Guest Post: Julie Lynn Parson Hoepfer and a Lesson of Love

 The Delaware Bay at Lewes Beach circa 1964

I know I've been away awhile. It's been a difficult six weeks. Gratefully, my mother's house sold quickly. The long and arduous process of emptying the house finally come to an end. Now for the downside: I now have so many more boxes to add to my sorting process. The silver lining in this may be the stories to be told and the lessons to be learned as I empty them.

After a ten year battle with a rare form of cancer, my sister Julie slipped through the veil from this world to the next. The impact of her passing has not yet fully descended upon me. I am being kind to myself and allowing the grief to unfold in its own time. Past experiences have taught me that grief cannot be forced, each experience of it is different. There is no way around it, only through it. My sister was brave in her dying so I must honor her and be brave in my living.

 For the moment, I have some wonderful guest writers to share with you in the days to come.

In the final weeks of Julie's life, my sister reunited with two of her oldest friends from childhood. She eagerly anticipated their visit and talked happily about it for a long time afterword. To my surprise they all recited their childhood phone numbers correctly from memory without hesitation!

The bonds of true friendship are deep and it is never too late to rekindle them. The joy of that renewal may be beyond measure.

I have posted Lynn Hackman's blog post about my sister here:
the mentally itinerant methodist: Julie Lynn Parson Hoepfer and a Lesson of Love


And if you missed my earlier post about my own reconciliation with my sister you'll find it here:
There's a Hole in my Sole

Be well. Do Good Work. Find your old friends and hug them.

Day 12: On Retreat: Reach

The whiteness, the blankness, of a piece of Yupo paper beckoned me. My approach to painting is often contemplative, but sometimes it is just for pure kid-like fun. Having used my earlier painting to let go of anxiety I now wanted to play, to experiment. Add water and inks, blow with a straw. Nope.  Grabbing a paper towel I wipe it off and begin again. Ah the beauty of Yupo.

I rummage around in the "Paint Night" 2.0 box that Aletheia has brought to the retreat. Painters tape. Happy Dance! Blue tape now adorns my paper as I tape off a design. Ink, water, more ink blown through an atomizer. A couple of minutes under the hairdryer. Peel off the tape and voila. Meh. This isn't it either. It's a nice base layer so I will just add to it.

Blotting the excess umber ink with a paper towel, I drop green and turquoise onto the paper. Across the table there is discussion about painting with ones eyes closed or using your non-dominate hand. Wonder what would happen if I did that? I grab a foam stenciling brush, put it into my left hand, close my eyes, take a deep breath, and begin to swirl the ink. Opening my eyes I like what I see.

Waves on the beach immediately came to mind. The blue-green evokes memories of the foaming Atlantic at Cape Henlopen, the destination of many childhood vacations. Comfort and peace wash over me. Even during a storm I felt safe tucked into my bed in our apartment just off the beach in Lewes, knowing that the next day the shoreline would hold treasures churned up by the waves.

What if I looked at the storms in my own life that way? Giving up some of my fear by remembering (anticipating, perhaps?) there may be some treasures churned up by the waves? I only have to look for them, to reach for them.

Despite what this painting revealed to me, a title did not shout its name to me. I believe that creative works are meant to shared, that they may hold healing or wisdom (or joy) for the community. In turn, I receive, and value, the insight from others. Among ideas that came forth were Brussels sprouts on a stalk, shells in a tide pool, and waves on a shore. Cool insights, but what do these have in common? It became clear from my friend Becky's comment, "I see people reaching out their arms."

And so the painting became REACH.

Waves reaching for the shore.  Brussels sprouts reaching for the sun.  Snails in a tidal pool reaching for food. People reaching for each other in love and comfort. After the storm there is sun and food and friends and family and community however you define it.  Treasures. Reach for it.

Day 11: On Retreat: The First Wave May be Small

Slowly waking to the distant train whistle, I stretched for a moment before opening my eyes to the pale morning light. After showering and dressing I headed quietly down the stairs to breakfast. In the dining room the silence was broken only by clinking dishes and the low murmurs of the resident Jesuit priests in their portion of the dining room.

As I pulled the silence around me like a favorite blanket, I laugh to myself thinking how unnerved I felt during my first stay at The Jesuit Center. Turning on my electric toothbrush that November morning, I was convinced even the kitchen staff two floors below were deafened by its hum. By the next morning I realized the only person disturbed by the toothbrush was me.

"I am sorta like those jelly-filled french candies. I am hard on the outside, but if you push too hard my shell will break and expose the soft and runny inside. If you aren't careful I might ooze onto you," I explained when it came to my turn to introduce myself by using a texture.

The overwhelming anxiety of the day before had lessened but, I still had trouble focusing. While sitting in front of a piece of blank Yupo paper I struggled to remember to the task our facilitator had suggested to our retreat group. What are we supposed to create? I felt cracks appearing in the hard shell and the gooey interior welling up. Sensing my frustration, Aletheia gently suggested, "Don't over think it. Just go with your intuition. Let your heart and the Spirit guide you."  

Wait, this isn't art class. I'm not getting a grade, I reminded myself. Giving myself permission to reach for whatever I felt drawn to pick up, be it ink color or implements of creation I grabbed orange, yellow, blue, and violet inks. I used a toothbrush, an atomizer, a stippling brush, a spritz of alcohol, and a bar of ivory soap. What emerged was darkness and light, layers and textures, while anxiety dropped away and inner focus returned.

Having almost no background or training in art outside of required public school classes, my approach to painting is one of play, prayer, and/or self discovery. Rarely do I have a "picture" in my mind, but rather I like to clear my mind of the chatter and simply focus on only what is in front of me. More and more I try to go with impulse and instinct rather than force an image to appear. (In fact, I generally don't like the paintings in which I try to manipulate the end product, too much.)  This painting held several surprises for me. Usually I know when a painting is done. I don't know until I get there, but when I do, it is just done. About that same time, or as the painting is drying, the meaning or title crystallizes in my mind.

This painting was different. No meaning became clear. It was done, but it wasn't finished. I wasn't even sure of the orientation of the painting. I studied it from several angles. And it held a mystery. In the lower left quadrant, it seemed that three Greek lower case letters appeared. Lambda. Alpha. Iota. I Googled them from my phone (not a good thing to do while on retreat.) The results didn't really shed any light for me. I felt myself becoming frustrated.  Let it be. Let it be, said that still small voice.

Yesterday morning, coffee in hand, I pulled out the painting and looked at it again, meditating on its images. Then I stepped into uncharted territory. Light. Yellow.  Pulling out my art suitcase...

...I did something I've never done before. I added to the painting that was done-but-not-finished. Yellow. A little at first and then with a larger almost dry brush I added more. While it was drying I opened my laptop. Lambda. Alpha. Iota. The words were still there, even through the yellow. In astronomy lower case Lambda means wave or wavelength. Alpha = first or beginning. Iota = a little bit. Ah, now I get it. The message is: The first wave may be small. 

The first wave of sunlight that breaks through the darkness. The beginnings of change, good or bad, may be small. When the hard shell breaks the inside may ooze just a bit at first.

At my husband's suggestion I worked on it a bit more last evening, reinforcing the TEXTURE of the wording in lemon yellow. NOW it is finished.

 The first wave may be small. Whatever your wave is. Don't miss it. Anticipate it.

Day 10: On Retreat: The Church of Gaia Sophia

Nope, I didn't make a mistake in the title. I did not misspell the name of former Greek Orthodox patriarchal basilica (church), later an imperial mosque, and now a museum in Istanbul, Turkey known as Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom.)  Instead I am talking about a place that came to me in a dream recently. It was a vivid and complicated dream coming just before I awoke in the morning.

I am walking up a hill.  A woman approaches me on the sidewalk, asking, "Are you looking for the Church of Gaia Sophia?" Until the moment she spoke to me, I was unaware that I was looking for anything. "Of course," was my answer and I knew, at my very core, that I was indeed looking for The Chuch of Gaia Sophia. Beckoning me to follow her, we entered a small door of a nondescript building. Once inside the colorful sanctuary was teeming with people, nearly ever seat filled. I felt a deep sense of calm and belonging.

Although there were other parts of the dream, these images remained the sharpest as the weeks passed. On the evening of January 10th, while attending a Visualizing Your Spiritual Journey retreat, I was encouraged to create a representation of my prayer/hope for the weekend. It had been an anxiety-filled day and I was desperately seeking peace and calm.

I created The Church of Gaia Sophia as part of that prayer:

The Church of Gaia Sophia (Earth Wisdom) - Collage

Having been to the Jesuit Center before, I knew that following All School Prayer, the night would descend into silence until the end of breakfast on Saturday morning. Creating my collage prepared me for rest and resting in the silence.

As yet I do not fully understand all the dream holds for me, but I am waiting, anticipating the wisdom it holds.

Day 9: 1,200 Names for Yellow

One of my favorite blogs for humor, creative ideas, and great craft tutorials all rolled into one sparkly package is Aunt Peaches. Just about the time I was thinking about my paint chip project I discovered one of her older blog posts about a "yellow" installation she had in her office.  Maybe I'll try something similar on my studio wall, but don't know if I'll get 1,200 names for brown, yellow, orange and/or green.

Please take a moment to read Aunt Peaches' post on Yellow and by all means read her blog.  She's messy and sparkly. Even if you never make a single craft project, you'll have more fun than a bag of possums!


Aunt Peaches: 1,200 Names for Yellow

Day 8: How I stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Entire Color Wheel

This is an embarrassing admission. I have a troubled relationship with brown (and yellow and orange and sometimes green.) These are colors I avoid as if they were wearing a leather jacket with the collar up, smoking a cigarette and trying to entice me into the alley to engage in some sort of risky behavior. I do not allow them in my pallet - not for painting (artwork or walls) nor for wearing. Oh, but I flirt with these bad boy colors entertaining daydreams of riding on the back of a motorcycle, yellow and orange scarf flying from the collar of my BLACK leather jacket.  For my own safety I steered clear of brown and yellow and orange and sometimes green. There is just no telling what they might convince me to do.

I was warned about the dangers of bad boy colors as a young woman, when my father disapproved of a green sweater I wore.* Fearing that as I aged I might become wild and out of control adorned with gold and olive, an intervention was arranged.  One evening a trained Image Consultant arrived at my home to drape my shoulders and face with capes of every color.  Her expert observations determined me to be a "Winter. Yellow, orange, gold, rust, olive, beige, golden brown and all colors with golden undertones are not for you, I was counseled.  To help me stay on the wagon when purchasing clothing and cosmetics (which she offered to sell me on the spot at a deep discount) I was given a bible, the "Winter Color Book." It contained such pearls of wisdom as, "In fact, for most of us, its refreshing to be released from our 'safe' (and often wrong) brown and beige wardrobes."

To further protect me I was given a card with my color swatches glued to it. Whenever, I felt the urge to buy say, khaki or yellow, I could meditate on the swatch card and be guided to a color that would treat me right.

I had occasional flings: a yellow turtleneck, an olive scarf, a pumpkin sweater, brown pants, khaki shorts. For the most part, however, I stayed true to my colors. I loved them and they never asked me to do anything I didn't want to. No risk required.

AND THEN I went on a retreat. In the first session, our facilitator, who could barely sit still, opened with, "Let's start off introductions." Okay, safe enough.  "Tell us your name and a bit about yourself by choosing a color as a descriptor and why. I'll go first. I'm Aletheia and I am neon orange with excitement."   

Uh oh, Crap. I'm in deep trouble here. Danger, Will Robinson. Danger. She might have candy...

I let the others talk about their colors first. I was anxious. My colors were picked. Black. Purple. What color AM I really? I didn't want to use blue because it was, well, blue. And that wasn't me that day. I took a deep breath and stepped into the alley, "My name is Pam and the color I choose is brown because when I mixed paint in junior high art class it just came out as brown. Recently I learned that getting brown is a more complex process than I imagined."

Some work to be done here. Risks to be taken. Forbidden worlds to be explored. Complexity to be understood. I wonder what else is in that alley.

I have issued myself a second personal challenge for 2014: to risk making friends with the entire color wheel, including brown. I'm going to walk down that alley boldly, eat that candy, ride that motorcycle, break those rules. I am going to be this:

And I am going to dance with my dangerous new friends:

I'm going wear this:

And this:

 (Notice I have boxes at work, too.)

 On the day it was 9 degrees in Harrisburg I stopped at a big box store and gathered all the brown paint chips I could find.

And more paint chips.

After cutting them apart and removing the names, I will be renaming (re-framing) the color hues as I fit them into my life. I'll post the colors as I go, repeating the same process with yellow, orange and sometimes green. At the end of the year, they might merge into some sort of installation, incorporating some of those empty boxes. There is just no telling what they might convince me to do!

**In high school I had a green v-neck sweater that I wore often. My father hated it. He thought it was an awful color on me. I don't remember what happened to that sweater. I think I might have gotten rid of it because it had a burn hole. I was irresponsible with fire. 

Day 7: Angst in a Lockbox OR Seven Gifts from my Younger Self

I'd call my attic stairs "rickety-tricky". Rough-hewn and narrow they ascend to attic from the closet in my home's third floor front room. One side of the stairs is bordered by an exposed brick wall and the other side is unplastered lath. Carrying down a large box may require me to either scrape a hand raw on the bricks or fill my knuckles with splinters from the lath on the other side. Recently I had a box that was so heavy and large I just couldn't get it down myself without risking major injury, so I dropped it at the top of the stairs and peered inside (the light is a little better there). Appearing to be filled with several smaller boxes, I hauled one of those out and made it down the stairs without requiring a first aid kit.

In the box was yet another box, a metal lock-box. I wiped off the dust and wondered where the key might be. It turned out to be unlocked and it was filled with these:

This is gonna be great, I told myself. A few days later, not having to be anywhere early I settled back into bed with a mug of coffee nudging the dog and cat for some space. Move over you two!  Opening the small red diary I eagerly anticipated pearls of wisdom and profound insights from my younger self. 100 pages later I realized my journals were like a train wreck. The pages were terrible, but I couldn't look away.  The little diary was followed by the steno book and finally the spiral notebook, I kept reading until everything came to an abrupt halt with this:

What? I turned the page. Nothing. The rest of the notebook is BLANK. Too fat to write? Too self-conscious that I might be fat to write? I was 15 when I scrawled these words. I don't think I wrote in a journal again for years.

Who was that girl? I was really disappointed. She had no wisdom and precious little insight, wrote endlessly about boys (especially certain boys) and hanging out at the mall, worried about being liked or fat or both, cried a river and ate mountains of ice cream at the now-defunct Alaskaland. And then there was the whining. Some of my angst about certain boys went on FOREVER. Enough already. Get over it! Like Bill Murray's character in Meatballs I wanted to chant, "It just doesn't matter!" Oh, but it did when I was 14. Its a wonder that metal box didn't explode embedding its emotional shrapnel into the attic walls!

While she didn't have the insight or wisdom I expected, my younger self jumped forward from the pages with gifts. I wasn't always comfortable with the packaging, but I receive them now with grace, humility and gratitude. I share with you seven of them.

1. Writing it down helps. It seems that my diaries served as a sort of teen "morning pages" that Julia Cameron talks about in The Artist's Way. I didn't censor myself. My handwriting was terrible. I seldom corrected grammar, spelling, or sentence structure. I got the crap out on the paper and I did so almost every day for several years of my young life.

2. Simple things are important. Yes, sometimes I wrote about the clothing or other stuff I bought, but mostly it was the gatherings with friends or family. We baked cakes together, made a silly movie, stayed up all night at Barb's house reading parts of Sisterhood is Powerful out loud, went to school dances and plays, enjoyed camping, retreats, hiking, flea market and beach trips.

3. Some friends endure. Many of the people who were my best friends in Junior High and High School are still my friends. Sure the closeness of our relationships has waxed and waned over the years complicated by distance, marriages, children, and illnesses. I am struck by the strength of some of them. My BFF Tracy was wise beyond her years then as she is now. Still one of the kindest people I know, she called me recently after the sudden death of one our high school friends and as we talked the years melted away. We were girls again, laughing and crying and talking about those certain boys.

4. Risks are necessary for growth. I signed up for drama class as an elective in High School. Drama, well not the acting kind, was never on my radar before that. I didn't record why I said yes (perhaps so I didn't have to take art), but there are lessons I learned in that class that stay with me still. I had a growing political awareness (this was 1970-73) and I must have been a bit vocal about it. In History class we were assigned group projects. I went to the teacher, Mr. Miller, telling him that most of the students in the class didn't share my politics and asking if I could have a different assignment. He let me do one on the history of protest through music. I got an A. We wore black arm bands in May 1971 in solidarity with the May Day Protests against the Vietnam War. There was some discussion about whether we should be sent home from school or required to remove the armbands. In the end, neither happened.

4.1 Some risks aren't very smart. We were a group of good (mostly) kids who had some fairly decent parenting, but that didn't stop us from doing dumb or risky things. One Halloween my friend Nancy and I visited mischief and mayhem upon the neighborhood. We filled mail boxes with corn, toilet papered trees and bushes, and soaped windows. My father found out and I had to apologize to everyone on our street and clean up the mess. My parents argued about this and in the end I was also grounded for a couple of weeks. (It must have been significant on many levels since it is the only time I record a disagreement between my parents.) I liked to sneak out at night. Another time when Tracy was staying at my house we slipped out to meet a boy she liked who lived on my street. It appears here on October 8th:

The word DOG is missing between "the" and "started to bark." It's all the dog's fault!

We didn't really DO anything bad when we were out at night. Mostly we chased each other through the fields and woods. I liked feeling free and pushing the envelope. We talked a lot about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, but we didn't do much. I am sure none of us thought there was any risk. We were invincible. Although we never met anyone out there except each other, nowadays I think of assault, abduction, and murder. After the night my mom caught us I didn't sneak out at night as much, not only because I was grounded (again), but also because I started to think about the consequences.

5. I like fire. Candles and sealing wax (hey it was before the internet and cell phones) were a big part of my life. With the amount of sealing wax and number of candles my friends and I gave each other as gifts, coupled with our irresponsibility with fire (one journal details hiding a burn hole in the rug), it is a miracle we didn't burn down all of Colonial Park. Plus I write fondly about sitting up late around a campfire with cousins and friends. I still like fireplaces (my father had one added to the house about the time I was in high school), camp fires, and bonfires.

6. I love,  and was loved by, my family (even when I thought I wasn't/didn't).  I called my sister "Jolly Julie" for entertaining me with bad jokes. My friends thought my dad looked like Fred Astaire.  My parents made it possible for me to go to school and church dances, after school activities, the library (it was conveniently located at the mall), church youth group, choir rehearsal, and school plays. As a family we went to beach, camped with extended family at state parks, went on day trips, and had unusual pets including a skunk and a goat.

7. It gets better. Yes, it does. Although it was hard to see when I was 15, high school doesn't (and didn't) last forever.  My first day in 7th grade homeroom the kid behind me nicknamed me "Moby Moose." Since his last name followed mine in alphabetical order he sat behind me for the next five years, kicking my chair and calling me that name every morning. I escaped only by the creation of a newspaper staff homeroom for the students who worked on the high school paper. I loved working on the paper. It gave me a sense of freedom. I was extremely self-conscious about my weight (see photo above) and really believed that people would like me better if I was thinner. Thankfully, that got better, too. And that kid who gave me the nickname, we are still in touch, too.

I'm not sure what I'll do with those journals now. I am using the (unlocked) lock box to hold some cards and photos I want to keep.  For the moment I put them on a shelf, but I'm not sure I'll ever need to read them again. Perhaps I might indulge my love of fire and burn them. I am more responsible with fire now.