Splendiferous Fall; Revealing the Beauty Within

The drama of changing seasons can hardly be ignored. Even those who are the busiest or most caught up in distractions or self-absorption take pause, however momentary. Life is transforming before our very eyes. Spring, Summer, and Winter each have plenty to offer, but Fall is the most magnificent. Leaves on hardwood trees make it so of course. When the countryside is dressed in red, green, gold, yellow and brown even the most ordinary places will become breathtaking. Or as my younger daughter, Courtney, said at age five, “It’s Splendiferous”

I've been around. My adolescence was spent near Fort Lauderdale in Hillsboro Beach where there is little that is overtly noticeable in Autumn's arrival or departure besides welcomed cooler temperatures. Instead, it's carried on a gentle evening breeze by Night Blooming Jasmine. I've also lived in North Carolina where people come from all over to be swept away by the grandeur. My childhood in Danville, Illinois had a Fall with its own charm and beauty. We took an annual drive down to Brown County, Indiana to have our socks blown off. But Autumn and "Injun Summer" were spectacular enough. Regardless of where home might have been, the seasons-of-life analogy was not lost on me. As the hours of light become shorter, chlorophyll production slows, and true leaf colors are revealed, it has always seemed obvious that God is sending a love letter about what could be coming next as people age.

The truth is that nothing diminishes as daylight hours become shorter nor are we diminished as we get older. This is evidenced in beautiful colors revealed in the leaves which had been there all along. Likewise, grace and brilliance are exposed as we transition to elderhood. They too have always been there. What is difficult to see while we are young and busy becomes easily visible in later years. Some of this comes from slowing down and some of it is bestowed as wisdom through experience. Now that my own Autumnal Equinox is well astern, floating out in Mother Ocean along with the exuberant energy of my youth, I began to wonder where the splendiferousness might be. But then it became clear. Just like my Autumn's in South Florida, it hides as a subtle insider while blossoming at the edge of night.

Surviving Trauma; Transforming Pain and Suffering

We have survived somehow. Through all of the trials and tribulations, pain and suffering, we have come out on the other side. Often bruised, damaged, and somewhat worse for the wear, we have overcome adversity to meet the challenges of today. It hasn't all been a bed of thorns of course. There has been plenty of sun drenched days and ample amounts of joy. But the one who survives trauma carries a certain amount of death into even the best of times.

“If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.”

— Richard Rohr, Christian mystic

Our survivor brains have adapted to deal with the worst. This presents us with a dilemma. We can either endure what has happened by continuing to protect and defend ourselves against an unknowable future, or we can choose to transform our pain and emerge as a new and improved version of ourselves.

Richard Rohr, the Christian mystic, tells us, "If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it." There is no doubt that he is right. My decades of work with wounded people affirms this truth. For example, without exception, every boy who was referred to me as a sexual perpetrator had been molested repeatedly as a younger child. Their sexual assaults replicated the young offender's own exploitation.

Power exerted over them created a survival response of seeking control by victimizing weaker children. This pattern or trait is not limited to any specific trauma. If left unattended, the suffering experienced and survived will later influence our behavior in ways that often inflict even greater anguish to others.

All of the negativity we witness has roots in piles and piles of disappointments, unrealized dreams and hopes, tragic losses, betrayals, and all forms of woundedness. Bitterness and blaming is heaped on the shoulders of innocent bystanders, our friends, family and children of the next generation. But each of us has the power to stop transmitting our pain by transforming it.

We can refuse the tendency of our ego to hurt others by offering the wounds we have received and our survival of them as rays of hope for all those who suffer similar experiences.

We can offer hands of healing instead of building protective walls. We will in turn find ourselves transformed and born anew.

Life can be wonderful when we make it so.

Grief Transformation; Cocoons and Butterflies

We have spent a month together this May delving into grief. From the Five Stages, to coping, and even celebrating.  There is always more to say. But one point always comes to the surface, as it did for my friend Elisabeth Kübler-Ross twenty-five years after an awakening she had three miles from Lubin, Poland at Majdanek Concentration Camp in 1946. The story she told me and recounted in a short book she wrote, The Cocoon and The Butterfly, provide perhaps the best understanding of the transformative power and nature of grief.

In 1992, while helping my patient and friend, Michael, through the struggles he was having with terminal illness and alienation from his family, I had a long conversation with his mentor Kübler-Ross. Her straightforward advice was that he should come back to her ranch in Head Waters, Virginia for a retreat.  Our talk then took another turn as I asked her why she chose to work with death and dying, particularly with children, which had been the focus of her medical career.  For the first time, EKR elaborated with me about her life.  Her initial one-word-response was this; "Butterflies." Then she went on to tell me a story.

In 1946, Elisabeth, one of three triplets born to her parents in Zurich, Switzerland, had at age 19, decided that she would become a physician.  World War II had ended in Europe the year before.  Elisabeth told me she felt compelled to join the International Voluntary Service for Peace in an effort to help decimated communities and provide assistance to countless refugees.  It was her visit to Majdanek Concentration Camp that changed everything.  The SS killed tens of thousands of an estimated 90,000 Jews deported to Majdanek.  Three gas chambers were used to choke the life out of prisoners, many of them women and children.  It was in the children's barracks and at one of the gas chambers that Elisabeth saw the butterflies.  She was sorting shoes on the floor of one of the gas chambers when she noticed the drawings.  Children had used their fingernails and rocks to carve butterfly images on the walls.  Hundreds if not thousands of the etchings were in the barracks as well.  She was shocked, shaken, and bewildered.  How could these little people, condemned to forced labor and death find a place in their hearts to draw butterflies....and Why? Though she did not have an answer, EKR made a decision then and there to become a psychiatrist and to work with children who were suffering and terminally ill. It was in 1971, as she recounted, after sitting at the deathbeds of many hundreds of children that her answer to the Holocaust puzzle came.  She told it to me in these words;

"The little ones were no longer in cocoons.  Now they were butterflies.  They would be set free from the hellish concentration camp. No longer prisoners of their bodies.  No more torture. No more separation from their mothers and fathers.  This is the message they were leaving for me and for all of those left behind.  I have used the image of the butterfly for the past twenty years to explain the process of death and dying."

The pain and suffering of horrific losses have the power to change us and to shape our lives like no other force.  After we descend into the darkness there will come a possibility of liberation.  We see this in the lives of people like Elie Wiesel, a child survivor of concentration camps, who went on to "combat indifference, intolerance, and injustice through international dialogues and youth-focused programs".  We witness the incredible work of John Walsh whose little son Adam was brutally murdered in Fort Lauderdale at the hands of a child molester.  John has gone on to expose every kind of crime as he advocates for justice with his television shows and writings.  Of course, there are many more like Elisabeth, Elie, and John.  They each have been transformed, taken from predictable lives, thrown into a cave of darkness, and have emerged with wings.  They point us to the possibility of new beginnings. They also give us a message that there is something more. Like the children of Majdanek, they signal to us that there is something more powerful than death.

When a caterpillar begins to spin her cocoon the most incredible things begin to happen.  Woven into what appears to be a shroud, the little creature starts a cycle of death.  Then, in an unexplainable moment, it becomes a goo of nothingness.  From that goo, a form appears and new creation begins to take shape.  Soon, with an incredible struggle that empowers its wings, a butterfly breaks forth from the cocoon.  She loosens, exercises, and then flies into the sky.  What a miracle.  So it is for each and every one of us.  EKR saw it happen without exception when her young patients transitioned from life.  As she was so fond of saying; "Life doesn’t end when you die. It starts.”