12/04/2024
It’s hard for me to believe it’s been a year since my last newsletter. It’s been a year of change, grief, facing shadows, losing and gaining hope over and over…..we are indeed living in interesting times.
Possibly my biggest loss was my sister Rose. In 2020 I took her to Mexico with me. It was the first time she had ever been out of the country. She fell in love, and 2021 came for a longer period. After returning home she began to experience pain in her body that got worse by the month. After many misdiagnosis, it was discovered she had multiple myeloma cancer. Thus began an intense couple of years for the two us, of research, trips south to a former Mayo physician doctor now practicing integrative medicine , struggling to make sense of mountains of information, and always with the fear of loss underneath. By mid-2024, she was cancer free. It was a huge victory for her, and we made plans for a much longer trip to Mexico in 2025. She wanted to be my assistant at the 2025 retreat and I was thrilled to have her help.
In October, she somehow got Legionnaires pneumonia, and just like that she was gone. It was a crushing blow after all she had done to beat cancer. One month later, my daughter’s dad died of turbo cancer. While we never married, in the past decade the 3 of us regularly went to brunch together and considered ourselves good friends. So I have had to dance with grief, succumbing to bouts of despair and having to face the question, what happens when we die? I have never quite found an answer to that, yet I know it is perhaps one of the strongest unconscious drivers throughout our lives.
The world has changed so much in the past decade, I scarcely recognize it. And yet the things that are most true, most valuable, most meaningful have not. These are the things we have in real life relationships, in partnership with our own bodies, in the joy of watching something we’ve planted grow and flower, in the awe of experiencing the Milky Way on a dark night in the wilderness. As my 71st birthday approaches, I find myself wondering about the rest of my life. Do I have any dreams left? Is there something unfinished that needs to be addressed? Is what was important to me for so long still important, and if so, what is that? My confidence of my 50’s is no longer around. My passion for life has slowed to a quiet stream. The loss of energy that comes with aging feels wrong somehow.
I spent 2024 practicing putting nothing on my calendar, greeting each day with a wide open block of time of which nothing was expected of me. (Hence no newsletters lol) Triggers galore revealed themselves. I found each morning as soon as I was awake, the to-do list floated over the bed. Then the expectation that for every hour I was awake I should be working showed up. Those two things were relentless and I had to face them every day over and over. “I’m not doing anything today” I would say to my daughter and she would say, “Good! You don’t have to!” But secretly I would be thinking, “Then what is my value? What is the point of being alive if I’m not productive in some way?” And while there WERE days I just read or lay in a hammock, I continued to tackle my list of things to do because I did not know how else to live. I am still trying to find my way through this last chapter of my life, looking for new dreams, for new pleasures, for a way to relax into what I have created. Because I now know viscerally that tomorrow it could all change, for me and/or those around me. And that is the human condition - joy and loss and fear and despair and hope and laughter and love…we have a body to experience every single nuance of being human and I am reminded daily that what is real and true is felt in my heart.
Throughout all this, the synchronicity of teaching a retreat appeared. I wasn’t really planning on one but chess pieces began moving across the board and when I was at the ancestor altar, they said, “take everything you’ve learned and share it in a beautiful package.” So Retreat 2025 was born. Located in the jungle south of Holbox, Mexico, it will be a juicy and tantalizing experience. It was the first thing all year that brought excitement into my body, and I have been working hard with the retreat owner to offer something amazing. Here’s the link to the retreat page. I hope you feel inclined to join us.
Additionally, I will be speaking at Lake Harriet Spiritual Community in Minneapolis on December 13, and on the Real People, Real Healing podcast Friday, December 6.
AND, I finally got the second edition of The Secret Language of Emotion on Amazon with a Kindle version as well.
I wish you all the best visions humanity has to offer, and that we can realize a global community of beauty, maturity and above all, compassion and love.
Blessings!
Cat
