All Shall Be Well

Coping in Hard Times

Dear Friends,

Thanks for hanging around in my long absence. Busy holidays, side effects, recovering – you know the drill.

Today’s newsletter is a mish mash of things that have been floating around in my head and heart. I guess that they could be gathered under the umbrella of coping mechanisms.

Life has been challenging lately. There is the state of this country, and of the world that bring outrage, fear and the struggle for hope. I’m having medical challenges that I’m not ready to write about fully yet. I will say that there has not been a lot of good news lately; the best I can do is “it could be worse.”

So … coping mechanisms whose common theme is offering comfort.

When I am holding an image of my body and sending love to its broken parts, I have started to think about Kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold. “There is beauty in the broken.” I imagine my bones which are riddled with cancer mended with gold, the thin places, the small fractures, all strengthened. This image gives me comfort.

Photo by Matt Perkins on Unsplash...

Insomnia has been a recurring issue for me these days. I wake at 2 or 3 am to go to the bathroom and more often than not, I don’t sleep again. I’d gotten pretty good for a while at just lying quietly in the dark night, letting thoughts come and go. I quickly learned that scrolling in the night spaces was a bad idea that invited neither sleep nor rest. I tried listening to EMDR soundtracks, and while they were relaxing, they didn’t help me sleep. Recently I tried listening to books on tape in those waking hours, especially children’s literature. Inspired by this year’s Christmas gift from my daughter of hand-knitted characters from The Wind in the Willows, I started there. I’m not sure that I’d read it before, and the story of Mole and Rat, Toad and Badger delighted me and quieted my busy mind.

Badger, Toad, Mole and Rat from The Wind in the Willows plus Toad from Frog and Toad

It brought me back to days of reading stories to my young children, and listening to stories read to young me. Those times are some of my favorite memories.

Being read to during my night watch hours is comforting. My mind is at ease, and I may drift in and out of sleep. I feel no pressure to go back to catch up on what I missed, just the pleasure of being held by story.

I continued with The Secret Garden, remembering the illustrations in my childhood copy of the book, and now I’ve started The Birch Bark House series by Louise Erdrich. In between I listened to The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl.

Margaret Renkl writes week by week through a year in her garden. She describes the return of the frogs each year, and her efforts to create a frog pond. She builds a pond with a trough, adding water plants and algae. She slips in some tadpoles and waits for the frogs to emerge.

I was transported back to my grandma’s back yard and the memory of the annual return of spring toads when I was young. Her suburban house backed up to a concrete lined drainage ditch abutting a strip mall. A few doors down, an alley connected her street to the strip mall parking lot. In the spring, the ditch had some standing water, and some algae, not much of an ecosystem, but enough to support the return of the toads.

We hunted the toad’s eggs and then the tadpoles. But the miracle came when that ditch became host to hundreds of baby toads. Somehow the tiny toads climbed the steep wall of the ditch and made their way into Grandma’s backyard. No bigger that a nickel, the yard became alive with baby toads. My brother and I easily caught the babies and examined the thin skin that showed the pulsing of their tiny toad hearts, their bulging eyes and thin lips. There were so many that we always released them. The knot of toads became the main event for a few weeks. As they grew, their numbers thinned, and by the end of the season there would be a few grown toads hiding in damp places in grandma’s garden.

The comfort of being read to, of children’s stories, of childhood memories is a good place to rest and restore.

Introducing the newest member of the family, Cali the cat. We adopted her and are all getting to know each other. She has made herself very comfortable. She is 6 years old and still has the energy and agility of a young cat, her spicy side. We are happy to have pet antics in the house again.

Cali the cat

Music always contributes to coping for me, as does community whether that’s around a table, or at a No Kings march, or connecting with friends. I have a playlist in progress on Spotify for Resistance in 2026.

I appreciate all of you who subscribe to these musings, especially as I have been very inconsistent lately. I want to remind you that all the content is available free with an unpaid subscription. If that works better for you, I invite you to change your subscription to the free version.

Tomorrow I’m heading into the next stage of treatment which is daunting and honestly a little scary. I appreciate your kind thoughts and prayers for navigating this path. I’ll update as things become clearer.

I will leave you with some wisdom from Julian of Norwich, a Christian mystic born in 1343. Her writings are the earliest surviving works in English written by a woman, Julian of Norwich was no stranger to suffering having contracted and survived the bubonic plague.

She wrote :
All shall be well, .
and all shall be well .
and all manner of things shall be well.

I repeat this lately as a mantra for myself and for this hurting world. It brings comfort and helps me cope. And in spite of everything, I actually believe this to be true.

How are you coping? Be well my friend.

Lots of love,

Maija

Song for this issue: How I Long for Peace, Rhiannon Giddens, Resistance Revival Chorus, Crys Matthews. It’s on the Resistance Playlist but I will add it to our Healing Happens playlist too.

The complete Healing Happens playlist is available at Spotify and Apple Music.

Healing Happens on Spotify

Healing Happens on Apple Music