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Archive for Mosaic Of Empowered Feminity – Page 2

Being an Advocate means Defining our own Version of Success

By Denise Boehler
Monday, June 24th, 2019

I just finished dancing in my barn loft office, the place where I write for the animals and on behalf of women. It’s been a few days. Four, even. But I feel better that I did. I could feel thoughts releasing, moving through. I could see myself. I could feel my body again. I feel more aligned. I needed to dance today – I forced myself. I’ve been on the floor with failure since Friday, feeling the plug of writing and advocacy has been pulled and I have no direction in which to turn, no bread crumbs on some inspired, creative path ala Tama Keives, my wonderful and ever-optimistic career catalyst coaching icon, who I cannot afford to hire for the money this career isn’t making.

I’ve been wanting to feel successful in having rebuilt my life after sudden divorce ten years earlier, that I found ways to support myself financially with my creative energy and intellect. Especially since leaving that marriage meant leaving that law firm (and that lucrative income).

Instead, I’ve been struggling and straining, efforting and learning, signing up for one online writers’ course after workshop after freelance group, opening up to opportunities never forthcoming because well, I’m not a social media slut and I prefer face-to-face interactions with real human beings.

So today, I have no direction – yet – for how success will now feel to me.

I am telling myself that today I don’t have to.

After falling down with failure yet again, I feel done with forcing outcomes for what success should look like to me. I simply don’t know. I’ve never done this before. What I do know is that the former’s version or the husband’s version or the dominant patriarch’s version cannot be my version. Success for me as I may one day define it will feel authentically like my own version, as it will have been built from the constituent components of me.

No one else is going to have the privilege to define my success. If I feel it in every cell of my being, that will be enough for me.

What, then, is my version of success?

It’s feeling healthy and strong, embodying my athletic life, being able to move and be physical as I want to express myself. It’s having animals in my life that I can relate and give back to, animals in need where they had no one before, hearing sighs of contentment after a long walk in our valley. It’s watching cats sleep on the back of a chair, cats living in the shelter for months unwanted. It’s getting to see the mama Tanager feed suet to to her splashy sub-adult male offspring on the Ponderosa Pine next to the house. It’s having friends who call in need of a listening ear or a compassionate heart because they feel comfortable doing so. It’s having my sweet husband say thank you for cleaning that floor / making that lunch, because he noticed and was listening to how unacknowledged I have been feeling. It’s having someone reflect back to me that they felt moved by an animal piece I wrote and tell me how it affected them.

I’ve been spending time with society’s version of success a lot lately. It was highlighted in a recent interview with the Career Advisor at my alma mater. I walked out of that meeting soul-crushed. Perhaps you should take a break from trying so hard, just for a while, do something else, she said softly.

I couldn’t answer for my throat was filled with resentment and grief. My mind couldn’t process for it was filled with confusion. My body couldn’t engage, for it was spent and depleted.

It’s been ten years since I left my old life, and I’ve been trying to earn income doing what I love since then, I replied weakly. She didn’t need to be told again how obsolete I felt in a world steeped in technology, or how I felt left out of the world of productive, engaged and contributing adults. I was certain she’d heard the tired story before. And she didn’t need to offer the platitude, Do what you love and the money will follow, because no one in a serious career at an accredited university actually believes that.

And, I didn’t have to wait for the sarcastic, superficial query often originating from the less sincere – How’s that working out for you? – my presence had already answered the question.

I’ ve answered that question myself. I walked out of her office, feeling failure deep in my being. It persisted deeply into the weekend, crying hard through the moments when I could have otherwise been enjoying the downtime with my sweetly loving husband. (Though I did resonate with all the micro-stories in Little Miss Sunshine, particularly the moment when Bryan Cranston tells Greg Kinnear, No one’s heard of you, crushing his fiery, divinely inspired motivational speaking dreams.)

So, today’s a new day. After I allowed the failure to hang out with me like an unwelcome dark traveler for a while, I decided to take the baby step of doing the little things that I love – walking our dogs, dancing, writing – and looking at that wonderful and well-meaning Career Advisor’s e-mail for her next suggestion. (I have now decided that I will create a system for how to proceed in the next phase for my advocacy work in the way of asking those already situated in their careers, How did you get there, and keep writing.) I will keep advocating for the lives and well-being of animals and complete my essay collection on coexistence with wildlife here in the mountains, though a proper title eludes me. And I will decide that my version of success is authentically my own, not anything defined by anyone outside of me.

Just for today, my raison d’être will be taking care of my animals who were all thrown out of society’s flow and into the repository of shelters. I will make delicious meals for my sweet husband, care for my physical self. I will answer the call to show up for whichever friend needs a compassionate ear, and write what comes through my mind or lives deep within my heart on behalf of a rescue dog in need or a moose gone unnoticed in our mountain valley, so that people won’t drive up here unaware.

Just for today.

 

Categories : Just For Writers, Just Life, Mosaic Of Empowered Feminity

The Final Say

By Denise Boehler
Thursday, March 7th, 2019

I just knew I would cry. From the first glimpse of that kilt and Prince Charlie jacket, pangs of sadness moved through my body like incense through air in a Buddhist meditation hall. He was there to play Amazing Grace live on his bagpipes, the hired Scotsman for the funeral of John S. When he took a deep breath after the eulogies, put his lips to the pipes and blew his heart into the ever-popular Scottish rendition I’ve heard at so many Scottish-Irish festivals, I couldn’t keep from crying.

It – the tears – weren’t for my husband’s mentor, a man of ninety years whom I’d never had the pleasure of knowing. John S had helped my husband begin his scientific aspirations with the government back in 1979, the beginning of a beautiful mentor- and friendship. They were, instead, for the death of a life: long-term relationships ended with the harshest of punctuation, careers long-ago retired, travel completed with no hope of return, opportunities never to be had ever more, animals come and gone, experiences evaporated with the final breath that was his last.

As my husband said for his mentor/friend when he carried him amongst his fellow pallbearers, John and I traveled the world together. It only makes sense I carry him on his final trip.

The day itself to celebrate John S’s life was sun-washed and mild, the funeral held in one of the busiest metropolitan areas on the Front Range. For just a moment, however, traffic stopped at intersections and entrance ramps as police officers ran sirens and lights, playing leapfrog in Dodge Chargers and Ford Explorers. Compliant motorists screeched to a full halt in the midst of their Friday afternoons while a line of twenty-two cars proceeded the ten-mile stretch from the funeral home to the cemetery. The final gesture was made with the last left-hand turn into Ft. Logan Cemetery. As police officers leaped from their cars to stand by the driver’s side, white-gloved hands were raised to the foreheads of attendant police officers gesturing the final salute.

In our everyday chaotic, hyper-connected, turbo-charged, techno-centric society, such processions to honor the life of the departed are exceedingly rare.

It wasn’t simply the ceremony of the funeral that gave me pause. It was the raw finality. Literally, a funeral is the final statement of a person’s life. There will be no other chances, choices or possibilities.

That’s it.

Your turn at life is over. Whatever choices you made are final, whatever chances you had – or didn’t – have come and gone. Whichever relationships or careers you had – or didn’t – are yours to take with in the memory that was your life. If they were the wrong ones or incomplete, accompanied by regret or surrounded by turmoil or misfortune, they are all yours. You take them with you to your grave. Whatever kindness or anger or sadness or joy, generosity or thoughtfulness, selfishness or addictions that were your way of being in the world are reflected in the whispers into the cold air in the words of others. Eulogies, those good words spoken at the final gathering to honor your life, will reflect however and whoever you were, no matter your thoughts or desires to the contrary or sweet agreement with the Creator. You are your own final witness, rendered forever silent.

Rarely do we have chances to participate in such time-honored rituals, to pause to reflect on the arrival of our own last moment. We take for granted we will have another Monday morning in which to pursue a networking opportunity, another Friday in which to cozy up to our beloved on a couch in front of a fire, or another Saturday on which to hike our rescue dogs up a mountain.

Perhaps the ability to reflect develops with the passage of time. The more years the years pass, the deeper I feel the impact of meaningful events. Expanding permeability has become synonymous with each passing birthday. When I was in my twenties, I thought my skin would grow thicker as I aged. Life has revealed, however, just the opposite.

Over is over. You get no more life. I can think of nothing more sobering or clarifying. I felt honored to attend John S’s funeral, even more so with the ceremony of it all. It lent importance and depth in a way I don’t often encounter, and it was a reminder that while I use up my own days here on this sweet earth, it will continue to be to speak for the animals chancing across my awareness, advocating for their needs and raising consciousness for the beauty they bring to our world. Animals may not be your thing, as we each have our own – but whatever it is, make it count – you never know if you’re going to have your own police-escorted funeral procession on a 60-degree day in Denver on a February Friday, and what those gathered to honor your life may have to say…

Categories : Just Life, Mosaic Of Empowered Feminity

Can you Feed Both your Passions and your Animals?

By Denise Boehler
Thursday, February 7th, 2019

It’s 4:30am on this early February morning, and I just can’t sleep. It could be a room too warm or living at eight thousand feet above sea altitude. Or perhaps, it is the deep sadness, frustration and discouragement meeting me in my days. It’s hard to feel beyond the obstacles, gather the energy to sustain my creative efforts on behalf of all things four-legged and winged.

I wonder how my life can ever change when I struggle so hard and feel that little is moving in the direction I need it to move in.

God help me, does anyone else ever feel this way?

Because ever since that damned awakening nine years hence, the one where I was called forth to abandon my first marriage for the voice I couldn’t have, I’ve been advocating for the animals I chance across. It went something this:

I’m here to devote myself, to continue opening to constantly listening, to richly developing a life for others, not just for myself. A life for the earth, for wolves and prairie dogs, for rivers and mountains, humans and hawks. A life for us all, lived with greater awareness of our potential for harm and our capacity for good…

My own words reflected back to me now, as written in my journals just before I nearly drowned in the Lamar River, make me cry. I know many advocates who feel this way, who turn away from their heart’s pursuits with bitterness, resentment and cynicism in their war-torn spirits and battle-weary hearts. I know the days I fall down; I know the discursive dialogue in my mind, now all too familiar.

There are days in which I feel humiliated with the hubris in which I believed I could make a living writing about animals or advocating for them. That I was supposed to do that — and only that – as my life path. That the major, transformational life change into the big Self I reclaimed was supposed to mean something. I thought I could find place, find people who needed or wanted what I wrote for the nonhuman beings of this world.

Or maybe, it’s all simply for the animals.

Hell, we have a developer for a president squatting in the Whitehouse, a capitalist, misogynistic, racist, swine. Doesn’t that say something about the values of our culture?

One of my favorite writers, Julia Cameron, speaks of remuneration for our efforts – as an artist, it completes the creation cycle. You find a place and receive a reward — however modest — as reaffirmation for your effort.

Do what you love, and the money will follow, the tired platitude of the human potential movement. They seem to be making a living propounding that idea. What then, for the rest of us, embracing that idea for animal advocacy?

I give my life to the animals. I do it every waking moment of my living, breathing days. Isn’t it fair, then, that I have a life back in return, for doing so? Isn’t that the call of every animal advocate?

I long to love and care for the creatures of this world – but the only return from animals is that of their love. And a writer can’t live on that.

I ask, then, What’s a passionate, talented, creative, intelligent, dedicated animal advocate to do?

***

You have very expensive tastes where your dogs are concerned, my friend Leslie said to me the other day at Brewing Market. As she held her repurposed bottle of Smart Water while I sipped a $3.50 Chai latte, I hesitated. She was one of my few friends who could get away saying such things to me. At least, you could have a job to pay for your dog things.

I’m not contradicting what you’re saying, I finished taking a sip. Leslie has always been my friend. I realize I require that our dogs get the best food we can afford. So, I research, I ask. I wind up with a $70 bag of Fromm Lamb & Lentil kibble, to help make sure my incontinent Shepherd mutt’s solids remain so. Her incontinence requires daily Prazosin & Bethanecol, her arthritis requires Metacam, her aging dementia is soothed by CBD Oil. And diapers, well, we run through seven to eight dozen in any given month. I spend my days writing, looking for opportunities…

So yes, you’re exactly right, I smiled at Leslie, Where dogs are concerned, there is expense – and the younger ones, they don’t require near as much. Just kibble – Fromm – wet food, training treats, bones and toys…

She laughed, because she knew the truth of it, having a dog with a neurological problem herself. But Leslie is my realtor friend and a former mentor when I was such – a profession I relinquished for emotional and psychological sanity.

Should a writer relinquish their dreams and return to a more lucrative pursuit?

Some people have a travel addiction, others — children consuming all their resources. I’ve chosen – and would continue to choose – to care for the dogs I chance across who require things to live that cost money. It’s not as though I can ask for them for free, as an advocate and a writer – say,

Can I write for your company, about how your Prazosin keeps my dog alive, and you give me free Prazosin in exchange? She can be your spokesdog, as it were – or the Bethanecol, for instance?

Don’t we all need sponsors for our lives? I ponder the dilemma for a while…

***

If I resolve nothing else at 4:30am on this early February morning, it’s another working through, a wading and muddling in the muddy, murky waters of how to process the deepest emotions of sadness or despair into clarity, and how to move beyond obstacles into more creative answers. Each time I allow myself to dive down deep, swim with the emotional turmoil that accompanies this life and throw in a little bit of compassion, I resurface with something lighter. I’d like to say it comes from intuition, but I know better — it is the voice of my own Higher Power that has been leading me through every weighted, challenging step of this journey.

And for that level of reaffirmation, I can keep going. Just for today, I’ll contact the people I give my money to in order to keep my dogs alive, and see if they would like to return the favor…

 

Categories : Animal Stories, Just For Writers, Just Life, Mosaic Of Empowered Feminity
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