yet, of daughterless mothers – whether daughters have died or, in my case, still living.

‍Two people peeved me off big time this week.  The common thread being both laughed at those in pain with an added layer of me all my life helping such people who they considered unlikeable, in fact in their mind, darn strange.

‍The acute psych ward on the 10^th floor was my first “real job” location. This followed my student out-training in the late 1980’s in New Zealand psychiatric institutions that were barbaric.  Lock and key, white walls, electroconvulsive therapy, …..

‍ Grief - Sorrowful or Sassy?

Jeez. When we get run over by the loss and grief truck, life can feel far from sassy. Sorrow fills us from under our hat right down to the big toe in our boots. Ever crevice of our skin, bones, muscles, arteries and heart can feel like a sack full of sadness. And life with its curveball can now feel like a long-death-procession of feeling brutally smacked over the head.  Every waking move, decision, action…. can feel hard.

So how could grief possibly be sassy?  And how could life post-such-tremendous devastation, feel like an opportunity worth taking? ….

‍ ‍

“She who hath had an easy life will not be the changemaker. She who hath been given the hard road can move mountains.”

‍To be a change-maker and bold voice in the realm of well-needed social change, you need fire in the belly. And that doesn’t come from an easy “sit by the pool” life. It comes from the burn of …..

Pious Prayers versus Pastoral Care

“Pious” is a one-word understatement for an Easter Mass I stumbled across today on my first day in Sydney.  It happens to be Easter Friday.

My heart screamed as we were led around the 12 stations of Christ – full of liturgy, repeated Hail Marys, The Lord’s Prayer recited 12-fold re sins and trespassing, and bended knew upon narrow seats that could hardly fit the man two along from me.

But sitting next to me was a beautiful woman.  I could sense her pain. I saw her…

Oh my.  Recently welcomed as a new member to a collective, I put my hand up to offer where I know one of my talents to be.  Eventing.  Maximising the lead-up, the event itself and the aftercare.

My atom-bomb brain whizzed into action with a zillion ideas.  Not asking them to consider all, but perhaps to action one or two suggestions.

I landed like a tornado on some of the group who felt utterly overwhelmed and strewn to pieces.

Having been an exchange student in Germany years ago, I was horrified today to read an article in the newspaper about a German exchange student who was hosted here in NZ and suffered sexual abuse at the hands of her host-father.

My body sensed this as abhorrent. I felt sick in the stomach. Sadness flooded my face and my eyes wept for a stranger, but a kindred Spirit – excited to head to the other side of the world for new experiences, but certainly not this initiation into abuse, which started innocently, but followed the action path of a “groomer.”

Her message was sexual abusers are not necessarily the “monsters’ out there lurking.

The Accidental Activist - Rise and Rally

This morning, the alliteration Accidental Activist screamed out of my screen.  Having always advocated, activism feels feistier.  Placards, banners, marches and causing a stir.  But for me, a sensitive soul, advocating for others has always come easily.  Activism has felt too harsh, and I didn’t (until now) feel internally “hardy” enough to whether the storms or the backlash, let alone make impact for social change.

But something about turning 60 this year, with the help of fiery menopausal, “time to transform my view of self” energy, it feels apt to be taking big risks, standing my ground and stepping into leadership and helping bold women speak to create social change.

Sustainable change requires the Sticky Cocoon-breaking analogy.

Today is International Women’s Day and I am in awe of some game-changing women who’ve made impact in the world we live.  But today I ponder the metaphors of Glass Ceiling vs Sticky Cocoon – a mainstay of Bold Women Speak.

This Sunday day-off morning, I watched as a beautiful fantail arrived in my yurt.  She couldn’t see how to get outside, so she flew around trying somewhat frantically to find a place to land.  She arrived at the window – plastic one in our yurt – but nevertheless, …

She offered her baby life when many wouldn’t.  She wanted to give him a happy in-utero life of love and unconditional acceptance.  A peaceful birth was offered knowing he may not survive.  But he did. And for 10 days he lived in the arms of his parents and the NICU incubator.  And then he took his last breath.

Why is this happening to me?  Or why did it happen to him/her, the “casualty” of that thing called death?

Well, why NOT you?  Or them?  Notice the hard-hitting “edge” of this question? Sounds like a highly insensitive remark.  But I call it a “power question.”

Loss and death are not personal.