May It Be So
Kneading
How Can I Never Lose Who I Really Am?
Alternate Lifestyle for a Wounded Housewife
Footsteps to Follow
How Do I Risk My Significance?
Let Wounds Be My Teachers
That Which Is Unfinished for Me to Give
What Is Bigger Than My Fear?
No Matter What
The Other Side of Everything
Braiding
How Do I Grow My Heart?
Finding My Unlived Parentheses
Even Here, Love Can Grow
Will I Lose Everyone I Love?
Unlearning to Not Speak
Tomorrow Is Not Promised
Will You Ever Leave Me?
Giving What Only I Can Give
What Are You Waiting For?
Baking and Sharing
What Would It Take to Let Go of the Forgetting of Joy?
Open Questions to Evoke “Talkstory”
Appreciations
Bibliography
Author’s Note
About the Author
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“It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble now because we do not have a good story. The Old Story sustained us for a long period of time. It shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with life purpose, energized action. It consecrated suffering, integrated knowledge, guided education. We awoke in the morning and knew where we were. We could answer the questions of our children. We could identify crime, punish criminals. Everything was taken care of because the story was there. It did not make men good or make for unfailing warmth in human association. But it did provide a context in which life could function in a meaningful manner. Now we are between stories.”
—Thomas Berry
The coauthor of this book is a ghost. My grandmother was a midwife and healer. She sat with people as they entered the world and as they left it. She never set foot in a school and could neither read nor write. I haven’t included her name on the title page because I never really knew what it was. I just called her “Grandma.” Others called her “Ma” or “Dora,” or by her husband’s name, “Michael’s wife,” as if she were his possession.
As I am writing about her to you, she becomes alive again: a tiny woman with a fierce will. In the late 1800s, she ran across Russian potato fields to escape Cossack soldiers who had killed her first two children and brother during a pogrom, an attack on Jewish villages. She and my grandfather escaped to New York by boat, traveling in steerage. Driven by that indomitable will to foster life, she gave birth to eight more children in a two-bedroom apartment on the fifth floor of an old brick tenement in Hell’s Kitchen.
One of her feet was planted on the spiritual side and the other on the pragmatic. But to talk about her in terms of one side or the other is inaccurate, because Grandma was always braiding together people, their resources, and the challenges of their lives so that they would be inspired to love their existence. Her prayers went something like this: “May Willie’s ability to make money help Sammy, who has to sleep in a cold car because he can’t afford to pay his rent. May they both love the life they are living. May they each live the life they love.”
On the day when I am writing these words, the whole world seems to be teetering on a knife edge between right/wrong, either/or, us/them. I have been asking myself several evocative questions for the past two years. They have midwifed the pages you are now reading: How do I find a way to live a life I can love? How do I help make it possible for those who will come after me to do the same? What do I need to remember, as in “re-member,” to bring together all that has been torn in two? How do I re-collect the wisdom earned through my own and others’ challenges? What is the most effective way to pass it on? Is there a place inside me and between us where vanished wisdom secretly gathers?
My grandmother gave me one of the greatest gifts one person can give to another: she helped me to discover how my life matters. She told me that the moment I was born, Life made a Promise to the world that only I could fulfill. She inspired my search for what this could be by telling me stories of her own experiences and by asking me wide-open questions that would lead me to live a life I would love.
When people don’t believe their lives really matter, they shrug, feel impotent, and disconnect from one another, slowly declining into what they most despise. Grandma used to kiss the unique marks at the very ends of my fingertips, calling them “promise prints.” She said they prove that never before and never again will there be another such as me.
Understanding how each of us does and can matter is the most powerful force I know to make it possible for a human being to love his or her existence. Why don’t most of us know this? So many of the people I have worked with for the past fifty years didn’t. Whether it was as a psychotherapist helping groups of people heal sexual abuse and couples repair the ruptures between them, or as an advisor to CEOs and senior leadership teams, one person after another told me that deep down in the canyons of their bones, they felt as if their lives didn’t really matter. Why isn’t this lack obvious to us? Why don’t we know how to instill a sense of personal significance in our children and grandchildren so they can love being alive?
I believe there are three implicit forces that contribute to this:
1.The current dismissal and dishonoring of elders and their importance to the rest of us has resulted in this awareness being eclipsed. In many traditions, elders were the ones who pointed out a basic fact of human life to the youngest members of a community: that the fingerprints at the end of our reach prove that each of us is a one-of-a-kind marvel that has never existed before and never will again.
2.Our educational and cultural systems are deficit focused—in other words, attention is solely focused on what doesn’t work and what is wrong rather than on what does work and has worked (i.e., “You got four wrong on your spelling test” rather than, “You got twenty-six right.”) Consequently, it is rare to find someone who is as articulate about the talents they have to contribute as about the flaws they need to hide or improve.
3.A major thinking strategy embedded in Western culture is domination rather than collaboration. What has been honored and respected, therefore, is power over rather than power with others. What makes this possible is culturally