I was once sharing a room at a retreat with a high-functioning businesswoman who was holding a lot on her shoulders. Each evening, after our sessions ended, I’d hear her on the phone talking with her husband about their clients and business operations. Though she was on retreat, she couldn’t stop working because so many clients (and her husband) depended on her.

When she got off the phone one evening, I commented about how much capacity she had, and then I asked, “Do you ever get to fall apart? Do you ever get to just be weak and not be the capable one in the room? And do you have anyone in your life capable of holding you when you fall apart?”

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Image cover: A gift from Heather's friend Susan, from Stoneware Gallery

I have decided that I am returning to love.

No, it’s not that I ever abandoned love entirely. I didn’t become an angry ogre living in a cabin in the woods and scaring away small children. But… after a period of burnout, overwhelm, conflict, relationship challenges. and endless pandemic disruption last Spring, I was having trouble finding love.

By the end of June, I had lost some love for my work and for the people who come to this work. I tried to dig deep to find the source of the love that had sustained me over the years it’s taken to build this work, but when I tossed my bucket into the well, it kept coming back empty. Instead, the bucket held resentment, irritability, exhaustion, and disdain.

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I washed the windows this past weekend. Well… I washed MOST of the windows. And those that I washed, I had to do twice.

I am remarkably bad at washing windows. If there’s an opposite of a “superpower” mine would be window-washing. I have never, in my fifty-five years on this planet, had a streak-free window.

After washing the outside of the windows of the front and west side of my house, I came back inside and saw that they still looked like they were covered in at least a year’s worth of grime and dust. I gave up and tossed my squeegee aside in frustration. The next day I tried again – this time with the stepladder and various cloths for scrubbing and drying (as the experts on the internet told me to do). When I finished the last of those (with reasonably good results), I smashed my finger in my stepladder and was in so much pain, I gave up on the rest. Perhaps the windows on the east side will be cleaned before the snow falls and perhaps they won’t. I make no promises.

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It all starts months ago. Whenever I consider that two of my daughters are planning to move out at the same time (each to cities more than 2000 kilometres away in opposite directions), I find myself dissolving into minor panic attacks. My throat closes, my brain starts to buzz, and suddenly I’m gasping for air and fighting tears. And then I soothe myself by slipping into denial, because… really… could this ACTUALLY happen, especially in a pandemic when we’ve all become so accustomed to hunkering down and barely leaving the house? My mama-heart does everything it can to try to shield me from the thoughts my mama-brain is trying to have about this sudden upcoming transition from too-full nest to nearly-empty nest. “Nope,” I tell myself, “It likely won’t happen. The fourth wave will come, their universities will shut down, or… maybe one of them will change their mind?” Read more...

The boat launch was busy, so I sat on a park bench a short distance away instead of my favourite spot near the end of the dock. In the parking lot behind me, a small boy in a life jacket was flailing and screaming “I DON’T WANT TO GO!” His dad was trying everything he could to coax, cajole, or convince the boy to head down to the dock to get in the boat with his grandpa. Nothing seemed to be working, so he finally threw the boy over his shoulder and walked down to the dock, with that familiar clenched-jaw-look that every parent knows.

Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke that wiped out the capacity of her left brain. As a Harvard trained neuroanatomist, she had unique insight into what was happening in her brain and was fascinated to discover that when she had only right brain capacity, she felt surprisingly blissful and connected to the universe. She lacked language capacity and had to work to regain her memory and academic knowledge, but she was content and at peace in a way that she’d never been before.

Recently I learned about the Navajo ceremony that honours a baby’s first laugh. Whoever is the first person to make a baby laugh is expected to throw a dinner party on that baby’s behalf. In one account of this tradition, the person who had to throw such a party (the baby’s aunt) also had to give that baby the gift of turquoise.

The Navajo believe that when a baby is born, she belongs to two worlds: the spirit world and the physical world. The first laugh is seen as a sign of the baby’s desire to leave the spirit world and join her earthly family and community. Further, the Navajo believe that laughter is a sign that people understand the meaning of k’é (kinship). Read more...

I have an uneasy relationship with power. Even though I worked in senior leadership in government and non-profit, where I managed people and influenced politicians, I still go into resistance mode when I feel like too much power has been handed to me or I’ve taken more than I “deserve”. I’ve found this to be especially true now that the influence I hold relies largely on my own ideas and wisdom and people expect me to have more power than I often consider myself to have. 

This resistance is deeply rooted in my lineage (a good Mennonite should never take on too much power), my gender (a girl isn’t allowed a lot of power and is shamed for trying to take too much), my family (poverty and insecurity and all of those other things), and my own personal trauma. Read more...

When you go white-water rafting, if you’re a novice, your guide will spend some time teaching you how to sit in the boat, how to hold your paddle, how to adjust your centre of gravity, and where to plant your feet so that there’s less chance that you’ll get tossed out of the boat when you hit the rapids. Then, once you’re floating down the river, your guide will watch the river and warn you when the rapids are coming so that you have time to adjust your posture accordingly. An experienced guide will have been down that river many, many times, so they know how to navigate whatever’s coming. Read more...

A few weeks ago, I was in a FaceTime conversation with my friend Saleha, who’s just completed a master’s degree in counseling psychology. As we always do in our conversations, we were going deep into our past trauma, our families of origin, and the most recent breakthroughs we’d had with our therapists. While we were chatting, Saleha was sitting outside on her deck and I was in my bedroom. Read more...