When Holidays Haunt Us With Empty Chairs, Remember This:

“A chair is still a chair, even when there’s no one sitting there …” An empty chair, an approaching holiday, tosses us into a desperate wilderness without a map. And it’s messy off the map, no matter what age — this year, particularly so.

This post is for you, the one who is holding your breath a little too tightly to your heart because this is the season when that chair becomes so much more than a chair — and you feel like you are not going to make it through. You, covering up, yet cracked wide open. I see you.

I see your bravery, navigating through the wilderness of loss. I want to remind you – to remember with you – that this wilderness is not so desperate a place when we recognize that we are the embodied sum of our experiences with love.

When Pink is Blue on Valentine’s Day. A Recipe for Love.

Has Valentine’s Day found you alone – or alone in a relationship? (Yes, there is such a creature.) What do you do when the “d” in Valentine’s Day cozies up with despair or disappointment while chocolates, flowers, and cards fly by you in the checkout line – yet there are none to greet you at home?

At its core, Valentine’s Day is about love, and taking pause to delight in displays of love that express appreciation for a special someone in our life. If you explore the history of how Valentine’s Day evolved, however, you might be a little surprised that it made it through as the ritual of love we recognize today. Stories about exploitation and enticement of the masses for political and religious gain mingle with fertility rites and names pulled out of village-mating jars. Wooing, courtship, and acts of appreciation didn’t enter the picture until much later.

Based on all that, the relationship status of Valentine’s Day would have to read, “It’s complicated.” Not unlike many of the relationships we find ourselves in and out of, huh? No wonder it’s a day of delight and dread in so many lives. This is love’s challenge – given time and human involvement.

Where am I going with this?

2020. Vision. Not Hindsight.

If “hindsight is 20/20,” then 2020 is the infamous year for which we’ve all been waiting. For those too young – or smart – to know this phrase: hindsight means “thinking about things after they’ve happened” and 20/20 means “perfect vision.”

The more optimistic, glass-half-full version of this phrase would be, “I always seem to grow smarter in retrospect.” The glass, half empty, would be, “I should have known better.”

THIS is the year when it all comes together, because our hinder will be in clear sight. Hinder, as in “belonging to that part or end which is in the rear,” as in our rear with no regrets to follow, as in no one’s butt to kiss but our own. WooHoo. 🙂

We are heading straight into 2020, the heavily prophesied, magical year when the rear view mirror is replaced with a crystal ball. The year when wisdom is harvested in advance, like low-hanging fruit in an orchard, ripe and ready for the picking.

Let’s take a nice, deep breath here while we imagine the possibilities.

Hitting Pause. Nurturing Essentials.

What do you cherish? What delights you and drives you to devotion? I don’t want to know what you like. What do you cherish?

Heading into my third holiday season after Ray’s transition, I cherish that you will read on, and indulge me in savoring a sweet memory from our courtship days while you search your own heart for that which you cherish.

Honeymoon Photo Booth Fun 1975

I was working in an art studio in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan when Ray and I met. He’d returned to Detroit, after living seven years in New York City, and had been back only a few weeks when we went on our first date. The city had burned him out – he thought – but he was coming back to find me. We just didn’t know it yet.

I was 20. He was 28. He asked me to marry him, one month later. There was no doubt in my heart that YES was the only answer. Within seven weeks, we were married.

Living a Fairy Tale. Embracing the Slide.

With the drama of all my recent posts about cancer and toxic air, it’s time for me to blog a happy tale. One that encourages you to pay attention to the whispers and follow where inspiration leads.

There is a fun, “spooky” story behind this picture of comp book and pen. If you know me at all, you know I like to write. If you know me really well, you know I have to write. Writing helps me maintain perspective, keep my sense of humor, gain clarity, and stay close to the guidance that gets me through this messy life with some degree of grace.

My favorite time to set pen in motion is in the morning during my quiet time, a daily ritual of contemplation, prayer, and reading that sets the tone for my day before the rest of the world does. It was in one of those quiet times that I was given the vision of two women sitting on a hill, silhouetted by a gorgeous sunset. I had the sense that one of the women was older and wiser, perhaps even an angel, when I heard her speak these words.

“Some might say this was a story told to me by a woman mad with grief, but to sit in her presence was compelling; the more she spoke, the more I was drawn in by a desire to believe that what she told me could be so.”

“Wow. What a great lead in for a movie,” I thought, as I took in the scene before me.

“Write that down,” something inside me prompted.

Breast Cancer. Kissing My Breast Goodbye.

Written for every woman who lost, or is losing this intimate partner.

—–Originally posted, August 17, 2017, on my old website. Re-post worthy.—–

I find myself on the merging ramp to a mastectomy and wishing to yield, for just a moment, before this breast becomes a blurred memory in the traffic flow of life.

She is the part I must release to protect the whole, but she will not go without notice or appreciation for what she held space.

There is a body of experience in this sweet breast of mine. She and her sister were late bloomers. No doubt, I got that premature training bra because my mother was tired of fielding questions that always started with a whiny “When…”

As intimate partners go, both breasts have been first class. But she is the one that held space over my heart. For that I grieve her loss. I would love to kiss her for all that we’ve gone through together – but she is not that large nor I that agile.

Sound strange?

Our bodies are living, breathing temples that hold space for a fusion of body, mind, and spirit – from the most elemental level to the most sublimely sacred that life has to offer. And each part speaks to aspects of experience that leave imprints – clues – as to how we maneuver through and integrate events from the significant to the mundane.

Healing Art, Mixed Media, and Paper Flowers.

I saw the vision of a woman. She coaxed me into the studio after these words popped onto the page of my journal one morning.

“He gave her paper flowers,
because he knew that she loved words.
Wax-pressed intent upon her heart,
that his voice within be heard.”

I thought this piece of art was finished when I framed and entered it in last year’s Artful Harvest show, hosted by my local art guild. Since then, she’s been hanging on a wall adjacent to my computer area. I walk by her every day.

She quietly holds space for me, like one of those tent cards that reserve your seat at a banquet table, waiting for me to venture back into the studio. Time in the studio, that once was Ray’s, comes with hurdles. It’s that grace and grief thing, creating a kind of chaos in my heart, healing through a cosmic codependency with my creative compadre, now on the other side of the veil after losing his fight with cancer. Expressing my creativity looks vastly different now as I work to heal beyond not only losing him, but also losing a breast to cancer just five months after his departure.  

Competing with Your Past. Bernadette’s Messy Musings Takes On Bernadette’s Musings from the Messy Room.

Ever find yourself in competition with an old version of you, one that you’re trying to grow beyond because it’s in your best interest to do so, but it seems the world around you isn’t quite ready for the change—or even set against it?

Frustrating, isn’t it? And kind of scary when you are crawling out from a dark place, and your eyes haven’t adjusted to what the light-of-possibility has to offer you. There’s a lot of trial and error involved in any attempt to embrace a new life while moving on from an old you. Particularly if those around you react as if you belong to them, because of the role you play in their life.

Since I lost Ray and my breast to cancer, I have been vigilant in shaking loose from the bad stories that surface, in finding ways the present-me can thrive and coexist in peace with the past-me while she transitions through the sense of loss she feels some days.

A Glitchy Leap of Faith is Better than No Leap at All.
When the bots booted me out of Bernadette’s Musings from the Messy Room, (Bots. Bandwidth. Blah-Blah-Blah…) I chose to embrace the blank canvas forced upon me, and set about the business of creating a new home for the “next chapter Bernadette.” (About Now)

A few days ago, I decided to see how the new site was doing in the search engines. I typed in Bernadette’s Messy Musings, the present me, and Google showed Bernadette’s Musings from the Messy Room, the past me. So, I typed in Bernadette’s Messy Musings WordPress, and still got Bernadette’s Musings from the Messy Room. I typed in my name; pages and pages from the Messy Room stared back at me.

Bots. Bandwidth. Blah-Blah-Blah. Bots are Booting Me Out of My Messy Room.

As I stare at this forced-upon-me blank canvas on this new website platform — not sure what to write — Bernadette’s Musings from the Messy Room is under what they call “brute force attack.” The bots are squeezing me out, using up the bandwidth, and banging on the door trying to get my password. I feel like I am in an episode of The Walking Dead where the zombies take over the town and more just keep coming … and coming …

When I was told the fixes weren’t diverting them and chances were not looking good for restoring the site, it broke my heart. There is so much history in those pages: creative projects, collaborations, heart-felt exchanges. My spirit is humbled when I read the hundreds of comments left there. I am sad to have to let them go.

Plus, closing the door on the Messy Room so soon after losing Ray — and my breast — to cancer feels like giving up another piece of us. The timing of this good-bye is surreal but my gut says something new — and necessary — is around the corner.