It’s Monday evening on the first day of the winter school break. It’s pretty quiet here tonight. Gabe is at a friend’s. Max is downstairs working. We have many quiet evenings now. They can be nice and quiet .. or sad an quiet. It depends on what else is going on. Monday night is Yoga night here. Diane teaches a class at 6 in the barn. She usually has between 10 and 18 folks show up. I am absolutely hooked on Diane’s classes.. (I’m absolutely hooked on Diane too) . She is a wonderful and interesting teacher. The class always has something new with a nice mix of hard work and relaxation. Yoga is a great physical and mental release for me. I have not had a yoga class since Sam died that didn’t bring me to tears at some point.. Sometimes its from my tight hamstrings.. Sometimes it’s memories. Tonight I managed to fall into such a deep relaxation during Savasana (meditation) that my snoring woke everyone else up…
After Yoga, Diane Max and I had a nice quiet dinner. It’s really good just to have some time with Max. We were all talking about how much older and wiser we’ve become in the last 3 months. I can see him growing so much . What a great and sensitive kid. I am so thankful that he decided to take Spring semester here with us. I can’t imagine how it would have felt to have him back down in NY so soon.
I’m going to try to get to bed early tonight and read. I’ve been reading a book called ‘Swallowed by a Snake’ by Thomas R. Golden. My friend Craig, the guy who is helping start the group Father’s Forever I talked about in an earlier post. turned me on to the book. It’s subtitled ‘the gift of the masculine side of healing’ . By ‘masculine side’ Golden doesn’t mean just men.. he acknowledges that both genders have masculine and feminine sides. The main premise is that guys have different ways of dealing with grief than women.. (no surprise) . Golden points out that men may have more trouble expressing their grief than women because societal expectations.. or their own expectations on themselves. Even though I’m getting pretty tired of reading grief and healing books, this book has some useful insights..
The title ‘Swallowed by a Snake’ comes from a story Golden tells about a village which sis being terrified by a giant snake. The snake is so powerful that no man had ever fought it and survived.. A guy offers to kill the giant snake. Instead of fighting the sanke directly.. he allows himself to be swallowed whole along with his knife and a bag of food. Once inside the snake he takes out his knife and cuts away at the belly of the snake a little more each day. Eventually he reaches the snake’s heart and kills it .. he then slips out of the snake and returns to the village triumphant.. It’s a strange analogy which he uses throughout the book. The point is grief take a long time, is dark, it’s confining.. etc./ I’m not sure I completely resonate with that analogy.. but he does have one other analogy I like.. He says grief is like manure.. if you spread it around you can grow from it.. if you leave it all in one pile it just starts to stink. Now that’s an analogy I can use.. He said two other things that I thought were useful.. one.. he took issue with the notion that a loss like Sam’s pasing was like a wound that would heal.. he pointed out that such a deep loss was more like loosing a limb.. it never heals.. you just learn to accept it. The thing about loosing a limb is that it’s apparent to everyone. Our loss is invisible unless you know us. The other good point I took form the book is the view of grief as a guest.. Golden points out that we are not our grief.. it is something that is visiting us .. and will leave over time. He observes that many men get consumed by their grief and define themselves by it.. just as we define ourselves by the jobs we do. Golden also observes that men may need rituals more than women .. By that measure I must be doing fine. I have so many rituals to my daily bonding with Sam (how I put on my Sam button. Touching his pictures kissing the rock in the back yard, talking to him in the shower and the car, writing his name in the snow, writing this blog in his room, etc, etc). , that I sometimes feel i’m starting my own religion. Maybe I am.. Sam.. I might be your first disciple.. Namaste
-jc
Here’s picture Ivy took the other day of me with a newly placed SamStone at Birch Glen Lodge. Thanks for the picture Ivis.
