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: the heartwork center
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.
It began with a Buster Brown Sock Box
There was a box that reappeared under the Christmas tree every year at the house where I grew up, and it happened for as long as I lived there. It took two or three years when I was a tot to notice the annual reappearance of The Buster Brown Sock Box, but eventually it became obvious that Santa Claus was decades ahead of the recycling movement.
It was a yearly curiosity, the question of who’d have a gift in that long-lived box. Because of its size and its original use, it usually held practical items, like the predictable socks for my brother or me, or new gloves to wear to church. The worn ones that were getting a bit snug in the fingers could now be relegated to school wear. New hunting socks for my dad fit the box perfectly, the gray woolen kind with red toes and a wide band of red around the top of the cuff. A book, stuffed in tight with tissue paper, was my preferred present, if the gift tag had my name on it.
Whatever was in the box brought a smile to someone in the family. As long as it wasn’t the dreaded underwear!
Santa shopped locally, like my mother, because I often recognized familiar labels on our gifts. That was one little detail I tried not to think about; it didn’t quite fit the North Pole scenario, but Christmas didn’t seem like a good time for me to get caught up in pesky details.
Santa reused more than The Buster Brown Sock Box; he recycled bows and wrapping paper and he’d probably have reused tape if he’d been able to make it stick. It wouldn’t be unusual for him to deliver gifts wrapped in paper creased with memories from years past and bedecked with ribbons that looked vaguely familiar, as if I’d met them—oh, say—about a year before.
Yes, indeed, feel free to insert a winking emoticon here.
The annual appearance of The Buster Brown Sock Box became an element of my story, a single memory that brushes aside the cobwebs of the past and teases vague recollections into the light. Dusting off my memories of Christmas in Corinth in the late ‘50s through the ‘60s and early ‘70s, I find that my musings are as sturdy as that sock box. Simple and tenacious.
Our annual visit to Toyland, upstairs over the old Mitchell’s department store at the corner of Fillmore and Wick, was the official beginning of the Santa season for me. It always began on a crisp Saturday morning, soon after Thanksgiving, when Daddy would nonchalantly saunter through the house, accompanied by the slight sizzle of the gas heaters. Almost to himself, he’d say, “I was thinking I might go to Toyland. Anybody want to go with me?”
Want to go? Out of my way. I was already pulling on my coat. Younger brother was on his own.
Around the perimeter of the second story wonderland were magical painted images of fairy tale characters. Ole King Cole was of particular fascination to me because I’d seen Nat “King” Cole singing on TV and this robe-and-crown-wearing cartoon character bore no resemblance to the crooner. Still, the similarity of names baffled me and I concluded that they must be relatives.
And there was Humpty Dumpty, in all his ovate glory, depicted teetering on a brick wall. He remained teetering, year after year, observed by walls full of his fairy tale friends. Below the painted characters, cellophane-wrapped dolls lined up on shelves, in bridal dresses and fancy outfits, while beneath them were displays of Tonka trucks, games, baby doll buggies, toy dishes, pedal cars, doll houses, and more— enough delight to leave me speechless at the abundance.
When I peer into that memory, it sparkles with such intensity that the details blur like the reflection of big colored Christmas bulbs dancing on silvery tinsel.
If I’m not mistaken, it was also in the vicinity of the old Mitchell’s store that my dad and I went to the Christmas parade, just the two of us. I can be forgiven if I mistake the exact location, because I was little, really little. Probably three years old, bundled up in my red wool coat, I clearly remember Daddy hoisting me onto his shoulders so I could see the splendor of the majorettes, tassels swinging on their white boots. The band stopped in front of us, as if on request, and I could feel the music vibrate inside my ribcage, the brass instruments gleaming below the street lights and the bass drum throbbing. The breath of the majorettes was suspended in the night air, like the memory now suspended in my mind, and I worried that their legs were cold under their short skirts.
Fast forward to school impressions. A couple of weeks ago, as I drove west on Linden Street, I turned onto Wenasoga Road and stopped to pay my respects to what remains of the auditorium of West Corinth Elementary School, the façade now crumbling as deconstruction continues on what is, to me, hallowed ground. As I write this, enough of the auditorium still stands for me to see the stage where yearly Christmas programs played out. Today the roof sags open. Overcast shadows spill across the space but it isn’t today that I see. I see the space circa 1960-66.
The stage once jutted out to either side, creating a narrow ledge in front of the flanking brick walls, where I stood and recited my memorized paragraph about Christmas in England in the sixth grade program. I wore a long dress my mother made, red with a lacy stand-up Elizabethan collar that she based on illustrations in our treasured World Book Encyclopedia. From a neighbor, she borrowed a couple of skirt hoops and situated one high and one low in a petticoat, so the silhouette of my costume was true to the era. That skirt took up the entire depth of the ledge. Yikes! I clearly recall holding my breath as I navigated my way back onto more spacious footing.
Through the gaping front wall, the crumbling hallway gives way to a tangible picture in my mind. One more time, I feel the excitement of party day and early dismissal, a child finally set free for Christmas vacation. My first grade classroom is now rubble, but I still have the dainty china boot that Mrs. Jewel Goforth, principal and teacher, gave each of her girl students for Christmas. For six years, Christmas parties played out for me down that hallway, with the anxiety about whether my teacher would like her gift, or— in the case of sixth grade— whether Mr. Victor Miller would like his handkerchiefs, because I noticed that, like my daddy, he always had one in his back pocket.
My mother was a full-time homemaker so she was usually one of the moms who brought treats for the parties and stayed to tidy up stray wrapping paper and crumbs, while the teacher helped students clear out for the holidays. I liked how it felt to help with the tasks and the slightly surreal experience of being in a school building as it emptied itself of the bustle of children and settled into the quiet of its own Christmas vacation.
The thing about growing up and growing older in the same town is that the past and present overlap at every street corner and along every sidewalk. At the corner of Wick and Fillmore, at Linden Street and Wenasoga Road. Along Waldron, Cruise, Taylor, Foote.
The store fronts in this familiar downtown, changed from my youth and continuing to change, have the stories of my distant and recent memories etched into them. The streets that I’ve driven for decades take me past images that I still see clearly, though many are only in my mind’s eye now.
Consistently, the traditions of stepping into the magical lure of Toyland, of childhood Christmas programs and parties and parades, of The Buster Brown Sock Box, anchored my Christmas experience. And, of course, there are more stories for another day, recollections that resurfaced simply because I unwrapped these few.
We all have them. Personal, potent, poignant.
One reminiscence leads to another. We can’t help it; that’s how we are wired. Stories long to be given voice and they long to be given ear. They make us human.
Somewhere a little girl would like to ask about what it was like back “in the olden days” and she very much wants us to stop what we’re doing and listen to her telling her story, too. A little boy wants the company of an adult who will slow down and hear him share his Christmas wishes, an adult who will admit that he, too, still has dreams.
Whether we are four years old or ninety-four, our narratives are the most substantial gifts we give each other. Once given, they can’t be lost, stolen, or misplaced.
They become not “my” story but “our” stories.
May we value our collective stories as the precious gifts they are, sharing thoughtfully and receiving gracefully.
Jaylene Whitehurst is an artist and Licensed Professional Counselor in Alcorn County. She contributes to the Daily Corinthian and Crossroads Magazine. She may be reached at jaylenew@yahoo.com or (662)808-0902.
This post appeared as a column in the Daily Corinthian newspaper, December 15, 2015.
What not to post…
The following is a column, slightly revised, that appeared recently in the Daily Corinthian newspaper.
I don’t know which disturbs me more, that some Facebook users make posts without realizing what they are revealing or that they are aware of what they are revealing and simply don’t care. Either way, it’s often embarrassing and occasionally alarming to be a witness to the drama that results when we fail to manage our social media presence.
At first glance, Facebook looks like a place to connect with others, but, time after time, it’s revealed as one more place where we find out what kind of boundaries the people who call themselves friends actually have. Too often, it’s evident that everyone who wears the label “friend” isn’t one.
Join me for a foray into the juggernaut of chatter that calls itself Facebook. Let’s take a quick look at possible consequences of online comments.
Most of us are nice folks and don’t automatically think that our friends or our “friends of friends” aren’t as nice as we are. The reality, however, is that nefarious types search Facebook for information about vacation schedules. Oh, yes, all those lovely vacation photos are a giveaway for times when a house is unattended. Even if there is a house sitter, the idea that no one’s home can make the house and the sitter vulnerable to a break in. It’s not as much fun, but it’s safer to show restraint and post those pictures upon returning home. Ask close friends privately not to refer to your absence online and refrain from it yourself.
Employers (current and potential) will check your online presence. This is reality, so assume it will happen. It may seem harmless to post a picture of yourself out with friends, but remember that photos don’t go away. Any image that you post, or are tagged in, which gives the slightest suggestion of inebriation or lack of judgment can be more potent than any resume’. Does that scare you? It should. One photo can follow you and be the persistent visual reference that you never wanted.
A cursory scan of social media reveals that many folks are shockingly careless about work related posts. Never post complaints about a boss or that you’re not satisfied with a job, or you may find yourself leaving that job sooner than you planned. Take for granted that your comments will be seen by your boss and co-workers, because they probably will.
Also work-related is the habit of some Facebook users to post about what they are doing on the job, during work hours, that isn’t work-related. If you’re reading a novel or writing your term paper or planning the week’s menu, keep it to yourself. You might slide by for a while, but a pattern of posts about doing not working at work will eventually get you noticed by your employer and it won’t be for that A you got on the paper.
Be mindful of name-calling or using derogatory epithets, whether serious or joking. Comments made in jest don’t always come across as humorous in print and what’s said can’t be unsaid. Using insulting labels for others can make you look immature and inarticulate. Users are particularly vulnerable when they post comments that are dependent on tone of voice or expression to be understood. Emoticons are not always effective for conveying context. If you aren’t okay with your comment being taken literally, whether you mean it that way or not, rethink it.
One boundary that is crossed continually on Facebook is posting sensitive details about the private lives of friends and family.
Don’t. Just don’t. It’s not worth the drama.
Many users would never intentionally over-share and have no desire to cause hurt. Indeed, most of the over-sharing I see comes from a genuine desire to help, but wanting to help doesn’t necessarily mean we are helping.
Consider the young woman who is diagnosed with a critical illness and is struggling to come to terms with the news. She’s not ready to talk about it and has only shared the diagnosis with a couple of family members. One of those family members tells a cousin, who immediately goes online, posting the devastating news where it is seen by hundreds—no, thousands—of people.
The cousin means well, but because she didn’t clear it with the young woman first, she took the young woman’s power away from her. The distribution of her deeply personal information is her business.
In fact, if she never wants it made public, that is the young woman’s business. Not everything is up for public grabs but a lot of users have lost sight of that.
There’s the young man who, in a fit of desperation, posts details about his breakup with the woman he thought he’d marry. There’s the mother who posts about her child’s horrible divorce and how badly his boss treats him and his financial problems. There’s the father of the soccer player who posts a tirade about his child’s coach. Can you see where these examples are going? They are true examples, by the way. It doesn’t take any imagination to know that more drama ensued, and not only for the ones who made the original post.
The ripple effect of a single post is unstoppable.
Requests for prayers abound on Facebook. Because of its reach, many users are drawn to it as fast way to ask for support in trying times. If you post your own request about your personal situation, that’s your prerogative, but remember, if you are posting about another person’s situation, to clear it with them first, and to share no more than you are given the okay to share.
Thinking it’s okay doesn’t give any of us the right to share another person’s story without their permission.
Social media offers us wonderful ways to stay in touch with those we care about and to connect with groups that share common interests. There are art, counseling, and other inspiring pages that I have no intention of giving up, along with the on-going connections I have with former classmates and people in the community. The benefits are rich and real, and so is the potential harm.
Perhaps these summary guidelines can help us monitor our communication styles and minimize our vulnerability :
• For me, this first item is the Granddaddy of All Guidelines. Remember that, while you can delete a post or picture on your own page, what you delete may have already been caught on a screen capture, where it will live longer than a cat with nine lives. When that happens, you have lost any control of the image and it can go viral. That picture can be shared and re-posted and take on a life of its own. You may regret what you posted, you may apologize, you may post retractions, but that image is out of control and can go to an audience that won’t see your mea culpa. Scary? You bet. If you wouldn’t want what you’re about to post to be on CNN tonight, don’t hit that enter key.
• Be sure that what you post doesn’t compromise your safety or the safety of anyone else. No sharing of schedules or daily routines, no revealing vacation times, no letting others know your children’s schedules.
• Speaking of the children, consider all the possibilities before sharing names, birthdates, pictures, and activities. I know, I know, it’s hard because we love to share about these precious young’uns. It’s natural to want to share what we delight in, but there are unsavory folks who troll, looking for identifying information about children. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that a predator could easily assemble the entire makeup of a family, right down to the family pet and home address and family schedules, simply from online sharing.
• Be cautious sharing work-related information. If you do, keep it light and general. No complaining, no revealing sensitive or confidential information, no criticizing boss or co-workers.
• If you’re not okay with you post being taken literally, don’t post it. Someone will take it literally. Count on it.
• If there’s anyone in the whole world that you wouldn’t want to see your post, don’t post it. Your mom, your preacher, your boss, the head of the company, your ex-boyfriend, your worst enemy, your best friend?
• If it involves another person’s personal information, get their clearly stated permission before sharing, even if it’s the well-meaning request for prayers or support.
If we stay alert and monitor how we share our stories on social media, we can enjoy connecting with others. We might even save heartache and certainly save face.
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.
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
More on NO
That’s a sentence.
I post on this topic often and there’s a reason for that. It’s because the problem is persistent and pervasive. Consider with me, one more time, the NO struggle:
It is NOT rude to say no when asked or expected to do something. Not rude to say it to the kids, the grand kids, friends, family, or any of your social and familial connections.
If your “no” is ignored, it is not rude if you keep right on your merry way and let the people who wouldn’t hear your “no” live with THEIR consequences of ignoring your word. They are the rude ones. The consequences are theirs.
If you give in to their pressure, accept that they will never hear you or take you seriously. It’ll never happen. Trust me on this. (That pressure is subtle bullying, by the way. Really, it is.)
If you are too often doing things you didn’t plan to do, things you don’t even want to do, because someone taught you that you had to please everybody or you might hurt somebody’s feelings if you told them “no” then YOU, my friend, are the one who’s ignoring your “no.”
You are ignoring you.
Your Life, this one precious Life you get, is being lived by others.
Not by you.
And it’s happening with your permission.
Are you okay with that?
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
jaylenewhitehurst.wordpress.com 