I’m not really in to self-promotion and that’s not what this about. But, in case you missed it, The Thomas Ten was on the local news a couple of weeks ago!
We shot three or four different segments but here is the one I have a link for. Enjoy.
Read about how we became The Thomas Ten (our foster and adoption story)
I hope that you’re trying to find time in Quarantine to create healthy mental and emotional practices.
Maybe you need to . . . breathe in . . . listen to some music, read a book, watch a movie, eat something. Find what refreshes you, what keeps you alive.
Maybe you need to . . . breathe out . . . make some music, write something, create something, cook something. Find how you can express yourself and bring some good in to the world.
I’ve recently been playing around with some collage ideas and took the opportunity to experiment with three different gluing methods. You can click though each image to find more information, but, from left to right, we have: 01) Mod Podge, 02) Elmer’s Glue, 03) Glue Stick.
See some of my other collage pieces.
You may know Daved Wilkins from the amazing project Last Call, or as the guy from that one Super Bowl Doritos commercial. Or, if you’re like me, you might be a vague Facebook acquaintance. Whatever your relationship, that’s not the point of this post except that Wilkins recently posted about a short film called Rebooted and I think you should watch it.
If you’re curious about the project, here’s what the film’s Youtube page has to say:
“It’s not easy for a movie-star to age - especially when you’re a stop motion animated skeleton monster.
Phil, once a terrifying villain of the silver-screen, struggles to find work in modern Hollywood due to being an out-of-date special effect.”
You know the saying: “Nothing’s certain in life except death and taxes.” We are born to die and love away the days in-between. But if death is certain and we are born to love (and receive love), then grief is also certain, isn’t it? Grief is the natural reaction to any significant loss.
But this is counter-intuitive. It’s against everything we’ve been taught. We’ve been raised to pursue comfort. And grief is certainly not comfortable. So we try to avoid grief. We repress our emotions. We just try to get through it. We won’t let ourselves cry (especially in front of other people). And our society somehow equates doing any of these things as “giving in” and as weakness. So we try to avoid grief.
And we experience another loss.
Which now weighs on top of previous losses.
And the unresolved grief knots itself inside us.
You know the saying: “Just rip the band-aid off.” Just get through it. Some things just need to be faced. Though this is more blunt than I’d like to be, the sentiment remains. We will never completely “get over” grief, but it can get easier. And for that to happen, we must move through our grief.
There is a scene in Pixar’s Finding Nemo, in which Marlin and Dory ask directions from a school of John Ratzenberger fish and we find the following exchange:
School of Fish : “Oh and one more thing: when you come to this trench, swim through it, not over it.”
Dory : “Trench. Through it, not over. I'll remember. [swimming to catch up with Marlin].”
Dory : “Hey wait up there's something I gotta tell you. [sees the trench]”
Dory : “Woah. Nice trench.”
Of course they try to go over the trench. And Jellyfish Mayhem ensues. If you haven’t seen the movie, I highly recommend it. When we try to go around or over or under or avoid our grief, jellyfish mayhem does not occur. We become anxious, angry and/or depressed. We become stuck.
It seems counterintuitive, but the best way to deal with grief is to move through it. We need to allow our emotions to run their course. We need to let ourselves cry. The true strength is found in what the world considers to be weak. Pull out the photo albums. Watch the videos. Listen to the songs. Smell the smells. Eat the food. Visit the places. Because grief is evidence of love and it is a thing to be celebrated.
Watch Finding Nemo at Amazon.
Purchase The Grief Recovery Handbook at Amazon.
Browse my previous posts about grief.
This past weekend I had the profound honor of serving at the Banner Hospice The Dottie Kissinger Bereavement Camp For Children in Payson, AZ and I want you to know about this valuable resource.
“The Dottie Kissinger Bereavement Camp is a free community program designed to help children cope with the loss of a loved one.
Children and parents participate in activities that inform, educate and provide opportunities to talk about very difficult aspects of loss. We have helped families who have experienced losses such as grandparents who died from an illness, or sudden accidental deaths of parents or siblings.
The camp is offered three times a year – just outside of Payson, Arizona and is open to the entire community.
For more information, please call (480) 657-1167.” (from the website)
Watch some informational videos about what happens at these camps.
We have several resources if you are unsure about how to help a child you know through the grieving process. Please contact me or call (480) 657-1167 for more information.
“The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the March on Washington, or The Great March on Washington, was held in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. The purpose of the march was to advocate for the civil and economic rights of African Americans.”
Many have heard the highlights, but did you know you could watch the entire speech for free? I highly recommend doing so.
And, if you haven’t had a chance to read King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” I cannot recommend it enough. Please read it.
“Enjoy 45 minutes of uninterrupted Lagavulin™ Single Malt Scotch Whisky-drinking bliss with Nick Offerman by the Yule Log Fireplace… and you don’t even need to exchange words.”
I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but I live in a city without a lot of historical context. When buildings get old, we tear them down and put up a Starbucks. But when we lived in Louisville, there were buildings that had been there for a hundred years and people could tell you the story. Part of that is that I live in one of the youngest states in the Union, but part of it is cultural. Some cultures preserve history better. Tradition.
Some cultures hold on to things better than others.
I won’t talk about grief all of the time. But, as a Hospice Chaplain, it is something I deal with every day. Grief can begin long before a loved one’s death and last long after. It is the price we pay for love. It shows that our hearts are alive, despite our mind’s assertions otherwise.
Grief is something we will all experience and yet we will not all grieve the same. This includes how we finally come to grips with our grief and how we view ourselves in relation to grief. Some people try to “just get over it” and try to just get back to life without really allowing themselves to pass through grief. For some people, grief is viewed as just that time of crying when someone died, and now I’m back to life. But for others, it is the result of love and it is evidence of the hole that is now left right in the middle of our lives. It is something that shapes us.
The question becomes whether we identify grief as part of our beautiful story or whether we try to hide it.
In some cultures, we try to hide our scars. Makeup. Clothing. Plastic surgery.
We try to hide our brokenness.
Some people are more comfortable with brokenness than others. Some of us want to sweep it under the rug and keep on pretending that no one trips over the big pile under the middle of the rug.
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed or dusted with gold. Sometimes known as “gold joinery,” “golden seams,” or “gold repair,” this is more than just repair. This method brings new life to pieces by highlighting their brokenness. My Modern says:
Beautiful seams of gold glint in the cracks of ceramic ware, giving a unique appearance to the piece. This repair method celebrates each artifact's unique history by emphasizing its fractures and breaks instead of hiding or disguising them. Kintsugi often makes the repaired piece even more beautiful than the original, revitalizing it with new life.
The practice itself arises from several different Japanese philosophical concepts:
Wabi-Sabi: seeing beauty in the flawed or imperfect.
Mottainai: regret when something is wasted
Mushin: the acceptance of change
and
“As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise . . . Not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, but the repair is literally illuminated” (Wikipedia)
What if we treated grief as something not just to “get through” or to bury but understood it as part of life and as part of our beautiful stories? What if we all believed that our stories were beautiful? Kintsugi helps us see how brokenness can be beautiful. But what if we believed it about ourselves?
None of this makes grief easier or diminishes its weight. But I hope it helps give us the perspective that it is part of what makes each one of us so unique. No piece of Kintsugi are the same. No two people are the same. And it is our grief that helps shape us.
Read my follow-up piece Sitting With The Brokenness (More About Grief, Kintsugi and The Art of Precious Scars).
One of the beautifully mysterious, confounding, and yet comforting things about life is that everyone is different. And yet, how often we forget this. We marvel at snowflakes and ignore other people as though they weren’t walking miracles themselves. We inspect and catalog plant species, marveling at their differences while flattening out humanity into cardboard caricatures.
Though “Grief is the natural response to loss or change” and “the price we pay for love,” and everyone grieves, not everyone grieves the same. And grief is more than a simple emotional response to loss. It is a physiological reaction that may differ from person to person. Some people may want to sleep all the time while others won’t be able to sleep. Some will lose their appetites while others will find comfort in food. Some people will need silence and time alone to process while others will find it more helpful to be in crowds and around people. Some people will have guilt or anger while others have only sorrow. None of these is “right” or “wrong,” they are just the different ways people move through grief.
We need to stop trying to prescribe how everyone will do everything. For a religion that claims to be for people who don’t have it all together, Christians often try to pretend that we have it all together. And that we can tell everyone else how to do things. We hold financial seminars telling people how to deal with their money, we have conferences about parenting and marriage. But the truth of the matter is that cultural statistics, bankruptcies, divorces, etc. are not all that different for those who claim to be Christian and those who do not. I’m not saying God’s Word does not have helpful things to say about all of these topics, including grieving, but I am saying that we need to stop telling people how long or how they should grieve.
One of the questions I am most often asked is: How long will my grief last?
I don’t know. How long did you love that person? You will never forget them, so in a sense, grief never ends. I know most people don’t want to hear that; that grief never ends. But it does change. It will not always feel like we’re gasping for air in the belly of the best. But grieving is the process of admitting and accepting our loss and finding the “new normal.” Things go on. Even without the ones we love. There are still bills to pay, mouths to feed, yards, to mow, dishes to do. Only now, we must face them alone.
If grief truly is the price we pay for love, then grief is also the process of discovering life after loss. There will be tears, there will be sorrow, there will be loneliness, anger but there is also the simple process of being changed by our loss. Grief is the redefinition of who we are in relation to what we’ve lost.
If I’m saying anything at all (and believe me, there is much more that I want to say beyond this post), it’s that I would love to see the Church make more space for lament. I would love to see Christians move beyond prescribed 1,2,3 step programs for everything and I would love to see Christians move beyond trite-isms and embrace the grieving process as an essential part of life.
As with yesterday’s post, I very much would like discussion. What has your experience with grief been? How has it shaped you? What was helpful? What was not? What would you like others to know?
It has been said that the only sure things in life are death and taxes.
I think we should add grief to that list.
Live long enough and you will experience grief.
And yet, even though we will all experience grief, it is one of those things that no one likes to talk about, much less consider. As such, there is not always a consensus about what grief actually is. It’s troublesome that we don’t talk more openly about something we all face and it’s even more troublesome that many of us are unable to define such a common experience. One of the first things I do is just try to write out a couple of different perspectives. When I began counseling people through grief as a Hospice Chaplain, one of the first things I did was piece together some basic definitions and try to distill them down to as few words as possible:
Deep sorrow, sadness and a mix of other emotions, especially caused by someone’s death.
Grief is the conflicting feelings, possibly including relief resultant guilt, caused by the end of or change in something familiar.
Grief is the normal/natural emotional reaction to loss or change of any kind.
Grief is the natural response to loss or change.
Grief is the natural response to loss or change. This seems like a pretty fair and straightforward definition which also accounts for the fact that grief will not look the same for everyone.
I don’t know how you begin to think about such topics, but once I narrow down a definition into my own fewest words as possible, I like to look at other people’s words. I like to look at quotes. They’re like different sides of a prism. Since everyone is different and, no one grieves the same (though there will be similarities), understanding how other people process grief can help us process grief ourselves.
“Grief is never something you get over. You don't wake up one morning and say, 'I've conquered that; now I'm moving on.' It's something that walks beside you every day. And if you can learn how to manage it and honour the person that you miss, you can take something that is incredibly sad and have some form of positivity.” (Terry Irwin)
“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.” (Anne Lamott)
“the way I think about grief is that it is the great tug-of-war, and sometimes the flag is on the side you don’t want it to be on. And sometimes the game has exhausted all of its joy, and all that’s left is you on your knees. But, today, even though I am sad, my hands are still on the rope.” (Hanif Abdurraqib)
“Every one can master a grief but he that has it.” - (William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing)
“Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.” (Anne Roiphe)
“Grief is the price we pay for love.” (Queen Elizabeth II)
Every once in a while, you come across a quote that just stops you in your tracks. Grief is the price we pay for love.
Everyone wants love but no one wants to grieve. Grief is the price we pay for love. No one wants to think of love as a trade-off; and it’s not really, not in the strictest sense. But grief reminds us that we care. Grief reminds us that our feelings are alive and that, we are still in touch with life; with relationships; with thankfulness. Grief is proof that we are human.
Grief is the result of losing something that was important to us; a job, a spouse, a position in life, a loved one; whatever it is. Grief is the act of trying to adjust to the “new normal” after a loss. Grief is the process of moving on with life when we don’t want to.
It does not mean forgetting what we’ve lost.
It is far too common to hear people say things like: “You’ve just got to move on.” This is not helpful or true and I may explore why in future posts, but for now, let me just say that grief is one of those things that must not simply be faced but embraced in order to move forward. It must be passed through.
Of course it changes us, and that’s part of the point.
I hope to write more about the idea of grief and the process of recovery, but for now, I’d love your thoughts. Have you experienced grief? How would you define grief? How did you move through it (or did you?)? Did it change you? What did you learn?
This is Suicide Prevention Week and yesterday was World Suicide Prevention Day. We’ve already highlighted Suicide Prevention Week in our highlight of the Last Call screening. But, with the recent news of pastor and mental health activist Jarrid Wilson, it seems like we should continue talking about this topic.
My friend Shane works for NotMyKid, an organization that exists to “empower and educate youth, families, and communities with the knowledge and courage to identify and prevent negative youth behavior.” They recently launched a podcast and coordinated the launch with World Suicide Prevention Day.
The podcast is called Win This Year and they describe it this way:
“Win This Year is the official podcast of notMYkid, a national 501(c)3 prevention nonprofit dedicated to inspiring positive life choices by educating parents, preteens, teens, families, and educators on the mental health and behavioral health challenges facing our youth today. Win This Year shares information, inspiration, and strategies for parents and educators on the topics of substance use, suicide, bullying, internet safety, social media, body image, relationships, anxiety, self-injury, depression, and more.”
Listen to the podcast here and read more below.
Segment One:Following the loss of her son Adrio Romine in May 2019, Paolla Jordan is determined to use her experience to prevent teen suicides and to help other families not have to go through the same thing. In this episode, she shares her exper...
Segment One:
Following the loss of her son Adrio Romine in May 2019, Paolla Jordan is determined to use her experience to prevent teen suicides and to help other families not have to go through the same thing. In this episode, she shares her experience, knowledge, and hope as well as suggestions and strategies for parents and those who work with youth. Paolla and Win This Year host Shane Watson also discuss the role that the internet played in Adrio's suicide.
Segment Two:
Longtime prevention professional, coach, parent, and ASIST master trainer Joronda Montaño talks with host Shane Watson about signs and symptoms of someone who is considering suicide, how to begin a conversation with someone who is suicidal, and how to help someone who is having thoughts of suicide.
Segment Three:
Host Shane Watson discusses suicide prevention and intervention resources and crisis lines, and shares a personal anecdote regarding an unusual suicide intervention he once took part in.
Contact information, resources and links mentioned in this episode:
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: (800) 273-8255
Crisis Text Line: Text "Listen" to 741741
Teen Lifeline: (800) 248-8336
Paolla Jordan/LaloBoy Foundation: (480) 788-4187
Visit NotMyKid’s official website.
Visit NotMyKid at Facebook.
Visit NotMyKid on Instagram.
Follow NotMyKid on Twitter.
You might know my friend Stephen Roach from his band Songs of Water. Or from his work with The Breath & The Clay. Or perhaps from his podcast Makers & Mystics, “the podcast for the art-driven, spiritually adventurous seekers of truth and lovers of life.”
Stephen often incorporates live events into the podcast recordings. The fine folks over at Axiom Church are hosting a live Makers & Mystics recording Saturday, September 14, 6:00pm. The theme will be “Art as Hospitality” and I hope to share a bit about how the Habañero Collective House Show Series accomplished just that, and how we tried incorporating art into the Gathered Worship time of Church of the Cross (now Missio Dei Peoria). Browse the lineup here.
You might know my friend Daved Wilkins from his amazing Dorito’s commercial. Oh, yeah, that guy! While that might live on to overshadow some careers, Daved is immensely talented and his latest project proves it.
Shot in two true single takes, filmed simultaneously in two different parts of a city, Last Call, is a real time feature presented in split screen showcasing both ends of a wrong number phone call that has the potential to save a life. The film's music was also conducted and recorded live to picture.
Phoenix area friends: the movie is screening at Flix Brewhouse in Chandler September 13 and 14 to help bring awareness and action to National Suicide Prevention Week. Daved will be there both nights for a Q&A after the showing.
Watch the official trailer:
Last Call - Trailer from Gavin Michael Booth on Vimeo.
Watch a short movie about how everything was done.
Directed by: Gavin Michael Booth
Written & Produced by: Daved Wilkins & Gavin Michael Booth
Starring: Sarah Booth & Daved Wilkins
Visit the official website.
Purchase tickets for the September 13 or 14 screening at Brewhouse
Follow the movie at Facebook.
Follow Daved Wilkins on Facebook.
In honor of Songhoy Blues’ Tiny Desk Concert, let’s take a look at a movie profile originally posted at the Global Elite Music Radio Podcast Supershow’s site on July 11, 2018.
Islamic Extremist/Jihadists seized control of Northern Mali in 2012. The imposed a brutal regime of extremist Sharia Law. All forms of music were banned. Instruments were burned, radio stations were demolished and musicians faced torture and even death.
But Mali has a deep musical heritage.
Though many musicians became part of a Malian diaspora, fearing for their lives, they continue to shine a light on injustice through their music. This film chromicles the continued struggle for and power of music. Director Johanna Schwartz says: "I remember very clearly reading about what was happening. I couldn’t imagine a world without music, especially in a place where music was so vital to everyday life. I began to plan my trip to Mali almost immediately."
“Director Johanna Schwartz’s documentary, clearly made with devotion over several years, unpacks how several different Malian musicians struggle to survive the privations and strains of civil war, and especially their grief and horror over the way jihadist rebels banned all music-making the north of the country.”
From the Sahel Sounds Facebook page:
“Zerzura, the feature length Saharan acid Western is now available for streaming on Vimeo. Starring Madassane Ahmoudou (Mdou Moctar / Les Filles de Illighadad) Zerzura follows a young man from a small village in Niger on a surreal journey across the Sahara, crossing paths with djinn, bandits, gold seekers, and migrants, in search of an enchanted oasis. A collaborative project, featuring all original guitar score.”
“After a year of work, we’ve finally wrapped up our feature film Zerzura. A collaboration between Sahel Sounds and the nascent Imouhar Studio(an all purpose film/music studio in Agadez, Niger), the film is a magical journey through the Sahara, following protagonist and guitarist Ahmoudou Madassane in search for a lost city of riches. Along the way he encounters nomads, djinn, bandits, and gold seekers – a nod to our docu-realist approach to the film. While the concept of a lost desert city film has been kicking around for years, Zerzura was written, produced, and filmed entirely on location. Scenes were done in single takes, sometimes completely improvised.”’
Watch the trailer:
Watch the movie at Vimeo for $5.00.
According to the Wikipedias:
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (Urdu/Punjabi: نصرت فتح علی خان), born Anjum Pervaiz Ali Khan (13 October 1948 – 16 August 1997), was a legendary Pakistani vocalist and musician, primarily a singer of Qawwali, a form of Sufi Islamic devotional music.
Real World Records says that Khan’s voice is “universally recognised as one of the great voices in musical history and he was key in bringing the Qawwali music tradition to the Western world.”
Though Khan died in 1997, his powerful voice still resonate. Real Records just released Khan’s 1985 appearance at WOMAD. If you’re not familiar, “is an international arts festival. The central aim of WOMAD is to celebrate the world's many forms of music, arts and dance.” The album’s liner notes lay out the significance of the performance:
Looking back, it’s impossible to over-estimate the significance of this moment of musical history. On the remote flat lands of Mersea Island in Essex in July 1985 an eclectic programme of music was unfolding at the WOMAD Festival. New Order appeared on the same bill as Tabu Ley Le Rochereau, The Fall and Penguin Café Orchestra— it was a remarkable line up.
At midnight on Saturday night July 20 Nusrat Fateh Ali Khanand Party took to the stage. The group sit cross-legged in two rows and for some minutes there is a silent pause. What unfolded over the following hours stunned the audience. And it impressed upon Nusrat his remarkable skill at communicating with audiences from a different culture and language and with no understanding of the deep and ancient traditions of qawwali music.
“What unfolded over the following hours stunned the audience.”
Listening to this electrifying live performance, I have been meditating on those words: “What unfolded over the following hours stunned the audience.” And, even at that, as NPR says: “In all, it was a very truncated performance — in more traditional settings, qawwali concerts can go all night.”
I love music from all around the world and my “Western Sensibilities” are often challenged, whether it be tones, time signatures or time. It is not uncommon for my kids to complain about the length of something I’m listening to more than anything else. Though I regularly listen to long pieces of music, they do not. They have grown up with pop nuggets 3 minutes or less. This isn’t a “GET OFF MY LAWN” rant against young people or shorter songs. It’s just something I think about.
Non-western music often requires commitment. The first two pieces are each longer than 20 minutes. The shortest song on the album is over 9 minutes. These pieces are musical meals but I worry that ours is far too often just a snacky culture. Far too often, we are far too easily pleased with musical munchies when a four course meal is being offered. This is turning into a “GET OFF MY LAWN” rant, isn’t it? Sorry, I’m just reminded that, sometimes, things are worth our full attention. There is something meaningful in committing more than three minutes to the experience of music. Music can be entertainment but it can also be so much more. Khan’s powerful performance reminds us of that.
Watch the album’s official trailer.