As the 2015 fall semester was kicking off for area schools, I made a quick stop at Walmart, not thinking of how many shoppers would be there stocking up on school items. The parking lot was busy but since I was already parked, I stayed. Maybe the store wasn’t as hectic as the parking lot.
Who was I kidding?
If the lot was hectic, the interior was chaos. School supply lists fluttered in the air, whirled by the spinning wheels of shopping carts driven by harried parents, as the doors closed and opened and closed again behind me. I was followed through the doors on the right side of the storefront by moms and dads on a mission and children on a wild tear.
There was a gap in the frenzied aisle across the front of the store and I turned toward the left, on a mission of my own. I hadn’t found any other local store that had my preferred coffee flavoring and I was on empty. It was only desperation that had me in the middle of this commotion.
Coming toward me, as the gap closed back in, was a young dad, rail thin in the clothes of a manual laborer, his uniform no longer clean and crisp by day’s end. Trailing behind him were three clones of him, except for their size. Stair step brothers, each obviously elementary aged, falling all over themselves, pushed a cart behind him, the middle one wrestling the others for control. The youngest wore a hand-me-down shirt, two sizes too big, that rippled around him, full of his energy. The tallest of the boys called out, “Daddy! Hey! Wait up!”
In that instant, as they clattered past me, I could feel the weight on the shoulders of that young father. I wondered how many things his children needed that would have to wait for next payday, or the next, and if there was a mom, maybe at work or maybe at home with a baby sister.
Life is hard and it is harder on some of God’s children than others.
The reasons are many, but that’s not what this column is about.
This column is a simple reminder that the family scene that passed me in Walmart that night first broke my heart, and then filled it overflowing, in no more than thirty seconds. We are participants together in this same Big Life, and if we can’t help others—for whatever reasons—let’s not add to the hurt.
Let’s not look down on or shame the strugglers. It only adds to their burden. And it’s not the whole story.
No, it is far from the whole story.
Let me tell you something else. Those three stair step youngsters were laughing and the tender affection in the eyes of that weary father, as he looked over his shoulder at his progeny, was transparent. In spite of his fatigue and drooped shoulders, his eyes sparkled.
That, my friends, is more than I can say for some of the more prosperous families I met, pushing full shopping carts that they would pay for with fuller bank accounts than the young dad, while they were distractedly checking their phones and reining in their own rambunctious children. From their dazed expressions, I imagined that they, too, had their own burdens.
Life is hard but, when the children are laughing, the burdens are lighter.
We are easing up to the end of this school year now, but I often think of that that August experience. Most every time I enter Walmart, I remember that energetic gaggle of stair step boys and their father.
And I still smile.
—————————————————-
Alcorn County resident Jaylene Whitehurst is an artist and Licensed Professional Counselor. She may be reached at 662-808-0902 or jaylenew@yahoo.com. She contributes to Crossroads Magazine and the Daily Corinthian.
Tag Archives: heartwork
A Heart Full of February
Fellow Travelers,
My personal February project is wearing hearts every day. Yesterday I decided that’d be fun.
It’s already becoming more than fun. The jewelry I wear acts as a talisman for what’s meaningful to me and being constantly reminded of my heart, your heart, the heart of the matter, the heart of the world, is connecting me with more.
I need reminders that LIFE is ever so much more than I have the power to understand or see and that, if I am to live at peace and, one day, leave my body at peace, I must remember that:
I might be wrong.
I don’t know much. Much of what I thought I knew has turned out to be tunnel vision.
I can’t change anyone else. It’s not my job to do that.
Shaming others destroys their spirit — and mine.
Listening, being a witness to another, changes the speaker and the listener.
And
A heart-broken open won’t kill me.
A hardened heart will.
Let’s all go in love, just today.
In the Season of Darkening Days
In the Season of Darkening Days
With softness flickering
And shadows cast
In the stillness of drawn blinds,
What hidden part of your story
Would come to Light
If you knew that
Mercy would hold
With tenderness
Every part of your Life
The secrets and the open chapters
The awkward lines
The false intelligence
The courage that cost you the unspeakable
The sideways truth you live with
To protect the innocent
The rationalizations that are almost reasons
But not quite
The right you did
But not for good
?
If you knew that
Mercy
Would hold every word
Every period and question mark
And dash
Of your story
With the same gentle attention
What would you lay in her hands?
jmwhitehurst
The Shawl
October is the shawl around the shoulders of winter
The be-draggled be-gonias that will fast be-gone
Lavender shadows in the soft silver hair of the elders
And in the air of an aging year that will not go down quietly
The bite of the noon breeze is sharper than my mother’s tongue
Keen
Whetted by the contrast of cerulean and coppery shades
Shimmering in the reluctant light
As it pulls the unknowable close
October rustles her shawl
Tucked snug around the thin days
And turns inward.
Jaylene Whitehurst
October 2, 2015
True Abundance
True abundance isn’t a substance that can be banked; there is nothing of “grabbing and snatching and stashing” that relates to Life’s wealth.
Nope, real abundance is experiential; it is fully experiencing one’s own Life, however it happens to unfold. It is active. It is born of allowing ourselves to stay with what is showing up: the expansive moments and the tight emotional spaces that are claustrophobic, the exhilaration and the sorrow, the generous and the miserly gestures, the tension and the release.
Abundance is waking up with the realization that an intention has become tangible with substance as solid as the mountain that has finally been tunneled through. It’s knowing that a decision has arrived under its own steam, driven by forces we can’t touch but can sense in ourselves and others, decisions not determined on the game board of LIFE with only winners or losers.
Abundance is hearing the train leaving the station and getting on board with a ticket stamped “Trust the process.”
Let’s ride.
~~~jaylenewhitehurst
“I’m here. I’m listening.” That’s enough.
Dear Hearts,
If you reply with “Yes, but…” or “But, at least…” when a friend brings a slice of her precious Life to you, you’re not listening.
No. No, you’re not.
You may be trying to help, which you’re also not, by the way. You may be uncomfortable with where your friend is and so you offer distraction. You may have been taught (directly or indirectly) that it’s your job to remind others of what YOU see as their reality or to encourage them or to relieve their roiling emotions—as if you could even be that powerful. As if there’s something wrong with their feelings. As if there is something wrong with them.
Notice. All of that is about YOU. Good ole well-meaning YOU, with the desire to help so hard-wired into your system that you spring into action like a rescue dog after a drowning soul, before you even realize what you’re doing. Good ole well-meaning YOU, who wonders why the eyes of your friends glaze over when what you’ve said was meant to be nothing but helpful. Good ole well-meaning YOU, who wonders why people sometimes pull back from you when they’re hurting.
It might not be their hurt that’s distancing them. It just might be YOUR inability to let them hurt and simply be present as a witness to their wounds.
What looks like a breaking down to you may well be your friend breaking open.
I can get away with all this finger-pointing “YOU” language because I am YOU, too. Thanks to the hard work I have done over the long haul in psychotherapy and study and making of art, my role of being too helpful is manageable, compared to what it was decades ago, and still the doggone thing pops up. And Dear Hearts, I’ve been at this for decades.
It’s a stubborn role and it doesn’t go down easily.
I know that role of trying so hard to help, pointing out what seemed obvious to me, that I cut people off.
I couldn’t hear the groaning of the hearts of others, so deeply uncomfortable was I with the groaning of my own heart.
If I take the risk and allow myself to shut up and lean into the pain of another person and listen, heart to heart, I am going to hear my own honest emotions, along with those of the other, and I won’t be able to deny any of it.
It’ll be out in the open and I’ll have to decide what to do with it. Oh, mercy. I’ll have to take responsibility for managing those emotions and some of them will feel like a tsunami headed straight for me!
I can’t tell you how to do that responsibility thing with your emotions. Your path is yours and it won’t look like mine, nor should it.
The one thing that’s worth passing along is that it took actively wanting to respond differently to others, and I very much did want that. I longed for relationships that were at least lake-deep, instead of the puddle-deep things I’d had.
As I set my heart on having relationships of depth, the healing path with kindred hearts and opportunities opened before me. No farther than I could see in the moment, but it was there and it was enough.
It has led me to ocean-deep relationships, where saying, “I’m here. I’m listening,” is more than enough and it all started with actively wanting more and recognizing that “Yes, but…” was a cut-off to honest connection with others.
~~~jaylenewhitehurst
The Ragged Phoenix
Do not tell me what you believe.
Do not tell me about what you believe.
Show me what you’ve experienced
And if you can let go of what you thought you knew
Without beating up yourself or others.
Can you can untether your doctrines and creeds
And risk bloody knees and scraped knuckles
When you see the Light flickering between the trees
Across the distance?
Are you ready to
Strike out in the dim twilight,
Knowing that solid night lies ahead
Under a new moon?
Will you stay with the darkness long enough to emerge into the Light
And meet me there?
~~~jaylene whitehurst
Deep Courage and Pink High Heels
I keep them handy as a reminder.
Through most of my Life, no one in my world heard me. If you think I’m exaggerating, let me reiterate: NOT ONE HUMAN BEING. Hence my fondness for animals, but that’s another story…
Mostly, what they heard wasn’t what I was saying or doing. They were too busy trying to fix me to hear me (translate that as trying to make me into copies of them) and I hadn’t yet realized that most of what was “wrong” with me was the “wrongness” of trying to please them, which often resulted in caring more about the welfare of others than I did about my own.
On the surface, that doesn’t sound SO awful, does it? I mean, it’s good to be concerned about others, right? Throngs of children are taught this, either directly or indirectly.
Here’s the rest of that dynamic, though. In worrying about everybody else’s needs and in trying to keep them happy (translate that as trying to keep them from getting mad, especially at me, when things went wonky), I had no energy left to learn how to take responsibility for my own welfare. But I was super good at tending to theirs. All that made me look to them as if I knew stuff I didn’t know, so they’d lean heavily on me for support, and then I’d feel put upon and unappreciated. I heard them but I didn’t get heard. So I’d keep trying to get what I needed by being there for others.
It’s exhausting to write it down and it’s exhausting to read it.
Living it was NOT living.
I felt like a little girl masquerading as a grownup, sure that behind the facade of work and family life, my ruse would be found out when I tripped wearing pink high heels that were too big for me.
And of course, none of what I was trying to do was even possible, but it was what I’d been conditioned to do within my family, and I kept doing it until the cycle almost did me in.
Then I got help.
It’s satisfying now when another person hears me and doesn’t offer unsolicited suggestions for how I could be better. It co-creates a space for creativity when another person allows me to simply have my feelings and not act as if there’s inherent danger to feeling.
Yet, there are still those lonely moments when NO ONE hears me, when they can’t shut up, when they feel a need to encourage me. I still hate it when they try to fix me.
It’s lonely when all I need is a witness to where I am.
These moments call for deep courage, the kind of courage that’s a rich pink and vibrant and pointed—like those high heels I keep on the shelf as a reminder of where I’ve come from. Courage hears my own voice and trusts it, even when it whispers, “I don’t know.” Courage speaks the hidden into the light, even when no one else can see it.
They don’t know it, but deep inside myself, I’m beating their voices into silence with those pink heels. I keep them handy.
~~~jmw
They watched her
They watched her
Once again abandon her Life
The one she’d patiently cobbled together
Using the best parts of her fragmented dreams—
The mosaic that sparkled with a vitality that a straight road and a smooth pavement
Could never have mapped for her.
She abandoned the Life she’d consecrated to making beauty from shards
One more time
Desperate
Hoping for the consideration of a family
Who could not value her
Who would not grieve her
Even if she died.
They watched her relentless silent plea to be known by those who didn’t know themselves
Shrivel her into the unrecognizable
A dry shell of the woman she’d once allowed herself to be and they grieved her
While she screamed inside herself
Not aware that she was dying.
~~~Jaylene Whitehurst
My heart is broken open with a recent intense awareness (more intense than usual) of how many of us dear human beings are giving up our own precious lives, because we’ve been taught that we must have the approval or attention or understanding of our families in order to fully live.
I will not tell you that this is easy, this creating a life that those around us likely never will understand.
I also will not tell you that it’s impossible. We do it when we make connection with those who can connect to our longings and when we release the grasping for those who can’t.
And I’ll never tell you that it’s not worth it.
~~~jmw
A very few words on staying in trouble…
Misery is trying to please everybody.
This is my shortest blog ever, but there’s nothing else to say:
Trying to please everybody will endear you to nobody and keep you in trouble with somebody all the time.
Either you’ll be miserable most of the time or you’ll create misery in the lives of those you love, or —more likely—both.
Misery all around. Is that really what you wanted?
~~~jaylene
jaylenewhitehurst.wordpress.com 