Taboo Topics: Losing a baby – meet Grant and Mauri

Itʼs July, Mauri phones to tell me the news, weʼre pregnant again. Whoohoo! We had been trying and Mauri had had a dream in which a date for a birth of a baby was given. So the news was, well, wow perhaps God had spoken to us about the actual birthday! We did a calculation and due date was in the ʻdate proximityʼ. Sure it was very early days, but God had spoken hadnʼt he, and so we started dreaming: is it a boy or a girl? What will they look like, be like? And how will they play with Kristen?

A couple of weeks later Mauri comes into the lounge with an anxious, slightly panicked look on her face, she is spotting and the bleeding was getting heavier. The next day we are in our doctorʼs surgery and he confirms our fears. A miscarriage.

Itʼs only a miscarriage, just a miscarriage, we carry on with life, right? Hey in the old days no one would have even known, and the bleed put down as a late period. Thatʼs what some have said. I begin thinking along those lines too: itʼs not like weʼve lost a baby. Or have we? Almost as if right there and then i have the wrestle of our time: when does life begin? Iʼm struggling to know what i should be feeling in the midst of Mauriʼs emotions, strengthened by hormonal changes in her body. I write to a mentor of mine and his wisdom to us is that we need to name the baby and say goodbye. That shouldnʼt be too difficult? Mauriʼs instinct was that it was a girl. We had a name we were going to use if we had another girl, and so we named her Bethany, had to name her Bethany because to choose any other name would be to discount the life that had been there. It was at that point that Mauri and I wept together. I was so surprised by how pained i felt, how disappointed I was.
It was so much harder to say goodbye that i had imagined.

Itʼs so easy for me to delegitimize my feelings because otherʼs have had it much harder. Which is true. But thatʼs not right either. When life is formed it is only right for us to expect that, that ultimately life will be birthed. When it doesnʼt there is the sense of something stolen, of an incompletion. I sometimes still cry when i have to think about or share that experience (like now) and know the deeper pain of many others who have lost their babies.

Mauri fell pregnant, quite unexpectedly, not long after that and our little boy, Jesse is about to turn 2. I canʼt imagine life without him but sometimes wonder how Bethany would have fitted into our family.

Taboo Topics: Losing a baby – meet Nicole of Graeme and Nicole

a little while ago [well, a month it seems] i started a series called Taboo Topics where i wanted to look at some serious issues in life that deeply affect people but that rarely get spoken about. The first one, losing a baby, was something that had been on my heart for a long, long time because of knowing some friends who had been through it and having a glimpse of how devastating it must be, especially if you are carrying it along and feeling like you are the only one… an old friend of mine, Graeme, boldly stepped forward and shared their story from his perspective and a lot of people read it and were encouraged and it is now my privilege to share the same story, but from his wife Nicole’s perspective. Thank you, Nicole, for the strength you show in sharing this with us:

As you can see, it’s taken me a whole month to work up the courage to read this blog…. When Graeme told me that Brett had asked if he could post our story, I was not in a good head space, so told Graeme to go ahead, but that I couldn’t do it. Now, with Zoe’s 5th anniversary behind me, I feel I’m in a better space now, so I thought I’d head on over here and read all the stories he’s posted so far. Each of them broke my heart…. I know the pain hidden under the words each of them uses.

As with all couples, even having experienced the same event, my journey has been different to Graeme’s. As a mother, you connect with your child physically and emotionally long before it’s born. When I heard the news initially, that the doc couldn’t find a heartbeat, I was so sure it was just faulty equipment. I went into denial immediately. But after half an hour, the reality finally hit me. I was so devastated, and crying so hard, I nearly vomited on the floor. When the doc told me that it would be better for me physically, as well as emotionally, to go through natural labour (Zoe was 37 weeks), I wanted to hit her. I thought for sure she was joking. Yet, in retrospect, she was absolutely right.

We were given a private labour ward, with a dedicated mid-wife (so no extraneous staff wandering in and out, or noise from other labour wards to bother us), and at the end, our minister and his wife were allowed to join us, so we could wash Zoe, dress her, and hold a short ceremony for her immediately. I still remember the sound her body made as it slipped from me…. a dull thud followed by silence….

We didn’t find out until later that the name Zoe means life.

Something that gave me (and continues to give me) tremendous comfort was a vision that one of my friends had in which she saw Jesus take Zoe into heaven cuddled in his arms. To know that she’s loved, and cared for, and is in the best possible place…that is a great source of comfort to me.

I don’t believe that God made this happen. I don’t believe that God even allowed this to happen. Something as evil as killing an innocent, unborn child on the cusp of life could only come from the pit of hell itself. For the longest time though, I blamed God for failing to take action, for failing to save Zoe’s life.

Now though, I have Nathan (his name means ‘Gift of God’). There’s no way he will ever replace Zoe – not in a million years. But I know that if she had not died, he would not have been born. Right from the get-go, when we dedicated him, we asked that God would use him to heal and bless, and to bring joy into the lives of those he touches. God has honoured our prayer, and Nathan has already brought such healing and joy into ours.

I still don’t know ‘why’ Zoe died. I don’t know why we were targeted in this way. I don’t for one minute believe that Zoe’s death was part of God’s plan. Yet, I know that God has redeemed what Satan intended for evil. For both Graeme and I, our faith has been tested in the fire. The dross has been (and is being) burned away. Although we’ve still got a-ways to walk, I know that now our faith is real in a way that it never was before. We’ve also been able to comfort others with the comfort we have received – through Born Sleeping (our support group). Plus there is the blessing of the child who would not have been – Nathan – if not for his sister’s death.

As Graeme said, the grief is never far from the surface, but that doesn’t mean our lives are joyless. We have simply learnt how to tolerate indescribable pain, to allow it to wash over and through us, until we can breathe again. We have learnt how to live and love and laugh despite our pain. Having said that, please don’t think I’ve got grief taped, or that I have all the answers. If I were to go through this again, as Sandi & Mike, and Debbie & Bruce, have had to do I think I’d probably fall apart just as much, just as quickly, and take just as long to be put back together.

Losing a child…. it really is one of the hardest things any parent can go through, and unless you’ve been through it yourself, with the greatest respect, I don’t think you have a clue what it’s like…. which is probably why so many people don’t like to talk about it: everyone else says such banal things, insensitive things, the platitudes that are like a dagger in your heart and a slap through the face. Which is why Brett’s blog is so important. We need spaces to talk openly about our pain, and about how the pain makes us re-evaluate our lives, our values, our beliefs, our faith, our hopes, our dreams, our plans. And others need to hear it, to learn how to deal with us, and to help us grapple with issues of faith.

So thanks, Brett, for having the courage to open the lid on on this can. I just hope the worms turn into butterflies sooner rather than later.

Nicole [Nicole Masureik and Graeme Broster]

Born Sleeping Website – http://bornsleeping.wordpress.com/
Born Sleeping Facebook Page – http://www.facebook.com/pages/Born-Sleeping/150344014978601

if you would like to read the other stories that were shared, click here.

protesting the protesters…

so i posted about the protest action we were involved in with regards to the outdoors sharing of food with homeless people on my ‘the simple weigh’ blog but i know a lot of people susbscribe to this one so thort i would stick the links here as well.

click here for part I dealing with what i was pertaining to.

click here for part II which deals with the picnic which was my beautiful wife Valerie’s greatly creative idea.

and then here if you want the part where everything went nutball shaped as we got inside for the meeting…

and here is a blog from a new friend of ours perspective – a man who drove over an hour to be part of the protest despite himself and personal fear and trepidation…

Taboo Topics: Infertility and Losing a baby – meet Debbie and Bruce

WAITING FOR A MIRACLE

There’s a glimpse of heartache and pain in 31-year-old Debbie lvin’s eyes, but just for a moment, and then it’s gone, swallowed up by a smile, a nervous chuckle as she launches into an account of her painful journey through infertility.

It’s a much greater problem than people think. It was only after I started talking openly about it, that I discovered that some of my friends and their friends were going through what I was going through. It was knowing this that got me through my bad days. I wasn’t doing it alone and it also gave me something else to focus on. Instead of wallowing in self-pity and depression, I focused on how my experiences could perhaps help someone else. It got me through the dark times she says.

Her story, much like the woman she is, can only be described as remarkable. Her journey through infertility has made despair, disappointment and bitterness constant companions, but in the process she has discovered new friends in the form of hope, faith and courage. Throughout it all, she has had the constant support and love of her husband.

“I take great pride in my role as a wife and my husband and I work hard at keeping our marriage strong. This is essential to ensure that this experience brings us together and doesn’t tear us apart.” she says, a softness in her eyes as she speaks of the man who has been at her side throughout this journey. “When my husband and I found out we could not conceive naturally, I felt broken inside and filled with despair. At first, we chose not to tell anyone and as a result, this private pain gnawed at me constantly. Nothing seemed to soothe my aching heart. I spent hours wondering why it was happening to me, why my body didn’t want to co-operate. It was only made worse when my friends fell pregnant with ease. Babies were everywhere and even being surrounded by prams in shopping centres became too much to bear. I was so focused on the one thing I couldn’t have, I lost sight of everything else in my life.”

“I’ve been battling with infertility for seven years and have tried everything, from complementary therapies to in-vitro fertilisation.This was a huge financial and physical sacrifice for us and involved enduring drugs, injections and surgery. Our first attempt at IVF resulted in me carrying twins for a few weeks, before suffering a miscarriage. After all the anticipation and watching the embryos moving around, I could hardly endure the physical and emotional pain of losing them.” Debbie smiles bravely as she recounts those painful times. But determined to keep trying, she underwent another IVF procedure a year later and on the third and final attempt, she miscarried again.

The root cause of Debbie’s infertility lies in hormonal imbalances. “When I discovered my hormones, or rather, lack of them, were the cause of my problem, I took it very personally. It struck the core of who I was as a woman and I felt my body had let me down. I felt as though I had failed as a woman and it was easy for me to sink into the depths of self-pity.” It took an extraordinary will, for Debbie to drag herself out of the dark and make a conscious decision to be happy despite the circumstances she found herself in.

“Somehow I knew I’d have to let go and release the control I thought I had over the situation because it really wasn’t in my hands at all”. Naturally shy, Debbie says the experience in talking to other women who have suffered loss or those in similar situations as herself has forced her out of her shell. “This experience has helped me grow into a more self-assured, confident person. I force myself out of my comfort zone and set myself a challenge each year.”

This year, her challenge has been to keep herself strong, fit and healthy. “I joined a running club!” She laughs as she explains she has never been much of an athlete. “I think I surprised myself more than anyone else. I joined the Chiltern Athletics Club in December last year and ran my first 50km marathon a few months ago! I’m really enjoying it, and it’s making me stronger.” she says proudly. “Because my hormone levels are so low, I have to take care of my body. I will never give up hoping for my miracle baby and I want to make sure that when it happens, I am strong, fit and healthy. It has taken me years to reach the level of maturity I am at now. To leave the bitterness and self-pity behind and realise that although pain is inevitable, it is possible to choose joy despite this. I still have bad days, but it on those days that I’ll indulge in my favourite pick-me-up, peanut butter! It always makes me feel better she says laughing.”

“I realise now that I don’t have control over this. I have done all I can to make it right. I don’t want to feel like I didn’t give it my all. I have tried so hard and at times felt like a slave to my timetable of drugs and injections. Now it is all in God’s hands. Right now, I’m happy, I enjoy my life and like to think I’m a mother-in-waiting!”

[Debbie and Bruce Ivins]

Taboo Topics: Losing a baby – meet Sandi and Mike

The 18 August 2009 is the day that life changed for Mike and I.

It was the day that we saw our baby on the sonar screen for the first time, but instead of tears of joy, tears of indescribable sadness flowed as we saw our quiet, lifeless baby on the screen with no heartbeat. At home that evening Mike and I sat very quiet on the couch, staring at the tv feeling completely numb. 2 days later I was in hospital to have the baby removed. I tried SO hard to be strong but as I was wheeled into theatre I looked back and saw Mike in his mothers arms in tears, my heart broke.

6 Months later I was pregnant again. It was a new year with new beginnings. After 1 successful ultrasound we were reassured that things were looking good. However, 2 weeks later at a routine ultrasound appointment the doctor once again had the awful job of telling us that she ‘was sorry’ but there was no heartbeat! I lay there thinking no, no, no, not again – this really cant be happening again? She wanted me to try miscarry naturally as during the first procedure my uterus was perforated and she wanted to limit as much trauma to my uterus as possible. But after a week I had to go back to theatre to have the baby removed. What pained me most was signing a paper that stated that I gave them permission to “burn all contents of my uterus”. Is that it all was? The “contents of my uterus” was a little boy!

We were then referred to a specialist at a fertility clinic who did tests and discovered that I had a septum in my uterus which could “possibly” have been the cause for the previous miscarriages. So, once again, I was wheeled into theatre to have the septum removed. Mike, again, my constant supporter and encourager!

10 Months later I was pregnant again. To find out on Christmas day that we were expecting was the most amazing feeling ever! This had to be it? The weeks leading up to this occasion had been incredibly stressful as it involved scans and blood tests to assess my ovaries so that I could start taking extra hormones at exactly the right time. Unfortunately, our world came crashing down again. This pregnancy was very short lived and once again we said goodbye too early.

Very soon after that I fell pregnant again! This HAD to be it? People were praying, my uterus was healthy, I was taking the right amount of hormones – everything was perfect? After 3 fantastic ultrasounds, our baby boy was growing so well. Good strong heartbeat, growing perfectly. Until the 9 March 2011, when our world collapsed again. Routine ultrasound showed out baby’s heart had stopped beating. My doctor just held me and we both sobbed. 2 days later I was back in theatre having yet another operation. 7 weeks later after being referred to yet another fertility specialist, I ended up back in theatre as there was still placental tissue that hadn’t been removed from my uterus and was causing problems. This was all we could handle – enough was enough!

It has been a journey that Mike and I NEVER thought we would go on. It was not something we had discussed before we got married – “what if we struggled to have kids?” It just seemed like a given – like a package deal when you get married – you have kids too.

We have been through some very low patches emotionally, spiritually and financially. It took months to get through a church service without sobbing and it took a year since the last loss to pay off our medical bills. We held a special memorial service in June last year with close family and friends. That was a turning point in our journey. To be able to openly share our pain with those who love us the most was so special! The grief we feel is definitely for the little souls we have lost, but also for the uncertainty of what lies ahead. Will we be parents? Are we willing to put ourselves through another pregnancy which might or might not work? This journey has caused us to drift from certain friends and get closer to others. The lessons we have learnt along this journey are invaluable. The things we have discovered about each other are just so special. We have definitely grown closer through this process and have a much greater appreciation for one another. It bothers me when people say “oh, look how blessed you are because you are pregnant or have kids”. Where does that put the couple who have lost kids or are struggling with infertility? It makes us feel like we have done something wrong to not be blessed? I have learnt that I mustn’t measure how blessed I am by what I have or don’t have. We are all blessed because of the fact that Jesus died on the cross – not because of what we have or don’t have.

I don’t know what our future looks like? It doesn’t have the fairytale ending that we had hoped. We still have baby clothes but no baby, so much baby love to give but no baby. But one thing I am SURE of is that we serve a faithful God who loves and cares for us beyond what we could think possible. Through all our hard times we have KNOWN God’s peace and healing in our lives. We came to a point where we thought that we actually can’t go on, but here we are. Sharing our story with others in the hopes that it encourages others to keep going.

I can’t wait to get to heaven one day, meet my babies and for God to say to me “Well done, My good and faithful servant!”

Blog: www.sandalsgilmour.blogspot.com

[Sandi and Mike Gilmour]

Taboo Topics: Losing a baby – meet Heidi and Shaun

Shaun and I had been married for a couple of months and decided to start trying for a family. Imagine our excitement as we found out I was pregnant. At about 8 weeks things didn’t seem to be quite right so found a gynae and went for a check-up. I had terrible pain and was bleeding a little. After some scanning and much to our surprise the doc couldn’t find any indication of a pregnancy in my uterus. It was confirmed that I was experiencing an ectopic pregnancy (where baby is growing inside the fallopian tube and not the uterus) and was rushed into hospital for emergency surgery. We didn’t have too much time to process all this as I was whisked off to theater and when I woke up was told that all was fine and there was no permanent damage. Yes, we were relived that my tube and uterus were intact but what about our little baby we would never get to meet. What was probably the worst for me was the comment people made like “oh well. You can try again” and “it wasn’t really a baby anyway”…to us it was!

A couple months later we fell pregnant again and I was terrified… I didn’t ever fully enjoy my pregnancy and it was filled with complications. I eventually had to have an emergency caesar at 35 weeks. God blessed us with a wonderful little boy. As I was already heading for my mid-thirties we decided that we didn’t want too much of a gap between the children so fell pregnant again when Merrick was about. 9 months old and things seemed to be progressing well.

Then disaster struck. I started bleeding again at about 6 weeks. We were on holiday in Plett and drove straight back to CT to see my gynae. She couldn’t find a heartbeat but said that it was perhaps too early. Blood tests, bed rest and a 2 week wait. We went back..a perfect little sac was seen on the inside but no baby… It was called a blighted ovum. In other words something had gone wrong during fertilisation and the foetus had not developed properly. Not some people don’t even consider this to be a baby. But we did..as we believe its our child the moment conception takes place. Another procedure to remove the remains of our pregnancy. And more comments of “it wasn’t a real baby”. “You’re so lucky cause you already have a baby” , “your age gap would have been so small” and lots of other insensitive things like that. Guess people thought they were being helpful but all I really wanted to hear was “I’m sorry for your loss”.

Often I think situations like this are more difficult for the husband as the loss is not physical but emotional and we know how most men are not so good at dealing with their “emotional side”. We were blessed with a gorgeous little man and had the courage to try again a couple of months later. We are now the proud parents of 3 beautiful children here on earth and two little souls up in heaven. I guess people may think that it was “just a miscarriage” – but not to us. We know God has reasons for these things happening but that doesn’t mean that we are always able to look at the big picture and see things the way God wants us to. Yes I get upset when I think about them, yes I get angry when I think about the thinks people say and yes I am thankful that God gave us more children.

This may not make a whole lot of sense but perhaps someone who reads it can relate..its okay to be angry, its okay to be sad but mostly its ok to talk about it.

Love Heidi xx

[Heidi and Shaun Hudson-Bennett]

Taboo Topics: Losing a baby – meet Graeme and Nicole

My second daughter, Zoe, was stillborn at 37 weeks on 24th March 2007 in London, UK – we had no warning, one day she was well, with a strong heartbeat, head down, ready to come into the world, and two days later, she was dead. It turns out that Nicole has a blood condition that pre-disposes her toward clotting, and the best guess is that there must have been sudden clotting in the placenta/umbilical chord which starved Zoe of oxygen. We didn’t know this until after Zoe was born but because our first daughter, Janel, had been premature, Nicole had been under closer observation than a normal pregnancy, including specialised prenatal care, so there was nothing more that could have been done under the circumstances. Nevertheless, you plague yourself with “what if” questions – what if I’d taken Nicole the emergency room the night before when she first commented that Zoe wasn’t moving regularly, what if Nicole had noticed earlier that something seemed to be wrong?

The church community we belonged to were amazing and really rallied round, providing us with meals, doing laundry, taking Janel out so we could be alone. We were put in touch with a charity called SANDS (Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Society) who invited us to a meeting of parents who had lost their children. It was just incredible to meet with other parents who had walked a similar path to us and who could tell us that there was some light at the end of the tunnel, no matter how long and dark it might prove to be. When we returned to South Africa, we looked to find a similar support group, but saw that none existed. As a result we started Born Sleeping and have had the privilege of supporting, and being supported by, many couples both in Cape Town, where we live, but also around the country via email and Facebook.

The issue of my faith in relation to this experience is a difficult, complicated, and ongoing one – in the weeks after Zoe’s death, we felt God’s love and comfort expressed to us by his people and we truly felt that, somehow, it was all going to be alright. As a bloke, I was in full strong-man support mode for Nicole, we had a 18-month old daughter to take care of, I had a job to go back to after a couple of weeks, we were preparing to move home to South Africa, etc and although I had the opportunity for some counselling, I don’t think I was able to fully engage with the enormity of my grief and its impact on my faith. When we moved back to Cape Town, we struggled to find a worship community where we felt comfortable – going to church itself was not a happy experience, when you have deep questions about the goodness of a deity who would allow a child to be created only to take her back before we could know her, it is not easy to be surrounded by people singing His praises. The best advice we were given in this time was permission to miss church, to stop feeling duty bound to attend if it was damaging our relationship with God. In spite of this respite, for many months, I would go through phases of truly hating people who had an open, easy faith, because they had what I no longer could claim to be my own.

Truth be told, my relationship with God had been on a downward trend for some time before Zoe died, but the questions that her death raised for me became stumbling blocks which I couldn’t overcome and although we settled in a church and joined cell groups and I even began to lead worship again, my personal spiritual life was essentially dead. Matters came to a head one Sunday morning when God, through one of his children, lovingly confronted me and said that I could not continue like this, struggling on my own and hoping that things would improve, that I needed to seek help. And so I re-entered counselling, and have made progress – Zoe’s death has become the scalpel God used to cut through layers of tradition and habit to uncover fundamental flaws in the way I view God and how I relate to him. There is much work to be done still, but I have hope again that at some point in the future I will be restored as God promises, I will be able to say with Spurgeon “Oh Blessed Hurricane that drives me onto the Rock of Ages” and mean it.

Next month it will be 5 years since Zoe died, and although we have been blessed with a son in that time, I still think of her often and am surprised by how close to the surface the grief remains. In writing this, I have been reading through some of the messages we wrote and received at the time, and the tears have flowed freely again. You never “get over” a loss such as this, but you learn to live with the pain. You never ever quite work out how to properly answer the question “How many children do you have?” but you stop feeling guilty when you say 2 instead of 3. There is life after stillbirth, but it is never the same as before.

Graeme [Graeme Broster and Nicole Masureik]

Born Sleeping Website – http://bornsleeping.wordpress.com/
Born Sleeping Facebook Page – http://www.facebook.com/pages/Born-Sleeping/150344014978601

Taboo Topics: Losing a baby [intro]

this series of blog posts has been on my heart and mind for well over a year and i am excited to finally be at the point of getting started on it.

there are a number of incredibly important, life-transforming, heart-breaking life events that happen to huge numbers of people that no-one, or very few people, ever seem to talk publically about – and so for the most part there are hundreds or thousands of people living quietly and alone with their pain or confusion, struggling along as if they are the only ones that have gone through that thing and as if help or advice or at the very least understanding is not freely available.

my hope with ‘Taboo Topics’ is to be able to deal with one of those topics at a time by finding people who have experienced the very thing in question and are brave enough to share their stories and hopefully also offer some insight and advice as to how they managed to get up again, dust themselves off and keep going…

and the first one that i am wanting to look at is a hectic topic – that of losing a child and i am specifically wanting to look at miscarriage or stillbirth so a baby that has died before it has been given birth to, or very soon after, before the parents concerned really get a decent chance to build relationship. i heard a while back that this is a lot more frequent than most people would expect and i know that i have hardly ever heard about it and so there must be a lot of people silently suffering alone [or alone as a couple] with something that is either too painful or shameful to speak about.

i really hope this blog series will be a light at the end of that dark tunnel for a lot of you. by simply writing my intentions as a facebook status i was inundated with responses from a number of very brave people who want to share their stories and so i am wanting to create a space for them to do so. if you know of someone who you think will benefit from hearing the stories that follow, please feel free to cut and paste/tweet/share/link/email, whatever it takes to let them know that these stories are here.

you are not alone. there is a light. and there are many people who have walked this road and are walking it and will offer you support where you are on it.

click here to read the story of Graeme and Nicole

click here to read the story of Heidi and Shaun

click here to read the story of Sandi and Mike

click here to read the story of Debbie and Bruce [infertility and losing a child]

click here to read the mother’s side of the first story we shared as we hear from Nicole, Graeme’s wife

click here to read the story of Grant and Mauri

click here to read the story of Sandra and Shane

five more stories and links to resources including those of David and Sarah Seabrook, Cath, Margaret Ann and Adam Schaaf, Rory and Debbi Windell and Adrian and Benita Wright

and finally a rather more hardcore, in your face, pull-no-punches, commentary specifically for those who have not gone through it, from someone who is still living through the pain

putting the ‘C’ back in Christmas [part iii]

this year we got to be secret rooftop witnesses of this incredible act of Christmas mischief that Shane speaks about in this article and it was incredible hearing some of the stories from some of the people who had no idea where the money came from and yet for some of them it was a complete lifeline and life-changing moment for them:

So here is the start of the article shane wrote but click on the link to read the whole thing:

Critiquing the thick irony of the Christmas season is fair. It’s ludicrous that we celebrate the birth of the homeless baby Jesus by indulging in the biggest consumer spending of the year, scurrying around trying to find something to buy for people who have everything.

Nonetheless, there is something beautiful about giving, generosity and the contagious cheer that fills the world (not just the malls) during Christmas. We just need fresh imagination with how we celebrate amid the frenzy and clutter.

So we’ve started a new tradition here in the post-industrial concrete jungle of North Philadelphia … we call it the “Christmas Carol Conspiracy”.

You can read the rest of it here…

the little cow that could…

i came across this blog today and i want you to read the bio with me and try and conjure up in your mind an image of the person who might possibly be writing it:

“A few years ago, I stumbled upon the Vaquita, a tiny endangered porpoise. I was heartbroken when I read about its story, so I decided to start this blog, along with many other efforts to help this species. I post poems, facts, and updates about the Vaquita weekly, and have other pages to help inform you about the Vaquita and its helpers. I hope this blog will help save a species in need.”

if this is all the info you have, [and take another minute and read it once more to really try and figure this out], what picture comes to your mind? is it a male or a female? someone with many years of life experience to draw upon, or a young child? someone who speaks with an English accent? or are we talking European? Australian or New Zealand perhaps? or is it someone from my continent of Africa or my present home of Americaland?

who do you picture writing this?

but wait, here is one more set of clues as to the authorship of said blog:

“I love playing tennis, birdwatching, hiking, even school, but my main focus is animal conservation through writing.”

for me, ‘animal conservation through writing,’ and i instantly have a woman in mind… ‘playing tennis’ and ‘birdwatching’ makes her fifty plus years of age… hiking throws a potential hint of a curveball… but it’s the word ‘school’ that seems out of place…?

it is in fact the line i omitted, that starts off this blog bio, which fills in a lot more of the gaps:

“I am an 11-year-old boy living in Bethlehem, PA.”

well slap-my-face-to-the-side-of-a-pig-and-roll-me-in-the-mud. It’s called V-Log and it is largely about the saving of a species of porpoise called the Vaquita [of which there are only about 250 left in the world] and you can check it out here, and it does contain poetry like this, and it really just moved and excited me to see an 11 year old confident young man with poetic gifts and more really being passionate about something and then actively living out/chasing his passion in the best way he knows how… [where is Oprah or Ellen when you need them?]

his blog profile name is goldenliontamarin and it describes him well. we can learn a lot from him and i hope we do.

if you don’t have a passion and a purpose or aren’t pursuing it, then there is a really strong chance that you aren’t living, you are just existing. let’s learn from this young 11 year old guy [who seems a lot older than a lot of older people i know] and really start sucking the marrow out of life. in a good way.

choose living.