I Love Faith Shearin's Poems

Suicides

by Faith Shearin

There was the one who walked into a river
with her pockets full of stones and the one
who started her car with the garage door closed,
determined to drive herself elsewhere.
The youngest went into the kitchen
and placed her head where she had
so often placed chickens or hams.
These were the women whose voices
I carried in my backpacks, whose books
moved with me from one city to another
and, one day, I realized I had outlived
all of them. I was sad that they could
not describe the other world,
that they offered no map to old age.
Was it dangerous to write? I began
to walk more carefully beside rivers,
to eat cold food, to let someone else
back the car out of the driveway.

- Faith Shearin, Telling the Bees © Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015

Dream

I dreamed that I walked across the street and hung out there was an expanse of green space. It was a grassy courtyard made from the leftover space.

Game Show

I just won a freezer full of Eskimo pies.
You did? What will you do with all of them?
I asked if I could swap them for a freezer full of frozen spinach.
What did they say?
We've never had a request like that.

Brené Brown: If you Trade your Authenticity for Safety

“We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection.

Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.

Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed and rare.”
― Brené Brown


“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.”
― Brené Brown

“Faith is a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty.”
― Brené Brown

“If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.”
― Brené Brown

“I now see how owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.”
― Brené Brown

“Staying vulnerable is a risk we have to take if we want to experience connection.”
― Brené Brown,

The 'You' Statement

When you focus on what you are feeling, rather than on your opinion on the matter (as is conveyed through a ‘You’ statement), it is non-threatening and inoffensive. Hence it doesn’t make the person jump to his defense with all shields up and instead allows him to drop his guard. So always identify and say what you are feeling about the situation, instead of what the other person is doing.

‘I’ statements make the speaker take responsibility for his emotions, acknowledging and understanding them better. Also, we can really know only what WE are feeling.

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Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer

Apropos of nothing at all except that it has been on my mind and I think I had better say it because it accounts for a good deal of my behaviour. There is a strong streak in me that wishes not to exist and really does not believe that I do, so that I tend to become unnerved when these curious ideas are proved to be not really true because someone (in this case you) has responded to something I have said or done just as if I were an actual person the same as you (especially) or anyone else. Some of it is, I guess, just the worst sorts of arrogance and irresponsibility , but not all of it, as I really don't think I exist a lot of the time, so I'm asking you to bear with it, me, whatever, for the sake of what?—friendship I suppose, which I want to be capable of, which is obviously not enough. More brains might help, but enough unseemly remarks for eight o'clock in the morning and the shivering in pyjama bottoms syndrome.
― Edward Gorey, Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer

Letters of Virginia Woolf

I like her. She makes life interesting. She, herself, is interesting, I suppose. She talks right from the heart. I appreciate her frankness and I like the fact that she doesn’t force the natural flow of a conversation. There’s personality in her words. She thus gets to the core of things and that’s important because with her — I can talk knowing that the talk is real! Oh believe me, it’s amazingly real! And she also gives me the opportunity to listen as fully and completely as possible. And I can’t seem to get her out of my head […]
― Virginia Woolf, Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf

E.L. Doctorow

[On writing]: It's like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights illuminate, but you can make the whole trip that way.

When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it. The book is constructed as a conversation, with someone doing most of the talking and someone doing most of the listening.

- E.L. Doctorow

Stiff Neck from Swimming

For the most part, swimming is a great way to overcome neck or back pain, but the swimmer still needs to be mindful of the ways it can also cause additional pain. Factors that may increase pain include:

Overdoing your workout – muscle strain and injury can result from overdoing your swimming session

Insufficient stretching – before swimming, the swimmer needs to fully stretch to avoid potential damage

Improper flip-turning at the wall – a flip turn is a great way to maximize the speed of a swimmer’s lap, but over-extension can injure neck or back muscles

Back stroke problems – the back stroke can be hard on the neck if the swimmer isn’t conditioned properly

Freestyle neck injury – the swimmer should roll their head out of the water to breathe, not dramatically extend and rotate

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Dream

I dreamed my friend Sally came over and told me she was pregnant. "A menopause baby?" I asked. She nodded. I gave her a hug. We sat on a wooden black bench in a white attic room. She stood up, said a prayer out loud and a gust of wind blew the door open just like in a horror movie. Her face was ashen.

There was Nothing in the House

There was nothing in the house except a bag of lentils so I rinsed them and put them in the pot and added water. I found carrots and celery in the fridge and four onions in the basket and a bulb of garlic. I chopped them and added them too. There was a six inch chunk of smoked sausage left over from Christmas eve in the cheese drawer so I cubed it and added it to the pot. I opened a can of crushed tomatoes and poured it in with some olive oil. I threw in a chunk of ginger root. Pretty soon the soup pot was overflowing so I got out another. Half of the soup was in the slow cooker and the other half was baking in my dutch oven. I took a long walk in the cold with Lily and watched the sun set over the pond. When I arrived back home my hands and feet were numb but the house smelled amazing. I ate a bowl of the soup and decided to add the last of the hard cider to it. It was fantastic.

The Distraction of Guessing

One-sided conversations are more distracting because our minds race trying to fill in the blanks on the other side of the chat, guessing what the unheard voice might be saying.

Scientific American‘s Ferris Jabr explains:
The less information we glean from a conversation, the harder our brains work to make sense of what we hear and the more difficult it is to stop listening.

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Writing Your Way

“Writing forces people to reconstrue whatever is troubling them and find new meaning in it,” he said.

Much of the work on expressive writing has been led by James Pennebaker, a psychology professor at the University of Texas. In one of his experiments, college students were asked to write for 15 minutes a day about an important personal issue or superficial topics. Afterward, the students who wrote about personal issues had fewer illnesses and visits to the student health center.

“The idea here is getting people to come to terms with who they are, where they want to go,” said Dr. Pennebaker. “I think of expressive writing as a life course correction.”
[...]
“When you get to that confrontation of truth with what matters to you, it creates the greatest opportunity for change,” Dr. Groppel said.

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Design Thinking

Design thinking on the highest level is a way of reframing the way you look at the world and deal with issues, and the main thing is this idea of empathy.
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Snow Globe City

Today it looks like we live inside a snow globe. The snowflakes are swirling around. Some flakes are huge but most are small.

Understanding Cyclothymia

Many experts, Preston said, advise against treating cyclothymia with medication. For one, mood stabilizers have troublesome side effects. Second, antidepressants are well-known for worsening cyclothymia in the long run, he said. (They can trigger hypomania.)

Preston stressed the importance of two major lifestyle issues in treating cyclothymia or any kind of bipolar disorder. One is maintaining healthy sleep patterns, because poor sleep activates mood episodes, he said. Avoiding caffeine after noon can dramatically improve your sleep. [...] If you’re feeling really tired, go for a 10-minute walk, which Preston said offers virtually the same amount of energy as a caffeine-filled drink.

The second is avoiding drugs and alcohol. Alcohol abuse is common with cyclothymia, he said. When people are depressed, they reach for a few drinks for relief. However, alcohol exacerbates mood disorders and sabotages sleep. While you’ll probably fall asleep faster, you’ll disrupt your quality of sleep. (Alcohol – along with caffeine – doesn’t let you progress to the deep, restorative stage of sleep.)

Psychotherapy also is highly effective. Research has found that both cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and interpersonal social rhythm therapy (IPSRT) are helpful for treating bipolar disorders. Van Dijk and Stokl also noted that dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) is valuable.

Interpersonal social rhythm therapy focuses on two goals: improving relationships and creating healthy routines. According to Preston, relationships can be a significant source of stress for people with cyclothymia and may contribute to their mood episodes. Social rhythm therapy is similar to couples or family therapy and helps individuals learn better communication skills and solve their problems, he said. It also helps loved ones better understand that cyclothymia is a neurochemical disorder – not the person’s fault – and how it functions.

Routine is key for stabilizing moods, and people with bipolar disorders are especially sensitive to change. Any changes made to their eating, sleeping or exercise routines can interfere with their circadian rhythms and trigger an episode, Preston said.

That’s why it’s so important that all three are done on a regular basis. For instance, experts suggest going to bed and waking up at the same time each day. While this might seem tough and tedious, Preston said that it can help tremendously with regulating mood.

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Anne Lamott

Expectations are resentments under construction.
― Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott

We don’t have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not go in to. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in – then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment. And that moment is home.
― Anne Lamott

Dream

I was having a family party outdoors, in a rural area. My friend Daniel was my country neighbor in the dream. He peeked over the stone wall that bordered the front yard and I invited him to join us. I brought him around introducing him to everyone. There was a woman scientist at the party who wanted to show us her latest research with robots. There were two robots in a sterile white room embracing passionately. Their heads were plastic nesting picnic coolers. "This is amazing, we have to make a movie of it," I said, waking up.

Pizza Man with His Pants Down

I just saw a pizza man with his pants down. He was walking up a driveway holding the fresh hot pizza in its red insulated pouch with one hand and yanking his pants up with the other.